I have been very busy these past couple of weeks and have lots of stories to tell. On Thursday we distributed plumpy nutt sachets donated by the UNICEF program to children between 6 months and 5 years, breast-feeding women, and pregnant women. If the child was malnourished they were sent to me to record their height and weight and give them vitamin A and albendazole. As easy as this task sounds, it was very difficult to force a child to take a spoonful of ground-up vitamins and it usually ended with the mother plugging the child’s nose to force them to swallow. There was about 100 women that showed up for the distribution. The best way for me to describe the chaos of 100 Togolese women being offered free food is to compare it to the day after Thanksgiving shopping rush, except all of my homologues had branches and would hit the women with them to keep them in line. Overall the day was a success and I am going to try and make it a monthly thing.
I have had some recent bad experiences with bugs. First of all, a new spider has moved into my latrine. It is about the size of my hand and is bright yellow with orange stripes. I am pretty sure anything that colorful and exotic has to be poisonous. I also got attacked by ants. I was walking home from one of my homologues houses the other night and since it was dark I didn’t see the huge ant colony forming along the path. It didn’t take my long to realize what I had done because all of the sudden my feet started burning and I looked down and saw that I had about 50 ants gnawing at my feet. I had to rip them all off and these things have big pinchers so some of them even took skin.
I have also eaten a lot of foods that I would normally never eat. I can now add to my list rat, bat, and the whole entire fish (bones, eyeballs, fins, everything). It gets to a point where you just don’t care anymore and are pretty much willing to eat anything.
Well, I hope you all are doing well. As always I think about you all often and miss you lots!
Lots of love from Togo
-Whitney