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