Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!
I had meant December to be a month in which projects would be finalized and my life would equal village, such had previous months and ones to come been filled with travelling, I had said to myself that if my projects were to succeed they could have to show signs of success before year’s end. Not surprisingly, my will was not paramount – some marvels have occurred and some disasters befallen me without as much as a warning bell. They say that Africa teaches you patience – you might also say it teaches you to roll with the punches or to let go and let God. Whatever axiom is chosen one is for sure - you have to live day by day or will end up bursting a blood vessel like I nearly did last month.
Since Thanksgiving I have been to Niamey twice – both times for medical reasons and both trips decided upon the morning of the trip. For the span of two weeks or so I spent more time out of village than in it. While Niamey is a wondrous land of running water, ceiling fans and occasional a/c, restaurants and the like, the jarring effect of going in straight from the bush in 4 to 7 hour shot is quite undesirable, especially when repeated in quick succession. On my count, which I have spent far too long try to nail down, I have been medicated for GI (gastro-intestinal) issues 17 or 18 times since entering Niger. The last few times have been particularly problematic in that each time I have been treated, the symptoms have continued on – or returned in quick fashion after the treatment. Therein lies the crux of the issue – how to tell if I have been continually infected, especially due to a weak immune system following an antibiotic treatment OR have I not been fully cured by the meds, leaving me dependent on them or resistant to them. How long can I maintain what sometimes feels like a perpetual state of infection or treatment? My fellow villagers are blessed with youths in which their bodies grow to withstand bacteria and parasites, at least to a large extent. I am not so luckily but I do feel that my body has adapted to its environment despite all its issues – I react with much greater resilience than when I first arrived in country. I have worked weeks while symptomatic and have not shown symptoms at some times when faced with infection. While on meds I feel none such strength.
I believe I mentioned before that I would talk a bit about the upcoming elections. As PCVs we are not to choose sides, and I don’t think I would want to – after seeing the first couple days of the campaigning season in Niamey I was so confused by all the banners and posters, cars and t-shirts. Little did I realize the situation in Ivory Coast would highlight the issues of African politics so soon before Niger’s own fragile attempts to establish stable democracy. The biggest difference between the two countries seems in their functionality. Ivory Coast has substantial mining and oil sectors and is the world’s biggest cocoa exporter; they have the means to fund their own government much beyond what Niger is capable of doing. Their coastline also helps fund their economy through trade and transport. Niger has uranium and little else. At the same time the factionalizing of countries based on religion and ethnicity added to the quick recourse to force is lethal concoction that plagues the whole region from time to time, even if Niger is less affected than others.
Across Francophone Africa, not just in Niger, the size and reach of state bureaucracies boggles the mind. While efforts of decentralization have been made, trying to make politics more real to the people, they have also layered more opaque reams of paperwork to a culture that has a very small written tradition. But one need not look just to the government; a recent visit to the bank highlighted the extensive reaches of bureaucracy. Upon receiving a transfer of money for a project I was told to ensure that the money had indeed arrived. The normal guy I would have talked to was not there and the person at the desk said to go up to the 1st floor. I went up one only to find out it was the mezzanine. On the next floor up I was directed to the end of the hall where I met a man who escorted me down to the office I had just come from. He was told that this was indeed his affair and we thus returned back to his windowless, fluorescent-lit whitewashed office, where he sat in a few dozen square feet space with another man. Stacked high on bureaus were register books and loose paper. The desks were equally cluttered where the two men fluttered back and forth between pages of handwritten notes. In barely legible chicken scratch were the money transfers of the French mining giant AREVA, among others. After a conversation with a friend on the phone and the DHL guy who passed by, my nerves were rubbing sideways – I was required to get out of town before sunset and time was flying by. After pleading with him he said he knew someone who could help – we went down to the main floor to watch a man chew out a colleague for a few minutes before telling us that my transfer must be international since I’m in an American organization and directed us up a floor. There the man said it was moved in from another local bank and therefore it was actually a domestic transfer. With some pity I was allowed to wait for him while he dealt with another client. I sat outside, watched him come in and out a few times while I watched well-dressed individuals pace down the hall every few minutes – sometimes in the same direction! Other people stared into space; a couple women dozed at their desks. I felt trapped in an Orwellian mind-game. I quickly dashed downstairs hoping and praying that money indeed had come – it had…but I had spent an hour gaining nothing but knowledge about how to avoid going to these efforts again. The extent of the banking bureaucracy is mirrored elsewhere in Niamey, but abroad as well - the US included. What is truly marvelous is how people can work through bureaucracy, although in village it feels people can easily avoid it altogether. Somehow, in order to progress, my villagers will have to learn the illogical ins and outs of Niamey. There are those who do know how to already, but they live in larger cities or in other regions. I can only hope that they are able to add a little dose of their own small town common sense to the whole system.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Changing, changing, changing
Can't believe it's been since August that I last wrote, and now it is Thanksgiving and the end of the year is nearly here. How time absolutely whooshes by! Niger and Peace Corps Niger have been through a number of changes recently and will continue to be changing for a few months to come. When I first came in I was kind of awed and overwhelmed by our history in this country: 50 years in 2012, and how much effect we have had on this country that is hard to quantify or to even discover (either because of lack of paperwork or our diminished presence in many regions). I have seen so much turnover in Peace Corps, both in volunteers and in administration, since coming that it feels that we continually reinvent our image without even trying. Just the combined effect of personalities makes the biggest difference in this image change.
When it comes to the country itself, the biggest change I have witnessed as of late is governmental. When it comes to the administration of this country, the longer I am here the less I understand how anything actually happens. Right as the school year began the school administration for the whole country was reshuffled. Entire school teaching staffs have been moved out and have only been partially replaced. Regional school administrations have also been entirely moved in and out. Not only that, but those staffs still intact have not had gaps in their ranks filled-my middle school included. My director has taken a number of trips to the regional and national capital, and people in high places originally from Lido have petitioned on our behalf. Nonetheless, two months into the school year we are still at half strength. At least all our classes have started, nearby middle schools have only had the highest-level classes begin courses. The distance between my middle school and the town itself (a few hundred yards beyond the town limits) is symbolic between the teaching establishment and the rural community. It feels that the national ministry is just as out of touch with the needs of the nation: materials, classes, books, teachers, quality teaching methods...as soon as improvement is accomplished you have to start all over again with a whole new team.
At the primary level, usually better off due to greater international funding - the UN considers a primary-level education essential of their Millennium Development Goals - vast recruitment campaigns have been undertaken, signing up under-qualified individuals to send them off to bush schools and be thrown into with almost no teacher training and a middle-school education. What's more, the vast majority of these individuals are simply desperate for a job, often without an invested interest in the work - not from the area and not interested in helping kids learn. My work counterpart attempted to enter such a recruitment process after failing for the fourth (I think) time to pass the test to get beyond middle school (only 30 out of 321 open candidates passed from his testing center). He even sold his sister's goat to get some cash to grease the gears, but was still not accepted. He ended up making a contact with a person from Lido living in Niamey who offered to take him in and offer him a spot in a technology school there. What an opportunity! Although it doesn't help me as a PCV in Lido it is an enormous boon for Isiya himself. There seems to be so little options available that anything other than working for the government is unfathomable for most educated individuals.
In fact, in village life it feels that the real "African Ingenuity" comes from the guy who buys a bunch of canned tomato paste and milk powder from Niamey or from Dosso (the regional capital) and sets up a little shade hangar and resells these products in the village. "Fat" Sani, who buys sodas from Nigeria and ice from Dosso to make cold sodas in Lido; my neighbor Muntari, who set up a tea and coffee stand, who also makes trips to local markets for guavas and sugar cane when in season; girls who sell fried bean flour balls and boiled and ground ground nuts near his stand, all are entrepreneurs to the highest degree. Unfortunately, the profit margins for dry good sellers are slim enough to hamper any large improvements to their business models. The fact that almost everything beyond the grains and sauce ingredients grown in local soils is imported and the added cost of importation inhibits most villagers from buying more than basic sugar, salt, MSG, from such merchants. Nonetheless, the effort it takes to constantly be traveling from market to market, buying in one place and reselling in other, paying a lot for poor transportation, etc. is admirable. The creativity it takes to grow a business is definitely here, unfortunately the unavailability of larger markets and the lack of infrastructure to produce and transport goods and services is an invisible closing fist that squelches out even the most determined significant efforts to upgrade. Thus there are enumerable sellers of fried flour balls or rice and bean stands or dried and ground peanut ball ladies. Labor, shea butter, gum arabic, sesame oil, peanut products - there are exports beyond uranium in Niger - but the distance from start-up cost to profit earned is almost too long to fathom if done on a local scale.
