Harmattan, Ouidah, Mina and Corruption!

Another saturday at work.

Harmattan is slowly over and heat has showed its side. It is humid and hot, but apparently nothing yet. Today Harmattan could again be felt as the morning was nice and chilly. During the middle of the day during the last week it has been so sweaty that one can’t do much else than run into the big waves or throw oneself in the nearby Hotel’s swimming pool. The waves are big and the water is salty. The best time for swimming is between 12-14 p.m as the sea is at its calmest during this time of the day. The waves are anyways big at this time and the currents are very very strong so one has to be careful. The salty water and the waves hitting me in the back of my head make my hair very funny, its becoming Rasta à la naturell. The Rasta-reggae population of Grand Popo really likes my messy silly looking hair.

On Wednesday I visited Ouidah with the Finns. My job was to translate everything the guide said in the museum of history and at the port of no return. It is tiring to concentrate to hard especially as I naturally get the Swedish words in my head but not the Finnish ones, so my head is doing a double translation task…phew. But it was very interesting as it was all about the slave trade and the history around it. It is a cruel brutal past. The things we people do to one another, it’s incomprehensible.

I have been thinking about the local dialects lately. People here learn French in school but hardly ever speak French to one another. Here they mostly speak mina that is also spoken in southern parts of Togo. I tend to forget that French is not people’s mother tongue. Then I realized that it is a bit like being a finn-swed, most of finns-sweds speak a good if not a fluent finnish but many also struggle with it. It is like French here; many speak it absolutely fluently while other struggle to find words and especially numbers. This mostly concerns elderly as young people use French on a daily basis in school.

My mother called me yesterday and said that there had been a program about Villa Karo on FST. Apparently it had shown Villa Karo in a very bad light in many different ways. Local authorities that they had interviewed had a negative view of Villa Karo and its impact on Grand Popo. This surprises me as it is not the impression I get being here. Many locals appreciate Villa Karo greatly partly because it has woken up a sleepy almost dying little town and given many locals jobs and party because Villa Karo organizes free concerts every months and movie nights every Friday. For the concerts up to 4000 people attend from all nearby villages. The institute is open for everyone; at least this is the point of the institute. Yesterday a local catholic school visited the postcard exhibition and the children between 3 and 11 years of age were very excited and it was many times pointed out to them that they are always welcome to the institute. Drawing and music classes are being arranged for local children, obviously for free. Of course there is also another side of the coin. The program on FST had apparently also shown a side of corruption, that Villa Karo put money on beer and parties while the town needs money for schools and medicines and so on. Finnish Artists that maybe don’t have enormous amounts of money in Finland can live like Kings here and eat at restaurants every night and basically buy all they want. Of course this is very frustrating for people in a poor country that can’t put a third of a monthly salary on an evening out at the restaurant. Of course being here as a yovo feels a bit perverse at times. We live in the fancy houses and eat at restaurants. The program also brought to light something about Villa Karo stopping a Finnish school to collaborate in Grand Popo. It is quite impossible for someone that doesn’t know the language or the culture to come here and collaborate and this is why the project should have gone through Villa Karo, as the cultural institute already had a steady foot in the society. Well I haven’t seen the program so I shouldn’t comment more but it simply doesn’t seem like objective journalism. One can always create a bit of drama it one wants to. Why didn’t the program bring to light any of the positive effects Villa Karo has on this town, or was the point that there are not any? I have a hard time believing that.