Since stepping off the plane into Niger’s “little heat” just over two weeks ago, time has at once slipped by and crawled at a snail’s pace. We are in Niger’s mini hot season, approaching the cold season. This means farmers are finishing up the harvest, the days are hot but the nights are cool, and cool season gardens’ vegetables are coming in. After spending just two nights at the training site having doing the medical and bureaucratic rigmarole, we moved into our host families. A couple of hours before meeting our hosts we had a crash course in Hausa’s many greeting formulas, then my roommate and I followed our host mother Biba down to the village, little ducklings with saucer eyes.
There we met our other mom, Fati and the seven children. My family is polygamous, which usually means more babies and more money. This is easy for me to say now: “there we met our host mom, Fati and the seven children,” but that night and the following week or so, it seemed impossible to figure out who all these people were. In our living concession there are not only moms and dads and kids but there are uncles and uncles’ wives and grandmothers and cousins and nieces and nephews. Now, after two weeks of learning Hausa and deciphering my host cousin’s “Frausa”, I think I have finally figured out just who is who. It was a huge breakthrough to figure out that “Maman” is actually a man’s name and is in fact our host father. That night we received our Nigerien names, and I am henceforth “Baraka.” We ate pasta that night, seated on a mat around one large platter, trying to eat as gracefully as possible without silverware. If only we had known that night that we would only be eating rice with sauce from then on…
A concession is the family’s yard that is enclosed by some sort of fence. Inside this concession are personal concessions—a small yard that with an adjacent hut. My hut is a nice little adobe hut with a thatched roof. I sleep outside every under my mosquito net, a neem tree and the stars. My alarm clock’s thermometer tells me it is usually around 90 degrees when I’m falling asleep and around 74 degrees when I wake up cold at 3am. During the day, it has gotten as hot as 117 or so, but miraculously, it hasn’t felt too oppressive.
Generally speaking, this is what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks during “scheduled time:
50% language training, 20% cross cultural training, 20% technical training, 10% medical sessions.
“Unscheduled time”: 90% sleeping, 5% eating, 5% thinking about eating.
We have very little free time, and when we do, it’s almost as sweet as a being offered a cold glass of water. I am careful not to complain, though, because I am told that once I am sworn in as a volunteer, I will have way more free time than I know what to do with.
For the FARM technical training has so far included starting tree nurseries, cold season gardening, composting and mulching field crops. We were all pleasantly surprised to find out that we each get a garden plot plus a plot for our host families. I was lucky to snag some extra plots to plant some seeds from home. I was worried that by the time I’d get to my site it would be too late to plant vegetables and I wouldn’t be able to save any seeds. Our program coordinator is so great, he said that if my vegetables don’t come in before I leave for my site, they will send my vegetables to me so that I can collect their seeds!
Language class is with two other trainees and a Nigerien language instructor. We change instructors every week. Some instructors speak English and others only speak French, so language classes range from challenging to very challenging since the other two trainees in my class don’t speak French. We meet in a host family’s concession with a black board, chalk and a bucket of water and chase the shade around all day.
The most important thing to learn in Hausa are the greetings. There is a formula of greetings that must be answered with the appropriate response:
Q: “Ina kwana?” “How did you sleep?” A: “Lahiya Lau” “In health”
Q: How were your daylight hours? A: In Health
Q: How is your home? A: Every thing at my home is in health.
Q: How is your work? A: I am thankful for work.
Q: How is your tiredness? A: No tiredness. **one must never say that they are tired in Niger!**
Q: How is the heat? A: It is the time for heat.
The more profusely you greet someone, the more they will just adore you and of courses respect you. More on Hausa the more that I learn. In Hausa, you conjugate pronouns instead of verbs. Woah.
This past weekend, we went on “demystification” where in small groups we stay with current volunteers so that we can see what the life of a volunteer is really like. Along with four others, I was lucky to stay with Alice and Jesse, a wonderful couple working Community Youth and Education and Municipal and Community Development sectors, respectively. They apparently have the nicest Peace Corps house in all of Niger, located in a very large village equipped with electricity, a refrigerator, oven and running water. It’s a cruel “demystification” for us Forest, Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (henceforth FARM) and Community Health Agent (CHA) trainees, considering our posts will all be in the bush without any of those amenities. But for those 3 glorious days we delighted in all of those luxuries, the cold water, the fresh brownies and omelet breakfasts, etc. Right now we are currently in Maradi spending the night here steeling up for our 5am 10 hour hot bus ride back to the training site.
This morning before leaving their village, we happened upon a group of men trying to smoke some snakes out of a giant pile of cement blocks in an empty field. They found brown cobras and three small spotted snakes that burrow in the sand but were not identified. One man told me the men were snake charmers and were going to use the snakes for spectacles, but another told me they were going to sell them to traditional medicine makers.
These past two weeks have been so full of new experiences and a wide range of emotions—it is a challenge to write this first post, because there is so much that I am leaving out. There will me more to come, plus photos and I will gladly answer any questions you may have.
Also! Some great news is that letters have only been taking about 6 days to get here! In case you need it, my address is:
My name
c/o corps de la paix
B.P. 10537
Niamey, Niger
West Africa.
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