FESPACO

2 March 2011

It’s been almost 9 months in Togo, and I’m 7 months into my service. I’m currently in transit from Burkina back to my village, so I’m sitting in the Peace Corps transit house in Dapaong. Now I’ve officially stayed at least one night in every regional capital of Togo. How exciting.

The film festival was really cool! There were so many foreigners there and it was awesome to just sit in a café and listen to all of the different languages. We saw 5 films while we were there, and they were really hit or miss. One of them was the worst movies I’d ever seen in my life and others I really enjoyed. There was one Haitian film I liked, set in Paris, about love but definitely not a love story. It followed the lives of thee women, a teacher who messes around with her student, a woman who is fed up with love and decides to invite the first guy she sees to move into her apartment, and a girl who is confused about life and religion when she starts seeing religious signs. Really well done – well filmed and well written. A few of the movies were hard to follow because they were in another language with French subtitles. Trying to follow fast, French subtitles is not so easy!

Ouagadougou is a little more developed than Lome and definitely has more culture. Several of the films were shown at the “Institut Francais,” a little art gallery, library, and French café. The first night, we walked around the art gallery to see the works of Patrick Singh. I thought he was incredibly talented and you should google some of his work – especially if you want to really understand the faces of West Africa. After the gallery, we drank expresso in the little French café and ate a ham and gruyere sandwich. It was like heaven.

Now it’s back to the grindstone in Pagala for a few weeks. We’re celebrating my boyfriend’s birthday in mid-March, so are going to visit another volunteer who lives near the famous waterfall of Togo. The greatest thing about being here so far has been all of the opportunities to travel. It’s an exotic life I live here in West Africa!