Weekends and Religion

Gbatope is a relatively small town but it’s only 6km away from Tsevie, a much larger city. This is where the GEE group has their training. Occasionally on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon the Peace Corps will give us a ride to Tsevie. There we can hang out with our GEE friends, play ultimate, and walk the dirty streets. On Mondays and Fridays the market in Tsevie is bustling. There you can peruse the venders and dicker and haggle over prices. A trip to Tsevie means internet access at the cyber café but usually we all end up at the bar with GEE. Last time we were in Tsevie a couple of us bought some street meat from a vender on the side of the road. It was the first time I’d bought food in Togo and although I’m not entirely sure what it was, it was delicious. The vender was Muslim so we figured he probably had some choice meats. One fun thing about living in Togo is that you can litter. I know that probably sounds awful but it actually makes sense. Togo doesn’t exactly have a fantastic waste management system and all the trash will be burned anyways. Sunday means no class so we’re free to do whatever. Sometimes I’ll sleep in until 7 which is nice. Sunday morning is the one time I’m alone in the house, because my whole family is at church. Church for them lasts about an hour and a half. Other churches have longer services as my buddy Luke found out after he spent 8 hours at church with his family. Shoot me. Religion in Togo is varied. According to Lonely Planet 12% follow Islam (there’s a mosque in my town) and 29% are Christian. Now it’s important to note the way these religions are practiced here are really more of a blend with traditional and local beliefs. This makes sense because the dominant religious practices in Togo are indigenous beliefs and animism at 59%. One particular indigenous belief is quite notable as it originated in Togo and neighboring Benin and has since spread to other parts of the world. The religion was originally called Vodun a word that means “the hidden” or “the mystery.” Many of the slaves who were shipped to the New World were from Togo and Benin and they took the practice of Vodun with them. In Haiti and Cuba it became known as Voodoo.Voodoo tends to draw negative connotations but it gets a bad rap and here it’s just a part of people’s daily lives. Voodoo is mainly practiced in southern Togo but I haven’t seen much of it there in Gbatope. A local farm we toured has a sacred forest next to it and there is a small fetish inside. Donny carved a face on a block of wood and we’ve made it a fetish for our garden.My family are Jehovah’s Witness which I honestly don’t know that much about because back in the States I would always turn them away whenever they knocked on my door. That’s just because I simply wasn’t interested. I’m not one to easily judge a religion (especially one I know very little about) because I’m still asking questions myself. But I do know one thing about Jehovah’s Witness and that’s that they don’t believe in the use of modern medicine (herbs and natural medicines are ok). One volunteer has a Jehovah’s Witness temple in her village and she told me about a girl who suffered complications from pregnancy and ended up bleeding to death because Jehovah’s Witness doesn’t believe in blood transfusions. The whole story was pretty disturbing. It doesn’t seem like my family is uber- religious although they do sometimes have morning prayer sessions which I’ve accidentally interrupted a couple of times. My little 10 year old brother Jacque asked me to go to church with them and I told my dad that I would one day so I suppose I will as long as it’s not 8 hours long.