Hard rain, hard questions

It has been four months since Jessica returned from her Peace Corps experience in Niger. If you were to ask her if she has "re-adjusted" yet, I doubt that she would say yes. For a time as intense and transforming as that was, the question of being readjusted probably isn't even the right one to ask. Although it might be better than:

"How was Africa?" (This is a little like asking "You were in Oregon? How did you like North America?")

"Did you like it?" ("You've just spent 24 months sleeping at night under the stars in one of the most remote places on the planet...hey, didya like it?")

"How was your trip?" ("You know, that 24 months you just spent immersed in the lives and deaths of a thousand people in a tiny village without electricity, roads, or much water...wasn't that just a...trip...?")

I have heard people, in their good-hearted ways, ask all of the above. It is after all, a little hard to know what to say. Recently one of J's fellow volunteers made this video, perhaps with the idea of promoting the Peace Corp Niger experience. It just so happens to feature a favorite song of mine, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", playing to scenes from Niger. J appears very briefly twice during the last minute of the video.



Maybe the next time somebody asks "How was Peace Corps" she can just refer them to this video, which gives some good glimpses of the everyday life she led for two years.

Waiting

Jessica has been gone for two years, a Peace Corps volunteer in one of the most difficult environments on the planet, Niger, West Africa. There have been times of worry when she has had to face the death of children, the death of young mothers, her own illnesses, the danger of travel, the background noise of terrorism. I never knew these things when I was her age; she has absorbed experiences I will never know.

And now it is over and she is on her way home, or so we thought; Mother Nature had ideas of her own when she piled 20 inches of snow onto the eastern seaboard of the US this weekend. And so J is stranded at JFK, with no help yet from United Airlines, but at least the companionship of two other volunteers returning with her.

We have to wait a little longer but it will be OK.

Waiting
By John Burroughs

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.

I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.

Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.

What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
And garner up its fruit of tears.

The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder height;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.

The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.

Dark moons

Today I sorted through a 2-week old bouquet of flowers and picked one out that had a brown center. Holding it, I was reminded of my own brown-dotted fingernails, the last remnant of the henna painted on my right hand one stifling hot August evening in rural Niger. There hasn't been a week gone by when somebody hasn't asked about the dots on my fingernails. They wonder if I have done this with nail polish to signify something, or if possibly I am following some new trend. No, and no.


The dots were painted at the very base of each fingernail, like small dark moons, by an ebony-skinned teen-aged girl in Jessica's Peace Corps village. They were an afterthought to the rest of the elaborate henna swirling around my hand and wrist, but they turned out to be my favorite part of it. As time goes by the moons have risen up. Eventually they will reach the top and I will have to clip them off. I imagine that they will reach that point in mid-December, exactly when Jessica comes home; they are kind of like an advent calendar moving towards the anticipated event.
That's why I wasn't too surprised this week when J was presented with the sudden possibility of flying home early, and yet she decided to stay. She isn't ready to leave; her mind and heart need the full allotment of time. The threats of extremists can't change this. The calendar knows what's right, and the little dark moons will be obeyed.


She will be safe, and completely ours on December 18, the day I look at my clear fingernails and miss the brown dots.

I'll put a trinket on

Autumn
Emily Dickinson

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.

On everyday dog-walks I am adorned these days with bracelets we bought from women at the Niamey National hospital in Niger, and that dot on my fingernail is all that is left of the henna designs put on my right hand in Foloa, Niger: ahhh, talismans and trinkets that I love! And now after reading Dickinson I will claim that I must wear these to keep up with Madame Autumn. She is becoming fancier with every passing day.

Fight like hell to do any good

"You have to fight like hell to do any good."
Aengus Finucane

I was told this week about the death of Ireland's Aengus Finucane. Do you know this name? Maybe. I was informed by a comment made on my daughter's blog from an Irish reader, that Father Finucane had died on October 6, after a short illness, so I read up on him. Talk about a life worth living:

1. 1959: he was a parish priest in Biafra. (Biafra, oil-rich, declared independence from Nigeria, and subsequently its population was starved to death by the Nigerian government.)

2. Instead of comfortably returning to Limerick, Ireland, where he was born, Gus worked with Gabon, Africa, to evacuate sick children and arrange food-drops to Biafra. The Biafran war was the first to be reported on public television as a place where mass starvation was a strategy used by a government to subdue its people. The novelist Frederick Forsyth, who covered the war as a journalist, wrote of the children airlifted out of Biafra by Finucane that they were the "living, breathing monument" to his work.

