Paris
Our last few days in Niger dragged on for what seemed like weeks. Extended goodbyes, desert heat, and uneventful afternoons combined to make us all very tired and vary lazy. With almost nothing to do all day we bided our time watching taped episodes of Six Feet Under and Weeds on people’s laptops. We did your best to take everything in, waking up early to watch the sunrise and 13 hours later walking out to the mesa to watch it set over our training site. Our last few hours in Niger were spent sprawled out on our beds watching the stars in silence for almost an hour. At 9:30 we were crammed into vans for a final trip into Niamey. Arriving at the airport, we wandered through three separate metal detectors, two bag searches, and more passport checks than I can remember before we were finally allowed onto the tarmac for our 12:30 flight to Paris. I popped two benodryl as I stepped on the plane and successfully knocked myself out for the entire flight.
Paris was, as usual, a great experience. Being that this was my third time to the city of light, sightseeing was not high on my priority list, but there were many members of our stage who had never seen the city. We checked into our hotel near the airport early that morning and walked a mile and a half to the RER-D stop in the adjacent town. The Peace Corps had generously given us a whopping 20 euros to spend (sarcasm) and the ticket into town cost me 10 so after a fresh baguette, big chuck of cheese, and bottle of wine, I was done spending money. After gracefully scarfing my purchases in a Parisian park, I went on a walking tour of the city with my friend Julie, who had never been to Paris before. I tour-guided for her and a few other friends all around Paris’s major sites complete with visits to the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, and Notre Dame. By dinner we were beat so we retreated back to our hotel for dinner and hot showers.
The Paris hotel as well as our flights to and from Charles De Gaulle turned out to be a great stock-up opportunity for me. From the hotel I restocked on some much needed soap and shampoo. I also acquired two new pillows, two blankets as well as some magazines courtesy of Air France. It also gave me the opportunity to indulge just a little before heading back into the thick of things. I took three very hot showers in a 12-hour period just because I could and I used a hotel hairdryer for the first time in my life, just because it was there. Yet after all that cleaning I still had Niger-colored dust in my toenails.
Starting Over in Madagascar
Madagascar is a place that everyone seems to like in theory but no one really knows anything about. Most people know where Madagascar is and seem to enjoy the animated children’s movie set on this island nation, but that is all. I must admit that my knowledge of Madagascar was no more extensive. Once the transfer from Niger to Madagascar was announced, the 10-page section of the Lonely Planet Africa featuring Madagascar became a sacred text to all us trainees. Now I realize why so little is known about the world’s largest island nation: No one who comes here ever leaves. Madagascar is a stunningly beautiful nation of mountains, rainforests, rice paddies, and intense thunderstorms. Though Peace Corps has only been active here since 1994, there are at least 64 former Peace Corps volunteers that decided to make Madagascar their homes after their service was completed and after just 2 weeks here, I can’t say I blame them.
Our stage arrived in Madagascar at 1:00 AM on the morning of December 10th and since then we have been living at the main Peace Corps training facility. The term ‘training facility’ is not really a good term to describe the place where we live. If the training site in Niger could be called “Fort Peace Corps” the place in Madagascar could be called “Resort Peace Corps.” Located hour’s drive east of the capital Antananarivo, the center is built on a green peninsula jutting into a massive mountain lake. Our dining room boasts splendid mountain vistas with large bay windows and our accommodations are complete with beds, flushing toilets, hot water, and big closets. When I am not in language class my time is divided between long bike trips into the mountains or canoe rides into unexplored coves on the pristine lake.
Our afternoon activities are only restricted by the weather, which is predictably rainy. It has literally rained every single day since our arrival. The day can start out without a cloud in the sky, but every evening without fail a massive thunderstorm will roll in off the Indian Ocean complete with searing lightning and rolling thunder. The clouds usually begin to assemble by three of four and by dinnertime a full-scale monsoon is barreling down on us. After most meals a group of us assemble on the dining room porch to watch the towering clouds conquer the green mountains as brilliant lightning strikes on the distant hills. On one particularly eventful evening, we could see the moonrise, sunset, and lightning storm move in all from one chair. It is like nothing I have ever seen anywhere. I can’t imagine what this place is like when a cyclone hits.
After almost two weeks in language classes here, I can now say with some confidence that Malagasy is the worst possible language to play Wheel-of-Fortune with. The language is guilty of the drastic over use of the letter ‘A’ and every word seems to contain one ‘M’ or ‘N’. One can actually form a complete sentence using only these two consonants. (Manao inona ianao?) Additionally, Malagasy words are ridiculously long. Common verbs in English that require just a few letters require four or five syllables in Malagasy. The verb ‘meet’ translates to ‘Mahafantatra’ and the verb for ‘run’ is ‘Mihazakazaka’. If one can manage to pronounce these gargantuan words, Malagasy is an exceedingly simple language grammatically. All the verbs start with M and to change a word in to past the first letter changes to N and in the future the first letter is H. The language, however is nothing like anything I have learned before as it is actually most closely related to a language spoken on the Indonesian island of Borneo.
In the coming days and weeks there is allot of excitement planned. On the day after Christmas we are going camping in Madagascar’s most famous national park where we anticipate seeing some interesting wildlife, including the world’s largest lemurs. After New Years, We are going to be transplanted from our resort into the village at the bottom of the hill to live with Malagasy host families for three weeks. We have had some opportunity to explore our new village and it is a really fascinating place. It is located in a valley filled with lush green rice paddies and teeming with life. Ducks and geese patrol modest yards sporting huge pink hibiscus bushes and roses. The Malagasy people are all about six inches shorter than the average European so all the homes, while usually two-stories tall, look like they are build for dwarves. I anticipate that this will be a problem for me once I move into my Malagasy house considering I already have to duck to enter most of the shops and stores.
Yesterday also marks my first Christmas away from home with Peace Corps. Curiously enough, the holiday season in the third world is markedly different from what I have grown accustomed to. A brick of newspaper failed to arrive at my doorstep to mark the eve of Black Friday, I have seen no inflatable Santa-and-reindeer snow globe lawn ordainments, and I have yet to hear any Christmas advertisements to attract me to the malls. Christmas in Madagascar has really been a low-key affair. In all honesty it is really hard to get into the ‘holiday spirit’ when you are around no family, in the middle of a jungle and you wake up early on Christmas morn to attend a 2-hour Malagasy language session. There has been a concerted effort to bring some holiday cheer to our training site. Each of us was assigned a Secret Santa and a budget of 5000 Ariari for gifts, one of the girls has been playing carols off her IPOD during meals and during a long drive to the market town our van stumbled though as many Christmas tunes as we could remember. The real ‘presents’, however, come when someone gets a phone call from home and the lucky recipient always hangs up with a smile on their face and a little Christmas in their hearts.
I can say with some confidence that Madagascar is the exact opposite of Niger. Niger was hot, dry, flat, landlocked, and Muslim. Madagascar is cool, green, wet, hilly, Christian (for the most part) and a tropical island. The currency here is called Ariari; the exchange rate to the dollar is approximately 2000 to 1. In terms of dollars, things here are even cheaper than they were in Niger. One can buy a kilo of rice for 50 cents and a chocolate bar will put you out a solid 12 pennies. The national beer in Madagascar is called Three Horses Beer and one can buy a .65 liter bottle for approximately 80 cents. Surprisingly, Three Horses aka THB is actually really good, better than any mainstream American brew I have tasted. However, on our budgets 80 cents is rather expensive so I have limited myself to just two bottles since our arrival.
As I expect my mother has already written, I got my site announcement a few days ago. After I swear in as a PCV at the end of January, I will be moving to the village of Ranomafana (Malagasy for ‘hot water’) a few hours south of the Capital Antananarivo. Although I know very little about this place that will be home in a little over a month, I do know that it is adjacent to one of Madagascar’s biggest and most renown national parks so I expect to get very close with some of the very unique wildlife that calls Madagascar home. In terms of flora and fauna, Madagascar really is in a league all its own and Ranomafana is reported to be one of the great sactuaries of Mother Nature. There are 12 species of lemur and 68 species of bird that are only found in Madagascar which can be found in this park and the plant life is supposed to be just as impressive. Thus I am very excited to FINALLY finish Peace Corps training and become a volunteer.
While Madagascar is a paradise in almost everyway, politically this place is an absolute mess. Isolated up here in the mountains we don’t receive allot of news, but what we have pieced together about what is happening in the capital is not very encouraging. The coup d’etat, which ousted the president in March of this year, is still in full force. As a result the man with the power in Antananarivo is a 34 year-old former DJ who is constitutionally forbidden from assuming the presidency. There was a transitional government formed, a government that has one president and two ‘half-presidents’ however, many foreign governments, including the US, do not recognize the transitional government. In November the three presidents went to Africa for some confrence and in doing so perturbed the DJ turned dictator who now refuses to send a plane to bring them back to Madagascar. In playground terms the new kid pulled up the rope ladder to the tree-fort that is Madagascar. So while the only government with any thread of legitimacy is hundreds of miles away in Mozambique or South Africa, the economy of Madagascar has gone to the dogs. What once was a healthy tourism industry has taken a 90% hit. Some generous trade programs with Madagascar have been suspended and a bunch of factories may be forced to close. As a result many Malagasy have been forced to turn to illegal logging for income. The rainforests and wildlife here is some of the best in the world but it is impossible to keep people from logging when the starvation of their families is at stake. I anticipate much of what I will be doing at Ranomafana will be related to preventing this from taking place. Even here at the PC training site deforestation is evident. Entire hillsides are left barren exposing the red soil underneath. When the cyclone rains come later this year, much of the topsoil will be washed into rivers, which will turn a crimson-hue as a result. During past years of heavy deforestation, astronauts have commented that after a heavy rain, Madagascar looks like it is bleeding into the Indian Ocean, and in a very real sense, it is.
I hope everyone back at home is enjoying their holiday and the cold weather, although mail service to Madagascar is reportedly even slower here than in Niger, letters are highly sought after and appreciated.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Michael
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The Assignment
posted by the administrator
Michael received his assignment today and was very excited to find out he would be doing environmental work in the cloud forest of Ranomafana. Near the town of Ranomafana is Madagascar's largest National Park where he will assist in reforestation efforts there, perhaps do some rice farming, and work on any other project that his community will need. He will leave for his village assignment after his swearing in ceremony at the end of January. See this link for more information on the area.
http://www.wildmadagascar.org/conservation/parks/Ranomafana.html
I'll post more later and watch for a personal post from Michael in the next few days!
Michael received his assignment today and was very excited to find out he would be doing environmental work in the cloud forest of Ranomafana. Near the town of Ranomafana is Madagascar's largest National Park where he will assist in reforestation efforts there, perhaps do some rice farming, and work on any other project that his community will need. He will leave for his village assignment after his swearing in ceremony at the end of January. See this link for more information on the area.
http://www.wildmadagascar.org/conservation/parks/Ranomafana.html
I'll post more later and watch for a personal post from Michael in the next few days!
Friday, December 11, 2009
News from Madagascar
Michael chatted with us this morning from his new home in Madagascar. Here are some highlights:
-Life in Madagascar is the opposite of living conditions in Niger; they currently have all the comforts of home: toilets, showers, hot & cold water (either/or but not warm water), closets, buildings made of bricks with windows, trees, rain most every day, good food, fruits and vegetables, etc.
-The place they are currently staying is a training center that is often used by other high-ranking officials for retreats and meetings; it is very beautiful, located on a peninsula jutting into a lake in which they are allowed to play with boats and canoes--as long as they do not swim in the water. There is a risk of contracting Schistosomiasis, so there is no contact with the water.
-Madagascar has lots of trees and hills. They have been doing some mountain biking for fun during breaks from their lessons.
-He is now learning the native language: Malagasy; although it is confusing to be learning yet another language, he says it is a very logical language which helps his learning process
-The people there are "small" in comparison to most Americans. Most do not get much taller than about 5'6".
-He gets paid less in Madagascar, but things are typically cheaper. He can buy a beer for about 80 cents.
-Most of the clothes available for purchase there are second hand from the U.S. He isn't really opposed to wearing second-hand clothes--except for the socks and underwear!
-There are not many roads in Madagascar so road transportation is long and laborious. The roads they do have are often washed out by the flooding that occurs when the cyclones hit. If one needs to be transported for a medical issue, they will send a plane.
The French have a big influence there which gives them access to delicacies such as Laughing Cow cheese!
Michael knows he will be posted in the northern section of Madagascar, and he will find out specifics about his post and his job in about a week. Look forward to more posting then!
-Life in Madagascar is the opposite of living conditions in Niger; they currently have all the comforts of home: toilets, showers, hot & cold water (either/or but not warm water), closets, buildings made of bricks with windows, trees, rain most every day, good food, fruits and vegetables, etc.
-The place they are currently staying is a training center that is often used by other high-ranking officials for retreats and meetings; it is very beautiful, located on a peninsula jutting into a lake in which they are allowed to play with boats and canoes--as long as they do not swim in the water. There is a risk of contracting Schistosomiasis, so there is no contact with the water.
-Madagascar has lots of trees and hills. They have been doing some mountain biking for fun during breaks from their lessons.
-He is now learning the native language: Malagasy; although it is confusing to be learning yet another language, he says it is a very logical language which helps his learning process
-The people there are "small" in comparison to most Americans. Most do not get much taller than about 5'6".
-He gets paid less in Madagascar, but things are typically cheaper. He can buy a beer for about 80 cents.
-Most of the clothes available for purchase there are second hand from the U.S. He isn't really opposed to wearing second-hand clothes--except for the socks and underwear!
-There are not many roads in Madagascar so road transportation is long and laborious. The roads they do have are often washed out by the flooding that occurs when the cyclones hit. If one needs to be transported for a medical issue, they will send a plane.
