The CLOS-O-MAT

What will the Swiss think of next?

File this under "Random Things You Find In Africa." This gem is in the Diffa CARE office. How or when it got here is beyond me. I should see if I can order one for our place back in Madagascar.

Driving Mr. Dan

I’ve spent a lot of time sitting behind computers and riding in cars these last three weeks. It’s hard for me to find inspiring and interesting material about computers, as nowadays this is SOP for most of us; and despite the wonders of the web and other technical advances, everything with computers is still a bunch of ones and zeros. You might think being a passenger in a car is as humdrum as working in front of a computer. But this is not so. Traversing the eastern reaches of Niger as a passenger has given me (ample) time to take in the scenery, catch up on sleep, and interact with the drivers. Eventually, however, the scenery stops being new and captivating, and you can only sleep so long before a pothole or an evasive maneuver—taken to avoid hitting some free ranging animal or child—wakes you. So, it’s only natural that your attention turns to your other human companions, which for me has been the driver du jour, assigned to schlep me from place to place. They're all top notch in my book and I've enjoyed my time with them, so I’d like share some vignettes that I’ve assembled. We all have our own quirks and habits that we do without thinking countless times in a day. And I know I’d hate having my quirks, no matter how innocent, funny or bizarre they might be, scrutinized and shared with strangers. With this in mind, I’ve changed the names to provide at least a thin veil of anonymity.

Adamou: Adamou drove me from Diffa to Maradi, a drive that lasted 10 hours. The drive is long, but Adamou made the drive even longer by stopping at almost every coffee and kola nut stand between Diffa and Maradi to get a fix. Add nicotine to the list of stimulants too, because each stop was an opportunity to smoke a cigarette. At one point he complained of a pounding behind his eyes and partial paralysis of his face. He reasoned that it was “L’Urgence” and the long hours causing the mysterious ailment. I think an equally plausible hypothesis is that he was hepped-up on too many stimulants and had some physiochemical imbalance going on.

A tall, slender man with a youthful face, Adamou wore, during the trek, no less than three different pairs of sunglasses (but never more than one pair at a time). He had sunglasses stashed on his person as well as in the car, and I could never learn what prompted a change from one pair to another. In talking with him, I discovered he was only 42 years old—I thought him to be much younger—and has had 12 children between his two wives. Six boys, six girls, two sets of twins. Gobsmacked doesn’t even come close to conveying my disbelief at his fecundity, and luck. I guess it's people like him who are keeping Niger's birthrate so high.

Moustapha: Moustapha was the first driver assigned to me at the start of my grand tour. The day before I left, the director sought me out and told me CARE Niamey has five drivers, four of whom are wonderful. And then there’s Moustapha. She assured me that he wasn’t dangerous, just hard to communicate with-in any language. Apparently the senior staff avoids taking trips with him, so he was really excited to learn that we were heading all the way to Diffa and would be away for at least two weeks. (He told me later, It’s good to travel; I can’t go for long periods being with my wife. I said, It must be the secret to your long and happy marriage. He agreed.)

During our first days together I saw why the director warned me. I know I’m not a fluent French speaker, and that I have a mélange of Malgache and Hausa in my head, so I’m accustomed to being not well understood; however, I can usually manage to get my point across when talking with someone. And nine times out of ten, I can communicate with Moustapha perfectly well, but that tenth time is a doozey. Usually our communication breakdown happens when giving or receiving directions. For example, I’d say, Moustapha, slow down; we’re coming up on our turn. He’d say, Turn here? Yeah, we’re going here, this is our turn; turn right here. Moustapha would say, Did you want me to turn back there? I’d reply, Yeah, you have to turn around; you missed it. Oh, you wanted me to turn right back there? Okay, violà, here we are. And so on.

It would be easy for me to conclude that he just doesn’t hear my French, but I’ve seen similar scenes played out between him and other Nigeriens. I felt better after learning this—that it’s not just me that struggles to communicate with him, and now I just laugh when we make a wrong turn, or when Moustapha starts some tangential conversation thread that only makes sense to him.

He also has a funny personal grooming habit that I can’t resist mentioning. We had just eaten lunch at Dogondutchi the first day out and were back on the road heading east. I was absorbed doing something and was startled to hear a hissing noise coming from our Land Cruiser. I thought the radiator had a problem, or that we’d blown a tire, but Moustapha’s face didn’t register any concern. In fact, he wore a wide smile as he stared ahead watching the road. Confused, I studied him for a few moments before two things dawned on me: 1) he wasn’t smiling; and 2) he was making the hissing noise with his mouth. With his lips pulled back, he was forcing air through his teeth to dislodge some morsel of food still caught in his teeth from lunch. Not finding success with his air-pressure method, he pulled down his sun visor to get out his dental hygiene heavy artillery: a Bic ballpoint pen. After discharging the stubborn bits, he replaced the cap to the pen and re-holstered it in the visor. I noticed he had more than one pen in the visor, but I have personally witnessed that when he’s picking, he’s not picky—he’ll use whatever “tool” is handy at the moment of crisis.

