Life in Togo: the Basics

I was recently asked to write a guest post for Mom on a Mission for her upcoming 2025 series about Anabaptist women on the mission field. I was aiming for 1500-2000 words and ended up with 6000, so I’ll be posting those in a series with pictures here over the next couple of weeks. Sign up via email if you don’t want to miss them.

What you see here is the guest post I ended up writing, written for an audience who may or may not know who I am. It’s kind of a broad overview of our life here. A good introduction to Mango, Togo. I’ll be following it up with more detailed posts about culture, fabric, language, etc. You can see all future posts in this TOGO INDEX.

Bonjour, mes amis. Bienvenue à Mango, Togo, en Afrique de l’Ouest.
(Hello, my friends. Welcome to Mango, Togo, West Africa.)

My name is Briana Burkholder, and my family has been calling Mango home since last October. My husband Ryan is a gastroenterologist just out of training, and we wanted to experience life on the mission field before settling down somewhere in the States. I’m so glad we made the leap to come here because I don’t think I’ll ever view life the same way again; in fact none of us are looking forward to returning to the States mid September. For some things, yes – Aldi, our favorite zoo, or luxuries like dishwashers and dryers and air conditioning. But for the endless rat-race of North America, the isolation inside one’s own four walls, the crazy woke influences, and the materialism – no. The simpler life has much to recommend it.

In many ways, this has been the easiest move we’ve done so far, largely because of the close community we moved into. Ryan is volunteering at l’Hôpital de l’Esperance (the Hospital of Hope), an ABWE (Baptist) hospital in northern Togo. We live on the private side of the hospital compound with around 10 other families + singles (give or take, as people often come and go on furlough), and there are some families/singles living off compound as well. Along with the hospital, there is a radio station (Radio Esperance, or Hope Radio) bringing light to a mostly-Muslim population.

Language

French is the universal language here, even though it’s most people’s second language. There are around 40 tribal languages spoken across Togo. Thankfully I had some high school French to get me started (and took weekly lessons after coming here), but Ryan has had to feel his way blind through hand-written French notes in the hospital! He makes do with Google Translate, nurses who speak broken English, and lots of signs and wonders.

Housing

We are very blessed to have a simple but well-built home with tile floors and louvred windows. Because we’re on the hospital compound we have access to clean water and reliable electricity (from a huge generator when the grid goes out), but our off-compound friends aren’t always so lucky. They’re at the mercy of the unreliable city water supply (which still has to be filtered) and electricity that blinks out, although many have generators. We have a small (6 kilo) washing machine that ensures that I never get too far behind on laundry…haha. When you’re using cloth diapers and they take 2 days to dry on the back porch, that’s not really an option anyway. We are in rainy season right now and I try to do laundry on sunny days and lay the thicker items out in the grass to dry! There’s something so satisfying about snapping clean pre-folds into submission and laying them out in the abundant green grass.

Even though we have electricity, we try not to use it too often as it’s more expensive here. We have AC units in our bedrooms which was such a blessing during hot season (February through April was the worst of that), but we try not to use them if we don’t have to, and we never turned the children’s on. What they don’t know won’t hurt them, and they have become vraiment Togolese. My daughter Hadassah was wearing a turtleneck and long pants to bed in March when the house was 95* at night. We have a hot water heater but we only turn it on for a bit to get a warm shower when it’s “cold” outside: during Harmattan (the dry season from Nov – Jan when dust clouds from the Sahara cover the sun) or rainy season (what we’re experiencing now).

Seasons

It has been so neat to experience all the different seasons here in Western Africa and compare and contrast them to what we’re used to back in the States. I’ve loved seeing a year’s worth of fauna and the growth cycle of all the different flowers and trees. When we came last October we saw the tail end of rainy season with so many puddles, lizards, and dripping humidity. In November came Harmattan with its blessed dry air – and lots of dust. I did get tired of the dust. The days would get up to the high 90s but because the humidity was so low it was easy to bear – and the laundry dried in a flash! Around February things starting warming up and the humidity increased, but things were still dry and dusty. Mangos ripened in March, the peak of hot season with temps in the 105-110* range (and humidity to match). But the rains didn’t start coming until April/May, when they gradually increased in frequency and brought an advent of new life and GREEN. Now in June/July we feel like we’re living in the Garden of Eden, with such an abundance of jolies fleurs – my favorites being the enormous pink-spotted caladium (aka “Heart of Jesus,” Caladium bicolor), peacock flowers (Caesalpinia pulcherrima), and a prolific orange variant of Lantana camara.

