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

Off to a Month in the Ville!!

I’ve spent the last five months, very good months, traveling all around Niger doing all sorts of interesting things, I just spent the last three weeks working with 33 new volunteers. This last three weeks gave me some great rejuvenation, the year mark is a hard mark for volunteers (Man I can’t believe it’s been a year), In the beginning I spent so much time integrating into my village that it was like a full time job, learning the language, meeting new people, learning how to live in Niger. And now life has kind of normaled out a little bit, a bit mundane to be honest, I speak Hausa with relative fluency, I know the people I want to talk to and interact with, I am integrated. This combined with the fact that it is rainy season and most of our projects get put on hold because everyone is concerned with farming, this happens to be a boring time in the Life of a PCV in Niger. I am hopeful that in the next few months that It will pick up again, and I can deal with my little issues, as long as it continues to rain and my villagers have adequate food supplies come next hunger season. Being able to transfer all of the knowledge that I have learned to the new volunteers has been really good because, I feel as though I have actually gained a lot of skills by being here, and that I really have grown in many ways in the last year. The 33 new volunteers are an amazing group of people, I think that the recession in America caused a bunch of qualified people to sign up for Peace Corps, because this group has their sh*t together. I really enjoyed my time working with them and can’t wait for them to be out working in the field.

I am working on a proposal for a hospital building, running into a couple of road bumps which may prohibit it from happening but hopefully all will work out and it will be online, looking for donations, within the next couple of months. This hospital building will sleep up to 6 patients who currently have to sleep outside when they are sick. In the mean time I am burning more millet stalk, saving up charcoal powder to form it into briquettes when rainy season is over. This next year is going to be full of analysis of the project, making sure that is it worthwhile, and profitable, I will also be testing it to see what kind of things I can cook with it. Then I will spend some time training other volunteers and villagers from within my community to make charcoal in their own villagers.

I’ve been future thinking a lot lately, I don’t know why, maybe it’s the boredom, maybe it’s that I only have a year left in Niger (they say the second year flies by faster than the first), and I have no idea what I am going to do after I’m done here. I think that’s okay, and I’m open to all sorts of suggestions. I’m actually taking the Foreign Service Officer Exam in October (gonna spend the next month in ville studying for that). Maybe grad school? Maybe Peace Corps work? I guess it comes little by little, and you just gotta let it happen. I’m excited about the FSOE, and about the next year in Niger, hopefully it’ll be a good one J

So, lastly I’ll talk about Ramadan. Niger is a 98% Muslim country, and all of my friends are fasting for the holy month of Ramadan. Its an interesting time in Niger, and I think I am going to fast when I go back to Ville in a couple of days. When they fast, at 430ish to a guy banging a pot, and singing to wake every one up, they drink and eat and then have their morning prayer. Then its nap time, they wake back up around 7 and head to the fields to check on their crop, then for the men, it’s basically nap time for the rest of the day, before the second to last prayer they begin to prepare their food and drink to break fast with, everyone has their own breaking fast rituals (what they like to drink and eat and how they like to drink and eat that). A lot of money is saved up and spent on good food, ice, biscuit crakers, and other treats to break fast with, which means good dinners at friends’ houses for the next few months. So I am going to give it a shot, and I’ll let you know how it works out next month when I come back in from Ville.

Take Care - Ousmane

I'm really sorry...This has been a long time coming...VACATION...LITTLE CHARCOAL...HOUSE CONSTRUCTION...ALL VOLUNTEER CONFERENCE!!!!!!!!

