Sports tournament, chickens and campaigning

Ok, once again, quite some time has passed since the last entry! The soccertournament is over by now. Here a short description of the tours in the villages: 1st day The first day in Kpimé passed quite nice. We had a lot of audience, but after the match it started to rain, so we could not do the movie projection that night. Kpimé – Kpalimé FC: 1:0 2nd day In

Meetings and election campaign

By now the policital climate has cooled down a little, since there are going to be elections on the 24th of april , but the election campaigns are only starting on the ab 8th. At least in Lomé, but also in the north of the country have always some people been killed during the campaigns. A member of the independent elections commission told me that the RPT (Eyadémas party) has

Riding a bike at work and a refreshing rain

By now the preparations for the sports project are running. With Bruno (one of my colleagues) I already went to several villages around Kpalimé to see, if there are any soccer teams present and there are :). For our tour, we used a 125cc motocrossbike and went around 100 kilometres over sticks and stones. The last six kilometres were even in the pouring rain on thursday evening 🙂 we just

Canadians, Coco Beach and Uprisings

I spent this weekend at Coco Beach, near Lomé with the canadians, who I got to know last weekend. On friday on my way to Lomé I already saw some patrol jeeps with mounted guns and finally arrived, a truck turned over and blocking half the road in the middle of the city. The things looked worse than they were; besides, it is pretty normal now in Lomé. After lunch

French fries and Gabun

Last night we had another campfire. We wanted to fry a chicken for some of, and french fries for all of the volunteers :). The chicken had been slaughtered by Johannes, Constantin’s brother (he had a relationship to that chicken – as a medical student, I hope that there are no consequences 🙂 ). Most of the volunteers already left at around midnight, so they did not eat too much.

The president does not want to let go

When Faure finally announced that he is going back to unamended constitution, meaning that he will take care of elections within 60 days, but also that he will stay in power until then and not hand the power over to the speaker of parliament, it was not enough for the Westafrican Union: They raised an arms embargo, a travelban for togolese officials, withdrew all embassadors of the Westafrican Union fom

Demonstration and even more Canadians :)

At the oppositional demonstration in Lomé on saturday where about 25.000 participants, but apparantly nobody seemed to be hurt. Since the situation is still not at ease some Canadians from Quebec (also french – speaking) decided to take a break at Kpalimé over the weekend We chatted a little on saturday evening and on sunday and they are spending the next weekend at a cocospalm beach and already invited me

The President is organizing elections himself and Manifestations with stationary machine guns

The president still spoke yesterday (we happend to have a black out during that time 🙂 ) and announced that he will stay in office but will organize elections himself until the end of the 60 day period. There has also been a demonstration in Kpalimé, some of our artists went there and saw a stationary machine gun with sand barricades! For some time now you can also see Jeeps