26/06/06

Ma & Pa

Hello!  How are you guys doing?  How's the summer coming along back in America?  It appears it's been awhile since I sent a letter to you guys.  Or to anyone, really.  So, here it is!

Remember last year when I went to the fishing & only brought one water bottle and no food?  Last week, I experienced something wthat probably surpasses that event.

So Friday before last, I get back to my village after a week in Niamey, working on the quarterly newsletter et cetera, as we're sitting around eating our millet and sauce, and my school director tells me he's going to his hometown.  I pass through this town every time I go to Gotheye, but have never found any legit reason to stop there..  So I say, yeah, I'll go, since he's become one of my best friends here and I figure that I could swing by a neighboring village that just so happens to be the home of my nearest PCV neighbor, Alison (and the former home of Windsong).  So that next morning, we're walking through the road town (where we caught the bush taxi when you guys were here), and a teacher there tells us there will be a "fete scolaire" - school party later that afternoon - in Alison's village, of all places.  Perfect - now I wouldn't even need an excuse to leave my teacher in the lurch - we could just walk to that village together.

The visit to his hometown was somewhat of a bust, as he had intended to show me his mother (as he had the pleasure of meeting my parents! -  His dad died 9 years ago or so, and incidentally I got to see where he was buried).  However, it did help reinforce the notion that everyone in Niger is related to one another.  One of the people who works with an NGO that does work in my village is his "kayna" - a blanket word with as narrow an interpretation as "younger brother" all the way to "cousin" and beyond to "someone who's somehow related to me, and either I'm older than him or my parents are older than his".  All this time, and I didn't even know they were related.  I suppose it helps that one can have up to four sets of in-laws.  Anyway, his mother was at market, and so was another cousin who had until recently been living with my teacher, and that the director wanted to take back to do more work (what, after all, are kids good for if they're no longer in school, other than to work for their family?)

Around 10:00 a.m. we start on our way to Alison's village, and it takes almost no time at all.  I managed to surprise Alison slightly with my presence, but she didn't seem to mind my English-speaking, American-culture-understanding presence.  It was slightly awkward hanging out with the gathered teachers, many of them young and from nearby villages.  I guess it wasn't that strange, they've all been to school and therefore at least exposed to Western civilization/culture more than most villagers.  I am just often at a loss about what to talk about with Nigeriens, because my vocabulary is sort of limited.  Anyway, they served us a bunch of sugared up green tea, as well as Lipton tea with lemon in it, which tasted exactly like I remember sun tea tasting (or whatever it has that you used to put in the big glass jars, out on the deck in the sun), and then they served us food, rice, and sauce with veggies and meat, eaten with the hand, of course.  After that, the "older" teachers (including mine) started to take their naps (it's what you do when it's hot), while the younger ones changed into their "uniforms" - clothes of different cuts but all of the exact same print.  I would say I don't understand why, but then I look at a picture on my wall and realize Trevor and I have the exact same Coca-Cola shirts.  Anyway, Alison and I used this moment to take our Nigerien break - these are a necessary part of any day in Niger, if you want to maintain sanity - and hung out at her house for a few hours.

After the "alasar" prayer (late afternoon, around 4:00 - 4:30 p.m.) we went back to the school, expecting the "fete scolaire" to be under way.  Instead, we were greeted with a spectacle that I've never seen before, and can't imagine taking place at home.  The "school" is the cement brick single classroom of the type in my village.  As we walked up, we saw kids crowding the doorways, and spilling out the windows, and we assumed they were watching a movie, as they were fiddling with the TV and generator when we here in the classroom earlier.  Instead, it was the radio playing West African music and all the gathered kids, especially those inside, sitting complacently in rows on the floor or in the desks lining two walls, are watching the young teachers dance.  It was quite strange.  Imagine a dance being held for teachers in America, in the auditorium at Immaculate Conception school, for example, with all the students sitting quietly along the walls, watching the teachers.  And the kids weren't allowed to dance, and they kept their conversations at a low level, and seemed quite entranced by the sight of these 7 or 8 teachers dancing together.  After persistent prodding, and a few "shots" of the sugared-up green tea, they finally got Alison and I on the dance floor.  We were up for three songs - music here is the same repeated phrase, over and over till the musicians are done, I guess - and the dancing consisted of walking slowly in a circle, counter clockwise, occasionally jutting a leg or arm out, and - oh yeah - sweating a lot (the high that day was 106 degrees).  I understand the rationale for such a dance:  young men and women are not allowed to flirt much one-on-one, so let 'em dance in front of the safest audience possible - school kids.  Still - it was weird.

