Lido Lately

Reflecting back

2011-06-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-03T20:29:00.000-08:00

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

Third Year in PC!

2010-12-21T09:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Changing, changing, changing

2010-11-25T23:28:00.000-08:00

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

Absolutely nothing....life in Ramadan

2010-08-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

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

Changing of the Guard

2010-08-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

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

The rains return

2010-06-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

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

Pix of Dutsin Leila

2010-04-25T02:08:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-04-25T02:05:00.000-07:00

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

Working it

2010-03-21T23:34:00.000-07:00

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

In-service Training

2010-02-16T23:40:00.000-08:00

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

Adjusting

2010-01-18T05:49:00.000-08:00

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

Article in the Dexter Leader

2009-12-10T03:08:00.000-08:00

An article of mine was published in the Dexter Leader a couple weeks ago. Here is a link to it:
http://www.heritage.com/articles/2009/11/25/dexter_leader/news/doc4b0ccdbe8ac7b169760598.txt

As you can see I have changed the title of my blog but not the site. It is nearly official that I will be heading out to Lido, Niger next week. Unfortunately, the amenities available in this village may preclude frequent postings, but I will do my best. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

-Thomas

Happy Thanksgiving/My crazy life these past two weeks

2009-11-27T07:18:00.000-08:00

Before you take another dig into those mashed potatoes and another whack at that turkey, here’s a little diversion to liven up another one of oh-so-nail-biting Lion’s Thanksgiving Day games and to take the edge of the tryptophene effect. Hold onto your seats, because if you don’t like rollercoasters you might want to let the turkey sit a little while longer.

The tenor of the Peace Corps rumor mill in any country never is one to lighten one’s heart - frequent stories of volunteers leaving for family reasons, folks getting flown around the continent for what Americans would consider routine dental care, and the always juicy geographically-doomed lovers. But as of late the tune has changed so rapidly and frequently that over a three-minute span last night I was asked by volunteers from three different regions if my cluster (sub-region) was being shipped off to a certain ironic isle off the coast of southern Africa (Ironic in the sense that it handed Niger ‘refugees’ from political instability less than 12 months ago and now a set of yet-to-be sworn-in volunteers are headed to that same country to re-open the program). I still must refer you to the travel warden page of the US Embassy in Niamey to tell you what started this whole hullabaloo.
Before we get any further in the story, let you take back to the moment it all began. It was an early Sunday afternoon, lazy as lazy can be, and I was approaching my weekly call with my parents. All of the sudden I was packing my backpack to head off to my sub-regional (cluster) capital: the security breach mentioned in the warden’s message (see my last post) had incurred the security measure that brings people to centrally-located houses to stay until the threat lessens (sorry for the vague language, but in case it happens again I shouldn’t reveal more). From what I remembered from training, this could only last a few nights as all Niger’s houses (called hostels) did not have adequate capacity for extended stays. After finding a car, playing cat-and-mouse on the phone with my parents and my PCV neighbor - also searching for a difficult-to-find midday ride down my dirt road - I ended up in said town with a change of clothes, my laptop and toiletries.
By midweek we were starting to go stir crazy. Running off of adrenaline and the rumor-mill, with and occasional dose of fact, the four of us were getting low on clean clothes, beer, food and patience. Luckily, one of our number belonged to the stage of volunteers whose close-of-service date (COS) was now being moved up to the soonest date possible. This meant for her tickets to reverse, grad apps to write, paperwork in Niamey to fill out, etc. A special car was sent out for us in the morning, by midday the COSer had said her goodbyes and taken her valuables out of her house in village, by early afternoon we were in Niamey, having gotten there twice as fast as any of us had ever remembered…I remember wondering if the tires could grip any harder onto the gravel and banging my head on a metal bar at every washout.
Fast-forward another five or six days, past an amazing Thanksgiving potluck which made many sick - myself violently so - daily doses of rumor and fact, new volunteers piling into town every day, and ever-mounting stress, and we arrive at ‘judgement day’. I guess I call it that in retrospect, as I assumed that on this eve of our potential re-departure for villages, that only those in the Tahoua/Konni region would be addressed in the Country Director’s lifting of precautionary restrictions. Unfortunately, in a stroke of Microsoft Word, the villages of mine and three other PCVs were gone in Peace Corps terms, our whole cluster shut down indefinitely, hostel included. A few other high-profile posts were also removed, the current training stage was erased, and my stagemates from one of the eastern regions began proposing a mass exodus out of this place. To make matters worse, two further security issues arose over the weekend and last night (I’m now writing on Friday) near the Mali border (look it up on BBC). With dozens of us in town, we could not help but to play off of each others pessimism about the weeks and months to come.
Now, with most of the PCV populace out of town, begins the long and drawn out search for a new village. It looks certain I will remain an volunteer, and an education volunteer as well, but it also looks likely that I will move to a new region, learn a new language, have new neighbors and a new set of working conditions. It may seem hard to take, but it is a chance at a do-over: to begin the integration process anew, drawing upon Larba and all its challenges and blessings. I hope this time to find a host family instead of falling back on the chief, to work harder to find friends my own age, to engage the movers and shakers of my town consistently and expectantly, to explore the new options on the NGO-front and work with my PCV neighbors (who won’t be COSers any time soon). Things are looking up, and even if PC Niger is living on borrowed time, I plan on making the most of every minute of it…even if those minutes may not come until January (or maybe February, considering my Inter-service training is slated for most of January) for Niger’s PCV refugees. For now I might play the tourist around Niamey a bit, hopefully find a good connection at the right time to get loads of photos up, work on the hostel and maybe even consolidate my French and English blogs into a whole new look (I might switch to Wordpress, but don’t tell Blogspot!), because “Along the Sirba” just doesn’t quite cut it anymore.

