February 15, 2007

I hope everything is going well in GA – I’ve been pretty busy here! Lots of stuff has happened in the last month…Its finally getting hot again (no fun at all) and I’m dreading hot season which is starting officially in March and will last til probably June or July when the rains come…Right now, its so nice its like springtime!! Next week when I’m back in Maradi we definitely have a few days at the pool planned so I’m excited about that.
Work is going well here! Its good to actually have work and stuff to do, that’s for sure…I went to this bush village called Kwaila to do baby weighings, and it was a huge success the first time I went…I was afraid that maybe like 15 or 20 mothers would come to have their babies weighed, so I went out to the village (about 1 hours walk from my village) with two girls from my village to help me, and hung up the scale outside the chief’s house and waited on the mothers to show up, and boy did they show up. We weighed babies for 4 hours!! All the time the babies were screaming (not only were they afraid of the scale, their simply terrified of me and my white skin and blue eyes), and we ended up weighing 80 babies in all! And then I ran out of the baby weighing sheets, but there were even more to be weighed, so I’m glad there is a lot of effort in that village. I will be going back out there next week (once every month) to do that and talk with them about what they can feed their babies to help them grow and avoid malnutrition. It was so funny, this one lady came up to me and had 2 of her babies weighed, and they were both albinos…After they were weighed and left, my two girls from my village who helped me, looked at me, eyes big as saucers and said “Yasmina, those babies were whiter than you!”
What else, the girls group is going well!! So far we’ve been doing it every two weeks, we’ve talk about hygiene, oral rehydration solution, AIDS so far…The club is going really well so far…Shoutout to Devon and Sims for all the fun stuff they sent for the club!! The girls are going to love all the games and art stuff! ( : Thanks so much. Also I’ve been teaching at the schools, lessons on hygiene and conjunctivitis. You want an ego boost, you come be a PCV in Niger and walk into a classroom of kids. Its so funny, when I walk in and they realize that I will be teaching, the kids just burst in to screaming applause and yell “Yasmina!! Yasmina!!” its too cute. Also, me and three of my closest PCV neighbors are planning a bike ride from Maradi to Gidan Roumdji (50 km) where we will be stopping in 12 villages along the way, it will last 3 days and 4 nights, and we will be doing skits and presentations and sensibilisations on hygiene and cleanliness…It will be from March 2-5, we are biking the route tomorrow to go talk to all the chiefs to let them know we will be coming and find good locations..It should be fun.
Oh yeah, I know yall will think this is funny. So I’ve been farming again!! Hahaha. Now is cold season, and people have huge fields of gardens where they do tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, and cantelopes, so I went out with my favorite family in the whole village on their oxcart way out in the bush, and we picked tomatoes for like 5 hours. I was soooooooo tired!! The next day I felt like I had run a marathon…I don’t know how they do that every day. But it was fun, just talking to them the whole time…They are the nicest family, with lots of young women and teenagers so we basically just joked around the whole time, and at the end they gave me a huge bowl of all the biggest and best tomatoes…It was fun. The dad in the family said that come rainy season, hes going to give me some of his land and teach me how to plant and harvest millet, haha I can’t wait. Its going to be great.
SO unfortunately I had a thief in the past week -- they hopped my wall when i was out talking to a surrounding villages school about doing health lessons there at the school there. When i got back at 1030 in the morning, my phone and 700 CFA (not even 2 $, but a lot of money in niger) was missing. I went out and asked the women pounding outside of my house if they saw someone hop my wall or in my house and they said no. Word spread like wildfire through the village, people were pissed, within 5 minutes the whole village knew. I had all of the elders and men from my village in my concession, they were so mad, they were looking for footprints..A bunch of girls from my girls club came over, they were crying they were so upset, they're so sweet. SO anyways, i too was pissed, bc it was obviously someone that i let in my house often and am nice to bc they knew exactly where i keep my phone and extra change. In the afternoon, my friend Ila came over ( i trust him more than anyone else in my village, he brings my water and makes repairs on my house for free) came and was like, here it is yasmina!! He said he came in my concession and the phone was lying right on the ground. Who ever the thief was must have gotten scared by all the comotion and knew that the mess would be beaten out of them if they were found with my stuff and they threw the phone over my wall and ran. Oh well...from now on i will be more careful and lock my house every time i leave and not leave my phone outside. it was crazy.
The day that I had the thief was not good at all. My neighbors had a baby a little over a week ago, and she was the tiniest thing i'd ever seen. light as a bird with the littlest arms youve ever seen. I could just tell she wasn't going to live, and you could tell she was suffering. Well so taht day was supposed to be her biki (baby naming ceremony where they kill a goat and give the baby a name and everyone in the village comes to celebrate). Well anyway, so i dress up nice and am walking to the biki, and halfway there I met someone on the path and they told me that she had died in the night. It was sad. When people die here, youre supposed to go and greet them on the death, to show that you care. they call the people's house where the person died the "wurin gaisewa", or literally "the place of the greetings." Deaths are different here, people weren't crying, but everyone came out from the village to show their respects. basically you just go and greet the family, ask what happened, and say lots of different allah phrases, such as "May Allah give her a place to rest." May Allah give you patience. May Allah make the ground soft for her. Etc. and you can replace Allah with God, basically. It was sad. At the end, the dad gave me a watermelon. It was sweet.
All right, well that is about all that is new now! Hope everything is going well in GA, miss and love yall. - KTP

