Happy Boxing Day

Merry Christmas to everyone, a day late! Our country director gave us permission to come to our regional capitals for the holiday even though normally you have to stay at your post for the first month after installation. So yesterday I enjoyed sipping mulled wine by a faux-fire place and eating quiche at the PC Christmas party. As much as it was hard not to be with family, there is something to be said for celebrations in a tropical arid climate. That is, the weather was beautiful yesterday. I wore a scarf over my tank-top to stay warm.

To back track a bit:
I moved to post (my village) last Wednesday, December 17th. I have a cat and three kittens who occasionally join me in my mosquito net at night.


Two of the kittens (Samuel Jackson and Sylvia Plath, she's the one in the bowl) are going to friends of mine after our inter-service training (IST) in March...in'sha'allah...and I am keeping the mother (Kalima) and my kitten, America (the striped one). Amerik for short. My village is wonderful. I am slowly getting to know the eight families who live there, and it already feels like even two years is short.

Though it is winter here, and in the 80-90 degree weather (dropping to 60 at night) my villagers are walking around in parkas with wool hats because they are so cold; I have still been sleeping outside beneath the stars. They tell me I'm crazy and that Americans "gonda hargu gabi." We have strength against the cold. I say that may be true but to have patience with me when I am fainting in the hot season and have no strength even to pump water when it is 125 degrees.

In the morning I wake up to the sun by 7:00, and put on sneakers to warm up my icy toes. I take my cart carrying 3 watering cans and a bucket, and go to the hand pump outside my concession to begin the tri-daily process of watering my garden. My vegetables drink about 58 watering cans a day. My arms are getting stronger. Then I make some coffee, some hot cereal, and sit with my kittens at my desk looking over the grasslands of my backyard.

This is where the magic happens...



Our first three months are really meant to be spent meeting neighbors, letting people know we are here and who we are, assessing the needs and wants of the community, going to weddings, funerals and baby-naming ceremonies, trying to find our market town and learn how to get there, and most importantly trying not to pass out from exhaustion due to incessantly not understanding a thing people are saying to us as we try desperately to get used to the new dialects of our villages and try to improve and adapt our Zarma. We are essentially making fools of ourselves day after day and trying to keep a good face on. And on top of that, trying to act professional about it as we do, in fact, work here...

I walk around with a notebook writing down anything I hear people say that I can understand, and anything I can single out as a word or a phrase that I don't understand so I can look it up later, (and when it isn't in our tiny mildly helpful Zarma dictionary, ask someone to explain it to me). But generally when I am in group settings I tend to just sit and stare at everyone trying to hear any familiar word. And the women especially love to talk about me incredidbly fast, while laughing, in the third person. Everyday I am gaining appreciation for foreigners everywhere. Not understanding, and not being understood makes you feel helpless, and 3 years old again.

My second night in village I went to a wedding, which in no means coorepsonds to a wedding in the U.S. with the exception that the fundamental sentiment of it is that two people will soon be joined and people come from far away to attend. Weddings here entail showing up to the man's family's compound around 6:00 pm, as the sun is setting, and sitting on mats (divided by gender) after putting your gift on the pile for the bride. And you sit, and you sit, and you sit, and you fakaray (make conversation). Meanwhile, the groom's friends are going to the bride's village to "steal" her away from her family. The bride's friends and family are aware of this imminent "kidnapping" so they often arrange several elaborate hoaxes. For example, they will disguise someone as the bride (it is hard to know who you are kidnapping when their whole body, head to foot, is covered in pagnes and a head scarf) and leave her in the bride's house. Then the men will show up to take this alleged "bride." Her friends will scream and cry and beg them not to take her away, but the men will insist. When they have sucessfully put her in the car, or on the back of the ox or donkey cart, and are beginning to drive away, the village will scream, "Stop! You have the wrong girl!" The men will say, "is this true? Where is the real bride?" And the village will present a second woman. This could go on for hours. And yes, over at the groom's village we are still sitting, and sitting, and the women are cooking giant pots of hayni hawru (millet mush) over scattered fires. People eat together (divided by gender) around 10:00 out of communal bowls with hawru and sauce (with their hands). And after that there is generally dancing. And often times the bride does not arrive until the wee hours of the morning. Everyone is excited to see her, and there is her giant pile of wedding gifts! ...but the bride has just left her village, her friends, and her family, forever. So she arrives crying, and veiled. And for the next several days she will sit in her new hut and cry while people come in and out to greet her. Were she to not cry, it would show immense disrespect to her family who has provided for her up until now. How could she be happy to leave them? I would offer that perhaps Nigerien (and specifically Zarma) wedding culture might be more in tune with responding to the large breadth of emotions which entail when two people choose to leave childhood and begin a new life together as adults (different, yes, in the case of second, third, fourth wives); but nonetheless I can't help but be nostalgic for the Western image of giant white cakes, champagne and flowers. Sometimes it takes leaving to realize how specific your own culture is. I have never sat on the ground hardly moving and speaking to almost no one for three hours in the dark. It is so much harder than it sounds.

In other news:
There is still a snake in my salanga (bathroom), along with its strange family of 1 scorpion, 1 hedgehog and 1 giant toad. We are learning to get along.

I cook dinner in my kitchen hut with a headlamp. I put dishes off til morning. I think, about a million things, constantly.

I wash my laundry in a metal bowl. I chase chickens out of my garden. Pink and white flowers grow near the doors of my huts. I have two small solar panels on the roof of my hut so I can sometimes charge a laptop using a car battery and converter, and I can listen to music on outdoor speakers.

Tomorrow I am going back for my first full month in-village. I will have internet again at the end of January. I will try not to be too jealous of all of you on new years. If you don't like writing letters, I will have time to read e-mails when I come in to Niamey.