3. Unsurprisingly, Aengus Finucane was expelled from Nigeria in 1970. He got a degree in Development from Swansea University in Wales, and became head of the aid group Concern Worldwide in Bangladesh, where he was friends with Mother Teresa, and became known for using strong language to speed up the delivery of food to the extremely famine-stricken areas of this region. Finucane led Concern International out of financial crisis into a smart, successful aid group.

4. This is a blog, so it's supposed to be short. There were further adventures in Sudan, Somalia, and Rwanda but I won't go into them here because you get the picture. This past summer, though, John and I saw the results of Aengus Finucane's intense devotion to African children. We got to know a little boy who is only alive because of the availability last year of a Concern Worldwide clinic near his village. For the six hardest months of the year the Niger-staffed clinic is available to help mothers and children survive famine, and Rahman was one of those kids:

John and Rahman

Me and Rahman

Jessica and Rahman

Quite honestly, I could have easily swooped this child up and brought him home with me. Thank you Fr. Aengus Finucane for your work in Africa.

Competence

• competence - Having the ability to apply knowledge, skills, or judgment in practice if called upon to do so.
  
  

Jessica was a competent child from the start. At four years old, the day that she flew from my hands into the milieu of preschool, it seemed to me that she could take care of herself. She barely needed me; I wondered how long it would be before she would surpass me in just about everything. In fact after a decade or two, she was the athlete that I never would be. She was the dancer I never could be. She had social graces that still elude me. And now she is about to finish her two year stint in the Peace Corps, a not-insubstantial contribution to making the world a better place.

How did a bumbler like me have offspring such as mine? This is a mystery. I pondered this as I watched her haul a heavy bucket of water in the heat of an August afternoon in Niger.

Our children outdo us.

Photos by John Bliss

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Giraffes

Its hoofs do not tread on living beings and in its wanderings it carefully selects its ground. It walks in stately fashion and in its every motion it observes a rhythm.

"The African Unicorn," Chinese poet and artist Shen Du (1357-1434)

I was riding in the aisle seat of a small crowded bus enroute from Niamey to Birnin Konni, Niger, squeezed between a polite young girl on one side, and John, in the window seat next to me. My feet were wedged on top of my pack, my knees against the seat in front of me; I had just begun to doze when John suddenly jabbed me and said "LOOK!" My eyes flew open and there they were: gliding through the scrubby trees maybe 100 yards off of the highway, five giraffes. Three seconds later we looked at each other in surprise; they were gone and only the two of us had seen them.

Two weeks later, back in Niamey, we debated whether to fork out the $250 it would cost to pay for the required car, guide, and permit to go back and see if we could get a longer look at a few of Niger's giraffes: the last self-sustaining herd of giraffes in West Africa. It was a short debate. Of course we would. But we were given to understand that despite having a guide, we wouldn't automatically see the giraffes. And when we did see them, would it be, "Yep, there they are, now we turn around and go back..."?

It was like this. The cheerful driver picked us up at our little hotel in Niamey at 8:30 AM, and by 10:30 AM we were in the area north of Dosso officially known as the "Zone Giraffe."


The guide hopped on top of our vehicle and said he would signal us when he spotted a giraffe...thirty seconds later he rapped on the windshield, and there was our first giraffe, munching on tree leaves a short distance from the car.


Although I knew we were looking for giraffes I was still floored, astonished, left breathless with amazement, as if I had just seen a unicorn. The closeness of it, those liquid eyes, the slender body, the unhurried caution of this rare creature in the midst of a desert. I realized that I had begun to cry. How foolish! But only for a moment; soon I was just happily enamored, caught up with looking.

Isn't he gorgeous? Males grow to be 18 feet tall in this sub-species of giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis peralta ), found only in Niger.

The giraffes are not in a park. They share their habitat with livestock and villagers. Although this is an uneasy alliance in a country where people starve, the numbers of giraffes have more than quadrupled since 1996. At that time there were fewer than 50 animals heading towards extinction. In 2009 there are over 200 giraffes, making it on their own.

Researchers recognize individual animals according to their unique markings: no two are the same. (Furthermore, I have to say it: we saw a mama and a baby!)

The foot prints were big.


Their bodies were so tall and slender, and as if by magic they could disappear into the bush within moments.