So...here we go...Ghana..Beach...Beer....Awesome!!! So my friend Brian (A fellow volunteer who was actually my roommate in Philly for the two days before coming to Niger, we've been friends since we bonded over a beer and philly cheese steak and the fact that we were both like, what the hell are we doing?!!!) we went on a 16 day (well 15 cause we ran out outta money, which gives you a pretty good idea of how much fun we had) vacation from Niamey, through Beinin, Togo, Ghana and Burkina Faso. PC Niger volunteers call this the loop, cause you can buy a visa that allows you one enterance into each of these countries. We had a lot of fun, we traveled alot, every day in fact for the first like 6 days. We got in a bus at 5 am in Niamey and drove 18 hours through Benin, into Lome, the capital of Togo...we arrived in Lome in the middle of the night, found a GHETTTTTO!! Hotel and crashed after a fan millk(basically like chocolate ice cream in a bag, which they sell out of carts in all the countries we went to, they cost about 35 cents a piece, i think Brian and I ate about $40 dollars worth of them, so goddam DELICIOUS :-)!!!! anywho...we woke up and got our ghanain visas(not included in the loop visa) then we set off to find the Peace Corps Office, we found some really nice volunteers, who we ended up having some beers and some dinner with (good night!!!). We stayed the next night at a volunteers home, she lives at the base of this mountain...amazing!!!, me and brian got up the next morning and took a taxi to a bigger city nearby where we exchanged our Niger money into Ghanaian money, then we went to get a car to cross the border into Ghana. The taxi driver, the money exchanger, and the guys who got us a car to cross the border were all from Niger, and spoke the local languages that me and brian speak, and were kinda blown away at the two americans speaking Zarma and Hausa. We went into Ghana that afternoon, chilled in Ho, next to lake volta, and then went to Accra, the capital of Ghana. Up untill this point we had been taken aback by the mountains, the green, the water, but other than that, where we had gone, was most certainly more developed than Niger, but not significantly, Accra, blew our minds, Accra has skyscrapers, a huge ass mall, that would rival malls in America(Brian and I had draft beers and called our mom's from this bar for mothers day, what good son's we are!!) We were in Accra on a Sunday, and the south is predominately christian, therefore, much of Accra was shut down, so we didnt get to a PC Niger favorite Irish bar or Sushi restaurant, but no big deal...When we woke up monday, it was like the city came to life, people everywhere, commuting to work and what not, and it was nuts, It had been 9 months since I had seen that many people, cars, hustle and bustle, and it was honestly overwhelming....and it was really weird, being from Dallas, a huge city, I figured i'd be totally fine. But living in a village of 3000 people for nine months has apparently taken an effect. anywho...Brian and I got outta there real fast...took a bus to Cape Coast. Cape Coast is...well... a coastel town that was, during slavery, a port for shiping slaves. It is this amaizing post colonial town with beautiful old building and rich history. Me and Brian both are in agreement that the place we stayed in Cape Coast was by far our favorite, mainly because it had a roof top bar with a great view of the city. We tthe day there touring an old slave fort, learning about the history, really moving and informative, something I obviously missed in History class. The next morning we went to a national park and walked a famous canaopy walk, (pictures will come, some time)....then we headed off to our real destination, a Beach resort(a cheap but cool, PC volunteer favorite) called the Green Turtle outside of Takrodi. we spend about 4 or 5 days here, chilling on the beach, swimming, playing volleyball, drinking, EATING, reading, sleeping, really the most relaxing part of our trip. Then we were basically just traveling home, we went north to Kumasi, where the biggest market in West Africa is located, we spent the night at a PC hostel and then went to the market the next day where we were amazed by the market, it was so huge, and a really cool part of it, is that there is a huge Hausa population there, so i got to get a quick refresher before going back to Niger. We went through Burkina Faso, stayed for two days at the PC Hostel there, met some cool volunteers, and ate some pizza delieverd to the hostel (AMAZING!!) Then we made our way back to Niger, I think the last four days, we rode busses for 38 hours or something....So this is what I did...how I felt though...i think is different...It felt nice to eat some good food, drink some better beers(I think we tried every kind available in each country) and to relax a little. But I did not enjoy being a guest in a place of the world where I have currently resided for almost a full year. Having lived in Niger for 9 months before we went on vacation, we knew the rules, the languages, how life works here in Niger, from prices of food to taxi prices, and just knowing the local language gets you so much respect (for example, when we got back from vacation, all the taxi drivers who were outside the bus station knew that our bus came from burkina faso, and probably figured that i was a visitor to Niger, a driver greeted me in French, I responded in French where I needed to go, he quoted me a price in french (the wrong price, 1000 cfa (2 dollars), and I reponded in Hausa with the correct price (i'll give you 2oo cfa my friend), and he responded in Hausa, okay lets go). So we kind of got tired of being treated like visitors, even though thats what we were. And, please no one take any offence to this whatsoever, but there are no other people in the world like Nigeriens when it comes to honesty, niceness, hospitality, and what not, and the West Africans we met on our journey, with exeption of course, were not as nice as Nigeriens, and by the end of the two weeks, we both wanted to be home in Niger again.

So I came back to my village for a couple of weeks before leaving again (we'll get to why)...and I kind of got back into the swing of things, and worked on my house a little bit, I added two new doors to my house and re-cemented one of my rooms' floor because I was unable to properly sweep it before, and now my house is breezy and cool, and now I can actually nap in my house which is nice. Rainy season is coming, so charcoal is gonna kind of take a back seat to the farming that is, right now, far more important, the rains have started, and are coming every few days, I plan on getting back to village and heading to the farms with my friends to get a better idea of what it is that they do out there all morning. Its really interesting how life changes depending on the season here in Niger, i mean in America, whether its spring, summer, fall, or winter, you're still going to the gym, to the office, to the grocery store on saturdays and what not. During rainy season, women get up super early to pound millet to take to cook lunch in the fields, and everyone heads to the farm untill it gets to hot to work...I'll blog more about farming when I find out more, but i'll end by saying that if farming doesn't get better this season, that next year the hunger is going to be really bad...currently, my friends have a rotation system going on where everyone goes to someone's house for dinner, so that way they all get a little something to eat.