Happy Halloween (Dated Oct. 30)

2009-11-25T07:07:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody,
Happy eve of All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween. I’m back in Niamey after a couple more weeks in Larba Birno. While no earth-shattering events have taken place, I did get electricity installed in my house, which may as well count as earth shattering in my little world. I had bought the cable during my last trip to Niamey, not knowing what kind of cable or even how much of it I would need. A couple days later some guys from the village chief’s concession and down the street came over to hook it up. One had some outlets and light bulbs and fixtures, which I bought off him. They got straight to work walking across a few hut roofs, only to find out it wasn’t long enough for the house a few doors down, so they set to digging a trench across the road with a pick and spike. The one with the fixtures went about digging a hole in my house with a screwdriver, then using his teeth to peel the plastic off the wire to attach to the fixtures. I offered my scissors, nails and tape: the nails were driven into the clay/cement to keep the wire from falling down, the scissors replaced teeth and the tape tidied up parts of the cable where copper was disconnected or broken. While we had to hunt around for a few more meters of cable to finish the job, the bulk of the project took all of a half-hour with a half-dozen helpers and another dozen lookers-on. To call the whole operation a ‘jerry-rigging’ would be an understatement, it felt downright illegal - maybe it was the fact that I was hooking my line up to the chief’s across the street and paying for a chunk of his bill. On the other hand, such is the way of Niger…just reference my last blog post for a few more examples. Ironically I spent part of the operation helping some folks build a wall out of clay bricks and mud in the chief’s concession.
Classes have begun to pick up at the collège (middle school), and I have sat in on a couple different grades during different subjects. Needless to say, the differences between the American and Nigerien education system are striking. In American public schools, kids walk about in hallways and attend classes in air-conditioned classrooms with enough room for cabinets and desks and posters. Nigeriens sweat through classes and crowd three to a one-person bench. Yet at the same time, some American students, at least in the public schools I attended, were prone to giving teachers fits for talking in class, wearing inappropriate clothes, apathy and the like. In Niger, at least in Larba, students stand and recognize a teacher when he enters the room, wear uniforms (if they can afford them), and repeat answers memorized from the previous day’s lecture. All the same, American students stay motivated through a variety of classes and electives that suit their interests, after-school clubs, extra study help for those who need it, while Nigerien students have some of the lowest rates in the world in literacy, failure to make it into or past secondary school, and girls enrollment. As I may have mentioned in a previous blog, Niger has re-found itself in last place on the UN’s Human Development Index, education contributing a number of dismal figures to this composite study of societies across the globe. The reasons behind this poverty are multitudinous, many of which I may never fully understand. But once one understands that for a kid growing up in the bush, middle school may mean months separated from one’s family, learning languages and skills that most likely will never be applied in real life jobs, and association with mentors/ teachers who would rather be spending time at home in Niamey than in ‘the sticks.’ The somewhat supercilious attitude of the teachers, whose authoritative and somewhat distant teaching style has been a bit of a shock to the system, and has pushed me to create stronger and more productive relationships with my villagers, as it will be they who will sustain the projects I help to get off the ground. From the previous volunteers in Larba and other PCVs across the country, teachers rarely last more than a few years in a single town.
As I head out back out for the hot and humid month of November (yup, cold season won’t be here for a little while - they call it the ‘mini hot season’), I hope to learn more about what can improve the futures of the kids of Larba and neighboring towns; I counted students from 16 towns attending the CEG (collège), including Boulkagou, Touré, Chaptondé and Hanti Goura, estimated to be 40km away. In case I don’t get back into Niamey by Thanksgiving, Happy Turkey Day, ma y it be thankful day.

