Another Milestone

All of the sudden, we have less than a year left. Last Friday was my one-year mark in Tamtala. I celebrated as I usually do, handing out popcorn and Gatorade. Lots of fun.

I was in Niamey the week before to welcome a new AG/NRM (“sister”) stage and bid goodbye and safe journey to our old one. The hostel was packed. There was nowhere to eat, sleep or work. Now it’s eerily empty – the old stage is gone, the newest one is out doing their First Month Challenge in the bush (the challenge being: can you stay in the bush for an entire month?).

I’m here for one night only to buy and arrange transport for the long-awaited millet grinder, and I have a moment to write because my chief, who is in Niamey too, insists he will get a better price if he goes to buy it alone. This is almost certainly true, and he is so trustworthy I would’ve given him the money to buy it now – but, for the sake of inefficiency as well as transparency, he and two others have gone to discuss the price with several merchants before they come back for me and my envelope full of cash.

Back in the village, the women who believe this is actually going to happen are ecstatic. The men began building the hut for the machine while I was gone. It’s a comfortable distance from most of the village, but I fear it’s close enough to my house that the frenzied, rapid-fire thwap-thwap-thwap of the motor will replace the deliberate thumping of the mortar and pestle that underscores my attempts at sleep. Nigeriens, I think, have the admirable ability to sleep through anything. Biiba, my friend who braids my hair and whose daughter Anifatou I practice carrying on my back, lives next door to the new structure. She’s not concerned about the noise, so I won’t worry. Hopefully the rest from constant pounding will be peace enough for her.

Between my last post and the week of festivities (and proposal writing, and movie editing) in Niamey, I spent three glorious weeks in Tamtala. Bitterly disappointed at first because the cold season women’s garden was an unequivocal failure due to my absence for most of cold season, I consoled myself with the work left.

GLOBE, our environmental education program at Tamtala’s primary school (as well as schools around the world: www.globe.gov), got off the ground –finally- and is going well, with the kids taking temperature readings (this is depressing, because it’s sooo hot, and I can only sit and watch it rise by almost a degree Celsius a day lately), learning about soil, trees, wood conservation and the water cycle. I sit in as Illiassou, the headmaster and teacher of the CM2 class (about 6th grade equivalent), presents the modules. I don’t do much other than assist and ask questions of the kids in halting French or clarify points in surreptitious whispers to them in Zarma.

Illiassou’s a good teacher, generally patient and understanding, and feels for the poor kids who must pass exams in French but are barely literate in it and have little support from parents at home. Illiassou dreams of constructing a school library so the students might have resource for language learning, but I’m trying to urge him to start small – with perhaps a few textbooks in the corner of a classroom. His enthusiasm is waning, though, and he wants to go back to university for another degree. Teachers here, like in the States, are overworked and underpaid. And that’s where I stop in order to remain as apolitical as possible in my blogs.

I’ve got moringa trees growing in my concession, and my host family even watered them while I was in Niamey! The lizards are awful pests, but I should have two nice-sized trees this year. Moringa, “the miracle tree,” grows like a weed and its leaves are incredibly nutritious. I’m growing them to show my neighbors how easy they are to care for, how quickly one benefits from a little bit of effort, and how yummy the leaves are in sauces. Maimouna, Djamila, Djamila’s mum and several of her neighbors are all now growing trees because of my promises. The deal-breaker, though, is whether they’ll like the taste of the moringa-leaf sauce. No matter how nutritious, they won’t eat it if it tastes bad. Same goes for water. No matter how much I encourage drinking pump water - which comes out clear, which, in a pinch, I can drink without filtering or bleaching and not get sick – it’s a bit salty and therefore “si kanu” (“not sweet”), and Tamtalans won’t drink it. The filthy, cloudy, disease-ridden well water is almost a kilometer away from the village center, but it’s free of charge and salt-free, both essentials for my friends the villagers. Sigh.

