Reflecting back

Hi,

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

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

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

On the Radio

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

On the Radio

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

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

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

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

Gone in a flash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Thomas

Third Year in PC!

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

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

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

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