Wiza*, I Have A Real House!

* "To my surprise"

Training is coming to an intense and rapid close. The end of Language Immersion as well as the first week back with our host families has come and gone, including a colorful session on Nigerien superstitions. My personal favorite was "If a woman is struck by a pair of pants, she will not find a husband." Okaay...

Life in Niger is becoming easier day by day. The heat is no longer oppressive, for we are in the coveted "cold season." It's actually quite funny to see Nigeriens bundled up in winter jackets. Yesterday I glimpsed a little girl wearing a body-length puffy North Face coat with a furry hood. I would have registered the temperature at around 75 Farenheight. She reminded me strongly of the younger son in the classic movie "A Christmas Story" ... "I can't move my arms! I can't move my arms!"

I don't have a lot of time to write this and I apologize for the slapdash manner in which most of my recent posts have been published. In general I feel my ability to write and speak in English is deteriorating, so I hope by 2012 but you can still decipher my meaning! What I  hope to mention quickly is that our Site Announcement ceremony was today, and I am very pleased with the post I've been given. The village is one I have visited before (only briefly), and is considered to be the nicest house for a Peace Corps Volunteer (in the bush) in Niger. So, you know, I'll take it!

Honestly, I've adjusted well to living in a mud hut and had envisioned myself doing such for two years, but now I have to completely restructure my visions of my service. The house I'm given has 2 bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room, with tile floors, ceiling fans, electricity, carpets and sofas. Wiza!* There are downsides to the post as well, so don't be too awed by my good fortune. The village has never had a volunteer and is unsure how to treat Americans, which can translate into unfriendliness. There is a large health center that I'll be affiliated with, also new to American presence, so I have my work cut out for me. I'll have to establish and represent the Peace Corps as best I can, as everyone knows the first impression counts immensely!

Another key upside to my post is that I am in the same region as many of my friends from training class. This means I can travel and visit with them easily, and see them once a month for Volunteer Meetings. It makes such a difference!

New Address:
Phoebe Uricchio
Corps de la Paix
B.P 144
Dosso, Niger
West Africa

I have to dash, but a fellow stageur has put up a blog with all our trainee biographies if you wish to see the rest of my class. Check it out!

http://jacobmbarela.wordpress.com/

Best -
Phoebe

Giardia: My New Best Friend

You may be wondering how I am able to post a blog so soon after leaving for language immersion. The simple answer is: I got giardia! The title of this blog rings true as I am now sitting comfortably in the Niamey bureau - in air conditioning - instead of sweating through six hours of Zarma class a day. I'll be right back to it tomorrow...but we won't think about that just yet.

My language immersion site is very beautiful, set in the south of Niger on the Benin border. The village is surrounded by a yet-unknown source of water - really, I have no idea where it comes from - and thus has arable land and gardening potential. The only drawback I can see to being posted there is its daunting distance from the rest of the "civilization." After a harrowing four hour drive down the worst, most pot-holed road I've ever seen, we turned off the road (literally...off-roading) and plunged through the African bush for another hour (fording a river at one point, I  might add) before reaching this little tucked away oasis. I would enjoy my life in this site but I would not enjoy trying to leave it...as I can attest to today as I was brought on the return trip to the Niamey infirmary.
To help you understand what this week has been like, I should start from the beginning. We arrived, as I described, on Sunday only a little worse for the wear (and green around the edges). The recipe for language immersion is essentially one hundred billion kilos of Zarma class sprinkled with a bit of local interaction; visiting the tailor, shadowing a housewife, going to the market. To fulfill this last requirement we rode on an oxcart for an hour to another village on the coast of Benin, right along the Niger river. We forded another spot of waterlogged land to get there and I had a brilliant flashback to the PC game "Oregon Trail"...fording a river in my oxcart! Who thought I'd be living "The Oregon Trail" in West Africa? Life is truly weird sometimes.

Back to this market village; it is really breathtaking. After a month of viewing only sand and sparse vegetation, the sight of a sparkling blue river was quite startling, but very welcome. I was about to jump in one of their huge canoes and paddle off for the afternoon but apparently Peace Corps regulates that we need life jackets...as if! Another time.

