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Friday December 5 2003

What I miss about home
Peaches, grapes, strawberries and apple,
Chocolate, cookies, ice cream and Snapple,
These things may seem minor when,
One is really used to them.

So take them away, that's not so wrong,
But now I see I'm not so strong!
The little things can matter most,
Like broom-handles, speedometers, and cinnamon toast.

Old friends and faces are far away,
Family is still where they always stay.
My own comfy bed, with my big thick blanket,
Is empty and waiting for me to be in it.

But all is not lost even when I feel blue,
Because something else comes along, yes, something new!
I struggle and battle, but as if on cue,
On come green oranges, la pate, Botoquoin and FouFou.

Fun drums, tall trees, mega mountains and waterfalls,
New jokes, silly smiles, cool clothes and termite hills.
Funny chickens, wooded trails, cute kids that laugh allot,
This may all sound trivial, but it's really not!

Somewhere within me I can feel something shift,
Something I haven't yet grasped, through which I must sift.
Whatever may come at the end of this all,
I will be stronger and bigger, not weaker and small.

Oh Lord, please stand with me, be my cornerstone,
For I cannot handle this journey alone.
Thank you for prayers from friends and family,
You're using them all, to make a better me.

Tuesday December 9 2003
Technology Project & Christmas Gifts
So, today I finally got the initial draft of my “technology project” proposal together. I was waiting until I finished the Vivre Mieux webpage, but it’s becoming obvious that THAT is not going to be complete for a long time because I am waiting for information from other people to fill out the content… which is going to take a while.

In the meantime, I have a lot of (what I think are) great ideas. The proposal for the project is up on the new and improved Vivre Mieux website. If you scan the site, you might notice that most of it is in some formed of wacky made up language! Do not be alarmed, there WILL EVENTUALLY be meaningful content there

So, for those of you who read my journal, please take a look at the new and improved Vivre-Mieux website, and give me some feedback, some constructive criticism.

Even MORE important, take a look at my “technology project” proposal. This will be most of my life for the next 3 months I think. Tell me:

• Is it clear?
• Does it seem like a good idea?
• Do you have anything to add?
• Should anything be taken away?

The site isn’t complete, so I’m not going public with it yet because I want possible funders to be able to have a really clear idea of what Vivre-Mieux is. But if you believe in the project from what you see and would like to make a pledge (I haven’t yet figured out the details on HOW to send money, but a pledge would help us to plan) then let me know at techproject@berezny.com and I would be just ecstatic.

In other news, Guy, or should I say Superman, has been hired by the UN to distribute 3 million dollars worth of AIDS funding to organizations in the plateaux region. That’s pretty exciting, but it takes him away from Vivre-Mieux for at least a year. Vivre-Mieux will live on though, there are some sociologues (that’s a French word, I know) coming on board. Guy wants to return working full time for Vivre-Mieux and doesn’t want to work at the hospital anymore because it takes too much of his time from Vivre-Mieux. He basically works as a doctor to support Vivre-Mieux as well as his family. Crazy. So that’s one of the major motivations for my technology project, to generate enough funds to be able to hire a full time staff solely dedicated to Vivre-Mieux and it's work.

In yet other news, I just got Christmas presents in the mail from my cutie girlfriend Laura! Of course, she says I can’t open them until CHRISTMAS! (She’ll never know the difference though… mwa haha… oops, did I just type that out loud). There’s like, 10 wrapped packages here, 10 letters, and a bag of Snickers. Mmmmmm… Snickers. How sweet… Laura is sweet I mean...not the Snickers... although Snickers are sweet too…

… oie, listen to me gibber, it’s definitely getting too late!

Keep Smilin’
-Tim

P.S. As you can see, Laura sent me a Santa hat too. Rather toasty to wear in Africa! (Now I just need to gain a few pounds, but all the good little boys and girls ALREADY run after me!)

Well, she wasn’t actually giving birth yet apparently, but she did later that night. So now, around the office we have a brand new baby! She doesn’t have a name yet, other than YAWA, which is the name given to a female who is born on a Thursday. (Like Kathleen, and like me, only I’m YAWO, meaning I’m a male born on a Thursday).

