A Couple of Wooden Benches

It's true, I haven't posted in a few days. You see, I took some time this weekend to go into the bush with some friends and visit a village...
A two and a half hour drive north out of Lome took us to the town called Atakpame where there is a Peace Corps maison. The maison provides regional PCVs refuge, showers, flushing toilets, books, movies. At the maison, we picked up a couple of friends and the five of us headed out of town onto an old beat up tarmac road into the bush in an SUV. People stopped their work to stare at the yovos as we crossed their path.

We arrived as the sun was setting and took a short tour, shaking hands and greeting our new friends along the way. Most of the homes were made from mud. Thatched roofs. There was no electricity. No town pump. No flushing toilets.

A kerosene lamp and a couple of wooden benches would provide the setting for an amazing evening.

Some local men, friends of a friend if you will, came to visit after dark with what appeared to be a 5 gallon plastic gas can and several gourds cut in the shapes of bowls. It was tchouk. They tasted the thcouk first to show it was not poison and passed around the calabash bowls for everyone to have their own. We poured the first drip on the ground. Respect to the ancestors, then sat in the dark, on our wooden bench sipping an ancient recipe from a calabash, staring at the stars and listening as the women pounded manioc in a wooden bowl as they had done for so many years. Hundreds? Thousands? It is hard to say.