After the market I began to experience my giardia symptoms, making language immersion a bit less fun. On Thursday I realized I effectively hadn't eaten in two days and something needed to be done, so after much finagling to find a cell signal (think back to the Verizon commercials...'can you hear me now?') I managed to get in touch with the Medical Officer. Not having any way to test my symptoms in village, he sent a car out to bring me in, just for tonight.

Let me describe for you the following scenario. I am lying on my mattress, surrounded by local village kids who have never seen a white woman and have consistently followed me for the past week, trying to drown out their chattering voices. I hear the sound of the Peace Corps car tearing up vegetation and sit up warily. I see the Dosso region driver step out of the car.

Now, the Dosso region driver is a large Nigerien man whom I have only ever seen wearing a crisp black suit with black undershirt, bold Nike sneakers and Matrix-reminiscient sunglasses. His driving style could be compared to that of, well, nothing I've ever experienced! He dominates the aforementioned bad roads as well as the African countryside with little concern for what might be in his way, casually swerving at several intervals to avoid a particularly bad pothole or sheep. On the way to our site I hit my head on the ceiling of the Land Cruiser five or six times while jouncing about in my seat. I'm sure you can appreciate the dread I was feeling this morning at the anticipation of another such ride...with a roiling stomach.

I'll spare you the details, but for most of the ride I was decidedly uncomfortable. The driver seeemed determined to get me to Niamey as quickly as possible (perhaps a shorter ride with more bumps is better than a drawn out one...?) and I arrived in record time. Considering the man made a full six hour trip to pick me up and is probably going to do the same to take me back tomorrow, I'm certainly in his debt. But I'll probably feel more grateful when my stomach stops telling me off!

That's all for now - despite giardia and our malfunctioning gas stove that singed off the bottom half of one of my skirts (a story for another time) language immersion has been surprisingly pleasant. I'll report back at the end of next week and hope to talk to many of you soon!

<3 Phoebe

"Aichatou, Kill the Sheep!"

Seventy days after Ramadan is a Muslim holiday called Tabaski. For those of you who aren’t familiar, the holiday celebrates the biblical story of Abraham and his son Ishmael; God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son to prove his devotion, at the last moment substituting a lamb to spare Abraham a terrible loss. In Nigerien culture, on this day a sheep is slaughtered and eaten to mimic this Biblical event and praise Allah for his generosity.


For many Nigeriens, this is one of the few times a year when meat is readily available. Most people are too poor to afford regular meat and therefore Tabaski is a pretty big deal. According to Muslim culture, each sheep that is slaughtered is supposed to be divided into three: one part is given to neighbors and friends, one part to the poor and one kept for one’s own family. The idea is that no family should go without meat, even if they can’t afford to buy and slaughter their own sheep. This past week Tabaski rolled around and my family, happily, was quite able to afford a sheep and took great pleasure in offering me the knife to kill it. I had some difficulty refusing but I essentially told ‘cultural sensitivity’ to take a hike and put my foot down. Sheep slaughtering is not my thing, but thank you Niger for already making such experiences commonplace.

I also made the mistake of telling my family that I liked meat before actually tasting it. If only I had the language skills to make qualifying statements…”Actually, I like meat in America but not so much in Niger…”something about the way they cook it is singularly unappealing. I’m also never sure what part of the sheep I’m eating, as in I’m pretty sureI ate a sheep testicle yesterday. It wasn’t enjoyable.

The plus side of Tabaski is that Nigeriens get two days off work. Wait, another qualifying statement: men get two days off work. The women work harder than ever – they spend every waking moment cooking and cleaning. The first morning I was able to go to the mosque with the men and older women in my family, which was fun. I observed from the back and the service itself was unremarkable, but the Nigeriens took the opportunity to wear fancy clothes and put on quite a show. Even the dusty, half naked children were scrubbed and put into new dresses and shoes. It was good to see my family take such pride in their appearance and for the women to take a break from the pounding and the heat of cooking to socialize and relax. This astonishing pause in work only lasted about an hour before they were right back to it, but I guess every minute counts!