Countdown to T-day

2009-11-21T02:38:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving approaches, but here in Niamey we will celebrate it on Sunday. I may have mentioned that I didn't expect to spend Thanksgiving in Niamey. However, circumstances have changed (which I am not permitted to disclose at this time). As I will be in Niamey for the next little while here I hope to write a more complete posting once my future plans find a solid footing...for the time being I can only direct you to my superiors at the dept. of state: http://niamey.usembassy.gov/niger/warden_messages.html

Take care and talk to you soon,
Thomas

p.s. Look out for facebook photos and possibly on google picasa soon

A few more pics

2009-11-01T23:02:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,
I have a blog post ready to go, right as I'm about to head back out to village from a Niamey Halloween. Unfortunately, it is not in the right format for this computer and yesterday I was unable to connect on my own computer. Here are a few pics to keep you busy...
-Thomas
Folks gathered at the central mosque for the end of Ramadan (my chief is in front at far right)

Our stage seated at the swearing-in ceremony at the Ambassador's residence

The Grand Mosque of Niamey, as seen from the road

PC personnel gathered at the Gotheye mayor's office for the installation of two PCV's in this commune (one of which is me).

A few more pics

2009-10-19T00:15:00.000-07:00

I've been back in Niamey for the weekend and have to head back out today as the legislative elections get underway tomorrow. Here's a few pics from this past month, enjoy.
-Thomas

Sunset over the Sirba as it begins to dry up and leave these cool cliffs behind.

No touching up here- that's really how humid it is right now...don't worry hot and dry season is right around the corner.

At the primary school with the director and some of his kids.

Bathers, laundry washers and fishers using the Sirba for all it's worth. That line of sticks in the river act as a sort of cage for catching fish.

On a rocky (clay) outcropping overlooking my bend in the Sirba.

Sunsetting and shepherd boys holding up their beating sticks off to the right in a sign of defiance

Team Tillaberi for the CYE/MCD Stage of 2009-2011. Yay! We made it to swear-in!

So what makes Niger 'Niger' ?

2009-09-29T08:32:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody,

It’s hard to believe it’s almost October and I’m sweating more than ever before! At least the days are getting a little shorter. I’m writing this blog entry on the last bits of battery left on my laptop in my village, Larba Birno, as I wait for my villagers to hook my house up to the village chief’s electricity across the street (when I don’t know, but I will be in Niamey after my first month is completed). I’m sure if I said they’ll ‘wire up my house’ you’d conjure up images of workers coming in digging trenches or putting up poles to carry the wires (plur.) across or under the street, installing a power meter, outlets, light fixtures, etc. I can’t say what the operation will look like, but it should be a whole lot more interesting than that. Which brings me to the topic I’d like to address in my few minutes here: ways in which Nigeriens and modernity interact that might befuddle, bemuse or bug your average American (I want to note them now before they become all to commonplace).

- One of my stagemates out east in Hausaland noted that during live-in her villagers were charging cellphones with car batteries (as their village has no electricity).

