A Sad Note from Hamdallaye

Last Wednesday I came back from Zinder to Niamey. Coming to the Peace Corps hostel I found out I had missed all the other members of my stage who had already departed to the training village, Hamdallaye, for our two week In-Service Training (IST). By chance, I bumped into a good friend of my host-family’s, Mamadou, who was on the same mini-van taxi with me for the ride out to Hamdallaye. Apparently he had been trying to get a hold of me the last few days and my ex-roomate hadn’t been able to track down my number. But just about 10 days ago the father of my host family passed away. Perhaps a day or two after the two of us had exchanged happy greetings and text messages. Mamadou told me that he was at his side when he had a heart attack in a mosque during prayer.

He was always kind and welcoming to me and my roomate, Nate. And he certainly had his moments of tenderness with his family. He loved playing checkers with us and further got a kick out of watching me teach his littlest kids a number of secret handshakes. The day before we left, he said he was going to miss hearing his kids shout out me and my Nate’s Nigerien names when we came back each evening from training. Further, in a rarity for Niger, he was putting every last one of his kids into the schools (including all the girls of school age). In a country with a female enrollment rate of something ghastly like 15% that is truly amazing.

On top of the personal tragedy of his own death, I fear that his passing also has severe implications for his wife and the eight kids he left behind. Nigerien culture is extremely patriarchal, and for the ten total members of his family (plus the other cousins and familial extensions who often came to join them for long stretches), he provided the sole source of income. While the family members said they didn’t know what the future would hold, Mamadou told me that it is was most likely that they would be forced to break up and live with other family members. I’m further not sure what that means for the prospect of continuing studies for the children. And when schooling ends for girls in Niger, that tends to be quickly followed by marriage. Though, my worries are getting well ahead of me, and I honestly know little about the financial solidity of the rest of the family.

In the end, I realize that I was really lucky to have the chance to live and spend a very very special 9 weeks with this family. They were the family who welcomed me to Niger, and their faces will be synonymous with my first impressions of and first experiences in this country. I caught them in what was in retrospect their last hurrah, and I can’t make clear enough how grateful I feel to them.

So I’ll leave other news to another post sometime later. Though briefly I’ll just say that I’m still doing well and seeing the other PCVs from my class is fun. So don’t worry about me, I’m doing fine but send your positive thoughts towards the family of Hamid Alwili.

The 9 to 5 Grind (Part 1)

…and then there’s work. Up to this point if you’ve read my previous rantings it probably seems like Niger has been a walk in the park, that the roses smell sweeter here than the states, and that my life has thus far been a 4 month joyride. Well let me dispel with that impression by elaborating on the topic of work. I’ve already talked a bit about my social life and whatnot, so for this installment (heh heh, that word strikes me as ridiculous at the moment), I’ll catch you up on my “official” duties.

Yes, the PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer, don’t know if I’ve spelled that out until now) experience by design does consist of a good amount of socializing (“cultural exchange”) and some adventure (however you want to define that). BUT, it also involves work. Sure it’s not work or a job as rigidly defined by 9 to 5 New York office job standards, but its work for sure, and it can be a real pain in the _____.

The first few weeks were occupied by getting my feet on the ground, meeting important people, and trying to assess and get a feel for the community of Matameye, what it has, what it lacks, and what I see myself doing with my time here. Actually, we are instructed not to start any projects until much (a month or two) later so that we know what we are doing and can then begin cautiously. Well, I haven’t really had that luxury of a leisurely introduction like I understand is the experience of most volunteers. The volunteer before me did A LOT of work, and as her replacement, I’ve inherited a number of her projects and have been expected to jump in and deal with them despite my limited or non-existent understanding of how things have functioned before me, or how my counterparts expect me to be involved.

I think it may be easiest if I break it down by project:

SCHOOL DESKS: The Matameye high school is a pretty good school by Nigerien standards. However, like most things here, there is a severe lack of funding. Already, since the beginning of the school year in October, we have lost 2-3 weeks of class because of strikes by contractual teachers who hadn’t received their salaries from the government. Its hard to find fault in the teachers who have families to support, and at the same time the sad reality of Niger is that there is often simply not enough money to go around. Pay your teachers or pay your doctors? Or as it sometimes seems, pay neither…

I digress… A lot. The point is that the school lacks basic funding and some of the classrooms don’t even have desks. Students sit on the floor of their classroom (which may have over 60 students) which is needless to say both uncomfortable and makes it difficult to take notes and pay proper attention. So, the volunteer before me was able to find some money from a U.S. Embassy grant, and as we speak the missing desks are now in the process of being built (yay Katie!). Or, I suppose I should say, that they WERE being built, until the guy in charge of building them ran out of money and the project got stopped half way with a whole bunch of half made desks. I don’t know the details, basically because I arrived in the middle of the project. But the gist is that the guy in charge of the tables exhausted whatever money he was advanced. I don’t know whether that was due to poor foresight, poor money management, or some other variable outside of his control, but the result has been that as the school year has begun (in stops and starts as a result of the periodic strikes) the desks remain sitting as unfinished skeletons in the school courtyard.

