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 !

Outstanding Matches

The crowds gathered to see the wrestling matches in my village. Young wrestlers came from the nearby villages.