"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!)