- Peanut butter is made on the spot and sold in used cans of tomato paste (only tomato paste, as that is one of the few canned things you can rely on in smaller towns) - although currently in Larba there are different types of peanuts along with peanut powder and peanut bricks (that look like dog food) but no peanut butter…Go figure…Motor oil/gas is sold in old gin bottles (but I’ve never seen those same gin bottles full of gin). Sweet peanuts are also sold in these same bottles.

-Despite the waste in ditches along side of major roads, Nigeriens throw little away that can be used. Many types of food come without packaging, but if there is any it is a small black or clear plastic baggie. These baggies hold everything from ice and cold water to fried millet cakes or cassava flour - anything that can go in these bags does, even if it doesn’t need it (like pre-wrapped tea bags).

-When I go out into my concession to burn my trash the omnipresent neighbors’ kids invariably tell me they want nearly every piece of it. I wonder what they want to do with old plastic applesauce cups, but I’m sure they’ve found some use…plastic from old sandal thongs can be used to soften the entry of a nail into brittle clay walls, old wire can be attached to a radio antenna to get a better signal, anything can be a toy!

-Transportation is always an adventure, and it is amazing to see cars that would have been sitting years in a US junkyard toting two or three times their intended capacity in, along and on top of the vehicle (on my slower dirt road bush taxis often have three young men ride standing up leaning on luggage stacking high above the van). Time is not of the essence - on one ride from Hamdy to Niamey (30k) on the ‘commuter bus’, the ride took a whopping two hours and change. No traffic, no break downs, and even the detours were not that bad…no, the driver stopped sometimes less than 100m from a previous to let one person from the middle of the bus off, at some of the larger stops the bus would turn off and both the front and rear of the school bus (style) would be loaded.

-One of the more elderly people in my town has a collection of photos from the last PCVs in Larba during the 1990’s. In one dated 1995 people are drinking tea using the same styles of tea sets and plastic cups sold throughout Niger to this today. Even the funky color schemes seem not to have changed - apparently they all come from a single factory in Niamey.

-While cell phones have come to Niger, even a tower in your town doesn’t mean that you can get through. Nonetheless, it is a recent tech. advance that has taken the country by storm: people often stop to answer phone calls while giving speeches during meetings - sometimes without leaving the premises. Teens will walk around blasting their music/ring tones/even videos as if it was a portable speaker. Cells are not unlike TV’s and radios, where it doesn’t matter if no one is listening to it, keep it blasting at full volume into the night!

-As you might imagine, all of this technology is imported…In a visit to the grocery store you might find one to five percent of products sold are from Niger (probably closer to one); much processed food comes from the EU, batteries and many other technological goods are from China, many cookies found on roadside stands are from India and Indonesia. And most everything seems to be imported directly by the seller - rarely does any local distributor find his name on a label.

-In terms of vocab, all such imported products, from buckets to shovels to electricity are taken from English, Hausa or French (sometimes interchangeably)…Yet I have counted at least four ways to say in the Zarma/Songhai of Larba Birno to say “in the bush” and a different description for millet at nearly every stage of maturation and in every form in which it is eaten.

Sorry, this post has gone on waaay to long,
Thomas

Some pics from Pre-Service Training

2009-09-12T01:58:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Here is sampling of my first few months Niger in pictures. I hope you enjoy them. We swore-in two days ago and are waiting to be installed in our respective villages....

Some of my host kids holding my umbrella after a rain. In a matter of hours the water in that okra patch behind them was gone. Flash flooding, is FLASH flooding in Niger....

During Demyst weekend in Torodi (halfway between Niamey and Burkina) a streambed that I shot on our walk through town, not realizing that...The next day, and morning's rainfall later it would look like this.

A fitting sight that I caught on my way to class in Hamdy. A man remaking a wall, with his hands. Manual labor is so persuasive in this country that you can find people making mud bricks and laying them on the street in downtown Niamey...oh yeah, and that wheelbarrow is about the extent of the construction equipment at any worksite.

My concession in Larba...that is our 'mainstreet' in the foreground. Although dirt, it is the only thoroughfare and the only street in the main part of town that could 'safely' hold a car.

A rain/dust/windstorm making its way to Hamdy.

A very typical sight for a Hamdallaye morning...this counts as a bush taxi. And so, it seems, do all other vehicles not sporting an NGO logo or construction trucks.