This impossibility of local-earned success can make the countless numbers of foreign aid organizations an attractive alternative. Often such organizations have an agenda, a certain number of projects in a certain sector. For a example a health NGO might have $2 million to spend on malaria prevention, $500 thousand on polio vaccination campaigns, $2 million on AIDS prevention. Another one might focus on business development and have $26 thousand to start up youth clubs. But what if it only requires $2 thousand? Well then it can spend the rest on lodging, transport costs, t-shirts, new pick-up trucks, whatever it takes to spend up the rest of the money. "If the town actually needs low-cost hole-in-the-ground latrines in people's houses, too bad! We have x million dollars to spend on pretty cement-block structures to be built in the vicinity of every marketplace in the region." So what do they do? They pay locals multiple times the going rate to bring up sand and gravel and build the thing and they import the rest from elsewhere. After it's built, they stick a pretty sign saying who paid and when it was built and off they go. No, no one was even told what these strange miniature houses are supposed to be used for, or if you should happen to know why you might need a single place to poop, where to find it (tucked away beyond the back end of the market where no one ever goes). Half was left locked, and the "opening ceremony" for the first half happened unbeknown to me. I have seen a couple latrines, at my primary school for example, but they are in such a decrepit state and are so incredibly filthy that I hold it until I get back home. Of course everyone else doesn't have a pit latrine so they go in the ravine in the middle of town or wherever there is substantial weed cover.
When it comes to my artisan group, for whom I have spent nearly a year searching for a way to create either an apprenticeship program, a women's sewing group, or a small business cooperative out of this talented group, I can't possibly to expect them to go out of their way pick the place, time, frequency of meetings or even a couple kids to work with. They need stuff. Not just any stuff, new sewing machines, one for work and another for the apprenticeship program. Nice thread and cloth, saws and wood, shoe polish and high-quality leather. They cannot make do with what they have, if it involves me, it has to be done "the right way." My first collaborator was a talented and experienced vocational school from a large city, but he expected me to pay him for every check-up, for multiple trainings where he would get a teaching fee, his transport paid, a lodging fee (But you have a friend in every town, this one included. Just sleep at your friend's place for free!); money for food, for the use of training materials that will never actually been given to the artisans but just used once. Even if he was great, PCVs can't get funding for the same project twice, so that was out of the question and I can't get the same kind of dough that the Swiss and French can. There were other options, and I went to all lengths to get some kind of support, but nothing has succeeded. A couple days ago I was able for the first time in months to hold a meeting with majority attendance and where people showed up not only in time, but at roughly the same time. We went through some past news, and I told them straight: "We can't depend of outside help. With the government situation the way it is, we're not likely to get anything anytime soon. We can only develop with effort, we can't depend on funding." But it was like a broken record: "If you can't get funding, let's drop the whole thing until you can bring use stuff from Niamey." After hearing this repeated by the same woman with the same phrasing each time, I had had enough. I flipped a lid, burst my bubble, shorted a circuit - I went off in English, in a cathartic screamfest releasing all that pent up frustration from this and other projects that carry the same characteristics - namely, lack of initiative. Of course that evening everyone asked me if I had been possessed (bori-the word to describe a possession dance or ceremony) and if my health was still all there.
All is not for naught, though. While things coming in from the top down, especially at the national level, just never seem to meet their intended goals or have any efficiency, local, traditional leaders in my area are motivated. With upcoming elections I will hopefully blog a bit about Niger's political scene, but for my local chief, the development and improvement of Lido is a top priority. He spends most of his time as a primary school director and the rest traveling to Lido, Dosso and Niamey trying to get us electricity, a new mosque, a new school, extensions on existing schools and health clinic, and on and on. While his methods are very Nigerien and might, like the national government, garner a frown from the US State Dept., they might just help our town become a hub of local commerce, education, culture.
Until next time,
Thomas
When it comes to the country itself, the biggest change I have witnessed as of late is governmental. When it comes to the administration of this country, the longer I am here the less I understand how anything actually happens. Right as the school year began the school administration for the whole country was reshuffled. Entire school teaching staffs have been moved out and have only been partially replaced. Regional school administrations have also been entirely moved in and out. Not only that, but those staffs still intact have not had gaps in their ranks filled-my middle school included. My director has taken a number of trips to the regional and national capital, and people in high places originally from Lido have petitioned on our behalf. Nonetheless, two months into the school year we are still at half strength. At least all our classes have started, nearby middle schools have only had the highest-level classes begin courses. The distance between my middle school and the town itself (a few hundred yards beyond the town limits) is symbolic between the teaching establishment and the rural community. It feels that the national ministry is just as out of touch with the needs of the nation: materials, classes, books, teachers, quality teaching methods...as soon as improvement is accomplished you have to start all over again with a whole new team.
At the primary level, usually better off due to greater international funding - the UN considers a primary-level education essential of their Millennium Development Goals - vast recruitment campaigns have been undertaken, signing up under-qualified individuals to send them off to bush schools and be thrown into with almost no teacher training and a middle-school education. What's more, the vast majority of these individuals are simply desperate for a job, often without an invested interest in the work - not from the area and not interested in helping kids learn. My work counterpart attempted to enter such a recruitment process after failing for the fourth (I think) time to pass the test to get beyond middle school (only 30 out of 321 open candidates passed from his testing center). He even sold his sister's goat to get some cash to grease the gears, but was still not accepted. He ended up making a contact with a person from Lido living in Niamey who offered to take him in and offer him a spot in a technology school there. What an opportunity! Although it doesn't help me as a PCV in Lido it is an enormous boon for Isiya himself. There seems to be so little options available that anything other than working for the government is unfathomable for most educated individuals.
In fact, in village life it feels that the real "African Ingenuity" comes from the guy who buys a bunch of canned tomato paste and milk powder from Niamey or from Dosso (the regional capital) and sets up a little shade hangar and resells these products in the village. "Fat" Sani, who buys sodas from Nigeria and ice from Dosso to make cold sodas in Lido; my neighbor Muntari, who set up a tea and coffee stand, who also makes trips to local markets for guavas and sugar cane when in season; girls who sell fried bean flour balls and boiled and ground ground nuts near his stand, all are entrepreneurs to the highest degree. Unfortunately, the profit margins for dry good sellers are slim enough to hamper any large improvements to their business models. The fact that almost everything beyond the grains and sauce ingredients grown in local soils is imported and the added cost of importation inhibits most villagers from buying more than basic sugar, salt, MSG, from such merchants. Nonetheless, the effort it takes to constantly be traveling from market to market, buying in one place and reselling in other, paying a lot for poor transportation, etc. is admirable. The creativity it takes to grow a business is definitely here, unfortunately the unavailability of larger markets and the lack of infrastructure to produce and transport goods and services is an invisible closing fist that squelches out even the most determined significant efforts to upgrade. Thus there are enumerable sellers of fried flour balls or rice and bean stands or dried and ground peanut ball ladies. Labor, shea butter, gum arabic, sesame oil, peanut products - there are exports beyond uranium in Niger - but the distance from start-up cost to profit earned is almost too long to fathom if done on a local scale.
This impossibility of local-earned success can make the countless numbers of foreign aid organizations an attractive alternative. Often such organizations have an agenda, a certain number of projects in a certain sector. For a example a health NGO might have $2 million to spend on malaria prevention, $500 thousand on polio vaccination campaigns, $2 million on AIDS prevention. Another one might focus on business development and have $26 thousand to start up youth clubs. But what if it only requires $2 thousand? Well then it can spend the rest on lodging, transport costs, t-shirts, new pick-up trucks, whatever it takes to spend up the rest of the money. "If the town actually needs low-cost hole-in-the-ground latrines in people's houses, too bad! We have x million dollars to spend on pretty cement-block structures to be built in the vicinity of every marketplace in the region." So what do they do? They pay locals multiple times the going rate to bring up sand and gravel and build the thing and they import the rest from elsewhere. After it's built, they stick a pretty sign saying who paid and when it was built and off they go. No, no one was even told what these strange miniature houses are supposed to be used for, or if you should happen to know why you might need a single place to poop, where to find it (tucked away beyond the back end of the market where no one ever goes). Half was left locked, and the "opening ceremony" for the first half happened unbeknown to me. I have seen a couple latrines, at my primary school for example, but they are in such a decrepit state and are so incredibly filthy that I hold it until I get back home. Of course everyone else doesn't have a pit latrine so they go in the ravine in the middle of town or wherever there is substantial weed cover.