The first thing that surprised us was that she was white skinned. Apparently it takes a little bit of time for the dark pigment to kick in, so all babies are born white. However, this baby is slightly whiter than a normal African baby, so her skin will apparently be slightly brown, not necessarily totally black. She's really tiny, about 4 1/2 pounds I think. She doesn't even know how to blink yet :P

So, of course I snapped some photos, and will probably end up taking LOTS of baby photos over the next 3 months.

Kewlio.

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A client just arrived here on a bike and asked if there was water in Kpalimé because he has been touring on his bike, and really wants a shower! I told him he could have a shower but that we haven't had any water in over a week, so please be conservative.

Fortunately, a few weeks ago I had sent about 12 photos over the internet of the hotel to my parents to print up and send over here for a Christmas present to Amedjie and Christine. Well, I have another Christmas present for them (a toaster), and the photos go to another purpose. The day the photos arrived they were feeling particularly down, so I pulled out 3 photos to give them "pour regler le problem d'eau" (to solve their water problems). They absolutely loved the photos, and it brightened their spirits considerably. So, now I'm bringing them a photo every meal or so to help them keep smiling through this struggle.

They went to find out exactly what the problem is, but the technicians have no idea. They know there is a leak somewhere, but haven't found it yet. This seems to me like a job done by an extremely inept engineer and an incompetent set of technicians. Civil engineers out there, let me know if it is ACTUALLY is reasonable to take 9 days to find a water leak that chokes an entire city.

Unfortunately, as of this morning the well is now empty. We have maybe a day or two of water in the reservoir. Amedjie is ordering some water that will get us by for a little longer, but obviously this is a big problem. So, this is where I insert my prayer request.

However, it is eqally possible that it will have stopped when I get back to the Hotel. Let's pray that this isn't the case!

Monday December 22 2003
Roastin’ Marshmallows

Everybody (excepty me of course, because I'm holding the camera as usual) enjoying a campfire in Togo, Canadian style

Well, I had a jolly good ‘ol time the other night. I had found some marshmallows in Lomé, and it’s possible to buy chocolate and Crackers in Kpalimé, so the other night Kathleen and I hosted a Smores party! We pulled out the little stove fire, used some shishkabob sticks that I had also found in Lomé, and cooked away.

Amedjie trying to figure out exactly what the ball of goo is...

Now, not to brag or anything, but I consider myself among the best marshmallow cookers in the world. At least among the top 0.0001%. The fire was perfect, allowing me to demonstrate and teach the finer elements of mellow-roastin’.

Christine after her first bite

We did this after 7 days of no running water at Hotel Agbeviade, and it helped considerably to lighten the mood! Everybody had a wonderfully good time.

Paul, his lips are stuck together with the gooey marshmallow

This was the second (after French Toast) “Canadian” food that I had introduced to them. Amedjie in particular quite enjoyed it (and he was the first one to burn his marshmallow!)

Kathleen: I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M EATING SMORES IN TOGO!

The next step is “spider-dogs”. If you don't know what those are... well... ask somebody. I'll have pictures up when I do it.

Me, Tim Berezny, demonstrating my (not to brag or anything, I'm a humble man) marshmallow roasting skill that are better than yours.

Keep Smilin'
-Tim

Monday December 22 2003
Merry Christmas
Today we put up the Christmas decorations around the hotel. There are Christmas lights and streamers and I bought some little red ball ornaments for the fir tree in the garden (how they keep that thing alive I do not know). I have some presents for Amedjie and Christine, and can’t wait to give it to them!

Tomorrow I ride of to Kara, which is a village in the North of Togo. I am staying with a Canadian missionary family there for Christmas. I will have some presents and letters to open Christmas morning to make things feel more *Christmassy* (Thanks Mom and Laura).

After Kara, new years is still as yet somewhat undefined, but I am hoping at some point to go to Ghana for at least 4 days to explore a little. Ghana is the country next door to the west of Togo. Apparently it is quite a bit better off than Togo (though still considered a developing nation). At the very least, it has tourists. In fact, tourism makes up 30% of the GNP. Togo could use a little bit of that…

And so those are my holidays! Chances are that there won’t be an update in 2-3 weeks on the webpage, but that after that there will be a serious information dump all at once!