Cousins of my host family in Hamdallaye. They LOVE matching outfits.

Our whole group after the fashion show.

Our group meeting together at the training site during the first hour of PST, just off the bus from the airport.
Jesse (al-hajji), Alice and Liz during our fashion show, in which we wore clothes from our host families.

My first morning in Larba Birno during Live-in week, this scene reminded me of something from the Lord of the Rings films.

Teaching the Macarena to Hamdallaye kids during a training session.

Picture perfect sunset my first evening in Larba...no touching up, it was really that amazing. Of course the bugs that water produces are slightly less amazing.

- See you all in about a month's time, or until the next time I get internet access

A Taste of Reality

2009-09-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

Before I begin this post, I would like to note my new mailing address at post. I should be posting it (along with some photos, hopefully) on Facebook soon. If anyone of you should be interested in sending over some goodies, make sure to put in a checklist of the box’s contents as some things can ‘disappear’ during customs.
Thomas Leonard, PCV
Corps de la Paix
Gothèye, Niger
West Africa
You may be wondering why there is no PO Box or address. It is because the six or seven PCVs in the Gothèye cluster are the only people to pick up their mail at this post office! I am posted about 24 km from Gothèye city. I also have changed my cell number from my original to (011227) 96 12 61 44.
My training group has about a week of training left before Swear-in, and I expect it to be a very busy few days. Thus, I am taking this time to share about our live-in experience completed last week and to preview the near future.
Sunday before last all thirty-one of left to the far reaches of Niger to visit our future posts for the week. My region, Tillaberi, surrounds Niamey, so our travel to site lasted all of one afternoon. That morning, the six Tillaberians in our stage met up with our Regional Representative (a PCV) and some other PCVs to buy the essentials for the week: cot, mat, table, pots, stove (and gas tank), buckets, cord, food and utensils. After lunch we split up into two cars and headed to our sites.
I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say we all had our share of adventures. Some trainees had unfinished houses, unusable latrines or missing ovens. I didn’t lack anything to essential. Still, I felt like I was at Boy Scout Summer Camp except there was no car to whisk me away, no trading post or swimmable water, and ‘wilderness survival’ actually meant survival. While education and municipality volunteers are often considered ‘spoiled’ compared to other Nigerien PCVs, there are some bush CYE (education) posts. Mine, which did not include a high school, school inspection, municipal government or a paved road, is included in the latter category. CYEs often follow directly after a previous CYE, while I was ‘opening’ a new post. While I have reliable cell phone service and the potential for electricity, my town of 7,000 (chef de village estimate) does not carry much economic or cultural clout. Whereas the training town of Hamdallaye is marginally smaller in size, it has a paved road lined with merchants and relatively constant motor traffic flow. Larba Birno, my site town, has a handful merchants in huts hidden seemingly at random along the main dirt road and in the ‘alleys’ winding throughout town. The sporadic (a few times per hour) traffic rarely stops on its way to the gold-mining operation in Samira 72 km west, hence the lack of imported goods.
On the flip side, Larba Birno had natural beauty not found elsewhere. The seasonal Sirba river whooshed by the south of town, cutting crevasses into the clay and feeding a multitude of trees and shrubs nearby. Additionally, the townspeople had a uniquely positive view of Americans, having welcomed in succession four previous volunteers in Agriculture and Nat. Resource Development (I believe) somewhere between a few years to twenty-some years ago (a point of contention between village elders!). At any rate, the immediate warmth with which I was received differed exceptionally from the awkwardness experienced by many of my stagemates. While at times I felt that certain villagers were trying to exploit their kindness for their own advantage, I greatly appreciated the opportunity to be shown about town like a dignitary. The slow pace of life around Larba seemed to suit me well as well, although I did feel more than a bit cut off from ‘real life’ - despite the fact that this will be my reality for two years. I also learned more Zarma than in I had in the weeks previous combined, although the little French I spoke acted as a mental popsicle.
I will return to Larba sometime around September 12. For the first month I will be staying exclusively in village with an exceptional market excursion to the next town over. That said, do not expect any new blogs for some time. Even when/if I do get electricity, Niamey is the closest internet, and that will be off-limits for my first three months - except for official business like regional team meetings.

