Orphaned Organs

I don't know what it is inside of me, but just as I try to follow my intuition, that silent urging in situations, there come those times when I feel pushed to move – to go – to see something different. You can call it stir craziness, cabin fever, itchy feet – whatever you name it, it has been a driving force in my life, always leading me to places I've never expected to see. Yesterday the walls were closing in on me. The thought of being here in my house made me feel very tired and my heart race with anxiety at the same moment. Knowing the only thing to do was leave, I threw some odds and ends in a bag and got a taxi out of town. I remember an episode of The X-Files, one where a government-built subterranean antenna broadcasting ultra low frequency waves was causing peoples heads to pop like water balloons. It was actually due to a build-up of pressure behind the ear drums, and Scully and Mulder found that if they traveled west at a quick clip, the pressure would abate for a bit. Yesterday I felt my own bit of pressure here in Lome. Not as if the Togolese government can afford a head-popping secret antenna – there's only enough money in the official coffers here for a crippled infrastructure and the occasional presidential palace. No, I simply mean that as the wind rushed over my face and the landscape faded from sand and concrete to lush rolling hills, I felt the weight of my sedation peeling back and flying off like so many old layers of chipped paint.

I descended back upon Agou-Akoumawou to visit with the stage family and to eventually make my way to Cafe Kuma, a small coffee plantation nestled at the top of one of the mountains circling Kpalime. I needed to find Kujo, the proprietor, whose number went missing with my phone all those weeks ago. True, there were easier ways to find his number, many of which didn't involve leaving my couch, but it was nice to have an over-arching purpose for my impromptu vagabonding. I was at peace last night, relaxing with my surrogate parents and walking the familiar stretch of highway that forms the town. I met with the new stageres this morning and doled out some American sweets I've had stashed – they were all in high spirits, but looked as if their appendages had had a nasty run in with some sort of pox – the heralded akoumawou-tech-house-bugs strike again. Still – an upbeat crowd -

After coming back from the mountain today, Maman had a lunch prepared for me – pate with gbomadetsi (spicy spinach sauce), my favorite – this was interesting, however – now being here has facilitated in my losing any inhibitions I still had about food – granted, there wasn't much I wouldn't eat back in the states (man, you should have seen me at Bray's Island, my last restaurant) – but now be it bones, marrow, skin, fat, organs – bring it on. Hearts? Meaty. Lungs? Spongy. Intestines? If you blur your vision and imagine they are some type of expensive, exotic truffle, they taste just exactly like – you guessed it - intestines. Yum.

Yet today, I ran across a surprise in my gboma – a stray kidney bean. Odd, I thought – Why is there only one bean here? When I remembered there are no kidney beans in Togo, it made much more sense – ah, just a stray kidney. Fine, no problem, I could use the protein. Knowing they come in pairs just added to the excitement – I knew there was one still hiding out. Like finding two temporary tattoos in a box of cracker jacks.

Dear diary – jackpot.

Finding the 3rd kidney a few minutes later was only mildly disconcerting - I was hungry, you see. Truly bothersome, though, wasn't that there were more than one set of kidneys, nor that they were the only bit of meat in my otherwise vegetarian meal. It wasn't even the fact that a small, unsolicited act of poultricide had been commited just to spice up my lunch. No, the truly disturbing fact was the easily overlooked significance of the number of kidneys found in my meal. There were seven kidneys.

Seven.

You see, its not just that 4 chickens died to bring you this journal entry, its that even though 4 died, I only had 3.5 chicken's worth of kidneys. Think about that. I was tackling the idea that I had been served a prime number of kidneys. Where was the orphaned organ? I imagined all the stories I'd ever heard of traveling to Mexico and getting drugged at a club and waking up in an odd hotel room with stitches on my abdomen, only to die a slow death over the next 4 days from a build-up of toxins in my body that my harvested kidneys could no longer filter – except these were chickens, not humans, and they had never been to Mexico, nor ever experimented with psychotropic hallucinogens, and they sure as hell didn't know how to drink too much tequila and dance the meringue at 3am with overweight Mexican prostitutes on their spring break in Tijuana, trying to forget about the girl who dumped them after their senior prom. But I digress... Not to mention, where the hell do you get 7 kidneys from at one time? Is there an organ-lady-stall at the marche? Was I eating a fetisheur's last commission?

The hell if I know – you really think I was thinking that hard about it then and there? I popped those bad boys like popcorn shrimp.

Where Everyone Knows Your Name

If someone were to ask me what I truly loved, a few things would come to mind. There are the bucolic standards – family, life, freedom – but assuming for just a second that I am a healthy, well-adjusted individual we can delve to a much more fun, superficial level. I would say that I love seeing my breath on a cold morning. I love the smell of sun-soaked skin after a day swimming in the river or searching for shark's teeth. I love it when sons show respect to their mothers. I love the exhaustion and relief that come intertwined at the end of a long run. I love the walking stick I had to leave in the states. I love hearing the exact right set of chords at the right time. I love the excitement that comes with taking a huge risk. I love waking up and trading a knowing smile with someone. I love wine. I love cheese danishes (I'm talking, really love cheese danishes).

