Two Days in Kpalime (Pa-Lee-May)

This Thursday I was invited to go hiking in Kpalime, an area about 2 hours northwest of Lome. Joe went to the same little village the very next day for work. My visit was as a tourist. His was as a Diplomat. You get to hear from us both today. Herein lies our two very different days in Kpalime:

Jen's Day -
I looked at the speedometer of the car from the back seat and saw that we were getting scarily close to 160KpH. This on a road filled with potholes, motor bikes, and people walking down the street with 10-foot logs balanced on their heads. I felt my stomach churning from all the bumps and looked forward to arriving in the mountains in one piece.

I was with the son of a woman Joe works with and a man named Michele, our guide who was from Kpalime. Just when I thought we'd finally arrived, Michele pulled off onto a field and started driving through the window-high grass. He told us he had to make a quick stop at his cousin's wife's house to get a camera. ? Oh, okay. Sure. Cool.

Initially, I was fascinated. The chance to see Real Life African Homes! But as this continued throughout the day, I was caught between the amazing experience of seeing what I was seeing, and the horrific poverty in front of me.

We did squeeze in some sites in between Michele's family and friend visits: a beautiful waterfall in the forests, an agricultural project way out in the cocoa and banana fields that helps support adult orphans, and an old dilapidated chateau built by a German lawyer after WWII and taken over by the former President of Togo as his 70's Glam Fest party house.

Quick digression: Something someone, somewhere should help the Togolese with is the art of tourism. It doesn't really exist here outside of a group of men sitting at a gate of a blocked-off section of the road where Site X lies. You have to pay them Amount Y to get by and then Amount Z upon your arrival. The "guide" you get does little else but show you the kitchen of an old house and say, "here is the kitchen of President Z." End of story. My favorite part was being pointed out the Presidential urinals.

I wanted to know why in the heck some German lawyer would build this giant thing in the middle of nowhere Togo. And what crazy things happened in the 9 guest bedrooms where the old, dirty, round mattresses and gaudy chandeliers still rest. I see the urinal buddy. Give me the good stuff.

Squeezed in between the sites and the friends were the stops for us to buy things that we didn't want to buy. I made the mistake of commenting on a pretty dress in a photo that Michele's cousin's daughter showed me. I was trying to be polite, but unbeknownst to me, in this country, if you compliment something, they will either give it to you or, in our case, take you to the very place you can buy it. Without asking you if you want to go there. So when we pulled into a fair where the very dress from the photo happened to be on sale for the bargain price of 100,000 CFA ($100USD), and I looked confused, Michele knew enough to say the day was over.

We stopped at his friend's bar on the way out so that we could buy him a soda (also unspoken, but we were catching on). I sat there as the local drunk came up in a furry zebra cowboy hat (Another aside: Why is it that furry animal print cowboy hats are the chosen accessory of local crazies everywhere?) and chatted us up in English. Hmm. Meanwhile, a woman with a baby strapped to her back and a huge metal bowl balanced on her head walked back and forth in front of us for an hour.

She was transporting water from a pump to her home. I'd guess that the bowl weighed around 30 pounds. I saw her make 4 trips in the hour that we leisurely sipped our Coca Colas.

As the day progressed, I felt a growing urge to get back to my giant home with the gates and the guards and the running water. At this point it was almost unbearable. And then I felt horribly for feeling that urge.

It was an amazing day, but I arrived home tired and moody. In hindsight, I think it was the first time I've really, truly experienced culture shock. And the utter discomfort of observing that my life is a certain way because I just so happened to be born somewhere else.

Joe's Day -
7AM pick-up and off to Kpalime we go. I was super excited because I was finally getting out of the office and have a chance to "win hearts and minds" and do real diplomacy in action.

We drove through village after village of grass huts on our way, on the one narrow paved roads with dense trees and hills on either side. It was very Africa. Probably the same way it was 50 years ago.

We arrived at a large, flat schoolhouse, where we were honoring a group of Togolese English teachers from around the country. They'd just completed a teaching seminar to learn new methods put on by the embassy's Cultural Affairs specialist - a Togolese man - and a hired English teacher trainer brought in from the States.

There was a long table set up front with 4 name tags, including mine and I soon found out that I would be speaking. Delighted, I ran to the back room to cook something up on short notice. I thought about my many hours spent in our garage with our guards, trying to learn some basic Ewe phrases. I started using my tape recorder so that I could capture the words, since the accent is so hard to recreate. It made me think of our own words and sounds, and how hard they are for the people here.

Soon after that, I found myself staring at 50 African faces with a microphone in my hand. I talked about the importance of learning languages as a gateway to other cultures, and that English was their chance to understand US culture and much of global trade.

I busted out the few local Ewe phrases I'd learned, and that got the whole room hooting and laughing. The rest of the day we spent chatting, and I made many promises to go speak at their high school English classes.

You could tell this was a huge deal to each of the English teachers (who unfortunately couldn't speak that well). Nonetheless, it was a wonderful experience and perhaps the favorite I've had in my career. The chance to inspire so many disadvantaged people was why I joined the Foreign Service in the first place.