Feet on the Ground in Togo

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime... Mark Twain Five months late, I finally took a vacation. It wasn’t just a vacation, but a desperately needed and long-overdue break from the exhaustive heat and Togo sun, from the challenges of constantly speaking a foreign language, and from my all-carb Togo diet. This was the vacation my family and I had planned originally for the holidays in December last year. In October when the Togolese government announced it would hold elections in late December, the Peace Corps restricted its volunteers from leaving the country let alone leaving the village they live in for the week prior to the elections and the week following. To say I was disappointed understates how I felt. In May, my parents, my brother, my aunt and I met Cap...