But there was really no hurry. We watched them to our hearts' content. Finally we started noticing other things, like the huge termite mounds everywhere.

A group shot of Jessica and myself along with driver and guides.

If you want to find out more about Niger's giraffes, read this Smithsonian article.

All photos copyright of John Bliss. Thank you John!

The party

The little town of Faloa, in central Niger, was excited about the party we had said we would host. A group of women, mostly Narba's family, cooked rice and sauce in the afternoon. We had bought a lot of rice,which was a treat in mid-August, the hunger season. Rice was expensive compared to the staple grain of millet, so it was special.

The women cooked it in big pots on wood fires, in their compound. Then they delivered it to Jessica's little concession, where dozens and dozens of women came by to share it. The candy that I had brought from the US was also shared.

The women wanted a dance, and they wanted to hire drummers. So they gathered at Jessica's concession in the afternoon and shoved coins at her to help defray the cost. The excitement was palpable!


Four of the eight drummers; one group came from a neighboring village.

The dancing occurred in the late afternoon; it was all women except for the musicians themselves. The crowd was probably 200 or so women and young girls.

Everybody danced, even the visiting Peace Corps volunteers who had come to meet us and be guests at our party.

It lasted for at least an hour, and was so amazing.

It was a mass of color, sound, and movement.

Shaibu, a neighbor (and Narba's son), butchered the sheep and cooked it over an open fire for hours. Then it was meticulously cut into many pieces, and secretly delivered to over 50 households, all after dark. Narba helped make the decisions of who got some, and who did not. It was stressful. How do you have "parties" in this land of so little? How do you share what you have when there is not enough to go around?

Well, I can say this: nothing went to waste. When it was over, there wasn't so much as a dry bone left. And all of us were really quite tired. But days later, they were still talking about it.

Going to Badigishiri

While we were staying with Jessica in Foloa, we wanted to throw a party. We had already been treated to two somewhat impromptu celebrations held at night in the dusty lane outside her little compound. The first one was put on by the young girls, who danced and sang; two days later the young men danced to their favorite songs blaring from a cassette player. It was fun, and drew crowds both nights. So the expectations ran high for our party, and we didn't want to disappoint.

Our party planner was none other than Narba, Jessica's 70-year-old neighbor and head woman of the village. The party, to be held Friday, required a trip to Badigishiri, a good-sized market town about an hour's drive away via the weekly market car/bush taxi. No description of the party could go without first showing you that trip.

All photos taken by John Bliss.

Here is the vehicle. The road wasn't great, and at one point we were stuck up to the axle; but luckily there were 20 or 30 passengers to help push it out. No problem. We had six more breakdowns, and the driver quickly fixed them all.

The market was a feast for the senses.

Narba, in the pink dress, watched carefully as the shopkeeper made his big sale. We bought rice for 200 people. He sold it by the bowlful, never weighing anything.

Peanut resin for sale here.

We bought dried tomatoes, garlic, and other assorted dried foods to be used in sauce for the rice.

Jessica and Narba did the bargaining.

Meanwhile we soaked up the sights all around.

I loved the brightly colored mats that were for sale. Can you tell how intensely the sun was shining?

Batiks from the Ivory Coast were beautiful.

We weren't the only ones soaking up the sights.

There was even a snake charmer.

The animal market was huge, filled with horses, goats, sheep, and camels for sale. That's a cell tower in the background.

We left it to Jessica's friend Ayuba to buy a sheep and transport it via bush taxi back to Foloa. Here he is, fed and resting after what must have been a stressful day. I was glad to see him treated well on his last night.

Starry night

Photo by John Bliss

Foloa, Niger, is very dry this year. I think about this as I lay awake, perspiring, in the wee hours of the morning, looking up through the mosquito net at the inky sky. The full moon has begun to set and it seems that I can see every star in the Milky Way. It is the most beautiful night sky, the constellation of Scorpio has never stood out so brilliantly, and because it is August the meteor showers punctuate the heavens with sudden streaks of moving light. I am lucky to be here, lucky to see this clear, dark, bejeweled sky.

And yet Foloa is not lucky. It is the middle of rainy season; the sky should be filled with huge clouds, swept with powerful winds, split violently by lightning bolts, and the rain should fall in torrents during the August night. It rained the day before we arrived in Faloa, a storm just like that. But for the 10 nights we are here, every storm goes to the north or to the south, teasing us with a few drops, or stinging our faces with blowing sand. The crops look worse with each passing day.