When it comes to my artisan group, for whom I have spent nearly a year searching for a way to create either an apprenticeship program, a women's sewing group, or a small business cooperative out of this talented group, I can't possibly to expect them to go out of their way pick the place, time, frequency of meetings or even a couple kids to work with. They need stuff. Not just any stuff, new sewing machines, one for work and another for the apprenticeship program. Nice thread and cloth, saws and wood, shoe polish and high-quality leather. They cannot make do with what they have, if it involves me, it has to be done "the right way." My first collaborator was a talented and experienced vocational school from a large city, but he expected me to pay him for every check-up, for multiple trainings where he would get a teaching fee, his transport paid, a lodging fee (But you have a friend in every town, this one included. Just sleep at your friend's place for free!); money for food, for the use of training materials that will never actually been given to the artisans but just used once. Even if he was great, PCVs can't get funding for the same project twice, so that was out of the question and I can't get the same kind of dough that the Swiss and French can. There were other options, and I went to all lengths to get some kind of support, but nothing has succeeded. A couple days ago I was able for the first time in months to hold a meeting with majority attendance and where people showed up not only in time, but at roughly the same time. We went through some past news, and I told them straight: "We can't depend of outside help. With the government situation the way it is, we're not likely to get anything anytime soon. We can only develop with effort, we can't depend on funding." But it was like a broken record: "If you can't get funding, let's drop the whole thing until you can bring use stuff from Niamey." After hearing this repeated by the same woman with the same phrasing each time, I had had enough. I flipped a lid, burst my bubble, shorted a circuit - I went off in English, in a cathartic screamfest releasing all that pent up frustration from this and other projects that carry the same characteristics - namely, lack of initiative. Of course that evening everyone asked me if I had been possessed (bori-the word to describe a possession dance or ceremony) and if my health was still all there.
All is not for naught, though. While things coming in from the top down, especially at the national level, just never seem to meet their intended goals or have any efficiency, local, traditional leaders in my area are motivated. With upcoming elections I will hopefully blog a bit about Niger's political scene, but for my local chief, the development and improvement of Lido is a top priority. He spends most of his time as a primary school director and the rest traveling to Lido, Dosso and Niamey trying to get us electricity, a new mosque, a new school, extensions on existing schools and health clinic, and on and on. While his methods are very Nigerien and might, like the national government, garner a frown from the US State Dept., they might just help our town become a hub of local commerce, education, culture.
Until next time,
Thomas
Monday, August 30, 2010
Absolutely nothing....life in Ramadan
So I write to you in the middle of the month of Ramadan where you ought not eat, sniff food, smoke, drink, or swallow saliva from sunup to sundown. Since this year, like last year, it fell during the rainy season, men and women must go out and farm in the morning. After that the men come back into village and the women...continue to work, carrying firewood and water, cooking, ordering around kids. What's more is that some women continue to fast even during breastfeeding or pregnancy, though those conditions warrant postponement of fasting according to Islamic rules. On the flipside, for those teachers back home for summer break, a day of Ramadan means doing nothing...absolutely nothing. Normally, they sit in their fada, or men's group drinking tea, chatting and maybe playing cards. But recently they've just been sitting there, and then talking a little (sometimes listening to music), and then sitting around some more. So, a few days this past week I've had the get up and go to wake up (acutally the drums do that) and prepare myself breakfast at 4 something in the morning and then not swallow anything till just after 7pm. To the end of energy conservation I've been hanging out at the teachers' fada. Knowing what to expect, I've been bringing along something to read.
One of my recent reads was The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. In it he prescribes what he terms a 'clinical' approach to development: a steep increase in aid from wealthy countries and a much more detailed and extensive wish list of items needed for economic growth from developing countries. While his book spends a lot of time harping on the failures of the West to properly aid the poor world, and even more time describing the endless number of factors needed to make a correct diagnosis of a country's deficiencies, there still seems to be something missing. He still seems to assume that each country's central government can decide how to use money given as a lump sum from donor countries in the most efficient way possible. I have witnessed, even on a small scale, how this can go horribly wrong. As he mentions repeatedly, the third world is not inherently corrupt, yet he doesn't mention that humans don't spend gifted money in the most thrifty manner. What's more, a fleet of technocrats, no matter how large, can't possibly think of all the ways a project could go awry. In a fellow volunteer's town young girls' scholarships have gone to the richest families in the town - as opposed to poor families in bush villages - thus creating little net improvement. These girls would have already succeeded at school. In another volunteer's town, a highly-reputable NGO built a beautiful primary school with solar panels and well-equipped classrooms, while leaving a med clinic half-built (only the walls) and completing ignoring the secondary school, which has not a single classroom (only millet stalk shade hangars). In Lido, the largest building in town is a farming-supplies warehouse that has been largely vacant since the NGO that built is now defunct and the second-largest structure is a water tower with too many issues to count: poor placement, structural defects, lack of repair parts, change in managment rules at nat'l level resulting in no outside management at local level....It's not just that these projects build what are essentially gifts -with a small community contribution- it is also the fact that the village's opinion is rarely asked. Latrines were built in all the marketplaces near Lidoby a large Belgian outfit all in a few months time, including in Lido's market. Not only was Lido's placed in the far back of the marketplace, no one was informed about how to use it and when I last checked it was still locked. What's more, latrines in the bush have a history of being troublesome and expensive to take care of, and as its stinkiness worsens, villagers revert back to going #2 in the bush, as they always have.
Despite these projects failures, it sometimes feels as though my ideas have not been any better. The other day another volunteer and I were comparing the progression of our English clubs, and found them to be exactly the same: large attendance petering out to just a handful, lack of creativity and inability to respond to open-ended questions, lack of continuity to due student and volunteer absences. In other projects, villagers, despite having to pay a fee, attend and participate, consider the project to be the volunteer's - not their own. This is despite the fact that villagers come up with the ideas, if not much of the planning, for all projects. I have been working for months trying to help our tree nursery man get year-round water access: writing one proposal for a well-improvement, then trying another approach with a pump, then writing another proposal for the first idea and then organizing a women's gardening group for him to help lead (as we ought not do a project for just one person's gain but rather for the greater good of the whole village, plus both the women and the nurseryman really desired to start up gardening). Now, in the past few days, he has shown signs of flaking out; I believe it may be that he may not actually want to help out the women as much as he said he did. Even if things do work out, there's no saying that someone essential to the operation might dissappear for over three months, ruining the essential follow-up work that makes a project sustainable, as happened with our agricultural methods training and subsequent demonstration plots earlier this year. As I have noticed with my counterpart's predicament - he didn't pass a certain test to go on to become a primary teacher so he felt compelled by hunger (literally!) to go back and work in Benin and Togo as he had done for many years prior to my arrival. Leaving to Nigeria or other countries along the coast in search of work is as common for young men in Niger as going off to college is for young Americans.
Not to leave you on a sour note, there are some promising signs of development. Some aspects of development seem inevitable: every neighboring country had cell phone coverage, it's only a matter of time before Niger got it too; other driving forces of development appear 'out of thin air'. Sachs mentions India's telecommunications boom as such an event. On a small scale, where I believe Peace Corps and most individuals can do most, projects have to be launched without promising funds and without a locked-in end goal. Too much frustration can arrive from trying to turn out 20 women knitters a year when it turns out there already enough of them for their clientele; the supposed knitters might have better luck selling millet cakes on a wider turf than where they had been selling them before. Growth can easily be halted by a lack of market: Lido is a closed economy, the same people come every week with the same amount of money. People turn cash into livestock or other goods almost immediately, making investment growth only as dependable as your goat's diet. When you want to sell outside of Francophone West Africa your exchange is only as good or bad as the Euro's, lowering incentives for business expansion. I am no economist, but I can sometimes tell that the best idea may just be to pack up a bunch of goat, sheep and cow skins and jump on the truck to a big nearby market, hoping someone who can turn them into something nice and shiny will show up and pay you good cash for your stinky fare.
