Flurry of Activity

Meh... flurry makes me think of snow. No snow here!

On July 2, the wedding anniversary of a friend I've known since preschool who is now teaching little tykes in Wisconsin, some star alignment created a flurry of activity in Tamtala. We finally, finally, finally got rain last week, and had been planting (yes, I am in Niamey, leaving my field half-covered in manure, awaiting sorghum planting. Yes, this is late, but the time hasn't totally passed yet.). I guess it really started July 1, but all of the following took place in the ensuing 48-hour period.

My friend Djamila, who has a four-year-old daughter, Wassila, gave birth to a boy. Only three days earlier, she'd been winking at me saying that she expected to give birth this month, and that no, she wouldn't tell our health agent, Ousemane, (the closest thing we have to a doctor), but she'd tell me. I fretted, wondering why, but the answer wasn't hard to reach. Medical ethics haven't reached American proportions here yet, and a lot of bush women fear the prenatal consultation. Ousemane is very professional by all accounts, but there is still distrust when one is in a room alone with a man. Djamila had been at Ousemane's office last week, though, in the prenatal consultation room. I was there, under the shade hanger with the Unicef scale, for baby weighings like I am every month. This time I'd brought bags of dried Moringa leaves to give to mothers whose little ones had lost weight since May. There were more kids than the twenty bags could serve, but I've just bought more at the Yantala Market in Niamey. One day, insha'allah, the women will be able to take care of all of this themselves, because many of them are growing their own Moringa (I am a seed distributor as well, you see). Asking the handful of vendors at Yantala, they said their leaves came from Maradi - halfway across the country! I know there are Moringa plantations south of Niamey. Obviously we need more...

Some of you know that, because of my practical obsession with this tree, I was lucky enough to get selected to attend a West African sub-regional conference on Moringa in Burkina Faso. Along with "ay baaba," three volunteers and their counterparts, and three PC/N staff, we trucked it 12 hours overland to northwestern Burkina Faso (which means "land of the brave" or something similar...). We had a fabulous four days sharing ideas, successes, failures and recipes with volunteers from Ghana, Togo, Benin and Burkina. I met another Gallagher (probably not really related to me, but also traces his lineage to Donegal). We PCVs exchanged Franglais puns. We ate egg sandwiches and yogurt and compared Biere Niger with their two equivalent options. We ripped on the Ghana PCVs for getting to speak English all the time. We tried to come up with cool stuff Niger had that the other countries didn't. Our list: giraffes (although they're in Benin too, so geez, nothing?!). How about Tuaregs? Land mines? An overabundance of sand? No?

Over the course of the conference, Chris mentioned to me that somehow Niger seemed... different. It was true. As I wrote in an article for our PCV newsletter here:
"During the conferenece, we Nigeriens showcased for the other attendees the best things about our culture. We thought these little quirks were rather pan-West-African, but as it turns out, other countries seemed to have a bit more alhali [manners/behavior] than us, even though the Niger PCVs knew it was just stuff we'd gotten used to... Our offenses included stealing control of entire sessions in order to overexplain a point, and then doing it again five minutes later, burping, laughing at inappropriate times, not being able to speak French OR English, refusing to turn off our cell phones, showing up late to sessions because some of us were praying, snapping ("moi, monseiur!"), stealing the soap, stealing seeds, stealing food, talking when someone else "had the parole" and various other faux pas everyone else was too polite to call to our attention."

In truth, I don't think we (and by we, I don't mean the PCVs) were too badly misbehaved (and I do recognize that it's a bit snobby to quote myself on my blog, but hey, I gave permission), but we were really the only country that brought counterparts who couldn't speak English or French, including my baaba (also the primary burper and laugher). Shrug and sigh. I was made to once again examine my feelings about colonial languages: they sure did make life easier for 90 percent of us that week.

Anyway, I digress (although really, is extolling the virtues of the Miracle Tree ever irrelavant? I think not.). I was telling you all about July 2. So Djamila had a boy. I'm glad she did, I guess... she already has a daughter, and people here always prefer boy babies to girls. But I have to say, she was my closest shot at having a villager name a baby after me, since she is my closest young-woman friend. This is kind of a rite of passage for a PCV. Anyway, she's got a healthy boy who pooped on me when he was three hours old. He won't have a name for another couple of days, but my bet is Mohammad or some variation of it.

