Un petit sejour en brousse/ a little trip into the bush

Greetings everybody!

I hope all is well with you, and sorry that I've been a bit out of touch lately. I just got back from a short trip to some villages north and east of Niamey, where I visited some awesome Peace Corps friends and got a little taste of village life. I am writing this blog entry from home right now, but I'm eager to check my email and read the news to hear what is going on with the fires in San Diego, I hope things are better now, that must have been scary for Grandma Jeannine and Grandpa Charlie. If anyone feels like sending me news updates, or just writing a sentence about a current event in an email, I would love it! I try to check the news here, but nytimes.com and some others are slow to load, so any little news from the "outside world" would be much appreciated.

Although I sometimes miss the news and always miss ice, It was really great to get out of the city for a few days and see more of Niger. I left my house (well not my house but where I am currently crashing, in keeping with my nomadic lifestyle here in Niger) at 3:45 am last Thursday, took a cab to the bus depot, where most people had spent the night, and boarded the bus at 5 am to head to Birnin Konni, a crossroads-type town about 6 hrs east of Niamey and about 5 km from the NigerIAN border. There happened to be a Peace Corps volunteer (Jen) on the bus, and she was also headed to Konni, so we chilled together and she told me a bit more about the region. I was very surprised to see MESAS, Arizona/Utah style, large and small, peppering the dusty scrub brush landscape. The Mesas reminded me of a fun road trip I took with my dear friends Becky and Maria after graduation, so they made me happy. We were greeted by my friend Natalie, who is the volunteer sort of in charge of all of the other volunteers in her region. She was living in Spokane (Eastern Washington) before she joined Peace Corps, and she is a ton of fun. As the regional rep, Natalie spends a lot of time visiting other volunteers in their villages and making sure everything is going smoothly. This is great, because I got to tag along on her visits, and Jen, the volunteer I met on the bus, decided to come too, so we had a good little crew. We drove around in a Land Cruiser with an awesome dude named Moussa, who is the Peace Corps employee in the Konni region. He is very wise and funny and fun to talk to, and he makes great tea, with massive quantities of sugar of course.

We spent the first night in a Natural Resource Management volunteer's village, and we went to school with her to watch her teacher-counterpart introduce this really awesome environmental education worldwide initiative called the Globe program (I think if you google that, you will find the website). We also made a delicious tofu peanut cabbage dish with all local ingredients, and Jen and I invented a tasty side dish of fried eggplant! I practiced my meager Tamashek with a nice Tuareg lady who lived next door to the volunteer. We spent Friday night in Natalie's old village, where she visits regularly to work on projects. It was a harvest moon that night, which was gorgeous, and I had my first semi-successful experience carrying water on my head from the well to the house, I need to keep practicing, it is a serious workout! On Saturday, Moussa drove us back to the Peace Corps hostel in Konni where Natalie lives, and we dropped her off and headed north to visit yet another volunteer in the absolutely stunningly beautiful village of Kehehe (pronounced kuh HAY HAY!)…there are dunes and a lake and cool mud houses and egg-shaped grain shelters and Tuaregs everywhere, it is paradise! I was planning to only stay one night and then head back with the other volunteers to Konni, but I ended up staying for two nights so Kelly, the volunteer in Kehehe, could introduce me to her Tuareg pals and so I could set up contacts for a research visit for a couple weeks in January or February. Her friend Al Kossam made us a tasty Tuareg dish called Togala that is actually cooked in some kind of underground oven, it reminded me of stuffing because it was made from pieces of bread, the flavor was great and no one tried to make me eat cow intestines, so I was happy. Then we had tea and stretched out on the beach and chatted, overall a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Later we continued the eggplant theme with some baba ghanoush and tomatoes for dinner, and watched the stars and talked about places we want to visit in West Africa, one of my favorite subjects these days.

