Did I say Hot???? I meant HOT!!!!

I am Texas born and bread, been living there all my life, spent several a summer at camps for months at a time with no air conditioning what so ever....seen 102 degrees in the shade before...and i would give anything to feel that again :-)...NIGER IS HOT!!! My dad called me the other day to complain that his AC broke in his car, and i pretty much yelled at him and told him to go see how hot it was in Niger that day, 113 degrees F!!!! HAHA! So what do you when its that hot??? We'll aside from vast amounts of sweating, You sit for hours on end...from about 10 am - 5 pm, during the hottest part of the day, from about 1-4, you make sure that the smallest amount of your body is tocuhing something, you lie...spread out on a mat in some shade, with the minimal amount of clothes on and you wait....you fall in and out of sleep, you scream, you kill mass quantities of flies, and you wait some more....

Now considering this, i've actually managed to do alot of work lately, and am about to venture out on my first vacation. Since I last wrote, I have done alot of work with my charcoal, testing different binders, and working on making it more profitable, and a better product as a whole. I have also begun corespondence with a team from M.I.T., from whom i got the idea in the first place, to see if they would be interested in maybe helping me out a little. My neighbore Lachland, a 4th year volunteer and amazing artist has a goal of putting Africa and Niger maps in all the Primary schools in my commune (about 38 spread out within a 50 kilometer radius). So we have started in this venture, and hope to complete the goal over this coming rainy season. My villagers are in the process of planting 30 trees that I grew from seed in my home, and the garden has been utterly destroyed by the heat of the sun, but now that I know how it all works here, I am planning a larger garden for next year!

VACATION!! Me and my friend Brian are going thru Burkina Faso to Ghana for a couple weeks of Beaches and Beers. This is the perfect time to get away, because its hot, and villagers dont do much of anythng during this season...hopefully when we get back the rains will come and I may learn a little bit about Nigerien Farming.

I am ready for vacation...but I think you all should know how freaking happy I am here...I love this place, these people, my life here. I never in a million years would have considered ever coming to Niger, hell i didnt even know where or what Niger was when I got invited to be a Peace Corps volunteer. But i most certainly wouldn't trade it for anything.

One last note...there is an Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, who severved here 5 years ago, who has come back to do some work for his masters, and its been really cool to sit and chat with him about how life has changed here since he was here, for instance, there were no cell phones when he served here, and now they are everywhere...and he still speaks the local language he learned when he served here...I hope i keep my Hausa!!!

Take Care...I'll let you know how vacation goes - Ousmane