Until next time,
Thomas

Birthday in Niger!

2009-08-23T01:22:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,
I know it's been forever since I posted and I've actually been pre-writing blog posts to put up right now, but unfortunately they cannot be read on the computer I am working on right now. Suffice it to say that I am alive and well, and thank you for all your birthday wishes on Facebook.

-Thomas

Any Given Sunday

2009-08-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

As you can tell, my last blog posts are completely false on a particular point. While I did get back to Niamey, the server that I hooked up to was not connected to the internet. The sub-oceanic cable that was cut some time ago is still affecting Nigerien internet, which is being redirected through other cables, slowing down or stopping up the whole operation. The pool along with the milkshake and chicken caesar salad found therein were still heavenly.
The past week and a half have sped by, filled with more adventure and progress towards our new lives in the field. The number of untold stories piles up while I continue to lack internet access. Our stage has meshed very well and personalities have emerged as comfort levels have risen. Getting sick brings people together, as does shared hardship in general. A week ago I began to feel little beasts scurry about my intestines with an intensity akin to that of liquid hot magma. With powerful meds. it still takes about a week to completely get rid of them - that is amoebas. At the same time I was able to find out more about our new set of volunteer trainers and got to stay in Hamdallaye for one wacky Sunday - our one completely open day of the week.
The rainy season brings Niger its only rain of the year. It’s a bit hard to imagine Niger having problems with desertification when the streets flood multiple times per week. While my hut is doing fine with its cemented albeit holey walls, the mud wall around my concession loses significant mass with each rainfall and this Sunday the liquid level in my latrine rose alarmingly high. When the straw door to my concession fell apart due to the rain, I was admittedly frustrated. Then, after another disappointing lunch I decided to head to the road and find some more nutrition. I was accosted by the college students chilling in their summer pad and was invited to a wedding of one of their brothers within five minutes. Seeking back up, I stopped by a friend nearby who I found out had just had her cement latrine collapse after the morning rain, cutting one of her legs with falling concrete as she managed to only get her toes wet. This only hours after a tree fell on her and her concession-mate’s beds shortly after sunrise. After chatting about that and her trip plans for the end of service, we went to the wedding pre-reception by the marketplace. We were offered food and met the bride off surrounded by her entourage in a house. The wedding was to take place at 4:00. Right around four o’clock a bunch of people left and said that they would be back soon. A handful stuck around while others came back in twenty minutes and said that the wedding was done and that the couple had already headed off to Niamey, where they will live. Confusing, no? Guess what, a Nigerien groom often doesn’t ‘propose’ until two weeks prior to the wedding date! We all should be invited to a number of weddings, naming ceremonies and such similar events, that cultural norms should clear up in our minds. Explaining them to someone who hasn’t attended all our cross-culturally themed sessions might still be kind of difficult.
In other news, late last week we received our site announcements and earlier this week we were able to meet our future supervisors. Next week we will all spend a week going through a ‘live-in’ acclimation in our respective sites. After that only two weeks of training will remain. Wow.
Next time I hope my news will be more up to date, and a full-scale introduction to my site should be in order.
-Thomas

Niamey!

2009-08-08T07:47:00.000-07:00

This will be a short blog post written (hopefully) the evening before it can be read on my blog.
The referendum was fairly uneventful. After seeing military uniforms around Hamdallaye and ‘vote taxis’ departing and arriving, I still didn’t feel nervous. I just today found the complete results of the elections: something like 92% voted yes for the referendum, ‘approving’ President Tandja’s dissolution of parliament and the constitutional court as well as his decision to surpass the constitutional two-term limit for another three years of service. One of my formatrices (language teachers) said that she found all the foreign press attention regarding potential opposition violence funny, as Nigeriens wish to preserve peace more than anything else. More than anything else, I sensed that life for the average Nigerien town remains largely unaffected by national politics - Nigerien families are more autonomous than their counterparts throughout much of the world today.
Today we received our Niamey safety and security tour, a bus tour of much of the city, and experienced a grocery store and restaurant for the first time since we left the States. Our Chinese food was amazing and the fruit, A/C and candy bars made for quite the reverse cultural shock. Tomorrow (today) I plan to go back with much of the group to catch a bit of internet access and a swim at the American Recreation Center pool. Quite the treat of a weekend!
Cheers,
-Thomas