It was awesome to visit these volunteers and see what their lives are like in their villages! I was so impressed with their language skills and their friendliness and their dedication to their work, and also of course their ability to live like the locals. It sounds cheesy, but I think everyone knows that it's not easy to leave the comforts of home and to be an outsider, so the fact that these volunteers carry water, wash their clothes, learn a local language, and become residents of these villages is pretty dang cool. I am kinda starting to think about doing Peace Corps after I'm done here, but we'll see…

The only hiccup in the rockin vacation began when Kelly and I boarded a bush taxi at 7 am and headed to Tabalak, a larger town a few kms north of Kehehe, to find the bus that would take me all the way to Niamey. Moussa had said that the bus I could take would leave from Agadez early in the morning and arrive in Tabalak by 9 or so, incha'allah. That phrase, if Allah wills it, is VERY VERY important to internalize if one (uh oh my English is getting crappier b/c of French, I am talking about myself here) is going to survive life in Niger as an impatient, fidgety American. Incha'allah does not mean that something will happen, it MIGHT happen if and only if Allah wills it, and on this sweltering morning, apparently one of the 2 buses coming from Agadez had to break down! Kelly and I waited until 2:30 pm for the non-broken bus to arrive in Tabalak.

Because Nigeriens are nice and always help a brother/sister out, the non-broken bus drove back to collect all of the passengers in the broken bus, and all 80 or so of them squished in one bus meant for 40 people. After some lively discussion with the bus agency manager in Tabalak, we convinced him that I was going to get on the full bus even if they had to strap me to the top, so when the bus came barreling through Tabalak stuffed to the gills, the agency manager shoved me in the door and slammed it, and there I was, plopped into the chauffeur/bus doorman dude's lap, with about 10 people laughing and greeting me in Hausa and Tamashek. I rode pretzel-style-squished between the driver and the stick shift and an Al Hadji (that technically means the dude has been to Mecca, but here it's kinda slang for a big pimpin, rich, usually fat dude). There was also a cute little Tuareg girl who ate an impressive amount of dates when someone bought them and passed them around, and a bunch of annoying young bus agency employees who kept raising their eyebrows suggestively at me, which I responded to by adjusting my veil and shrugging my shoulder at them, which in Niger means, "no thanks asshole." I rode this way for 4 hours until we deposited some passengers in Konni, still another 6 hrs from Niamey.

The disconcerting thing about riding in the front of the bus is not only the obvious concern that you will be the first person skyrocketed through the windshield in the case of an accident, but also the ability to see just how idiotic the bus driver is. I watched the driver barrel towards a limping goat, a toddler, semi-trucks, other huge buses, and donkey carts, blasting his horn to tell them to move along, and in the mean time talking on his cell phone, popping dates, joking and hitting his buddies, and cruising along at a fast clip. It was hard not to laugh at the irony of our bus teetering off the road in order to pass a huge semi-truck going 60 miles an hour with a fatalistic phrase painted on the back like "No one knows what tomorrow will bring." I am not quite used to these fatalist slogans that adorn all form of transportation here, but I have begun repeating incha'allah under my breath as I see my short life pass before my eyes on ridiculous bus journeys like this one.

I will spend the rest of this week in Niamey getting ready for my first real fieldwork stint, which I leave for on Saturday, again at 4 am. I am going wayyyy far east and north, and I will be living and traveling through small villages for a month. Yikes, I've got some stuff to get done, drop me a line and let me know what's cooking, I miss you all and please know that today as I was sweating and secretly freaking out about the crazy bus driver I was also thinking about home and good folks like you!

Xo
Mags

PHOTOS:

Chopping for the tofu peanut dish in the shade hangar outside of Piper's hut:




Moussa, major dude, presiding over his tea-making station:




More tea drinking by the lake with Kelly's friends in Kehehe, sorry it's kinda dark:




Kelly with her village's sign:




A Kehehe BABY and Mom!:

And this is a photo from last week, when I went to a baptism for a Malian Tuareg baby, here are some of the relatives and a nice missionary woman who took me to the baptism. They are all wearing the traditional Malian Tuareg garb, a sort of one-piece scarf that you wrap all around you. The Nigerien Tuareg women don't wear these, but these ladies lent me one, which I remained tangled up in the whole afternoon! It's harder than it looks to be graceful in these pretty outfits!