I Win You!

6/26/2009

You would be surprised how much heat one little bandana will trap on a person’s head. At least, I am -- surprised by many things here.

Today it rained a solid three hours and for once, I am feeling cool instead sopping my face with a sweat rag. If you decide to brave this world, these little handkerchiefs will be your new best friend.

Seems I have found myself something of a new best friend, that’s not to say an old best friend got replaced. Never fear. Shortly after my last blog was written 4/21/09, not published mind you, I welcomed a visitor into my home for an undetermined amount of time, which to my astonishment turned into about five weeks. I like to think that I was the first person to have ruled out the possibility of finding any local romantic interests while in Africa -- for many reasons. But naturally, I was forced to eat my words in a very hearty helping of never say never. After all, living together is not exactly an appetizer. Seems stereotypes are social constructs set up to make us look the fool… The challenges, or let’s face it, the problems I thought I would encounter never materialized the way other issues I assumed to be non-issues turned into major epidemics. Even now as I am sitting here alone in my house in the middle of the Togolese bush, I feel beaten, but thankfully not vanquished by all that has transpired. If anything, I am curious to see what the future holds for me and, well, for us.

Shifting gears a bit, there was an event or an incident that occurred on Friday, May 1st, 2009 that I, for myself, need to document. If you look back in my blog archives you will read that historically May 1st in Togo has been a bit stressful. 2009 did not disappoint. This momentous day happened to be the second day of my boyfriend’s visit in my village and it was a national holiday, Labor Day. Holidays are essentially excuses to eat and drink and drink and drink some more -- a favorite pastime of many villagers. Also the day before, Thursday, was my village’s market day, another opportunity to drown your sorrows in calabashes of Tchouk. So imagine, by Friday night two full days of festive inebriation coming to a close. Normally, this kind of debauchery is fine when one sticks to one kind of alcohol, such as the local brew, but when people start hitting the moonshine, the spirits change. This is not anything new; people turn from happy drunks to aggressive ones; this happens anywhere and everywhere. It just happened to be here in my village that my host father Yao chose to drink gin on the first of May that resulted in one of the most fucked up nights of my existence to date.

It went down like this: my boyfriend Amed and I were enjoying a relaxing evening lounging in my private backyard. The hour was somewhere around nine o’clock at night. My host mother Kossia was home with the baby and as far as I could tell, all the other kids were out studying at school or at the video club. The evening was pleasant, until my host father showed up piss drunk. Africans are known to speak with a certain amount of passion and heat in their voices, at least when compared with Americans, so that what I often think is a fight is just a discussion. My host parents have lots of discussions. This night I thought the same thing at first; they would talk it out and everything would be fine, go back to normal.

For all intents and purposes, they were yelling at each other, which was par for the course. Then I hear what sounds like a strike, not a slap which has its own distinct sound. Initially, I was too shocked at what I was hearing to really process it. Was I actually hearing what I thought I was hearing? Or was it my imagination? I do remember Kossia crying at one point and calling Yao the equivalent of “asshole.” They were in their bedroom at this point. There was some silence and I remember thinking it was over. I turned to Amed and told him this wasn’t normal. He held my hand as the arguing resumed. I have never been around domestic violence, so I felt like it took me too long to register what was happening. As Yao started beating Kossia again, she started crying and shouting more loudly and calling, at first, for her eldest son, Georges. I was paralyzed with shock or disbelief and this sickening feeling. I tried to block it out by holding onto Amed, wishing and praying for it to be over, reliving childhood memories of my own parents fighting. Then Kossia started screaming my name, my village name. When she started yelling for me to help her, I knew without a doubt I had to do something. I had to.

I ran out of my house and into the family courtyard. I turned for half a second to look at the door to my host parent’s bedroom, knowing I didn’t have the strength to go in there seeing Yao beat Kossia with a belt, as it turned out later. So instead, I started screaming at the top of my lungs, “HELP ME!” with the notion that people would come running. How often does the white girl run screaming through village? No one came running, so I did. I ran all over my neighborhood screaming and crying “HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME!” in french of course. All I thought is that I can’t do this alone, I need help. One girl from the middle school asked what was wrong, so I asked where her father was; I needed help at my house. She looked at me blankly. It felt like forever, but in reality it was probably more like one or two minutes before I ran toward my chief’s house and caught his brother. All I said was, “Yao, Kossia!” and he ran off in the direction of my house. By the time I made it back to my house, to my astonishment, a crowd of people had arrived and in the middle was Amed, sitting with Yao, trying to calm him down. Relieved, I started to cry for real, until a neighbor came up to me and told me to essentially stop crying. Perhaps culturally that was normal to say, but I was left feeling angry. I walked out of the courtyard and sat under the tree to cry silently to myself. A different neighbor came over to sit with me. I am guessing to make sure I was okay. He was surprised as I was about the whole incident. Never would I have taken Yao as someone who would do such a thing. He may be a lot of things but I never would have guessed this from him. And, for what? He came home drunk to a child-free house and wanting to take advantage of the situation have sex with his wife. My conjecture is that she refused him, so he forced himself on her. Whether he was successful or not, I do not know. I do know she started calling him names, insulting him, naturally. So for insulting him, he decides to beat her??? I am getting these bits and pieces from what I heard and what my neighbor was telling me under the tree. By this point, I was sufficiently numb, as more neighbors began to surround me. Amed came over and sat next to me as Yao asked for my pardon. My pardon??? He should be apologizing to his wife! I could have said so many things at that point. It was really tempting, but instead I said that I just wanted to go to bed and deal with it in the morning. All I wanted was for the nightmare to end, to go to sleep instead of wake up.

Amed told me later that after I had ran off screaming into the night, he went in the bedroom to stop Yao. The room I was too afraid to go into. He said the sight was basically how I had imagined it: Yao, in his underwear, arm raised with a black leather belt in hand, Kossia crying, clutching the baby. He was beating her while she was holding the baby; I am not sure who’s in the wrong here… Luckily when Amed entered, it shocked Yao back to reality and he stopped. Amed separated the two by taking Yao outside to calm him down while help arrived.

So what the hell is wrong with people? Even writing about this causes me to feel sick. It was strange and bizarre and awful, like an episode of the Twilight Zone. I thank my lucky stars that Amed was there; I am just sorry that was his introduction to my village. Needless to say, it is difficult to look at Yao the same way and I have come to dread the Thursdays and Fridays that he is perpetually drunk since now it seems like anything can happen. Most of all I feel bad for their kids. Amed told me that Freeshia, their 13 year old daughter did come home at one point during the commotion; I just don’t know how much she saw. RPCV’s have told me that it is in your last six months of service that you start to see people for who they really are for better or worse.