The French have a big influence there which gives them access to delicacies such as Laughing Cow cheese!
Michael knows he will be posted in the northern section of Madagascar, and he will find out specifics about his post and his job in about a week. Look forward to more posting then!
Old Update #3
November 18, 2009
Our PC retreat began on Sunday, November 15. Typically Sundays are really boring days for us trainees; we have no scheduled class or activities and we are responsible only for finding our own breakfast. By 8am a large group of us Anasara (white people) had gathered on the street to slurp bags of sulani next to piles of smoldering garbage. All of the Zarma trainees who are housed in other villages had biked into our village for lack of anything better to do, so there were even more of us loitering around than is normal. By 10am we had broken into smaller groups; I hiked through the fields and villages surrounding the water hole with a group of friends, and, after lunch, settled down in a friend's hut to wait out the afternoon heat.
At 3pm there was a knock at the door. It was our language teachers. The Emergency Action Plan had been activated. Because of where the PC operates, it always needs to be ready in case a situation should arise in a country. Therefore, the PC uses a 3 stage response system. Stage 1 is standby--restricted travel and no leaving the village. Stage 2 is consolidation--report immediately to a safe house so that all personnel are accounted for and are in a controlled environment. Stage 3 is a full nationwide evacuation. The teachers informed us that we were at Stage 1 and not to panic because there was a possibility that this was a test.
Sunday was also the day the weather changed. For the first 3 1/2 weeks, the weather was constant and predictable. The sun beat down on the parched Nigerien soil from 9am until 6:30pm when the dimness brought on by an impending sunset made walking in unshaded areas tolerable once more. After we were moved to Stage 1, something changed; a deep haze enveloped the country. Visibility dropped down to a few hundred meters, and the once punishing heat of the sun was dulled as it continued its westward journey. It was as if a heavy smoke or fog had moved in, but the air remained dry and sweet smelling. The weather, combined with our lack of knowledge about what was happening gave everything an eerie quality and had all of the trainees on edge.
As I walked home, I turned the corner only to run into a fellow PCT. We were both startled and she tried to comfort me by giving me a big hug. While a hug from a friend certainly helped, its comforting qualities soon wore off when at 5pm I discovered we had been moved up to a Stage 2. All of the Zarma trainees who had biked in that morning were forbidden from returning home and instructed to report immediately to the safe house. Those of us living in the village were ordered to return to our houses and travel only when necessary and only in groups. None of us had been told what had happened, only that this was not a test and we would be briefed on the situation in the morning. I got a call from home at 6:15pm. With Grandma, relatives, parents, and family friends all conferenced in on the call, I resisted the temptation to alert the home front and conducted the phone call as if all was well.
The rest of us trainees were evacuated to the safe house the next morning. we were told to go back to our host family's and pack one bag for the next 2-7 days and not to tell anything to our Nigerien hosts. As could have been predicted, this sudden evacuation was enough to upset some of the host mothers who quizzed us in Hausa as to what was happening as we packed up our things. It was all we could do to respond only with "Ban sane ba" (I don't know) and hurry out the door. The safe house is one of the safest places to be in all of Niger. It has enough bed space and food to host us for a week. Once we were all safe, we were briefed on the situation. Four armed gunmen attempted to kidnap three American foreign service officers in Tahoua. The attack was unsuccessful, but it set off alarm bells all over the American Intelligence community. The situation has been weighing heavily on us. We have been sequestered here for a week, and we are not scheduled to be released for another 3 days. It is tough to stay focused on learning Hausa and agriculture when we have no interaction with average Nigeriens and are faced with the possibility that we could be evacuated if something else happens.
Thankfully the food here is great (I have put a few pounds back on!) and the staff has done their best to keep our spirits up. We were given an entire day to rest and tonight we are throwing a dance party in the cafeteria. Our country director got special permission from the Ambassador to come out and spend time with us answering questions and calming us down.
Apparently PC has decided to close the Tohoua and Konri regions and cram the existing PCVs into other regions. Then, by December 30, our Associate PC directors will need to find places for us 26 PCTs in the same regions. Needless to say, these terrorists have turned PC Niger into a logistical nightmare. In the end, none of us really know what is going to happen to us. Living as an ex-pat has taught me a lot about patience and going with the flow. We are scheduled to be released from our safe house on Friday. Hopefully we will be able to complete our service without any more consolidations.
--Michael
Our PC retreat began on Sunday, November 15. Typically Sundays are really boring days for us trainees; we have no scheduled class or activities and we are responsible only for finding our own breakfast. By 8am a large group of us Anasara (white people) had gathered on the street to slurp bags of sulani next to piles of smoldering garbage. All of the Zarma trainees who are housed in other villages had biked into our village for lack of anything better to do, so there were even more of us loitering around than is normal. By 10am we had broken into smaller groups; I hiked through the fields and villages surrounding the water hole with a group of friends, and, after lunch, settled down in a friend's hut to wait out the afternoon heat.
At 3pm there was a knock at the door. It was our language teachers. The Emergency Action Plan had been activated. Because of where the PC operates, it always needs to be ready in case a situation should arise in a country. Therefore, the PC uses a 3 stage response system. Stage 1 is standby--restricted travel and no leaving the village. Stage 2 is consolidation--report immediately to a safe house so that all personnel are accounted for and are in a controlled environment. Stage 3 is a full nationwide evacuation. The teachers informed us that we were at Stage 1 and not to panic because there was a possibility that this was a test.
Sunday was also the day the weather changed. For the first 3 1/2 weeks, the weather was constant and predictable. The sun beat down on the parched Nigerien soil from 9am until 6:30pm when the dimness brought on by an impending sunset made walking in unshaded areas tolerable once more. After we were moved to Stage 1, something changed; a deep haze enveloped the country. Visibility dropped down to a few hundred meters, and the once punishing heat of the sun was dulled as it continued its westward journey. It was as if a heavy smoke or fog had moved in, but the air remained dry and sweet smelling. The weather, combined with our lack of knowledge about what was happening gave everything an eerie quality and had all of the trainees on edge.
As I walked home, I turned the corner only to run into a fellow PCT. We were both startled and she tried to comfort me by giving me a big hug. While a hug from a friend certainly helped, its comforting qualities soon wore off when at 5pm I discovered we had been moved up to a Stage 2. All of the Zarma trainees who had biked in that morning were forbidden from returning home and instructed to report immediately to the safe house. Those of us living in the village were ordered to return to our houses and travel only when necessary and only in groups. None of us had been told what had happened, only that this was not a test and we would be briefed on the situation in the morning. I got a call from home at 6:15pm. With Grandma, relatives, parents, and family friends all conferenced in on the call, I resisted the temptation to alert the home front and conducted the phone call as if all was well.
The rest of us trainees were evacuated to the safe house the next morning. we were told to go back to our host family's and pack one bag for the next 2-7 days and not to tell anything to our Nigerien hosts. As could have been predicted, this sudden evacuation was enough to upset some of the host mothers who quizzed us in Hausa as to what was happening as we packed up our things. It was all we could do to respond only with "Ban sane ba" (I don't know) and hurry out the door. The safe house is one of the safest places to be in all of Niger. It has enough bed space and food to host us for a week. Once we were all safe, we were briefed on the situation. Four armed gunmen attempted to kidnap three American foreign service officers in Tahoua. The attack was unsuccessful, but it set off alarm bells all over the American Intelligence community. The situation has been weighing heavily on us. We have been sequestered here for a week, and we are not scheduled to be released for another 3 days. It is tough to stay focused on learning Hausa and agriculture when we have no interaction with average Nigeriens and are faced with the possibility that we could be evacuated if something else happens.
Thankfully the food here is great (I have put a few pounds back on!) and the staff has done their best to keep our spirits up. We were given an entire day to rest and tonight we are throwing a dance party in the cafeteria. Our country director got special permission from the Ambassador to come out and spend time with us answering questions and calming us down.
Apparently PC has decided to close the Tohoua and Konri regions and cram the existing PCVs into other regions. Then, by December 30, our Associate PC directors will need to find places for us 26 PCTs in the same regions. Needless to say, these terrorists have turned PC Niger into a logistical nightmare. In the end, none of us really know what is going to happen to us. Living as an ex-pat has taught me a lot about patience and going with the flow. We are scheduled to be released from our safe house on Friday. Hopefully we will be able to complete our service without any more consolidations.
--Michael
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Old update #2 Demystification
Written over Demyst: November 6-13, 2009
Fifteen days down; 784 to go! Things are cooling down here in Niger, the weather becomes tolerable around 5pm, and it is getting legitimately cold at night. I finally broke out my light sleeping bag. I am adjusting to life in my town. We did a tour of the village the other day, and now I can navigate the streets confidently in the pitch black that blankets the town at about 7:30pm each night. Suddenly where the moon is and what cycle it is in has become very important. While the moon has been relatively bright for the past few nights, the moon is rising later and later each night so when we go to visit our friends after dinner we are often tripping over the garbage littering the streets. I have been playing lots of cards in the past week. My roommate, Matt, gave his cards to our kids to play with; big mistake. In less than 5 days half-eaten cards had found their way all over my family's compound. The queen of spades somehow found its way 3 blocks down the street. To avoid my kids, some of us have been meeting for games in our huts. I taught a bunch of fellow PCTs how to play Up and Down the River and now we play it almost everyday. We find ourselves avoiding the children a lot. Don't get me wrong, the kids are great, and they are really good and really patient teachers, but there comes a point when you don't want 6 very dirty, naked African children grabbing for your hands and asking for your camera. The novelty of friendly African children has completely worn off. We were sitting in our test gardens yesterday, and a group of Zarma-speaking children stood at the fence screaming, "FoFoFoFo!" (hello) "Comment to t'appelle" which means, "what is your name?" in French and is the only French any of these kids speak. We ignored them for 1/2 hour.
I have been reading tons since I got here. I finished Birds without Wings and polished off Blue Like Jazz in less than 2 days. It was really good, thanks, Diana! This, however, means I have already halved my supply of books (so send more!)
We all look forward to the core days we have on Tuesdays and Fridays. The name of our training site in Hausa means "top of the rock". We like it because we can eat a lot of fruits and veggies, spend a few minutes with air conditioning, and we can behave like Americans for a few hours. After our language and shots are done, we change into shorts, put our Ipods on speakers and play volleyball for 2 hours. Yesterday was a special core day because the American Ambassador came to speak to us. She is a stately African-American woman who is nearly finished with her time in the Foreign Service. We got to ask her lots of questions and she gave us some hope that the travel ban to Agader would be lifted. She also told me that 15% or so of Foreign Service officers are former PCVs so that gave me a lot of hope for getting in to the Foreign Service after my PC service. Ambassador Allen gave all of us her card and stayed for lunch with us. There was meat in our rice for lunch, and for dessert we all got a meningitis shot! After lunch she had to go to a meeting with the Prime Minister; things are not well in Nigerien politics.
Now I am on Demystification, aka 'demyst'. This is the period where we leave our training town and spend 5 days with a real PCV in the field. My "demystifier" is named Errin and her site is in the Dosso region. Her village is 10 km from the main road and any electricity. The cool thing about this area is the giraffes. We got dropped off by the PC "magic bus" (magic because it has air conditioning!) off the side of the road where Errin met us. She told us that we would be walking 10K out to her village. Luckily, a few other PCVs showed up and wanted to go out to see the giraffes. One of the PCVs had her parents visiting her and they wanted to see the sites. The very last herd of West African giraffes lives in this region. There are only about 150 of these types of giraffes left in the world, and they are all here in Niger. We all hopped on the bandwagon and drove out to the bush for a giraffe safari. My fellow demystee, Alison, and I were sitting in the back of an SUV driving through the bumpy fields We were warned not to lean back or we would risk the backdoor latch failing and falling out on to the dirt. After 20 minutes our guide pointed right and suddenly we were in a herd of 13 West African giraffes. It was amazing! Here we were in the middle of the bush chilling next to a herd of endangered giraffes. There was a baby between 1-6 months old in the herd; it was really cute. It was a surreal experience; giraffes are really mellow creatures. You can walk right up to them, maybe 20-30 meters away. They stare at you like a confused puppy, and then they keep eating. I took tons of pictures! Following our mini-safari, the other PCV's dropped us off in Errin's village, thankfully sparing us the walk. Her village is considered the epicenter of nowhere because the water table is so low and there are few water sources around here. The town well is 50 meters deep and women can pull no more than 7 buckets without exhausting themselves. Errin tried once but it tore up her hands so now she leaves it to the locals. Errin has her own concession with a shade hangar, small hut, latrine, and a pet cat named gutter. Her hut is surrounded by a millet stalk fence which has collapsed 3 times in the last year. Last time the neighbor's cows came and ate her roof. Her millet-stalk door had fallen apart so, after playing some cards, we set to work making her a new door. It took us about an hour, but eventually we threw together a sturdy door out of millet and a few strips of cloth. The next day we were toured around the village. It took a few hours because literally everyone and their cousin insisted upon greeting us and inviting us to sit. We met the chief of the village, a wide-eyed friendly old man who, according to Errin, sits under a big tree and reads the Koran all day, although we really have no idea how much Arabic he actually understands. Various aid organizations are active in this village. The EU has build a grain bank and an Islamic aid organization built a foot pump at one of the wells and a health clinic that is occasionally staffed.
All of the PCVs I have encountered comment on how clean and "fresh off the plane" we are. Alison and I have likewise been observing how "weathered" all of the PCVs look. Their t-shirts are streaked and faded in the sun with holes stitched up with sewing kits. I am learning new things like "sun washing" clothes which really doesn't wash them but keeps them from smelling too badly. Or, if you put your water bottle in a clay jar filled with water, it will stay cool even in the heat.