Rainy season brings with it malaria, which fills the hospital full to bursting. We take a weekly malaria prophylaxis called Mefloquine (as in, the quinine you’ve read about in history books), which makes for an interesting ritual for the children. It tastes nasty, so it’s met with mixed reactions. Hadassah (almost 5) and Noah (3) do very well taking theirs – and even look forward to it – as long as it’s delivered in one of our precious marshmallows. Rafael (15 months) is another matter. On the advice of a veteran missionary we have started crushing it and mixing it with peanut butter, which works well to 1) mask the taste, and 2) stick it to the roof of his mouth so he can’t spit it out.

There have also been a lot of snakebite victims at the hospital lately because this is planting season and everyone is out in their fields. The echis, a squat grey run-of-the-mill viper, is the culprit for the vast majority of bites, although the only snakes we have seen personally were a black cobra in our carport one night and a green mamba that Hadassah and a friend saw. Before coming to Africa, snakes were high on my “things to fear about Africa” list, but thank the Lord we haven’t seen many. And it’s amazing what one can adapt to. You quickly learn to teach children what to watch out for (rock piles) and what to do: 1) RUN, and 2) tell an adult. A cry of “Serpent!” will bring gardeners, guards, and teenage boys with sticks running to the rescue.

In most ways, my life here looks the same as it did in the States. I feed my family, I do laundry, I clean the house. I take care of my children, I teach life skills, I read stories and wipe bottoms. Life is simpler here, but the day-to-day chores take more time. There are no dryers, no dishwashers, no vacuum cleaners. I have to “spring clean” my house about once every quarter instead of once every year because things just get so much dirtier so much faster when the windows are always open and there’s no rain for half the year (and that’s not even taking into account all the bugs and lizards that hide out in every nook and cranny). I thank the Lord for tile floors that are easy to clean!

Cooking

Cooking (and the resulting dishes) also takes a lot of time because you cannot buy any convenience ingredients – other than some pretty delicious freshly-baked white bread. Tortillas, pancake syrup, yogurt, salad dressings…these and so many others are things that you have to make from scratch (or hire someone to make). And that’s all well and good – better for our health, I’m sure, to make everything ourselves with no preservatives – but when you’re doing it by necessity rather than choice with no option to pick up an emergency rotisserie chicken or run to Chick-fil-A if things get hectic, it can make one weary after awhile! I’m so thankful I have a background in cooking and love doing it because otherwise I’d be up a creek!

Common foods I buy in market: eggs, rice, milk powder (no dairy products available other than some yogurt), tomato paste, salt, flour, sugar, vegetable oil, Maggi cubes (bouillon), instant coffee (grounds must be bought in the big city, and whole beans must be imported from the States), lettuce, cabbage, onions, garlic, tomatoes, green peppers. Some additional things can be found when in season: carrots, watermelon, mangos, pineapples, bananas, oranges, avocados.

We get frozen meats and mozzarella or cheddar cheese from Kara (a city 2 hours away with the closest supermarket; a taxi brings orders in every 2 weeks, but we try to buy in bulk for a few months because ordering and sending payment is kind of a hassle) or Lomé (the capital city on the coast, 8 hours south). The cheese is pretty expensive though! Specialty items like chocolate chips, pepperoni, Ranch powder, and any mixes or “American” items have to be imported with visitors from the States or purchased at a highly-priced store in Lomé. We have gotten some good local beef, but it needs to spend some time in a pressure cooker before it’s tender enough to chew! In general we just try to cook pretty simply with what we can find in market. For awhile we did all our shopping by bicycle, but a few months into our time here we bought a moto, and we are currently using someone’s truck. Going to church with 5 people on the moto was good for some laughs but always felt a bit precarious!

The most common foods for the Togolese are pâté (corn – kind of like grits but ground finer), bouille (a millet porridge sold at all the roadside stands in plastic bags), and rice (for special occasions). Eggs, dried black eyed peas, okra, various greens, peanuts, and dried fish are common sauce ingredients. I find it interesting walking through market and seeing all the ingredients that I associate with Southern soul food…even little fried blobs of dough that are like a chewier New Orleans beignet minus the powdered sugar. This is where it came from! In general people survive on very little. They don’t earn much but food prices aren’t that much lower than in the States.

