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CLIMATE
(written around November 2024)
Everything is dirty. Always. As soon as I got here I realized that trying to keep our clothing free of stains would be a quick route to insanity, so I gave that up before starting. The sheets get washed often. Hadassah and Noah get scrubbed down in the shower before naps. Our feet are never clean, and the floors get dirty about 2 seconds after being mopped. Dry season is beginning and a film of dust coats everything. Closing the louvred windows helps, but without AC air movement is important.
Funny thing is, we arrived right after the biggest rainstorm the hospital has ever seen. Roads were washed out, vehicles got stuck in the mud, and there were puddles everywhere. That was the tail end of wet (malaria) season, and rainstorms blew up every afternoon. Out of nowhere the wind would start blowing, rain would pound down, and inevitably Noah would wake up from his nap and join me in my bed. He doesn’t like storms. Nothing ever felt dry.
But now Harmattan is coming; dust clouds from the Sahara move in and cover the sun in a dusky haze, cooling things off but trapping in all the dust and smoke. The air quality is not great, but the drop in humidity is a welcome change. Laundry actually dries – and dries quickly! (Our house is set up with an awesome set of clotheslines covered by the back porch.) Sweat evaporates quickly, and it’s SO nice to not constantly be sticky. Even though the temps have been in the high 90s during the day, the nights cool off to the lower 70s. It’s the kind of weather you could easily get sunburnt in without knowing it because it’s hotter than it feels.
The sun seems to go down early here. We left the States when it was still in Daylight Savings Time so that made the difference seem more stark. It’s dark by 6pm, but the intense sun is starting to dissipate by 4-5pm. I love those evening golden hours settling over the dusty red road in front of my house. People go out to take walks and it’s just a nice time to be alive.
When coming to Africa, I was most worried about how I would handle the heat. Despite growing up in the southern USA, I have never enjoyed heat and get hot very quickly. But honestly, it has been very manageable and I’ve been amazed what one can become acclimated to. Ceiling fans are a wonderful invention and make a world of difference. You learn to go out early or at dusk, take cold showers, and drink lots of water. (Between breastfeeding and sweating, I barely have to pee. Noah has very few accidents…haha.) Do I miss fall in the States? Yes, yes I do. We did get to see a few pretty leaves in Ohio before we left.
We are just entering the cool, dry season. Apart from the dust, I’m really looking forward to it. I’m told that the humidity gets so low that our skin will crack. February starts warming up, and March and April are the hottest months of the year. Scattered rains start around April and gradually increase until rainy season starts in earnest around June, then runs through Sept/Oct.
We DO have an AC unit in our room that we run at night when it’s hot. That is a huge blessing. The children have made do with ceiling fans so far and seem to be faring fine. Another huge blessing when it’s hot is a beautiful pool that was donated to the hospital compound. It has a shallow section for the children and has been so much fun. When Ryan works nights I often take the children over there in the evening to wear them out before bed. Hadassah is already learning how to float!
COOKING
I really miss my dishwasher, especially since I feel like I do a lot of cooking here. There aren’t really any convenience ingredients. I’m not talking about TV dinners…I’m talking about hamburger buns and tortillas. You want ’em? You make ’em. Thankfully I enjoy cooking – and tweaking recipes. But even I have been getting burned out with cooking three meals a day. For breakfast we do a lot of oatmeal, and I always have my homemade granola on hand (with a few modifications for the groceries available).
Lunch for the children is often peanut butter and jelly sandwiches…. Ryan has his bread lady that he buys the big soft 500 CFA loaves from. (You can get 3 sizes of bread – 100franc, 200franc, 500franc.) For dinner we often have something over rice. Chili over rice, curry over rice, black beans over rice, peanut chicken over rice. We buy rice by the 5 kilo sack. Keep in mind that we don’t have a car here so we transport all our groceries by bicycle. It’s a balancing act. Ryan recently went on a watermelon spree and brought SIX WATERMELONS (albeit small-medium ones) à vélo (by bike). I was impressed. We also do a lot of eggs. Creamed eggs on toast is a new favorite. Bringing eggs home on a bike is interesting too. (We use a small bucket.)