For dinner we managed to put together some spaghetti-type stuff. After we had finished eating, the neighbor boy brought over some locust he had caught and cooked up for us. We were obligated to try them as that same boy had tried some almond M&M's Alison had brought for Errin. He was convinced the M&M's were poison, but he ate them anyway. The locust he brought were fried or something because they tasted like a bad potato chip. After that ordeal passed, we sat out on mats and stared at the stars until 11pm. I managed to get a hold of mom & dad on Sunday, and I found out I passed the Foreign Service Exam, but I don't know how to get to an interview when I am held up in the middle of nowhere.
On Tuesday we got up before the sun came up around 6am. We were meeting up with the other PCVs at the Peace Corps hostel. However, in order to get to the road, we needed to hike 11 km through the open bush to get to the road. If we left much after 7, it would get too hot and we might not be able to go. We got everything in the backpacks and left by 6:45am. We arrived at the road 2 hours later just as the heat was setting in. A Nigerien man flagged down a bush taxi for us. Nigerien bush taxis are just larger than a VW bus and have the approximate body structure of a poorly-constructed tin can. Errin, Alison, and I, as well as 16 other Africans, smashed into this mobile death trap. Errin told us that she once had to sit next to a woman with a bucket full of dismembered goat parts on her lap. After a very hot hour ride, we arrived at our destination and made our way to the hostel. At the hostel I stocked up on books and met lots of current PCVs.
On Wednesday we bussed into Niamey. There is one "foreigner" store and restaurant there; we were so famished that we ordered pizza and burgers at 9am.
I don't know if any of you have been paying attention to the political situation in Niger, but things are not well here. We only get snippets of news from the BBC or other volunteers, but apparently government leaders are behaving in a way that the other countries in the region find undemocratic. In the past Niger has set the example for democracy in the area. There has been free and fair elections here for years now. Therefore, what is happening now is considered a big deal: ECOAS is upset with Niger and some states are talking about sanctions. So keep Niger in your thoughts and pay attention to the news because Niger is really exploring some new territory here.
Being in Niger has taught me so much already about the little things. Mirrors, for example, are a little thing that we never really think about, but when you remove it from your life, looking in a mirror becomes a strange luxury. Little bits of American food or candy are priceless gems here. All of the PCTs share religiously. One of my friends got a package from home and the first thing she did was pass around the dried apricots and cheddar flavored snacks. Another big thing that we miss immensely here is cheese! I never realized how much I love cheese until now. All of the goat/cow/sheep milk here potentially has TB in it, so we can't drink any unprocessed milk or cheese (which is 90% of what is available here). We are essentially getting only one of the food groups consistently, that being breads and cereals; everything else just does not exist for at least 20 miles in all directions. To help out our bodies, Peace Corps has us on prenatal vitamins, but that can only do so much. I have already dropped 12 or so pounds, but I am not yet sick. Some of our other volunteers have not been so lucky. At least 8-10 of the other PCTs have gone up to the infirmary for treatment in the past 2 days--an alarming trend for sure!
Today in gardening we got to plant our veggies. The main season for gardening here is during the cold season even though it may seem counter intuitive to lay down a garden in the middle of November, that's how it goes here. I planted tomatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, lettuce and sweet peppers. It is unlikely, however, that I will see any fruits of my labor before I am sworn in and placed at my site on December 30.
I find out what village I will be living in for the rest of my term of service on December 1 (Happy Birthday to Lauren!), so that is a big day for me. After we get assigned our sites we go out and spend a week at them in early December, so I will have a really good idea of what my service will look like after that.
I hope all is well back in Michigan or wherever this letter may find you. While I love being and working overseas, I always miss my hometown, my family, and my friends immensely.
--Michael
Fifteen days down; 784 to go! Things are cooling down here in Niger, the weather becomes tolerable around 5pm, and it is getting legitimately cold at night. I finally broke out my light sleeping bag. I am adjusting to life in my town. We did a tour of the village the other day, and now I can navigate the streets confidently in the pitch black that blankets the town at about 7:30pm each night. Suddenly where the moon is and what cycle it is in has become very important. While the moon has been relatively bright for the past few nights, the moon is rising later and later each night so when we go to visit our friends after dinner we are often tripping over the garbage littering the streets. I have been playing lots of cards in the past week. My roommate, Matt, gave his cards to our kids to play with; big mistake. In less than 5 days half-eaten cards had found their way all over my family's compound. The queen of spades somehow found its way 3 blocks down the street. To avoid my kids, some of us have been meeting for games in our huts. I taught a bunch of fellow PCTs how to play Up and Down the River and now we play it almost everyday. We find ourselves avoiding the children a lot. Don't get me wrong, the kids are great, and they are really good and really patient teachers, but there comes a point when you don't want 6 very dirty, naked African children grabbing for your hands and asking for your camera. The novelty of friendly African children has completely worn off. We were sitting in our test gardens yesterday, and a group of Zarma-speaking children stood at the fence screaming, "FoFoFoFo!" (hello) "Comment to t'appelle" which means, "what is your name?" in French and is the only French any of these kids speak. We ignored them for 1/2 hour.
I have been reading tons since I got here. I finished Birds without Wings and polished off Blue Like Jazz in less than 2 days. It was really good, thanks, Diana! This, however, means I have already halved my supply of books (so send more!)
We all look forward to the core days we have on Tuesdays and Fridays. The name of our training site in Hausa means "top of the rock". We like it because we can eat a lot of fruits and veggies, spend a few minutes with air conditioning, and we can behave like Americans for a few hours. After our language and shots are done, we change into shorts, put our Ipods on speakers and play volleyball for 2 hours. Yesterday was a special core day because the American Ambassador came to speak to us. She is a stately African-American woman who is nearly finished with her time in the Foreign Service. We got to ask her lots of questions and she gave us some hope that the travel ban to Agader would be lifted. She also told me that 15% or so of Foreign Service officers are former PCVs so that gave me a lot of hope for getting in to the Foreign Service after my PC service. Ambassador Allen gave all of us her card and stayed for lunch with us. There was meat in our rice for lunch, and for dessert we all got a meningitis shot! After lunch she had to go to a meeting with the Prime Minister; things are not well in Nigerien politics.
Now I am on Demystification, aka 'demyst'. This is the period where we leave our training town and spend 5 days with a real PCV in the field. My "demystifier" is named Errin and her site is in the Dosso region. Her village is 10 km from the main road and any electricity. The cool thing about this area is the giraffes. We got dropped off by the PC "magic bus" (magic because it has air conditioning!) off the side of the road where Errin met us. She told us that we would be walking 10K out to her village. Luckily, a few other PCVs showed up and wanted to go out to see the giraffes. One of the PCVs had her parents visiting her and they wanted to see the sites. The very last herd of West African giraffes lives in this region. There are only about 150 of these types of giraffes left in the world, and they are all here in Niger. We all hopped on the bandwagon and drove out to the bush for a giraffe safari. My fellow demystee, Alison, and I were sitting in the back of an SUV driving through the bumpy fields We were warned not to lean back or we would risk the backdoor latch failing and falling out on to the dirt. After 20 minutes our guide pointed right and suddenly we were in a herd of 13 West African giraffes. It was amazing! Here we were in the middle of the bush chilling next to a herd of endangered giraffes. There was a baby between 1-6 months old in the herd; it was really cute. It was a surreal experience; giraffes are really mellow creatures. You can walk right up to them, maybe 20-30 meters away. They stare at you like a confused puppy, and then they keep eating. I took tons of pictures! Following our mini-safari, the other PCV's dropped us off in Errin's village, thankfully sparing us the walk. Her village is considered the epicenter of nowhere because the water table is so low and there are few water sources around here. The town well is 50 meters deep and women can pull no more than 7 buckets without exhausting themselves. Errin tried once but it tore up her hands so now she leaves it to the locals. Errin has her own concession with a shade hangar, small hut, latrine, and a pet cat named gutter. Her hut is surrounded by a millet stalk fence which has collapsed 3 times in the last year. Last time the neighbor's cows came and ate her roof. Her millet-stalk door had fallen apart so, after playing some cards, we set to work making her a new door. It took us about an hour, but eventually we threw together a sturdy door out of millet and a few strips of cloth. The next day we were toured around the village. It took a few hours because literally everyone and their cousin insisted upon greeting us and inviting us to sit. We met the chief of the village, a wide-eyed friendly old man who, according to Errin, sits under a big tree and reads the Koran all day, although we really have no idea how much Arabic he actually understands. Various aid organizations are active in this village. The EU has build a grain bank and an Islamic aid organization built a foot pump at one of the wells and a health clinic that is occasionally staffed.
All of the PCVs I have encountered comment on how clean and "fresh off the plane" we are. Alison and I have likewise been observing how "weathered" all of the PCVs look. Their t-shirts are streaked and faded in the sun with holes stitched up with sewing kits. I am learning new things like "sun washing" clothes which really doesn't wash them but keeps them from smelling too badly. Or, if you put your water bottle in a clay jar filled with water, it will stay cool even in the heat.
For dinner we managed to put together some spaghetti-type stuff. After we had finished eating, the neighbor boy brought over some locust he had caught and cooked up for us. We were obligated to try them as that same boy had tried some almond M&M's Alison had brought for Errin. He was convinced the M&M's were poison, but he ate them anyway. The locust he brought were fried or something because they tasted like a bad potato chip. After that ordeal passed, we sat out on mats and stared at the stars until 11pm. I managed to get a hold of mom & dad on Sunday, and I found out I passed the Foreign Service Exam, but I don't know how to get to an interview when I am held up in the middle of nowhere.
On Tuesday we got up before the sun came up around 6am. We were meeting up with the other PCVs at the Peace Corps hostel. However, in order to get to the road, we needed to hike 11 km through the open bush to get to the road. If we left much after 7, it would get too hot and we might not be able to go. We got everything in the backpacks and left by 6:45am. We arrived at the road 2 hours later just as the heat was setting in. A Nigerien man flagged down a bush taxi for us. Nigerien bush taxis are just larger than a VW bus and have the approximate body structure of a poorly-constructed tin can. Errin, Alison, and I, as well as 16 other Africans, smashed into this mobile death trap. Errin told us that she once had to sit next to a woman with a bucket full of dismembered goat parts on her lap. After a very hot hour ride, we arrived at our destination and made our way to the hostel. At the hostel I stocked up on books and met lots of current PCVs.
On Wednesday we bussed into Niamey. There is one "foreigner" store and restaurant there; we were so famished that we ordered pizza and burgers at 9am.
I don't know if any of you have been paying attention to the political situation in Niger, but things are not well here. We only get snippets of news from the BBC or other volunteers, but apparently government leaders are behaving in a way that the other countries in the region find undemocratic. In the past Niger has set the example for democracy in the area. There has been free and fair elections here for years now. Therefore, what is happening now is considered a big deal: ECOAS is upset with Niger and some states are talking about sanctions. So keep Niger in your thoughts and pay attention to the news because Niger is really exploring some new territory here.
Being in Niger has taught me so much already about the little things. Mirrors, for example, are a little thing that we never really think about, but when you remove it from your life, looking in a mirror becomes a strange luxury. Little bits of American food or candy are priceless gems here. All of the PCTs share religiously. One of my friends got a package from home and the first thing she did was pass around the dried apricots and cheddar flavored snacks. Another big thing that we miss immensely here is cheese! I never realized how much I love cheese until now. All of the goat/cow/sheep milk here potentially has TB in it, so we can't drink any unprocessed milk or cheese (which is 90% of what is available here). We are essentially getting only one of the food groups consistently, that being breads and cereals; everything else just does not exist for at least 20 miles in all directions. To help out our bodies, Peace Corps has us on prenatal vitamins, but that can only do so much. I have already dropped 12 or so pounds, but I am not yet sick. Some of our other volunteers have not been so lucky. At least 8-10 of the other PCTs have gone up to the infirmary for treatment in the past 2 days--an alarming trend for sure!
Today in gardening we got to plant our veggies. The main season for gardening here is during the cold season even though it may seem counter intuitive to lay down a garden in the middle of November, that's how it goes here. I planted tomatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, lettuce and sweet peppers. It is unlikely, however, that I will see any fruits of my labor before I am sworn in and placed at my site on December 30.
I find out what village I will be living in for the rest of my term of service on December 1 (Happy Birthday to Lauren!), so that is a big day for me. After we get assigned our sites we go out and spend a week at them in early December, so I will have a really good idea of what my service will look like after that.
I hope all is well back in Michigan or wherever this letter may find you. While I love being and working overseas, I always miss my hometown, my family, and my friends immensely.
--Michael
Old Update #1
As the current blog administrator, I have been asked to post the letters Michael sends to me. It took until last week for me to get any letters after the one he sent on day 2 of his Nigerien experience...then I got 3 all at once. He has since posted "live" last week but has asked that I still post the "old news" because he invested so much time in sharing his experiences with you, his followers. I am posting these in reverse order, and I may not get them all done at one time, so keep checking back! Grab a beverage and get comfie; these are long entries!--the mom--
10/26/09
Dear friends and family,
I have been in Niger for only four days now and I have enough strange and interesting cultural experiences to fill an encyclopedia. I should start by saying the the Peace Corps is hard, very hard. Two days ago I moved in with my host family. Our place is a large concession with 2 trees, a garden, 2 adobe buildings and a grass hut. There is also a pit latrine and an animal enclosure propped up against the tall walls that surround our house. Our place is way on the outside of the town. It is on the side of town with the "lake" on it. By "lake" I mean seasonal water hole that is at best a pond and at worst a glorified mud puddle. It is the end of the wet season, so the water hole is rather full with reddish-brown water that actually looks rather gross. My family consists of a mom, dad, four young children between the ages of 3 and 12, three sheep, ten hens, and two very loud roosters that wake me up at 5am. My roommate, Matt, and I live in the grass hut in the middle of our concession. There is a little grass fence surrounding our hut. We keep our stuff in the hut and sleep outside. There is a padlock on the hut, but I doubt it would dissuade any potential robbers as the walls are made out of dried millet stalks. The lizards have already found their way in! The first thing my host family did was to give me a new name. My Nigerien name is Habibou (Ha-bee-boo). I was named after the youngest of my brothers, an adorable little boy who runs around all day wearing only a tank top and has a huge protein deficiency. We spent our first day in the village exploring with an armada of young African assistants carrying our water bottles and monopolizing our cameras. We have our own money for breakfast each morning, and we go down the main drag for some good eats. The only road with any stores is the main "paved" road running out of Niamey and some of the huts there have electricity. My favorite breakfast so far is a chilled yogurt drink that comes in a bag. It costs 100 CFA (about 20 cents).
