Some May photos...

Ann and my friend Mariama in the Abalak weekly market on our fun trip up North



Me and one of Mariama’s aunts in Tuareg garb at the family house in Konni (I realize these town names don’t mean much unless you are looking at a detailed map of Niger, but just in case you are)



Ann and me with our fav fried food, fermented rice pancakes (called massa) and squash sauce.



At my awesome friend Ruki’s thesis defense/presentation for her Master’s degree in Sociology at Université Abdou Moumouni in Niamey…here we were waiting for the jury of professors to make their decision after two hours of hammering her with questions. The verdict: she passed with flying colors! Allez Ruki!



I love this little dude Ibrahim (see previous blog posts) so much it hurts…he’s looking good here in his mini boubou and sitting with his mom Fatima and my friend Mariama.



Pretty Niamey sky from my backyard

Checking in before checking out...

Hi everyone,

It has been quite a while since I have written because a lot has been going on lately in the hopping town of Niamey ;) Actually I have just been busy wrapping up loose ends, saying goodbye to friends and people who have helped me with research, chilling at the university, finishing up articles and sending them to newspapers, etc…

a great non-work highlight of the past month was ANN SAGAN’s visit!!! Ann rocks as you might know, and she was the perfect person to come visit Niger, because she was so can-do and never complained that we kept a breakneck schedule (visiting all my friends, eating all the traditional and fried food we could find, traveling North with a friend) until she unfortunately kind of got heatstroke and we had to slow things down. Don’t worry, she recovered quickly and we went back to having a rocking time. Then Amy Van Buren, another Pomo peep, popped over from Ouagadougou, where she will be interning at the U.S. Embassy this summer, for a short visit, which nicely overlapped with Ann’s last few days in town.

Yesterday Amy left and then I went to a rap concert and a “boite”/nightclub with some friends to celebrate my last weekend in Niamey, but the point of the story is that today I was really tired and emotional about leaving Niger in six days and also trying to get a bunch of work done and say bye to my wonderful families and friends. So when I rolled up to Habsou’s (my Tuareg mom) house to hang out because I hadn’t seen her in a few days, I must have looked not so good.

Habsou’s older sister Zeynabou was braiding Habsou’s hair and after a few minutes she said, “You are not in your plate today,” which I guess means I was not acting like myself, which was true. I was kind of mopey and laying on the mattress in the tent outside (actually I always lay on the mattress but usually I am not mopey ;)) Habsou and Zeynabou talked to me and made me feel better and told me everything would work out with post-Niger life and work and such, and then Habsou yelled at me for having dirty cracked feet, which was fair, so I promised to wash them every day until I leave. Then Ghaicha, Habsou’s 13 year old daughter walked into the tent and gave me a head and feet massage and sang a Tuareg song to me until I fell asleep. I floated home later that afternoon feeling so much better and so grateful to have that family in my life. Seriously, they are just the greatest, and I can’t imagine this year without them. I know I will come back to visit them ASAP, and Habsou even said she would write another letter and try to help me to get another grant, which I thought was funny and unfortunately probably not going to work out anytime soon!

I’m leaving Niamey on May 31 and headed off on a bit of an adventure with limited internet access, so I may not post on my blog again for a while. I think I will wrap this blog up with some photos and one last post once I return stateside later this summer. Thanks for reading and I hope you are well! Drop me a line if you get a chance, I love hearing from you and hope these posts aren’t too boring.

Xoxox Mags

Ibrahim, little man of greatness

Ibrahim is a two year old whose family lives across the street from me. I have known his family for a few months because they are cousins of Habsou (my "mom" here), but since moving in with my friends (oh, le nomadisme of la vie à Niamey), I get to see the family pretty much every day. Sometimes they force me to eat meat at 11 am and that is isn't fun, but most of the times we dance or watch a Brazilian soap opera or lay on the outdoor bed when it's hot.

Ibrahim is defintely a highlight of every day for me. If he is outside playing in the dirt and I walk outside he comes running over and kisses me. He is so adorable and I somehow feel that he has something to teach the world that will eventually emerge from his sweet little head. Right now he just gurgles and mutters some Tamashek occasionally, because he's pretty big (huge by Nigerien standards), you might think he could talk, but he is too busy careening around. Everyone gets annoyed with him because he gets so excited that he knocks stuff over a lot, but he rarely cries even if he falls. He just looks mildly surprised.

I asked his mom Fatima if I could put these two photos on my website to show my friends and she said sure. So here is a little happy Saturday treat for you!



I don't know what I am doing, but don't you just love that little face?!