Inoussa: Speaking of picking, I have to mention Inoussa, who was my most recent driver, taking me from Konni to Tahoua. I had arrived in Konni early Saturday morning after taking the 4:30am bus from Maradi. I was waiting around the office in Konni when a heavy-laden Toyota pickup rolls in and out jumps Inoussa, a short, curly-haired Touareg man, sweating profusely. He informed me that he was to be my driver, but that he had to unload his truck and do some other errands before he’d be ready to leave. Fine, I said and went off to have a Nescafe with sweetened condensed milk, a concoction I’d normally gag over in the U.S., but a delicacy in Niger.

About an hour later Inoussa reappeared. We loaded up the truck and headed out of town. Like most of the CARE staff right now, he seemed fatigued: his eyes were two slits. He told me that the day before, he had made the drive between Konni and Tahoua four times. He was still sweating and asked me for some aspirin to help with a headache. I didn’t have any on me, so he stopped and bought some on the road just outside of Konni.

The drive to Tahoua is only a couple of hours long and that, combined with my napping, didn’t leave a lot of time to really connect with Inoussa. But the drive was sufficiently long for me to watch him engage in a truly perplexing habit. During a waking moment, I saw Inoussa remove a scrap piece of paper from the truck’s center console and tear off a strip about ½ inch wide and 3 inches long. Casually, but purposefully he then began to roll the strip of paper into a long, thin twist. He glanced at me sideways to see if I was watching—but with my mirrored sunglasses he wouldn’t be able to see my eyes—and then cautiously snaked the paper twist up into one of his nostrils. After a few exploratory pokes, he buried the twist into his nose and then erupted in a sneezing fit. He blew his nose into a handkerchief and then acted like nothing had happened. This happened one other time during the drive. It was truly fascinating to watch, I must admit. I could only think of three reasons for engaging in such behavior: to keep awake, purge his nostrils of boogers, or simply for pleasure.

Three drivers, three different personalities, all are good people who do a great job under difficult circumstances. I used to think that I’d like to be a driver for a NGO: you get to drive nice cars, you receive per diem when you’re out on mission, and there’s a certain status that drivers possess. But now, knowing that I might come under such close scrutiny, I think I might have to rethink my dream job.

The Drive to Diffa

This is going to be a tough clean up.

We left Zinder on Sunday mid morning and I felt I should have been more excited than what I was feeling. Up until Thursday, I’d never been east of Maradi and here I was about to travel to one of the last outposts in the farthest reaches of Niger near the Chad border, but too many long nights working in front of a computer screen had left me drained and edgy. The long hours had also left me somewhat of a mute; I felt I didn’t have enough accessible memory to run the language software in my brain with everything else going on inside. We were five, including the driver, and riding in the back seat sandwiched between Sanda and Moussa made me miss having my own personal chauffeur and Land Cruiser. Carpooling: just another sacrifice made in the name of the “Emergency.”

The road leaving from Zinder soon became a mosaic of asphalt and potholes. That I was even able to nap during the drive is either a testament to our driver’s ability or my overall fatigue, or perhaps both. During my waking moments I noticed less millet planted and more sorghum, and then, eventually, I stopped seeing anything planted, aside from Neem trees in the villages that bordered the road. Acacia trees could be seen farther from the road being visited by camels that used their height advantage and dexterous tongues to strip the young, tender leaves off the thorny branches. The colors out east, or at least those visible from the road, seem different to me than those in the west. My father wouldn’t find the red, red soil and rocks that imprinted so vividly in his memory during his trips to Niger. The soil (and the houses made from this same soil) look washed out, grey, and tired. It seemed to me pure folly that humans inhabit a place like this. But the human race has proven itself highly adaptable to even the harshest environments, and I would submit that Niger ranks in the top tier of the “Hardest Place to Live on the Planet” contest.

While seeming particularly hostile to humans, this part of Niger seemed perfectly suited for camels, goats and sheep. Seeing a goat perched up on its back tip toes trying to reach a tasty morsel that dangles temptingly just above its reach never fails to make me smile. Looking at the scene from afar you could easily think the goat is talking to the object of her desire, almost persuading it, from the oral gymnastics it’s going through to gain some purchase on said morsel. If goats ever figure out how to cooperate to make a goat-ladder, the Sahel is going to be in real trouble.

From the road, the pasture looked decent, but I was told that at this time of year the thickness and the color of the vegetation should be denser and more lush. And, during a pit stop I walked over to look at the grass and saw it was sharp-edged and filled with evil briars, not exactly prime grazing material. Still, the animals I saw looked surprisingly healthy. A few of the cows and horses looked more like skeletons, wearing their skin pulled tightly across their bones, but these were in the minority. Other than finding adequate forage from seemingly nothing, the other talent that sheep and goats posses, I’ve noticed, is sensing when to cross the road at exactly the right (or wrong) moment to make you stop or swerve to avoid hitting them. I’d like to think they do this on purpose, to have a good laugh with their buddies afterwards at our expense, but I don’t think so. All you have to do is look into the vacant eyes of sheep to know that they’re just not smart enough to pull something like that off.