Big event number two: a ruckus outside my concession. I went out to see what was going on. Fati (and when I say "Fati", you say "which one?" - this Fati was the first neighbor I had, my Live-In week in February of 2002) has two boys. The older one, Souley, was tied to his grandma's back, which is very normal, but a knot of women were fussing over him. As I got closer I saw red streaks on his face. I'm ashamed to say it, but for a split second - just a second, to calm myself down, because I knew what had probably really happened - I had some thought like "wow, maybe this is some "African" face-painting thing I don't know about." Terrible, I know. But anyway. What's just as terrible as my ignorance is the fact that Souley had been injured by a donkey cart - stories were flying every which way as to exactly how and who was to blame (the blame, apparantly, was mostly Souley's, since "little boys in rainy season don't behave"). What was apparent was blood clotting on his forehead and soaking the pagne tied around his head in back. The women debated the possibility of getting him a donkey cart, but they had all gone to the fields (overnight we'd had rain, yes RAIN!). And Ousemane was in Lossa, our town at the road. So his grandma was preparing, gathering money, to walk him the hour-plus to the doctor's office. In the hubbub I managed to check his alertness and speak soothingly (I think) to his mother and aunts, explaining that we could see his eyes were open and were following movement, and that was really good. I don't know what my opinion was worth to them, but noting this made me feel better. Through the whole clucking-women chaos, Souley was incredibly calm. I couldn't tell if this was because he was in incredible pain, or if he, at three years old, had just developed the uncanny patience common to many a long-suffering "child of the bush."

I went out to my field to spread more piles of poop on the sand and await the owners of any animals to get to tilling my 40x40-meter plot. I am planting sorghum and beans until I run out, and I've got some hibiscus left from my garden. Might add millet and peanuts depending on availability too. I'd set up my 5x4-meter garden plot inside my concession, complete with a drip-irrigation system, and planted carrots, tomatoes, hibiscus, melons and lettuce. The lettuce won't make it - it doesn't like the heat. But the melons and hibiscus should be fine. And the tomatoes are special rainy season variety from ICRISAT, so there is hope for produce for me this year.

I'd had a screamer of an evening on the first, when an enormous creepy-crawly creature invaded my house. I was brushing my teeth by the light of a battery-powered blue lamp. This creates an effect not unlike moonlight in the house. Cat rushed in, running erratically. This is not strange. Cat is still an idiot in some ways. But she did indeed appear to be chasing a dark shadow, so I grabbed for my flashlight and spotted a Big Gross Thing running up my wall. It froze on my bookshelf, and I fumbled for my camera, making the shot you see to the left (it was the first day I took my camera out in Tamtala since getting back from America). Training the light on it, I stooped for the cat, toothbrush still in my mouth, eyes on the Bug. Oooh I hope this is not a scorpion. Oooh those things hurt. It doesn't look like a scorpion. What is that crazy tentacle-looking Thing on it? Is it a chariot spider (so named because they're big enough to be a scorpion's ride)? I place Oblivious Cat on my trunk, four inches from the Thing, staring straight at it, and she loses interest three times before she finally gets it and pounces for the Thing. I might have shrieked at this moment, but probably just started doing a little stomping dance until Cat reappeared with Bug in her mouth. Frantically cranking my flashlight (after a year those battery-free wind-up flashlights need to be constantly encouraged to work) and nervously scrubbing my teeth, I train the light on the cat and scoot toward the door.

Then, of course, I knock over my broom, scaring all of us. Cat loses Bug, I lose Cat, etc. Cat streaks out the door, I jump onto a stool, and somehow manage to spotlight Bug again, this time on a piece of 2x4 leaning against the wall. Cursing the cat for her uselessness ("Kittennnnn, I this would've been a reaaaaally good thing to start your killing on"), feeling very girly for being so creeped out by this bug, wondering however I'll make it to my bed with Bug between me an it, not to mention sleep safely knowing Things like That are out there, I continue to brush my teeth (dental hygeine is important). My heavy Chacos are on the other side of the room? What can I reach from the relative safety of my stool? Ah-ha, my Reefs, which might seem flimsy to some of you, but I wear them to farm, so I know how strong they really are. I took the right flip-flop and wound up, thought better of it, leaned closer, switched hands, cranked the flashlight, aimed and chucked the shoe with all my might at the top of the 2x4. It looked dead-on, but of course during the throw I'd lost the light on the Thing, and after I recovered it, Bug was gone, shoe was on the floor, etc. Whimpering (okay not really...), I decided that I could talk myself into thinking I'd killed it and could go to bed, letting it escape from my house in the night. Luckily my mosquito net was set up, and all I had to do was crawl in and squeeze my eyes shut. Cat not allowed. Cat has betrayed me. I needed Cat, and Cat did not hold up her end of the deal. She can sleep alone tonight. But then madness set in and I imagined the thing lifting the feather-light Reef on its strong Bug Shoulders and darting out to bite my ankle and cause me screaming pain. So I grabbed the fallen broom and gave the shoe a few good whacks. I heard a crunch! Yes! I shooshed the flip-flop aside and saw the telltale spot of ooze on the concrete floor. Victory was mine. Vindication. Self-actualization. I don't need any cat to save me from any scary bug. Until next time. And that it the story of the picture to your left.

