Keeping it moving..

September was a busy month here in the wonderful world of Togo. Summer vacation has finally ended, and we are all transitioning from the drag days of summer and perhaps still recovering from post-camp exhaustion as new projects roll in with the beginning of the school year. The cool season has ended, and it has again started to climb into the mid-90s with 100% humidity down south, with little relief from the daily rainstorms. The last month had me attending mid-service conference, carrying out my first real training, and celebrating both my 24th birthday and my one-year anniversary of being in Togo. It is really crazy to think that so much time has already passed, and yet it has gone by so quickly. After struggling for most of my service to find tangible work, regain my footing after my med-evac, and really just find my place here in Togo, I feel as though I am just now starting my service. In many ways, that is to be expected – they tell us that the life of being a Peace Corps Volunteer is a series of ups and downs, figuring out how to work around the realities of being in Togo, and learning how the realities of Togo work around you. As much as I have been learning and adapting to a new culture, new lifestyle, new everything, I have been learning just as much about myself. It is at this point now, halfway through, that I really understand how I need to carry myself in order to find, pursue, and carry out the work that I really want to do here.

In the first week in September, I collaborated with the Office of Education Inspections (think- superintendents for all of the secondary schools for my entire region), to carry out a Training of Trainers on Men as Partners. What in the world is “Men as Partners”, you ask? You thought I was a Girls Education volunteer, didn’t you? Well, it just so turns out that incorporating men and boys in the empowerment of women is not only a good idea, but absolutely necessary for the promotion of women’s rights and gender equity in Togo. In order to really empower women, we need to engage men in understanding how their behaviors and decisions affect women – especially in regards to gender equity, and the reproductive health of both men and women. The Men as Partners program was started by an American NGO called EngenderedHealth, as a behavior-change training module targeting men to take responsibility for the role they play in the transmission and spread of HIV/AIDS. Togo is the first Peace Corps country in West Africa to incorporate the program into Peace Corps projects.

The training took place in Tsevie, the regional capital for the Maritime region, with 7 Inspectors and 13 school directors participating, and the Chief Inspector, the Inspector of Physical Science, myself and 2 other PCVs facilitating. The 2-day training was a bare-bones introduction to the concept of Men as Partners, with sessions geared towards opening up the floor to conversations that are not typically held here in Togo. Sessions focused on examining our attitudes about gender, identifying risky situations, and discussing how we feel about certain gender issues and why people often feel the way they do. The program does not really teach behavior change, but guides participants towards reaching their own conclusions. We will be carrying out a second phase training of 40 teachers at the end of October, with 3 of the participants facilitating and with the understanding that these teachers will implement the MAP program in weekly HIV/AIDs classes at the middle school level. This is my first funded project, which is an interesting experience in itself, and this was also my first time facilitating sessions in French for adults, so the first phase was a wonderful learning experience. I’m really excited about the second phase, especially two teachers from my village’s middle school will be attending.




Aside from the MAP training, my homologue and I have been hard at work carrying out our women’s clubs. We now have five groups in five different villages, talking about women’s rights and gender equity, good business practices, Moringa, and teaching them income-generating activities. I am starting to reach out to other Volunteers in my region to make guest appearances and help me out with certain sessions. This is so far my favorite activity that I’ve done in my village, because it is the first time that most of these women have ever had the opportunity to speak their minds about sensitive cultural issues such as the status of women in Togo. The groups are so popular, actually, that most of the women’s husbands have started crashing the group and participating- even helping to explain difficult concepts. The women have been so appreciative and so giving of their time, and I can tell that they generally appreciate that I come visit them every week and give them the opportunity to learn those things they’ve never been able to in the past. I have also agreed to start teaching classes on HIV/AIDS, Life Skills, and Men as Partners concepts in my local middle school. This is really exciting to me, because I had tried all of last academic year to get something going in the school without any luck, and I really enjoy spending time with the teenagers in my village.

Day to day life has become easier now that I have been here for a year, and I have made myself a nice little home in my village and in Tsevie (what I am now calling my OTHER “chez moi”), so that I have a great network of counterparts, friends and second families. But, still, my heart belongs to these little darling Bocovi children that I spend so many of my days with: