People Remembered, Places Revisited

It’s been a long wait for this blog entry that I hope has been eagerly awaited. I’ve been running around quite a bit recently, reflecting on my trip, allowing the images and the feelings to ferment and gather strength without, hopefully, losing any potency with my lack of immediacy in recording them. Here it is then: reflections on my return to Niger.

Let me start by saying that this wasn’t an individual accomplishment. I was accompanied on my trip by my friend Jane, a Nigerian with a rugged sense of independence that surpasses that of nearly every other woman I know. She had to be tough: overall, I think we totaled 50 hours of travel time from Jos to Sokoto, Niamey, Tanka Lokoto and back in only eight days. Along the way, we were helped out by Ms. Lindsay Goldberg and her boyfriend Nasser who gave us succor in Niamey to break up the travel days. Lindsay is a former Volunteer who stayed behind in Niger after the Peace Corps evacuated, braving the capital even without a half-dozen, Mefloquine-crazed Volunteers lighting up the town and breaking the monotony of quiet, rice and bean flavored nights.

But that isn’t why you came to this blog today. In my last entry, I expressed real fear at the possibility that, upon returning to my village, the realization that one can never go back would tear through my gut like some hateful combination of barbed wire and amoebic dysentery. In my mind, any number of tragedies could have befallen my community in the two years since I left. Most involved the famine that affected the country in 2010, but in my wildest imaginings, which tend to run like an out of control train, certain individuals were vulnerable to anything from malaria to hyena attacks, complications in childbirth to that scene in Alien where the little baby creeper bursts out of the guy’s chest. These things happen in my mind even without government mandated anti-malarials.

So it was as I stepped out of the bush taxi, just pitching up in the village without any prior warning or word that I’d be returning. I’m a terrible guest; really, I am. Unloading from a bush taxi to the sand, sounds, and heat of a two year time capsule was a surreal experience. The men at the mosque seemed to take it in stride: “Hey, Mubarak, ni ka? Fonda kayan!” (Hey, Mubarak, you’ve come? Welcome back!) The children alternately mobbed me and went tearing off through the neighborhood screaming to everyone who could hear, “Mubarak ka! Mubarak ka!” (Mubarak came! Mubarak came!) My friends from all over the village came streaming out of the woodwork, their faces shifting from disbelief and confusion to smiles and laughter seconds after setting eyes on me. All day as they slowly made their way back from the fields, dirty and tired, neighbors and friends greeted me, none of whom I had seen or spoken to since I left. They’d heard news that I was in town and had dropped everything to come see me. And all day, I worried over this person or that until they visited and I saw him or her with my own eyes.

And you know, everyone was fine. Everyone is alive and well in Tanka Lokoto. The village was remarkably the same. They’d built a new mosque, bright, white, and shining even from the dunes north of town. All the children were present and accounted for, all a couple inches taller, their faces slowly smoothing away baby fat as they get older. And everyone had a new baby. I leave for a couple years and suddenly every single family has a brand new baby, most only a few weeks old. It’s something I should have expected in a country with such a high birth rate, but it’s one of those things you just don’t think about when you’ve been gone for so long.

I’m happy to report that my favorite kid, my attakurmizo, Razak, who grew from this kid at the beginning of my service:


To this kid by the end of my service:


And is now this kid:


And if that picture were expanded just a little bit, you’d see him with his little arms around a cute little girl. So maybe he learned a thing or two from hanging around me for two years.

Also, my friend Sekou, who I still maintain is one of the most clever, most amazing people I’ve ever met, is still doing great things for his community. In many ways, he’s still this guy:


He's the one in the blue-grey suit, speaking while everyone else just listens. A man so well respected that he commands attention just by the nature of who he is: a hardworking man diligently working to better himself and his community. He’s still kicking it, same as always, a little pensive in this shot from the top of the dune at sunset:


And in one off the cuff comment, he amazed me with his humility and his dedication to his home and his people. Though it had taken him five solid years, he told me, he had finally managed to acquire a car to act as an ambulance for the local medical center. If ever anyone is in dire need, they can be at the hospital in Niamey in a just a couple hours. Already, the ambulance has saved lives. And he mentioned this just as casually as he would a prediction of afternoon rain.