Healthy Eating

Some of you might know me as “that THM lady with the cookbooks.” To be honest, I haven’t stuck very strictly to THM since having children, but I continue to use some of the principles and ingredients and try to feed my family a fairly healthy, balanced diet. Moving to Africa has been both good and bad for our health. Good in that we hardly eat any processed foods because they’re just not readily available. And even the “unhealthy” things we do partake in (like soda and ketchup) don’t seem quite as bad because they’re not filled with corn syrup. (Wishful thinking?) Bad in that we primarily have access to white flour, white sugar, and vegetable oil. But the flour is freshly ground, which some people seem to think is better. And the sugar is coarser and not as white as in the States, so maybe it’s better? It all depends whom you ask…haha. 

We eat very simply here because we’re working with many fewer ingredients. We do a lot of (white) rice with a sauce of some kind of top. Homemade granola and homemade yogurt – both sweetened with sugar, although not outrageously so – is usually our breakfast. Hey, at least we have natural peanut butter! That’s all that’s available – freshly ground! And I don’t think I’ll be going back to the American dessert spread that we used to call peanut butter. I do miss having a variety of easy-to-find fruits and vegetables. And frozen vegetables to pull out and roast in a pinch. I feel like we eat fewer vegetables here because a) the variety is pretty limited, and b) I have to bleach everything thoroughly. We only have a few available fruits, unless you want to pay an arm and a leg for apples, clementines, or grapes. We ate our weight in mangos in March, though! And now we’re on to oranges. They’re pretty seedy but I’ve perfected the art of cutting them in such a way as to remove all the seeds and the children will eat as many as they’re allowed to have! I feel like it’s difficult to get as much protein as I’d like here because dairy products (other than milk powder) aren’t readily available and meat is more of a process to get. Thankfully we have eggs! And we do those a lot – scrambled, in egg sandwiches, as egg gravy or egg curry, or hardboiled for lunch. You do have to watch out for the rotten ones, though. It’s a rotten egg roulette. =D 

So all in all, I feel like our lifestyle here is fairly healthy. We make all our own food out of whole ingredients, we get lots of exercise and sunshine, and we aren’t as prone to overeating as we were in the States because there’s just less choice and more work goes into preparing everything. But there are some things I wish we had more of: protein sources, vegetable variety, and sugar alternatives. I did bring some THM stevia and Sweet Blend along, but the Sweet Blend has been gone for awhile. If I were going on the mission field again, sweeteners and collagen (for a protein boost) would be my top two ingredients to take along. I did bring my sourdough starter along, so I use that for pancakes and muffins and things. I would make my own bread but I don’t have a mixer and it’s just another thing to make from scratch when there is fresh bread available every day. And it’s delicious. White and sweet and probably so unhealthy, but we’re supporting the local economy, so…. You pick your battles. Living here has taught me that “diets” are really more about undoing damage from bad lifestyle choices – i.e. we just eat too much. Most of these people are doing just fine on corn and the odd smoked fish. You do the best you can where you are and don’t stress about it, because there are much more important things to spend your time on in life, like people.

Togolese Culture

I have come to appreciate the culture here so much. Everyone is warm and encouraging, and extensive greetings and exclamations of “Bon travail!” (good work!) are the norm. Quality time is the universal love language. People are content with so little, and not much is wasted. For as dirty as things get here, I have been amazed at how clean people keep themselves and their clothes – and how little water they require to do so. And their whites are far brighter than mine! Probably because they hand wash everything. People work hard, but on the other hand are content to spend time resting (things kind of shut down from 12-2pm, even in the hospital!). Our children have thrived on the outdoor life and will certainly miss always having friends to play with. We are in and out of one another’s houses all the time. Life is better with people in it, even if you’re an introvert. I guess I had to move to Africa to learn that for real!

Thanks for coming along on a tour of our life in Togo. May you serve God well wherever you are!

TOGO SERIES

• Life in Togo
• Life in Togo: the Basics
• Life in Togo: the Arrival
• Life in Togo: Culture
• Life in Togo: Climate & Cooking
• Life in Togo: Language & Church
• Life in Togo: Fabric (Pagne)
• A Week in Togo
• Life in Togo: Things I’ll Miss and Things I Won’t
• Life in Togo: Common Scenes