June 26, 2011

After 31 hours of traveling- 21 of that sitting on a plane, not much fun- and about 8 hours of sleep in 50 hours (great advice to any of you going on a big trip: pack a little earlier than the night before you leave! That way you don’t have to wake up early the day before you travel and don’t have to stay up through most of the night getting little stuff done before you’re out of the country haha) I made it to Togo!!! As I look out the window during landing I am thinking to myself, ‘Well hello 3^rd world country!”. Soooo much different than anywhere else I have been!

Made it through customs (with only one marriage proposal) and met up with some ABWE missionaries and two other families checking out what a long-term mission with ABWE in Togo looks like. Tim and Esther Neufeld were there, pleasant surprise!  They are the missionary couple my church supports who came and talked about the hospital in Togo right before I started college. I told them that when I was a real nurse someday I would come serve here. Well here I am! They seemed to enjoy seeing me and I was surprised how much they remember about the people in our church.

We spent the first day running errands and doing some grocery shopping in the city of Lome.  A few things that stood out to me:

-The city is very dark at night. You see an occasional streetlight or lightbulb outside a building. Almost everyone carries around flashlights.  

-The roads and traffic are absolutely insane. There is a general idea of cars on one side of the road go this way, cars on the other side of the road go the other way… but not really. The vehicles get SO close to each other and then crazy motorcycle (‘motos’) fill in any small gaps. At one point Betty- the missionary who is in charge of the guesthouse here- had to get out of the van and direct/stop traffic because there was a jam in an intersection. At first I thought for sure we were stuck there forever, but vehicles managed to squish together a little tighter so someone could make the first move out.  There are potholes everywhere. Most of them are filled with water from rain, so you can’t see how deep they are. But a general idea of the size is that Luke (our 110 pound lab) would enjoy swimming in them haha.

-Women carry everything on their head, and their babies on their backs.  One woman had a HUGE bowl of pineapple and mangoes on her head with a small toddler swaddled around her back. They carry as much as they can and then take it to a market or just sit on the side of the street to sell it.  As we got further out of the city another woman had a bowl of water- about 9-10 gallons I think as I’m comparing it to the buckets we use for the show cattle J- on her head, was using one hand to steady it, the other to hold onto a kid, and at the same time had to get over into the brush/trees for passing cars. I was impressed.

- In the town of Lome there seemed to be a lot of men standing/sitting around. If a truck stopped to be unloaded or a tire went flat in the middle of the road and needed to be changed they would gather around to help out… I’m not sure if they were hoping to get paid?? When we loaded a refrigerator about 4 guys standing outside the store helped us and I’m assuming that the guy who worked at the store split the tip with them.

The further north we drove towards the mountains and the hospital, the more rural it got. I saw a lot more kids carrying water/branches on their heads or in carts walking along the side of the road.  There were a lot more mud houses instead of concrete.  The way of living seems really simple out here. It revolves around the basic necessities of life: water, food, shelter. And that’s about it. Very different, but I think I’m going to like it.

Okay, so for those of you who know me and how I appreciate ‘nice’ places and things and couldn’t really imagine me living in the jungle, you are going to like this next bit. As we pull into the hospital compound I am a little surprised. Lots of really nice buildings with decent gravel roads.  The house that I’m staying in right now is nicer than my parents’. Real beds, nice showers, mirrors, air conditioner, couches, decorations the whole nine yards.  At first I was almost disappointed because this wasn’t the ‘experience’ I had been prepared for. But it didn’t take me more than a couple of minutes to really appreciate it! A lot of the missionaries consider the compound their home over their houses in the states, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s a very nice place here!  However, I am VERY excited to spend some days in the villages. There are a few missionaries who do that, and I plan on joining up for sure!

I could go on and on, but I’ll save more for next time.