As I'm sure you can imagine, I could keep going. We all have those little things that make us smile and keep us centered even in unfamiliar environs. My environs are quite unfamiliar to me, so I've had to make a concerted effort to find things that can keep me centered, balanced, focused. When we fall out of sync with ourselves, we end up falling into patterns of extremes – adjectives followed by 'too much' – sleeping too much, reading too much, crying too much, drinking too much. At home, surrounded by family and friends our patterns keep us grounded, if albeit at times, quite bored. At home, I drink lots of hot tea and take long walks in the woods. I find back-alley bars and sit for hours with a bottle of wine and a good book. I hug my parents. Here its a bit different – in such a different environment its much easier to go a little ape-shit from time to time. So, what to do? Well, I've found a new love – everyone, meet tchouk. Tchouk, everyone.

Tchouk is, at its simplest, home-brewed millet beer. Millet is ground in a mill (called a moulin here – a windmill) which produces a red clay-colored powder. This powder is mixed in with a huge pot of water and left to settle for a few hours. When all seems calm, the froth at the top is scraped off and a huge fire is lit underneath. The brew is stirred for many hours and then left to ferment for many days. As a fun bonus, charcoal is thrown in with every batch. When asked why, I received the all-encompassing response that, by the earnest look across Maman Colette's face, settled all further discussion– 'for the ancestors'.

Still, by reducing it to its basic constituents does it a great injustice, for tchouk's meagre means belie its greater purpose as a whole. Tchouk comes originally from the northern parts of Togo, brewed by the Kabye and Kotokoli. I've heard the best of the best can be found near Dapaong and Mango. Brewed every morning and fermented in either 3 or 5 day shifts, a community's morning visit to the tchoukstand (called the 'cafe matinal') is comparable to a morning coffee at Hardee's back in the states. Gossip is traded, stories swapped, the difficulties of the day sloughed off with each calabash. There are two main types of tchouk – the vrai tchouk and tchokpa (I am clueless as to the spelling there). They are fundamentally the same thing, with only a few variations in the brewing originating from their locations up north. Tchouk tends to be a bit sweeter, less fermented, and less alcoholic. Tchokpa on the other hand, is darker, spicier, more fermented, and quite a bit stronger (still, maybe only 5% by volume). I've heard lengthy diatribes from local experts expounding upon even more minute differences between further delineations (loso-micine, kabye-micine, dapaong-micine) but for all intensive purposes, just know that there are a few types and while you aren't expected to drink one exclusively over the others, depending on where you are from you are expected to profess your love for your natal brew, no matter how deferentially you choose to do so.

Now there are much more efficient vessels for inebriation in country. A 50cfa (a dime's-worth) shot of sodobe will buddy you up much faster than 5 or 6 calabashes. But tchouk isn't drank here as we would drink it in the states. Tchouk is used primarily to escape from the heat of the day and relax with conversation. There was tchouk stand a stone's throw away from my house in Agou-Akoumawou, which I used almost daily as an impromptu Ewe lesson. It didn't take long before I was known throughout my stage as Mattchouk. I've continued the tradition here in Lome, and truly enjoy my daily excursions. As a happy side effect, my Ewe has become relatively passable --- and I owe it all to those dirty calabashes of tropical swill. So, in the effort to better integrate, learn some local language and stay centered, anytime I see my local maman's drapeau sitting out front of the tchoukoutchounuƒe I always make sure to sidle up and enjoy a few quiet minutes with friendly smiles where everyone knows my name. And, hey, here its not a bad thing that me tro va egbe sia egbe. If I come back every day, it just makes me one of the locals.

AIDS ride blues

Awoke from the concrete this morning to another breakfast of Ablo and gboma (sweet, moist corn cakes and spicy spinach sauce). Sitting across from everyone, shared happiness and exhaustion passing between smiles and looks throughout the room, it was hard for me to be down on my luck -- still, as I shoveled the congealed spiciness into my gaping maw, the slightest urge to retch tickled the back of my throat and made me yearn for home in a way Ive never really felt before. Maybe it was the Ablo (which I love, actually), maybe it was the soiled biking clothes I had been wearing for 4 days that lent me a wonderful musk of a middle school gym locker room, maybe it was the heat and humidity that, even at 6AM, was already laying heavy on the landscape like a quilt thrown across a freshly made bed. Maybe it was simple exhaustion, or the simple quiet of the morning that left me to my thoughts that tickled at the shadow of loneliness that had been spreading from the back of my mind for a few days, but I would have slapped someone's mother for a 5 am trip to Bojangles on a cold morning for boberry biscuits and shitty coffee. And just because I could, I would have smoked a cigarette and listened to an epic song while gazing at the sun coming up to make it more like a movie.

This is all coming from the last full day of AIDS Ride, a yearly event here where I met with a group of 10 or so other volunteers from Maritime (our region here in the south) and we embarked on a 5 day bike tour through nigh-impassable reaches of the interior to sensibilize small villages and schools about AIDS and preventative measures. We covered beween 40 - 60k a day in about 130 degree temps, over an amazing array of sandy impasses, sandy hills, sandy paths, sand covered slopes, sand filled pits, and through sandy villages. I was up until now unaware of the charms of biking long distances in the dead heat of the day, but let me tell you, its quite invigorating in a what-in-the-hell-have-I-done-to-deserve-this sorta way. Also if there are any questions, or anyone needs a quick condom demo, Im your man to come to.

Dont you be talkin bout no AIDS...

On a related note, I have decided that my Peace Corps project will be to pave the entire country of Togo. Asphalt for all.