The first days back (a month ago now) were rough and wonderful at the same time. My chief and others who’d heard I went as far as Dakar for treatment were sure I’d just continue to Amerik and they’d never see me again. Not so, ouiza, though Dakar is, in more than one sense, one step closer to the US. There was the aforementioned Huge Bummer of the Failed Women’s Garden – but what did I expect, missing the entire cold season? If they’re not going to do it without me, it’s a waste of effort anyway. The women have more than enough work, and I don’t blame them for not planting. The problem is, if they don’t cultivate fruits and veggies, they won’t eat them. They won’t use the money they earn from weaving mats (tabarmas) and making water-cooling pots to buy produce; they’ll buy millet, because millet fills them up. Hence the rampant malnutrition, hence my current push for moringa trees in every concession.

My biggest tear-jerking event upon return to Tamtala wasn’t the marriage and departure of my friend Saouda, who’d I guess at about 17 years old, nor the betrothal of little Haoua, who definitely just turned 16. It was the death of an old man, Maimouna’s uncle. Barely able to see and older than Allah, I never saw him outside of his concession. He and a younger man, Weyla the table-seller’s dad, died the same week. Everyone was sadder about the latter, because to die young is of course a bigger tragedy. But I had a harder time with the dotiijyo (old man).

When I went to greet his wife on the death, she welcomed me warmly, as usual. She and her husband had always been kind when I made the treeless and rocky trek past the pump and across the cracked-mud soccer field to visit them. The old man would greet me and chat, and never failed to send me away with an embarrassingly precious gift – once even carefully filling a teacup with powder to make "anasara milk," despite the fact that I always have a huge, extravagantly expensive tin at home. Anyway, the old woman knew I’d been gone and sick, so she greeted me on my travels and congratulated me on surviving the ear infection. I hurried to assure her I was fine before expressing my condolences.

Uncharacteristically, she threw up her hands in an energetic show of emphasis. “Sakina, when the old man died, he asked about you!” Oh really? She continued, breaking my heart, “He said, where’s Sakina? Why hasn’t she come yet?”

What in Allah’s name I was able to get out of my mouth by way of apology before tears choked me, I don’t know.

This, and the warm welcome I received from people who literally thought I’d died – because that’s what happens here: you get sick, and you die if you don’t get better – threw me down a small dark hole of despair (and, of course, guilt). I listed to myself the number of times I would have died if I’d been born with the circumstances of a true Tamtalan (four: 1. at birth – premature, frank-breech, Cesarean; 2. at age four, in Chicago, with pneumonia; 3. five years ago in Florida, with that anaphylactic reaction to fire ants everyone heard about for the following year; and 4. here, in January, from some germ in my ear). Instead, I’ve had proper care whenever I needed it, and someone has been able to pay for me. THIS IS NOT FAIR.

As has happened more than several times in the past fifteen months, my ability to bounce back astounded me. With nothing constructive to do with that guilt, I buried it, or burned it, or let it go somewhere where it wouldn’t prevent me from functioning. I didn’t even really cry. I prefer to think I’m not heartless… am I not paying attention?

I went on to have a fantastic few weeks in my favorite place in the country. They were so good and full of productive work I thought briefly about not taking vacation to the States (but am now looking forward to it, seeing as though it’s 115 degrees again). I thought about extending my service beyond my original two-year commitment. I thought about how much I believed in the Peace Corps model of development, even while at the same time, I am suffering from the oh-so-typical mid-service crisis of disillusionment common to PCVs when they see that perhaps this pervasive NGO presence in their capital cities does more harm than good.

One tiny thing that bolstered my belief that What I’m Doing Here is Good was my ability to facilitate a connection between Mamoudou (“any PCV’s dream”), who I wrote about last summer after Kate, Kurt and I worked with him to start a Gum Arabic plantation near Gotheye, and my chief. Amirou and I went to Gotheye to visit Mamoudou’s garden, which, like his plantation, is awesome. “Of course it is,” Amirou said to me, gesturing to the canal that bordered one side of it, “he has water!” Mamoudou has every tree known to PCVs growing in his garden, including grafted versions of the pomme du Sahel, which Amirou also has in Tamtala, and from which he took scions to graft on in the village (a skill he and Maimouna learned at ICRISAT during our training in December).