All the best, and happy end of August,
Thomas
One of my recent reads was The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. In it he prescribes what he terms a 'clinical' approach to development: a steep increase in aid from wealthy countries and a much more detailed and extensive wish list of items needed for economic growth from developing countries. While his book spends a lot of time harping on the failures of the West to properly aid the poor world, and even more time describing the endless number of factors needed to make a correct diagnosis of a country's deficiencies, there still seems to be something missing. He still seems to assume that each country's central government can decide how to use money given as a lump sum from donor countries in the most efficient way possible. I have witnessed, even on a small scale, how this can go horribly wrong. As he mentions repeatedly, the third world is not inherently corrupt, yet he doesn't mention that humans don't spend gifted money in the most thrifty manner. What's more, a fleet of technocrats, no matter how large, can't possibly think of all the ways a project could go awry. In a fellow volunteer's town young girls' scholarships have gone to the richest families in the town - as opposed to poor families in bush villages - thus creating little net improvement. These girls would have already succeeded at school. In another volunteer's town, a highly-reputable NGO built a beautiful primary school with solar panels and well-equipped classrooms, while leaving a med clinic half-built (only the walls) and completing ignoring the secondary school, which has not a single classroom (only millet stalk shade hangars). In Lido, the largest building in town is a farming-supplies warehouse that has been largely vacant since the NGO that built is now defunct and the second-largest structure is a water tower with too many issues to count: poor placement, structural defects, lack of repair parts, change in managment rules at nat'l level resulting in no outside management at local level....It's not just that these projects build what are essentially gifts -with a small community contribution- it is also the fact that the village's opinion is rarely asked. Latrines were built in all the marketplaces near Lidoby a large Belgian outfit all in a few months time, including in Lido's market. Not only was Lido's placed in the far back of the marketplace, no one was informed about how to use it and when I last checked it was still locked. What's more, latrines in the bush have a history of being troublesome and expensive to take care of, and as its stinkiness worsens, villagers revert back to going #2 in the bush, as they always have.
Despite these projects failures, it sometimes feels as though my ideas have not been any better. The other day another volunteer and I were comparing the progression of our English clubs, and found them to be exactly the same: large attendance petering out to just a handful, lack of creativity and inability to respond to open-ended questions, lack of continuity to due student and volunteer absences. In other projects, villagers, despite having to pay a fee, attend and participate, consider the project to be the volunteer's - not their own. This is despite the fact that villagers come up with the ideas, if not much of the planning, for all projects. I have been working for months trying to help our tree nursery man get year-round water access: writing one proposal for a well-improvement, then trying another approach with a pump, then writing another proposal for the first idea and then organizing a women's gardening group for him to help lead (as we ought not do a project for just one person's gain but rather for the greater good of the whole village, plus both the women and the nurseryman really desired to start up gardening). Now, in the past few days, he has shown signs of flaking out; I believe it may be that he may not actually want to help out the women as much as he said he did. Even if things do work out, there's no saying that someone essential to the operation might dissappear for over three months, ruining the essential follow-up work that makes a project sustainable, as happened with our agricultural methods training and subsequent demonstration plots earlier this year. As I have noticed with my counterpart's predicament - he didn't pass a certain test to go on to become a primary teacher so he felt compelled by hunger (literally!) to go back and work in Benin and Togo as he had done for many years prior to my arrival. Leaving to Nigeria or other countries along the coast in search of work is as common for young men in Niger as going off to college is for young Americans.
Not to leave you on a sour note, there are some promising signs of development. Some aspects of development seem inevitable: every neighboring country had cell phone coverage, it's only a matter of time before Niger got it too; other driving forces of development appear 'out of thin air'. Sachs mentions India's telecommunications boom as such an event. On a small scale, where I believe Peace Corps and most individuals can do most, projects have to be launched without promising funds and without a locked-in end goal. Too much frustration can arrive from trying to turn out 20 women knitters a year when it turns out there already enough of them for their clientele; the supposed knitters might have better luck selling millet cakes on a wider turf than where they had been selling them before. Growth can easily be halted by a lack of market: Lido is a closed economy, the same people come every week with the same amount of money. People turn cash into livestock or other goods almost immediately, making investment growth only as dependable as your goat's diet. When you want to sell outside of Francophone West Africa your exchange is only as good or bad as the Euro's, lowering incentives for business expansion. I am no economist, but I can sometimes tell that the best idea may just be to pack up a bunch of goat, sheep and cow skins and jump on the truck to a big nearby market, hoping someone who can turn them into something nice and shiny will show up and pay you good cash for your stinky fare.
All the best, and happy end of August,
Thomas
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Changing of the Guard
In a few days, just about half of Peace Corps Niger will be newly-arrived trainees...My stage will soon be some of the longest-serving volunteers in the country as our sister stage hits the exits. We will be the elders, the ones providing the same kind of advice and helping hands that we received up until just recently from our sister stage. The other day, we were sitting there, gathered around our regional leader, asking endless questions about our soon to be villages with an unbound energy and togetherness that cannot be mustered without intense surroundings. Just last week it was our stage, together with some of our sister stage on the cusp of their peace corps service, handing the torch to the next year's generation. The excitement again was infectious, the chemistry surpassing anything that summer camp counselors or dorm hall RAs could hope to generate (even though training often resembles these locales) - and making us 'old folks' a bit nostalgic. So here we are, with my cluster jumping from five to nine volunteers (six of them being new people with four new posts) and my region taking in 11 volunteers out of a total of 22 with the country totals roughly totalling the same percentage.
Funny how life repeats the same cycles, you could have said the same thing about high school or college: freshman become seniors, friends move away, and responsibility is thrust upon individuals who feel unprepared to take it on. I felt this way last week as I visited two new posts, onstensibly to represent the face of Peace Corps to the community about to receive (for the first time EVER) a young American into their village for two years. I had to explain our work to village dignataries, learn about the work of government agencies within the district, fend off those wishing to leach all kinds of goodies off the rich Westerner, all with a mosquito net, a bedsheet, a bar of soap, a half-full water nalgene and a change of clothes. Here I was, living off the generosity of villagers I had never met, in the middle of a hunger season of unprecendented magnitude. Here in the south of the country, further south than my post, in a town next to a valley with stands of sugar cane, rice patties and banana trees, was a municipal staff dealing with national directives to give three sacks of rice (enough for 21 people) to villages of hundreds people spread far off the main dirt road on sand paths torn up by rain. The municipal staff is full of interim political officers from Niamey, here until this fall's elections, knowing and caring little for their temporary surroundings: how is this supposed to work? While this may create difficulties in knowing what kind of support to expect from Niger's infrastructure, it also presents an opportunity to work directly with a community, often more efficient in getting projects of the ground.
A recent project of such variety was the Doutchi girl's 'tourney' completed last week. The five volunteers of the Dogondoutchi cluster organized and carried girl's conferences in each of our villages' middle schools. This involved meeting in three different towns throughout the country stretching back to March (with planning prior to that), ensuring that farm girls in the bush have their parents' permission and are reminded of the date and time of the event, getting community members to speak with (NOT to) the girls about topics almost never breached in this culture (self-esteem, women's health, nutrition, study skills, career planning), organizing our own activities and presentations in a culturally-sensitive and exciting format, and here's the kicker: taking care of the six of ourselves over the course of ten days in houses and nerves not meant for more than a couple people. The planning was almost as engergy-intensive as the tourney itself, but it paid off in the end as almost every village had a near 100% turnout in the middle of rainy season (only one village had a reduced turnout by rain - but we managed a small conference in the downpour). All in all, I was impressed by the whole thing: the girls who walked in and out from bush villages the same day, the role models from each village who showed girls what kind of opportunities they have if they push through these crucial formative years, the cooks for making such quantities of food on such short notice, and everybody for rolling with the punches - modifying plans on the fly and dealing with unforgiving circumstances. This has been my first major collaborative project, I hope more are down the pipe, especially if they are so effective as this one.
Until next time,
Thomas
Funny how life repeats the same cycles, you could have said the same thing about high school or college: freshman become seniors, friends move away, and responsibility is thrust upon individuals who feel unprepared to take it on. I felt this way last week as I visited two new posts, onstensibly to represent the face of Peace Corps to the community about to receive (for the first time EVER) a young American into their village for two years. I had to explain our work to village dignataries, learn about the work of government agencies within the district, fend off those wishing to leach all kinds of goodies off the rich Westerner, all with a mosquito net, a bedsheet, a bar of soap, a half-full water nalgene and a change of clothes. Here I was, living off the generosity of villagers I had never met, in the middle of a hunger season of unprecendented magnitude. Here in the south of the country, further south than my post, in a town next to a valley with stands of sugar cane, rice patties and banana trees, was a municipal staff dealing with national directives to give three sacks of rice (enough for 21 people) to villages of hundreds people spread far off the main dirt road on sand paths torn up by rain. The municipal staff is full of interim political officers from Niamey, here until this fall's elections, knowing and caring little for their temporary surroundings: how is this supposed to work? While this may create difficulties in knowing what kind of support to expect from Niger's infrastructure, it also presents an opportunity to work directly with a community, often more efficient in getting projects of the ground.
