Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2007
From: Michael Redman
Subject: Michael in Niger (Well Update #3) - 07/01/07

Greetings again, one & all - I hope everyone had a great and happy Christmas & New Year's!

Things are going well in this area of the world.  Well enough, at least.  (Hah! "Well" enough - I kill myself!)

The well is going along in such a manner that I really don't need to be there at all anymore for the actual work.  I left my village for about a week around Christmas, and came back and the first well had been more or less finished, and they had already started putting the well mould in the ground for the second well.  Now I'm disappearing for another week-plus, and the second well should also be more-or-less finished by the time I finally make it back to Safatane.  Again, I reiterate my thanks to any & all who helped make this happen.

I just uploaded 10 or so more pictures, which should show the work better than I can describe it, so I'll leave you to them.

http://picasaweb.google.com/redmanma/WellProject

(On the subject of pictures, thanks to all those on my mom's side of the family who were involved in the Christmas photos @ Grandma's: it makes a guy happy to know he's missed / loved even though he's half a world away.  I printed out a picture my mom sent along & it's now hanging proudly in my house)

December 31st, in addition to being New Years' Eve, also happened to coincide with Tabaski, the most important Muslim holiday in Niger.  It commemorates the biblical story of Abraham almost killing Isaac, then God being like, "Just playin' - uhh, kill this sheep instead."  So, Nigeriens kills tons & tons of sheep.  Literally tons of them.  For weeks and weeks, every bush taxi you see has sheep tied up sitting on the roof, packed like open-air sardines, bleating in the wind, with their sheep pellets tumbling off the side and back of the car with a frequency directly proportional to the recklessness of the bush taxi driver (it's recommended to ride with the windows closed).  The poor dumb animals don't see it coming, blessedly, until three or so powerful men grab a knife on the day of the celebration, hog-tie it and pin it to the ground near a freshly-dug collecting pool; then it gets it across the jugular.  This year I observed closer than ever, but still had to look away as my school director's goat got the same rough treatment as the sheep; it's powerful to see a life snuffed out, something I never appreciated much as a meat-eater in America.

As I said, it's the most important holiday for Nigeriens, and it shows.  Everyone gets in their shiniest new clothes: new boubous for the men, new outfits for the women, little boys in clothes that haven't (yet) been torn by rough-housing or over-use, little girls with their tightly braided hair and impeccably clean matching shirts & skirts--and everybody scrubbed clean of the normal grime.  The food is good and plentiful--as it ought to be; Nigeriens believe what they sacrifice on this day will be waiting for them on the other side, so it pays to be over-generous--so long as you don't mind meat.  (And being protein-deficient the other 51 weeks of the year, how could you not?)  Nigeriens literally use every piece of the animal, from the head and legs (charred in the fire), to the inner organs (some used to make a make-shift sausage, some simply fried in oil) and "traditional" muscle (the body is splayed and then placed a few feet from an enormous fire). It's impressive, and the village smells of charred wood & meat for days, of course helped by the fact that there is meat sitting in containers for days until it is gone, slipping its way into every normal sauce and special preparation along the way (I had pulverized meat [bone chips included!] with onions & hot pepper the last day I was there, four days on).

Myself, this is my third Tabaski, and frankly I didn't want any organ meat myself (sorry Windsong; I know you cringe at the mention of the phrase!), so I headed to Koddo Koira to ring in the New Year with Alison, my nearest Peace Corps neighbor, in an effort to avoid the ubiquitous gifts of black plastic bags of cooked meat, and was actually largely successful.  It helps that her kitten has evolved & grown into a small puma, able to consume vast amounts of meat, so it could help us with the gifts her villagers insisted on giving us. The next day, the day the meat was divided (by the dictates of Islam, a third to the needy / poor, a third to friends & relations, and a third to the immediate family) after being cooked near the fire all the previous day, I slipped off to Gotheye to try to fix my bike, so I escaped the meat again. It's not necessarily that I don't like the meat--though the excess & the fact that frankly I'm not used to eating sheep's lung & not ready to start now certainly play their parts--but this is Nigeriens' one chance to gorge on meat, so I'm all in favor of them getting everything.

So, that's Tabaski, and that's about all I have to share with you all today.  I'm about to head off to Hamdallaye for a four-day session for all the PCVs who will be spending time in the coming months helping the newest batch of Americans get ready to be Peace Corps Volunteers in Niger (Hamdallaye is the town where the Peace Corps training takes place; I spent two months there myself--beginning 2 years ago to the day, in fact!).  After this I'll be headed back to Safatane for a while, then I'll spend a couple of weeks in Hamdallaye myself trying to be useful in mid-February.  It looks like I've got a busy couple of months ahead of me!

Alright, that's all I've got for now. I hope you are well, and I hope to hear from you all soon. Take care of yourselves in this new year.

- Michael
  
Corps de la Paix
Gothèye, NIGER
West Africa
+227 96-53-88-30