week 1

Hi all!

So for the past week I have been settling in on top of a mountain in northern Togo. The mountain is great! On Sunday I read on these rocks that are positioned like a lounge chair with a really nice cross breeze - amazing. The food here is really good. The sauces are awesome and everything is made from ingredients either cultivated by the family or from the plants nearby. Ive grown to love rice and beans but still getting used to the sorghum pate that you eat with your hands and then dip in the sauce. I suppose its an acquired taste.

Yesterday along with my translator/assistant/advisor Jespere I interviewed several people in the valley village of Farende about child trafficking in the area. I spoke with 2 grandparents, the host father of Rui (another Duke student), a shop owner, and two others in the market. All were vehemently opposed to the trafficking since it leaves their family shorthanded when their livelihood depends on subsistence farming. If the kids return from Nigeria, etc they often come back only with a menial amount of money (for school fees) or materialistic and thus useless goods likes videos, tvs, motorcycles, etc. Even if they could be harnessed to create an income, it would take to long to turn that around for it to be meaningful to the family. The people I interviewed were older (parent-aged) and seemed more traditional and so the kids breaking their ties and allegiances to the family was very hurtful to them. Sometimes kids (who leave around ages 14-15) return with mills. These types of goods that could benefit the family and the entire village immediately received a mixture of reactions - people did not want to accept the children secretly leaving the village but they did not want to deny the huge benefits of a local mill. One person said that if the child left, returned with something beneficial, and then stayed in the village then that was sort of okay but if the child kept leaving for Nigeria then that was detrimental. I was also surprised by the number of girls who left the village for housekeeping jobs both internationally and domestically, and by the impact trafficking has had concerning the spread of disease namely HIV in the village.

The main response for the cause of the trafficking was poverty. Everyone so far believes that if parents were better able to support their children in the education, health, etc that the kids would stay in the village and help their families. One person even suggested family planning as a way to help prevent trafficking, which I think is incredibly interesting. He said that if families had less kids, then they would have more money to keep them in school, the kids would then be better educated and be able to bring modernization (like tractors) back to the family, which would in turn improve their life styles and harvest returns. This is interesting considering that in school when we learn about the "demographic transition," it is often inferred that agricultural lifestyles are a reason for having more children (more laborers) - but what this man was saying is that the families could do without all of the kids working on the farm and that what is needed is better family planning access and education.

This week I am back in the south in the capital city Lomé to speak with NGOs about what they are doing concerning the issue.