NEW PHOTOS!
(Photo-op with the young soccer players in Rawfi. As long as we have a functional or close-to-functional soccer ball these kids will spend about 4 hours a day on the sandy streets playing the world's most popular sport. The balls last about 2-3 weeks before they are worn to shreds and go flat - even the sturdier ones I brought from the U.S. October 2007)
Hey everyone,
Grafica's back! I finally made it to the capital where I can upload my photos. I'm going to post a bunch of them, so I'll leave most of my writing for the photo captions. There's also a copy of a mass e-mail I wrote back in December. Hope you enjoy!
Matt
P.S. The photos are in reverse chronological order.
(This well is 45-50 meters deep, so you can imagine there's a fair amount of friction on the logs created by the ropes. The rivets in these logs were created from the friction over many many pulls of water. The wooden pulleys are used for a animal pulling system, whereby they use bigger bags to pull up the water and connect the rope to cows, donkeys, or camels. I saw them connect the rope to two cows via a cross-bream harness on their backs. After they walk half a football field away there's water! This well is in the village of 'Don Amaria' - meaning 'son of the marriage'. My friend Cory Enger lives and works here. January 2008)
(Fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, Mr. Cory
Enger. He works hard and plays even harder. It's also a well known fact that he's always a threat with the ladies. He farmed half a hectare this year
by hand, so the kid's got heart. January 2008)
(A group of young female students together in
Zinder, Niger for a Young Girls Scholarship Program
conference. The three gents are fellow Peace Corps folk that put it all on. The two girls standing up on the far left are from my village -
Balki and
Binta. They're the only two girls from my village that are attending middle school/high school. January 2008)
(Glamour shot for the Young Girls Scholarship Program conference. January 2008)
(The Pats go 16-0! Celebratory chug. This photo was taken at the Peace Corps hostel in
Konni. December 2007)
(
Festivus feats of strength. Just before Christmas I visited my friends Elyse and Kate in Elyse's village. To my surprise Elyse had organized a
Festivus celebration - reference to Seinfeld. After an amazing
Festivus meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and veggies (and after the airing of our grievances) we held a village wrestling match as is the
Festivus tradition. There were 20 rounds of matches - the first person to touch the ground with their head, elbows, waist, or knees loses. It was a truly bizarre event, but also amazingly fun. The kids were so intense that the adults were following them around the ring so that no one got hurt. I tried to intimidate the competition with some jumping jacks and fake karate. The kids were impressed by my offering as they immediately copied my moves, but the adults... not so much. My match came with a villager older than myself and I got thoroughly creamed and thrown down on my head. These dudes are strong. I did make a comeback however, beating up on our host Elyse. This after the local crazy man insisted to all for quite some time that it was not right for Elyse and I to wrestle since we were not of the same gender. Elyse's face jabs in attempt to blind my vision were to no avail for it was I (mu ha ha ha) that was victorious! This is all serious by the way, we really did have a Seinfeld inspired
Festivus in my friend's village. Such are the possibilities in Africa. December 2007)
(My good friend
Abdu with his handy work on
Tabaski [a big
Muslim holiday]. The tradition is to slaughter a sheep and share it with your friends. My sheep's the one closest to
Abdu. After they are fixed up on these sticks they are then smoked over an open fire and left to cool down overnight before cut-up and shared the following day. December 2007)
(
Abdu, myself, and some local kids cleaning my sheep. The sheep is blown up by mouth in order to make the skinning process easier. It's a peculiar site to see a man blow up a sheep's corpse like a balloon. December 2007)
(The chief of
Rawfi with my sheep. He was the one who looked after it for me [I bought it at the local market back in April], so it was really part his as well. I gave him a lot of the meat as compensation. December 2007)
(Go
Sox! This one's name is
Rahamatu. She's my next-door neighbor's youngest child. And since she's too young to be scared of my white demon skin she still smiles a lot when she sees me. December 2007)
(The kids. Left to right:
Rahamatu, Kane, Dodo, and
Jamilu.
Rahamatu and Kane are the
chief's brother's kids. This family lives in the same area as I do. Dodo's a neighbor's kid. and
Jamilu is one of the chief's kids. This was taken on
Tabaski. December 2007)
(Hanging out on
Tabaski drinking tea and eating dates. December 2007)
(The crocodile in
Dosso, Niger. There's a bar in
Dosso that has a caged-in crocodile you can feed chickens too. We did. There's a guy to my left who has the chicken in his hand, so the
croc got out of the water and approached the cage to wait for his meal. December 2007)
(Kate Miller and I on the annual AIDS bike ride. For a week, just after Thanksgiving, we bike around Niger educating locals on
STDs, HIV/AIDS, and safe sex. It's an amazing way to see the countryside. December 2007.)