Lunch and dinner are served at our host family's house. Eating in Niger is a very interesting experience. We sit on mats in the dirt in a circle. Dinner comes on a massive platter; my host mom generally uses a colossal pizza pan. Then we all eat out of the same dish with our hands. I'm serious. This presents a host of potentially embarrassing issues. Generally the food is served really hot, and I have already scalded the tips of my fingers on overheated rice. It is recommended that you mash the food into a ball in the palm of your hand because your plam can take more heat; this means you must literally shove your whole hand into the same dish everyone else is eating out of. Once you have the food in your hand, one is presented with the challenge of getting it to your mouth. I am a messy eater to begin with, but trying to eat rice or small bits of pasta with your hands while seated on the ground has taken me to an entirely new catagory of messiness. Once I am finally done eating, there is food everywhere: on my face, on my pants, on the ground, in my hair, etc. It looks like someone dropped a small grenade into the dish. Once the food is to your mouth, you still have to get it inside. Nigeriens can gracefully pop their balls of rice into their mouths; I essentially wipe my food all over my face in order to get any inside. Additionally, we are almost invariably overserved. The dish served to Matt, me and the father was about 1 1/2 inches deep with rice over the whole pizza pan. It is all I can do to just polish off a tiny corner of the pan. Once we have finished we are expected to take our bucket shower and go to bed.
It is really hot in Niger. We are moving into the "cold" season and it is still unbearable everyday from about 12noon-4pm. In the states we can escape the heat by going inside to the basement or taking a cold shower. In Niger there is no escape. There is no where to go and cool off for a bit. No cold shower; not even cold drinks. The heat is everywhere. The best one can do in the hot hours is find a shady spot and bed down for a while hoping there is a breeze. I have started learning the Hausa language and tomorrow is our first big day of lessons. There is a lot of importance placed on learning it. My host family has been drilling me on random vocabulary that I can't make sense of. I need to attain an intermediate level comprehension of Hausa in the next 9-11 weeks or I cannot be placed at a service site for the next 2 years. It is a lot of pressure, but I keep thinking that, if you put together enough heat and pressure you will get something beautiful out of it. :>)
It keeps occurring to me how fitting the colors of the Nigerien flag are. The orange-brown on the top is the color of all the dirt and sand here. The pale green is the color of the Gao and Eucalyptus trees that are everywhere and the white is the color of the blinding sunlight that bakes this place 12 hours a day.
The Peace Corps is very concious of the health of the volunteers. We get lots of shots; today we got typhoid and rabies #1, and there are more to come. The main concern of our med staff is 'Mr D.' coming to visit us. Mr. D., aka diarrhea, is a serious problem in Niger because there are a plethora of water and food borne pathogens that can cause it. Today one of our doctors used the "Welcome to Niger" poster that was made for us to list all Mr. D's possible causes. For every 100 PCV's ther are 175 reported cases of severe acute diarrhea per year. Because Niger is so dry, Mr. D is no laughing matter as it can very quickly lead to dehydration. We are accustomed now to hearing horror stories about Mr. D visiting PCV's at the worst possible times, i.e. when crammed into a bush taxi with 18 other people. This phenomenon has been termed "riding it hot" by other PCV's. If Mr. D does pay me a visit, we are all trained to use our intestinal pathogen detector kit" to submit a stool sample to the lab in Niamey for further analysis. In addition to our shots and anti-diarrheal precautions, we are all on 2 types of malarial meds. The first is a daily green pill that makes the skin extremely sensative to sunlight. Good thing Niger is not a sunny country! :>) Luckily we only have to be on it for 2 weeks. The other is a weekly pill whose side effects are similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, in particular vivid, crazy dreams. This I need to take for my entire service. I am not sure if it is affecting me yet, but I did have a dream last night about trying to buy an advanced electric hot water heater for $3045. Tuesday is market day in our town, and it is pretty much chaos. Everyone seems to have brought all their livestock to the center of town for some reason. I have never seen so many skinny cows and overladen donkeys. People bring their various products and set them up in stalls made of sticks. I saw piles of clothing just like the stuff I baled in Holland being sold right next to traditional fabrics. There are large portions of goats and sheep hanging from crossbeams, completely skinned except for their tails. The whole area is under the continuous assault of flies which are ever-present in rainy season. Walking through the village it almost seems like a big step back in time. It seems like life has been like this here for hundreds of years, and it has changed very little. The only difference is the garbage. There is trash everywhere on the street and most of it is non-compostable cheap plastics. There is plastic garbage all over, and there does not appear to be any organized way to dispose of it. Some big heaps of trash have begun forming in abandoned houses and dead-end alleys, but I still feel guilty disposing of my trash on the ground.
My Peace Corps group thus far is great. There were supposed to be 42 of us but 3 never made it to staging, one girl was told at the Niamey airport of a family matter and was rushed home, and another girl gave up after 2 days, before we were placed with families. The attrition rate for Peace Corps Niger is really high. A past group lost almost 50% of its members over the 2 years. It is testament to how difficult things can be here. Niger is also Mr. D's favorite place to visit of all the PC countries. However, I cannot imagine any of the remaining 37 would leave at this point. We are all becoming very close, and we are all interesting and motivated people. All of my fellow PC trainees (PCTs) live with various families in the area. It is really good to meet up with them occasionally and tell stories. On the first night we were with the host families, one of the girls' mother had a baby. In Nigerien culture it is considered shameful for a woman to cry out during childbirth, so the PCTs did not know the baby was born until the next morning. Another family celebrated the arrival of their PCTs by slaughtering 6 goats and leaving their severed heads in the courtyard overnight. I have not had the pleasure of slaughtering an animal, although I think one of our chickens might get the axe soon. Another PCT complained that the rooster woke her up in the morning and returned home to find she was eating it for dinner. I can only hope my rooster meets the same fate soon.
Here are some other things I have learned in and about Niger:
1. Goats taste like they smell
2. Everything is cheap except postage
3. Assume everything is contaminated with Giardia or E-coli
4. Everyone likes Obama
5. pooping in a hole the size of a tin can is not easy
6. Toilet paper is not native to the area
7. Chew with caution
8. clothing for children under the age of 7 is completely optional
9. Niger has more wildlife than you would expect
10. poop is a common and very serious topic of conversation among PCTs
There is so much more to talk about; it seems the further from America I go the more interesting things there are to write about. I am sorry my blog posts are not up to the same standard as they once were, but without the luxury of a word processor, it is impossible to properly organize and edit my thoughts as I did before. I hope this post/letter finds you all well. I think about home all the time; I am confident that the Chips (CMU Chippewas) have continued to dominate the gridiron, and I hope for the success of MSU at the expense of OSU. It is strange how no one here has even heard of the things that are so important to us Americans. Please write lots.
Love you all,
Habibou
10/26/09
Dear friends and family,
I have been in Niger for only four days now and I have enough strange and interesting cultural experiences to fill an encyclopedia. I should start by saying the the Peace Corps is hard, very hard. Two days ago I moved in with my host family. Our place is a large concession with 2 trees, a garden, 2 adobe buildings and a grass hut. There is also a pit latrine and an animal enclosure propped up against the tall walls that surround our house. Our place is way on the outside of the town. It is on the side of town with the "lake" on it. By "lake" I mean seasonal water hole that is at best a pond and at worst a glorified mud puddle. It is the end of the wet season, so the water hole is rather full with reddish-brown water that actually looks rather gross. My family consists of a mom, dad, four young children between the ages of 3 and 12, three sheep, ten hens, and two very loud roosters that wake me up at 5am. My roommate, Matt, and I live in the grass hut in the middle of our concession. There is a little grass fence surrounding our hut. We keep our stuff in the hut and sleep outside. There is a padlock on the hut, but I doubt it would dissuade any potential robbers as the walls are made out of dried millet stalks. The lizards have already found their way in! The first thing my host family did was to give me a new name. My Nigerien name is Habibou (Ha-bee-boo). I was named after the youngest of my brothers, an adorable little boy who runs around all day wearing only a tank top and has a huge protein deficiency. We spent our first day in the village exploring with an armada of young African assistants carrying our water bottles and monopolizing our cameras. We have our own money for breakfast each morning, and we go down the main drag for some good eats. The only road with any stores is the main "paved" road running out of Niamey and some of the huts there have electricity. My favorite breakfast so far is a chilled yogurt drink that comes in a bag. It costs 100 CFA (about 20 cents).
Lunch and dinner are served at our host family's house. Eating in Niger is a very interesting experience. We sit on mats in the dirt in a circle. Dinner comes on a massive platter; my host mom generally uses a colossal pizza pan. Then we all eat out of the same dish with our hands. I'm serious. This presents a host of potentially embarrassing issues. Generally the food is served really hot, and I have already scalded the tips of my fingers on overheated rice. It is recommended that you mash the food into a ball in the palm of your hand because your plam can take more heat; this means you must literally shove your whole hand into the same dish everyone else is eating out of. Once you have the food in your hand, one is presented with the challenge of getting it to your mouth. I am a messy eater to begin with, but trying to eat rice or small bits of pasta with your hands while seated on the ground has taken me to an entirely new catagory of messiness. Once I am finally done eating, there is food everywhere: on my face, on my pants, on the ground, in my hair, etc. It looks like someone dropped a small grenade into the dish. Once the food is to your mouth, you still have to get it inside. Nigeriens can gracefully pop their balls of rice into their mouths; I essentially wipe my food all over my face in order to get any inside. Additionally, we are almost invariably overserved. The dish served to Matt, me and the father was about 1 1/2 inches deep with rice over the whole pizza pan. It is all I can do to just polish off a tiny corner of the pan. Once we have finished we are expected to take our bucket shower and go to bed.
It is really hot in Niger. We are moving into the "cold" season and it is still unbearable everyday from about 12noon-4pm. In the states we can escape the heat by going inside to the basement or taking a cold shower. In Niger there is no escape. There is no where to go and cool off for a bit. No cold shower; not even cold drinks. The heat is everywhere. The best one can do in the hot hours is find a shady spot and bed down for a while hoping there is a breeze. I have started learning the Hausa language and tomorrow is our first big day of lessons. There is a lot of importance placed on learning it. My host family has been drilling me on random vocabulary that I can't make sense of. I need to attain an intermediate level comprehension of Hausa in the next 9-11 weeks or I cannot be placed at a service site for the next 2 years. It is a lot of pressure, but I keep thinking that, if you put together enough heat and pressure you will get something beautiful out of it. :>)
It keeps occurring to me how fitting the colors of the Nigerien flag are. The orange-brown on the top is the color of all the dirt and sand here. The pale green is the color of the Gao and Eucalyptus trees that are everywhere and the white is the color of the blinding sunlight that bakes this place 12 hours a day.
The Peace Corps is very concious of the health of the volunteers. We get lots of shots; today we got typhoid and rabies #1, and there are more to come. The main concern of our med staff is 'Mr D.' coming to visit us. Mr. D., aka diarrhea, is a serious problem in Niger because there are a plethora of water and food borne pathogens that can cause it. Today one of our doctors used the "Welcome to Niger" poster that was made for us to list all Mr. D's possible causes. For every 100 PCV's ther are 175 reported cases of severe acute diarrhea per year. Because Niger is so dry, Mr. D is no laughing matter as it can very quickly lead to dehydration. We are accustomed now to hearing horror stories about Mr. D visiting PCV's at the worst possible times, i.e. when crammed into a bush taxi with 18 other people. This phenomenon has been termed "riding it hot" by other PCV's. If Mr. D does pay me a visit, we are all trained to use our intestinal pathogen detector kit" to submit a stool sample to the lab in Niamey for further analysis. In addition to our shots and anti-diarrheal precautions, we are all on 2 types of malarial meds. The first is a daily green pill that makes the skin extremely sensative to sunlight. Good thing Niger is not a sunny country! :>) Luckily we only have to be on it for 2 weeks. The other is a weekly pill whose side effects are similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, in particular vivid, crazy dreams. This I need to take for my entire service. I am not sure if it is affecting me yet, but I did have a dream last night about trying to buy an advanced electric hot water heater for $3045. Tuesday is market day in our town, and it is pretty much chaos. Everyone seems to have brought all their livestock to the center of town for some reason. I have never seen so many skinny cows and overladen donkeys. People bring their various products and set them up in stalls made of sticks. I saw piles of clothing just like the stuff I baled in Holland being sold right next to traditional fabrics. There are large portions of goats and sheep hanging from crossbeams, completely skinned except for their tails. The whole area is under the continuous assault of flies which are ever-present in rainy season. Walking through the village it almost seems like a big step back in time. It seems like life has been like this here for hundreds of years, and it has changed very little. The only difference is the garbage. There is trash everywhere on the street and most of it is non-compostable cheap plastics. There is plastic garbage all over, and there does not appear to be any organized way to dispose of it. Some big heaps of trash have begun forming in abandoned houses and dead-end alleys, but I still feel guilty disposing of my trash on the ground.