So, despite two years away, the village is still there. It hasn’t changed much. And in the few days since I’ve been home, I realize how similar my Nigerien village is to my American village. Nothing much changes. There’s a new building here or there, the kids grow a bit taller, the seasons change, but life keeps on going. I’ll tell people where I’ve traveled and they’ll be amazed without any real idea what those places are like, the people who live there, the cultures slowly changing just as cultures always do despite calls to nostalgia and “the way things were.”

I know now that things in Tanka Lokoto will continue without me, just as things in Flora, Indiana continue without me. I can leave these places behind and they’ll be secure in my heart. They don’t change. Or rather, they change with me. They’ll age alongside me, they’ll change as I change, but I don’t have to fear returning to a place I don’t recognize. As I grow older, these places seem smaller, like my childhood bed. I can still sleep there, but my feet hang over the edge. I haven’t outgrown it, but I’m just used to bigger things. I’ve never gotten used to being a big fish in a small pond. I don’t like it. There isn’t enough room to swim. And even if I feel a little lost sometimes, I like the freedom to explore that comes with being a little fish in the big, wide ocean. In the end, I feel a bit like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. I’ve learned and grown, but I need to keep moving, to keep discovering, to know that I’ve left people behind that I care about but who I still carry with me in everything I do. These places and these people will always be there, but I’ve got to keep moving. So was it worth traveling over 1200km to learn such a simple lesson? I’ll leave it with a lesson from Hesse’s Siddhartha:

“Certainly I traveled for my own pleasure. Why else do it? I got to know people and places, I enjoyed amiability and confidences, I made friends…I have had good days, I learned, I enjoyed myself, I harmed neither myself nor others through vexation or excessive haste. And if ever I go back that way again, perhaps to purchase a subsequent harvest, or for any purpose whatsoever, friendly people will receive me amiably and cheerfully, and I will have myself to commend for that.”

I will always have a bed to rest my head; I will always have friends and neighbors, whether I’m living in a place or not. And I have only myself to commend for taking the time to build those relationships, for revisiting my past and realizing that I continue to carry a living memory wherever I go.

The Return: A Search for a Living Memory

I've been struggling with this decision for most of my time in Jos, but by nature of the fact that I just got the visa, I think I've resolved it: I'm going back to Niger.

I figure, why not? It's only a two-day trip on tortuous roads through the heat and dust of Northern Nigeria and that half-remembered road from Niamey to Zinder. After all, when will I honestly next get the chance to be a mere 1,271km road trip from the home that built me up, pulled me down, and, every day for two solid years, fundamentally changed the person I was and the person I was to be.

It's impossible to describe the emotion that goes into this decision. It's something I've been grappling seriously with for the last two weeks now. As this idea took shape and began to materialize, I realized that it isn't all Tuareg tea and starry nights. If I'm expecting life to have frozen there in my time away, I'll be sorely disappointed. The children will have grown, there will have been births, deaths, marriages, all the events of life that ground us and give us structure. And I'll have missed many of those.

In fact, I have no idea what has happened in the village in the nearly two years I've been away. I lost my Nigerien SIM card while I was traveling in West Africa. With that small piece of plastic and electronics, I lost my only living connection to my village. Every phone number I collected in Niger is now lost in some forgotten corner of Africa.

I remember meeting a young woman in Sierra Leone. She was set to leave the country and was a bit heartbroken by that fact. We commiserated over leaving a place that felt like home, and I mentioned how much I wanted to return to Niger. "Don't," she said, "I know how much you want something like that right now, but you can't ever go back. What is there for you? Things change."