Tabaski was an interesting experience from a religious and cultural perspective, but it also fueled me to begin planning my first Peace Corps project. A common first project for volunteers is to implement something called a “cook stove”, which is essentially a mud structure created to protect women from the flames of the fire as well as be more fuel efficient (less coal/wood is required when the fire is sheltered in this manner.) I learned about the cook stove earlier in training and was interested, but became infinitely more so after a toddler fell into the fire during Tabaski. Don’t panic – he suffered burns to his left leg, but will only have minimal scarring. I watched this whole event in slow motion, if you can imagine – the women were bustling around the cooking fire and this child was milling in between them and then all of a sudden he was in the fire and screaming at the top of his lungs. We pulled him out, put out the flames and got him into some cold water immediately, I wrapped the burns and used some of my Peace Corps med stash to bandage him up. He’ll be ok. If the women had a cook stove, it wouldn’t have happened at all. Peace Corps Project Number One – check.

In all other facets of life, the pace of training is picking up and we’re getting ready to set out for dreaded “Language Immersion” (our training schedule manual actually says “English is now DEAD”). It is pretty daunting to imagine two weeks with only a few other trainees and a language coach, isolated in a rural village speaking nothing but Zarma…I feel like I won’t be speaking much at all! Zarma is an infuriating and complicated language – context is everything, because words have multiple meanings and are all strung together very quickly. I’m getting the hang of it sloooowly if at all. Yesterday I was telling my family that I’d spent the morning working in the garden, but lo and behold, the word for “watering the garden” and “giving birth” is virtually the same and I ended up telling my family I’d had a baby that morning instead. They understood my mistake but thought it very funny. Jerks!

That’s all from this end for now – I don’t think I’ll have internet access for another three weeks, so much love from Niger and I’ll be in touch when I can. If you have an international phone card and any interest in texting/calling me, my Nigerien number is (227) 91.54.30.92. It might be expensive to text but I’m hoping to give it a try sometime this week…if you get a text from me and aren’t sure how much it will cost to respond then don’t worry. I don’t want to be responsible for astronomical phone bills…:)



<3 Phoebe

"Fofo, Mofo" Yes, we say that a lot...

So - it's been two weeks! Life in Africa is already very surreal. I am still in major "adjustment" phase, dealing with the heat and the food and the constant attention. Being American in Niger is tantamount to being a celebrity - yesterday my host sister told me she saw me in "that music video." Nope - not me. Haha.

To start, I applied to switch programs from a Forest and Agriculture Volunteer to a Community Health Volunteer, and was accepted. It's pretty unusual for trainees to switch, and so I was lucky that they even considered me. Initially, I was installed with a host family in a town called Barchawal, about eight miles from the Peace Corps training center. Twice a week we bike to the center for training in safety, culture, etc. The rest of the time we had language class with a trainer in our host village. After I became a health volunteer, I moved to a village called Fandoga (we call it Fandango) closer to the training site. (I had to move to be centered around the other health volunteers.) It was a bummer to have to readjust to a new host family, but it's been going well so far. In Barchawal my family had two wives and my new family has only one...way less interesting.

As a health volunteer, I'll be working on issues of women's health, maternal and child health, as well as vaccinations and nutrition. It's common for volunteers to be paired with local and global NGOs, assessing needs and trying to address the cultural barriers. I expect to be doing quite a bit of family planning as well as women's education, all of which is exciting to me.

The training is very intense. We have six hours of language class a day, on top of cultural and technical training. The heat is debilitating at best - yesterday was a record 121 degrees. I'm also struggling a bit to adjust to the food. Good news is - Niger has Coke! It's warm...but it's Coke. You all know how happy that makes me!

The poverty level in Niger is definitely something to get used to. I think it's hard to envision unless you are here, but there is so much trash, and such a high degree of obvious malnutrition that it can be hard to take. I'm adjusting as best I can and reminding myself why I am here...as if I need reminders! Every night we eat pounded millet for dinner (imagine rice with a consistency of dirt and with much less flavor). Bon appetit...