A recent project of such variety was the Doutchi girl's 'tourney' completed last week. The five volunteers of the Dogondoutchi cluster organized and carried girl's conferences in each of our villages' middle schools. This involved meeting in three different towns throughout the country stretching back to March (with planning prior to that), ensuring that farm girls in the bush have their parents' permission and are reminded of the date and time of the event, getting community members to speak with (NOT to) the girls about topics almost never breached in this culture (self-esteem, women's health, nutrition, study skills, career planning), organizing our own activities and presentations in a culturally-sensitive and exciting format, and here's the kicker: taking care of the six of ourselves over the course of ten days in houses and nerves not meant for more than a couple people. The planning was almost as engergy-intensive as the tourney itself, but it paid off in the end as almost every village had a near 100% turnout in the middle of rainy season (only one village had a reduced turnout by rain - but we managed a small conference in the downpour). All in all, I was impressed by the whole thing: the girls who walked in and out from bush villages the same day, the role models from each village who showed girls what kind of opportunities they have if they push through these crucial formative years, the cooks for making such quantities of food on such short notice, and everybody for rolling with the punches - modifying plans on the fly and dealing with unforgiving circumstances. This has been my first major collaborative project, I hope more are down the pipe, especially if they are so effective as this one.
Until next time,
Thomas
Sunday, June 13, 2010
The rains return
Hello all,
It was before leaving for vacation that I wrote last, finishing up a two-week agricultural training and heading into my third consecutive bout with amoebas and subsequent 10-day medicine regimens. Besides a few moments the first week of vacation (including a moment in the courtyard of Versailles, doubled over from cramps with a long line at the toilets), the trip was a great way to chance to change pace and see some friends, sites and graduate schools. I came back refreshed, clean (acne and heat rash gone) and healthy. Of course it didn’t take more than a week for things to go back to Nigerien normal. Thankfully though, my many weeks of stomach issues have fallen back into the shadows, ever-present but manageable.
I returned to village to the first two nights of real rain of the season. Most of my village had already planted a few weeks prior, one of the first rains of the season. Since the rains have kept coming, while certain villages nearby have received very little and have yet to plant their fields. Such is the nature of rainy season: heavy winds and dust alternates with overwhelming heat and humidity, in the same day. With each rain the town clears out for the fields, leaving the impression of a ghost town. This, as one might imagine, makes projects a little bit difficult to carry out. Even my English club, comprised of last-year secondary students preparing to take the test to get into high school or professional schools, has been non-existent the last couple weeks. Though they are the only students still attending classes (the school-year ended yesterday but other kids left a few weeks earlier) family or host-family (most students are from neighboring villages) fields are the priority. While this has been frustrating, I felt somewhat vindicated for all the meetings I’ve held where people don’t show up for an hour or at all, by a recent event at the primary school. The director, who had organized an end-of-the-year party for all primary and secondary teachers, was deserted by most of his teachers the day before the party: they had all returned to their city homes for vacation without even saying goodbye.
With vacation I hope to spend more time getting to know my fellow villagers, working up my Hausa skills, and farming. I went out a couple times recently, once to burn shrub grasses in my friend’s field, where we hope to split his plot of bean plants this summer. The other time was to plant my village chief’s plot: it was like a family reunion (except that all the extended family sees each other every day) in that all sorts of relatives came together to plant the chief‘s fields in his absence, digging holes and sowing beans and millets in lines five abreast, chatting all the way. I sowed beans, barefoot (easier to swipe to dirt back into the hole), getting into a pretty quick cadence after some practice. It seem odd, but it felt somewhat like a landmark in my service, farming in this pastoral society where a job means either a teacher, doctor, or vendor, is liking driving a car in America. My villagers keep telling me that farming is too hard for me, that it’s back-breaking and too rough for my “baby-like hands” - perhaps true - but I want to try and prove them wrong, even if only on a part-time basis. I’m actually more worried about the sun than the physicality of the work, more heat rash than sunburn, though sunscreen is sweated off rapidly my straw hat is quite effective.
I am off to the eastern part of Niger as almost all of the Niger’s volunteers gather for an project ideas-sharing conference this coming week. I wish you all a great start to summer.
-Thomas
It was before leaving for vacation that I wrote last, finishing up a two-week agricultural training and heading into my third consecutive bout with amoebas and subsequent 10-day medicine regimens. Besides a few moments the first week of vacation (including a moment in the courtyard of Versailles, doubled over from cramps with a long line at the toilets), the trip was a great way to chance to change pace and see some friends, sites and graduate schools. I came back refreshed, clean (acne and heat rash gone) and healthy. Of course it didn’t take more than a week for things to go back to Nigerien normal. Thankfully though, my many weeks of stomach issues have fallen back into the shadows, ever-present but manageable.
I returned to village to the first two nights of real rain of the season. Most of my village had already planted a few weeks prior, one of the first rains of the season. Since the rains have kept coming, while certain villages nearby have received very little and have yet to plant their fields. Such is the nature of rainy season: heavy winds and dust alternates with overwhelming heat and humidity, in the same day. With each rain the town clears out for the fields, leaving the impression of a ghost town. This, as one might imagine, makes projects a little bit difficult to carry out. Even my English club, comprised of last-year secondary students preparing to take the test to get into high school or professional schools, has been non-existent the last couple weeks. Though they are the only students still attending classes (the school-year ended yesterday but other kids left a few weeks earlier) family or host-family (most students are from neighboring villages) fields are the priority. While this has been frustrating, I felt somewhat vindicated for all the meetings I’ve held where people don’t show up for an hour or at all, by a recent event at the primary school. The director, who had organized an end-of-the-year party for all primary and secondary teachers, was deserted by most of his teachers the day before the party: they had all returned to their city homes for vacation without even saying goodbye.
With vacation I hope to spend more time getting to know my fellow villagers, working up my Hausa skills, and farming. I went out a couple times recently, once to burn shrub grasses in my friend’s field, where we hope to split his plot of bean plants this summer. The other time was to plant my village chief’s plot: it was like a family reunion (except that all the extended family sees each other every day) in that all sorts of relatives came together to plant the chief‘s fields in his absence, digging holes and sowing beans and millets in lines five abreast, chatting all the way. I sowed beans, barefoot (easier to swipe to dirt back into the hole), getting into a pretty quick cadence after some practice. It seem odd, but it felt somewhat like a landmark in my service, farming in this pastoral society where a job means either a teacher, doctor, or vendor, is liking driving a car in America. My villagers keep telling me that farming is too hard for me, that it’s back-breaking and too rough for my “baby-like hands” - perhaps true - but I want to try and prove them wrong, even if only on a part-time basis. I’m actually more worried about the sun than the physicality of the work, more heat rash than sunburn, though sunscreen is sweated off rapidly my straw hat is quite effective.
I am off to the eastern part of Niger as almost all of the Niger’s volunteers gather for an project ideas-sharing conference this coming week. I wish you all a great start to summer.
-Thomas
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Pix of Dutsin Leila
A fulani boy on Dutsin Leila with the town in the distance
Seydou and Isiya near the top of the mesa
The eastern approach, it's steeper than it looks
Not so bad after all...or wait, maybe it is?
Hello everybody,
I will be heading off to Europe early tomorrow morning so I thought I’d try to squeeze in a couple thoughts before heading out the door.
Now is the time when many Niger volunteers get out of town to beat the heat.. Hot season is upon us and temperatures have regularly been reaching 110 or higher. We talk about how rough life is in Niger, but occasionally it feels so, well, normal, that I feel obliged to disagree. Part of it has to do with living in the Dogondoutchi department, which as I have mentioned in previous posts, is highly developed by Nigerien standards.
I’ve just read Nicholas Kristof’s book, called Half the Sky, quite popular among our PCVs these days, in which he recounts stories of women’s development across the globe. As I read the gruesome, aggravating, yet ultimately uplifting stories of empowered women and valiant aid efforts, I started wondering why Niger seems so docile in comparison. Here’s what I came up with based on experiences in Lido:
-Medical clinics exist, women talk to men, even outside the family (not always true in other parts of Niger), not much history of tribal violence - low population density and low access to guns from neighboring countries
-Death persistent in hot season but seems confined to elderly
-Decent amount of fruits and vegetables in season
-Both sexes contribute to harvest, although women’s chores continue year-round while most men only farm only in the rainy season
-Not a lot of alcohol or prostitution, and only in the cities
-Roads passable, cars breakdown but not too frequently or gravely, kids rent bikes from school, relatively dense population so that kids don’t have to come from more than 15k to school
-Don’t hear stories of rape, infant mortality, maternal mortality (being a guy, I would probably see and hear less of these stories), some elderly go to Dosso for treatment
Upon closer examination, however, I’ve observed a number of recent events that brought me back closer to reality - Niger may be the poorest country in the world by the UN’s standards, but the poverty is often anticlimactic and softened by strong community ties. Plus, unlike Ivory Coast’s civil unrest or Ethiopia’s famine, Niger has never known times or had places of immense growth from which they have descended into poverty. The uranium boom in the 70’s and 80’s is the closest they got here, and the effects did not issue far beyond Niamey. However the signs of poverty and distress are not far if you look for them. Here are some recent examples I have experienced:
-Steps it took to find blackboard for our recent agricultural methods workshop - primary director-no, schools don’t have enough; hausa literacy program - it’s shut down here go to Bayawa (6k away); asked the president of community action committee - sure, we’ll get it from Bayawa (never did); 3e (last year of middle school) students study group - sure, but for one day; finally the teacher rented a motorcycle taxi to his town of Tolouwa (11k away) and back, carrying the blackboard on his head.
