mic check, mic check, one, two. what is this?

Whew. Here we go. Welcome to my blog. My hopes for this blog aren’t particularly lofty. Really, I just wanted to have a way to avoid mass emailing everyone I know with the nitty-gritty details of my time/experience out here in Niger with the Peace Corps. Of course that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to sift through the hundreds of emails that all of you will undoubtedly be sending in my direction when I get chances to find an internet connection. It just means that for those who really want to know what I’m up to, and didn’t just ask for me to add them to my email list to be polite, you can go ahead and check every now and then to see if I’ve done anything worth reading about.

Now, just so you know. Look over on the bar on the right. Somewhere over there is a disclaimer. The gist is that I work for the gov and in that role this blog will not be a catalogue of romantic trysts and drunken debauchery... I leave that for my emails.

A quick side note: things and people from Niger are “NigeriEn” or “NigeriEns”, written with an “e” and not to be confused with things and people from Nigeria who/that are “NigeriAn”, written with an “a”. Just a heads up since I’m gonna be living on the Nigerien/Nigerian border and you’re probably gonna be confused if you don’t make sense of that little detail from the start.

As this is my first post and its been a while and A LOT has happened an apology in advance. This post is lame and boring and I really didn’t have time to make it particulary funny or entertaining, but I figure it’s necessary just so people have some idea of the Nigerien basics and of my experience.

So here is the blitz. Pre-service training is on the brink of over. And that’s a good thing. Hanging out in Hamdallay has been a good and necessary introduction to the country, but it’s also gotten old. One can only take so many hours of “lang” class, of “what to do when you get Malaria” class, and “how to not embarrass yourself in front of the locals” class. And sharing a tiny straw hut in a host family’s concession with another trainee, and being unable to unpack for the last 9 weeks has gotten old as well. And so, on Friday 38 of the 43 of us who began training will finally swear in as official Peace Corps Volunteers to be shipped out less than 48 hours later.

Niger: Well, for starters and as advertised, it’s hot. Really, really hot. And its not even hot season yet. I became acquainted with this reality within about 5 minutes of arriving in Niger. Our plane touched down on the tarmac at the Niamey airport at around 2:30pm local time (smack in the middle of the hottest part of the day), and we descended onto the concrete, waiting to be shuttled over to the terminal. Within about 5 minutes of standing and baking on the tar the majority of us had soaked through our shirts. Every day there are a few hours where you simply don’t move, or if you do, you do so under the cover of shade and as slowly and little as possible. The Nigerien siesta lasts from about noon until 3:30 out of a matter of necessity. Everyone here is covered with a constant sweaty glow which you just learn to accept and embrace since there is nothing that can really be done about it. Luckily, the human body is pretty amazing and I can already tell that I have adjusted and can tolerate the heat much more easily after just 9 weeks.

The heat is the first thing you notice, but that still leaves a lot left to be said. Of course the second thing that one notices is the poverty. Niger was ranked 177^th out of 177 countries in a recent UNDP development study making it the least developed country in the world. That’s all pretty loaded, and I imagine that it also conjures some skewed images in people’s heads. People overall are certainly poor, and that poverty is much harsher in other more rural regions of the country than the training site and the other limited snippets of the country I’ve had the chance to see thus far. Most people live with extremely large families in mud brick or thatch houses or huts. The larger towns and cities do in fact have electricity, although it is known to go out from time to time.

The transportation system here certainly leaves a good bit to be desired consisting mostly of bush taxis (over-packed minivans or station wagons which tend to be in horrible condition, as an aside, on our way back from Niamey to Hamdallay one evening we saw a bush taxi burst into flames. Luckily everyone got out in time and the only person hurt was the driver, as he tried to rescue peoples’ belongings from the flames). The roads here are pretty spotty and there is really just one main road (which is really just a two lane paved street) which runs east from Niamey staying close to the Nigerian border all the way across the country out to Diffa, on the Chadian border.

And the third and most important thing I think we all have been struck by is the people. The people here are wonderful. Truly wonderful. Warm, friendly and patient. I have spent the last nine weeks, as I said, living with a Nigerien host family who I absolutely adore. There are a slew of kids 9 or 11, depending on whether you count the two cousins who were living with us for a while for vacation. I really should go through and talk about all of them to do them each justice, but I’ll just say that the twin 16 year old girls are some of my best friends here, and in recent weeks I’ve spent the bulk of my time trying to teach the 10-month-old baby girl of the family how to walk and speak. I’m gonna miss them all a lot.