There are two main languages in Niger: Hausa and Zarma.  Hausa is spoken by 60% of the population, but I am learning Zarma, a smaller regional dialect. Zarma is spoken in and around the capital, so when I am eventually posted it will be within a radius of 4-6 hours of Niamey. This is encouraging - more modern comforts may be available! Right now, I am in the Peace Corps Bureau in Niamey. (It's air conditioned...amazing.) All the trainees are going on a trip called "Demystification", where they send us into the bush to live with current volunteers for about five days. I'm waiting in the Bureau to be picked up by a bush taxi and taken to the regional capital of Dosso, to meet my host. First bush taxi ride awaits...wish me luck! We've already had extensive training on how to navigate the system.

Yesterday the U.S Ambassador paid us a visit and I was invited to sit at her table for lunch. She only arrived in Niger two and a half weeks ago to begin her three year tour, so she has some of the same concerns as the rest of us! She talked a bit about her background before becoming Ambassador to Niger and my favorite quotation from the speech was "I was married, it was the eighties."
 
Time to go catch my bush taxi - more to come perhaps next week on the way back from Dosso - miss and love you all. (Again...letters are gold! Or dried fruit. Dried fruit is probably worth more.)

Phoebe (or Aichatou - my Nigerien name. You decide!)

Uh oh...

Here we go! Off to Africa, goodbye all my dear friends...will be in touch as soon as I can!

Phoebe :)

Beware - this is a potentially thought provoking entry!

When I tell people I'm going to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, I get several different reactions. Most are positive, some are at best skeptical. In reality, I welcome the more cynical responses as an avenue for explaining the job and why I'm doing it.


The most common "negative" question I'm faced with is one that debates foreign vs. domestic service. "There's so much good to be done in America - why don't you stay here?" This is true, and I myself have been a part of the call for service in the United States. Several programs exist to try and fit our need. It's not a matter of putting other countries before my own, as some may consider it. I believe that being a part of the American cycle of education and community service is extremely important.


There are several different ways to address this question. The American poverty rate is high and many are unemployed or homeless, and yet we are a developed country with a system designed to assist those in need. This system often fails and thus, relief agencies are put to work. It's far from perfect.


In many countries, there is little/no welfare structure. Nigeriens can ill afford to spare workers to the schools when crop season arrives, they have antiquated techniques of farming and irrigation that threaten to be insufficient to their needs, and preventative health issues and developments for economic stabilization are often put in the backseat. My intention is not to make these needs seem more or less grand than those in the United States. They are simply different, and Americans are capable of addressing both. By assisting developing countries, the United States makes a worthwhile investment in the future of our world and I'm excited to be a part of that process.


In other news, I would like to suggest a moment of reflection for Peace Corps Volunteer Stephanie Chance. 


Chance began her Peace Corps training in Niger in July 2010, and was by all accounts excited and ready for her official posting in September. In early October she was found deceased in her home in Zinder (a larger city in Niger), the cause of death unknown but likely natural according to the Peace Corps press release. 


This incident is profoundly sad, for everyone connected to either Chance or the Peace Corps. I can certainly attest to the reams of medical forms and exams required to become a Volunteer (I grumbled about them often enough). The precautions are in place to prevent tragedies such as this one, to forsee conditions that could cause unnatural early death in a new environment - but no method is without fault and many conditions are undetectable. A high school friend of mine died from a brain aneurysm; just one example of a fatal, invisible demon. I post this on my blog to raise awareness for this family and in the hopes that those considering applying for the Peace Corps won't be deterred. 


Like any death, premature or otherwise, this incident gives me a strong sense of our human mortality. I think it's important to make the most of what time we're given, which means different things to different people. If it were to all end tomorrow - would you be satisfied? 


(I said this might be thought-provoking!) 

The Chair is a Girl

In case you weren't aware, I'm required to learn French as well as the local dialects of Hausa and Zarma for my job as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, West Africa. This is no small feat, given my less-than-average propensity for languages.