My Peace Corps group thus far is great. There were supposed to be 42 of us but 3 never made it to staging, one girl was told at the Niamey airport of a family matter and was rushed home, and another girl gave up after 2 days, before we were placed with families. The attrition rate for Peace Corps Niger is really high. A past group lost almost 50% of its members over the 2 years. It is testament to how difficult things can be here. Niger is also Mr. D's favorite place to visit of all the PC countries. However, I cannot imagine any of the remaining 37 would leave at this point. We are all becoming very close, and we are all interesting and motivated people. All of my fellow PC trainees (PCTs) live with various families in the area. It is really good to meet up with them occasionally and tell stories. On the first night we were with the host families, one of the girls' mother had a baby. In Nigerien culture it is considered shameful for a woman to cry out during childbirth, so the PCTs did not know the baby was born until the next morning. Another family celebrated the arrival of their PCTs by slaughtering 6 goats and leaving their severed heads in the courtyard overnight. I have not had the pleasure of slaughtering an animal, although I think one of our chickens might get the axe soon. Another PCT complained that the rooster woke her up in the morning and returned home to find she was eating it for dinner. I can only hope my rooster meets the same fate soon.
Here are some other things I have learned in and about Niger:
1. Goats taste like they smell
2. Everything is cheap except postage
3. Assume everything is contaminated with Giardia or E-coli
4. Everyone likes Obama
5. pooping in a hole the size of a tin can is not easy
6. Toilet paper is not native to the area
7. Chew with caution
8. clothing for children under the age of 7 is completely optional
9. Niger has more wildlife than you would expect
10. poop is a common and very serious topic of conversation among PCTs
There is so much more to talk about; it seems the further from America I go the more interesting things there are to write about. I am sorry my blog posts are not up to the same standard as they once were, but without the luxury of a word processor, it is impossible to properly organize and edit my thoughts as I did before. I hope this post/letter finds you all well. I think about home all the time; I am confident that the Chips (CMU Chippewas) have continued to dominate the gridiron, and I hope for the success of MSU at the expense of OSU. It is strange how no one here has even heard of the things that are so important to us Americans. Please write lots.
Love you all,
Habibou
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Niger
It’s true, after only six fabulous weeks in Niger, I am leaving. Rather than throwing all of my thoughts into an incoherent letter for my mother to copy down, I wanted to take a few hours to write something a bit more personal and organized, I think Niger deserves it. Niger is not an easy place to like. Most of the country is empty and featureless. Aside from the occasional mesa rising a few meters off the Sahel, there is literally nothing as far as you can see in all directions. Niger has no lakes, one river, and no coastline. The earth is either hard like concrete or thick with dusty sand. There are three things in Niger that make life here extremely uncomfortable. The first thing is dust, it gets into everything. I feel it in my hair, see it caking my feet and taste it when I eat the food. By American standards, there is nothing that is clean. In all honesty I would consider my kitchen floor cleaner than almost any surface in this entire country because as soon as you “clean” something a bug crawls on it, a breeze brings in a fresh coat of dust or a dirty child picks it up and starts playing with it. The second is the heat. When I came to Niger, the ‘mini-hot season’ was ending and cold season was moving in and for the first 2 weeks I seriously wondered if I was going to make it. None of us brought reliable thermometers, but the estimates for daily highs ranged between 105 and 120. I spent hours sitting quietly in my shaded Hausa class with beads of sweat dripping down my back and legs. All that heat and sweat requires lots of water and it is in short supply here. My family gets their water in buckets carried on their heads from a well about 600 meters from my house. Once it is there it needs to be filtered and bleached before Peace Corps considers it safe to drink. The result is about 8 liters of water that is already at body temperature and tastes like a swimming pool. Thing number three is the food. It is not that the food here is all bad. Don’t get me wrong there are some great tasting dishes that my host mother can make and I am developing a fondness for the taste of goat. The problem comes in the nutrition. All the foods available here are heavy in carbohydrates and low in almost everything else. It is like I am easting from only one of the five food groups. It isn’t that Nigerians don’t like other foods, they just don’t have them. You couldn’t buy them for $100. As a result I have lost a lot of weight. While we have been consolidated at our compound, the cooking staff has thankfully been insulating us from the Nigerian staples like millet and sorghum and providing us with some highly appreciated fruits and meats, but that is far from typical.
If you can get past those things, Niger may be paradise. The people here are more welcoming, more helpful, and happier than any people anywhere. The villages are quaint and idealic. Niger is a rare gem because it is so untouched by mass media and consumer culture. People here live and work just as they have for hundreds of years. Modernization has almost completely skipped over Niger leaving the land and its people unpolluted and unexploited. It is really easy to tell where the ideas and materials of the outside world have seeped in, mostly because there is garbage everywhere. Electricity and access to factory products has brought plastics which after being used are dumped casually in the road. Because our town is on a main road it has been exposed to a lot of ‘stuff’ from factories in Niamey and abroad. Thus, the garbage problem has come with it. Smaller less accessible villages are clean little islands of humanity on the open Sahel. These observations have led me to challenge allot of my conceptions of what development or aid means. Living and working in a village, I have tried to ask myself: “If I lived here, what could I do to help.” In many cases, the answer is nothing. Except for helping villages improve their own education, nutrition, and personal health, Nigerians really don’t need anything more. All the big economic data about GDP per capita and average daily incomes is completely irrelevant and frankly unhelpful when it comes to ‘helping’ the people of Niger. Who cares if the people live in huts made out of mud or millet? Enclosed areas are usually too hot to stay in and people live almost completely out doors. In many ways Nigerians have better lives than Americans simply because they know who they are and are content with what they have.
In a way I was expecting Niger to be like Turkey. In Turkey, everyday you step out the door it is an adventure. Niger is not like that at all. Life here is predictable, slow, and simple. The difference is that Niger changes who you are. The person who got on the plane in Philadelphia would not be able to make it for six weeks in Niger. I had to adapt, I had too change. I had to become someone who considers a bathroom luxury if there is a toilet in it; someone who can eat rice that bugs were crawling in; someone who is willing to walk all the way across town to buy a little cold water in a bag. Someone who can take whatever is thrown at him. I had to take to heart the Hausa phrase “Sai Hankori” or ‘have patience’ because in so many instances patience is the only thing there is.
Since it is likely none of us will ever see Niger again, the staff decided to let us go out with a bang. Our consolidation was lifted on Friday, just in time for the Muslim holiday of Tabaski and we were given one last day to spend time with our Nigerian families. Tabaski celebrates the near sacrifice of Ishmael by his father Abraham, a story that we would normally associate with Isaac but whatever. The celebration begins with a big prayer in a millet field followed by the sacrificing of a ram, mimicking the sacrifice made for Isaac/Ishmael’s sake some 4000 years ago. After prayer the people return to their homes where an absolute slaughter fest ensues. Practically every family in town slaughters another ram in their homes and eats it for the next two days. In my home we had three rams, two belonged to neighbors and the third was for us. The rams had spent a few days tied up next to the latrine and I had grown at least somewhat attached to the smallest one because he liked to be scratched on top of his head. Thus when the man in the white coat came with a knife I choose not to watch as my host father tied its legs and killed it. The experience was made even more unpleasant due to the fact that we were served lunch as the poor sheep was skinned not ten meters from where we were eating. After lunch I walked around town and observed as dozens of goats were strung up with sticks and placed over fires. There were parts of sheep all over. Horns littered the streets, small children carried around skins and heads, and intestines were hung out to dry on the clotheslines next to skirts and pants. Very little meat is actually consumed on Tabaski because of how long the skewered remains take to fully cook. By dinnertime most good mothers (including mine) had spiced and cooked the innards into charred but chewy morsels. They were served stone cold with plain rice. Tasty.
Once Tabaski was over we returned to the compound to await our departure. Rather than sit on our hands for a week while Peace Corps gets all their ducks in a row, we were enrolled in French classes and prepared various events to absorb as much Nigerian culture as physically possible. These included a Nigerian fashion show, Q & A sessions, a mock Olympics, and a day trip to Niamey. French classes quickly degenerated into chaos. Our class met once before we started playing cards and just chatting, only in French of course. We learned a West African card game called Huit Americain and talked about the state of Nigerian politics. Many of us just skipped class. A group of trainees planned a bunch of American games for us to play with our Hausa and Zarma teachers. Watching a group of clueless adult Nigerians play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and musical chairs to a remix of Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back” have to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I will miss Niger so much, but there are other plans for me. All I know right now is that I am leaving Sunday night, we have a 28 hour layover in Paris (on the US gov.) and that once I arrive in Madagascar I will be working as an enviroment volunteer working in forests or national parks. It is all very exciting. More later. I miss and love you all
If you can get past those things, Niger may be paradise. The people here are more welcoming, more helpful, and happier than any people anywhere. The villages are quaint and idealic. Niger is a rare gem because it is so untouched by mass media and consumer culture. People here live and work just as they have for hundreds of years. Modernization has almost completely skipped over Niger leaving the land and its people unpolluted and unexploited. It is really easy to tell where the ideas and materials of the outside world have seeped in, mostly because there is garbage everywhere. Electricity and access to factory products has brought plastics which after being used are dumped casually in the road. Because our town is on a main road it has been exposed to a lot of ‘stuff’ from factories in Niamey and abroad. Thus, the garbage problem has come with it. Smaller less accessible villages are clean little islands of humanity on the open Sahel. These observations have led me to challenge allot of my conceptions of what development or aid means. Living and working in a village, I have tried to ask myself: “If I lived here, what could I do to help.” In many cases, the answer is nothing. Except for helping villages improve their own education, nutrition, and personal health, Nigerians really don’t need anything more. All the big economic data about GDP per capita and average daily incomes is completely irrelevant and frankly unhelpful when it comes to ‘helping’ the people of Niger. Who cares if the people live in huts made out of mud or millet? Enclosed areas are usually too hot to stay in and people live almost completely out doors. In many ways Nigerians have better lives than Americans simply because they know who they are and are content with what they have.
In a way I was expecting Niger to be like Turkey. In Turkey, everyday you step out the door it is an adventure. Niger is not like that at all. Life here is predictable, slow, and simple. The difference is that Niger changes who you are. The person who got on the plane in Philadelphia would not be able to make it for six weeks in Niger. I had to adapt, I had too change. I had to become someone who considers a bathroom luxury if there is a toilet in it; someone who can eat rice that bugs were crawling in; someone who is willing to walk all the way across town to buy a little cold water in a bag. Someone who can take whatever is thrown at him. I had to take to heart the Hausa phrase “Sai Hankori” or ‘have patience’ because in so many instances patience is the only thing there is.
Since it is likely none of us will ever see Niger again, the staff decided to let us go out with a bang. Our consolidation was lifted on Friday, just in time for the Muslim holiday of Tabaski and we were given one last day to spend time with our Nigerian families. Tabaski celebrates the near sacrifice of Ishmael by his father Abraham, a story that we would normally associate with Isaac but whatever. The celebration begins with a big prayer in a millet field followed by the sacrificing of a ram, mimicking the sacrifice made for Isaac/Ishmael’s sake some 4000 years ago. After prayer the people return to their homes where an absolute slaughter fest ensues. Practically every family in town slaughters another ram in their homes and eats it for the next two days. In my home we had three rams, two belonged to neighbors and the third was for us. The rams had spent a few days tied up next to the latrine and I had grown at least somewhat attached to the smallest one because he liked to be scratched on top of his head. Thus when the man in the white coat came with a knife I choose not to watch as my host father tied its legs and killed it. The experience was made even more unpleasant due to the fact that we were served lunch as the poor sheep was skinned not ten meters from where we were eating. After lunch I walked around town and observed as dozens of goats were strung up with sticks and placed over fires. There were parts of sheep all over. Horns littered the streets, small children carried around skins and heads, and intestines were hung out to dry on the clotheslines next to skirts and pants. Very little meat is actually consumed on Tabaski because of how long the skewered remains take to fully cook. By dinnertime most good mothers (including mine) had spiced and cooked the innards into charred but chewy morsels. They were served stone cold with plain rice. Tasty.
Once Tabaski was over we returned to the compound to await our departure. Rather than sit on our hands for a week while Peace Corps gets all their ducks in a row, we were enrolled in French classes and prepared various events to absorb as much Nigerian culture as physically possible. These included a Nigerian fashion show, Q & A sessions, a mock Olympics, and a day trip to Niamey. French classes quickly degenerated into chaos. Our class met once before we started playing cards and just chatting, only in French of course. We learned a West African card game called Huit Americain and talked about the state of Nigerian politics. Many of us just skipped class. A group of trainees planned a bunch of American games for us to play with our Hausa and Zarma teachers. Watching a group of clueless adult Nigerians play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and musical chairs to a remix of Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back” have to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I will miss Niger so much, but there are other plans for me. All I know right now is that I am leaving Sunday night, we have a 28 hour layover in Paris (on the US gov.) and that once I arrive in Madagascar I will be working as an enviroment volunteer working in forests or national parks. It is all very exciting. More later. I miss and love you all
Michael
Friday, November 27, 2009
Moving On
Authored by the CBA--mom
Today was Thanksgiving in the United States, but Thanksgiving was also being celebrated by the PC Trainees in Niger. We spoke with Michael and he talked of the feast he was enjoying with the group....mashed potatoes, chicken, and more "yummy food". He said the girls had been cooking all day and it tasted GREAT! He and the group were also enjoying one of their last days in a country he has grown to love in just a few weeks' time. With much regret, he and his group are being relocated next week. He really wants to stay, but there are only more threats in areas where he was supposed to go, so the Peace Corps is abandoning their intentions to expand in Niger (although current volunteers will remain). On to a new frontier! His new home will be in Madagascar! He is not sure what his assignment will be or exactly what he will be doing, but flexibility is the key! He is very thankful that they get to remain in Africa, although the climate and the living conditions will be much different.....seasons, a house, electricity....he will likely be able to do his own blog posts!!!!
