I hope this entry finds you all happy and healthy in the new year. It has been a while since I last wrote so I will give you a brief update on everything that has happened since November.

I celebrated Christmas with some other volunteers in Kara (a city in the North) and I celebrated New Years in my village. New Years involved a lots of dancing, sodabi, and eating more rice and fish sauce than I thought possible. The party doesn’t end after New Years either; it started New Years Eve and went until the Sunday following New Years, which meant four days and five nights of partying. I am exhausted. Also, my sense of time is all out of whack. In honor of New Years all the market ladies are selling fireworks. This combined with the heat has left me wondering if I should be saying Merry Christmas or Happy 4th of July. I did have a snowy Christmas though. With the end of the rainy season all the farmers are burning their fields which causes a constant flurry of ash. It looks like snow but makes everything really dirty and is sometimes so thick it almost blocks out the sun.

I got a cat, his name is Enonam (my neighbors named him so I am not sure what this means in Ewe). He can scale cement walls, he hunts spiders, cockroaches, and mice, he is afraid of everyone except for me and he eats anything from beans and pate to crackers and mashed potatoes. So basically, Enonam has been pretty entertaining and useful so far.

I tried to teach the kids how to play baseball with my nerf ball and a branch from a tree. Everything was going fine until I got up to bat and sent the ball flying right into this little 5-year old girls face. After that the kids weren’t to keen on playing baseball with me anymore. Right now I am in the process of trying to construct a basketball hoop in front of my house in hopes that I will be able to host a Togolese version of Hoopfest.

I haven’t had any interesting animal encounters lately and I don’t have anything new to add to my list of crazy things I have eaten (unless you want to count the other morning when I accidentally ate a cricket that had gotten into my oatmeal).

The mosquito net distribution was a huge success and also complete chaos, but that was to be expected. A total of 200 nets were distributed which means almost every household in Koudassi has a mosquito net! I posted some pictures of the distribution on my flickr account. Sorry I didn’t take better pictures, like I said it was a chaotic day. Thanks again to everyone who donated!

I have been trying to hone in on my Dad’s architectural skills as I am in the process of trying to design a new health center for Koudassi. I am getting a little frustrated with how slow things move here. We finally got permission from the chief and he designated a piece of land for us to use. Before I can submit the proposal for the project to receive the funds (which are already raised thanks to everyone at MSHS), I need to have the carpenter and mason bid the job. I have been trying to accomplish this task for about a month now and, to make a long story short, Togolese don’t really have a sense of time. They live in the present and progress is slow if not completely stagnant. I’m sorry if that sounds really pessimistic, but it is a struggle I deal with everyday.

As of the beginning of January I have been in Togo for 7 months. I can’t believe how fast the time has flown by. It has made me realize how short a time two years is and how difficult it is to really have an impact on a place in such a short time. I have spent the first quarter of my service just trying to adopt to the new culture and be able to communicate with people. I guess it is just frustrating when you see how much there is to be done, the odds of making an impact seem beyond attainable sometimes. Luckily I have developed a fix for when I start to get discouraged: playing with the kids, running around naked and eating dirt (just to clarify, I don’t run around naked and eat dirt, the kids do). Their joy is contagious and they always make me smile.

Well, as always I miss you all lots and want you to know, I couldn’t do this without your support. So until next time I will leave you with an Ewe proverb: Asigbe ye asi din a. Which means “there is time for everything” (I guess this proverb is more for my benefit).

Lots of love- Whitney