Update number 10

Dear Folks,
Since my newspaper-themed letter home I have: 1.baked bread in a dutch oven successfully twice almost successfully 4times; 2.gotten English club in full swing, sort of; 3.visited Kira’s town and Cindy’s town; 4. celebrated St Patty’s day in full Irish style (minus Guiness); 5. participated in Girls Camp 2010; 6. written a grant proposal for a moringa garden (fingers crossed); 7. eaten delicious Easter brunch in Zinder; 8. gotten through the girls Zinder soccer tournament 2010; 9. hosted tea parties Nigerien style for my middle school teachers; 10. Painted a mural in SLH’s town. 11. developed an allergy to mangoes?! 12. celebrated the first rains of the season!
ps there is an NYTimes article on Niger. one of the villages mentioned is the village of girls on my team. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/world/africa/04niger.html?ref=africa

Girls Camp
This is a yearly event that the Zinder region does in which volunteers bring young girls from each volunteer’s village to the hostel in Zinder. We host them at the hostel and do lots of activities which teach them about things from gender equality (and the idea that rural women like them can and have become important leaders), AIDS, the importance of birth spacing, self-defense and yoga, the kinds of careers they can have if they stay in school, how to paint murals and lots of other things.
I heard about two events which I would have liked to have participated in but had to skip for another project. One was the professional women visits: groups of girls with their volunteers went to visit women who worked at banks, the post office, the cultural center, schools and other places and they asked the women questions about their work. Evidently some of the professional women were super inspiring and engaging and were themselves touched by the activity. The other event, I got to hear on the radio, if not see them: the girls all got to give shout outs on the radio to people in their home towns and then they sang a song. I listened with another volunteer and our hostel’s guard, Dengay. Dengay really sincerely congratulated us on our work and seemed really proud for the girls.
The activities I participated in were mural painting and visiting the Sarki’s palace [-Sarki is the traditional big Hausa head honcho]. I helped design and set up the four murals we did on the walls outside an elementary school. The themes were “health is wealth, wash your hands with soap!”, “Ignorance is darker than the night: young girls go to school,” “A well educated woman makes a better mother,” and “To avoid AIDS practice abstinence until marriage”. The last message has a dubious record of getting results but if it influences someone and slows the spread of AIDS just a little, it’s still worth the paint. The girls had, for the most part, never painted anything before and then suddenly there were 20 of them doing a public mural. It was a bit of chaos, but we really got the girls to do all of the coloring. There were drips a plenty but we spent a few hours touching up and outlining and it came out looking really good. And even though we did the polishing, I see the murals now and I see the girls painting them, not us PCVs. As someone who has always wanted to promote art, that was really gratifying.
The Sarki’s palace was a fun outing. We piled the girls into a bush taxi and the rest of us rode down on motorcycle taxi’s (for future reference those are called Kabos in case I ever slip and say that instead of English). We entered the first chamber. There were baskets and sacks of different things hanging from the ceiling. I am still not clear on what that is for (wards for protection or charms for prosperity or to keep away evil spirits or something?) and some of the PCVs say that they have heard that ancient camel heads are in some of the sacks. There was a big door that was brought to Zinder about two centuries ago after the Zinder sarki won a war against the Mirriah sarki (that is a large town east of Zinder). It is made of a bunch of small plates of coppery metal nailed together and looks like an industrial chic decorator’s dream come true. We saw where they used to hold prisoners and in that court yard there was an actual hearing type thing for a family dispute going on. Many people still use the traditional authority of the sarki-system even tho it holds no legal value now. That was amazing to me that we could just walk through this courtyard while people’s personal disputes were being hashed out. The set up reminded me of King Solomon (ahem, do I have the right name?) and that biblical scene where he cleverly unmasks the true mother. We saw some garages/stables, and some outdoor hallways to various personal chambers. The girls seemed to be relatively engaged and our tour guide was fairly good.
I didn’t have much to do with this whole event. This is a testament to my awesome team who can 1. explain in Hausa and in a culturally sensitive manner how to have conversations with husbands on family planning, 2.organize 5 days worth of food and activities and 3. corral 20 girls, some of whom had never seen a paved road before, all through the streets of the big city of Zinder. I don’t know how I’ll ever help fill the older stages’ boots.

Bread Baking and other minor projects
I’ve been baking bread, mostly because it’s delicious, and also because I want to make an oven and get people to generate income with bread baking. For this I need to research the right kind of oven for Bande, the most nutritional kind of bread to teach them, and the most economical process to maximize profits. There are ovens in Zinder and my friend Alex’s town that I’ve heard about and need to visit.
I also want to do a plastic recycling project. There is some sort of project that an MIT group piloted that I am inquiring about, but if anyone knows of anyway to recycle plastic bags effectively, please let me know. Right now, they line the streets and sometimes get raked into piles to be burned. Niger has 3 huge and completely untapped natural resources: the sun, the sand and the plastic bags in the streets. I wish I could do some sort of glass bead making, but that seems out of my ability. Solar panels are expensive because Nigeria made Niger tax heavily solar panel imports so that Nigeria would be sure of a large electricity income. So plastic bags are staring me in the face (every time I look under my sandal or up at a tree branch where bags are caught) and I gotta do something useful with them.
I am working on my moringa tree nursery project for my health center. The plan is to plant 30 or 40 trees mostly for leaf production and some for seed production (to give to villagers for their own trees). Moringa trees are a malnutrition fighter that has garnered a lot of interest in the development community. I learned about it in IST and talked with my health center staff about it who were really enthusiastic. We would do little classes targeting women with malnourished babies and in addition to telling the women how to prepare it and why it’s important, we would make a small dish for them to try the moringa so they could see its not bad tasting or anything. I really think it would catch on well with my community so I’m hoping the funds come through.