So when I left my ville I headed straight for Zinder where we held a conference for every PC Niger Volunteer...Zinder is currently the eastern most region (however Diffa will be opening up soon, another story)...I worked with 4 fellow volunteers to help throw this conference together, I have to say that my two years working at the University Center in college was invauable when it came to getting this thing off the ground and running smoothly, I mean I felt home kind of, chairs, tables, lcd projectors, screens, tents, laptops,(all this a little less sophisticated than what I had at my disposale at UTA :)..) But it went so freaking amazing. I mean, putting together something like this in Niger is not easy, there are huge concerns on the part of Bureau concerning travel and what not, and the logistics of having 56 volunteers in the same place, feeding, bathing, not to mention teaching them something, and it went better than i think any of the planning team could have possibly imagined. We had volunteers present on projects they had completed in their villages, with some great information exchange. Volunteers reviews were amazing, it was something many of them had been looking for from PC Niger for a very long time, and I am very, very proud that I got to be a part of the team putting it together, and cant wait to do it again next year!!!!!

So whats next, well, this summer will be full of fun and alot of travel, in 2 weeks I get to go prepare for my sister stage to come to Niger, the new volunteers arrive July 8, 2010, a day before we celebrate our 1st year in country. As a Volunteer Assistant Trainer, I will train with the training staff for a week, welcome the new volunteers off the plane, then head back to my village. We have a great team of VAT's this year for training, and to tell you the truth I've wanted to be a VAT since my first few days of training in Niger. I will be a vat during the 3rd and 4th week of training, which means I will be traveling back to village, then turning around two weeks later to go right back to the capital to help with training, the new volunteers will swear in at the end of september (they have extended the training 2 weeks) and I will be allowed to go back into Niamey for their swear in, which is a really cool week, full of fun events!!! Another thing I will be doing this summer is fasting for Ramadan with my friends. I'll probably have a lot to say about this later, probably the fact that I regret doing it, but we'll see. And I will be finishing my proposal for my hopital buildings as well as working on some cheap but effecient handwashing stations...and working out a training for my charcoal project for some neighboring villages next year...all of which I will hopefully, and timely blog about as they occur... Keep reading...i'll try to keep writing...thanks - Ousmane

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

Hot and Hungry, Here Comes the Real Niger

Hi Friends, Sorry its been a while, but life has actually been really busy lately, per usual this will be a very unorganized blog post full of random thoughts and experiences ive had over the past couple months. For starters, i feel very much like a real Peace Corps volunteer now after completeing in service training. In a few short days I will have been here 9 months, and to me that is utterly astonishing, considering how slowly some of the days pass, the months fly by so damn fast. In a few short 3 months, we will be welcoming the new group of Education and Community Development volunteers to Niger, and saying goodbye to the people who welcomed us when we landed, which is so weird, i can vividly remember getting off the plane and meeting these people who had just completed their first year, and who will be soon leaving, i guess time flies when you're having "fun". So I guess i feel more like a real volunteer because I actually have work to do now. I have started working on several projects, and juggling just living in Niger, with now working in Niger has had its ups and downs. Integration is such a big part of the first few months in ville, and you would be suprised how much drinking tea and speaking Hausa all day with frineds in ville can really take up alot of time, along with taking alot out of you, to the point that its totally feasable for me to go to bed at 830 or 9 and sleep till 7...coupling this with work has been hard, but very good and rewarding as well. I have been working on a charcoal project, where I am burning millet(local grain) stalks and carbonizing them and making briquettes, which will/should end up becoming a small business enterprise in villages all over the country (I have more information and pictures on my facebook)...In addition I have also just submitted a proposal for a latrine for the primary school which serves 500 children and is without a proper restroom or water resource to wash their hands...the last thing i am working on is prepping a small business club that I want to start after the next rainy season ends, so farmers can have time to participate, I am currently working on translating teaching materials from english to Hausa. I have also done a few smaller projects like painting large maps of africa in the primary school which has no real resources for their students. Now me being extremely artistically challenged, I recruited the help of my closest neighbor Lachland, who is a fantastic artist, and they turned out awesome. So thats an update on my current life workings in Niger, now lets get to the heart of the reason for the title.

Hot season is a coming, now we have been "fortunate" for the past couple of weeks because huge wind storms have kicked up so much dust and sand that it has blocked out the sun, and kept it a little cooler. Now the reason I put the word fortunate in quotes is because, as a result of the sand and dust everyone is facing upper respitory illnesses, my throat and mouth are consistently, and i mean consistently dry. but everyone says that its coming and to tell you the truth i am not at all looking forward to it. I asked my best friend in my village what people do in the hot season in Niger, and his response was, look for a place with shade, sweep place with shade, sit in swept, shaded place. So that it'll be my days for the next couple of months, with a 2 or 3 week vacation thrown somewhere in the middle, hopefully i'll get out during the hottest part :-)...but we'll see.

