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

Michael