Visiting my friends
This month I visited Kira for a really short time, and Cindy for another really short time, Sarah LH and Ashle. The visit to Cindy’s town was the first time I’d stayed there, and it was about time I got myself there. Cindy needs to do more projects when I’m not busy so that I can visit her more often. (Shout out to Cindy who hates being mentioned online!) SLH and I did a health mural in two days (which is really fast) and also watched the sunset on top of her rock and indulged in our latest obsession, battlestar galactica! I stayed over at Ashle’s when I came for our soccer tournament’s first game. There was a fundraiser that I wanted to see, for the middle school, but unfortunately we missed it. I want to do a fundraiser in my town for the book drive eventually, but it is looking like it will have to wait until next school year. I traveled too much, but I spent quality time in my town too, so I don’t feel guilty.

The 2010 Zinder Girls Soccer Tournament
You think South Africa’s got something goin on? The World Cup has nothing on the excitement and world interest of the 2010 Zinder Girls Soccer Tournament. That’s not true, but it should be. And there is a lot of excitement, plus it felt like as much of a headache to plan and coordinate as the World Cup must be.
The tournament was based around the health concept of the importance of washing hands. We originally had planned to base (and for past tournaments had based) it on SIDA, but those funds fell through and we just barely got some Water Sanitation funds for educating the girls and our communities on hand washing. That meant there were three competitions, not just the soccer competition. The second competition was constructing hand washing stations in many concessions around town and teaching the family of that concession how to use it. These were made from cans and nails that the girls collected. The third competition was a performance of a song or skit on the importance of washing hands, performed after the final matches in Zinder.
For the first soccer match my town traveled to Ashle’s town. We were on foreign turf, with not many of our own on the sidelines and not having practiced much. We fought valiantly but lost 2:0. I had an experience like un-anaesthetized tooth pulling getting an official coach for my team. I had my middle school set up the team and then I left for IST and while I was gone, the coach had to relocate to Zinder. The new coach didn’t arrive on time and between my traveling and his taking extended holidays, the girls practiced with him 1 and 2 half times and with me 2 and 2 half times and played by themselves the rest of the time. I was just happy they were so upbeat and positive going into the match and didn‘t seem too dejected afterwards.
Although hand washing is important and is the reason we got our funding, the soccer component was the part that the girls were most excited about -and the part that I felt was most important. During practices and during the games, little pipsqueek boys, half these girls’ heights would be commenting and sometimes shouting, to say the least, non-encouraging things like “they can’t play soccer”. That was the number one most often said comment (that I understood), and even if it was the worst one they actually said, it’s subtly very dis-heartening. Girls rarely get the chance to play soccer. Even the boys don’t get to play as often as they’d like because balls are expensive for a lot of people and most kids have to work, boys and girls, young and older. If there is a free ball, it’s grabbed up by boys and the girls never get a chance. Beyond that, girls are expected to do girl-things and are expected not to be able to play soccer well. They have to sell things in the market and help their mothers cook, clean and care for the bazillion babies. ‘Boys are good at soccer and girls are bad at it’. It doesn’t matter that the girls never got the chance to get good. My friend’s town scrapped his idea of having a young girls soccer team because it would be unbecoming for young girls to play. However, there are people here -lots of my villagers were excited for this game- who would give girls sports some of their interest, but there isn’t (like for everything else here too) a social or governmental mechanism to give that interest a platform-like the States before Title 9. Niger isn’t a lost cause in this case, its potential is just languishing untapped. This tournament was just to quietly present the idea of girls sports to the communities and to build the girls’ confidence in their abilities to do anything outside of traditional gender roles.
The hand washing trainings also played into building their confidence because many girls don’t think they can even get in front of a family group and present information. In fact, most of my girls when they tried to give the presentations floundered a little, and for the most part only one girl who’s a good public speaker did them. These mini trainings were a demonstration on how to wash hands with a tin cup hung from a branch or nailed to the wall that lets you use both your hands to scrub the soap around by yourself. We went around my ville popping into houses and asking people about hand washing and then demonstrating the new system. Some volunteers’ teams got really into it, and some villagers were really receptive. Kira even told us about some random lady coming up to her in her town with a tin can of her own asking Kira to show her how to make her own washing station. A team in Zinder talked to something like 1200 people in a week. My ville wasn’t as gung ho, but more or less receptive at least. My team won third place in the mini trainings event.
The last component to this competition was the theater or song portion. I think my team should have won, because we had an awesome play, but we went last and it was hot and the audience was super antsy with not enough water and having had sat through 7 skits/songs before. So we didn’t win theatre. I have, though, a secret hope that the girls will have liked doing the play so much that they’ll want to do other theatre activities.
The final day of the tournament was hot and stressful because several things went wrong and some aspects that I wont go into were frustrating and sad to see. But I think my girls had some fun at the end of the day and we learned a few things about how to do it next year (if any of us have the effort to take it on), so I am satisfied.

