Reflecting back

Hi,

It has again been some time since I last posted. I have been living in Bloomington, Indiana the past month as I begin the new adventure of grad school. As I have been re-inserting myself into the academic world, I sometimes feel Niger slip further and further away. While it can be sad, a few things have brought new reflections: reading a book documenting the five years of Country Director James Bullington in Niger (http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Service-Peace-Corps-Niger/dp/1419679376), calling back to Niger, or finding some Zarma and Hausa newscasts online. The passing of our Regional Driver in Dosso, Seyni, hit all his volunteers very hard despite our physical distance from Niger.

Back to the book. I would highly recommend the book as a way to get to know Niger and Peace Corps life there, though it may difficult to place all the events in the book without a map by your side. For me, it brought to light how much things had changed organizationally since this director left in 2005. Whether it was working directly with volunteers to think up new projects, travel to parts of Niger and West Africa always off limits for us in 2009-11, or encouragement to think outside the box, it made me wish more of my Peace Corps service. On the other hand, despite the lack of depth that I may perceive in my own experiences in Niger, I can still appreciate the experience of two different villages and the friendships and projects I pursued.

After watching the documentary, "Niger '66" (http://www.niger66.com/) I appreciated how much Peace Corps and Niger have changed - training practices, population growth, technology, etc. While much has changed, their experiences had motifs remarkably similar to my own: weather, friendliness, cultural barriers. While these ideas seemed unremarkable after a year of life in Niger they now seem significant challenges. Even as I write this I don't feel as if I can think quite as clearly as I could when in Niger. Vegetable are too easy to find and too watery to have real taste, nothing ever seems all that dirty or genuine, the nicest people don't seem as friendly as I once thought, and so on. That isn't to say that I can't enjoy myself, it just seems harder to make life as vibrant of an experience as it should be...so that's why I've included a few photos I took last November that show some of the pure joy I experienced among kids in my village. They may seem cliche, but it was kids like this that could make the unbearable bearable.
Enjoy.

On the Radio

Hi again, It's been more than a couple weeks, I think, since my last post. I have accepted Indiana's offer of admission and had a glorious trip to the Grand Canyon just last week. I thought I would write up a poem, like I promised, though many of them are only indirectly related to my experience in Niger. The following one, entitled "On the Radio", written October 11th, 2009 in my first village of Larba Birno, came to me while passing the time like many Volunteers do - listening to the radio. I'll get some photos up here soon, though blogger's headaches may push me elsewhere someday. -Thomas

On the Radio

Turn on the radio under African skies,
First our northern neighbors - omnipresent Arabic,
Then the night falls, the world falls to fingertips,
The assorted unintelligible voices -
That one must be from rough, barren Central Asia,
That one misty African jungle,
But horizons expand to Europe and afar,

The bustling, smoggy, dusty streets
of Cairo, Islamabad, Shangai?
Places where modernity has assimilated,
Rugs invented to cover the dust,
Cities that barely stop to wait -
Cafes of Mumbai piled high for cricket,
Bars of Abidjan bumping to football's beat.

Someone in Tripoli is reading the news,
"This is the BBC" - like a machine
A Spanish dancer, a Bollywood soundtrack,
Italians learning Mandarin, French Russian,
The Southern Baptist missionary and his gravel voice,
The staccatoed African French,
All this from my periscope I survey.

From the deepest corners of the bush,
In the sky, Mars is now pasted,
Unfurled is the verdant cape over the day,
Soon to wilt under the African sun,
But here, the stars remain - modernity's grip stumbles,
Slackening at the sun's last stroke,
Such silence come in such a loud world.

Gone in a flash

It is a month since I left Morocco. “Morocco?! Why Morocco?” you ask. That question demands a bit of a story.

December and January fused into a tumultuous and fitting dash to the end of my time in Niger. First the continuing GI-issues, then a well-improvement project that had been on my map since last February, completed the year. My small part in the project was primarily to coordinate, plan and budget. The real work was done by a small team from my departmental capital (Dogondoutchi) along with a generous set of helping hands from my fellow villagers. A day or two operation stretched to a week as pipes were thrown off their screws, rocketing down the well, only to be pulled up and reinstalled, twice. One team member was lowered down the well by rope tied once around his waist to recover items…five times! The head mechanic traveled three times on trips of ten, sixty and over a hundred miles and into Nigeria for repairs or replacement parts. After all was said and done we had a half-moon shaped cement motor casing and motor installed, a pump and 45 meters of pipe attached to a hand-driven flywheel attached to the motor via a loop made of old car tires over the motor’s drive shaft. (I’ll attach pix soon) I just learned that the pipes need to be fixed again, but this need hasn’t stopped them before. The 15-year old water tower has been out for 20 days, but I trust that somehow they will make it work again. Because if they don’t, hot season is fast approaching and 2.5 open wells (we left half of the well open for Fulani herdsmen who operate the open wells for their livestock) can’t compete with 7.5 mechanical spigots.

