Togo!

TOGO WAS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It was just what I needed - a perfect vacation. You know, they tell you culture shock and study abroad will take you through a range of emotions - honeymoon, hate, humor, home. What they don't tell you is that all four of those can occur in the same day. They make it sound like you'll transition from one to the next over time! That has definitely not been my experience, and I think I had finally hit the point where everything was just frustratingly overwhelming. But I went to Lome (capital of Togo) for a few days and loved it! I'm sure if I were in Lome for the semester, I would find things equally frustrating there, but for the short time I was there I loved it much more than Accra.

Instead of regular taxis and tro-tros, everybody takes "taxi-motos," i.e. motorcycle taxis. You just hop on the back of one and zip around the city! Lome is much smaller than Accra anyway, but because there are hardly any cars, there's much less traffic/congestion, so you can get from one end of the city to the other in just a few minutes. I stayed at a hotel right on the Ghana/Togo border, and right on the beach. Literally. Cross the street and you're on the beach. My room was about $10 a night. A HOTEL ON THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BEACH I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE FOR $10 A NIGHT!!

I visited a couple of different markets and artist villages, got some cool souvenirs - decorations for my wall back home, etc. And except for accidentally buying 12 YARDS of the same fabric, I think I was pretty savvy with using my French to bargain! I did have a little bit of trouble using my French at times, because I'm used to France French, and African dialects are slightly different (pronunciation is often VERY different), but all in all I sort of surprised myself with how much I remember and was able to use. People could tell I had a different accent and would often ask "What language do you speak? English?" and every time I replied, "Oui, may je suis a Lome et je veux parler seulement en francais." (Yes, but I'm in Lome and I want to speak only in French.) So, unless there was an absolute language barrier and we couldn't communicate, I stuck to my French!

I also visited a voodoo fetish market, which wasn't nearly as excited as I had anticipated. I do have some interesting pictures of dried out chameleons, pig heads, mice, etc. And I took a day excursion to Togoville, on Lake Togo. This is sort of the Togo equivalent of the Cape Coast slave castles - voodoo practitioners were taken from here and sold as slaves in the Americas (hence why voodoo is present some in Jamaica and parts of the Caribbean). I refused to pay for a guide around Togoville, so I didn't learn as much as I could have, but I had already been spending a fair amount of money. Traveling solo isn't bad at all - it was nice having a few days with my thoughts to myself - but it is definitely more expensive than traveling with friends.

Also, yesterday was a great day at my internship! We went to a nearby village and went door to door doing HIV/AIDS education. I was a bit nervous about how we would be welcomed into the community, but everybody was very friendly, welcoming, and curious about the topic! Just my accident my group only met with women, and it was a great experience. Though a couple of the women had some knowledge about AIDS, none of them had ever seen a female condom before, and they all had lots of very insightful questions. I did a couple demonstrations of how to use the female condom, and I really felt like I was helping the women I was talking to. None of them spoke great English so my coworkers were translating my demo, but it was still a great feeling. Who knows what will happen after we're gone, but the women were very engaged and curious, and seemed thankful that we were willing to talk and answer all of their questions.

I think I am discovering an interest in community health. Prior to arriving in Ghana, I knew HIV/AIDS definitely is one of the biggest factors affecting African development. I hadn't thought as much about diseases such as malaria, typhoid, and other treatable diseases that are huge killers simply because people don't have access to hospitals and medicine. But being here has made me realize how many of the issues I care about - the environment, clean drinking water, poverty, child labor, international development, and others - are all interrelated around public health. I'm not really sure where I want to go with this, but I definitely plan to explore this interest more through classes and possibly internships when I am back home.