-Walking around town I was asked if I had seen the possession dance, confused I asked the person if he was referring to the witch doctor in the neighboring town of Fada. He said no, this is hot season and that means it is the time of the year for genies to bring the rain…curious what it looked like. I’ll get more chances later, the region is known for its Animism.
-A couple months ago I saw that witch doctor try to heal a kid with what I assume was polio, kind bizarre experience with her spit into his face, rubbing sand into his hair and causing his mother (who was holding him up) to cry by accusing her to be the source of his illness, this was all accompanied by a lot of screaming and an intent crowd gathered around.
-I visited a beautiful mesa called Dutsin Leila - I’ll try to attach pix - that, the story goes, will blow up if the neighboring village if its citizens try to dig into it, apparently because the phantoms inside the hill don’t want their riches stolen. As my ever-rational friend pointed out, this story was probably invented to make up for the fact that the contents of the mound were worthless, as they would have long been extracted if there was anything valuable inside.
-I was telling this same friend that I hadn’t been able to take my early afternoon nap for weeks because it was too hot to get comfortable (absolutely sopping wet with sweat in a matter of seconds indoors and not enough shade outdoors). He thought I was purposely not sleeping to avoid meningitis. Seeing me puzzled by that explanation, he explained that people said meningitis attacks people if they fall asleep at noon. I said no, that the hot season is a time when people are hungry and weak, making them more susceptible to such a virus/bacteria.
-I saw my primary director cut from motorcycle across a swath of his hand - I’ve seen a few other such incidents left untreated. Being a sensible chap he went to the clinic in town and they dumped what must a ton of iodine on it (apparently this is a pan-regional treatment as I heard a story of Westerners in Mali having the same treatment for a motorcycle fall), turning it black and itchy, though warding off infection.
-After working towards getting a new water tower to replace the unreliable existing one, it broke again. It’s been off for 10 days now. This means that 4,000 or more citizens and as more livestock are using three open wells, as opposed to these three wells and nine taps spread throughout town.
-Women who participated in the agricultural workshop rave about the chance to learn such techniques, they said they had never participated in any training of any kind up till now.
-A man who was able to get into the men’s section of the workshop before it filled up signed up his wife in the thoughts that she would get millet and fertilizer that he would use for his own fields. Luckily we had already established that the women were going to get vegetable seeds instead - he threatened to pull her and the fee paid out of the workshop. She and a bunch of others didn’t show up, but enough did to make it a fruitful experience.
-Cold season was the time for weddings, people coming in rich from the fall’s harvest. Hot season is the time for death. For the past few weeks, in my village alone, about every other day I hear about another passing, occasionally two in the same day. One such death was an excruciating story to listen to. I heard it the same day that I had visited the health clinic (which has neither a morgue nor a maternity ward, although it’s asked for both) and happened upon a women lying in fetal position, her emaciated body evidently not able to support her weight - I didn’t even bother to ask what she had. The story was of a woman from Goubawa (6k away) who had what sounds like obstructed labor, common among narrow-hipped women throughout Africa, she was taken by ox-cart to Lido’s clinic and gave birth on the road in the middle of the day. After all that effort the baby died upon arrival in Lido…it’s hard to believe any baby could survive this heat.
-It took me 7.5 hours to take a bush taxi into Niamey from Lido (190 km, just under 120 miles) last market day. Within a meter of departure the side door had fallen off. It took an hour and a half of tooling around to get the engine started again. We traveled the next 19 kilometers in an hour and a half, including one stop of 20 minutes to tie on new luggage - avg. of 12 km/h or 7 mph. Never getting much above what I guessed to be 30 mph on the main highway (of course there was no speedometer, rearview mirror, speaker, a/c, but that’s always the case) as we would rim out every time we careened to the right, the whole chassis seemed ready to burst like the Blues Brothers car at the end of the chase scene. My water bottle was broken and our grumpy driver would share his water with anyone. When I asked to switch to a new car in Dosso he said that he wouldn’t transfer the money to the new driver, he’d spent it all on fixing his car - I didn’t have enough cash to pay for the whole thing, so I waited it out.
-I saw a concert the other day while here in Niamey. While it started over two hours late and was attended by a typically sparse and unenthusiastic Nigerien crowd, a drum and dance troupe from Burkina Faso and a woman Nigerien rapper highlighted an eventful, though not fully-appreciated night. To be expected when it is sponsored by the likes of the US Embassy and some big international projects. What I didn’t expect to see, however, was a young kid mimic cutting himself with the sharp side of a knife, while squealing incessantly in the most inhuman voice. He was accompanied by an adult who would demonstrate the blade’s sharpness by cutting a stick, then handing the kid the knife. The background noise/music for this was a group of old men croaking out a bunch of typical Nigerien folksongs.
So there you have it, Niger is poor, but it its own unique way…not always so bad, but sometimes downright aggravating (just like the heat rash covering my upper body). I’ve gone on far long enough. So cheerio, and here’s hoping I don’t experience too much reverse cultural shock in Europe
-Thomas
I will be heading off to Europe early tomorrow morning so I thought I’d try to squeeze in a couple thoughts before heading out the door.
Now is the time when many Niger volunteers get out of town to beat the heat.. Hot season is upon us and temperatures have regularly been reaching 110 or higher. We talk about how rough life is in Niger, but occasionally it feels so, well, normal, that I feel obliged to disagree. Part of it has to do with living in the Dogondoutchi department, which as I have mentioned in previous posts, is highly developed by Nigerien standards.
I’ve just read Nicholas Kristof’s book, called Half the Sky, quite popular among our PCVs these days, in which he recounts stories of women’s development across the globe. As I read the gruesome, aggravating, yet ultimately uplifting stories of empowered women and valiant aid efforts, I started wondering why Niger seems so docile in comparison. Here’s what I came up with based on experiences in Lido:
-Medical clinics exist, women talk to men, even outside the family (not always true in other parts of Niger), not much history of tribal violence - low population density and low access to guns from neighboring countries
-Death persistent in hot season but seems confined to elderly
-Decent amount of fruits and vegetables in season
-Both sexes contribute to harvest, although women’s chores continue year-round while most men only farm only in the rainy season
-Not a lot of alcohol or prostitution, and only in the cities
-Roads passable, cars breakdown but not too frequently or gravely, kids rent bikes from school, relatively dense population so that kids don’t have to come from more than 15k to school
-Don’t hear stories of rape, infant mortality, maternal mortality (being a guy, I would probably see and hear less of these stories), some elderly go to Dosso for treatment
Upon closer examination, however, I’ve observed a number of recent events that brought me back closer to reality - Niger may be the poorest country in the world by the UN’s standards, but the poverty is often anticlimactic and softened by strong community ties. Plus, unlike Ivory Coast’s civil unrest or Ethiopia’s famine, Niger has never known times or had places of immense growth from which they have descended into poverty. The uranium boom in the 70’s and 80’s is the closest they got here, and the effects did not issue far beyond Niamey. However the signs of poverty and distress are not far if you look for them. Here are some recent examples I have experienced:
-Steps it took to find blackboard for our recent agricultural methods workshop - primary director-no, schools don’t have enough; hausa literacy program - it’s shut down here go to Bayawa (6k away); asked the president of community action committee - sure, we’ll get it from Bayawa (never did); 3e (last year of middle school) students study group - sure, but for one day; finally the teacher rented a motorcycle taxi to his town of Tolouwa (11k away) and back, carrying the blackboard on his head.
-Walking around town I was asked if I had seen the possession dance, confused I asked the person if he was referring to the witch doctor in the neighboring town of Fada. He said no, this is hot season and that means it is the time of the year for genies to bring the rain…curious what it looked like. I’ll get more chances later, the region is known for its Animism.
-A couple months ago I saw that witch doctor try to heal a kid with what I assume was polio, kind bizarre experience with her spit into his face, rubbing sand into his hair and causing his mother (who was holding him up) to cry by accusing her to be the source of his illness, this was all accompanied by a lot of screaming and an intent crowd gathered around.