In every way, she's right, and that's the biggest fear I hold. Two years is a long time in a country where the average life expectancy is 53, where 16% of children don't make to to the age of 5, where, as a woman, you have a 1 in 16 chance of dying during childbirth over the course of a lifetime that averages 7.6 children per woman. In my mind, I imagine this place held in time, where I'll step out of a bush taxi and have a horde of screaming children welcoming me back to village. In reality, there's every possibility that a few of those children will no longer be there to greet me. There's every possibility that the old men who spent their days napping in the shade of the neem trees will be fewer in number. There's every possibility that sometime during one of those hot, black nights of the past two years, someone I cared about has slipped into a malarial fever from which they couldn't recover.

And what can I do about that? Can I mourn time lost in a place I once called home? Or can I return and find a place that has continued on without me and be thankful that I was allowed such a profound experience? One that can never be shared, no matter how many words are spoken or how many photos were taken. Can I grow and plant this piece of myself, permanently locate it within my heart, and continue on, carrying this shard of experience with me, knowing that there is a piece of myself somewhere that continues to live, to grow, to flourish in the harsh, near-desert of the Sahel?

That is ultimately what has brought me to undertake this journey back to Niger. I don't know if I'd ever get the chance to do it again. Despite all the promises and assurances, I've met too many people who never got around to that great passion, experience, or dream that slowly faded into the soft pain of regret and a wistful nostalgia of a previous life.

If for no other reason, I want to go back in the hopes of seeing this kid again:



That's my attakurmizo, my little trickster, the kid who saw me through the trauma of leaving, who taught me more about love and friendship than I ever could have imagined, who did that all without being able to even properly say my name. That picture is the perfect representation of him. Whenever I think about him, that's how I see him, arms wrapped around my leg, wide-eyed affection without a trace of guile. I could keep him like this forever, like a glass ornament, precious and beautiful. But I want to see what he's become. As much as possible, I yearn for the living memory of this place, even if it has a few cracks and scratches. That's what this ultimately is about: the search for that living memory, even if it's painful or broken in some way. Tomorrow, I'll start that search, unsure of what I'll find but longing for it nevertheless.

A Long Time Gone

I've been away too long, and in three days, I'll leave again.

In this case, I'm not talking about America. While it is true that I've been away from my childhood home for over two and a half years, I've been away from my second home, London, much longer. I left this city over four years ago, after studying abroad and working here for the summer. It was a special time for me: my first time living and working abroad, thousands of miles from the place I'd grown up, the people I knew, and the person I was. I loved London, and, at the time, I could imagine myself spending quite a long time here.

But four years later, and how things change. It's part of growing up, I guess, but no one ever tells you how difficult it can be to go back to a place. Now that I've lived and worked in Niger, completely on my own in a completely foreign place, can I really still call London my second home? After all, I only spent about six months across the pond, whereas I spent two years in Tanka Lokoto, my Nigerien home. Does London get priority because it was my "first" second home? Or does Niger win out because it's so much closer to my heart and so much more immediate in my thoughts? When does the idea of place and home dissolve? After your third, fourth, fifth home? I'm closer to Niger than I am to my original home in America at this point and seriously terrified to return to a place I feel will have changed in all the subtle ways places change when you're away for so long.

I've been in London for about three weeks now. Everything is the same, and everything is different. London, as a city, seems to have changed very little. In all my time here, I've taken more evening walks through darkened streets than I can remember. It's a very walkable city, and the cool air always helps to clear my mind and work out any number of things I may or may not be pondering. One would think that in such a dynamic city, that I'd be lost after four years away, but as much as things change, I find the streets are still there for long walks with confused thoughts.

Most of these thoughts have reflected change. When I was here four years ago, none of my friends were married, most were still students, we all had too much time on our hands and not enough money in our pockets. But that's changed. Several of my friends, after four years, have serious relationships, one's gotten married (though I still haven't met Becky, and I'm not quite sure if it's all just an elaborate hoax). There aren't many students left (except for one who went for a PhD and got it, only to realize that that wasn't the kind of doctor she wanted to be. She'll start med school in September), and those who were students with no money but all the time in the world are now working, have money, but don't have the time to properly spend it. The ironies of adult life astound me.

