A Day in the Life

I have shared stories from my first 11 months in Togo. I have welcomed you into my home. You have learned about Togolese cuisine, and you have read about culture in Togo. But, really, what AM I doing here? That is a question that I ask myself a little bit too often. As a Peace Corps volunteer, we are not led to expect structured days and work schedules. The Peace Corps administration does not hand its volunteers guides for structured days and work. Part of my work is to find and make my own structure—to find the niches where I can fit and fill the needs of the community and where I can find productive and sustainable work. With that being said, I did have a lot of down time during my first few months in village, and I still have down time to learn about Togolese culture and food, to continue learning French and Ewe, to build relationships with my community, and to question my sanity for living in such a foreign country for two years.

With this downtime, however, I have created my own structure and initiated my own work within the community. My work does not take the form of just one large project that will define my two years in Togo as I have been asked several times by my family and friends, but instead I have many projects and work at many levels of the community on health topics. For example, I work at the middle school, in the clinic, and with the community health workers just to name a few. The structure and routine that I have created for myself (shared below) reflects the culture I am living in and includes all aspects of my life as a volunteer, work in community health, work in learning about culture, and work at staying alive.

Daily Schedule

• 5:30 am: I wake-up, sweep the house and porch, make coffee, shower, and then I eat breakfast which is usually rice and beans from the market.
• 8 am: I make rounds of the community—stopping by the clinic to greet the staff and then walking around to my friends’ houses to greet them. If I don’t have anything planned for the morning, I’ll spend it at the clinic shadowing the nurse, helping with prenatal consultations or aiding with births.
• 12-2:30 pm: Rest hour. For these two to two-and-a-half hours the whole community takes a break, and the offices close. This is when I make lunch, and if I’m really tired, I’ll take a nap, or I’ll just watch movies and TV shows on my laptop.
• 2:30-5 pm: If I don’t have anything planned for the afternoon, I usually work on my laptop filling out reports on my activities, or I’ll go out and spend time with my friends in the community.
• 5 pm: I shower and make dinner. The sun sets between 5 and 6pm, and when it sets, it gets dark, really dark and the mosquitoes come out with a vengeance.
• 10 pm: I sleep.

Weekly Schedule

• Monday: In the morning I teach a sexual reproduction class for the 7th graders at the middle school. Teaching sexual education is challenging because the course is in French, and since the students themselves are still learning French, there is still some vocabulary they don’t know. I’ve had to become creative in how I explain certain terms. Yes, it does get awkward sometimes when we are talking about topics like puberty and contraception. I’ve just had to allow them five minutes or so to just giggle all the awkward out.
• Tuesday: In the mornings, nurses from a private French hospital and I weigh babies in nearby villages. Weighing and monitoring babies is especially important in Togo, where tracking the weight of a baby can tell you a lot about the child’s health status. We can monitor whether he/she is growing well or whether it is necessary to intervene before the child becomes significantly malnourished. Usually we weigh about 100 children from newborns to children who are five years old, and we find about 3-7 severely malnourished kids each time. When this happens, we refer the mothers to the nearby hospital and we talk to them about how to prepare enriched porridge with protein for their child so he/she can grow.
• Wednesday: In the morning I teach a sexual reproduction class for the second 7th grade class at the middle school.
• Thursday: In the afternoon I play soccer with girls from 6th and 7th grade as part of a girls’ soccer club. I started the club to allow girls to have the opportunity to play soccer because most soccer teams are for boys only.
• Friday: In the morning I weigh babies at the clinic as part of the clinic’s vaccination day. This is also the market day in village.
• Saturday: I am free most Saturdays. I spend time with friends, go to the farm to help cultivate crops, catch up on work etc. Some Saturdays, I’ll go to go neighboring villages to give health talks to community members on various topics like the importance of going to prenatal consultations, the dangers of giving birth at home, the importance of breastfeeding, infant nutrition, hygiene etc.
• Sunday: In the morning I go to Catholic Church and in the afternoon I’m free to play with the kids or just relax at home.

Monthly Schedule:
Each month I meet with the area Togolese community health workers as part of a project to build the capacity and working knowledge of the community health workers. I work with 25 community health workers, and each month I teach them on different health subjects including, for example, maternal health, infant nutrition, hygiene and sanitation, malaria and HIV/AIDS. At the end of these briefings, I give the community health workers take-home exercises so they can give their own talks so that they can take their new knowledge and share it with their communities.

My closest Peace Corps volunteer neighbor Tarah and I, attend monthly meetings with all of the nurses in the district led by the district director of health. At these meetings, Tarah and I give a presentation to the nurses on our projects the past month and the projects we are planning for the coming months.

I am also allowed two nights each month to spend in my regional capital city to withdraw money from the bank and go shopping for things that I can’t find in village. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I don’t have an income, but I do get a monthly living stipend of about $300 which is not a lot by American standards, but is a very wealthy living stipend here in Togo.

Weighing babies with the nurses from the private French hospital.


We weigh babies with a hanging scale.


My really good friend, Catherine, came to visit me one weekend and we gave a talk together about the importance of exclusive breastfeeding.


In this photo I am giving a talk with the help of two community health workers about the dangers of malaria in pregnancy. I am doing an activity to show how when pregnant women get malaria, the parasites attack the placenta which prevents the fetus from getting any nutrients and growing.