Ibrahim is enjoying his lunch with some cousins visiting from Agadez.

musings from the gutter

Hi all,

Last night I had a funny experience that I thought would be fun to relate. It started with dinner with some friends at a little bar overlooking the Niger river. After dinner I left my friends there and headed out by myself (I was in a hurry to go somewhere, you know, I'm often in a hurry, not a good thing).

It was 9pm and I walked out of the restaurant into a large unlit parking lot. I thought, hmm, this would make me nervous in the US, but it's Niger, so it's okay. Then I saw a man slightly ahead of me, but our paths were converging, so I sad "Fofo, Salaam Aleikum" to greet him. Well then he started teasing me/ harassing me so I picked up my step and emerged onto the main road. There was no one around except a guard of a small NGO across the street. I "fofo"-ed him and crossed the street, already launching into an explanation about how I needed him to help me find a taxi. He looked nice and we smiled at each other and then my next step put me knee-deep in an open sewer. I had completely forgot that I needed to jump over the open sewer, in my hurry to get the guardian. There was a splash and my cry of surprise and then the guard was pulling me out of the sewer. The pooface who was teasing me disappeared and so did my flipflops, lost to the guck of the sewer.

Luckily a taxi came and I poppped in, but then the girl next to me was trying to find her boyfriend at a hotel and she used a dollar of my phone minutes trying to track him down. In the end I went to meet my friend and her Nigerien friend helped me wash off and told me that he detests those type of guys that "see a woman and shike nan, it's over, they just won't leave her alone." He was approximately my grandfather's age and so nice, so he pretty much made my dad.

When I went home I disinfected myself very throughly. In the end, perhaps I fell in the sewer because someone wanted to tell me that I needed to get throughouly clean; in fact, i did, considering i swam twice without showering and sweat profusely b/c of the heat (sorry, gross, will shower more promise Mom).

I hope I don't fall in the sewer again. But I am now cleaner than I have been in months, alhumdillilahi!

Cheers et bon week-end,
Maggie

more photos...

My friend Leigh and me on the beach at Ile de Goree, off the Senegal coast near Dakar.



My cutie next door neighbors, Laile and Ibrahim!



NigerIAN, aka from Nigeria, moolah, called Naira...they use this currency anywhere remotely near the Nigerian border in Eastern Niger.



Some nice little guys in Rigal Koel, a Hausa village in Eastern Niger, where my friend Paige is a Peace Corps volunteer.

I'm MELTING!

Hot damn, it is hot in Niger. I know, I know, this hot season isn't as bad as the last one, and yes, it was cloudy yesterday, so the sun wasn't as bad (but then there was humidity). Life is not bad at all, but seriously, the hot season is no joke. My computer may break b/c when I have it plugged in and the power shorts out for the fifth time in one afternoon, I don't think that is so good.

Anyway my brain is fried so here are some pictures instead of stories, hope you enjoy:



Kind of a not attractive photo of me, but voila moi et Alice the other Fulbrighter, with my sweet Chadian henna, taken right before I went to Dakar to see the Fick family



With Ashley, yawning like the hippos on the river...



Cool handmade pots in the Ayerou market NW of Niamey, we watched these pots be made by women on an island in the Niger river near Ayerou



Some fabric (from Mali/Guinea?)and towels (who knows where from) in the Ayerou market



Sunset on the Niger River, I will miss this view. The water level is super low right now b/c it's hot season

Parc W fun!

I was lucky and got to tag along on a 2-day trip to Parc W, an awesome wildlife reserve a few hours' drive from Niamey. My French friend Raphaelle who works for UNICEF had her boyfriend Gathian visiting from Paris, and another French pal Sophie came, too. We saw a TON of awesome animals that I had of course only ever seen in zoos, and I have to admit it was great to be in a pretty open area with not one single black plastic bag littering the landscape! (that's a big prob here, not only in cities, sadly in villages and all throughout the country...The Rwandan govt outlawed the use of black plastic bags, seems like a brilliant idea to me)



All of us, plus our great guides Alhmoud and Issafou, at the park's entrance



Splish splash they were takin a bath!



You gotta love this giraffe!



Finally, at a millet beer bar in Niamey, with Seydou the serenader...my Nigerien name Fatimata sounds really great when belted out by this dude

Alright, now it's back to work on some articles I'm finishing up from the Diffa trip...turns out I'm lucky enough to be getting several awesome visitors from the U.S. in May, so I'll be playing tour guide, wrapping up my work here, giving a presentation at the American Cultural Center, saying my goodbyes, tout au meme fois/ all at the same time!!!

Hope all is well, I hear there has been snow in the Seattle area lately...hard to imagine for me when it's 120 degrees F here!