There are still many details to be worked out; I will update as I am able. Please hold off sending letters and packages for now---his address will be changing! He assured me that anything enroute will be delivered to him in Madagascar--eventually!
Thanks for all your continued love and support....
Today was Thanksgiving in the United States, but Thanksgiving was also being celebrated by the PC Trainees in Niger. We spoke with Michael and he talked of the feast he was enjoying with the group....mashed potatoes, chicken, and more "yummy food". He said the girls had been cooking all day and it tasted GREAT! He and the group were also enjoying one of their last days in a country he has grown to love in just a few weeks' time. With much regret, he and his group are being relocated next week. He really wants to stay, but there are only more threats in areas where he was supposed to go, so the Peace Corps is abandoning their intentions to expand in Niger (although current volunteers will remain). On to a new frontier! His new home will be in Madagascar! He is not sure what his assignment will be or exactly what he will be doing, but flexibility is the key! He is very thankful that they get to remain in Africa, although the climate and the living conditions will be much different.....seasons, a house, electricity....he will likely be able to do his own blog posts!!!!
There are still many details to be worked out; I will update as I am able. Please hold off sending letters and packages for now---his address will be changing! He assured me that anything enroute will be delivered to him in Madagascar--eventually!
Thanks for all your continued love and support....
Saturday, November 21, 2009
News from the Wanderer
This post is authored by the current blog administrator--mom
When Michael left almost 5 weeks ago, people would ask us, "Are you going to visit?" We would answer with a quick "yes, we're planning to!". This week the answer changed; it became a hesitant, "maybe". As of November 19, the US Dept of State recommends against all travel to Niger at this time. Our answer is now, "maybe we can meet him somewhere in Africa for a vacation!".
He has been living in a safe place and he is well cared for in his current situation, but his movement around the area is limited. In the meantime, he has gotten to know his fellow Trainees well, has learned a lot of new card games and has established himself as a frequent winner of the Catan game that one of the Trainees brought along! I pity those who try to beat him!
He is getting letters and packages and is very appreciative of them. He is pleased to finally have a phone so the parents can call him whenever they want to! I, however, am not getting letters from him--thus the lack of personal posts from the owner of this blog. I hear they are coming.....so stay tuned! There should be more news soon!
When Michael left almost 5 weeks ago, people would ask us, "Are you going to visit?" We would answer with a quick "yes, we're planning to!". This week the answer changed; it became a hesitant, "maybe". As of November 19, the US Dept of State recommends against all travel to Niger at this time. Our answer is now, "maybe we can meet him somewhere in Africa for a vacation!".
He has been living in a safe place and he is well cared for in his current situation, but his movement around the area is limited. In the meantime, he has gotten to know his fellow Trainees well, has learned a lot of new card games and has established himself as a frequent winner of the Catan game that one of the Trainees brought along! I pity those who try to beat him!
He is getting letters and packages and is very appreciative of them. He is pleased to finally have a phone so the parents can call him whenever they want to! I, however, am not getting letters from him--thus the lack of personal posts from the owner of this blog. I hear they are coming.....so stay tuned! There should be more news soon!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Hello from the Bush
Greeting friends and family. I apologize for my lack of posting, but mail home is painfully slow and this is the first access to a computer I have had since my arrival and I only have 10 minutes. Niger is great, Yesterday I went on an impromtu giraffe safari and saw a whole herd. It is super hot here and it is considered the cold season now. I am learning Hausa, eating rice with my hands, and sleeping under the stars. Good news, I passed the foreign service exam! Mom will post more on my adventures soon. I love you all!
Sunday, November 8, 2009
How to get from Holland to Niamey
Authored by Michael on October 23, 2009--two days after departure from Michigan
Dad & I left Holland at 4:15 a.m. EST. I slept maybe 2 hours that night, mostly as a result of nerves. Mom cried when I left which was sweet of her. Everything went smoothly at the airport; I made it through in plenty of time. I went to my gate, sat down next to some guy with ripped jeans and tried unsuccessfully to pass out. I did catch about 30 minutes of sleep waiting for my connection in Milwaukee, WI. When I got to Philadelphia and claimed my luggage, I saw the guy in the ripped jeans near baggage claim. Turns out his name is Aaron; he is a volunteer from Portage, MI! Together we caught the shuttle to the Radisson. By the time we made it to the hotel we were almost late for our meeting so we quick checked in and went to conference room 8.
These are some of the more interesting things I learned at staging in Philly:
1. Camel spiders, native to Niger, are the size of frisbees
2. We were expected to eat lunch before our 6 hour meeting so the 2 egg McMuffins dad bought me in Hudsonville at 4:30 am were clutch
3. You aren't supposed to touch anyone with your left hand
4. All 39 people in my Peace Corps group are super awesome and 5 of them are from MICHIGAN!
5. I am the only male volunteer assigned to agriculture; there are only 6 other guys--and all the girls are very pretty :>)
6. You will get sick in Niger
Once we were finally released from staging at 7pm, we decided to spoil ourselves with one last luxury. Fourteen of us decided on a nearby steakhouse. We all spent an obscene amount of money on an amazing steak filet and glass of red wine. We were all excited and shared lots of rumors about what we might find in the country.
On Thursday we were up and checked out early. We got on some tour buses for a trip to Philly. They parked us at the US Constitution Center, right next to the Mint, Liberty Bell, and Independence Hall. We were marched into a drab government building where we were each given a WHO card, a necessary travel document that makes me feel like I am being featured in a Dr. Seuss novel. We all got yellow fever shots and were led back to our bus. At this point we were abandoned by our training coordinators who bid us good lunch on their way back to D.C. We proceeded to JFK and boarded the 7pm flight to Paris.
I planned on sleeping for most of my trans-Atlantic flight as the in-flight movies were all bad. In addition, a fellow volunteer game me a Dramamine to put me down. My body and the infant of a hasidic Jewish couple had other plans. The Jewish child was screaming for most of the night and the Dramamine was not kicking in. I tried to help it along by drinking 2 things of wine and some liquor but by the time we landed in Paris I was wide awake. After a 2 hour layover, we boarded a flight to Niamey continuing to Ouadougov. O found it somewhat ironic that 80% of the 1st class passengers were Nigerien in fancy suits and the economy class was all Caucasian. After that I began a very strange sleep/consciousness cycle. I don't remember taking off from Paris only suddenly realizing that we were airborne. I chatted occasionally with the 81-year-old missionary on her way to a med clinic (nudge to Grandma). Air France installed a camera under the plane and broadcasted an image of the ground to the video screens of all the passengers. From this I learned that the Sahara desert is very big and dead. Arizona deserts have ground cover and cactus; the Sahara is all nothing, just sand. The screen constantly showed a big collage of neutral colors with no green in sight. The desert continued until the plane was putting down the landing gear and bushes appeared on the sand. The 81-year-old looked down and said, "Wow, look how green it is; you'd better look now because this is the most green you will see here."
We landed at Niamey "Airport" and stopped on the tarmac. Our Airbus 330 was certainly the biggest plane at the place, and I only saw one other plane with a jet engine. We were unloaded onto the tarmac and loaded into buses for the 100 meter trip to the "terminal". I made a quick stop at the men's room only to discover 1 working toilet with no seat, cover, lid or flushing device. Welcome to Africa. We were warmly greeted by Peace Corps staff in the dirt parking lot. All of our luggage was heaped on the back of a pick up truck, and we were smashed into 2 vans for a trip out to our training cite. Even though I was prepared to see rural poverty, I was blown away by what I saw just on the ride out to the training village. I am going to end my post now, but I already have a whole book's worth of stories and experiences to write about, and I have been here just 24 hours. You will have some good reading in the coming weeks and months.
Dad & I left Holland at 4:15 a.m. EST. I slept maybe 2 hours that night, mostly as a result of nerves. Mom cried when I left which was sweet of her. Everything went smoothly at the airport; I made it through in plenty of time. I went to my gate, sat down next to some guy with ripped jeans and tried unsuccessfully to pass out. I did catch about 30 minutes of sleep waiting for my connection in Milwaukee, WI. When I got to Philadelphia and claimed my luggage, I saw the guy in the ripped jeans near baggage claim. Turns out his name is Aaron; he is a volunteer from Portage, MI! Together we caught the shuttle to the Radisson. By the time we made it to the hotel we were almost late for our meeting so we quick checked in and went to conference room 8.
These are some of the more interesting things I learned at staging in Philly:
1. Camel spiders, native to Niger, are the size of frisbees
2. We were expected to eat lunch before our 6 hour meeting so the 2 egg McMuffins dad bought me in Hudsonville at 4:30 am were clutch
3. You aren't supposed to touch anyone with your left hand
4. All 39 people in my Peace Corps group are super awesome and 5 of them are from MICHIGAN!
5. I am the only male volunteer assigned to agriculture; there are only 6 other guys--and all the girls are very pretty :>)
6. You will get sick in Niger
Once we were finally released from staging at 7pm, we decided to spoil ourselves with one last luxury. Fourteen of us decided on a nearby steakhouse. We all spent an obscene amount of money on an amazing steak filet and glass of red wine. We were all excited and shared lots of rumors about what we might find in the country.
On Thursday we were up and checked out early. We got on some tour buses for a trip to Philly. They parked us at the US Constitution Center, right next to the Mint, Liberty Bell, and Independence Hall. We were marched into a drab government building where we were each given a WHO card, a necessary travel document that makes me feel like I am being featured in a Dr. Seuss novel. We all got yellow fever shots and were led back to our bus. At this point we were abandoned by our training coordinators who bid us good lunch on their way back to D.C. We proceeded to JFK and boarded the 7pm flight to Paris.
I planned on sleeping for most of my trans-Atlantic flight as the in-flight movies were all bad. In addition, a fellow volunteer game me a Dramamine to put me down. My body and the infant of a hasidic Jewish couple had other plans. The Jewish child was screaming for most of the night and the Dramamine was not kicking in. I tried to help it along by drinking 2 things of wine and some liquor but by the time we landed in Paris I was wide awake. After a 2 hour layover, we boarded a flight to Niamey continuing to Ouadougov. O found it somewhat ironic that 80% of the 1st class passengers were Nigerien in fancy suits and the economy class was all Caucasian. After that I began a very strange sleep/consciousness cycle. I don't remember taking off from Paris only suddenly realizing that we were airborne. I chatted occasionally with the 81-year-old missionary on her way to a med clinic (nudge to Grandma). Air France installed a camera under the plane and broadcasted an image of the ground to the video screens of all the passengers. From this I learned that the Sahara desert is very big and dead. Arizona deserts have ground cover and cactus; the Sahara is all nothing, just sand. The screen constantly showed a big collage of neutral colors with no green in sight. The desert continued until the plane was putting down the landing gear and bushes appeared on the sand. The 81-year-old looked down and said, "Wow, look how green it is; you'd better look now because this is the most green you will see here."
We landed at Niamey "Airport" and stopped on the tarmac. Our Airbus 330 was certainly the biggest plane at the place, and I only saw one other plane with a jet engine. We were unloaded onto the tarmac and loaded into buses for the 100 meter trip to the "terminal". I made a quick stop at the men's room only to discover 1 working toilet with no seat, cover, lid or flushing device. Welcome to Africa. We were warmly greeted by Peace Corps staff in the dirt parking lot. All of our luggage was heaped on the back of a pick up truck, and we were smashed into 2 vans for a trip out to our training cite. Even though I was prepared to see rural poverty, I was blown away by what I saw just on the ride out to the training village. I am going to end my post now, but I already have a whole book's worth of stories and experiences to write about, and I have been here just 24 hours. You will have some good reading in the coming weeks and months.
Monday, November 2, 2009
A Delightful Fall Day
Mom, the current blog administrator (aka CBA), Dad & sister Lauren had a delightful day! The cell phone rang at 12 noon with a strange number on caller ID. I took a deep breath, answered the call and heard the much awaited words: "Hi mom, it's me". The wandering Westendorp checked in with the family! Thanks to a fellow PCT, he borrowed her cell phone long enough to give me her number so I could call him back on Skype (at my expense, of course!) We were honored to then connect with him on Skype and talk for about 40 minutes. I will give a quick synopsis of the conversation.
-he loves it there!
-it is very hot....temps have reached 122 degrees to his knowledge
-time goes very slowly...he says it seems as though he has been there for 3 months instead of 1 1/2 weeks
-he is enjoying the company of the other PCT's. He said they are quite a compatible bunch
-he is reading a lot
-he lives with a family of 6--2 parents and 4 children between the ages of 3 and 12. The children love the PCT's and cling to them....he's adjusting to that!
-he has a new name Habibou....pronounced Ha-Be-Boo
-he eats a LOT of rice. He is adapting to eating rice with his hand and adjusting to the fact that his hand is not always that clean when he uses it to eat.
-he has encountered the bush taxis but is a little hesitant to ride in them. He says they load them up with 20 or more people, put the chickens and the goats on the top and the cows in the trunk. Definitely a transportation adjustment!
-there are letters en route to me that will, in usual Michael flare, describe his trip there and his first few days. I will post them as soon as they arrive and you will get a better picture through his eyes.
He hopes to get a cell phone at some point that will allow him to communicate with us more regularly. Until then we will wait for the next scheduled communication in 2 weeks.