At some point during the drive, sand dunes appeared. They weren’t the grand dunes that you might associate with the deep desert that go on and on, and disappear into the horizon, but were more low-slung and some were partially vegetated. But they’re on the move, no doubt, and they’re hungry. They have a particular appetite for the road and at certain points the sand had completely buried the asphalt. Not that this is an entirely bad thing in the right context. While we were stopped, so the others could pray, I took a moment to stretch my legs and I noticed a Peugeot station wagon, cum bush taxi, parked along side the road up ahead with its passengers sitting off to one side. I figured it had a flat tire or something and walked over to investigate. When I got to the car I saw that the bonnet had been completely removed and the entire engine compartment was filled with sand. The bits that weren’t covered in sand were charred black, visibly burned. The driver told me he didn’t have any water to put out the fire, but thankfully there was no shortage of sand.

Hadjia and Moussa spent a lot of the trip reading Koranic materials. Moussa, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 2003, was reading an Arabic/French dual translation of the Koran, with one page written in French and the other in Arabic. He had the French side covered with a piece of paper in an attempt to better his Arabic, but I could tell there was a lot of peeking going on. Hadjia seemed to prefer shorter pieces, all in Arabic, maybe the Islamic equivalent of the Upper Room. It wasn’t until we were about two-thirds of the way to Diffa that the significance of the date struck me: it was the fourth anniversary of 9/11. I didn’t think about the horrific details that took place four years ago as much as I thought about the perception of Muslims and their faith.

I wish more people could have the experience that I’ve had living in an Islamic society and alongside devout Muslims. Since being back, I’ve noticed how familiar the daily cadence, punctuated with the five daily prayer calls, feels to me. And I’ve slipped back into the habit of beseeching the will of Allah when I speak of things in the future that haven’t happened yet, and which might not happen—that’s only for Allah to know. The image of Islamic radicals who foment violence against others couldn’t be farther from my image I hold of people in Niger. Given the level of poverty and lack of education you might think these are volatile combinations that Islamic radicals would prey upon to recruit fellow zealots. But, by and large, it just doesn’t exist. I think most people would be shocked to learn just how tolerant Niger is of other religions. In fact, in the car ride I discussed with Moussa the unusual relationship that the Malagche have with their dead. I could tell he was somewhat shocked, especially the part about exhuming the remains of ancestors and fêting, but he didn’t pass any judgment. I don’t know what it is about Niger’s make up that produces such calm and tolerance, but it’s definitely a good thing and I wish there was more of it.

We finally rolled into Diffa around 6 o’clock. It reminded me a little of Konni in some ways—a little bit of a border town feel (Nigeria is only a dozen kilometers away and Chad is relatively close, I suppose), not many paved roads, and a kind of sprawling town layout. Noticeably different in Diffa, though, is the lack of the ubiquitous “cobble-cobble” drivers found in Konni: moped taxis, usually driven by teenage boys that queue along the road waiting for passengers.

We made the rounds at the office before retiring to CARE’s guest house. I made a quick tour of the facilities and in the kitchen, written on the wall, I saw, « 13/04/05 1ere pluie, 15h-16h». So little says so much: a promise and hope for another year, insha’allah.

From the Field

Here’s a picture I took en route to Tchintabaraden...only in Niger, huh?

I’ve been out in the field since last Saturday visiting the regional offices where CARE is distributing food rations to villages. At this time, CARE’s response to the food crisis is limited to the regions of Tahoua, Maradi, Zinder, and Diffa. In Tahoua, Maradi, and Diffa they are distributing food rations supplied by World Food Program and Niger’s government. In addition to the distribution, in Tahoua and Zinder CARE is opening feeding stations in select villages to aid moderately malnourished children. There are other NGOs who are also distributing food rations, but in terms of scale of operation and the number of people served, CARE’s operation is among the largest. They might have an advantage over other NGOs because they have been working in Niger for such a long time and already have a lot of resources on the ground and built up capacity in their staff. Also, being a large NGO with a worldwide presence, they can call upon experts from other field offices to help. I’ve met CARE employees and contractors on loan from CARE USA, CARE Germany, CARE France, and CARE Haiti.

So far, my primary role has been getting CARE’s field reporting operational. I’ve spent most of my time in front of a computer working with the various forms and reports that CARE is obligated to produce to satisfy the donors who are helping fund its operations, as well as to document and evaluate its actions during this period. Not very sexy, but I feel like I’m playing an important role. (Kristen wrote in an email that she was glad I’m doing important work; she would be pissed if I was just running the XEROX machine.) I have another week or so to go in this tour of field offices before I head back to Niamey. Once all the reporting tools are finalized, I’m looking forward to my secondary role: writing qualitative narratives, collected from the field, about the beneficiaries touched by CARE.

I've stolen some time to get this posted and now I have to relinquish the precious VSAT connection for some real work, so I'll sign off now. I'll try to post more soon.