Settling in
Trip Start
Jun 30, 2004
1
4
18
Trip End
Sep 15, 2004
Lome,
Togo
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Basically one of the reasons I decided to do this was I wanted to see poverty, and I wasn't pretending Id understand it but since they always bang on about people living on less than $1 a day at uni I figured I should try and work out what that actually meant.(by the way a good wage here is about 22 pounds a MONTH Now sitting in the Ex-pat compound of the capital city isn't the best way to do this so when the opportunity arose to go North and drop some of the children off with there remaining family members(most are orphans but the large African families look after the kids in the summer) I thought great yes fantastic.
Togo isn't very big and once we'd left the capital it wasn't long before we were in some villages, most of the people we saw were poor but not the poorest so they often had two rooms instead of one to live in, some houses I just didn't want to go into, they smelt awful, were dark and dingy and I was just freaked!! But amusingly at everyone the father figure insisted I drank his homebrew 99 %( ish) whisky.....I figured I can't get ill on this right (its disinfectant)!!!
Anyway most of the kids got upset when we got to there houses as although the SOS village where they stay for most of the year isn't high class they do get the basics (clean water/their own bed/food/mosi nets/concrete walls/ppl to play with out being forced to work) so when we got to there home villages lots of the kids started crying, We (the staff) couldn't show affection towards them as its not the done thing and the family would get annoyed. Was a bit of a nightmare and opened my eyes no end.
The last village was particularly horrific as I was tired and hungry (never a good combination) and well, the people who met us were a bit odd, we where led into another dark room then the grandma came in and started ranting at me in a local language (just smile and nod) then the aunt came in and started ranting as well. The child had been abandoned years ago and the director asked if the mum or dad had been found as ultimately a reunion is the ideal scenario, The aunt pronounced the mum has been found but there's not a chance in hell of her remembering who the dad was.........the room went silent, the kid started crying and bloody hell what do you do?? More ranting followed, I realised that the muttering grandma was very worrying because we where in a bloody voodoo village and she was probably cursing me!!! It turned out the 2 ladies were mad, but telling the truth.
It really made me think, I totally believe in the charity, it does do amazing things and gives kids chances, but it has to encourage the children to go home over the summer so they can understand what life is really like in Togo, but should we be letting kids go to these places, fair enough every child should have the right to live with their family but what if there just not child-care material!!
Sorry for the rant but those 2 days really changed my opinion on "the developing world" and how messed up it is now!!
I could go on a rant now about how the European Union is imposing sanctions on Togo because of the leadership but it is really only affecting the population but Ill save that for another day (once I've visited the EU mission here!!!)
