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