That aside, I was struck by something today as I was studying. In French, most words are assigned a gender. I was initially commiserating this fact as it makes learning the nouns that much more difficult, but it has social implications as well. Earlier today my dad pointed out that in casual conversation, if I were to tell him I was meeting "a librarian", I would say "le" or "la" instantly detailing whether this person is a man or woman.  In English, I would simply say I am meeting someone of that profession and leave it at that. The other party would need to ask the discriminating question if interested. Why, then, is gender of such import in this and other languages? Or perhaps I should ask - why the lack of interest in English? 

My dad further pointed out that in French (as well as other romantic languages) even inanimate objects are allocated a gender. I found this to be particularly interesting. Why is a chair (la chaise) "female?" Why is a desk (le bureau) "male?" A recent New York Times article by Guy Deutscher titled Does Your Language Shape How You Think? speaks to this question, wondering why genders vary for nouns such as "a fork" between German and Spanish. Check it out - I enjoyed it.

I think this is fascinating but I would like to come back to the social suggestions of having to reveal the gender of persons you discuss in everyday life. Of course, this information is naturally given throughout the course of most conversations. Yet I find it oddly constricting to be forced to give it up right away. Why can't a teacher be a teacher without being profiled as a woman or a man? Is this significant or have I gone off on some weird tangent? If you continue to follow this blog, you'll probably come across these sporadic posts every once in a while. Perhaps tomorrow I'll write about how the word for "divorced" in Zarma is the same as the word for "prostitute." I'd like to excavate those social implications! 

Le Premier - "Making Good"

What's incredible about the Peace Corps, or any government agency for that matter, is their phenomenal use of acronyms. From what I've garnered so far, I'm a PCV (Peace Corp Volunteer) preparing for PST (pre-service training) at the PCTS (Peace Corps training sight) and I am expected to begin assimilation with the HCN's (Host Country Nationals) ASAP (you get the idea.) I'm already suffocating in the language requirement of this job and I haven't left the country yet!

When I started this post with "What's incredible about the Peace Corps..." you probably expected me to say something else. It's true, I'm a recent college graduate, complete and equipped with strong ideals, glorious (and perhaps ill-conceived) fantasies about my role in the world and the will to make a difference.
Aha - there it is, that most sticky phrase. What does it mean, exactly, to make a difference? To me it has the potential to sound quite ominous, as if the change I'm bringing might be irrevocably negative. Sure, I'll make a difference - I'll make everything differently bad!

And yet, we all know this is not the common connotation of said phrase. And so I've decided to strike my fears and move forward for positive change, using the phrase "making good" which, while grammatically questionable, gets the point across.

This, of course, is assuming I make any sort of difference at all.

I've decided to name this blog after the infamous bush taxi, the most common mode of transportation in Niger and perhaps in West Africa. (See picture.) I remain convinced that the bush taxi must be some kind of manufacturing experiment, designed to determine how much sheer weight a given vehicle can hold whilst traversing desert dunes. The weight comes in all forms, of course; luggage, livestock and squirming humans all thrown in together. It seems indicative of our world, really - a modern version of Noah's Arc with two or five or twenty of every possible species combined in one small car. Bush taxi against the world. I'm exaggerating, of course, and I haven't even gone to Niger yet so this is entirely speculation. But in all seriousness, "fofo" means "hello" in Zarma (one of the dialects of Niger), and I like the concept of 'travel' and 'collaboration' between the unlikely suspects in a desert car and thus, voila, my blog title. (Disclaimer - I mean no disrespect to the bush taxi. I am actually looking forward to riding in one)

I recognize that so far the tone of this post is rather flippant, but I am truly excited to begin this incredible journey. After a year of applications and writing about why I want to join, the departure day is quickly arriving and I'm thrilled (as well as nervous). It's been a lot of talking and writing and I'm ready for some doing. I may regret those words come November, but I don't think so. I will feel many diverse emotions connected to this experience, but never regret.

As I say, I have not left the comforts of American society and therefore have very little to report on my West African adventure. The packing has yet to begin but the research is well underway; my findings will be posted shortly in the form of Lists about Niger where one can quickly absorb interesting facts about my country of service. At least, here's hoping.

G2G, BRB, TTYL (Just to compete for most outrageous use of acronyms...unfortunately mine take me back to some rough middle school years)

Phoebe