Ina kwanakku?

What's up folks?

I'm back in the capital for another brief trip. I had to see the doctor, attend a Gender & Development meeting (which I didn't actually make - food poisoning), and the real reason... attend a fantasy football auction. Greetings to all those guys back home in the States who I participated with. I was bidding for NFL players with guys on the net who were on the East Coast, the West Coast, and one in Egypt (I think). It was amazing how well it worked.

I left for Niamey this past Friday morning at 9:30 am. At 10:30 pm I rolled into Niamey. The trip should take 5 and half hours in a bus, which I left on. Not to be. About an hour after we left Birni N'Konni we came to the "rainy season detour". This is a dirt road that acts a detour when a seasonal lake floods the national highway. That's right, the country's lone national east-west highway is innaccessible during several months of the year. So, on this dirt-road-detour (which is in about as good of shape as a Vermont dirt road during spring) we hit some puddles. Bump, bump, bump we go as the bus goes in and out of the depressions. BAM! The driver was going a bit to fast before he hit the last puddle, and the air filter was toast. We pulled over. Found out the bad news. And for three hours, my friend Kate and I, tried to find shade in a place of Niger where there is no shade.

After an hour and a half of sitting around and moaning, we get smart and attempt to hitch a ride. There's a million NGOs in Niger, so there's typically white Land Cruisers (sometimes with empty seats) driving by. After another hour and a half, and no luck, we found a bush taxi heading west. These are vans designed to sit 10 people comfortably, that get "redesigned" to fit 21 people in them. So Kate and I are 2-of-the-21. Crammed in, but happy to be rid of the bus incident, we are back on our way.

15 minutes later we are on our feet walking for 2 miles. The dirt-road-detour is unable to cope with last night's rain. And there is a traffic-jam on a scale previously unimagined. Trator trailors, and there are likely 1,000 of them, are piled in one after the other incapable of traversing a muddy stretch of the road. The shipping trucks are at a stand still and their blocking the way. So we have to get out of the bush taxi to allow the driver to traverse a newly created trail (a detour of the detour if you will) to allow smaller vehicles through. 2 miles later, and filling nauseous from the plethora of diesel fumes, we get back in the bush-taxi. Two minutes later we are back on our feet walking. Some impatient tractor trailor driver decided it would be a good idea to block the opposite lane in order to move ahead 15 feet in line. The complete lack of logic is both infuriating and not entirely uncommon here. There are steep embankments on both sides of the road, and the bush-taxi driver seems to be at a lost. And I've just about lost my patience. 30 minutes later, the driver-turned-cowboy takes a detour threw some farmer's millet field and in a truly amazing display of navigational skill makes it through without getting stuck. SWEET LORD THANK YOU! We are now going 60 mph on the east-west national highway.

Taking bush-taxis from Konni to Niamey is not recommended. They are cramped, slower than buses, and make an illogical and overabundant number of stops. So, after about 20 stops for paying tolls, buying food, praying, and "resting" we get to the capital. 13 hours on a Nigerien highway during rainy season. That was a week ago. I'm heading back east today. So, if you're willing and able, say a little prayer for me.

ON TO THE PHOTOS!

Here's some Fulani ladies from my village in fron of a typical Fulani hut. They gave me a bowl of fresh milk and asked for their picture taken in return. It was a deal. The Fulani people are Niger's pastoralists along with the Tuaregs. There are 3 or 4 Fulani families in Rafi, and the men and boys of those families tend to the town's livestock when grazing.

Rafi got green. Compare this photo to the one from my 2nd posting (with the group of boys) and you'll see the difference. This is about as green as it gets - taken about a week ago, nearing the end of rainy season.

Here's the village chief, Jafaru. I was walking with him to one of a handful of his fields. The millet gets pretty big as you can see. Jafaru's about 5'8". Atop his head is a big bowl of "hura", which is mixture of milk, water, and pounded millet. The ladies of the village usually bring it out to them for lunch. But on this day, the chief carried his own lunch - tough day at the office.

Here's another village shot from atop a mesa. This is looking southeast towards my village (and towards Nigeria, which is only about 10 km away from me). You can basically see the entire village from this photo. My hut is situated somewhere on the far right of town. Yup, my feet.

This is my neighbor Kate's place in the village of Korup (kinda sounds like "crap" with the Hausa accent). She's the one in the purple tank-top. Ben and Joan, two other volunteers, are sitting on a millet-stalk bed. And a couple of locals (names not known - but, there's a 1/3 chance that their names are Mohamadou) are hanging out with us. My trusty Trek is propped up against the support beam.

This one's from my village's market car. It's a big 4WD truck with a flat bed and a role cage. These guys are sitting atop the role cage, which is typical for men here regardless of whether there's space on the flatbed or not. This truck makes trips in and out of my village on Wednesday's and Sunday's when there are markets to go to. So, it's a nice way to get in and out of Konni (where my hostel is). I know the guy in the pinstripped shirt. He's the town butcher. Since I was the last one to get on this taxi I'm sitting on a cross-beam that's both ridiculously akward and uncomfortable. The taxi had about 65 people in all sorts of weird positions in/on/hangin-off of it.

