Mormons and Strawberries

After the hike to the waterfall on the Togo/Ghana border, we enjoyed a last meal of chicken and fried rice in Ghana, knowing we may never consume such delicacies again. The same Togolaise guide who hiked with us to Upper Wli Falls walked us to the border, which was 200 meters out of town. On the Ghana side, three uniformed officials studied our passports for 15 minutes, searched our bags, and made us fill out some paperwork. On the Togo side, we had to wake the border official up from a nap and he dutifully copied our information into a giant ledger of border crossings, while waving any car that passed through the checkpoint without a second thought. Welcome back to the hot mess of Francophone West Africa.

We hopped into a shared taxi, the most common form of transport between cities in Togo, and started a 2 hour journey on a crazy, crappy mountain road. It's standard practice to cram 7 people into a car meant for 5, so someone has the unfortunate position of sitting between the driver and the passenger, contorting their body to avoid the gear shifts of the driver. Every pothole jarred the bones in our body and we were left wondering how the car was still in one piece after making that trip multiple times each day. Once we made it to a bigger city, we took another shared taxi to Kpalime, Togo, this time on a beautiful paved road. Alright, it was just black with a white stripe down the center, but it was nice and smooth.

In the process of looking for our hotel in Kpalime, we saw a foreigner biking with a helmet, the unmistakable sign of a Peace Corps Volunteer. We flagged her down and talked, finding out that hidden in this beautiful city was the training site for Peace Corps Togo. Over 30 people were still in training, so we made plans to meet up later that night. We had also planned to meet up with Burkina volunteers in Togo, so we had plenty of friends for the entirety of our three night stay in Kpalime.

During that stay, we hung out at another waterfall, hiked up the tallest mountain in Ghana/Togo (more of a tall hill), sampled coffee grown in the region, and found a restaurant owned by a Belgian couple that served authentic trappist ales! I was beside myself with happiness.

More waterfalls!

Beligan beer in West Africa.  A dream come true.

 After a couple days, we said a reluctant goodbye to Kpalime and headed to Lome, the capital of Togo. From there, we took a taxi to the Togo/Benin border, which only took 45 min because Togo is such a narrow country. Once crossing over into Benin, we headed to Grand Popo, a beach resort town. After our brief stint inland, it was nice to be back at the beach. We spent the rest of the day alternating between searching out seafood and relaxing.

The next day, we headed further down the coast to Ouidah. We ended up being dropped off really far outside of town, so we had to find a way to get ourselves and all of our baggage to a hotel that was apparently not very well known. After multiple people tried to rip us off, we just started walking in the direction we thought we were supposed to go. Unfortunately, we chose a terrible road that quickly turned into a series of puddles of mud. After about 30 min of slugging through ankle deep slop, a car stopped and a man asked in English if we needed help. He was traveling further past Ouidah, but offered to take us into town and help us find our hotel. Being a group of hardened, proud, Burkina Peace Corps Volunteers, our first instinct was to refuse. However, none of us had any idea where we were, we were tired, covered in mud, and pissed off, so we decided to accept the offer of help.

This angel of a man had his driver make room for the five of us and after some circular searching, found our hotel.  During the ride, we were casually tipped off that our savior was Mormon, as he had graduated from BYU and ran a business training program on behalf of the "LDS" church. Sometime earlier in our travels, a guy we met had said that Mormons were by far the nicest people he'd ever met while traveling. I wasn't sold on his assertion until the Mormons rescued me from a hot, muddy, hellish road that was 5 km from where I needed to go. Never again will I make jokes at the expense of the Church of Latter Day Saints. But I may still laugh at them.

The next day, we checked out a museum that documented the history of the slave trade in Benin and the exportation of Beninois culture to the Americas. Then we walked down the 6 km “Route d'Esclaves” that captured men and women marched down before being loaded onto ships and transported as slaves to the New World. The path ended at the “Point of No Return Monument,” which memorialized the hundreds of thousands of slaves that were exported from the shores of West Africa.

Point of No Return - Ouidah, Benin

 Ouidah is also supposedly the “capital” of Beninois voodoo culture, but clearly not the most authentic representation of it. While voodoo is depicted as a dark, doll worshiping magic in the United States, it's actually pretty similar to other polytheistic religions. Voodoo practitioners believe that there is a balance between light (good) and dark (bad) in the world. They believe in a “mother” of the earth and many other gods that control life as we know it. Animal sacrifices are a manner of showing respect to the gods and are extremely important to the practice of the religion.  Considering the frequency that animals are sacrificed in my village in Burkina, I wouldn't say it's a practice unique to voodoo.