In Gotheye I stopped by our transit house to say hi to Alison and pick up packages, most of which had been sent before Christmas (yes, it was March). Though I hadn’t planned on it, I stayed the night – because we went to see Nouhou, our neighbor the Xima! Seabass, who’d been en route to my village (to prove to Tamtalans that he, too, was alive, a year after doing my “live-in” while I was just a scared little trainee), changed his direction and met us for the intrigue.

He met us at dusk, and we headed over to a mud-brick concession that looked precisely like all the other mud-brick concessions on the block, except there was magic! inside (I say this with a wink, I hope that’s coming through). For the price of nothing (or the gift of a bag of onions) we were ushered into a spirit house. What does such a thing contain, one may ask? Hundreds of bottles of perfume lining one wall, costumes for the spirit mediums hanging on nails (18), various animal skulls, skins and sacks, a basket full of powders tied in bits of plastic bag and old pagnes, a bloody machete and two knives stuck in the sand, and a mat and mosquito net set up for the guardian to sleep. Sometimes this guy will be awakened by the spirits asking him to get them a bottle or two of beer (apparently they aren’t Muslims either), which he is obliged to do before going back to sleep. When he wakes in the morning, the bottle is empty, but it’s still sealed... creeeeeepy....

Nouhou called to his wife and she brought a calabash bowl full of water, which he placed in a depression in the sand until it was very still. Then he started untying the bundles of powders, all made by pounding leaves or bark of local trees. Daintily he sprinkled six or seven types of powders on the surface of the water until he’d made a sunburst-type pattern with powder covering the entire surface of the water except for a circle in the middle. He then proceeded to mutter spells over the calabash, after each he spit lightly three times in its general direction. Interestingly enough, each spell began with the Arabic word “bismillahye,” which good Muslims murmur dozens of times a day at the beginning of anything (beginning to cook a meal, starting a journey, opening a book to write, etc). Anyway, the particular spell he was concocting was a marriage one – if you knew who you wanted to marry and wanted him or her to agree to it, you ask Nouhou to take the steps outlined above, then you drink four handfuls of the calabash water and bathe with the rest of it. If you don’t know who you want to marry and you want to find someone, Nouhou places a shard of mirror in the bottom of the calabash, so you can see it through the non-powdered water (as Seabass astutely observed.: you will see a reflection of yourself), and you do the same thing.

The price: again, nothing. Until you get married. Satisfied customers come back and pay big for their happiness, he told us. There are “I need to find a good job” spells, and those guys come back with tons of money for their Xima.

This was a trip for us. Alison and Seabass had been here for more than two years without seeing such a thing, and here it is, right behind our transit house. Alison managed to go again before she left Niger and had her cowrie shells read (another of Nouhou’s many talents). We’ll see what comes true...

Seabass and I headed back to quiet, pious Tamtala, where the villagers loved him, the men told him he spoke better Zarma than me (jerks), and not a single person asked if we were getting married. It appears as though my constant refrain of “I don’t want to marry, it would only bring me suffering” has worked. He was my first visitor in a year, and it was nice to have an excuse to “cook” some precious American food for the occasion. It was also fun to tell my villagers that, while I was out working at the school, he was cooking for me. Hah! Allah is big.

The next week, after Kate and I talked on the radio in Tillaberi (which we also did this morning), we headed to Niamey for the bi-annual Gender And Development auction, a barbecue to welcome the newbies, and, of course, their swearing-in ceremony at the ambassador’s. We all ordered or sewed crazy outfits, sipped on fancy drinks, caught up with Hausaphone friends, etc. for a few days, said goodbye to the old AG/NRMs and welcomed the new ones, who will only know each other as ghosts and in legends.