(As of the time of posting this, we are borrowing a truck. Makes hauling things like rice and eggs much easier!)
There is an outdoor market here where we buy a lot of our basics. There isn’t a ton of variety, although I hear there is much more availability for fresh produce than there used to be, largely due to the hospital and its staff who a) want to buy vegetables and b) have the money to buy them. The local staples are pâte (a thick starchy base made from corn and often topped with a little sauce of some sort), bouille (a porridge made of millet, often sold in plastic bags that you tear with your teeth and suck the contents out of one corner), bread, and rice.
Our favorite fruits from market are
- bananas. You can basically buy one banana in the States: the Cavendish. Here there is more variety, but most are about half the size of our bananas in the States and not nearly as pristinely yellow. They have a more intense banana flavor – more like banana extract, which was modeled after the “Big Mike,” a now mostly-extinct variety.
- pineapples. They’re so sweet, more white than golden, and you can eat the core!
- oranges. I am told that the locals usually just suck the juice out of these, but I usually cut them into wedges and pick the seeds out with the end of a knife. We devour them. There are a lot of seeds, but if you enjoy popping pimples and picking people’s scalps, you might find a similar level of satisfaction from seed extraction.
- watermelons. These only show up every once in awhile. They’re small and seeded but can be delicious if you hit the jackpot. In some ways, Togo is like America.
Our favorite vegetables from market: tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, cucumbers, okra, lettuce, cabbage
All fresh fruits and veg that aren’t peeled need to be bleached before eating due to the lack of sanitation.
Unique finds: fresh coconuts (very labor intensive!), tons of piment (pronounced “PEE-mah” here) which I think are Scotch Bonnets and are eaten with everything, bissap (dried hibiscus which makes a lovely sweetened tea), tamarind (which I have used to make a delicious tamarind chutney)
Staples from the boutiques (tiny “stores” that are a bit more permanent than the vegetable ladies at their open-air stalls): milk powder, rice, sugar, oil (vegetable), salt, Maggi (a brand of chicken bouillon cubes), sweetened condensed milk, various soaps, bleach.
Flour is bought fresh-ground from the mill (white flour only). Honey is bought from the pharmacy (it’s delicious – a heavier, more floral honey than I ever had in the States). Ryan has a favorite peanut butter lady that he buys the Togolese peanut butter from. It’s literally just peanuts – and a dark roast at that. We really like it! Here it’s often used in savory sauces. Peanuts are grown here and are a common protein source.
Sweetened condensed milk is literally about the only sweet thing you can buy that you don’t have to make yourself. I keep a can of it in the fridge…. It’s pretty good with crackers. #desperate
There is also a grocery delivery service from a larger supermarket two hours away where you can order in meat (since refrigeration isn’t really a thing in Mango), dairy items, and other harder to find items.
If you missed it, check out the previous posts in this series about our life in Togo:
This is wonderful. Simple meals are so often the best and the older I’ve gotten, the simpler our meals have become. I would really miss the dairy as I make lots of homemade yogurt, cottage cheese, kefir, paneer, etc.. Do they not utlize the goat or sheep’s milk there? Just curious.
One thing you mentioned is that the white flour is freshly ground. That is the most nutritious form because it contains the vitamin E and about 40 other nutrients. Unless, of course, they sifted out the bran and endosperm where most of those reside. Real bread, is made from whole, freshly ground flour. Even if the brand and endosperm were sifted out, the fact it was freshly ground made it much more nutritious than standard grocery store bread here.
Thank you for sharing your family’s journey. Love to see a family following God’s plan!
I do regularly make homemade yogurt with powdered milk. It tastes different than what I used to make with fresh milk, but we like it! I could probably make a lot of other cheeses and things too, but I haven’t found the time with all the other things I’m already making from scratch! The locals do make a cheese similar to paneer using cow’s milk, but I haven’t seen anything made from sheep or goats milk. Maybe they do out in the really rural settings?
Thanks for the explanation about the flour! I’m guessing it’s sifted, but a fellow missionary found that she can order big bags of wheat bran for very cheap; they use it as animal feed! So I often add some of that back into the white flour.