Recent developments

So I am down in Lomé right now. This wasn't a planned trip but I am staying in the Med Unit for a few days. There are several things wrong with my stomach including giardia. I will know this afternoon what the next step is in my treatment.

Other than that things have been going pretty well. I finished my tour of my village meeting with all the villagers to discuss pooling money on several projects I am working on, such as opening the clinic and building new water pumps. By have the community contribute money into projects, it will bring about an ownership of the project locally and people will be more willing to maintain what they help build. This is my hope.

I had my second women's group and presented on family planning methods. The meeting was split into two meetings so there wouldn't be as many people at one time as last time. The first meeting went fine. The second meeting was pushed back twice, once for a funeral that everyone "had" to go to and the second time because or some random excuse. So when it finally happened I was not very into it. Everything was going fine. I had trained 4 people on the information prior to the meetings and they knew their stuff. Around 2/3 of the way through these three guys come into the meeting and sit right in the front. Normally men don't show up to the meetings so it as a bit of a surprise. But one guy raises his hand, interrupting everything and says if my wife doesn't want to get pregnant then I am just go to go outside of my house and have sex with any woman I want to. I got really mad about this. There are so many men in my village including my host brother who just sleep with women and think nothing of the consequences. They think that it is impossible to go even a day without having sex. I have been asked many times how I am going to go such a long time without having sex, like I will die if I don't. I eventually raised my hand, confronting what the man said. His two buddies were all in the same boat too. I told me that he has no right to sleep with anyone if he is not going to protect the health and safety of his family first. He has no right to bring HIV into his home infecting others and expecting them to take care of his mistakes. Aside for HIV if he can't provide equally and well all of his children, providing proper food, clothing, education and shelter, then he has no right to go and sleep with other women, possibly getting them pregnant and continuing the problem. If he wants to see his village or even the country develop, it needs to start within the home, making the choice on how many children a family is going to have, in order to bring up well educated, healthy children who in the future will be better able to help the country grow.

Well these three men knew exactly what I was saying because they spoke French and all sat there with there heads down like they had their tail caught between their legs. After I said that some other women who had come for the seminar got up and chewed them out as well. I was getting pretty heated by the end. I know that this is a problem that is so easy to solve but men are stuck in such an ancient belief system that they bring down everyone around them. Women get pregnant at age 14 and are forced to live the rest of their lives uneducated and poor. Their children will probably end up the same. It is just a nasty cycle.

After that, I really needed to leave village and luckily I left the next day for a week long training session in Pagala, the Peace Corps training center. There were two topics were discussing during the week: latrine and pump construction and free care for people living with HIV/AIDS. I brought a new homologue to the training. She is the social worker at the hospital in Niamtougou and she wants to start a free services program at the hospital for people living with HIV/AIDS. Her concentration would be in the psycho/social and nutritional aspect of the treatment. One of the medical people would be handling the medicines.

The first two days were about latrine and pump projects. The speaker was not very good. Only wanted to hear himself talk and didn't really give us any answers that we needed. Like how much it costs to build a pump, who do we contact to build one, what is a Togolese organization that could fund a project like he was describing. But no. We just trudged through two days of him talking. We even took a field trip to look at latrines that a volunteer was in the process of building. I personally never want to do a latrine projects because of the lack of success but whatever.

The last two days were about HIV/AIDS. This was helpful for my homologue. Many of the other homologues that came work with organizations throughout the country that help people living with HIV/AIDS so she got to talk a lot with them to get ideas on what the hospital needs to do to start the project. The presentations we sat through were boring for the volunteers because a lot of it was just numbers and stats that we never figured out where they were collected from since this country hasn't done a census in years. There were some helpful aspects. There was one presenter who told everyone that he was living healthily with HIV and had been for 6 years. Many of the homologues had never actually met anyone who would openly admit they were living with HIV. This is unfortunate because there is so much stigma in the country against people living AIDS and if more people would stand up and say they were positive, the situation would be much better.

I was very glad to leave the seminar. It had been a draining week. I went back up to Kara and hung out for the weekend. We had Club Espoir on Saturday which ended up being the most enjoyable club we have all since I got here. There were not as many kids as usual and we just played games and the kids were more relaxed and everyone had a good time.

But then I had to come down to Lomé where I have been since Sunday. Hopefully things turn out okay.

Everyone please write or email! I miss hearing from you all. Love and miss you!!! Alia