Togo Week 1

Greetings from Lome, Togo!  I can’t believe it’s already been a week since we’ve been on outreach!  Here’s a little recap from week 1 =) 

Things were pretty busy in our last week in Muizenberg as we were trying to get everything together for outreach.  Sadly one of our team members transferred to another team making our already small team of four even smaller with just three: our leader Gerard Rabo, my friend David Lewis, and myself.  (We miss you Doreen!)  But in the end I think everything worked out for the best =)

After a tearful goodbye to Jonah and my other friends, we were off!  We were looking forward to all that God was going to do in and through us this season as we embarked for Togo.   We had a bit of an adventure at the airport in Nigeria with a delayed flight and experiencing some cultural differences in communication and time management and although it was a bit frustrating, in the end David and I recognized the blessing that it was in teaching us to be humble, to surrender our rights of doing things and to embrace the culture that we were about to enter.  We were faced with the challenge to change our way of thinking in recognizing that the way that they do things here is not wrong, it’s just different, to not to be so quick to judge but rather to see the beauty in the differences and to learn from them. 

We were happy to finally arrive in Togo and to find that everyone was so welcoming.  Togo is a beautiful country in both the surroundings and the people and their culture.  As a lover of nature I was excited to see how lush and green everything was and to see new plants and animals that I’ve never seen before!  As a lover of food, I was excited to try some new things as well, the food here is a little high in carbs but still delicious—it just means I’ll really have to practice self control and discipline myself in getting some exercise too =)   As a lover of people I’ve been so thankful for the relationships that I’ve started building.  It can always be hard to leave loved ones and friends behind but God has been so faithful to providing me with family wherever I go and I look forward to developing meaningful friendships while I’m here as well.  I’ve been trying to learn a bit of French each day too!  In the last two days I learned two sentences!

1. J’aime les chats, mais j’adore les chiens. (I like cats but I love dogs)

2. Ce matin j’ai vu beaucoup de fourmis; j’avais peur!  (I saw many ants this morning, I was scared!)

Ha, I know these aren’t very useful, but they were fun to learn nonetheless and the people here appreciate the efforts I’ve made in learning the language =)  

We got to go to a farmer’s market a couple of days ago too!  I’ve been to quite a few farmers markets in my day but never have I been to one like this before!  The streets were lined with people selling goods filled to the brim and the women were walking around carrying everything on their heads too!  I was happy to be able to buy some fruit and to find that it was rather cheap too!  We got ten oranges for about forty cents and a full hand of bananas for about seventy cents!  Yay for keeping healthy at an affordable price =) 

So all in all it’s been a great start to our outreach here in Togo.  This week we were able to start preparing the classroom and do some lesson preparation and we got to meet some of our students as well!  We begin teaching on Monday, I’m super excited!  That’s all for now, until next time, au revoir!