One Month in One Post

Apologies. It's been quite a while since I last updated, hopefully the five posts from December can make up for it. I've been at site since Christmas, and obviously that means I've been out of touch via Internet. Right now I'm in Niamey. Some European tourists were kidnapped north of Tillaberi, and so some of us Volunteers have been brought to our regional capital as a safeguard. Let me assure any of you that might be worried, this is a precaution only. I think every Volunteer is so integrated into their community that his/her neighbors would be willing to take a bullet for them, but the surrounding areas may not be as secure. I may be updating a lot more in the next few days as I'll be in Niamey working on projects, etc. For now though, I'll just post a journal entry from about a week ago. Enjoy

It's very very cold. The wind has blown all day, completely obscuring the mesa and the dune because it carries with it so much dust. (To give some perspective, imagine living at the foot of a mountain and being unable to see it. There's so much dust, the sky is a uniform white color, and the sun is like a weak spotlight with a diffusion lens.) The only thing I've done all day is read, sleep, and listen to the wind howl. It's been glorious, and I don't feel bad about it because my cat and my maigari have refused to leave the house in this cold weather.

Without even meaning to, I've been running myself ragged for the past week or more. I've been sick, which has certainly contributed to a great deal of fatigue, and I've been holding meetings, gardening, visiting, and working throughout all that fatigue. I held a Participatory Analysis for Community Assesment (PACA) meeting with my women's group a week ago. It's a way to determine what the villagers see as their greatest needs and how those needs may be met by either the Volunteer or an organization. The meeting was long and tiresome, but it helped so much to be able to see (or hear) all the things I'd thought about communicated by my women. It lasted four hours, but even with distractions, we got a lot accomplished.

The sickness is, God willing, nearly over. It started with horribly swollen lymph nodes and a headache that kept me down for a solid day. Everytime I got up, it felt like Quasimodo was ringing the bells with a sledgehammer. That abated with some rest, but it was followed by a sore throat that kept me from speech and a sore neck that meant my head had all the mobility of a Ken doll.

I think the sickness is now over, but it's hard to tell with so much dust in the air if I'll continue to improve. The fatigue kept me sleeping nearly 12 hours a night. My social skills plummeted as I spent a large part of the day napping too. It's just a pain really. I calculated it up, and I found out that I'd had, on average, a new sickness every 6 weeks or so since I've been in country. Fun!

I road my bike 17k up the road to a French government site used to rehabilitate problem children from Paris. They are the worst of the worst, and they're given the choice of prison or Niger. Once here, they're put to work gardening, working with the local hospital, and coming to realize that their lives in a developed world, though hard, far outstrip the average in a place like this. At the site I met a man named Aurelian and a woman named Mariama, two of the teachers associated with the French site. They gave me a full tour of the project's numerous side projects. Aurelian is a Hausa from Zinder, who used to be the head at INRAN, a government agriculture agency. With the French funding, he set up a garden for 90+ families to plant potatoes during cold season for income generation and personal consumption. Mariama is a doctor, and together with Aurelian, they've set up a compound to train women in gardening techniques.

I'm convinced more and more that it's people like Aurelian, Mariama, and Hamani (the teacher who led my PACA meeting) who ultimately are the most effective elements of change. It's because they are part of their communities, a lasting part, that is dedicated to helping their communities better themselves. They know how to navigate their own waters better than an outsider ever could.

I'm kind of worried in some ways. I think I'm in real danger of becoming an active, productive member of society because of Peace Corps. Who could have seen that coming? But these development issues, the problems, and solutions actually interest me. I never thought they would, but here I am, in Africa, trying to get things started.