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Friday, September 17, 2010

Allah Shi Kiyaye!!

What a month...

So a lot has happened over the past month, and in spite of the following blog and some of its sorrowful nature(at the end, you'll get there), it was probably one of the best month’s I have had in village.

-4:10 a.m. - WAKE UP, WAKE UP, DRINK WATER, EAT FOOD, WAKE UP, WAKE UP!!! (I awake to the loud speaker, the gentleman who calls to prayer at each mosque is waking everyone up with the help of other fellow town criers so that everyone can get up and eat food and drink water before the sun rises and the fasting for the Holy month of Ramadan begins. I role over in my bed and put my pillow over my head.)

-4:30 a.m. - COME BUY BREAKFAST!, COME BUY BREAKFAST! (These are kids yelling in the streets, their mothers awoke hours earlier to cook breakfast to sell) My alarm also goes off at this time in case I have by slim chance actually slept through these callings which is not a frequent occurrence. I wake up, I put on pants and a shirt and I walk outside of my house to buy food from one of these kids, I go back in my house, I put the food on the table, I go to the stove and I heat up some kunu(a pounded millet porridge that is SOOOOOOOOO GOOOOOOD, especially with a little sugar) I bring the heated kunu out to the table with my purchased breakfast (fried pounded millet, hard to explain but delicious with sauce). This and a very large bowl of water is my breakfast. Many people do different things to start off their fasting for the day, my friend Nuhu likes to stay up all night till around 1 or 2 a.m. eating food and then he awakes right before sunrise, drinks some kunu and sleeps the day away(he’s relatively wealthy and so doesn’t have to take the morning trip to see the farm, he pays someone to do that for him). I chugged water in the morning, and at 1 p.m. in the afternoon on days that were hot, I am aware that this is cheating, but my reasons for fasting were various and this did not interfere with those reasons, judge away if you must but its not easy anywhere, and most certainly not in Niger.

-5:15 a.m. - I move my bed inside so as to not be awoken by the sun, and I lay down, my curtains are drawn and my windows covered so that I can try and get some more sleep. But I can’t sleep, not at least for a half hour, my stomach is so full and my brain wide awake from the activity. (By the end of the 30 days, my stomach could handle the breakfast much better and I could fall asleep a little faster)

6:15 a.m. - Get up to pee, go back to sleep.

6:45 a.m. - Get up to pee, go back to sleep.

7:15 a.m. - Pee, sleep.

7:45 a.m. - Pee - consider getting up for good this time…Perform the morning rituals, get dressed and what not, and head out to greet the family and friends. In Hausa, you have different greetings that you perform at different times of the day, and during Ramadan a new one for the morning, is basically “how was rising at 4:30?” - The correct response, a hard one to truly muster is “Da Godiya” I am thankful to God. I find this a very interesting part of the culture, the greetings, and don’t be surprised when I came back home and ask you how your tiredness, your family, your work, your getting out of bed, your farm (J) are within the first minute of our conversation.

8 - 10 a.m, - I gotta keep busy…sitting around thinking about hunger and thirst is not for me, I work on collecting old millet stalks that have fallen down (much like my concession wall) in the rain, splaying them to dry out in the sun (when available) and then burning millet to store for making bricks in the coming months, I am planning on starting a income generating activity with them. So I work now because its cool enough and then its shade time.

10 a.m. - Noon - I work on some Foreign Service Exam stuff (I take the test October 9, wish me luck) and I also read (This month I read The World is Flat and Guns Germs and Steel, both good books)

Noon - 2 p.m. - I sleep in the shade of a tree, its nice, no one talks, my friends who went to check on their farms are sleeping; everyone has no energy to do anything, even the women are resting (which they don’t get the opportunity to do a lot.

2 p.m. - 4 p.m. - I do some more reading and some more foreign service studying, this is the slowest part of the day!! It’s grueling, my mind and body are now fried and when I get up to prepare for breaking fast (in three hours) I feel very light headed like I may pass out. But I am excited because the time is soon approaching.

4.p.m. - 5 p.m. - I clean my dishes from the morning and the previous night, and I head to the main road with my thermos to buy ice (a special treat for me and my family with whom I will break fast). The Ice goes fast, so I’ve put an advance down for the week and they ice guy (who is not on anyone’s schedule but his own and will come when he wants) will save me a nice piece of ice. On the way to the road the only people working are tailors who are making outfits for the end of Ramadan celebration (good time to be a tailor in Niger), everyone wants new clothes for their kids and themselves if they can afford it. I get my Ice and go to visit one of my favorite Tailors. I call him Mai Kiran Sala (The prayer Caller, which is an honor in the culture if you are the one who calls the prayer five times a day), his real name is Hachimou, but that’s my best friends name so I go with Mai Kiran. I make a loop back around to my house.

5 p.m. - 6 p.m. - Gotta keep busy, I read, I play the guitar, It’s hard not to break into some of the treats I’ve bought to break fast with my family (potatoes, fried beans, juice and sugar), But I manage, I feel proud to say that I didn’t eat any food during daylight hours, which was one of my goals.