Enter me. Basically, this shouldn’t have been complicated, but it quickly became so, and with Katie now gone (she extended for a year, but is teaching at the University in Niamey) I was inserted upon arrival in the middle of it. To restart the project it was necessary to request the U.S. Embassy to advance the money for the work that had been done. Needless to say, that is much easier said than done. To do so required the completion of a number of forms, making sure that calculations of work done in Matameye lined up with receipts that had already been sent to Niamey, and getting everyone’s signature on everything before sending it all to the Peace Corps office in Niamey where a lady there was working on the project (and from where it could ultimately be submitted to the U.S. Embassy, which is separate from the Peace Corps headquarters).

Each of those steps, seemingly effortless, inevitably take on a difficulty of their own. For starters, the guy making the tables doesn’t speak any French (and most certainly no English). So, as I received instructions of what exactly Peace Corps wanted us to produce, all that had to be translated into my French to someone else who could then explain it in Hausa to Aminou (OK, that’s not really his name but I’m tired of writing “desk maker” and am further not sure that I should drop other people’s names in here). And that of course is further complicated by the fact that since he ran out of money Aminou has been hard to find, that using cell phones is really expensive (and useless if you don’t share a common language) and that Aminou may or may not be literate, but ultimately can’t read my text messages even in Hausa, though he could probably find a friend who could.

Even once we had all this information, we still needed to find some way to type it up (luckily the volunteer before me also got a computer for the school), print it, and get everyone’s signature on it. Furthermore, even when these papers are ready you need to find some way to send them to Niamey which is FAR and the post is unreliable and slow. Cutting out the aggravation in the middle and the first failed attempt, things were ultimately sent into Niamey, and in theory as of yesterday the documents were submitted and the one month necessary for processing the payment can finally begin. Meanwhile, the students wait, sitting patiently on the floor of their classroom.

The good news is that the other possibility for restarting the project is if the community can come up with the money that they committed to pay. Throughout all of this fiasco with the forms, that had not happened as of yesterday… But people in recent days were sounding like the Chef de Canton (basically the regional governor) was doing his best to round up the money and possibly in the next couple days he could give it to Aminou and the project could go on.

The moral of the story is that I’ve quickly found that even the little things can present big problems, that delays, even when unanticipated, should be expected. Hopefully, by the time I get back to Matameye the construction will have restarted and soon the students will finally have their desks. (Perhaps material for another post, but I want to say how much I admire the students here who really deal with a lot, are generally very smart, and themselves have been very welcoming to me… Sometimes too much so, though always warm and well intentioned.)

So, I promised to be more brief this time, and now I’ve passed two pages and have only made it through one of my projects… I guess I’ll cut it off for the moment, give some other news, and come back to the work side of things later.

Right now I’m in Zinder. Tomorrow morning I’ve gotta get up horrendously early (4am to catch the 5am bus) to head to Niamey (that 14 hour pleasure cruise) for our In Service Training (IST). Basically we do 9 weeks of training up front, then they ship us off to our posts for a couple months before calling us back to Niamey for two weeks or so to process how our first months at post went and to give us some further info/language/and explanation of resources. While I’m a bit nervous leaving Matameye and leaving a number of projects hanging, its gonna be a really good time seeing everyone from my training group and just getting to hang out a bit.

People have asked me how I passed Thanksgiving and that probably also begs the Christmas question. Thanksgiving was a low-key affair for me. A number of volunteers came together in Zinder to spend it together, but I decided to stay out at post in Matameye. If I’m not going to get up at an uncomfortably early hour, bundle up in a ridiculous amount of clothes yet still be cold, head to Newton, and play a game of muddy football with my sister, my dad and his work colleagues (a tradition I’ve upheld every year of my memory aside from the one spent abroad in Malawi), well, it just isn’t Thanksgiving. I’d just as soon sit it out.

I’ll probably spend Christmas with my fellow volunteers in Zinder. And perhaps some neighboring volunteers from the Maradi region will come in to hang out with us.

However, I might try and find a way to get out to Matameye between the end of IST and Christmas since right around that time is a big Nigerien holiday called Tabaski. I’ve been excitedly told on numerous occasions that “it’s the holiday where we kill a goat”! The sleeping vegetarian inside of me stirs, grumbles, or makes some other such stifled protest…

Things in Matameye continue to be on the whole really really good. While work can be stressful and sometimes frustrating (and, as I promised, there will be more on that later), my Nigerien friends in Matameye continue to be AMAZING. As my good friend Lawali said to me as I was leaving, “Cuand tu part, la Fada va mourir”. aka: “When you leave, the Fada is gonna die.” Clearly the guys will still hang out and do what they did with me there, and what they did before I arrived (chat, play cards, drink tea, and listen to either DMX or some singer who they affectionately call “Chinese Celine Dion”). While it’s unlikely that many of them will get onto the internet or ever read my blog, this crew has been so unbelievably welcoming and such sincere friends right from the start that I have to send them a little shout-out and thank them for being the biggest reason I’ve been so happy in Matameye. Long live Harlem City! (The name of the Fada for those who remember).

Alright, it’s a wrap… Til next time.