And this "adult life" is what really gets me. It's assaulted me since I've come back to London and seen the first big group of people from my past life. I went away four years ago and they were all like me. I come back, and I'm still like me but everyone else has moved on with new responsibilities, a career, a relationship, a life. And here I am, broke, unemployed, without a girlfriend or any responsibilities, and I'm looking to go back to graduate school. Another two years of student life. Many might paint me as trying to avoid all pretenses of adulthood for another two years, but I am quickly approaching 26 and those appearances are actually just a clever deception, at least that's what I hope. Suddenly it becomes easier to understand the long walks through quiet city streets.

If I have to be honest, it's hard not to feel a bit lost, psychologically speaking, after so long away. It's too true that life goes on without you, and despite all my egotistical cravings, there's no changing that. People have to live their own lives, with hundreds of others coming and going throughout the years. Old friends reminisce of years gone by, and a fleeting image appears before the next round of beers. I've realized that the further I've gone away, the harder it is to come back, and as the years go by, in this age of globalization and worldwide opportunity, the farther and farther my friends drift to different corners of the globe, and the more I move around, the harder it is to find my way back to them. Already, it's been nine months since I've seen any of my fellow Volunteers from Niger. The people I meet along the road are all temporary souls who move where they wish, and eventhough I can identify and instantly cling to these vagabonds, pour out everything that needs to be said, I know that the relationship will end, and I'll have a pin in the map representing someone else that I may or may never see again.

It's spoken of a lot in literature regarding cultural readjustment, but I've found that these vagabonds, the ones who take in couchsurfers or who band together for a few days at a time in small traveling groups are more inherently interested in who I am, what I've been doing than those who stay put. Most of that is due to time constraints. We travel together, spend hours with one another, cook meals together, live intimately in such short bursts that we never leave the honeymoon phase of burgeoning friendship. My friends here, as amazing as they are (and I do love every one of them), don't have the time or the opportunity to get into where we've been, what we've been doing over a beer or a meal. I don't find I have the time either. Where do you start? Four years away, and who knows where we'll be next time we meet? Everyone honestly tries, and the greatest thing about my friends is that I can usually just pick right up where we left off. You have to, because four years of life compacted into about two hours just can't do justice to all that either has experienced. It also means that I end up feeling as if I haven't done anything, or nothing significant anyway, and overcoming that feeling may be one of the markers of growing older.

Because if there's one thing I've come to realize over such a long trip, it's the importance of independence, of self-actualization of all you may or may not have done. I have to take advantage of the places I'm in, attempt to have an experience with each new moment, mine my fellow vagabonds for every ounce of the beauty that is in every person who counts themselves truly alive, and generally live without any regrets as to opportunities lost, words unsaid, or moments unrealized. Living like this, one creates moments to which only a few people are privileged. They're stories that are within you that you can't properly convey because true beauty, a unique moment, is the hardest thing to convey, and even in my best moments, I still feel like I'm falling short, even if I've left the other person spellbound. They are moments that stand with me, and even if no one can fully understand how unique an experience it may have been, I'll know that I've felt something special, and I have to be thankful that I can relive it in memory, even if I can never share it fully. For my friends here, and I'm sure for my friends back in the States, there's a lot that they cannot know about what I've done, and even with weeks and weeks of constant story-telling, I'd still not be able to create my world for them. And it's the same for their lives as well. I by no means think that staying in one place, connecting with one person, working on a career is any more or less significant than any of the things that I have done. So even these moments of quotidian life, the ones I've missed out on, can't be expressed any better than some of the magical experiences I've had. And that's the story of four years away. Where do you start? Can you start? And if you can, is it possible to ever finish? I don't think so. Our stories are how we define our lives, and our perceptions of ourselves change with each year gone by. It's why I believe, after my three weeks here, that if I were to move back to London, say for graduate school or just for fun, I know the city will be the same city I left, but I will not be the same person. And eventhough the city is so familiar, I will be experiencing it all over again as if for the first time. I'll be meeting people I know but who I really will be rediscovering all over again. I'll remember my past, and be content to remake my present in whatever way the current of time takes me.