SCHOOLS OUT🏃🏽💨💨💨
July 10th- hosted my monthly girls club to kick off summer vacation! We discussed strong influential women, women who are strong in our families as well as how we can promote gender equality. This is the start of shaping young minds to grow up and be influential like the founder of #LetGirlsLearn First Lady Michelle Obama. My girls range from ages 3-16 and all enjoy learning, dancing, singing and supporting one another. Cheers to these beautiful kind spirited souls!
At the beginning of June I led a session with students on how to start tree nurseries. We handed out over 300 tree seeds of various species along with planting sacks to the attendees so that they can start tree nurseries of their own at their houses. We use Pure Water sacks to plant in, which are baggies of water that you can buy just about anywhere, and you bite the corner off of it then suck out the water out. They are littered everywhere, especially after market days, and they make a great way to start baby trees and get trash out of the village at the same time.
Due to it being rainy season the dependence on water is at an all time high. ☔️Rain water brings not only potable drinking water but also helps turn the turbines to generate electricity. The other day all the water pumps were cut off but thankfully my village also has a well. In America our privilege and access to drinkable water that’s also fortified with fluoride is an amenity I will forever cherish. Water 💧truly is an essential part of life no matter where you are. Pictured here are my neighbors hauling water from the well about 300 feet from my house.
Guess What Day It Is….
March 8th Around the World🌍🌎🌏 is “La Journée International de la Femme” or International Women’s Day! Today I invited some Hospital staff (the mid-wife) and (hospital president) to join me in speaking about the importance of Women in the Health Field! We also did a relay race, talked about gender roles, equality and women’s empowerment !
“Girls and Women are NOT property. They have right to determine their own destiny.”
-UNICEFPlease join me in recognizing those special women in your life and say Thank you with a hug or a kind gesture Today!
Volunteers in Togo work with their communities on projects in agriculture, education, and health. During their service, Volunteers learn to speak local languages, including Bassar, Ewe, French, Ikposso, Kabiyé, Konkomba, Kotokoli, Moba, Tchamba, and Tem. More than 2,850 Peace Corps Volunteers have served in Togo since the program was established in 1962. http://bit.ly/1n4VNuH
“We held a M.A.P. (Men as Partners) event and covered subjects such as HIV, STDs, abstinence and condoms… This is a picture of Tanit speaking to the students. Tanti is a lycée teacher from another village. She travels to lycées all over Togo to deliver the message of safe sex, and why girls and boys should respect themselves and each other sexually. You can see by this picture how she engages the kids and gets her message across. Tanti has a gift and I’m sure has had a positive impact on many teens.”
You can’t introduce your parents to your village without a HUGE fete. So that’s what we spent Thursday doing - partying it up with my friends and members of the environmental association I worked with.
After a morning cooking rice pate and peanut sauce with my friend, Majorette, we sang and danced with the women in the environmental association. The members are from all over Togo, so the women performed different dances based on their ethnicity - the Moba shake, Kabiye, Losso, Ife, Fon. They LOVED watching my mom dance - and correctly intuited to let my dad just observe.
I’m not much for goodbyes, so this was the perfect way to celebrate with my friends and work partners in village before I leave Togo.
One day, I’ll be back.
“I met this man in 1982 in the the village of Kpagouda, Togo. Like most of the villagers he was a subsistence farmer and grew cassava and millet. My job was to identify and train farmers to use oxen for tilling their fields. The traditional method of preparing the fields in this area was by a hand hoe and was, of course, very labor intensive. The use of oxen for tillage could multiply their crop production by at least four times.” – Peace Corps Volunteer Thomas Schissel http://bit.ly/1Owllfp
Meet Zanab.
I call her “Nabu”, and she is my 7 year-old host sister. She is the oldest of the siblings here and therefore takes on most of the responsibilities of the household. At the tender age of 7, she often carries around her (rather rotund) host brother Ibrahim, 2, on her back. Have you ever seen an ant carry a blade of grass? Yeah, it kind of looks like that. Nabu is a dancer by nature. At any given moment, sans music, she will be dancing. When you see her demure smile paired with her charmingly erratic gestures of pure joy, you laugh, then you dance too.
“This moment was one of my last visits to a school in my community. The girls were sent to collect sand for a building project. There is still much work to be done.”
Continue the work of Peace Corps Volunteers in Togo. Now hiring Agriculture Extension Volunteers. Apply by October 1 to depart June 2016: http://1.usa.gov/1R2o6mQ
The first morning of camp started with a session on food security followed by hands-on practice with solar drying, banana jam making and tomato canning. All three activities help girls have access to fruits and vegetables throughout the year, thereby improving food security.
Check out some photos from our permagardening day at the February in-service training for first-year volunteers and their counterparts. After sessions on composting, transplanting, nutrition and natural insecticides, everyone was excited to return to start gardens at their schools, dispensaires and homes.
Photo Credit: Shea Flynn
Another awesome PCV project!
(via peacecorpsjourney)
A fellow volunteer took these shots at our Femmes Contre la Faim conference in December - and they are too beautiful not to share! Photo Credit: Julie Strupp.
Stunning.