Brief Moments

I would like to preface this blog by saying that, as you all know I am not that good of a writer and that so much happens here it is kind of hard to put it all in words, This blog is a combination of current feelings and input as well as past journal entries over a months time..thanks for taking the time to read it. Love you all!


When People told me that this was going to be one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do, or will ever do for that matter, I had some trouble believing them, and up until now, this experience has come so naturally and I’ve enjoyed it so much, that it didn’t seem very hard at all. Don’t get me wrong, there have been definitly days, usually accompanied by sickness, where I would have given anything to be home in America. Once physically well however, those feelings quickly reverse and I begin loving it once again. In the past month, as a result of a security issue in the Northern region of Niger, 4 of my best friends from my team in Maradi, including my best friend Anna, decided that it would be better for themselves and their families, if they returned home to America. I support each of their decisions as them all, 4 woman, lived in bigger villages and faced what I would describe as a higher safety risk than me, being a man who lives in a rural village where I feel no security threat whatsoever. I feel safe here, very safe, but loosing these four individuals kind of left me with a whole in my heart, I have known and bonded with them in this very un-normal situation that is Niger, very, very fast over the past 6 months. (Having initially journaled about this when it was happening to me, I would just like to say now, that two weeks has gone by since they left, and life in my village is getting back to normal, I have re-connected with other friends from my training group who have been really, really supportive and great, however I will always miss Anna, Cariad, Katie, and Liz!!!) So now out of 10 people on my team from my training group, we are now 4, we lost two others before the security incident. From about 130 Nigerien volunteers we are now 77 in country. Life here is not easy, the days are long, sometimes the minutes pass by so slowly I feel like I’m going insane, my mind is therefore free to wander, so when they left I started thinking about all the things here that I really don’t like and it started to take its toll on my brain. I struggled for a while with my decision to stay or go, and I started journaling about my decision. What it came down to was that this is my service, and I really don’t know how them leaving will effect my service, I spend about 26 days every month in my ville, and 4 days with these people (usually with a weekend trip in between to see a fellow volunteer in their village). So really the majority of my time is with my villagers, which are who, I came here to be with. If I become miserable, which I don’t see happening, I can always choose to come home, As I said before life here is not easy, some days I find myself counting down the days until I get to leave this place, and other days I think about projects that I would love to start that would take a lifetime of commitment to carry out and see to the end and I think that I could do that, that I could live my life out in Niger forever. Part of my current frustrations come from a lack of work to do, I have now spent nearly three months in my village, and am awaiting our second training which has now been pushed back until the end of January. I have small projects, like a tree farm, and garden that I am working on with some of my best friends in my village, but the bigger projects the ones I am going to look to all of you to fund :-), will come after this second training. I will learn, with a counterpart from my village who’s name is Idrissa, how to go about writing proposals, looking for money, and getting the community involved in helping with these projects. However frustrated I am though, these three months have been so incredibly invaluable. I learn something new every day, whether it’s a new word in Hausa, a new phrase, a new project idea, I learn something new about life in Niger. Some of the biggest things I’ve had to learn is that this place works nothing like America, for instance I am working on a charcoal project which I needed a 55 gallon drum for, of which there are plenty in Niger that they use to carry water with, but I just couldn’t get my hands on one for a month, In America I would of gotten in my car, driven to home depot and picked one up, here I had to wait to stumble in to a random conversation with a guy on the street who knew some 55gallon drum guy. On the same lines, we have a saying, if you see it, and you think you want it, buy it. This is because it may not be there again the next time you want it. I also had a list of project ideas that I wanted to do in my village, and over the last three months, most of those ideas have been erased from the list, mainly because stuff that I saw as a problem in Niger, isn’t a problem to Nigeriens, and therefore, I started listening and trying to address what they see as issues in their community and take my interests and combine the two to come up with a new list of projects that I want see through. So now that I have learned to walk, I’m very excited to get to run with my ideas at our next training. So I take it a day at a time here, slowly, cause life here is slow and uneventful most of the time. But the times that its not, the times where you really connect with your friend over tea, you watch as your neighbor sacrifices 6 goats on a religious holiday, then you walk around the next morning from house to house eating meat(from which I surprisingly didn’t get sick), it’s the random morning you wake up and are taken to an open field where traditional wrestling and your village comes to a standstill for the event, it’s the ideas that your friend has to better your community and how much he enjoys someone listening and responding to those ideas. It will be a compilation of these brief moments that I will look back on and say…it was hard, but it was worth it. Thanks Again - Ousmane