Mama Olga

The woman next door yells at her teenage sons. Her name is Olga. I call her "Mama". She owns my house and we occasionally sit and chat.

Last night Mama explained the latest ways her sons, daughter and family all drive her up the wall. The boys never listen; when she gets home from work all the dishes are dirty; the children lack humility; the daughter is too fat; and the cousins expect her to take care of the latest sick relative. I sometimes listen to her yelling and notice that she almost never calls each son's name less than twice. On the first times, I suppose they don't come.

Mama's husband died over a year ago after a long illness that robbed him of the abilities to talk and walk beyond a few steps for eleven years. She feels that she was robbed of what would have been the easiest years of her marriage. Mama is tired of illness and tired of men. She is tired of cooking for people and dealing with the attitudes of her teenagers. She is tired of working at the health clinic all day and wishes she could take a vacation to go anywhere but doesn't have the money.

Mama has a good job - hygiene assistant responsible for teaching the local population about environmental cleanliness, personal hygiene, family planning and heath maintenance. She is university educated. She can get by with a bit of English. But people have lost the respect they used to have for hygienists in her position. No one listens. She is grateful, nonetheless, for a job where she makes rounds in the community rather than sits tied to a desk. She is grateful to have at least one daughter who helps her at the house, begrudgingly, when she is home from university in Lomé. She is grateful for the grace of God. Like many Togolese, Mama is passionately Christian and proudly vocal about her beliefs in Jesus. We say grace each time before eating together and she tries to drag me off to church when I am not off to Lomé on a Sunday morning.

She gives me advice not realizing what my real Mama has long since known: I won't listen when I know I'm being told what to do. Even if she knew, it wouldn't stop her; the culture of unasked for advice is different here than in America. Advice comes free in West Africa. Mama tells me to enjoy the silence, the calm and the time alone in my life while I still can since one day I'll have "little Americans" running around, driving me crazy and refusing to be quiet or leave me alone. She seems to approve of my apparent senses of adventure and charity that have brought me all the way here to Togo. She would have liked to visit a place like America but knows that she will now never have the chance.

Mama's job is similar to mine in that she reaches out to people beyond her organization. She says the people in her household could use advice in leading lives that are healthy and sane since they're all so disobedient and unhelpful. She says I should enjoy my time alone now, go home, get married and have little Americans.