Happy Thanksgiving/My crazy life these past two weeks

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.