This one is taken in the Konni market. The tailor is Tuareg, and Tuareg men always wear a turbin. You can see bags of salt, sugar, flour, and green tea in the background that he's selling. The cylindrical shapes on the table are "blocks" of salt from the desert. Tuareg men still carry salt across the Sahara via camel caravans to make money.

Alright. Need to get on the road again. Hope you guys enjoyed the photos. Until we meet again, I bid you all farewell.

Matt

P.S. "Ina kwanakku?" means "How did you(plural) sleep?" in Hausa. It's used like "good morning" in English.

Back in Niamey

Greetings all,

So I made it back to Niamey... where the internet does exist. Let's see, since my last entry I've been spending most of my time in the village (Rahi). That's been good. Rainy season has come to Niger, meaning all the men who live in the bush are out tending to their fields. The rains started to really come in mid-July, and have been pretty regular since then (every other day or so). The millet in the area around my village is well over my head in some fields, and just up to my waste in others. That's mostly due to when the farmers decided to plant their seeds. Sometimes farmers can plant too early and lose their seeds (or sprouts), which happens all over the country. But luckily the rains were enough after the initial planting to keep the sprouts growing.

I've got my very own field where I'm planting millet, sorghum, beans, and peanuts. It's a fairly small field, but plenty big for me. The manual labor that goes in to tending the fields in maniacal. All the tilling is done by hand with the tools called "calmi" that kind of look like little hoes.

So, to dig up the earth (and the weeds) with this thing you have to bend over at 90 degrees. It takes about 10 minutes before my back starts to ache, which is after completing 2 of 30 rows. I'm in awe of the men who do this almost every day, all day. It's hard labor on a level I've never witnessed before.

Other than the farm, I've been teaching English to young men in the village. Many of them will travel to Nigeria at some point to find work after the harvest. And in Lagos, where most will travel, many people speak pidgin English (called "broka" for broken English). So a lot of the young men expressed interest in learning English. We've been through the greetings, numbers, "there is", and the verb: to be. It's been a lot of fun to teach them, and it's good time for me to practice my own language skills in Hausa.

So, I included some more photos here. The one on the the top of the blog is 4 of the 1,000,000 children that live in my concession. Actually there are 13, but they can multiply exponentially at a moment's notice. The mesa in the background kind of wraps around the village, and is pretty large by Nigerien standards.

Below is a photo from atop the mesa. You can see about a sixth of the village here, but the rest looks just like it. All the structures are made from mud bricks including the huts, walls, and granaries. The granaries are the domed structures. There's thatched-grass on top of the granaries to keep out the dust and rain. To give it some scale you can see about 10 ladies walking along a path at the bottom of the photo. There about to hike up the mesa path that will lead you to a neighboring village. My closest Peace Corps neighbor lives 5 km away along that path.

Below is a shot of group of boys from my village that were following me around town the first day around. I'm the first Peace Corps volunteer in my village, and also the first foreigner to live there. So as you can imagine the kids were a little curious as to what the white guy was up to. In the background you can see a valley in between two mesas. That's where the path is that I was talking about in the last photo. The one that leads to my friend's village. Yacubu, one of the 1,000,000 children that lives in my concession, can be seen holding on to my Nalgene bottle.

Here's the self-absorbed-portrait on my lake. I'm saving the sinking vessel with a trusty turquoise plastic bowl. There are half-a-dozen-or-so boats like this owned by local fisherman. That go out to the middle of the lake and throw nets off of them. And the lake is shallow enough (3 meters at the center) that they'll use long poles to get around. We we're using a broken paddle the day this photo was taken, so you might say we were at the mercy of the wind.

Well that's all for today. I'll be back in Niamey sometime in the near future to write some more. I hope everyone's well back home in the motherland, or wherever you may be. Matt.

I blog, therefore I am

It's 8:46 am, in Niger (whatever the official time-zone is called, I'm unaware of it). I'm feeling slightly groggy from this past evenings festivities at John Davidson's home (DCM US Embassy), where Peace Corps Niger held a COS (completion of service) party. The enchiladas were spicy, the beer was cold, and I think I consumed too much of both.

So, I just made this blog and I'm testing it out. I hope you guys like it.

Here are a couple of photos to give you a taste of the goods to come.

This was taken the night before I left Hamdallaye (the village where I had my Peace Corps training) to go to my post. That would be back in March. The man to my left, Sha' ibu, was my host-father in Hamdallaye. I had a little hut in his "yard" where I was living during my Peace Corps training. His wife, Huseina, made me dinner pretty much every night. The dude chillin' out on the far left is Abdu Hamzah, who is the training site manager for Peace Corps Niger. We're sitting underneath a shade hanger across the "street" from his home. The other guys are friends and family of Abdu Hamzah.

And here we've got a street shot from Niamey. I was in a Peace Corps bus traveling around the capital one morning and took a bunch of photos. This is one of them. It's a pretty typical street-side setting.

Alright, so we'll see how this all likes on the new website. There's more to come soon.

Take care everyone,
Matt