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