On the Eve of the Referendum

2009-08-03T07:45:00.000-07:00

While I should be able to write you a more up-to-date blog post in a few days when we should be able to use the internet for the first time, I thought that it would be best recount the past couple weeks and spend the next post only on the goings-on of the referendum vote which is scheduled for tomorrow. In case you haven’t read much about it, I will do my best to fill you in on some details, especially the perspective you can’t get from the news website.
The last weekend of July we had our first chance to leave Hamdallaye, or Hamdy, to see a bit of Niger and real Peace Corps life. Like everything in Peace Corps, this weekend has a name and its abbreviation: Demystification and Demyst. We are called Demysters for the weekend. All thirty-two of us set out in groups of one, two or three to stay with PCV hosts serving in the two regions nearest Niamey - Dosso and Tillaberi. Since access to much of Tillaberi’s territory has been restricted for US citizens as a precautionary measures (you can read up on that at the State Dept.’s website) only seven of us ‘demisted’ in Tillaberi. I and two others ended up in Torodi with PCV who had been serving. Torodi is one of the few notable towns on the road from Niamey to Burkina Faso (or Burkina, as the locals say) and was a prime location to chill out by the vernal river, sample the delicious meat and honey. Our demystifier cooked us scrambled guinea fowl eggs for breakfast - may I say that guinea fowl meat and eggs beat out chicken any day - with cereal and powdered milk. After beans and rice for oh so many days, ‘twas like manna to our bellies. We spent much of our time reading, journaling, chatting and playing cards. We also were able to meet many of our demystifier’s friends in town, including the smith, who created personalized silver rings for all three of us. The R and R was well-timed as well, as we were becoming overwhelmed by the repetitive language lessons and endless medical, technical and cross-cultural sessions. More than anything, it made me truly begin to anticipate my arrival at site, and my life thereafter.
Something that our demystifier mentioned in passing stuck with me in the following form: “In Niger, nothing ever works like new.” He was talking about a flashlight, but he could have meant many other things, including human bodies. As we were told, a number of us fell sick after Demyst. While I had Mr. D before and after demyst for about six days or so, it was fairly controllable. For others though, medications had caused up to two weeks of constipation. Still others had to swallow a cornucopia of pills for amoebas and bacteria having the opposite effect on the bowels. While this may not seem the most appropriate topic for the blog, you have to understand it has been my primary topic of conversation for the past few days as seven or eight of us spent quality time at the infirmary this weekend.
My lot was different in that I experienced fevers every afternoon and early morning from Friday afternoon till Sunday morning. Combined with continued stomach problems, everything seemed manageable but uncomfortable. At rock bottom I was left on Saturday afternoon with 102.9 temperature that had risen a degree and a half in just under an hour without a clear idea of what I had or even what medicine I should be taking. After an appraisal of the symptoms it was clear a malaria test was more than due. Fortunately, the fever broke yesterday and I feel much better. At the same time, the malaria slide completed under much supervision couldn’t be read. I doubt many of us could imagine what beatings our bodies would take before Niger, but camaraderie has its benefits…including those who can make light out of any situation.
- Thomas