Then by about 5:45, my teacher and I were on the road out of town (a 2km walk or so), and sitting under some shady trees, waiting for a bush taxi to stop and pick us up.  Soon one passes by, and then another, and another.  And still another.  None of them even slow down to ask us where we want to go, presumably because we would want to go past where there're stopping, the market town 4 km away.  So we wait a bit, and I say, "Man, there are no bush taxis!"  At that moment, one came around the bend in the road.  It quickly sped past, but it allowed me the chance to explain the idiomatic phrase, "Speak of the devil."  Only in retrospect would I reflect on the link between this phrase, and another conversation we had earlier as we were waiting, when I made a passing comment about how this year, none of the rainstorms were preceded by big dust storms.  I just had to wait an hour for that one to be contradicted.  

At some point, a fellow school teacher drove by on a motorcycle and offered to take us to our road town.  I declined, not wanting to breach a Peace Corps policy about not riding motorcycles, and offered to walk back to the village, telling my school director to go on.  He refused to split up on principle, so we held out hope for a bush taxi.  By around 7:30, Oumarou said, "Umm, Genghis Khan?  That sky is bringing a huge wind with it.  What should we do?"  As we were having no luck with bush taxis, and Alison had already offered her extra mosquito net, I said head back to the village.  But we were already too late to get back before the wind got there.

The lightning and thunder came at us slowly but relentlessly.  We got maybe 500 yards before the first wall of dust hit us, forcing us to lean left if we wanted to keep a straight path.  At this point the sun was mostly set, but now the overhead clouds completely blotted out any ambient light.  The more we progressed, the more we were dependant on the lightning at 2-3 second intervals for illumination.  After the first wave of wind let up slightly, Oumarou, who was leading the way, turned to me and asked, "Can you run?"  I said yes, and we picked up the pace, going as fast as we could handle without tripping all over the uneven terrain.

And then, without warning, the second wave of wind hit us.  I have never felt wind so ferocious, so focused in intensity.  It nearly knocked us over, and did in fact send us off the tack we had been following (the fact that Niger is basically all sand, and the "path" we had been following were two ill-defined ruts in bumpy terrain, means that we had probably lost the path in the pitch black long before), tumbling to safety, crouched behind the trunk of a thorny tree.  By this point, I had taken my glasses off and tossed them in my canvas tote bay, as my eyes have already filled with sand, so I could barely keep them open anyway.  It was at this point that I basically surrendered my fate to Oumarou, trusting him to get us somehow back in contact with humanity.

After that intense wave passed, the sand never really let up - I remember thinking that people in America would pay good money to have the outer layers of their skin removed in such an efficient manner - but we charged off in what we thought was the direction of town.  Without realizing it, my world view had shrunk immensely.  All that mattered was my ability to pick out the black form of my teacher against the equally black backdrop, now less frequently aided by lightning.  Finally, the rain itself kicked in, and we paused under a tree.  We used this time to try to find the village in the brief flashes afforded us by the lightning above.  As my eyes, eyelids, eye sockets and hands were covered in sand, I wasn't much help in this endeavor.