(Fixing bikes under a
baobob tree. December 2007)
(A village chief from one of the villages we stopped at to educate locals about HIV/AIDS, etc. November 2007)
(We have actors and actresses that travel with do performances and speak to the locals about how one can get HIV, how one can get tested, how one can live with HIV/AIDS, how once can get access to condoms, etc. November 2007)
(The bike mechanic crew for the AIDS bike ride. November 2007)
(Triangle of trust. Bike mechanics on the AIDS bike ride. November 2007)
(Glamour shot. Cory
Enger, Frederic Allen [aka DJ Fallen], and myself. November 2007)
(Cool tree with weaver birds nests near
Gaya, Niger. November 2007)
(My friend Alex Towns giving a speech in
Zarma about the Peace Corps experience in Niger. November 2007)
(The crazy dude. As soon as we got to this village on the bike ride this guy sat down next to us and started pulling these oddities out of his sack. That's his ID on the left and a really old, laminated piece of West African currency on the right. November 2007)
(The crazy dude got busted! Ouch. November 2007)
(The
gentleman rope weaver whom I met along the bike ride. Here he's making rope out of long grass. November 2007)
(A sky punch against AIDS. Fellow bike mechanic Cory
Enger and his new-found bud. November 2007).
(The
Gaya-
Dosso road.
November 2007)
(Yet another sky punch from Cory
Enger. We're at
Parc National W attending a dance performance by some local
Gourmantche men. They let us get in there. November 2007)
(Dance off. November 2007)
(A river in Parc National W. You can kinda spot some buffalo across the river chomping on some greens. This park is in the very south of Niger [shared with Benin and Burkina Faso]. It's mostly forest and is home to a large array of wildlife including lions, elephants, antellopes, hippos, and baboons. November 2007)
(Snot-nosed Huseini. One of the kids
I share a home with. This one's just starting to converse, so he makes for a good partner to practice Hausa with. He also likes to fall asleep on his belly with his butt poking out in the air. I need to get a photo of this. November 2007)
(My second-hand clothing market thanks to a donation from Toni Morgan of Essex Jct., VT. She filled up a giant hockey bag with clothing and toys for me to bring back to Africa. November 2007)
(Farming onions with Amadou - the chief's younger brother. This sticks poking up out of the ground are stalks of millet or sorghum left over from the harvest. Thhe plants to the left of Amadou are cassava - the tuber roots are eaten. These plots of onions are seeds plots. Once large enough they will be transplanted to a plot with more room for them to mature. November 2007)
(Some ladies of Rawfi. September 2007)
(The men of Rawfi. I asked that all villagers come to the truck-stop for a photograph. Only the men arrived - make of that what you will. Anyways, most of the men in the village did come and I blew up a copy of this photo when I was home in October to share with them. September 2007)
A mass e-mail I wrote back in December, 2007...
I'm looking out the window of our concrete bureau at a bright and hazy sky. The haze is neither fog nor smog, but dust. This time of year there's a steady breeze heading west/southwest that carries with it the tiny particulates of parched earth found covering the Sahara and Sahel. Some days are worse than others and visibility can be cut down to 100 feet or so. And upon awakening in the morning after a blustery night there's a residue of dust covering the parts of your skin that weren't sheltered. This is all a welcome nuisance as the dust reflects and absorbs the lights rays diminishing the heat for us inhabitants. So instead of 110 at midday it's 90. And instead of 95 at night it's 65 (this is the mother of all difference makers in making this place tolerable for at least a season). It's "coldseason"!!!! And a very pleasant time of year to be in Niger.
(Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is blasting in the background giving this e-mail a strangely demonstrative mood.)
I have welshed on keeping up on the blog and I apologize to any regular readers. Truth be told, I haven't been in the capital with enough free time to keep up on it. And there was that one time where I forgot my camera cord that allows me to upload photos to a PC. Well, I'm still not in the capital (where there is high-speed net access). Instead I'm in a small city with no internet access (none that I have access to anyways), but we do have a steady diet of e-mails. So it is that medium that I shall use. I would be updating my blog in the capital if it was up to me, but we've recently had a couple of land mines go off in the Niger and travel is being strictly limited. Only two people have bee killed by two land mines in total, so it's nothing too serious. But the potential for a more serious outbreak of attacks is there...
(Break for wiffle ball home run derby and BBQ.)