Now I'm exhausted, but I'll give you a rundown of the rest of July 1 and 2, exciting as they were. There was a landmark soccer match in Tamtala, where young men play on festival days (Muslim holidays, weddings and baby-naming ceremonies). This occasion was a big-deal wedding. Samira's dad was getting remarried, a mere three months after his divorce from her mother, whose picture I'd taken and had developed at home, but who had returned to her parents' village. Samira, one of my favorite kids, was still in the village, but her little sister is with her mother. This is because once kids are big enough to be useful they are the property of the father, but if they are little enough to need caring for they are the responsibility of the mother - and that's how divorce works here. Yeah - yuck. Anyway, there was a big wedding. I dug out my Swear-In complet, which I'd worn to the wedding I'd gone to last year with Maimouna's daughters in a nearby village. The young wife from that wedding was in Tamtala for this one with her new baby - a testament to how much time I've been here. A year and a half - plenty of time.

The soccer game was monumental in that it got so heated that the completely impoverished farmers in my village felt compelled to buy sweets from Weyla, the table-seller, to give out as bribes for the winners, and to toss to the groups of fans (boys, young men, old men, a lazy girl or two - because all the women, of course, are working). Great extravagance in the face of poverty. Was it brave, a display of joy and passion, or foolish? I am in no position to judge. I keep joking when I go to the water pump in the evenings, and watch the men play and the boys stand around, that tomorrow the men will pull water and the women will play ball. Everyone is scandalized, of course, but the hangers-around seemed genuniely impressed when i went out to juggle a half-flat ball with some eight-year-olds while I was waiting my turn at the pump. It has been proven true to me, what they tell us in training - female PCVs often pass as a "third" gender, doing things a Nigerien woman could never get away with. This is just one example.

Afer working in my field and my garden, and finishing Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (very inspiring! I've been tempering it with an account of 1990s China - fascinating as well, in a very different way), I went out to see if Souley and his grandma were back. Sure enough, they were - both of them. He had two huge bandages on his head, and she told me he'd gotten pills to take twice a day for four days, and that was that. It was a great relief - and even better to see him horsing around with the other boys in the sand as I went to the pump that evening.

Two NGO vehicles rolled into Tamtala over these two days, too. The first was from Quatar Charities. A representative came in and the chief called a village-wide meeting which was incredibly well-attended, especially considering there had been rain the night before. After asking all about the history of the village (I learned a lot myself) and about the resources available, the guy asked what problems there were and what the village wanted. This is pretty typical NGO protocol, from what I've seen. I did it too, in a way, when I got to Tamtala. I'm a bit tired of it all. I was just talking to my friend Danielle about this yesterday - what we need here is small business development. Small-enterprise loans, not handouts. Encouragement of entrepreneurship. I wouldn't have said this two years ago. But I am so tired of seeing this culture of dependency reinforced by people in white SUVs swooping in and handing stuff out. The QC guy was good, and I know what he is doing is with good intention. It's the same thing Peace Corps does (in part). We all seek the participation of our beneficiaries. I still have some faith in this system, but my tolerance is running low for watching villagers wait and wait and wait rather than go out and seek for themselves a way to get out of poverty. An ambitious chief here, like mine, is one who seeks partnerships with NGOs, not one that lures investors to the village. Two big things are to blame here: a lack of education and a lack of infrastructure. People don't know what's available to them, and there aren't clear avenues for getting goods to market on a large scale. There is very little disposable income. At least two, but maybe all four, of the other Peace Corps programs represented at the Moringa conference were running Small Enterprise Development sectors. We in Niger aren't even there yet. We're still trying to keep people fed.