Let it rain!
We had a nice, proper storm my last week in ville. I love weather and have been looking forward to the rains beginning for a long time. I am not looking forward to the bugs that come with them but I am not dealing with that yet. My villagers tell me that this is about on time, but I had been under the impression rain wouldn’t start until June or the end of May. One person told me if they come now, it can sometimes mean that the rains will stop for too long during the growing season and the crops will die. So I still don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but for me it’s a good thing!
Before the rain came, the wind knocked over a tree branch in my neighbor’s yard above a cow so that the heavy part of the branch was up in the tree and the smaller branches were spread around the cow. All the men in the vicinity came running right away and they began fixing the situation immediately. One guy held the cow’s bridle until it could be moved away and another guy got an ax and started chopping away at the tree branch while several people moved the smaller pieces away. I thought that was an interesting cultural difference to see played out so clearly; being from the Midwest, I have watched plenty of times when a big tree branch falls on something and a few neighbors stand around for a while doing more gawking than anything else and waiting for the tree branch removal service to come carry it away. Maybe that is because lay people could do more damage if electrical wires are involved or maybe because we just don’t have axes lying around in our houses too often anymore or maybe because if there is a service available, better to use it! In any case, while the Nigeriens were busy snapping into action, I upheld our American tradition valiantly, uselessly gawking from the sidelines!

The worst allergy in all the world
Until I was like 20 and developed an amoxicillin allergy, I was never allergic to anything at all ever except for poison ivy, of course, and a few sniffles in the spring. I always thought of those poor kids who can’t eat peanuts or anything made in a peanut making place or who couldn’t drink milk or eat bread, and who had to carry around an epipen lest their throat close up and they suffocate from eating some delicious food! No cheese? No yeast leavened bread? What a horrible, horrible world to live in. Let me thank my lucky stars I have no food allergy.
But then I woke up with swollen lips a few days in a row and then my whole face blew up (a picture exists but you will never see it). Peace Corps sent the car for me, even though besides itchiness and a battered vanity I was fine. The doctor sent me an epipen(!) and I had to take steroids. I thought it was spider bites but when puffy lips came back for a day the doctor told me I probably had a mango allergy. Imported mangos are in season now, and besides melons, mangos are the only fruit I can find in my town, although the bigger cities have bananas and pineapples and some other fruits. Mangos are going to be in season here in Niger soon and I was told that they’ll have so many mangos here that they’ll just give them away for free! Imagine missing out on free mangos! It was my only mantra before when I thought about hot season (and it is hot hot hot season now) “at least there will be mangos at least there will be mangos”. Mango crisp, mango smoothies, mango salsa (which is the most delicious thing in the whole of the universe and is what gave me my balloon face because I ate so much of it), mango cake, mango cookies, rice and mangos, dried mangos, fresh mangos, mangos in fruit salad. But now, I will be hot and tired and thirsty and craving fruit and surrounded by delicious mangos that I can‘t eat! I think people make comical descriptions of Hell along these lines! I will stop complaining now tho, because I have this one reprieve:

Vacation!!
I am going to Senegal for a week and a half to visit my Austrian friend whom I met in Paris when we studied there. She is now studying in St. Louis (San Lou-wee) and we will travel from Dakar to St. Louis and back. I have a day layover in Bamako, Mali, going both ways so I am going to visit an art museum and a boutique and maybe some of the music venues in that town (the music scene there, I‘ve been told, is unrivaled in West Africa).
For a while, what I was craving for vacation was just to go into an air-conditioned mall, watch fat people argue with their spoiled brat children and slurp up an Orange Julius. But the other weekend I was reading the guide book for Senegal and good thing I’m leaving soon cuz now I cant wait for Senegal! There are good art museums, restaurants, patisseries, shops and markets, excellent beaches(!) and there is a famous island called Isle Goree which is where many slaves left Africa for the Americas. There will also be, serendipitously while I am there, an art festival in Dakar called DakArt (oh the pun!) and it is the best in West Africa and only happens every two years. And if you can sniff at my lucky beautiful glorious timing still, get this: there will most likely be the best Jazz festival in West Africa going on in St. Louis while I am there. Art and Jazz and history and beaches and a long separated friend; you cannot improve upon a vacation.

And that is where I leave off for now. I’ll try to have some decent account of my travels when I get back.
Some of you have not been writing to me and now I am publicly scolding you. You have brought me to this. Write to me or I will stop writing these updates.
Cheerio, ~aj