Rollercoaster

Night before last I stood in the middle of my field, torn. Not a cloud in sight. Mesas to the east. Beautiful, too-fast sunset to the west. How are things these days? Good, bad, not terrible, awesome. Yes, all of those. In training, we get a graph, a nice medium-frequency, high-amplitude wave, showing us what to expect emotionally out of the next two years. It's a decent guideline, except for the frequency part. I ride one of those waves from trough to crest at least once every two hours or so. This morning I woke up screaming because my cat has attracted two other cats and they were fighting inches from my head, which of course my slow-to-wake self had registered as Immediate Danger to My Own Life. Heart pouding, I lay back down and caught a glimpse of the wildly pink sunrise beyond Saouda's house. I'm usually not up for that (some things never change). How nice of the cats to wake me up in time to see it before I set off to Niamey.

Back to my field. My millet is barely an inch tall. We haven't had rain in Tamtala two weeks. It's supposed to be the height of rainy season; the sky should be falling routinely, every three days (usually at night, usually with a windstorm as a warning). Instead, two weeks of nothing. So I was worried.

Also prematurely nostalgic (I have a propensity toward this. Terrible, weak human thing.) - because I was standing there, surveying the land, feeling very famer-ish and close to the land and all that noise, kind of proud that I was all worried about the rain like a Real Person, all Connected To The Earth, etc. All cheesy and leaning on my crude wood-and-metal farming-by-hand tool, getting ready to miss this place. Very aware of the sunset on the red mesas, made ever more deeply red by the unabashed greenness of even this weak rainy season. Thinking that it's my last rainy season, and how tragic.

Really. My LAST rainy season? My SECOND rainy season. In Peace Corps, the second is the last. Get over it.

What's tragic is this: this rainy season sucks, and we're already short on food. We're eating two meals a day in Tamtala. Millet is 24,000 CFA a sack, which is 10,000 more than it was last October. We can only hope it'll go back down to that this October, so we can buy up as much as possible and stock our cereal bank.

And this, I mention casually as if it's not the Big Major Point of This Blog Post - our cereal bank! Washington has approved my proposal, so we're ready to start accepting donations! Yippee!

To those of you who donated to the millet grinder project at Christmas time (thanks, thanks, y'all are super), you'll know just what to do (even though you're off the hook as far as I'm concerned).

To those of you who missed your chance, here it is. This will be my last call for donations from the general public while I'm a PC/Niger volunteer, so do not delay - whip those credit cards right out and get ready.

A bit of background on the project: (also posted on the Peace Corps website)

"Hunger season in Niger means that the last few months before harvest are spent working hard in the fields, but having little to eat at home. Millet and sorghum stores often run out a few months short of the September/October harvest, during the busy rainy season, and prices in the market skyrocket.

The construction of a cereal bank in my village of about 850 people means that villagers can take part in a farmer’s cooperative in order to ensure lasting food security for their families. They will pool their resources to buy grains at harvest time and store them in a grain bank, to be opened when the hunger season begins. During hunger season, grains from the bank can be bought below market price but for more than their harvest-time purchase price.

The community has been actively involved in making a plan for this cereal bank system. They have formed a committee, led by women’s group members and neighborhood leaders, to manage the bank. They have committed to covering every cost related to constructing the bank structure, and each family is donating a bit of money to buy initial stores of millet. A family can purchase membership in the bank for one small sack of millet a year.

A cereal bank will increase the capacity of everyone in the village to have enough to eat all year long, contributing to overall health for 850 men, women and children. This proposal asks for donations to cover initial food stores in the bank."

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How to donate:

Go to www.peacecorps.gov
Click on "Donate Now" - one of the yellow options on the left
Click on "Donate to Volunteer Projects" - first option on the list
Search using whichever criteria you'd like - Food, Africa, Niger...
There are only 3 projects (as of today) going in Niger, and the first one is ours: "A Path to Food Security." Click on it to learn more and donate!

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To, Madallah! Thanks for doing your bit. If you want to do more... well... buy local, organic and fair trade food, use public transportation (and vote for more of it), change out your incandescent lightbulbs for flourescent, etc. If everyone who reads this blog (apparently there are a lot of you!) did that and told your friends to do it, the world would be that much better. It might not be immediately noticeable on the global climate-change scale, but that's a crappy reason to keep doing nothing, isn't it?

Anyway, it's rude of me to lecture, especially since I just asked you for money. Well, Tamtala's farmers' association asked you for money - I just translated. I'm proud of these guys - they are taking the initiative, and during rainy season nonetheless, the busiest time of the year (I guess with no rain this year it's easier to tear yourself away from weeding your field, since even the weeds aren't growing). The men seem to be hearing me talk, even if they don't listen to my advice - a step in the right direction. Baby steps count, especially considering these guys aren't used to giving a woman the time of day. It's a bad habit of theirs, but it doesn't mean they should have to go without food.