The background here is that there are rebels in the north of the country from the Tuareg ethnic group - they have there own language and look more like Arabs than black Africans. Their homeland is the Sahara desert. Niger's lucrative uranium mine is in the north and so are some untapped oil fields, so these guys feel that it's in their best interest to have greater autonomy and benefit from the revenues of the sales of these resources. The government of course disagrees... And so the rebels are getting prepared fora military conflict and have started raiding government and army posts. I'm guessing the trouble won't affect me much before my time is up in Niger, but the situation seems to have a long-term outlook.
So, I went for a trip today. I needed to see a doctor - a Western doctor. And the closest access we have here is a Christian missionary hospital about40 miles away from Konni (the small city where I write this e-mail from). So at about 10 am this morning I departed for the "bus stop" (the only infrastructure here is one removable wooden bench). But it's in the right spot on the right road and people have become adapted to it, so it works. This is a microcosm of Africa - it works. Anyways, I found a little compact car with license plates from Nigeria (Kano, to be specific) that was taking passengers. Both the driver and the man who collects money for drivers (a completely unnecessary job since the drivers are able to do it themselves, which this ornery man has adopted as his full-time line of work) want 1,000CFA (roughly $2). The key here is to not give them any money until the caris literally driving away, because if you do you're tied in to a car that is waiting to be filled up with passengers. This could take up to an hour. Luckily, 15 minutes later the car was full and I paid the man 1,000 CFA. We were on our way (or so I thought)!
200 yards down the road we stop to fix the engine. Hmph, maybe we could have done this earlier in the day before we picked up customers. But this is Africa and this sort of patience trying event is so unbearably typical that after a while you just laugh and continue to read your book. After I develop some perspiration from sitting in this stuffy car we are finally on our way again. Another 200 yards down the road we stop again - this time for gasoline. Hmph, perhaps we could have filled her up before picking up customers. But the more logical excuse here is that the money the driver is using for gasoline is that which we just paid him. Here's where I ran into trouble. I'm in the back seat of a compact car (think 4-door Toyota Tercel) with two mothers and two children. One of the children was a young teen sitting on her mother's lap and the other was a toddler sitting on her mother's lap. It's a tight squeeze. My door does not open; I've already tried repeatedly to get out of the car because it's such a stuffy and cramped mess. The driver opens my door and demands that I move over to allow a seat for the adult male that's about to enter our ride. "No way!" I say to him. "There's already 5 people back here. Do you expect him to sit on my lap?" I point to my lap already knowing that this line of argument is in vain and sooner or later I'm going to have to find another ride or deal with the uncomfort of being 1 of 6 people (4 adults, 1 young teen, and 1 toddler) in the back of a tiny Toyota. I'm hoping I can annoy the driver so much with my argument that he'll furiously get in the car and drive us on or merry way minus this other guy whose about to get on my lap. I have already spent 30 minutes in the car and I don't want to wait another 30 minutes for the next car to fill up. I won't budge, and neither will the driver. In the midst of our argument he offers me my money back. I accept and walk back to the busstop - 400 yards down the road. The same 400 yards that took us 30 minutes to traverse...
Many of you likely saw the Blood Diamonds movie with Leonardo Dicaprio. A reoccurring line from that movie is "T.I.A. - This is Africa". My run-in with the sardine packer of a taxi driver is a great example of the daily sort of the trouble you run into here. If there's anything that you need to get by here it's patience - a heavy tolerance for the most mind-blowingly, incomprehensibly annoying experiences you'll ever encounter in your entire life.
So I walked back to the bus stop and 5 minutes later I was on the road in a more comfortable car with much more leg room. Vindication and luck were mine. Along the way we stop at a toll where the driver gets out to pay the corrupt officials their couple bucks. Here we're accosted by two men selling dried dates. Dates are plentiful in Niger and are grown in the oases towns in the north of Niger (where the Tuaregs live). The two men are offering one kilo bags of dates and tiny bags of 50 cfa. All salesmen in this county assume that people have no self control. They assume that the longer their product is in the consumers' field of vision the more likely they are to make a purchase. So they shove their arms into the vehicle and get the dates in our immediate fields of view (shove them in our faces). And they literally yell, "Buy dates!" along with "Look! Dates! 50 cfa or 1 kilo!". "BUY DATES!". They were so close to my mouth that I suppose I was more tempted than I otherwise would have been, but I was working on a stick of gum at the time and didn't need no dates. After about an hour in the vehicle we're in Galmi, the town where the missionary hospital is located.