January began on the Niger River as my brother visited me during the week after Christmas. I did a number of things that week that I had been hoping to do so for some time – on New Year’s we saw hippos feed in the river. Another day we took a donkey ride to a neighboring town and rode back on camels…for 6km. We actually got to drive for a little bit, which was a bunch of fun in addition to relieving the pressure on the crotch region. Seeing up close the giraffes that I had seen along the road was a treat. These giraffes are the last in West Africa and we got to just waltz up to them. We saw a woman in a nearby village healing folks from Niamey and the first day of a special 7-day long marriage possession ceremony in Lido (another first). This and much more in just a week – everything went better than in my wildest expectations. The timing was purely providential…

Less than a week after Ben left I was sitting in my mud house listening to French radio news: Two French men had been kidnapped in a bar/restaurant that I and many other volunteers frequented often, only a few hundred yards from our hostel in Niamey. After a night chase led by Nigerien military and French spy planes and commando-filled rocketship helicopters from Burkina Faso led to an ambush over the Mali border, the hostages were killed. At least one was executed and the other was killed either by friendly fire, gas explosion or execution. They were 25-years old and the white people closest to the exit (according to an eyewitness I heard on that same newscast). I had trouble believing my ears until I called a friend in Niamey. I got the lowdown, though much was still not known. Eventually Peace Corps reached me in the afternoon. For a day or two I thought evacuation was possible. Monday came and went and we only had received updated travel restrictions and Niamey curfew hours extended and set in place countrywide.

By Wednesday morning I had a solid night’s sleep and went off to school. I had observed much of the local and parliamentary elections the day before – thus I knew most of the school staff would be absent. In the middle of an informal lesson with a second-year class I got a call from the PC Medical Officer saying there was a message from Washington. With my previous GI-issues (which were on the mend) I thought that I was being med-evacuated, but no. Peace Corps was leaving Niger for the first time since we began working there 49 years ago.

The first goodbyes were anti-climactic as the majority of teachers, including the ones I knew best, were away. I waited with my phone at the cell phone tower for a couple hours charging it, waiting for the details about when I would be leaving. When I found that I would be leaving the next morning I starting making my rounds. I kept myself going almost the entire night packing up stuff, giving stuff away, burning trash, saying goodbyes – the adrenaline coursed away. Amadou, the chief architect of the project to extend Scouts throughout Dogondoutchi, came down via bush taxi (upwards of five hours one way) and returned the same night, somehow. We discussed the future of Scouts in Lido and elsewhere in Doutchi. The next morning I had the toughest time of the whole affair – I gathered the kids from all around my concession (upwards of thirty) to take a picture. I rattled off all their names to the astonishment of some out-of-town relatives of the chief. I also cried more than any other moment the whole time. I also went out to see the grave of the chief’s dad, my host dad, who had died a few days earlier.

Off to the races – the car took us to Dosso, the regional capital for a few minutes to pack our things there, then to Niamey. After closing out our bank accounts and some paperwork, I had another sleepless night at the hostel packing and repacking as we gorged on delayed Christmas packages. 4 am saw us heading off to the airport. A fainting spell/seizure upon landing in Morocco did a wee bit to dim the awesome experience of meeting a Gambian fossil/mineral merchant and world traveler who knew seven African languages plus some European ones AND a Frenchman who had often traveled through the Sahara to Niger and most recently through Mauritania.

The evacuation conference was stressful and at times memorable. It was hard to imagine this being the way we would leave Niger. A delirious haze wafted about my head the entire time. Katie Lawyer, my old neighbor in the Gothèye cluster, does a good (if long) job of explaining our group’s reaction to the conference’s result: http://niger-mania.blogspot.com/2011/02/thing-about-worse-thing-ever-peace.html. Suffice it to say that the majority of us who wanted a transfer were left on the street Saturday morning after a rushed five-day evacuation. After a couple days visiting the touristy towns of Fez and Marrakech, I headed home. Recently, I’ve been applying to graduate schools for programs in European Studies, or variants of on that theme. I’ve been accepted to Indiana and Illinois and await word from North Carolina. I also had a chance to meet up with other PCV’s from my training group at a career fair in Washington, D.C. last week.

I’ve called my villagers a few times since returning. While it is great to hear their voices, and I’m troubled by the fact that the water tower has been out for 20 days now, I feel the distance growing between Niger and myself. I wish it weren’t so…but life must go on. I try to reflect, yet there’s too much upon which to reflect. It isn’t yet the cathartic experience I’d imagined. In that spirit though, I may just post some of the poems that I wrote in Niger in the upcoming weeks. For old times’ sake.

-Thomas