Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Togo in Three Hikes

Spending time and exercising in the disorderly wilderness keeps me sane, and I’ve always sought out ways to escape civilization and de-stress in nature. My life in Togo is no exception and I’ve spent many hours exploring what’s left of the wilderness here. Recent estimates say that only about 13% of the coastal rainforest in West Africa remains, and most of that is on protected lands outside of Togo. This devastation is apparent as one hikes through what used to be rainforest and is now farmland, dotted with several 500 year-old trees awaiting their death sentence, to be made into a couch or bed and several bird species vying for survival. Yet some of the beauty and certainly my sense of adventure remain and what I’ve discovered through my recent rambling is priceless.

Summitting Mt. Agou
There’s no better position to be in Togo than on top of it all, that is, on top of Mt. Agou at 986m. It’s higher than the highest point in Ghana or Benin. Although the base of Mt. Agou is one of the most touristy areas in Togo, that is one of the only places Westerners care to venture outside of Lomé, there is no infrastructure set up to climb the mountain. It’s only a day hike, but guides are necessary because the trail leads many directions, through people’s houses, church yards, avocado groves and rocky terraces. We went to a bar where the owner found us two unemployed men to guide us up the mountain. They seemed nice enough, until half-way up the mountain they told us we’d have to pay them more than most Togolese made in one month for the 3 hour hike. Like any seasoned Peace Corps volunteer would, we told them that must be a joke, and they proceeded to lead us up the mountain like we were in boot camp. We didn’t let this ruin the spectacular views. From the ridges, you could see the topography of most of the Western Plateau region of Togo. We passed through two small villages with electricity (!) where fifty year old ladies ran up and down the trails with hundred pound avocado sacks on their heads. The houses were terraced into the mountains, and unlike most modest dwellings in Togo, were landscaped with an array of flowers from lilies to hibiscus. About a mile up the trail a large cement church was being built for all the mountain dwellers. When we were about spent we reached a paved road that had a small market on it and a lady sold us ice-cold bissap (hibiscus juice), which gave us the rush needed to get to the summit. When we reached the summit, a policeman who requested either a ticket from the local authorities or a bribe that he could pocket on the spot stopped us at a gate. Past the gate were a few satellites and a cement marker by the French, which declared the highest point in Togo and then at a more elevated point, a cement marker by the Germans declaring the highest point in Togo. We kept our money and skipped the colonial monuments in exchange for more time with views from the treetops.

Mermaid Hunt
A friend invited me to her village in the mountains the border Ghana in the southwestern Centrale Region of Togo with the goal of uncovering a mermaid in a wading pool nearby. I have always been fascinated with mermaids, having spent countless hours daydreaming and staring at the ocean as a beach lifeguard in Galveston, Texas. I’ve always joked (or secretly wished) that I’d like to become a mermaid one day, so the prospect of seeing one was an offer I couldn’t pass by. We were lead down a forested stream by our Togolese friends serving as our guides who explained to us that the French had come here many years ago and captured the merman who used to live with his wife, the mermaid in the wading pool. They brought the merman back to France to put him on display at a museum, and now the mermaid remains alone in Togo. Leave it to the French to steal the merman, mind you, this is one of the nicer things I’ve heard people accuse the French of. We continued along the winding stream, balancing across logs to pass from one side to the next on our quest to discover the siren. Through the verdant green foliage we walked until we finally reached a clearing where the stream diverged into many directions, disrupted by a grand outcropping. Just below, the mermaid lives. We bushwhacked down a hill to her tranquil wading pool and watched the water in silent anticipation. After several minutes, our Togolese friend asked if we really were expecting to see the mermaid? Of course, why would we have come to her pool? He seemed exasperated that we didn’t understand that seeing the mermaid involves a 48-hour ceremony initiated by the village spiritual leader to coax her from her warm waters. Of course. After the French debacle, foreigners don’t have such a good track record around here therefore the Togolese mermaid will probably ever remain legend to us.

The MAP Walk
One of Peace Corps/Togo’s main programs is called “Men as Partners” (MAP), which promotes healthy living and healthy relationships for men and their families with the goal of bringing about gender equity and better family relations. With this objective in mind, we set out, four idealistic Peace Corps volunteers and one enthusiastic MAP trained Togolese homologue to spread the good word of MAP to small villages in mountains of the western Plateaux region of Togo. Peace Corps rarely puts volunteers in places that cars can’t access and cell phones don’t work so our audience would be villages who rarely, if ever, see Westerners. As we hiked about 5k up the steep plateau to a village inaccessible by anything with wheels we ran into several isolated homes in the middle of the woods. We were barraged by gifts, consisting of bananas, avocadoes and manioc, by the mountain people who were honored that we chose to walk a path that ran next to their homes. We were offered palm wine, distilled palm wine (sodabi), tchouk (local millet beer) and boxed wine. We ate and ate and drank and drank. Those with the least to give are the most generous, though there is no shortage of fruit and palm trees in those mountains. At our destination village, our audience consisted of a schoolroom filled with men and women of various ages including the village chief who had set up the event. We challenged our audience to examine their ideas and attitudes about gender. “Should the woman cook all the meals and clean the house or should the husband share the work?” we asked. We were a force to reckon with, a Togolese man championing men caring for their daughters, an tall, an American male volunteer dressed like a Togolese chief, and three female girl’s empowerment and education volunteers passionate about leading girls to a brighter future and armed with French vocabulary to describe anything from the reproductive system to women’s rights. Women in the room stood up and shamelessly expressed themselves in front of men, perhaps for the first time. Some men seemed to get the picture, while others seemed too drunk to know where they were. They would have had us stay all day but we were kicked out of the classroom when the children returned for school after their lunch break. The villagers were starving for knowledge and asked us to come back to talk more about health. They seemed so far away from the modern world up on that mountain. We staggered down the mountain and called it a day well spent.

“You pass through places and places pass through you but you carry them with you on the soles of your travelin’ shoes”
- Be Good Tanyas