-I visited a beautiful mesa called Dutsin Leila - I’ll try to attach pix - that, the story goes, will blow up if the neighboring village if its citizens try to dig into it, apparently because the phantoms inside the hill don’t want their riches stolen. As my ever-rational friend pointed out, this story was probably invented to make up for the fact that the contents of the mound were worthless, as they would have long been extracted if there was anything valuable inside.
-I was telling this same friend that I hadn’t been able to take my early afternoon nap for weeks because it was too hot to get comfortable (absolutely sopping wet with sweat in a matter of seconds indoors and not enough shade outdoors). He thought I was purposely not sleeping to avoid meningitis. Seeing me puzzled by that explanation, he explained that people said meningitis attacks people if they fall asleep at noon. I said no, that the hot season is a time when people are hungry and weak, making them more susceptible to such a virus/bacteria.
-I saw my primary director cut from motorcycle across a swath of his hand - I’ve seen a few other such incidents left untreated. Being a sensible chap he went to the clinic in town and they dumped what must a ton of iodine on it (apparently this is a pan-regional treatment as I heard a story of Westerners in Mali having the same treatment for a motorcycle fall), turning it black and itchy, though warding off infection.
-After working towards getting a new water tower to replace the unreliable existing one, it broke again. It’s been off for 10 days now. This means that 4,000 or more citizens and as more livestock are using three open wells, as opposed to these three wells and nine taps spread throughout town.
-Women who participated in the agricultural workshop rave about the chance to learn such techniques, they said they had never participated in any training of any kind up till now.
-A man who was able to get into the men’s section of the workshop before it filled up signed up his wife in the thoughts that she would get millet and fertilizer that he would use for his own fields. Luckily we had already established that the women were going to get vegetable seeds instead - he threatened to pull her and the fee paid out of the workshop. She and a bunch of others didn’t show up, but enough did to make it a fruitful experience.
-Cold season was the time for weddings, people coming in rich from the fall’s harvest. Hot season is the time for death. For the past few weeks, in my village alone, about every other day I hear about another passing, occasionally two in the same day. One such death was an excruciating story to listen to. I heard it the same day that I had visited the health clinic (which has neither a morgue nor a maternity ward, although it’s asked for both) and happened upon a women lying in fetal position, her emaciated body evidently not able to support her weight - I didn’t even bother to ask what she had. The story was of a woman from Goubawa (6k away) who had what sounds like obstructed labor, common among narrow-hipped women throughout Africa, she was taken by ox-cart to Lido’s clinic and gave birth on the road in the middle of the day. After all that effort the baby died upon arrival in Lido…it’s hard to believe any baby could survive this heat.
-It took me 7.5 hours to take a bush taxi into Niamey from Lido (190 km, just under 120 miles) last market day. Within a meter of departure the side door had fallen off. It took an hour and a half of tooling around to get the engine started again. We traveled the next 19 kilometers in an hour and a half, including one stop of 20 minutes to tie on new luggage - avg. of 12 km/h or 7 mph. Never getting much above what I guessed to be 30 mph on the main highway (of course there was no speedometer, rearview mirror, speaker, a/c, but that’s always the case) as we would rim out every time we careened to the right, the whole chassis seemed ready to burst like the Blues Brothers car at the end of the chase scene. My water bottle was broken and our grumpy driver would share his water with anyone. When I asked to switch to a new car in Dosso he said that he wouldn’t transfer the money to the new driver, he’d spent it all on fixing his car - I didn’t have enough cash to pay for the whole thing, so I waited it out.
-I saw a concert the other day while here in Niamey. While it started over two hours late and was attended by a typically sparse and unenthusiastic Nigerien crowd, a drum and dance troupe from Burkina Faso and a woman Nigerien rapper highlighted an eventful, though not fully-appreciated night. To be expected when it is sponsored by the likes of the US Embassy and some big international projects. What I didn’t expect to see, however, was a young kid mimic cutting himself with the sharp side of a knife, while squealing incessantly in the most inhuman voice. He was accompanied by an adult who would demonstrate the blade’s sharpness by cutting a stick, then handing the kid the knife. The background noise/music for this was a group of old men croaking out a bunch of typical Nigerien folksongs.
So there you have it, Niger is poor, but it its own unique way…not always so bad, but sometimes downright aggravating (just like the heat rash covering my upper body). I’ve gone on far long enough. So cheerio, and here’s hoping I don’t experience too much reverse cultural shock in Europe
-Thomas
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Working it
Hey everybody,
I know it's been some time since I wrote a meaningful and somewhat lengthy blog post, and I can't promise anything here. Suffice it to say that Niger is not always the languishing, laggardly country were nothing gets accomplished in less than thrice the time it takes in the developed world. After a few weeks in my new village that you already heard about (please pardon those overly descriptive explanations of GI issues), I headed of to In-service training. I returned to village after a few weeks to find a newly elected chief - the previous one had died in the fall. Within seconds of first seeing him I found myself wrapped in a giant bear hug. For a country where crying or displaying affection are virtually never displayed, even in private, this signaled that something was different. Sure enough, within days the chief was organizing meetings with civil servants of the village (teachers, doctor's office director) and chiefs of surrounding villages, both unprecedented in Lido. He has been a veritable quote machine (it helps that he knows French and Zarma as my Hausa is coming along ever so slowly), telling me about the importance of documenting activity in a nealy paperless society (though the bureaucracy can't get enough of it) and of incorporating women and elderly into development work. Though he still maintains his post as a primary school director not far from Lido, while he is in town he has motivated me to plunge into the work of a PC volunteer.
In the past weeks, my counterpart (a village resident that PCVs must pick to help them carry out projects) and I have gathered artisans from around the village to organize an apprenticeship program to begin in the fall. On their behalf I traveled to Dogondoutchi, the capital of Lido's department (sub-region), over a few hours both ways to establish a budget with the Director of a vocational school there who will teach some of the artisans teaching methods. I was also able to observe a fellow volunteer's English club. Next week 14 artisans are set to go through the training session, enabling those who have attended minimal school to transfer their skills to a younger generation. I was also able to find some funding on a recent trip Niamey to minimize the cost of their attendance. While improving the content and solidifying the attendance rate (smaller yet more motivated) of Lido's English Club, a neighboring volunteer and I were able to conduct a successful letter exchange with her English Club. The third project ongoing is a sanition committee, or four of them actually, one for each neighborhood (or quartier). A week ago we had our first village clean-up day, people swept up millet chaff, manure and other waste onto carts and carted them out to fields to use as fertilizer. In one part of town a brigade of girls lined the street from wall to wall, sweeping the street in a line, bent over and hips locked in sway as they chanted in unison with the drums of the town criers. It was quite a sight. Much work was completed that morning and much is left done. But it has been a good start to real PCV life.
See you next time,
Thomas
I know it's been some time since I wrote a meaningful and somewhat lengthy blog post, and I can't promise anything here. Suffice it to say that Niger is not always the languishing, laggardly country were nothing gets accomplished in less than thrice the time it takes in the developed world. After a few weeks in my new village that you already heard about (please pardon those overly descriptive explanations of GI issues), I headed of to In-service training. I returned to village after a few weeks to find a newly elected chief - the previous one had died in the fall. Within seconds of first seeing him I found myself wrapped in a giant bear hug. For a country where crying or displaying affection are virtually never displayed, even in private, this signaled that something was different. Sure enough, within days the chief was organizing meetings with civil servants of the village (teachers, doctor's office director) and chiefs of surrounding villages, both unprecedented in Lido. He has been a veritable quote machine (it helps that he knows French and Zarma as my Hausa is coming along ever so slowly), telling me about the importance of documenting activity in a nealy paperless society (though the bureaucracy can't get enough of it) and of incorporating women and elderly into development work. Though he still maintains his post as a primary school director not far from Lido, while he is in town he has motivated me to plunge into the work of a PC volunteer.
In the past weeks, my counterpart (a village resident that PCVs must pick to help them carry out projects) and I have gathered artisans from around the village to organize an apprenticeship program to begin in the fall. On their behalf I traveled to Dogondoutchi, the capital of Lido's department (sub-region), over a few hours both ways to establish a budget with the Director of a vocational school there who will teach some of the artisans teaching methods. I was also able to observe a fellow volunteer's English club. Next week 14 artisans are set to go through the training session, enabling those who have attended minimal school to transfer their skills to a younger generation. I was also able to find some funding on a recent trip Niamey to minimize the cost of their attendance. While improving the content and solidifying the attendance rate (smaller yet more motivated) of Lido's English Club, a neighboring volunteer and I were able to conduct a successful letter exchange with her English Club. The third project ongoing is a sanition committee, or four of them actually, one for each neighborhood (or quartier). A week ago we had our first village clean-up day, people swept up millet chaff, manure and other waste onto carts and carted them out to fields to use as fertilizer. In one part of town a brigade of girls lined the street from wall to wall, sweeping the street in a line, bent over and hips locked in sway as they chanted in unison with the drums of the town criers. It was quite a sight. Much work was completed that morning and much is left done. But it has been a good start to real PCV life.