I tell the driver to let me out and I walk toward the front entrance. The hospital is filled to the brim with patients. It's an amazing site, and my heart goes out to the staff there that have to accommodate all these patients. So, I find the American doctor I'm looking for. He checks me out, gives me the thumbs up, and I'm on my way. A 10 minute consultation in the middle of a 4 hour journey. The doctor too speaks Hausa, and I'm surprised to see another expat who isn't a Peace Corps Volunteer speaking the local language. It turns out Dr. Kendrick Lau has been in Niger for 5 years and plans on staying for a while longer. This man is a true philanthropist making incredible sacrifices in the midst of his career.
Outside the hospital I'm sitting in the passenger seat waiting to drive back to Konni. I notice a man selling something from a giant tray. His back is between me and his tray and I can't see what he's selling, but he's advertising it very loudly. An interested woman comes over to look at his products. After a few minutes of getting distracted by a quarrel between a passenger and the driver over the equivalent of an American quarter, I turn back to the look at the salesman. He's got two juvenile puff adders (very poisonous snakes) on the ground and he's using the shadow of his foot to get them to strike in his general direction. After the snakes strike air a few times they curl up into spools and the man puts a his foot on top of them, resting it there for about 5 seconds before removing it. He does this for a couple minutes, then puts the snakes back into an emptied and dried-out gourd. The man also has something large on his nose that's difficult to makeout. It is a giant scorpion. It just hangs out there as he continues his business, which I have observed is the sale of traditional medicine. The lady next to the snake-scorpion-medicineman-guy, who is at arguably the best hospital in the entire country (equipped with a pharmacy), buys a 250 cfa bag of ground up leaves.
Five minutes after we leave the hospital town we are tracked down by another taxi and are accosted by a man looking for his change. He was the money guy (the same useless job I mentioned earlier) at the bus stop in the hospital town, and apparently he was shorted on a few bucks. After 15 minutes of arguments the tab is settled and we're back on the road. 3/4 of the way to Konni we switch cars and drivers. I'm still not exactly sure why; I never asked I was tired and just wanted to get back home. At about 2:30 pm I'm back in Konni ready to help cook chili for our Christmas Eve dinner.
And here I am full of chili and cornbread writing this letter. Today was an interesting day, but a typical one in Niger. It's meant to be an example of the hodgepodge of experiences one has here that makes life so much different from home. This place has been home to me for the past two years, and I'm going to miss the excitement of living here.
Pull a 90-degree turn and you'll see a pretty large cliff. There are gigantic cliffs everywhere in Dogon Country. AMAZING landscape and great hiking. UPDATE: There's a 150-mile espcarpment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escarpment) here that attracts a lot backpacking tourists. And also the inhabitants of this area - the Dogon - are also quite unique in West Africa. Long story short: They're a vibrant culture in a vibrant landscape - unique traits in northern West Africa. Also their architecture looks pretty unique. Instead of mud bricks or thatched grass they use rocks to builds their homes. The landscape along the escarpment is awe-inspiring. People have been living in this are for a very, very long time. Before the Dogon were pigmies - apparently they were driven off their land and journeyed to the current homeland in the Congo. The story is made really interesting when you see pigmy ruins half-way up a 1000-foot cliff (with no obvious way to reach the cliff other than technical climbing). The locals say they were like chimps and could scale the cliffs with ease. It's a mysterious place with an even more mysterious past. I need to go back during wet season.
Onion farming in between Dogon cliffs. Good soil is hard to come by in this area due to the abundance of bare rock. So any good soil is heavily farmed. Along the path we were hiking there were sporadic plots of onions, tobacco, tomotoes, lettuce, carrots, and cabbage - but mostly onions. The rocks around the onions in this photo act to trap the irrigation. That's my friend Katy in the photo.
Katie and our lying, crooked, and pretty dumb tour-guide Yussef Guindo. UPDATE: Well, all that information is true. But I was pretty bitter when I wrote it. To begin with, we get swindled into hiring Yusef. We were told he spoke English well - a complete lie. The fact that he said "yeah" way too much when we met him should have tipped us off. Also, we were told that he knew everything there was to know about Dogon Country - again a complete lie. E.g., and this is verbatum... Katy asks as we were walking along the escarpment looking at the pigmy ruins in the cliff, "Yusef, do you know when the pygmies lived in Dogon Country?" Yusef replies, "Yeah." Katy's persistent, "Um, do you know what year the pygmies lived here?" Yusef's on the spot now, "Sixty three, fifteen, seventy one." I look at Katy in awe.
Yusef the Dubious, a village elder, and I at one of the the village meeting spots. Every Dogon village has multiple meeting spots. It's an elder men's social club where the town's politics are discussed. They all look pretty similar to the one in this photo.