For Foloa, the clear night sky is a curse. Every bright star is a stab of disappointment, a reminder that it is dry. What will happen if the crops fail? What will the animals drink? Everything is thirsty.

And now, weeks afterward and far away, I have heard that it is still dry in Foloa. The full moon rises again this week; I pray that nobody in Foloa will see it, that the storms will fill the sky with rain. I hope the glittering sky is covered for days.

Hot

So, a little more on our trip to Niger.

On the left (in a photo taken by John) you can see Narba leading the way for Jessica and me as we walked through one of the millet fields one warm morning, before it got too hot. We are protecting ourselves from the sun with long shawls. I am, of course, sweating like crazy.

It was hot in Niger, very very hot. It was 115°-in-the-shade-hot (46.1°C). And it wasn't even "Hot Season," those months in the spring and fall when the temperature is regularly 120°-to-130°(48.8°-54°C).

At night it was too hot to sleep inside, so everybody slept outside, under mosquito nets. When I arose I could see the sweaty imprint of myself as it evaporated from the sheet. To cool off during the day we took large plastic mugs of water from a bucket, and poured them over ourselves, from head to toe, and it felt really good. I found that a 3-mug-bucket-bath was all I needed to feel better. That, and a good dose of baby powder to settle down the heat rash.


"The Niger climate, with tremendous heat and extreme aridity, is almost unbearable to the human settlements of the land. Popularly known as the "Frying Pan of the World", the Niger climate is so very hot that it even makes the raindrops evaporate prior to reaching the ground. " From http://www.mapsofworld.com/niger/climate.html

Coming to Foloa

When we first pulled into Foloa, we were sitting in the back of a mud-splattered vehicle driven by a cheerful Nigerien Peace Corps guy, who was pointing out, "Look! They all know her! They're calling her name! They're dancing! They love Samsiya!" It was a sunny morning with most of the men in the millet fields weeding, so it was the women and children looking over their compound walls, waving and cheering and then pouring into the street as our lone truck rumbled down the single dirt lane towards Jessica's concession. Narba, Jessica's neighbor, mentor and the head woman of the village, was the first to greet us. She bowed, and then bowed, and then bowed again, smiling and spitting out bits of orange cola nut between greetings. "Inna kwanna! Inna gadjiya! Barka! Gayshua!"

Little did we know that it was only the first of easily a thousand times that we would be greeted and welcomed in the 11 days of our stay in this little bush town. In fact the procession of greeters never stopped; from 7AM to well past nightfall people came to greet us. It wasn't just out of curiosity, although who could blame them for that? (The impossibly pale parents of Samsiye? Does she look more like her mother, or her father, or like neither of them at all? [A wide variety of opinions here.] Can they speak Hausa? [No, shucks.]) It is truly a part of the culture to greet other people. And so it began.

People came with smiles, they offered their babies to be held, they quietly slipped us gifts of money, and soap. They had heard that we liked to eat eggs. We started getting gifts of eggs, first in a little dish, then pulled as if by magic from 5 different folds of a woman's pagne, then delivered by little boys, then brought over by an old man. In the week and a half that we were there we were given over 100 eggs. I shrugged my shoulders as I popped my Lipitor every day: what are you gonna do? It was so sweet. Jessica was flabbergasted. She swore that she had never seen an egg in Foloa the entire time she has lived there.

In fact the villagers don't eat many eggs, preferring to raise them up for the meat they can provide. I began to worry that our presence was about to cause the decimation of the chicken population. My anxiety increased when an old man presented us with a live rooster. This was of course a great honor, but I could only think with dismay, "Oh man, not only are we going to have to eat this chicken, but first we're going to have to kill it, pluck it, and gut it..." Not ready to do that, we tied the rooster to a hastily-fashioned coop right next to John's cot. Poor John, despite his ear plugs, well..ask him about it sometime...and then ask him how he felt when we were presented with another rooster the next day.

In the end, Narba offered to slaughter and cook the chickens, for which we were grateful. We gave the meat to her family; split between the dozen people sharing her compound I don't think it went to waste.

This morning, back home in Corvallis, Oregon, I had to go in for a cholesterol screening. I don't have the results yet, but I'll let you know if the 100 eggs were a problem.

Before leaving Niger, I bought this batik. I saw this print being worn by quite a few women, and of course its a good reminder of our chicken-and-egg issues.