week 4,5,6 summaries and end of niger! sad!

Week Four, five and six….
The time in Niger slowed greatly after returning from demystification. Zarma continued, technical training continued, and we began and continued garden work!
And in the mist of it all, there was a consolidation announcement. There was an attempted kidnapping of American embassy workers in the Tahoua region of the country, which is in the center of the country. In response to this news, the country Peace Corps director decided to close the Tahoua region, as well as more of the Tillaberi region. During this process of closing part of the country for peace corps volunteer placement, we were living at the training site, taking language classes, having dance parties, getting medical checkups and shots, and having GAD Olympics (Gender and Development). GAD Olympics included doing a series of “Olympic” activities in which we carried water on our heads and raced around an obstacle course, pounded peanuts into peanut butter, and made Nigerien tea. I was team white and we got 3rd place over all! Yay! What a fun competition.
The following day, we received the bad news…The country director decided that our stage (French pronunciation) was going to be sent to another country to start our service…we’re going to Madagascar! This is both sad and exciting…it is so hard to leave the wonderful people that we have met in Niger, the trainers, language instructors, and families, but Madagascar, wow! But while we are going to have an amazing new adventure in a new country, Niger as well as other W.African countries are going to be suffering. Because of the security situation, many other NGOs and funding could leave Niger in the future, and this is the most painful especially since the people of Niger (the vast majority who are subsistence farmers) are the ones who will pay the price. It is so unfair and so unjust!
After being shocked by this news, we spent the next two days wondering about our job assignments (many people were going to be placed to different sectors such as education and business, though I’m still a health volunteer believe it or not!). Then we made an amazing Thanksgiving dinner…chicken (we couldn’t get the turkeys from Nigeria, oh well!), tons of mashed potatoes (the only real easy thing to find here!), sweet potatoes, cookies, apple crumples, pineapple upside-down cake, and the most amazing stuffing! If we can make a thanksgiving dinner in Niger, we can make it anywhere!
Then after a few more days stuck at the training site (though I was taking lovely runs in the desert early in the morning, watching the sunrise…it’s so beautiful!), we went back to our host families for Tabaski! Tabaski happens about a month after Ramadan, and people gather for a major prayer and then they slaughter goats/sheep, one for each family. They then cook the innards of the sheep/goat (and I write sheep/goat because it is hard to tell the difference between the goats and sheep here…it’s not like those in the states), and pass those around from family to family, neighbor to neighbor. Then they smoke the meat of the goat/sheep over night and eat that as a kind of beef jerky in the morning. I had front row tickets to the slaughter, and saw about 30L of blood pouring out of 8 sheep/goats…and some of them were even trying to move after their heads were clearly sawed off! Pretty gross, and I seriously don’t know if I could ever walk down a meat aisle in a grocery store the same way again!
Upon returning to the training site after a long Tabaski weekend of slaughter, we started French classes, we created an American Olympics game for the trainers and language instructors at the site: they had an obstacle course, a pin the tail on the donkey game, musical chairs, and a tug-of-war game. We were clearly working on Peace Corps goals 2 & 3 that include sharing our culture with the host country nationals as well as understanding their culture…too bad that we only had 6 weeks to do it!
Things I am thinking about when still living in Niger:
• I have never been in such an interesting and contradictory place in my life. Women spend hours and hours pounding millet and everything else, and in the process, all of the nutrients are pounded out. When confronted about ways to improve the health of their children, these same women will say that they cannot change their food preparation practices because to not pound as hard or to add more nutrients to their sauce would “not be Nigerien.” It’s also hard to argue against culture/religion: pregnant or nursing women will still participate in Ramadan (fasting during the day i.e. no food or water, and sometimes their children get extremely sick) without considering the consequences. They say it is “God’s will” if their children live or not. It’s hard to argue against God.
• People spend a greater part of the year working very hard, around the clock, just to have enough to eat. But then, on one amazing weekend, they kill thousands and thousands of goats/sheep and eat like kings for 2 or 3 days. They do know how to celebrate…they dress up in their finest clothes for a 1 hour prayer and for going “windi-windi-ing” (visiting) family members in the middle in the night, when no one can actually see their nice clothes. They are proud, and they are not budging or willing to change their traditions.
• Being dressed well is an important status symbol here. People always dress up to go to the once-a-week market or during the holidays. And “dressed up” can mean anything from wearing a new pagna or African-print dress for the women, or a Bubu for the men, to wearing a “ghetto” jean outfit or army/cameo outfit.
• Men like to ask you if you will be their wife upon meeting you, mostly just upon site, and sometimes even when they already have 1 (or maybe 2?) wives…they just hook their fingers together (the body language sign for marriage) and expect you to move into their concession! I love how dating is here… or at least how relationships develop here.
• The greetings: in order to have a conversation with a Nigerien, one must great them, with at least 3 different questions/responses, such as: how did you sleep? How are you? How is your family? How is your body/health? How is your tiredness?....there is always a question about your tiredness, and even if you haven’t slept at all and you are falling over, it is a faux-pas to say that you are at all tired! And the other thing is people basically talk at each other when going through these greetings…so it’s hard to know what greeting you are supposed to be answering, so you just kind of repeat everything that the other person says…it’s pretty fun.
• Weather and landscape: we are here during the cold season, so the nights can get pretty cold (down to about 50 degrees, which is cold for us who have now adjusted to the constant summer weather), but the days get up to about 80 or 90…it’s pretty nice. The landscape is just like what you would see in Arizona or Nevada: flat, some greenery, and the most amazing sunsets and moonrises ever!

I’m so sad to leave Niger! I hope I will come back, and I hope that the people here will stay resilient and wonderful! More updates from Madagascar!