Capturing the JoyLoreen Cumming — Owen Sound, ON It gives me a lot of pleasure to bring home photographic memories from travels to far away places. During our time in Togo we visited seven distribution sites to deliver 3,000 bedkits. Some were close to Lome and others were fifty to seventy kilometers outside the city. Every setup was different and each provided a special opportunity for unofficial photography. Children love to have their photo taken casually. You will see from the photos that accompany the acknowledgement letters from SCAW that smiles can sometimes be hard to come by for the official photos. In the classrooms however, when the bedkit items were being displayed, the cheers and squeals of joy provided faces that spoke a thousand words of gratitude. Capturing the joy on the faces of the children and the parents as we displayed the items contained in the bedkit was both challenging and rewarding. One could not help but feel that the faces in the crowd held many stories. Most of the women were beautifully dressed and you can see some of them on the SCAW website.
We visited one orphanage where a teenage boy was sitting on a top bunk. We asked him if we could take his photo and he agreed. We showed him the image in the camera and he exclaimed in French, “I am black.” We are not sure exactly what he meant by this — maybe he had never seen himself in a mirror or, almost for sure, he had never seen a digital image of himself. In this country, the power is off almost every day for at least five hours. In spite of this, and the other desperate conditions that we saw, the Internet is available and the photos I took, were posted to the SCAW website every other day. There are plenty of Internet cafés. For the most part the connection, while not high speed, is good. Some local folk were using web cameras too. There is just such a disparity that these cafes are located throughout the city and the one that we used was just around the corner from a huge local market operated on a daily basis. The market is where the local people barter for everything for their daily lives including clothing, fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, and grains for cooking local life preserving mixtures. One of our volunteers told us that it is not uncommon for him to eat only once a day and that meal would consist of a bowl of a thick paste like mixture made of millet, corn, plantain and yams. He said that to buy a mango would be completely unaffordable. This same volunteer told us that he is one of a group of six young people who sleep in an eight by eight room with one double-sized mattress. He was overjoyed when he received a donated yoga type mattress from one of our group because this meant he would no longer be sleeping directly on the floor. Behind the gate just down the street from the Internet café was an orphanage housing 92 children in very compact quarters. Thirty of these children received a bedkit from SCAW this year. When you see these and all of the other children in their new shirts “they don’t look poor anymore;” however, you realize that the children in the orphanage have come from some desperate circumstances of loss or they would not need to be in this facility. The visit to the home of a child who received a bedkit in a small city outside of Lome revealed conditions completely unknown in our part of the world. There was no water nearby and the family had two rooms six by eight for the parents and five children. As well, the kitchen supplies, bicycle, and clothing were stored inside. Cooking happened outside over an open fire. This family seemed to be so grateful for the bedkit and the children were active and playful as any we would see in Canada. It has been my pleasure to bring home some of my memories from Togo and I hope that sharing them provides you with a small glimpse into the reality of life in Togo. |