Peace Corps Hardcore

2009-07-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

I’m writing this not knowing exactly when I’ll be able to post it online. While much has happened since I last wrote in Philadelphia, I know the biggest events of my entry into Peace Corps Niger are still to come. After a flight to Paris and from there to Niamey, we were greeted by a red land more resembling Mars than North America and a number of volunteers who will serve as ‘summer camp counselors’ for the 32 of us (my term) the next nine weeks.
The first three VATs (Volunteers at Training) escorted us in two vans about 30km from the capital to the village of Hamdallaye, where Peace Corps has been training potential PCVs for decades. A smooth transition has been put in place for us, graded gradually down from American amenities to Nigerien bare necessities. While I don’t think we will ever ‘have’ to live as stripped down as your average Nigerien, it won’t be easy. For my group, made up of MCDs (municipal) and CYE (education) volunteers, we will probably receive an upgrade when we move from training to our posts around the country.
A little a bit about those conditions, shall we? Our first step down from the Philly luxe was the training site, where we slept two nights with lukewarm showers and nicely prepared, balanced meals, sat on chairs with pads, had “flush” toilets and electrical outlets. The first Sunday we were moved down from our gated site into the community. We were split into individuals or pairs and placed in compounds shared with local families. The conditions varied from an individual with a flimsy hut and concession (wall inside compound) made completely of straw, no electricity or TV, nothing but rice or millet to eat with his hands, and no French spoken at home. On the other hand, some people got a companion, a clay hut, a family with a TV and electricity, meat and a spoon, and French spoken in the family. I’m right about in the middle. No matter what, we all take baths with buckets of water under a glorious Milky Way, go to the bathroom in a whole in the ground, have innumerable naked kids running around our compounds, and hand wash at least part of our laundry. At least we don’t do our business way out in the fields or carry enormous water buckets on our heads. And I even escaped the carb-only diet when a group of French nursing interns stayed across my compound for a few days: I not only got to practice my French, but had some mango, egg on toast, and mint water….Ahh, I could die for some mint water right now!
Today marks our first full week in family, we all agree we’ve been able to adjust to the fact that we were able to handle an entire Sunday with absolutely nothing to do (although one girl in the group was put to work hauling water and wood right off the bat!). To me, I kept feeling as if I was in a living-history museum like Greenfield Village, except the fires actually were cooking food I would eat and the blacksmith was making real tools people would really use. Sleeping through the wee hours with donkeys, roosters, goats and sheep offering a cacophony of misfiring alarms brought reality closer to home. A sudden gust of wind and dust woke us all up our first night, as we were rudely welcomed to Nigerien rainy season: where you get more dust and wind than rain. Despite our groggy sprint with mattresses and mosquito netting from our outdoor platforms to shelter, we woke to eyes, clothing, and luggage coated, or even infiltrated with dust.
In our first of many medical training sessions, our Med officer introduced us to Mr. D - Diarrhea. We soon learned one of Peace Corps Niger’s most infamous claims: the highest ratio of gastrointestinal illnesses per volunteer in all of Peace Corps. While I want to say it was 175/year (with between 90-120 volunteers serving), there are of course numbers of unreported bouts. And we’ve already had at least one. This claim to fame categorizes Niger in the Peace Corps Hard Core category with the likes of Tajikistan, as opposed to Peace Corps Soft Core (Philippines - volunteering in a resort with tourists, what!?). As you may know, Niger has been 177 and 174 out of 177 on the UN’s list of human development for the last two years. Nonetheless, we seem to be having it better than I expected. And given that I am learning Zarma, I will most likely be posted well within a day’s drive from Niamey (the capital). When I return to the training site, I marvel at how much work is done by a toilet that flushes, even if it doesn’t quite do it right, or when I want it to.
-Thomas

In and Out of Philly in 30 hours

2009-07-07T18:35:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody,
I'm writing from my hotel room in Philadelphia in the middle of my staging process. I got in this morning and am leaving tomorrow afternoon. It's been a very busy time getting to meet everybody, learning rules and regulations...getting a crash course on loads of fun stuff like that. I won't be able to write for a while during in training, so I thought I'd write right now while I can. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers, I'll be thinking of you when I have a chance to think (or breathe).

-Thomas

Intro by the Dexter Leader

2009-06-04T14:32:00.000-07:00

I made it onto the front page of today's Dexter Leader, my hometown paper, and I didn't even know it was coming out today! It also made it to the top of the newsfeed on their website. As I plan to do when I start writing my monthly column for them, I will post the articles here on my blog once they hit the press:
http://dexterleader.com/stories/060409/loc_20090604002.shtml

Keep in mind that I was interviewed but did not take any role in writing the article.

-Thomas

Mon blog en Français

2009-05-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

Vous pouvez trouvez mon blog en Français à http://thomaseleonard.over-blog.com/

-Thomas

Welcome to my Peace Corps Blog

2009-05-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to my Peace Corps Blog. Beginning on July 6, 2009, I will be serving the United States Peace Corps in Niger, West Africa. I hope to begin sharing my adventures with you as soon as I arrive, although technical challenges will surely arise. Patience is a virtue.

-Thomas