The rainy spell was not too long in duration, so maybe 15 minutes later, we headed off to where we thought the village was.  As the Nigerien bush seems incapable of sustaining any plant life that doesn't have any defensive mechanisms, aka thorns, I found myself getting pretty cut up around the ankles, my boubou getting caught, whenever it wasn't my feet.  And all the time, my whole focus on picking out Oumarou's shape in the pitch darkness.  Only once did it happen that he had started walking when I thought he was still standing still, waiting to use the lightning to get his bearings - he only got 50 meters or so ahead.  There were numerous times where I ran into him or stepped on his heels.  Occasionally he took my hand when I was being particularly clumsy by walking into low-lying bush after bush.  Eventually the lightning had completely passed, but not before showing me that I was walking at a fast clip about a half-foot away from a two-foot gully that I luckily didn't fall into.

With the lightning and thunder past us, as well as the rain, we were out of one danger, but clear into another - we were hopelessly lost.  We criss-crossed  3, 4, 5 times, and now we had no bearing, no landmarks, just the darkness.  The moon was waning, so I was thinking we could just camp down for four or five hours till the moon would come out to show us something.  Oumarou wasn't going to take it lying down, however, so we continued our aimless rambling.  The geography around the village is confusing, partly because it is so alien to both of us, and partly because there are at least two different river beds.  So even if you get to one of these, you still have to figure out which one you're in to know which direction to go.  Being completely disoriented, when we finally got to one of the river beds, we bounced around inside it like a pinball, walking back and forth across it, thinking that the village is just over here?  Or is it there?  I had an inkling that the village was to our left, and prejudiced my senses that way.  I eventually heard animals - which at night are only around people, tied up, then saw the blip of a flashlight in a concession, and finally I heard the clinching piece of evidence - the all-too-familiar thud of a thick stick on the flank of a beast of burden.  There was an ox-cart up at the top of the hill.

We get to the ox-cart, and greet them.  Oumarou is still thinking of getting back to our village this night - I just want to crash at Alison's - but the people on the ox-cart point out rightly that we weren't likely to catch another bush taxi that night.

We got a young guy to take us to the village school director's house, and, for what felt like the first time in ages, I got to sit.  I drank some water, then pulled out my water bottle to wash my glasses and began a process that would take 2 or 3 days to complete - wiping the dirt out of my eyes and ears.  After a good 20 or so minutes of dithering, we eventually got a kid to take us to Alison's concession.  On this walk and the one into the village, we got to see some of the damage the wind had done.  A shade hangar that had until recently been a classroom was completely knocked down.  Many others were half blown away, and there were a fair amount of sizable branches strewn all about.  By about 10 or so, our ordeal was over, and I was tucked safely in my mosquito net.

Or so I thought.  To add insult to injury, a little after midnight, the wind kicked up again, blowing sand everywhere.  As I was already totally disgusting and dirty, I didn't really care.  But then the rain itself came, and my exhausted body somehow found the means to move my bed inside.  I did not have the energy to set up my mosquito net - I just slept on top of it in a fitful, sweaty, bedraggled semblance of rest.

The next morning, at about 6:30, my director swung by to pick me up.  We walked the path back out of town.  We still have no idea which way we had turned to get lost, and the daylight didn't provide any clues.  What it did reveal was the power of those winds.  There were a fair number of trees that had lost half their trunks and had lost limbs, even a few upturned at the roots.  It looks like we got lucky.

Finally, at about 8, we made it back to our village, sweet and sound.  I was intending to plant more millet, with the rain at night, but was too tuckered out, so I basically slept all the next day. 

Apparently it was an impressive feat for my villagers - I got a fair number of "barka" greetings - "congratulations" usually only used for births, deaths, weddings, the return of family members from working in the coast countries, etc.  We were pretty lucky there wasn't a lot of rain, because if we had been soaked and lost, we didn't have much in the way of protection against the cold.

Anyway, I came out of it with a few scrapes, but otherwise unscathed.  And if they had a "getting lost in the bush during a sandstorm merit badge", I think I'd qualify.

Okay, hope you guys are well.  I'm doing pretty well, though the rainy season is a bit slow in getting underway here.  It'll pick up though.

Michael