A bunch of photos, yoowa

Oyiwen, ma tole, maduwee egan tout le monde! / Howdy everybody

Ok, I am happy to report that I now have a Google Picasa web album with photos from my desert field research trip. I realize that most of my friends' blogs have super pimp albums galore so this is not that exciting for most people, but I assure you that it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to upload photos in this country. I emailed all of the photos in this album to my awesome dad who then put them together in an album for me. BARKA/Congrats on your effort, Dad! (this is a popular Hausa phrase, although I'm dumb and can't remember the word for effort in Hausa, Tamashek is enough to mess up my brain for the moment) My amazingly supportive parents are both winners in my book!

I believe that if you click on this link you will be able to view the photos, so "Bismillah"/ go for it:
http://picasaweb.google.com/maggie.fick/MyFirstTripIntoTheDesert

You may have to log into google, but hopefully not b/c the album should be public, incha'allah

So last night I was chilling with my Tuareg homestay family and we fried up some crickets with peppers and salt and Maggi bouillon cubes. They actually were not that bad! I really will try anything these days, and my fav new eatery in Niamey is this amazing street food stand run by a very enterprising woman name Zeynabou. Her speciality is dunbo, a green leafy-peanutty-spicy dried meat couscous concoction yoowa so delish.

Yesterday, I had a mini-linguistics lesson. I met up with my cool Tamashek teacher, Koule Al Housseini, and he taught me an important Tamashek rule/Tuareg custom. When you compliment someone in Tamashek--for example, my Tuareg cousins in Niamey that are always at Habsou's house sometimes flatter me by saying "tamtut tamusghul," "beautiful woman," and i respond, "Kai! Alees amusghul," "No, you're the beuatiful one"-- you MUST follow it up with "Tubarkallah," meaning, until G-d keeps it that way, otherwise Allah might steal the person's beauty, or make their house ugly or their children stupid or something like that. Do we have something like that in our culture or in the English language? I'll have to think about that.

Now I'm headed off to meet up with the other Fulbright chica, we are going to take our awesome Fulbright advisor here, Soumana, out to lunch to say a big tanimert/thanks for all he has done for us.

Then I'm going to try to brave the National Archives this afternoon. Actually, it shouldn't be too bad, because they're apparently not that extensive. How's this for another stupid, ironic, colonial twist: when the French pealed out of Niger/West Africa in the 1960s, they took a ton of their documents and records with them back to France, so now the best sources on West African colonial history are in Aix-en-Provence and other random French towns. Greeaat.

Oh, and it's not like the French or any colonial powers are actually really gone, they are here in spirit and they continue to tick plenty of people off… I'm not saying that the U.S. is not exempt from this colonial critique, heck the world can thank the U.S. for something else called neocolonialism. If you haven't heard about the failed attempt of the French NGO L'Arche de Zoé to transport Chadian "orphans" who weren't orphans to France, look it up if you have time. There were huge protests in N'djamena this past week over this absurd scandal.

I'll get off my high horse, or camel, now! Hope all is well chez vous, and holler back by email or snail mail if you have a chance!

-Mags