The End of Make Believe

Sometimes we forget why we've come.

I am a committed idealist. At home many of you know me for my refusal to use plastic bags, eat meat, kill anything, go near pesticides, etc. I've considered those quirks - whatever you call them - manifestations of my ideas of how the world should be (cleaner, more aware, kinder, more compassionate). Coming to Niger as a Peace Corps Volunteer seems like the embodiment of those ideals.

But I've found myself bogged down during these past seven months. Things are different here. Plastic bags are everywhere. I avoid them whenever possible, but it seems futile when they litter the landscape in a country without waste management. Meat-eating makes sense. If it didn't gross me out, I'd do it. I'm now able to squish ants between my fingers and stomp on scorpions. I even dusted my house with Rambo (white powder bug-killer), and I lather my legs and feet with Cutter (DEET in a stick).

I was surprised at how fast it faded. When stripped of all but two bags' worth of my possessions, when I could be down with amoebic dysentery in an hour for the next two days, when it's so hot my eyes feel like they're boiling in their sockets - that idealism, the patience I told myself I'd have, the honorable way I'd envisioned conducting myself - takes a distant second to meeting my needs for food, shade, something to use as a fan, someone to understand my intestinal woes. During training, we were understood, indulged, coddled. I whined because I could. I sought comforts like chocolate or Gatorade or a new zara*, and I could afford them, and so could all my friends. We were in this together - let's make it easier on ourselves.

At some point the we changes. I've been waiting for this chip to fall. In a taxi in Niamey a month ago, I wondered - when will I stop being relieved that I don't live here and realize that I do?

In the bush, especially at first, I was all-basic-needs, all the time. Tons of sleep, tons of water, tons of alone time. The illusion that I was going to become "a child of the village" was cute but looked less likely with every day**. I was paraded around, celebrated for my whiteness. People whose extended family make less in a year than I made in a month as an AmeriCorps Volunteer brought me precious food that was neither tasty nor at all necessary to me. I felt guilty. But I can't turn it down. I can't make myself understood. I came to think of myself in the village as like a person who dresses up as a character at Disney World.

Inside my house or concession, where it's by no stretch of the imagination 100 degrees, I wear shorts, cook pasta, read for pleasure, plant flowers because they're pretty, et cetera. I'm Brittany. If I'm going out into the village, it's on with the ankle-length skirt, the headscarf, the sleeved shirt. I bring my water, my epi-pen, and until lately my notebook (for new words). I am Sakina.

I am in the village but not of it.

No wonder people ask me to take their photo or give them money or medicine all the time. I have the capabilities to do this. I remember the rules though: development does not happen when you merely hand out food or pills. We are here to help people help themselves.

The past few months, as evidenced by my raving about what a wonderful time I'm having, I have gotten more comfortable in the village. I'm certainly not treated like any other village woman, but everyone calls me by my name, lets me pump and carry my own water, and is no longer shocked when I am headed out to farm (although that isn't typical village-woman work, it's village-person work). There is a tenuous, wordless agreement in place about what villagers can't do to me that they would do to other Americans - constantly ask for presents, call me Anasara, etc. I can never know whether or how much they resent how much food or medicine or clothing I have in my house while they go hungry or sick or ragged. It's terribly unfair.

It came crashing down this week. I was walking around greeting, trying to be fair, stopping a little while at each concession, chatting, moving on. Near my friend Amina's house is a small family with a 4-year old girl named Haoua. I stopped by and commenced greetings as usual:
Greeting - How's everyone's afternoon? Response -We're in health.
G - How are the children? R - They are thankful.
G - How's work? R - Thanks be to Allah.

After these initial niceties it's usually time to move on, but I noticed little Haoua didn't pop up to say hello from where she was lying on the mat. In fact, as I approached she was downright unresponsive. It was eerie. She barely looked in my direction when I took her hand. Her mother told me she'd been sick for a week with fever and diarrhea, and she'd taken her to see Ousemane, the village doctor. He'd prescribed penicillin. Interesting. I fretted and quizzed Haoua's mum and asked her if Haoua was eating. No, not for days. Drinking? Unsure.

In Tamtala, people take advantage of the relative abundance and availability of water to save 150 cfa (30 cents) a month and get their water from maasa-maasa (holes dug into a riverbed) rather than from the pump, which charges this fee in case it needs repairs. The relative cleanliness of pump water could save them from so much suffering, and it would be even better if they strained and boiled the water before drinking it.

All that is far-fetched fodder for public health talks, which I've tried to do informally. I don't hold a lot of sway, though. I don't have any kids, I get sick sometimes like everyone else, I've not even seen the end of rainy season yet - so what do I know? The village women look at me like they've been getting on fine without me so far, so why change? It seems our definitions of fine vary.

I went back to my house from Haoua's and raided my US-government-funded Peace Corps Health Kit for some Oral Rehydration Salts. It's basically a mixture of sugar and salt to be added to water (filtered and bleached like a good PCV's, of course) when you've gotten dehydrated from too much diarrhea (and who will disagree when I say any diarrhea is too much diarrhea?). I filled my Nalgene with my sparkling-clean water and brought everything over to Haoua's***. I showed her mother how much solution to put with how much water, how she should mix it with a clean spoon, how much salt and sugar she should use to recreate the stuff when the packet ran out. I explained that it would be best to boil water or at least use pump water. She nodded, stirred it up herself, and got Haoua sitting up to drink half a cup. I left everything there saying the nighttime blessing, "may we sleep in health."

The next day I walked around as usual but didn't make it over there in the morning. After lunch I thought I'd better go check up and get my cup back, and on the way I noticed more double-headscarves than usual on the path to their house. I immediately knew what was wrong, before anyone asked me if I was going over to the buyan e-do or "house of the dying." My heart sank. Indeed, my friend Zalika accompanied me there saying Haoua had died just a couple hours before. I wasn't dressed in proper costume (one headscarf only, farm clothes) but walked over a little dazed and greeted the parents on the death. Fonda tilas. Irkoy ma suuji, a ma'a yafa.

I hadn't known Haoua's father by name, but I knew his face, and he sure knew me. He spoke to me in broken English picked up from working in the shipping yards in Accra. "Sakina, thank you for a-give my daw-ta medicine yes-ta-day. I thank you ah very much." Sunken heart broke. Tears sprang up, and I had to get away - adults don't cry in Niger.

I can't make much sense of the story. It still dazes me. The wall that I'd built between myself and 'my' villagers has steadily been crumbling, and this dark event knocked a big hole in it.




* Zara = Zarma for pagne, which is French for "piece of fabric you tie around your waist." A fellow PCV remarked toward the end of training: "I never thought I'd be so materialistic."
**I should have patience. I've certainly made progress toward, though never imagine actually reaching, that goal.
***It's against the rules to give out medicine to villagers - as an American, I imagine this might have something to do with lawsuits, but it more likely is a way to protect us from being seen as "Doctors Without Borders Without Licenses" (as one PCV-made shirt says) and being subject to constant begging in the village. Rules or no, the ORS aren't really 'medicine' and are easy to make oneself - I just wanted to give a little headstart to Haoua's mother, who may or may not have had sugar that day.