The next day the biggest Nigerien I'd ever seen came to town, with two friends. He works with an NGO in Tillaberi with which Peace Corps has a good relationship. Since Amirou was very regrettably out of town at the market and his brother Dullah was in his field, I was kind of the unofficial high-ranking Tamtalan, as it was. These guys wanted to have a meeting with the village (probably the exact same thing that we'd gone through the day before). I knew my chief had been waiting for them and would be disappointed he'd missed them. I made Crystal Light for them and chatted with the super tall guy. His brother works for Peace Corps in Dosso as a driver, and he knows my friend Genghis Khan, now back in Minnesota being a 'regular person again.' He asked about him and suggested I leave Tamtala to come work with them in Tillaberi, and I respectfully declined, saying I had plans to go back to the States and then to graduate school. He said, "you will become a big important person, and then you will come back to Niger and bring us another NGO."

Exasperated, as politely as possible I told him that there are already bazillion NGOs in Niger. "But poverty is not finished," he said.

That's right.

At this same time, when I really wanted to get to the bottom of things with him, my boss Haoua was persistently calling my cell phone, which gets one bar of reception when I have it hanging in my shade hangar (enough to get texts or calls, but not to respond to either). While trying to talk to this guy like a grown-up, I was hauling my tree-climbing chair behind the house and excusing myself, thinking there could be an emergency here to deal with and knowing I had no money left on my pay-as-you-go phone to call her back. Haoua explained that there are issues with the exchange rate on one of my grant reports, and said I need to come to Niamey. So here I am. I got to go to an Independence Day reception at the US ambassador's house the night I came to town, which means that the electricity-less (and thus mostly unproductive) day I'd had at the bureau discussing exchange rates was not entirely lost. I'd been planning on being in the bush for three weeks straight, but oh well. Now you all can read this blog post and get more excited to donate to the cereal bank project - which, because of the trouble with the grant reporting, is not yet ready to receive your hard-earned money.

I'll take this opportunity to plug it a little, though the big push will be in a couple weeks (hopefully before August). I learned a lot from the millet grinder project, which was seen by the villagers as a gift to Tamtala, and I'm determined that this will be something different. We've had a lot more meetings with interested farmers, setting up a men's cooperative (to complement the two women's groups already in existence). There had been no formal men's associations in the village, since NGOs largely aren't interested in the men. Yes, the situation of women in Niger is worse than that of men. But it kind of reminds me of Title IX, under which my university had Varsity Women's Lightweight Crew but no Varsity Men's Baseball team. That's not to poo-poo on rowing. It's a tough sport. But no baseball? Come on people. Anyway - I have focused on empowerment and giving the men a lot of decision-making power (a difficult balance to strike, because I don't know if they are simply not deferring to me because I'm a woman, or are 'getting it' more quickly than the women's group did, or what). They know they're getting a donation, but that it's only a percentage of the grain they want for next season, and they have to get the rest together or it won't work. They are responsible for building the house and maintaining the whole thing for years to come. And this is not a project to be administered by the chief; as trustworthy as he is, he is oveworked (and a bit of a control freak). I'm lucky because he is not corrupt and he tries very hard - he hasn't burned out after 18 years as chief, and that's remarkable. One of my biggest challenges is convincing him to let these guys have some control over their cereal bank - hard because they often defer to him, of course. What to do?

Obviously I am wrestling with the idea of development work. But as far as it goes, it would be impossible at this point for Tamtala to stock its own cereal bank, even if everyone sold all their livestock and the xima made lots of spells and everyone went into debt. We don't want that. The structure available to us at this time is once again asking for donations from global citizens such as yourselves who want to reward the efforts of this small group of farmers on the edge of the desert and help them make it through next year's hunger season with more ease. Not that I need to guilt you all, or convince you of the importance your donation would make to the village, but I figure the more information, the better. Don't hesitate to ask any questions via email or text (if you're one of those lucky few who can text me, it's often the highlight of my day to get a message).

I've got a gross story about jumping weevils in my last breakfast mango of the season, a lot to say about farming (very funny Jodie), many overused phrases about how much more tolerable life is now that the rain brings cool breezes every three days (I haven't even sweated today!!!), and some commentary about the quality of light at sunset on Saouda and Dullah's house, but I've entertained you all enough for today. Soon, soon, I will invite you to lighten your wallets. For now, I thank you for reading (all ten of you).