But for now, we will enjoy THIS day!!
-he loves it there!
-it is very hot....temps have reached 122 degrees to his knowledge
-time goes very slowly...he says it seems as though he has been there for 3 months instead of 1 1/2 weeks
-he is enjoying the company of the other PCT's. He said they are quite a compatible bunch
-he is reading a lot
-he lives with a family of 6--2 parents and 4 children between the ages of 3 and 12. The children love the PCT's and cling to them....he's adjusting to that!
-he has a new name Habibou....pronounced Ha-Be-Boo
-he eats a LOT of rice. He is adapting to eating rice with his hand and adjusting to the fact that his hand is not always that clean when he uses it to eat.
-he has encountered the bush taxis but is a little hesitant to ride in them. He says they load them up with 20 or more people, put the chickens and the goats on the top and the cows in the trunk. Definitely a transportation adjustment!
-there are letters en route to me that will, in usual Michael flare, describe his trip there and his first few days. I will post them as soon as they arrive and you will get a better picture through his eyes.
He hopes to get a cell phone at some point that will allow him to communicate with us more regularly. Until then we will wait for the next scheduled communication in 2 weeks.
But for now, we will enjoy THIS day!!
Monday, October 26, 2009
Safe arrival in Niamey
The team of Nigerian Peace Corps trainees arrived safely in Niamey last week and posed to take a photo for us! The only other news is that they all survived their first African monsoon! Stay tuned for future posts!
the mom--current blog administrator
the mom--current blog administrator
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Chicago, Mount Pleasant, & Grand Rapids
21 Days and counting until I lift off for the Peace Corps and I am really enjoying the time I am getting to spend in and around W. Mich. This weekend I made trips to Chicago, Mt. Pleasant and Grand Rapids. I managed to get myself invited to go to Chicago last Thursday with Ms. Ensink’s AP World History class. Our resident Korean Max Kwon is in the class so I was going under the auspicious label of “chaperone,” although I was more interested in talking with Thelma Ensink and seeing the Art institute than monitoring fifteen mature high school students. On Thursday morning we carpooled to Michigan City and caught the commuter train into town. The day was thankfully uneventful and after a morning in the South Asian and East Asian collections, we were released to explore the museum at will. Although I have an undying interest in world history, my favorite gallery in the art institute is the modern art gallery.
A lot of modern art I don’t understand. For example one artist chose to place bags of kitty litter throughout the room. Another artist spent millions having a bunch of Japanese guys carve a life-size replica of a dead tree trunk he saw in California out of stucco. The fun of modern art for me is that you never know what you will find when you walk into the next room. Although I may not understand a 2 ton carving of a decaying log, it certainly was a surprise to see. There were a few pieces in the modern art section which I did understand were incredibly interesting and powerful. It is like the artist and I are tuned to the same channel mentally so that he can send messages to me through his art. This is also why I prefer to go through the galleries alone, so I can be taken by what I enjoy and not feel the need to explain my fascination.
On Saturday Mom, Dad, Alaina (Aaron’s significant other), and myself piled into the fun bus for a day of athletic spectating. First up was my sister cross country meet in Lowell. Lauren Beth Westendorp is gradually becoming a great cross country runner, and she got her time down to a 24:39 5K. The course was soggy and the air was damp for the entire meet which bore bad tidings of things to come later that day. After packing Lauren back on the bus to Holland we continued on to the fun and excitement in Mt. Pleasant. Central Michigan University is located out in the “Deer & Beer” country of Michigan, a region of the state with which I am only vaguely familiar. While the natural scenery was quite attractive, I felt as though if we broke down we may be eaten by a roaming moose or polar bear. Arriving at CMU’s large and lively campus was a welcome sight. We stopped to stretch out and wait for Aaron to meet us at a 7-11 where various Central students were making their pre-game alcohol selections. Miller Light appeared to be the beverage of choice. Aaron appeared from a building in short order and showed us to his dorm where he needed our help hack-sawing the chain off his bicycle. He also gave me some official team merchandise to sport during the game which was really cool.
Central Michigan has a really cool football program going on in Mt. Pleasant. They have a medium sized but comfortable stadium with lots of fan support. It is a good experience without becoming too overwhelming. Mom had brought up helmet-shaped Jell-o and a pasta salad for tailgating with team parents. Other team moms had brought fried chicken, casserole, and other feast-like dishes. We left tailgating early, however, because warm-up is the only time when Aaron is actually on the field with a football. It was at this point I remembered my best friend from middle school was going to Central for meteorology and after a few well placed phone calls (thanks Obed) I managed to get in contact with him. Cort showed up just after the game started and just as the rain began. As a meteorologist, Cort corrected me as the precipitation we were experiencing was technically “drizzle” not rain. Regardless of what it was, it “drizzle down poured” for a good part of the first half and we all got soaked. The game itself was over before it started. Central was playing Akron, a team from Ohio with a pathetic looking kangaroo for a mascot and an inexperienced quarterback. The game lost its tension when Akron had negative total yardage in their first 4 or 5 drives while Central had racked up 14 points. The final score was 48-21, but the play on the field suggested that Akron should be thankful for losing by a mere 27. After the game Cort left and we met up with Aaron for some late Applebee’s and pleasant family conversation. I spent the drive home using my mother’s phone to send text messages to my little sister demanding that various chores be completed before our arrival. Overall a great day.
On Sunday I took Sally to Grand Rapids for the Artprize contest. I picked her up at the Janssen’s house where she had been enjoying a Sunday meal. Once the Janssen pet cat had been successfully located and returned to its cage we continued onto Grand Rapids. Downtown G-Rap was packed. One artist had just dumped 100,000 paper airplanes off 6 downtown skyscrapers much to the delight of the 20,000 people gathered below. Sometimes places were too crowded to actually enjoy the art that was on display. We located Sally’s restaurant pal Maude and walked through the un-crowded DeVos Place while Maude told us a story about flooding 7 stories of the Days Inn. Hilarious.
This week I am back at Habitat, but at a different house, this house was just started and still needs a roof on top of it.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Cincinnati
It really hasn’t registered upstairs that I am about to leave the developed world for over two years. I haven’t really given myself time to savor my time home. Instead I have been running around the state visiting friends, tying up ends from my Turkey trip, and planning out my next 30 days at home.
One of the big things pressing on me right now is that my Grandpa Westendorp is sick. He was diagnosed with kidney cancer last week. The cancer appears to be aggressive and grandpa has been weakened by a heart problem so he has been suffering allot lately. Grandpa Alphenaar died almost a year and a half ago and I was forced to leave the country before the funeral for school in Paris. Now with Grandpa W in uncertain waters I feel bad leaving the country for so long.
This weekend I made the long journey down to Cincinnati to finish up some paperwork from my Turkey trip and say goodbye to my college friends. My mother, being the dear that she is, left me her tank of a van to take down to Xavier. Although driving 6 hours through rural Indiana and Ohio sounds about as much fun as having a foot amputated, I got my driving directions from NPR.org which came attached to a list of every NPR station along my driving route; transforming my drive from a boring labor to an introspective educational experience.
After getting slightly lost and nearly causing a head on collision in suburban Fort Wayne, I made a pit stop for dinner at Aunt Kim’s house. Kim is my dad’s sister and it had been a long time since I had seen the Fletcher family because of college and my summer travels. Though over half the family was away from home, Kim, my cousin Ryan, and I enjoyed a home cooked meal and updated each other on our lives. Ryan loves baseball and after dinner he wanted to go downtown to see the Ft. Wayne baseball team play and invited me to come along. The Fort Wayne ‘Tin Caps’ were bucking 17 years of truly terrible baseball by making the minor league playoffs. The three of us journeyed downtown to enjoy a few innings of baseball during which the Tin Caps scored and took the lead. Unfortunately I had to leave before the game finished in order to make it to destination before it got too late.
Unlike quality NPR stations like 104.1 in West Michigan which broadcasts the BBC World Service all night long, all the stations in Indiana and Ohio play classical music until the early hours of the morning. This did not make for good listening music so I preoccupied myself by arguing with the commentator on an AM conservative talk show.
Upon my arrival I quickly fell into my comfortable habits when I was back at school with my friends. We wasted 3 hours on Friday playing Frisbee golf through a park, watched long hours of college football on Saturday, and made frequent trips to Chipotle for burritos. On Friday night we had a great quantity of people over to the house I was staying at for a party. I spent so much time talking with my old friends about Turkey and the Peace Corps that by the time I went to bed at 2:30 I was exhausted and completely hoarse.
I had to leave Cincinnati at 7:00AM on Sunday to make it back to Michigan on time for Cousin Bethany’s birthday celebration. My absence at this festivity in the past has resulted in excessive chastisement directed to me by Bethany. Since I was not planning on flying back to Michigan in September of 2010 or 2011 my attendance at this event was essentially mandatory. Additionally, Alphenaar family parties are one of the biggest things I am going to miss when I am away so I really wanted to make it. I also used this opportunity to give my grandmother her 75th birthday present: a 6mm air soft handgun. She has been having trouble keeping deer out of her bird feeders so we are hoping a few bruising air soft pellets will scare them off. This also means my grandmother is going to be stalking her backyard with a pistol, something I would pay good money to see.
I got my staging information today and booked a flight out of Grand Rapids at 6:45 on October 20, 2009.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
ITS HERE
The suspense was awful. A few days ago our neighbors decided to have a tree removed and the sound of large mail-truck-sounding vehicles in front of my house all day was enough to drive me mad. The suspense was partially broken last Thursday when I got an e-mail telling me that I had been accepted and that my package was coming. The e-mail, however, contained no information about where I would be going or when. All the important stuff was in the elusive FedEx envelope.
It arrived on Tuesday. It would have been here on Monday but it was Labor Day and while all of you were out eating hotdogs and enjoying the weather, I was wishing the day would end so normal mail service could resume. I had just returned from my first 7 hours working at the local Habitat for Humanity house. I was contemplating what I would do if yet another day went by without any news when the big white truck came bumbling down the street. I met the FedEx guy half way up the lawn. It was all I could do not to give him a hug. Instead I awkwardly exclaimed, “You have no idea how long I have been waiting for you!” Laughing, he told me he had noticed the envelope was from the Peace Corps and asked me where I was going. “I am about to find out!” I interjected. Sensing the suspense, the FedEx guy waited with me as I tore open the package and shouted “I am going to NIGER!”
When you Google Niger (pronounced “knee-j’air”) the first thing that comes up says “Niger is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, with over 80% of its territory covered by the Sahara desert.” I am going to have my work cut out for me. One of my favorite teachers at Holland Christian spent a year in Niger at one of the schools there so I am looking forward to lunch date with her to discuss what it is like on the ground. The Wikipedia site, which I encourage you to browse through, lists six national languages and 90% of the country is Muslim. The largest city and capital is Niamey, a city of only 1 million people that contains no credit card machines. My over 200 pages of introductory material told me to familiarize myself with the cultivation of peanuts, highland rice, sorghum, and cowpeas before my departure on October 17th.
For the past 24 hours I have been rushing to fill out registration forms, passport and visa applications, medical releases, and reading through manuals. It is amazing how one envelope from Washington can complete change my life. The next 27 months of my life. Communication in Niger is not easy, but I am sure I will find a way to keep this blog updated.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Holland
Holland is a great town. There are sandy beaches, a beautiful lake, tall trees, fresh air, and at least some cultural heritage. What I like most about Holland is that all the people who support and care about me can be found here (or at least nearby). These amazing people include Mary T who drove six hours round trip to come get me from the airport with my mother, Dan and Diana who are always ready to come play a round of cards, and Aunt Mary who always amazes me with how much she cares, just to name a few.
This trip home, however, has been somewhat spoiled by what is going on in my life and it has left me feeling anxious and frustrated. The major problem is that I don’t know why I am here. Am I here on a short term visit or am I here for a more extended stay? This question stems from the absolute silence coming from the Peace Corps Placement Office. I am nominated for a project leaving in late October and it is likely that I will be invited on to a 27-month mission in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, likelihood is not certainty and there is a possibility that my project could be significantly postponed. So what will I do then? Do I get a job? Do I try to get into grad school? Do I just wait around?
So I sit here in Holland living out of my mother’s basement with no purpose, and no plans past next weekend. It is a college graduate’s nightmare. Not knowing why I am here has affected all of my plans and activities. I feel paralyzed by a sense of powerlessness. Should I make arrangements to visit friends and family I will not see for three years or schedule job interviews? What do I tell other people about my future plans? My mother keeps telling me that God is teaching me patience, but considering I was originally told this information would arrive in sometime in April I think I am entitled to a little anxiousness.
Against the good advice of probably every psychologist, I have been hiding from my problems by staying busy. Since arriving at home my time has been divided between landscaping the Church Parsonage, baby sitting, mowing lawns, volunteering at the city mission, and re-decorating my little brother’s bedroom. My mother had always planned on redoing Aaron’s bedroom once he left for college, along with about 18 other household projects. However, this particular project was quickly moved to the top of the priority list when my mother arrived home from work to discover that I had ripped all the wallpaper off the walls. Because I volunteered to do the majority of the labor, I was co-opted onto the decorating committee where I obstinately refused to lift a single paintbrush unless I was allowed to paint something colorful. My suggestions for variations on purple, blue and yellow were quickly vetoed by the family matriarch. The deadlock was eventually broken when we agreed upon a good color for the back wall. Sorry Aaron, I am not telling what color it is you will have to come home and see it for yourself.
