First Contact!

Samedi…


Today, after another horrible yet not quite as bad as the night before’s sleep, we woke up promptly thanks to our new cell phones and their accompanying alarms. And I somehow managed to take a shower in the freezing water with mosquitoes waiting at the ready as soon as I stepped out from the sputtering faucet. While refreshing, I can’t say that any of the showers here are enjoyable.

Wide awake and ready for the day, Colin and I walked to the restaurant where we met up with Yves for breakfast and then ended up returning to the hotel to wait for Felix. We were told that he was coming at 11 and well, Yves called us at 12:30 and asked if we wanted to go into town! I figured Felix had our phone and I didn’t know where he was so we went into town! We made it almost to the centre-ville (roughly a mile and half), when we received word that Felix was at the restaurant. Damn, we didn’t even make it to the markets; at least I got some exercise.

We returned to the restaurant and met Felix, who speaks very little English by the way, and talked with him about a bunch of random things. And after a little while we went with him to meet his family! Little did I know that meeting his family entailed sitting in a small room with two very shy children and a cautious mother who speaks less than ten words of English while Felix unpacked and changed. Awkward? Hell yeah! What do you say to someone when you don’t speak their language very well and they don’t speak yours at all? Not to mention there was a little added stress of meeting the family of the guy who was helping us out for our first few days in Lomé. That was probably more of a hindrance than not being fluent in French.

After bidding our farewells we talked with Felix about paying for the hotel and decided that it would be best if we went to try and find Fr. Boniface and the Cellule Monastique. So Zachari took me on a little scavenger hunt and after a little while we ended up finding the house. We managed to talk our way in and after meeting three different people, finally met with Fr. Boniface who to my relief spoke English! SUCCESS!

I found out that he had no idea that we were in Togo or even coming to Togo in the near future. Oops mom, don’t read that! Somehow he never received mine or Colin’s emails with our flight plans and for the past day and a half while we were trying to call his cell-phone, he was using a different number while the one we were calling was charging. A little strange, but that’s life n’est pas? A strange series of happenings that aren’t really explicable unless we try to derive some meaning from them, which can lead us in a multitude of directions ranging from religious explanations to political or self-serving explanations?

After talking with Boniface, we decided that it was best if both Colin and I were there to make decisions so we agreed to meet for breakfast a 9h the next morning. So I returned with the news and told Colin and Felix. Afterwards Colin and I went to a cyber café to send out a few emails, which took Forever, FOrever, FORever, FOREver, FOREVer, FOREVEr, FOREVER! The internet connection is terrible here if you couldn’t tell from my sarcasm. But afterwards we returned to the hotel to get our cameras and went out on a little evening photo shoot, which ended up being completely worthless in terms of taking quality photos for me because I need time to process and create artistic representations of things in real life and translate them into quality photos. But we had a nice chat about our experience so far and ended up walking back to the restaurant for a bite to eat.

We ended up convincing Yves to take us to the centre-ville for a bit of night life action. And as it turns out we ran into group of white girls from Germany! I’d say there were about twenty of them or so who are here in Togo for the next few weeks working at a hospital and going to school. We talked with them for a while before heading back to the hotel for the night.