Damn, this is really hard to get everything down and not have it come down as a jumbled mess. Oh well, it is what you all are getting for the moment. So, without looking back on this post I’ll continue. Just a couple weeks ago we finally found out our actual site assignments. Of course combined with all of this is the divisions it creates throughout our group of trainees as we learned who will be in our regions. Or in other words, who we will actually see over the next two years, and who we will miss and look forward to seeing at close of service (COS).

Me, I got assigned to Matamey, Zinder. Zinder is Peace Corps’ furthest east team. If you get up and start at around 5 in the morning you can make it from Zinder back to the capital, Niamey, by about 7pm. So it is doable in a day. It is just a long day and not that fun. But don’t let that dissuade any of you would be visitors. It’s worth the trip out East. Zinder is a cool city. (In case there is confusion, Zinder is both the name of the region and of the region’s capital.) It’s an African city, and moreso, a Nigerien city, so you have to take it for what it is. But it used to be Niger’s capital so at one point in time someone invested some money in it and many of the buildings have some cool history and architecture to them that is distinct from those you see in most of the rest of the country. Ultimately it’ll be a good place to spend every 3^rd or 4^th weekend.

And Matamey. Matamey is on the route from Zinder to Kano, Nigeria a large Nigerian city close to the Nigerien border. I’m about 95km from Zinder and just 35km from the Nigerian border. This is awesome for two main reasons. First, being as far south as is really possible in the eastern part of the country means that the landscape is slightly greener than further north and into the desert. Of course during hot season everything will basically become desert anyways, but right now, during rainy season, its actually really pretty and lush (okay, maybe lush is a little strong of a word for Niger, but it really is nice).

The second reason why the proximity to Nigeria is a good thing is that we allegedly get lots of cheap stuff that crosses the border from Nigeria. As a result, I will be privileged to enjoy the luxury of fruits and vegetables for most of the year.

Matamey is one of the larger towns in the Zinder region. It’s really hard to know how big it is. I was told that the population is 60,000 but I’m pretty skeptical and have since heard that that number may very well refer to Matamey and the surrounding villages. My guess is that the town itself is closer to 15 or 20,000. But forget about numbers, the point is that its great. We got a chance to do a little site, pre-visit before being permanently installed there next week and it just feels great. The people are awesome, immediately welcoming and friendly and my house is very legit (though not big by American standards, it is a good size with electricity! and plenty of room for visitors). My neighbors are wonderful, including an old El Haaji (a Muslim who has made the visit to Mecca, I hope I spelled that right) who is also the town’s leading religious figure and spends the bulk of his days sitting on a mat outside his house (and across from mine) with a band of other extremely nice old guys. I’m pumped to start spending some serious quality time with him.

And work. Of course, I’m not just here to hang out despite what most people seem to think about the Peace Corps. We are actually expected to do things, and “work”. In fact, it sounds like the volunteer I’m replacing did A LOT of amazing work, and I’m a bit on the nervous side as I sit thinking about the large shoes they’re asking me to fill. So, I’m a Community and Youth Education Volunteer. That really doesn’t mean that much. Basically I’m supposed to be developing and implementing education related programs. I am not a teacher. But I will be working with kids and in particular, a high priority of Peace Corps Niger is to stress girls’ education and enrollment since Niger has one of the lowest rates of girls enrollment in the world (It also has one of the highest fertility rates in the world at 7.5 children per woman which is sited as the root of many of the country’s problems. Of course low girls education rates and high fertility rates very often go hand in hand).

As of yet, I don’t know what projects I will choose to pursue, but thankfully Peace Corps is patient with getting started and realize that I’m gonna need to spend a good chunk of the first three months assessing my community’s needs and trying to sort out how to communicate with people through French and Hausa.

And with that, I’ve gotta run, with no real conclusion other than knowing and acknowledging that this adventure hasn’t even begun yet. In fact its about to begin next week, and to find out what happens next, you’ll just have to take that personal initiative to glance at my blog again at a later time. Again, I apologize that it was so boring and uninspired. But letting people have some idea of what I’m up to has been hanging over my head and I promise to write more inspired posts later (though not for the next 5 weeks or so since we’re not aloud to leave our sites until for that first stretch).

Miss and love you all.

Say hi to the rub for me.