See you next time,
Thomas
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
In-service Training
Hello all,
I am just about ready to head back into village after a mostly healthy and fun In-service Training. It was a great time to grow closer together as a stage and to have a good time playing volleyball, mafia and other kinds of games...All that stuff that was such fun for us may not be that interesting for you trying to learn about Niger. It was like a little America for three weeks. We're all full of new ideas for projects, here's hoping something gets done.
-Thomas
I am just about ready to head back into village after a mostly healthy and fun In-service Training. It was a great time to grow closer together as a stage and to have a good time playing volleyball, mafia and other kinds of games...All that stuff that was such fun for us may not be that interesting for you trying to learn about Niger. It was like a little America for three weeks. We're all full of new ideas for projects, here's hoping something gets done.
-Thomas
Monday, January 18, 2010
Adjusting
Hi everybody,
Happy 2010 to you all from Lido, Niger. Yesterday marks my one month anniversary in my new village of Peace Corps service. For a quick introduction, Lido is in the Dosso region, department of Dogondoutchi, within 20 km of the Nigerian border. It is marginally smaller than Larba Birno, at an estimated 4000 inhabitants, and has only one middle school and primary school (while Larba also had a Franco-Arabic primary). It has yet to receive electricity although some neighboring villages have it and the power lines pass by on the main road less than 1km out of town. Villagers say it is due to arrive this year (I’m writing off battery from a recent visit to Dosso). On the other hand, Lido is more connected than Larba, being situated at a crossroads and near to Nigeria. This location offers the perks of a relatively large market, oranges from Nigeria, sugarcane from a town nearby, occasional carbonated beverages from Nigeria with ice off of bush taxis from Dosso about 60km away. Despite not having electricity, Lido folks have a much more vibrant night scene: someone has been carting a generator and TV to various points around town to show videos, followed by a train of food vendors (peanut ‘brittle’, sugarcane, oranges, ‘medicines', even fried chicken - expensive though) and groups of card players with their innumerable gas lanterns. Over break I noticed some university students and teachers back in town - something a bit higher class than I expected from Larba’s progeny. The educational imparity is corroborated by the higher success rate at the middle-school levels. This also has proven a boon to my existence in this Hausa-speaking region. The number of young people and adults who can speak a ‘decent’ amount of French is noticeably higher than Larba, though pitifully low in comparison to the Francophone Africa average. Also, merchants and other notable village personalities tend to travel and thus speak some Zarma - Niger’s Zarma-speaking region begins about 30km to the west of Lido.
The holidays were as well spent here as I could have expected. Christmas fell a week exactly after my installation in Lido. We were allowed to gather with much of the rest of Dosso region in Dosso for Christmas Eve and the day itself. The days were relaxing: Christmas movies; a delicious potluck with rabbit stew, squash pie, mashed potatoes and stuffing; a night out on the town; board games… While we all missed our homes in America, especially those of us who were spending our first Christmas in Niger, we did a good job of innovating fun from not much material - including snowflake decorations from scrap paper. For New Year’s Eve I met with two of my PCV neighbors on what happened to be one of their birthdays. We took a look around the Guéchémé market, one of my favorites - in one afternoon we saw a snake charmer with a jet-black cobra and a man with three scorpions on his face (both were selling medicines) while seeing people carve calabash bowls and others sell hand-made meringue-like candies. We made a mad punch with both 7up and Sprite (due to its proximity to Nigeria, Pepsi products are available) and fruit juice also sent from that magical land of milk and honey to the south.
Since the new year I have been busy starting an English club for the upper levels of the CEG and picking a counterpart for when I can begin starting real projects after Inter-Service Training - due to start in less than a week. But above all I have been trying to get healthy/not get sick again and been failing miserably. Since the week before my departure for Lido until now I have been tested nearly ten times and received prescription meds more than a half-dozen times. While sometimes I have felt misdiagnosed, other times I felt overmedication had rendered them ineffective. While almost everything has been tied up to the gastrointestinal system, there have been other ailments as well. My most recent misadventure had me expelling (excuse the adjectives) bilious, acid-green liquid out of both ends simultaneously, followed by a mucus the color of river water: I was ‘Mr. D’-ing everything, even when I drank only water, out of my system. Although I was able to make it to Dosso for the second time in a few days after my system accepted oral rehydration salts, for a moment I didn’t believe I could make it out.
While so much adventure is sure exciting, I am much more interested in the next three weeks where I plan on ‘chillin with my peeps’ from stage and picking up as much Hausa as I can manage. Needless to say, my Hausa learning has left much to be desired these past couple weeks.
Talk to you soon,
Thomas
Happy 2010 to you all from Lido, Niger. Yesterday marks my one month anniversary in my new village of Peace Corps service. For a quick introduction, Lido is in the Dosso region, department of Dogondoutchi, within 20 km of the Nigerian border. It is marginally smaller than Larba Birno, at an estimated 4000 inhabitants, and has only one middle school and primary school (while Larba also had a Franco-Arabic primary). It has yet to receive electricity although some neighboring villages have it and the power lines pass by on the main road less than 1km out of town. Villagers say it is due to arrive this year (I’m writing off battery from a recent visit to Dosso). On the other hand, Lido is more connected than Larba, being situated at a crossroads and near to Nigeria. This location offers the perks of a relatively large market, oranges from Nigeria, sugarcane from a town nearby, occasional carbonated beverages from Nigeria with ice off of bush taxis from Dosso about 60km away. Despite not having electricity, Lido folks have a much more vibrant night scene: someone has been carting a generator and TV to various points around town to show videos, followed by a train of food vendors (peanut ‘brittle’, sugarcane, oranges, ‘medicines', even fried chicken - expensive though) and groups of card players with their innumerable gas lanterns. Over break I noticed some university students and teachers back in town - something a bit higher class than I expected from Larba’s progeny. The educational imparity is corroborated by the higher success rate at the middle-school levels. This also has proven a boon to my existence in this Hausa-speaking region. The number of young people and adults who can speak a ‘decent’ amount of French is noticeably higher than Larba, though pitifully low in comparison to the Francophone Africa average. Also, merchants and other notable village personalities tend to travel and thus speak some Zarma - Niger’s Zarma-speaking region begins about 30km to the west of Lido.
The holidays were as well spent here as I could have expected. Christmas fell a week exactly after my installation in Lido. We were allowed to gather with much of the rest of Dosso region in Dosso for Christmas Eve and the day itself. The days were relaxing: Christmas movies; a delicious potluck with rabbit stew, squash pie, mashed potatoes and stuffing; a night out on the town; board games… While we all missed our homes in America, especially those of us who were spending our first Christmas in Niger, we did a good job of innovating fun from not much material - including snowflake decorations from scrap paper. For New Year’s Eve I met with two of my PCV neighbors on what happened to be one of their birthdays. We took a look around the Guéchémé market, one of my favorites - in one afternoon we saw a snake charmer with a jet-black cobra and a man with three scorpions on his face (both were selling medicines) while seeing people carve calabash bowls and others sell hand-made meringue-like candies. We made a mad punch with both 7up and Sprite (due to its proximity to Nigeria, Pepsi products are available) and fruit juice also sent from that magical land of milk and honey to the south.
Since the new year I have been busy starting an English club for the upper levels of the CEG and picking a counterpart for when I can begin starting real projects after Inter-Service Training - due to start in less than a week. But above all I have been trying to get healthy/not get sick again and been failing miserably. Since the week before my departure for Lido until now I have been tested nearly ten times and received prescription meds more than a half-dozen times. While sometimes I have felt misdiagnosed, other times I felt overmedication had rendered them ineffective. While almost everything has been tied up to the gastrointestinal system, there have been other ailments as well. My most recent misadventure had me expelling (excuse the adjectives) bilious, acid-green liquid out of both ends simultaneously, followed by a mucus the color of river water: I was ‘Mr. D’-ing everything, even when I drank only water, out of my system. Although I was able to make it to Dosso for the second time in a few days after my system accepted oral rehydration salts, for a moment I didn’t believe I could make it out.
While so much adventure is sure exciting, I am much more interested in the next three weeks where I plan on ‘chillin with my peeps’ from stage and picking up as much Hausa as I can manage. Needless to say, my Hausa learning has left much to be desired these past couple weeks.
Talk to you soon,
Thomas
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