The One with All the Time in the World

Written on: le 15 Fevrier 2011

So there’s something you need to understand about village life.

We may not have a lot of water, vegetables, or things to do, but we have A LOT of time. And not just any old kind of time but that special brand known as “free time” – wide open free time which begins the moment the rising sun peels open your eyes at a quarter of 6 and ends when the complete absence of nightlife forces you into bed with a book at 8 in the evening. Being an anomaly of a woman here (husband-less and baby-less), I don’t have the luxury of passing time according to the gendered division of labor that defines Togolese households. Without a family to feed (or any real responsibilities whatsoever), how I pass the day is completely up to me.

You would think that it would be really awesome and liberating to have all this free time on your hands, which it is… until you find yourself talking to lizards and attempting to learn the geography of the entire world map (I’ve almost got Western Europe down!).

Here are just a few of the other highly productive ways I like to fill my daylight hours:

Wandering

Much of my time spent working on “community integration” (PC-speak for hanging out) includes wandering aimlessly around my village to “saluer” (greet) my neighbors, repeating a conversation that goes like this:

Neighbor: “Where are you going?”
Me: “Nowhere.”
Neighbor: “What are you doing?”
Me: “Nothing.”

Yep.

Drinking

Wandering pretty much inevitably begins or ends with a stop (or two… or three…) to fill up on a calabash of tchakpa, our friendly neighborhood beverage. It’s as locally-brewed as you can get: ladies make it in big cauldrons in their front yards and then bring it out to sell. Tchakpa isn’t just a drink – it’s a way of life. I would describe it as the social heartbeat of the village, and thus vital to my work as a professional friend-maker (shout-out to Brynna).

“Gardening”

It’s the dry season up here, which means that agriculture of the rain-fed variety isn’t possible. So what does a farmer do if not farm? Garden, of course! And I’m not talking backyard flowerbeds. For this kind of garden, one must walk an hour out into the uninhabited countryside, dig a 12-foot hole to hit groundwater, and pound the rock-hard dust that constitutes our desert “soil” with a hoe for days, transforming empty savannah into big fields of tomatoes or onions. My gardening buddies are nothing if not badass, and I have to put in a lot of muscle to keep up with them. This is why I put “gardening” in quotation marks, because I am not the one who actually gardens – to my frustration I have, more than once, been ordered (emphatically) to sit and watch. Thankfully at this point in the season the work dans le jardin pretty much just consists of watering, with which I can actually help, albeit with a much smaller bucket than everyone else.

Reading

Anything, anytime. Send me good material!

Experimental Cooking

How many different ways can you use tomato paste? Or sweet potatoes? Or black-eyed peas? Or powdered milk? How long can you ration the precious vegetables and eggs purchased in town? How moist a cake can you bake in a Dutch oven? This is Top Chef, Togo edition. Every meal is an adventure!

Never-ending Cleaning

Cleaning takes a relatively long time here, which is a good thing when using up time is your goal. I do my dishes in a basin in my front yard and my laundry in our little mostly-dried-up river. Unfortunately I get the feeling that none of my stuff is ever actually clean, but oh well.

Sitting in Silence, Staring into Space

Pretty self-explanatory.

Monitoring the Gecko Colony

When the Peace Corps told me I would have my own house, they were lying. They neglected to mention my ever-growing population of reptilian roommates. Fortunately the geckos that live in my palm-stalk ceiling are quite pleasant, peaceful creatures and make for good company. Here’s an average encounter:

Me: “How’s your day going, buddy?”
Gecko: “Click, click. Click, click.”
Me: “Yeah, me too. Did you manage to track down that elusive cricket?”
Gecko: “Click, click. Click, click.”
Me: “Oh that’s good. And what is your opinion on the situation in Cote d’Ivoire?”
Gecko: “Click, click. Click, click.”
Me: “Fascinating. I was thinking the same thing.”

Besides the clicks, the other thing about housing a gecko colony is the eggs, which are about the size of a dime and stick to the wall. The first time I found four of them above my bed I kind of freaked out and smooshed them all, but then I was immediately overcome by remorse. I have since become a fervent pro-lifer, vowing to protect rather than abort any and all gecko fetuses that turn up on my wall, even at the risk of overpopulation. I’m currently waiting for two eggs to hatch.

And last but definitely not least…
Puppy-ing!

Even with all my new human and reptilian friends, I was getting a little lonely during my first three months in my village. Enter Rundles Jr., the most recent addition to my little family. I am in love. He is cuddly and smiley and brimming with comic mishaps. My village friends are also smitten and are very protective of him, which was a little unexpected seeing as dogs here are neglected and then eaten (“le chien est le plus bon viande”). A couple of my village buddies named him “Dogma” – irony unintended. It’s pronounced “doe-guh-muh” in Moba and means “Le monde est bon, il n’y a pas le travail, c’est temps pour fêter, tout le monde danse” – party time! As for training, we are still working on the basics, like coming when called and not having accidents inside. Hopefully we can soon move on to more exciting tricks, like playing dead and doing the hokey-pokey, because let’s face it, that’s really what it’s all about.