Where most people start getting creeped out is the fetish practices of the voodoo religion. Various portions of dead animals are used to create objects that are “imbued” with certain spiritual powers by a priest. Priests can also be possessed by certain gods and deliver messages from the spiritual world. Although voodoo dolls are probably the best known symbol of the religion in the states, they are almost never used. All in all, it was extremely difficult to discern what parts of the voodoo religion and history were authentic and what parts were exaggerated for the sake of tourism, but the “fetish” section of the Cotonou market felt pretty damn real.

Voodoo fetishes in the Cotonou market

After Ouidah, we headed to Cotonou, the economic capital of Benin. It was a huge city, but we got tipped off to stay in a district of the city called “Haie Vive.” This little slice of paradise had pubs, clubs, and everything in between. A highlight of the stay was finding a grocery store that sold wine that I had actually tried during my Cape Town trip a year ago! It was a crazy coincidence We met up with more volunteers and had a couple of really fun nights.

Relaxing with South African wine in the Haie Vive District of Coutounou, Benin

 We were also able to check out a village that is built entirely on stilts located on a lake outside of Cotonou. It was actually more of a city, complete with a mosque and a church (both on stilts). People originally built the village to escape from the slave trade. The ethnic group in Benin that captured most of the slaves was forbidden from entering water, so they would never attack a village on a lake. When we asked our guide why people still live there when it seems harder than living on land, we got a very typical West African answer: “Because they're used to it.”

Stilt city on a lake outside of Cotonou, Benin

Everything goes in the lake......

 From Cotonou, we headed 12 hours north to the city of Natitingou, which came highly recommended by Benin volunteers. We spent a couple days relaxing and hiking around the area, which was very picturesque. Our last night of vacation, we got drinks and food at a bar on a hill that overlooks the city while the sun set. It was a beautiful end to an amazing trip.

View of Natitingou

Getting out of Burkina and seeing the rest of West Africa was one of the best decisions I've made during my Peace Corps service. It put my Burkina experience in perspective and confirmed my suspicions that the Faso is an extremely difficult place to live. From socializing with other volunteers, however, I realized that because the Peace Corps experience is universally challenging in West Africa, it tends to breed a negative perspective on your country of service and a idealization of life in surrounding countries. Nearly every volunteer I talked to, from the ones chilling on the beach in Cape Coast to the ones watching the sun set over the mountains in Natitingou, complained bitterly about their country of service. Not only that, volunteers in every country had heard ridiculous rumors about life in Burkina Faso. My personal favorite was the “strawberry myth,” which was recounted to us by volunteers in all three of the countries that we visited.

The myth: Burkina Faso has strawberries year-round. As soon as you cross the border, you start to see strawberry fields as far as the eye can see.  

Depending on who we heard the myth from, the explanation for this phenomenon was:

a) Burkina has cold, seasonal winds that produce frost in the mornings, which is necessary for strawberries to grow

b) The soil in Burkina is more fertile than surrounding countries

c) Burkinabe farmers are more resourceful than farmers in surrounding countries

d) NONE OF THE ABOVE 

That's right! The answer is d) NONE OF THE ABOVE!  The idea that frost exists anywhere in Burkina is laughable. The seasonal winds are hot and dry. Not to mention strawberries DO NOT need frost to grow. With less rainfall that Ghana, Togo, and Benin, Burkina's soil is dry, dusty, and not fertile for most of the year. Clearly there is one farmer growing strawberries who is more resourceful than the rest of farmers in the country, but to make the generalization that all of the farmers are that resourceful is ridiculous.

The truth:  Burkina Faso has strawberries for 1.5 months out of the year. They are only available in the capital, Ouagadougou, and I have no idea where they come from. I'll take 12 months of having the option of going to the beach over 1.5 months of strawberries any day.

In conclusion, it's easy to get narrow minded and negative when you're stuck in a difficult situation for a long period of time. Just the fact that I was experiencing new things during my vacation did wonders for my emotional health. And honestly, when I returned to Burkina, I tried a little harder to keep an open mind and appreciate the positive experiences I do have here. Because those are the experiences that will make it worth spending the last two years here.