So Keep Smilin’ and happy holidays
-Tim

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Tim (no me) on the right stirring paint, with Mike, a fellow Canadian on the left.

I asked him why the one time falling off the ladder didn't convince him that maybe he needed to make a new once. After breaking two rungs on the ladder throughout the day, he began to agree with me :P

So, I painted the lower half, with the smaller, much more stable ladder.

Then there was some dirt that needed to be spread out on the driveway, so I spent a good chunk of time piling that dirt into a wheelbarrow. The funny thing about this was that there was this little kid named "Wheo" who was helping us. He is about half my size (11 yrs old), and I would fill up the wheelbarrow, and he would push it over to the dump site (in his bare feet on gravel) and push with all of his might to try and dump the contents onto the ground. He seemed to be pretty proud of his work so I just let him do it. Then, every now and then when I was shovelling, he would rip the shovel from my hands and start filling the wheelbarrow. He wouldn't let me do it! I'm not sure if he was trying to show off, if he thought I was incompetent at manual labour because I was white, or if I shouldn't be doing manual labour because I was white, or if he really just wanted to help.

In any case I got a kick out of it.

As we were working he started asking me where I was from and asked me about my family. I told him I had two younger brothers. He said that he was going to follow me back to Canada. I asked him why he wanted to de that? He told me that it was because he wanted to "Saluer ton petit frère", to give salutations to my little brother! I thought that this was really funny, and a really marked difference between Togo and Canadian culture showing up in this small child. In Togo (apparently in Africa as a whole), greeting people is quite important. Even when buying something from a store, you don't launch right into asking what the price is, you go through a lengthy 'salutation' process first (and it always goes off really well if you can do it in the local language). So, he wanted to make a trip to say hello! In Togo, just about every child within 30 meters will greet me in some way or another. Furthermore, people will often go around a village just to greet people. The person may leave after the greetings, but the greetings are necessary! In Canada, it is usually considered rude to say hello to somebody, then putter off right away without having some kind of discussion for a bit. As a result, people often don't even say hello because they don't want to get stuck in a conversation! Here, everybody says hello, but if you just want to keep on going on your way after that, that's just fine! This took me a little while to get used to.

Wheo, little rascal who wouldn't let me shovel some dirt...

In any case, little Wheo wanted to come to Canada to say hello to my little brother, very amusing.

Later that night we were at a Christmas Eve service. They sung a few songs in French, poorly, and then when we sung a song is Kabyé, the whole room filled with singing suddenly. I guess a person's "heart language" makes a big difference in how you express yourself. Then there was some trivia games based on what they had learned that year in Sunday school. I was quite surprised how well people were remembering the things that they had been taught, including names, obscure places, scripture references and verse memorization. This went on for quite a while.

Then we watched two movies. They were dubbed in French, and I have the HARDEST time understanding French dubbed movies. There's just something about them that renders them completely incomprehensible.

All in all, the evening went from about 7:30 to 11:00. Then we came home, went to bed, and waited for Christmas.

Then we headed over to another missionaries house for brunch. They had a big decorated Christmas tree with presents under it! Then for breakfast we had this yummy egg casserole and other goodies. That night everybody came back to the Dickinsons and we had a fantastic dinner; Chicken (not Togo Style), stuffing, Jelly salad, Candied Yams, and all kinds of sweet deserts like fudge, cookies etc. Mmmmm, not even a hint of any Togolese food! A very nice escape.

Then we watched most of "The best Christmas pageant ever", which was rather amusing.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

Well, of course these things do happen again, in Bosnia and Iraq in particular but certainly also in many other countries. The great escape II dealt quite a bit with Gestapo issues, which once again I know very little about.

I find these films so interesting, because in these times when the world seems so messed up, I often don't know which way is up, and it is difficult to take an educated and balanced stance on any world issue, it seems that the past probably holds many keys to the present and future. Indeed, those of us who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

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On to January...