6 p.m. - 7 p.m. - I prepare to break fast, I boil sweet potatoes and mix the juice (kool-aid-esque) and sugar with water and poor it over ice so it has time to get cold. I get everything ready and head over to my family’s place, right next door, around 6:45p.m. The sun sets around 7,

You break fast slow, your initial instinct because its hot and you’re parched is to go for the ice cold juice, you can have a little, but a lot will give you stomach cramps, the trick is some nice warm kunu and a little bit of food to ease into it.

8 p.m. - I feel bad because my family doesn’t have any food to eat, its hunger season, which is kinda weird that they fast anyways cause most of them don’t have any food where I live, and a big reason why I chose to fast with them. So for about the first 10 days at 8, I got up and went to my house and cooked myself a substantial meal, while my friend and his family got a little food from friends who had it, or just drank kunu, which is not at all adequate.

8 p.m. - 10 p.m. - I listened to several programs on the BBC and took a bath and went to bed, we’ll get to the news I was hearing a little later.

So that was an average day during my last month in Village, a great bonding experience with my villagers, although hard, worth it. We’ll see if I try again next year.

So what happened after the first 10 days??? USAID happened…they came to my village with 15 huge 18 - wheelers full of rice, oil, sugar, and corn flour and provided food aid for my village and many of the surrounding villages. My family and most all of the families in my village were given enough food to last until harvest season which is just around the corner, and I am very happy to say that in my village, the harvest will be very good this year, as opposed to the drought that we experienced last year, this year has been full of rain, and I cannot begin to explain to you how happy that makes me. So for the remainder of Ramadan, I would buy rice and sauce ingredients to contribute to family meals, and we would all eat together, and I mean, there are a lot of stuff I know I took for granted living in America, food was never one that crossed my mind. It will now. The mood in my village, you could feel it, just changed, people were not only happy that they got to eat, but more so that their kids could eat, it was amazing. Thanks for paying your taxes. Sometimes America does get it right. - Sometimes America gets it wrong, we’ll get to that soon though.

So that was Ramadan, the Ede (and I probably spelled that wrong, its called Idi in hausa), is the festival to mark the end of Ramadan, and it’s a smaller version of a bigger celebration called Tabaski which I have written about before, but its just like any other holiday in America, you give gifts, you eat good food (we killed 6 chickens, DELICIOUS!!!!). I walked around in my new party (Nigerien) attire and handed out candy to kids and greeted everyone on the ending of Ramadan (BARKA DA SALA!!).

So Ramadan was awesome and led to what I would again call one of my best months in village, however, there were some things that were not so good, which brings us to the somber part of this months blog.

It’s interesting, with different seasons come different challenges it seems. It is currently rainy season in Niger which means a large increase in the number of malaria carrying mosquitoes, and the number of patients at the village hospital is ten times that what it is in off season. It is a challenge when everyday you see someone you know either going to the hospital themselves or taking someone they know to the hospital. When, “how is the morning of the sick?” becomes a standard greeting in your everyday routine. It’s even more of a challenge to watch a mother hold her sick child in her arms, fever of 103, and she can't take her to the hospital because she doesn't have the money for medication. We are taught in PST (Pre-Service Training) that it is best not to diagnose, and especially not to give medicine to villagers because it will inevitably lead to you being seen as a doctor and there is no way that you have the capacity (physical, emotional, or monetary) to deal with all of them. So you watch, you make sure they drink water, and eat food, and you hope and pray, that they will get better on their own. And once you've seen this once, you go around the village and you make sure that people are sleeping inside mosquito nets, and that they are doing it properly, because after all, prevention is the best medicine. There were several deaths in my village this past month, mainly those of the too young or too old, who can’t handle the disease on their own. I know I’ve said this before, but they way that Nigeriens handle death is, to me, beautiful, they acknowledge that it was time, they grieve, and they move on.

In addition to having to deal with the sicknesses of family and friends, I had to deal with the news from the outside world. The news is usually kind of depressing, but this month’s news was not only depressing, but also very, very embarrassing, and I’ve personally struggled with whether or not I wanted to write about this in my blog, for the same reason a lot of people didn’t want to talk about it, because it really doesn’t deserve the attention that it has gotten. I am speaking of course of the preacher in Florida who threatened to burn copies of the Koran, and also of the debate over the mosque near the site of the twin towers. I can say that when I first heard of these stories I practiced the phrases, “some Americans are kind of not intelligent,” and “I’m really sorry for this, it shouldn’t happen and I hope it doesn’t” in Hausa so I could explain to my friends what was going on in America and why because they we’re hearing the same news I was hearing. EMBARRASSING!!!!!! I’m not going to dedicate a lot of time to this, but he was wrong, and the fact that people care where a mosque is being built in New York (one of the most diverse places on the planet!!!!!!!) is beyond me? That just seems like a really big waste of time and effort. BUILD IT SIR, BUILD IT and use it to teach Americans about the real Islam, and in time, I hope we can look back at this, as a road hump in our history, and not something that propels us in the wrong direction as a country. I would like to say how relieved I was when the gentleman in Florida said he wasn’t going to burn the Koran. I can’t imagine how relieved other foreigners in countries where radical Islam is active. And the fact that he didn’t do it, gives me some hope that this too, will pass.

Well that’s it for this month, it was a long one I know, I hope not too long. I’m off to Niamey, the capital, for a week to celebrate the swearing in of about 30 new volunteers who just completed their pre-service training, still can’t believe that was me this time last year.

Thanks!! Love ya!!

- Ousmane