Terrorism and a New Life (2)

Alright class, has everyone done their assigned reading? Good, I'll be able to continue then.

The end of January, I received a text from our Regional Representative, the Volunteer liason between the bureau and the other Volunteers in Tillaberi region. She said the entire region north of Niamey was on standfast. This means we cannot leave our villages or travel around our clusters. Wherever we happen to be when standfast occurs, be it in our village or another Volunteers, that's where we have to stay. It was a let down because I had planned to come into Niamey to attend a friend's concert, but since I couldn't go, I didn't mind a few extra days at post. Four days later, I was walking out my door when I heard my phone ringing.

"That's strange, who could be calling me?" I picked up my phone: "Mary Abrahms" (our country director). "Oh this cannot be good." (Is it ever a good thing when your boss calls you unexpectedly?)

She told me that because of recent incidents (which I still did not have any definite idea about as no news reports were covering the kidnappings), she was consolidating the Tillaberi and Baleyara clusters. What that means is that the office considered staying in our posts too dangerous and we would have to come into our regional capital (in this case, Niamey) for an unknown amount of time. Now, this is a huge step to take for a country director, and an event I didn't think I would ever really witness. We have three steps in our emergency action plan in Peace Corps: standfast, consolidation, and evacuation. We were suddenly one step away from leaving country. Mary told me to pack for at least 10 - 14 days in Niamey, perhaps longer, to say good bye to my neighbors and explain where I was going. This was big, but at the time I did not know how much this would change my service.

I said goodbye to my neighbors. I gave the key to my house to my maigari and said, "Well, I have to go to Niamey, they're afraid we're all going to get kidnapped by bandits. Haha!" He said, "No one's going to kidnap you, you don't have any money."

It was a big joke at the time, but I couldn't have known then was that I would join ten other PCVs in a meeting with the Country Director, in which she would outline the severity of the situation in Niger. The two separate kidnappings were most likely linked. The American Embassy had initiated a travel ban on the Tillaberi and Filingue roads. To put this in perspective, the only other travel ban in country is in the area around Agadez, where the Tuareg ethnic group has been in rebellion against the government for increased autonomy for nearly two years now. Our Country Director explained that she had classified information from the French, Nigerien, American, and Malian authorities which she couldn't share with us, but that the kidnappings seemed to target Westerners. The area we inhabit is basically lawless. The Nigerien government just doesn't have the resources to adequately monitor the vast swathes of mostly unoccupied desert and scrubland. In the past 7 years, other kidnappings have occurred, including a grouop of 32 European tourists in 2003 and an Austrian couple in 2007 who were ransomed for $10 million. Additionally she told us that bandits had actually robbed an entire town a few years ago, rolling in with guns on open back trucks and escaping before any gendarmes could be mobilized to help. The situation did not look good, and Mary posed a possibility that none of us expected: new villages in a different region. There was no guarantee we'd be able to return to our villages, or ever see our villagers again.

We were encouraged to travel out east. In the past five weeks I have visited every Peace Corps region in Niger. I've been to Dosso, Konni, Tahoua, Maradi, and Zinder. I've visited Volunteers from my stage that I hadn't seen in months. It was great to travel around and see almost the entire country, but the more I traveled, the more I just wanted to go home, my home, on the Baleyara road, the place I had made my own over ten months. My area is amazing because it mixes four of the major ethnic groups in Niger: the Zarma, Fulani, Bella Tuareg, and Hausas. The area is so liberal and progressive compared to every other place I went, and in every village I visited, I noticed that many other villages had so much more NGO work than my area. I felt like if I had to leave that I would be abandoning my friends and my adoptive family. I couldn't do it. I couldn't imagine myself living anywhere else, and I would do anything to go back.

After three weeks out of our villages, Mary called us all together again and gave us three options. We could go back to our villages, with several restrictions, which I will enumerate later. We could move to a new village in a new region and basically start over again. The final option was to leave country, to take interrupted service with the hope that the situation would calm down and we'd be able to return to our villages. Five Volunteers in their first year of service decided to move to the Dosso region and take new villages. The six of us in our second year all decided to stay under restrictions that make us completely isolated and independent and nearly incapable of initiating projects that required any outside intervention.

I've decided to return back to village. It's going to be a very different, very difficult service, but I couldn't abandon my village. I came to Niger to do two years in one village, to learn and to grow from my friends and neighbors, and I could not give up on that. I'll post the restrictions soon. They're pretty tough. I can't fully communicate how stressful, emotional, and crazy this past month has been. Even Volunteers in Niger can barely comprehend what we eleven had to go through. Imagine that you were forcibly evicted from your community without a chance to say goodbye. That's only one of the issues tied up in this entire situation. God willing, I'll go back to village tomorrow. After that I will not be able to post on this blog very often. I think I'll be mailing blog entries to my dad to post on this blog. Anyone worried, I'm confident I'll be perfectly safe in my village. Like I said, there are a lot of emotions tied up in this decision to return, but I have to believe I've made the right decision, and I have to follow through with it.