Monsieur le botaniste

Until I have a riper reflection, I thought I would share a bit about one of the many courageous Togolese who are finding creative ways to improve the life of their compatriots.

Here are some points I noted from a talk with a Togolese botanist and self-declared peasant but first let me give a small historical description:.

Monsieur le botaniste, as I will call him, established a home on a plot of land at the top of a hill that had become barren, due to the population's need for wood fuel, and feared by the surrounding population for its bad spirits. The first thing he did was to establish a fire break to halt the bush fires that regularly scorch the landscape and render reforestation and soil regeneration extremely difficult. At the time his wife had to travel 1.5 hrs for wood with which to cook. Ten years of work later, the hill around his home is a regular forest, and his wife no longer travels for wood, needing only to harvest branches and dead wood from the reforested area. This leads me to the first of the points that I found particularly interesting while talking to him:

-In order to cross the threshold of subsistence (this threshold being where one can get ahead year after year instead of just producing enough to survive, this is where most of the togolese farmers, who constitute between 70 and 90% of the Togolese workforce, find themselves) Monsieur le botaniste and his family have discovered different ways of saving time. EX: the wife of Monsieur le botaniste no longer has to look for wood, she can dedicate her time to canning tomatoes for the family and income generation, or extracting oil from Neem tree seeds to create natural pesticides.

-Monsieur le botaniste has a principle : one should perfect the activity which allows one to live, in his case the working of the land. This principle, helped by his degree in botany, has led him to better understand the environment in order to better serve that environment which when treated well can serve Monsieur le botaniste so well. He has employed integrated agricultural techniques, agroforestry, innovative animal husbandry and composting, and a healthy dose of allowing nature to regenerate itself. The benefits are too numerous to list off but this creates a cycling of nutrients throughout the farm that leads to richer soil, and more varied diets for the family.

-Monsieur le botaniste believes that transparency and equality should reign in the household. This way everyone is motivated to be involved, everyone benefits from the amelioration of the family's wellbeing, and there isn't the dishonesty such as a wife hiding money from a tyrannical husband that occurs in many families. This equality may have been what led Monsieur to be the first African to reject my thanking him for the tasty dinner, stating that I should thank his wife for having prepared it, others have show little thanks for the work of their wives.

-Monsieur sees humans as having 4 fundamental needs and says the rest is more or less luxury: Nutrition, Health/ Medecine, Clothing, and Education At harvest time Monsieur and the family set aside a certain portion of the harvest for each of these needs and this is their form of accounting and planning.

-At the base of all this one gets the sense in talking to Monsieur le botaniste that he has a different mentality than many around here. Less eloquently stated it is the idea that things can be better and that one can learn how to make them better, a kind of future oriented mentality that reminds me of the United States.

Well, that is all for now, thanks for your good vibrations, If I haven't returned them it is probably the less than speedy metaphysical mail service here in Togo that is at fault...

other things:

First, I had said earlier that Peace Corps never stops impressing on me the ability for governments to create mutual understanding between peoples. I would modify that just a bit to say that governments can create canals between peoples that allow them to understand each other, and this because, as Ms. Difranco states, "God's work isn't done by God, It's done by people." I guess the same goes for government work.

Secondly, The power went out while writing this and a funny thing happened: The Muslim call to prayer over loud-speakers went right on despite the lightening and thunder, while Togo's connection to the high-speed, super-connected world was down. Religion is always there for the Togolese, the benefits are all around them and the mosque is never down like the internet or their hope of actually getting something in return for the university education. All this pushes Togolese towards religion and discourages going the route of the renaissance man, to school and towards the promises of development etc.



I mentioned that Islam seemed to fill an organizational void in my village when it arrived centuries ago. Islam seems to have just done the same in Somalia where newsweek said that "Islam has done in 15 days what the international community hasn't been able to accomplish in 15 years." Islam seems pretty good at this, just yesterday while in the quite muslim Sokodé, our Peace Corps driver said "look at the volunteers they are being proper and taking off their shoes before entering the house just like Muslims."



Also interesting was the fact that while the lights were out many of the folks around spoke French instead of local language, it seems that the type of person who frequents the internet cafe is a pan-Togolese citizen, someone that uses more French because they have gone to school and are connected to a larger base of people with whom communication requires a more widely spoken language than their native local language. An African scholar on the radio referred to the imposed languages, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, as languages of greater access to the outside world. On the other hand, speaking only local language, however brilliant or eloquent one may be, creates a huge barrier that the same African scholar referred to as the African intellectual holocaust.