I would have to say that before I came here, i had this preconcieved image that popped into my head when the word poverty was spoken, someone said poverty, and i guess i thought sadness, bad life, depressing. And i have to say that, living in the most impoverished country on earth, its nothing like what I imagined, I would be hard pressed to find much depressing and bad life about Niger. The people, for the most part are some of the happiest and kindest and sweetest people i've ever met, and i would say that the average Nigerien is alot happier with their lives as a whole than the average america. Impoverished just means different, they dont for the most part have electricity, they use the sun and the moon, and the occasional flash light when the moons not bright enough. They dont have air conditioning or fans, they use the wind and water, the way they utilize the wind in their everyday lives is amazing. I definitly as an american took for granted many of the luxuries, not neccesities, that I was given access to. Life here is quaint, and slow, and beautiful and I dont ever feel without here, I know that when I eventually come back home, there will be things i totally forgot about, that i trully dont miss. Now this being said, life here is no picinic when the rain doesnt come. Last farming season (basically when we got off the plane) there was very sparse and in adequate rains that have led to the nearly 7.5 million people who will go hungry in Niger this hunger season which is fast approaching. This year is said to be the worst since 2006. However, the government, and Aid organizations are planning in advance this year and it is said that they will be able to at least lessen the effect. But my friends here have already started skipping meals, and looking for alternative food sources like leaves, and roots that will supplement their diets. It is a very eye-opening experience, and for someone who has been taught to give to others his entire life by his amazing parents, who lead by example, it is extremely difficult to sit back and watch, when my stipend is enough to feed my entire village for a week or even more. But we are discouraged heavily against doing that for many important and obvious reasons. I have found ways to help ease my longing to help, by begining to eat more with my best friend Hashemu and his family, and I can chip in for money for sauce materials, and he supplies grain that he succesfully harvested last season, and the small amount of money i pay can provide sauce for the 14 people who live in his concession, and that makes me feel good, and its on the down low between me and him, he saves face and provides for his family, i get a meal, and good conversation, and good feeling's, for about the price of a quarter a day.

Take Care of Yourselves - Ousmane

In Service Training

Hey Everyone!! So...For the past three weeks I have been participating in In Service Training, the second of three trainings over the course of my two years here in Niger and I have learned alot more about doing actual work stuff with my service along the lines of Proposal Writing for funding and about other opportunities available to me as a volunteer. I also had quite a bit of fun, catching up with the people I started with here in Niger. Of the 32 of us who came, there are 22 who remain, and alothough those who left Niger were deeply missed, it was great to catch up with all of those who stayed. To share funny/scary/weird/amazing/life changing stories with them. Some of the training sessions that interested me the most and that I got the most out of were 1) A fellow volunteer Nick who was evacuated from Guinea due to the unstable situation of the country where he was a Small Business Volunteer gave a session on starting groups geared toward teaching people about Small Business Practices like Accounting and Cost/Benefit Analysis and what not while having group members contribute to a fund which will then, after several months loans can be given out through group members choosing which business plans to approve, then the loan can be paid back with interest and the group can make money as a whole. 2) The other thing that really interested me was Scouting in Niger, The executive at the National Level came to give a presentation about what Scouts is in Niger. And I am really looking forward to seeing how much interest my community will have in it the program. As most of you know scouts was a great part of my life and probably a big reason as to why I am here in Niger with the Peace Corps. It was a great three weeks, for many reasons, but I am ready to get back to Village, see my friends and my garden, and start working on some projects in my community. Thanks to all of you who wrote/called/facebooked/emailed me for my bday!! I had alot of fun, some of my great friends here bought me some yogort in bag (one of my favorite things here) and suprised me at breakfast, and I got a cake, all and all it was a great day!!! I did have a bit of a holy shit I am 25 moment, what am I doing with my life kind a thing??? And I realized that I am exactly where I want and need to be at this moment in my life, once again...I thank you all for your wonderful support and the time you take to read these posts. I'd like to end by thanking my Godmother Judy Hembree, She has invested a great deal of her time and efforts through volunteerism and helping those less fortunate than herself. She has made several trips to Haiti to volunteer in a hospital there, and as a result of the recent catastrophe is currently making plans to get down there as soon as possible. She is one of my biggest supporters, and this may be unknownst to her, but one of my biggest inspirations to continue my life filled with volunteerism. Thanks for all that you do Aunt Judy. Love You - Ousmane

February 4, 2010

BARKA da SABON SHEKERA OUSMANE !