Well. I wouldn't ask you all to part with your hard-earned money, especially considering the economy in North America these days, without regaling you with some Sahelian Stories. Since I last wrote...

I went to Tahoua again, more precisely, to Tabalak and Kahehe, where a PCV friend threw herself a birthday party and took advantage of the available labor to have us all dig 200 holes in a field for her Gum Arabic plantation - a fantastic idea. We went swimming in her village's gigantic lake - much to the amusement of the entire village, who'd come down to see the white people floating around in their clothes (or sitting on pagnes, fully clothed, on the beach, or walking on the shore, gaping at the massive body of water). What? Of course we went swimming in our clothes. What else would one wear to swim? Sheesh.

That night we volunteers camped by the lake, with a bonfire and marshmallows from a care package and chatting all night. Full moon on the water, a nice big fish, a mango crisp someone had baked, a cool breeze, all quite lovely. Oh, but I slept through it. Whoops. I'd been setting up my awesome little tent and thought I'd just lie down for a 20-minute power nap, and then I woke up and it was morning. Guess I was tired. Something about all that swimming, and maybe a bit of stress. Yes - even in West Africa, if you're dedicated to it, you can enjoy a similar stress level to the familiar one you knew in Amerika. I don't HAVE to have four major projects going, and I'd eventually regret it if I wasn't working this hard (though it's quite possible to just hang out here for two years - if you have no conscience). But still. I needed that rest in Tahoua. But again (remember, we're on a rollercoaster here) - will I ever have another 2-year period in my life where it's POSSIBLE to just hang out? Well. That's not why I came. Not all of it, anyway. A big part of it IS, actually - learning to "just be." Am I failing? Oh goodness. Rollercoaster rider or schizophrenic?

Back in Tamtala, I'd been gone eight days, and we'd had two births and one divorce. The divorce didn't last, though. According to midday-meal gossip with the ladies of my concession, Haissa's husband left her, saying he wanted a divorce, but was back within two nights (or three nights? It was the second night, Sallei said. No, no, the third one, Saouda insisted, because he stayed at his brother Moodi's. Ha-ah, two nights, Bouli supplied, because I saw him the second one doing this-or-that, and on and on, until I'm pretty sure it was the second). Then they turn to me - "Sakina, in Ameriki, there's no divorce, wala?" And I laughed, and said that it seems to me that marriage problems are pretty universal. But I suggested that if I were Haissa I wouldn't take the guy back. And they laughed.

Ousemane, the true "child of Damagaram," our health agent, came to see if my Hausa had improved after my foray east, and decided it had. Suuuper. He'd been working hard. It's malaria time, you know, because all the rain we had a month ago left breeding puddles for mosquitoes (damning us and leaving, cruel, fickle rainclouds). Yesterday he had 16 cases of malaria, all in children under five. One, a two-year old girl, died. She'd been sick for four days before her mother brought her in. And I sit here wondering what to say about that. Malaria medicine is FREE for the under-5 segment of the population. Why wait? Probably her mother didn't know it was malaria - she'd seen her get sick and recover before. If she was a little boy, though, that kid would've been at Ousemane's on the second or third day.

All 16 of Ousemane's cases were in kids under 5, but that's not because adults don't get malaria - I'd definitely have it if I wasn't taking prophylaxis - my legs and arms are covered in firey itchy welts. Most people simply suffer through, or die from it, rather than going to the doctor. If you're over 5, malaria treatment is about $2.50 - totally out of reach for most everyone. As if Allah had planned it, the "Malaria Prevention and Treatment" radio show Kate and I recorded a few weeks ago aired yesterday afternoon. Ousemane greeted me on our work, saying it was good, we did a fine job. Maybe tomorrow it'll be 15 instead of 16 cases.

I'd come into the village on a Peace Corps car, piled high with 150,000 CFA worth of fencing and posts for protecting our about-to-be-outplanted Moringa plantation. Cheif et al knew it was coming, we'd all talked about it, we're all very happy. That doesn't mean the men are ready to set the stuff up yet, of course, because they haven't done their part and scrounged up the concrete and wires and labor in a nice orderly pile waiting for me - but they will. I trust them, which is a great feeling. I've seen this happen now, twice. It's not how I would run things; it's certainly not efficient in my sense of the word, but it's how things work, and work they do. When I get back on Sunday, I expect posts to be in the ground in some concrete - unless Allah brings some rain this weekend, in which case I'll give them a few more days. Regardless, we will have big-time tree planting on August 3. The nursery looks awesome, too. We're excited. I've got a couple pictures of its lush green spectacularity... but my beautiful and trusty camera is toast now, died in a dust storm. Sad, but a small casualty, when I remember to keep perspective. Perspective smooths out the roller coaster to a nicer path, merely a potholed laterite road.

With that, kala ton-ton. I'm off to search for some calamine lotion.