ALSO, if you have a phone card and are trying to call me and it seems like I'm not picking up, IT IS NOT THE CASE. The networks here suck, but if you try several times in a row you are pretty likely to reach me. I miss all your voices.

Also, I will update now and again, my reading list. Currently I am reading (and if interested you should find a copy and join me :) ) Come As You Are the peace corps story, by Coates Redmon.

And really, seriously, you should book a flight, and come visit. Drinks on me.

Swear-In

So today, in a few hours, I will swear-in on national television to become an official Peace Corps volunteer. I will take an oath in French and in English, and promise, side by side with my fellow trainees, to the American Ambassador and the Nigerien government that we will commit two years of service to Niger.

Right now I am sitting at Amandine's, the let's-pretend-we're-not-in-the-third-world cafe with wireless, thinking about why I'm here and about home, and about a million other things. I have come to realize that I don't think there is any real way to prepare for something like moving alone to a rural sub-Saharan farming village for 2 years. So next week feels, in its own way, like jumping off some sort of imaginary cliff. But I guess a big part of me is as ready for the jump as I can be. There is a tiny piece of me screaming, turn around! go home! drink a cold beverage out of a refrigerator! get your clothes cleaned in a real washing machine! But the rest of me is getting butterflies in my stomach at the idea of reading books alone at sunset looking out over the grasslands of my new backyard; about putting my hands into the dirt of my own garden and making things grow in the sahel; about decorating my new mud hut, and sitting and talking with my neighbors in Zarma, holding their babies and playing with their kids. There are four kittens waiting for me in my new home, and here, things like kittens are really good at making hard days less hard.

Among all the other thoughts bumping around in my head, one of the more prominent ones is the fact the training is ending tomorrow. The 25 other trainees with whom I've shared these past two months will be posted to sites scattered across the country. Those of my friends who are going far to the east...I'll only see once or twice a year. It's a strange feeling to have built up a community like this that will be so quickly dispersed. I suppose, right now, the first segment of this experience is coming to a close. I have no way of knowing how I will feel in the next few months. Actually, we have packets and packets of information given to us with some frequency on how we might and probably will feel in our first 3 months of service, but those suggestions aside I am at a bit of a loss for what to expect.

To pull back from getting too lost in my own head... feelings, anxiety, etc. I will say this about my week: On Wednesday morning I moved out of Beeri Kwara. I said goodbye to my host family. Tabaski (Cimsi in Zarma), the holiday where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, was Monday and Tuesday. I watched countless white rams held down on the ground, their necks positioned in front of a shallow hole in the dirt, their throats slit open by the men of the village, and their blood collected in the pits on the ground.



Beeri Kwara was filled with shallow holes of blood as we all sang and danced and feasted on the luxury of meat. The children would say "kay yesi" to us, and we would respond "yesi mansancine" and give them a treat, some candy or a little money. It is sort of like Christmas here. Everyone is in holiday spirits.

So I better go and find an outfit to wear for the ceremony. There is a fake Christmas tree decorated and blinking its lights in the middle of the restaurant. I might have to eat one of the chocolate pastries that look so good in the glass display case before I go. Two of my friends just arrived, and I'm no longer in the zone to write. Lots of love to everyone. I am still (as I imagine I always will be) missing you everyday. If you get Nigerien TV, be sure to tune in tonight. xo

Greetings from Niamey

I imagine it is fitting that in my first post to this blog I am wearing a torn blue hospital shirt with the word INFIRMARY printed on the back in large block letters. Yes, Niger lives up to it's reputation as being the shittiest country in the Peace Corps. But that aside, I can't say that I'm not glad to be here. In fact, I know I'm really happy to be here. My list of things to learn is getting longer and longer, and in two short days we have our final LPI, language proficiency interview, to see if our Zarma is good enough to swear in as true volunteers on December 12th. Having been in the infirmary since Sunday (4 days?), I'm afraid I've lost a little of what I knew, but I'm not too worried about passing. It might even be true that my Zarma is surpassing my French, which I studied for nearly 8 years.



Winter is coming here slowly. Nights get chilly, but every now and then the afternoons make their way back to 105. And that is when thoughts of jackets and Brooklyn and crunching leaves and scarves and lattes creep into my thoughts and make me remember all that water that stands between me and home.

I went to my new village for a week, and though it had it's ups and downs, my new house is beautiful! I have a small mud hut as a kitchen, and second bigger one as a bedroom. I am replacing a married couple so I'm inheriting two double beds-one inside, one outside (with metal frames!), a cot and 4 chairs! Room for anyone and everyone who wants to come visit :) It's like a little slice of paradise in the middle of the Sahel. My houses are contained by a millet stalk fence (or concession wall) to keep the goats and chickens out; and to offer minimal privacy from my few and far off neighbors.

As PST (pre service training) comes to a close, it is hard to believe that it has already been nearly 2 months since I stepped off the plane. The little things that remind me I'm not used to Niger are becoming more and more normalized... The wild bray of the donkeys I wake up to each night, the chickens and lizards I have to chase out of my latrine, making sure not to put my hands or feet anywhere I haven't looked first for fear of scorpions, the gray haze that settles on top of the villages as they burn their nightly trash fires, and remembering not to walk in front of a man while he is praying lest he would have to do his three washings all over again.

I am thinking of everyone at home sitting under rooves, maybe with tea, driving on paved roads and flying through subway tunnels. I am thinking of you waking up before the sun as the winter mornings get darker, and how by sundown here I am so often getting ready for bed. This place is good for thinking and art and learning how to have different kinds of conversations. I am trying to absorb what I can.

I will keep you posted. And love hearing from you all.

P.S. There is currently a black snake living in my latrine. Maybe #1 on what to change about my new home. xx