January 19, 2007

Greetings from Maradi..Hope everything is going well at home! Things are going along here in Niger – I’ve been lucky enough to actually have work to do lately, and have been able to visit 2 of my closest friend’s here’s (Kristy and Mark) villages so that has been lots of fun.

I finally painted the world map…It looks good even if I say so myself. It is 4 feet tall and 8 feet wide, and the only place on the whole school where I could paint is this area that is in the middle schoolhouse about 20 feet off the ground…The only way I could paint is a few guys from my village pushed together about 8 schooldesks on top of each other, and I stood precariously on these painting…Needless to say, it was quite the spectacle…The painting part wasn’t too hard, it was actually tracing out the map that was hard…While I painted, Zita, my pup, sat under the schooldesks. Of course, at any give time, there were about 300 kids (seriously, I’m not kidding, I took pictures) watching me and running around the schoolyard tormenting Zita. Finally after she couldn’t take the temptation anymore, she would take off running after one kid, and every kid in the whole schoolyard would whoop and holler, it was pretty funny.

I also started my girls (actually young women’s) group!! I’m pretty excited, me and two of my favorite girls from the village went around and explained the club and told all the girls in the village when to come. The meeting was utter chaos at is calmest. Seriously. There ended up being 30 (!) girls coming, and every single kid in the whole entire village wanted to come too. I really wanted it to be something special for the girls, something they could be proud of and learn from, and didn’t want kids there. Well the kids didn’t listen. They crawled over my concessions walls like ants…I couldn’t make them go away fast enough. I decided for the next meeting, I’m going to get three teenage boys from my village to stand guard while we’re meeting, that should solve it, if that doesn’t work I’m going to get my chief of the village to come and make the kids go away. Anyway, for the first meeting we did hygiene and talked about all the ways to keep a clean house, wash hands, keep foods covered, burn trash, sweep your household, etc. I made all the girls nametags, they were really excited. One of the girls went and pulled a bucket of water from the well and i made a ton of Gatorade and gave out peanuts as a snack. They were so excited, so I’m glad there’s a lot of interest in this…Every day since then they’ve been asking when the next club meeting will be, so there is a lot of interest, hopefully they will go home and teach their families the stuff they are learning.

I went out to Zinder to celebrate a friend’s birthday last week, that was lots of fun…Also I got to go out to one of my FAVORITE people in Peace Corps village, Mark’s, he is simply fabulous, and he lives in a village called Mirriah. In Zinder, all the Education volunteers have formed girls soccer teams in their towns and they play each other, we went to the match of Mirriah vs. Zinder…He is about the funniest person I’ve met in my whole life and not afraid to say what is on his mind and I’m certain that you all would love him to death. I’m sure you’ve seen him in the pictures on webshots, he’s the redhead. I really can’t say enough good things about him. Some of my favorite people in the country are posted out in the Zinder region so hopefully I will make it out there a lot.