My work at the City Mission has also been quite eventful. Everyday the Mission makes the rounds of all the local thrift stores picking up all the junk that even the thrift stores can’t sell. I estimate that 80-90% of the stuff donated to thrift stores eventually ends up at the mission. Once it arrives there, the men living at the mission sort through all the clothes and throw them into massive compactors which crush the clothing into big fabric bricks. These are then exported to a wholesaler in Canada who ships them to poor African nations where the clothes are sold to African merchants who sell it on the streets. This dumping of old American clothing on developing nations destroys domestic textile industry, prevents job creation and only serves to increase foreign dependency. On the other hand, what else can we do with it? At least someone is wearing it. Nothing like a little moral ambiguity to get you up in the morning.
I am working there because there is so much clothing coming in from the thrift stores that the compactors can’t keep up and the growing mountain of used textiles has consumed about one third of the workroom and blocked a major shipping door. The people I have met at the mission could fill a blog post all by themselves. Overall it is a pretty unhappy bunch. There are guys convicted of DUI’s doing their 30 hours of community service, guys who got stuck in the recession and had no where else to turn, and guys who divide their time between working at the mission, AA, and meeting with parole officers. The stories are even more sobering as I consider my own awkward life situation.
I am going to keep blogging as I find out more about my future. Pray that the FedEx man comes soon with a big packet for me!
Saturday, August 22, 2009
London
In a stroke of genius, I booked myself a 17 hour layover in London on my way back from Turkey. I was going to take to Tube into town, have a beer at a pub, a long night sleep, and see a few landmarks before heading back to Holland. It was a fool-proof plan; or so I thought. I had a great last night in Istanbul. I went out for some Nargile with four of my hostel mates from various corners of Northern Europe. It was a fabulous finish to what had been a wonderful time in Turkey.
The next morning I realized how difficult it would be to be a handicapped person in Istanbul. I had two very large wheel-around suitcases weighing 23 and 19 kilos to get to the airport and I had decided to take public transportation to get there. This involved dragging them along a cobblestone street for 400 meters, down the stairs at Taxim Station, up the Stairs at Kabataş, up and down the stairs at the transfer station at Zetinbrounu, and up the escalators at the airport. At each one of these stations there are two turnstiles that require additional lifting. Needless to say by the time I got to Ataturk Airport I was ready to be rid of my additional baggage.
I arrived in London at 7:00 GMT. I found the tube station and got a ticket for downtown. After an hour of repeatedly being instructed to “mind the gap” I got of at Hyde Park Corner station. The hostel I booked was on the other side of park so I started walking. In traditional fashion I got myself lost a few times but somehow managed to find my accommodations. Unfortunately my accommodations were unable to find me on their reservations list and because I had left all my baggage at the airport, I had no way to confirm it to them. Undeterred I found a pub a few blocks away called “The Swan” and decided to think over my options with a pint of ‘London’s Pride’ beer. At the pub I met Ivan, the 26 year old Chemical Engineering Student from the Czech Republic. We spent the next two hours sharing stories, sipping on beer, and chatting with a gaggle of women in their 60’s sitting adjacent to us. The pub shut down at 12:00 so Ivan and I parted ways and I was left to figure out what I was going to do for the night.
With no place to stay I was facing a very long night on the streets of London. No thinking when I left Istanbul I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and the night was getting cold quickly. I eventually decided to find a place to sleep in the park and after an hour of searching I settled on a patch of dirt under a willow tree near the pond. At 2:10 AM after about an hour of uncomfortable shut-eye I was awaken by a hateful pack of geese that had wandered to my side of the lake. Unable to sleep with all the honking I got up to find another bed. At that moment I noticed the police car coming down the road scanning the park with a searchlight. I dove behind a nearby stack of lawn chairs until the police had vacated the area and made a quick dash for the park exit. Finding the gate locked I scaled a low spot in the fence and was deposited onto the streets of London.
Figuring that 2:30 in the morning was as good a time as any to go for a tour; I followed the street signs to Buckingham Palace. I was disappointed to find that the fancy guards with the fuzzy hats were not on duty. Apparently unrelenting dedication to protecting the Queen has its limits. After a quick photo I turned towards the river. The Thames River has to be one of the most disgusting waterways on the planet. Even during the night one can see that the water has the same consistency as a chocolate slushy. After finding the London Eye and The Houses of Parliament I decided to try to get some more sleep. I found a park bench by the river and passed out for another hour.
I was awoken this time because of the cold. The shorts and t-shirt were not cutting it and I was freezing. I got up and walked around for another hour before returning to the same bench for some more sleep. At 6:00 I woke to a stunning sunrise (pictured above) and a hungry tummy. I crossed the river and picked up some yogurt and granola for a few pounds and proceeded to locate some of the sights that I had missed the previous night. I found Westminster Abby, Lancaster Square, Trafalgar Square, Scotland Yard, 10 Downing Street, and the National Gallery. Unfortunately nothing in London opens before 10:00 and I needed to start back towards the airport by then. I made it back to Heathrow by 11:00 and found a couch to pass out on, but instead of sleeping I found myself engaged in a great conversation with a French/Australian University student on his way back to Paris.
When my flight finally lifted off at 2:00 I was still not tired so I indulged in the in-flight movies. Duplicity with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts was OK, but Knowing with Nicholas Cage was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. When we landed in Chicago it was raining (a strange weather phenomenon I was no longer familiar with) and Mom and Mary T were waiting for me at the gate. On the way home the rain got worse making Mary T and I understandably nervous about my mother’s driving. When we finally pulled off the highway to get some Wendy’s we discovered the Indiana town we stopped in had no electricity. We later discovered that the power outage was a result of a TORNADO that struck the city 15 minutes earlier. I finally arrived, exhausted and but safe at 694 Marylane Dr. at 10:45 EST.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Friends, Ferries, Frisbee, and Food Poisoning
Yes it is true. I finally got food poisoning after three months in Turkey. It is 4:00 AM less than 36 hours before I am leaving the country and I am hovering over a toilet puking my guts out because I ate a bad stuffed baked potato for dinner. As a result the prospect of eating food is revolting to me. Today I forced myself to eat some döner in Kadıkoy for lunch but other than that I have been on an all liquid diet. Hopefully tomorrow I will have some of my appetite back.
I am in Istanbul now. My time in Ankara came to an end much too quickly. Suddenly it was Friday and the Krause parents and I were booked on the overnight train. Before we left I get to have some bonding time with Granny and a ‘quiet’ morning at the Krause flat with the çocuklar (kids). Before we left Ankara the whole family, which by now includes me, went down to happy hour at the Embassy. Each Friday during the summer the Embassy throws a social that allows everyone from the American Mission in Turkey to relax and socialize for a few hours. After I sipped through my Newcastle, it was time to go and catch our Train.
Julie and John had never seen Istanbul and were taking advantage of Granny’s presence in the house to take a little coçuklar-free vacation. I needed to get to catch my Tuesday flight out of Istanbul so John booked the three of us in a sleeper compartment with one middle aged Turkish man. We all used this as an opportunity to work on our Turkish and proceeded to subject the poor man to an hour of turkilish small talk. At 11:30 we made a collective decision to convert our seats into four bunks and get some shut-eye. Just as I was falling asleep the Krauses discovered that there was a dining car and pulled me out of bed for late night French fries and beer. Unfortunately all the good beer was gone so we settled for MARIACI a Turkish imitation of Mexican beer that tastes like Nati-Light mixed with a green flavor-ice. I finally got around to sleeping at 12:30 and slept amazingly well for a train bed.
When you book the cheapest hostel you can find, be prepared for an adventure. One can get a pretty good idea of where I am staying from the name alone: “The Chillout Chengo.” Not only is my hostel the cheapest in Istanbul, but it is also located in Beyoğlu, the trendy, nightclub district of Istanbul. Thus while I am far from the tourists and close to the action, sleeping is a distinct problem with all the noise. All the walls are painted bright colors and the many of the rooms consist of plywood walls and doors. The bathrooms are bring-your-own-TP. When someone runs the water, the pipes vibrate so loud it sounds like someone just wounded an elephant in the bathroom. When I was checking in down in the lobby a girl strolled down the stairs in only a towel. You get the idea.
On Saturday I gave the Krauses the 12-hour tour of Istanbul. They had their diplomatic passports and therefore avoided the 15 Lira entrance fees to all the museums and had special tickets printed that designated them as “official guests.” Just one more reason I need to get into the State Department. On Sunday I met up with one of my campers from Olive Grove at church and spent a good portion of the afternoon reminiscing with him. Monday morning I was still recovering from my night of food poisoning, but by the afternoon I was healthy enough to meet another friend from Olive Grove for some Ulitmate Frisbee on the Asian side of town.
This is my last post from Turkey. Tomorrow I leave at 5:30. Pray for safe travels.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Ankara
If you know anything about me, you know that I like History, Politics, Running, and Family. This is why I love Ankara. When Ataturk first came to Ankara in 1920, the city consisted of approximately 65,000 poor Turkish peasants. The city had no history and an even bleaker future. Ataturk had come to town looking for an isolated place far away from Allied occupied Istanbul and Greek influenced Izmir to implement his vision for the future of Turkey. Ankara fit the bill. 90 years later, Ataturk's cultural revolution has transformed Ankara into a burgeoning metropolis larger than the City of Los Angeles. Yet Ataturk did more than make Ankara the capital and attract lots of people here; he transformed it into a global capital that seems custom built for my personal enjoyment. Maybe that is why I like Ataturk so much.
History:
One of the chief criticisms of Ankara as a city is that it lacks history. History is important to me so I was prepared for Ankara to be a disappointing collection of faded apartment complexes. It is true that Ankara is home to only a few ruined Roman buildings and one Selcuk castle on top of a hill. However, almost the entire history of the Turkish Republic is contained inside the city limits of Ankara. If you can't find history here, it just means you aren't looking hard enough. The architecture of the city tells a story in itself. The bustling city center is dotted with beautiful Neo-Ottoman buildings, evidence of early republican ties to the glory of the Ottoman period. To understand Modern Turkey, one must understand Ataturk and Ataturk's mausoleum (pictured above) is packed with artifacts and information not to mention his sarcophagus. It is true that a Roman historian would be bored to tears in this town, but my interests are not that exclusive.
Running:
Ankara is a runner's paradise. The city is centered in a wide valley and extends up the gentle slopes to amber hillsides dotted with green pines. There are plenty of steep inclines to train on and long stretches of flat sidewalk perfect for a long jog. The streets are wide, the sidewalks are clear, and everything is shaded by leafy green deciduous trees. About 500 meters up the road from where I am staying the sidewalk transforms into a 3-lane running track paved with soft rubber. There is also a huge forest-park with wide trails running along a steep ridge overlooking a picturesque lake and a valley (see the picture from my last post). I am told that there is a six-mile trail that encircles the lake, but I have not had the time to explore it. The entire countryside is just begging to be explored. Long roads into the hills make for perfect bike riding and hiking. Ankara sits at 4000 feet, allowing for some mild altitude training. Additionally the weather is ideal for the exercise-enthused. Mornings are cool and clear and afternoons warm up to no hotter than 85 degrees. The only thing that would make this city more runner-philic would be a government subsidy on New Balance shoes.
Politics:
Being the capital of Turkey, Ankara is a predisposed to being a political town. But Turkey's capital is very different than what you would expect to see in a capital. In Washington D.C., the big political sights are the capital building and the White House. In Ankara, the Parliament building and the Presidential compound exist, but they are not nearly as symbolic or as presumptuous as their American counterparts and they are certainly not open to the casual tourist. The American Embassy in Turkey is located just 100 meters away from the Parliament and is undoubtedly one of the ugliest embassies in the city. Thankfully it is mostly hidden from view behind steel bars, opaque screening, and enough security personnel to occupy Paris. It reminds me allot of the Xavier University Alumni Center, which was originally built as a Coca-Cola bottling plant and was saved from demolition only because some crazy nut had it declared a historical monument. Many of the other embassies in Ankara are quite impressive and are spread out all over the west side of the city. The embassy for the United Arab Emirates is about 200 meters down the road from where I am staying and the Dutch Embassy is located on "Hollanda Caddesi" (Holland Street) just a few minutes drive away. The Swedish and German Embassies are look like grand French Chateaus and are surrounded by meticulously maintained gardens. Some Arab country with more oil money than it knows what to do with has prominently displayed its oriental monstrosity of an embassy on the side of a hill on the outside of town. Turkey is the preeminent regional power in the Eastern Mediterranean and the movers and shakers of the world descend upon Ankara to make policy. Obama was here earlier this year as well as the presidents of Brazil, Portugal, and Singapore. Ankara is the center of the action.
Family:
Over the past three days I have been inducted into the Krause family clan. I have been staying at their comfortable flat on the outside of Ankara with their five energetic boys and granny who is in town on a visit. Julie Krause has been taking granny and I around to see the sights of Ankara in the mornings and the afternoons are spent running around and playing with the boys. Yesterday we packed them all in the fun bus and went down to the ambassador's residence to swim in the pool. Once the security guard had screened our car for explosive devices we descended on the peaceful pool like basketball fans rushing the court. The boys are tons of fun to play with. I have participated in long games of keep away in the pool and Hero Scape in the middle of the living room floor. Last night the boys invited me to sleep over in their room and I stayed up late telling battle stories from Byzantine History. The whole operation is a beautiful exercises in organized chaos. Leaving Ankara is going to be harder than leaving any other city beacuse I will not only be leaving an exciting city environment, but also a loving family unit that I have been bleesed to be adopted by.
Today is my last day in town. Tonight there is a happy hour/Barbecue down at the embassy that the Krauses have invited me to. It will be good socialize with some of the embassy staff and military personnel here in Turkey. I have already gone on a lunch date with some of the embassy staff and collected some good career advice about how to get a job at the Embassy here after the Peace Corps. It goes without saying that I like this city, perhaps better than any other city in Turkey. Ataturk did good work here.
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