I had my first (inadvertent) hitchhiking experience in Togo when I was traveling south and flagged down a car on the road that I thought was a bushtaxi, until I noticed that it was built within last decade and made by a recognizable manufacturer- Toyota, a rarity in Togo. As I entered the car the other passengers disembarked, making it clear that this was a personal car, not a bush taxi. While hitchhiking may present many hazards in the States, it was definitely the better option as the car had a seat belt, air – conditioning and a conscientious driver. I discovered in the first ten minutes of the journey that the driver was an engineer for Togo’s Minister of Health and had only picked me up because he wanted company as he drove home to Lomé.
This guy had clearly made it. Living in Lomé, driving in a car imported from Belgium nice enough to pick up young American women- it doesn’t get much better than this in Togo. We started talking about opportunity and the qualifications needed for his line of work. I was especially interested because I just finished “Take Our Daughters to Work Week” in Sotouboua with the hopes of encouraging girls to seek their potential. The girl I had nominated for the program had professed that her dream was to become the Minister of Health for Togo. I was also interested in finding out how this guy became affluent in a country where success is rare.
Opportunity in Togo is extremely hard to come by. Most students only finish college or junior high, which gives them just enough education to be fluent in French. To graduate high school, one must pass the BAC, which I’m told is next to impossible and requires near fluency in English. Many students spend years repeating their last year of high school, Terminal, and retaking the BAC at the end of the year. It is not unusual to find students in Terminal to be anywhere from 19-25 years old.
Take Our Daughters to Work week was a week long camp for girls in their last years of junior high to challenge them to attend high school, to plan for the future and to give them the skills avoid things like sexual harassment and early pregnancy. The participants were selected from villages all over the Centrale region to come to Sotouboua. I discovered that not a single one of them wanted to solely work at the house like many of their mothers currently do and that all of them had lofty dreams to be journalists, doctors, midwifes and school directors. We invited female role models from the community come explain their professions and encourage the girls. We also made site visits to a pharmacy, hospital and library to show the girls professional women in action. We taught them income-generating activities to pay school fees, like how to make lotion, liquid soap and popcorn.
It was clear that these girls have the drive to succeed. However, my engineer driver had different opinion of students in Togo. When I asked my engineer driver what was wrong with Togo, why the development was so far behind places like Ghana, he said it was laziness. I argued, saying that all the people I knew worked hard and farmed every day for many hours. He countered by explaining that all the hard workers are old people and the young people just wander the streets looking for trouble. This problem is endemic in all Francophone countries because they just copied the French model and “the French people don’t like to work hard”, while the Anglophone model has led to rapid development. Well, that’s one theory!