Also this week I spent in my friend Kristy’s village…She lives in a bush village called Birni Lalle (literally, city of the henna tattoo). We went around and met all of her villagers, she is working on an AIDS awareness skit with her school, and also she did a meeting with all of the women of her village and they decided that they want to do a literacy group and also a sewing class, so she has lots of work to do…It was fun seeing another person’s village, and it made me miss my village so that was nice. We walked up about 10 km to this city called Dakoro when I caught a bush taxi back down to Maradi, and that was an adventure to say the least. First of all, the road from Maradi to Dakoro is the worst in the country, and in a country like Niger, that is quite the statement. Its horrible, not paved, and with tons of potholes…and its cold and wind season, and there is constantly tons of dust whipped up in the air. So I get on the back of this open bed truck with a frame, that is tiny…about 30 others (literally, I’m not making this us) get on in the back and we make it to the road. Everyone is sitting on top of each other. This Fulani woman was sitting in my lap, with her baby in hers. I only got peed on twice the way down, which is a feat, seeing as there were like 15 babies on board. The guy next to me was wearing an Alan Jackson Tour tshirt, and here I am hanging on for dear life as we tear down this road. We stopped twice so everyone could get out and do the Muslim prayers. I finally got out the Harry Potter book I was reading, and had one of those “Where the hell am I and what am I doing” moments. I was so happy to get to Maradi to say the least.

I’m heading out to my village tomorrow, January 20, and should hopefully be out there until Valentine’s day. Hope you all are doing well!! Write me a letter if you get a chance I would love to hear from home ( : Again, my pictures from Niger are at: Webshots.com
Username: Katiepafrica
Password: Elkolta
Thanks for reading! Love, Katie

jan 1, 2007

How bout them Dawgs! Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a good Christmas and a happy new year...We had a fun Christmas out in Zinder, and spent all christmas day making empanadas. That is a labor of love, let me tell you. They took forever, but they were yummy. It's cold season her right now and cold season is no joke here...I went out to my village for a couple of days in between Christmas and New Years, and it's so cold and windy I barely leave my house until noon. Even then it's with longsleeved shirts, sweatshirts, jeans, and a thick skirt over the jeans...There are harmattan winds coming in from the Sahara, and it's so windy that it whips all the dust up into the air, so you can't even see very far at all for all the dust. When I went and visited with some of my friends in El Kolta, they were all burning fires inside of their houses.

I went out to my village for a couple of days mainly to get my pup and to celebrate a bit of Tabasci, the Muslim holiday with my villagers...It was pretty cool, on the day of Tabasci, all the men went to the mosque to pray, and when they return, each family kills a male goat and basically they just eat the meat for days..I came back into Maradi on the 31st to celebrate New Years and one of my crazy fun friend's birthday(Becca). Since I was coming in on the day of Tabasci, I didn't think about it, but there were no bush taxis going to and fro because everyone was celebrating...i Also brought in Zita because everyone wanted to see her and I just didn't want to leave her alone in the village...I waited 3 hours on the side of the road and there were NO cars coming through...finally I flagged down this car that wasn't even a bush taxi, just a random car, and begged them to take me into Maradi. They said OK, but not the dog. My village friends finally convinced them to let me bring the pup, since my hausa didn't seem to suffice...Well Zita was in fine form, howling the whole time, peeing on me, she does not like being in a car. I was mortified the whole way. She's been good in Maradi, though, and everyone is in love with her. We had a crazy fun party for Becca's birthday. We dressed up 80's and had a dance party. It was fun. Hopefully, you will get to see the pictures soon!

One of the things we focus on as health volunteers is Vitamin A and better food to feed your kids so they're less malnourished. It's so hard because they can't give more variety of foods if there is not enough money for eggs, liver, orange foods, etc. Sometimes there is nothing but millet, millet, and more millet, with some sorghum thrown in there. And no money to buy the foods that their kids really need. In Niger, there was a "food crisis" or "famine" in 2005. Every year, just before Nigeriens harvest the millet, right after rainy season, there is "hungry season." This is when the millet harvested the year before is running low or empty. The harvest was good in Niger last year, so the hungry season of this year wasn't as bad as the famine of 2005. Unfortunately, the millet harvest was poor this year, so while people have enough food for now, hungry season is shaping up to look like the hungry season/famine of 2005. Keep Niger in your prayers that there will be enough millet to make it last until next harvest. Happy 2007! Love Lots, Katie