Weddings, boiled leaves, and the only civilian rugby team in Niger.

My third weekend in Niger - and yes, this was now a little while ago - was the product of a series of improbable events. On the way to Garbey-Kourou, one of the people I got talking to during the long wait for a taxi-brousse to leave for the ferry was a guy called Issa, who was friendly in a refreshingly quiet way. Where the kids began by behaving towards me as if I were a sort of walking cash machine, and behaving themselves much like the crowbars needed to get into it, Issa was just pleasant, interested in what I was doing, and we talked briefly about the (benign) lump in his right forearm. He said he was coming in to the National Hospital to have it looked at, so I have him my number and talk him to call me when he did if he felt like it.

Which he did, and we had tea when he came in, and he said that I would have to meet his family. This invitation came sooner than I'd expected when he invited me to his younger sister's wedding that saturday. I ummed and ahhed about it for a while, not
being sure if it'd be weird being the only white person there and, indeed, not having met bride or groom - but in the end, saturday morning saw me up at 6am on my second successive trip out of Niamey.

Unlike the Tillabéri road to Garbey-Kourou, however, this one was largely intact barring the potholes which are a feature of every road here except the three bearing signs explaining that the European Union Has Resurfaced This Road For Your Safety and Comfort. Noble sentiments, except that in Nigérien this evidently translates from French to French roughly as "No potholes. Drive as fast as you can." Things did get a little squashed in the taxi when the fifth person got into the back seat on his wife's lap (this was undoubtedly the best way of doing things given the size of his wife's lap); this made eight of us in the car in total, but all in all it wasn't a bad trip.

Issa met me out of the taxi at Sudarey, his village, and after a whirlwind of meeting his sister's and the groom's large extended family in the space of about fifteen minutes, and having all of them pose for photos, we went to the ceremony. This started around 8am, and was held outside under a large thatched roof which was evidently the village meeting area. Neither bride nor groom was present, and while at a UK wedding this is normally an extremely bad sign, it is apparently the norm here, where wedding ceremonies consist of negotiations between the two families, and are sealed before a large crowd of witnesses with the handout of dates to all present (dates here are, like pretty much everything, very tasty but different - they are a little like soft nuts, and need to be checked for small bugs before eating them). I continued my role as a sort of additional photographer, and as ever the children all wanted to see themselves on the camera - as, come to that, did many of the adults...

You may or may not be able to see more photos here.

It was also the second occasion on which I got to eat boiled leaves, a delicacy I first encountered in Garbey-Kourou. During the rainy season, lots of plants spring temporarily to life in the desert and, being both resourceful and perenially hungry, the locals collect their leaves and boil them. Hence the, er, name. Happily, they add a sauce made from ground peanuts, salt, and spices, and they are thus surprisingly good, even when you eat them from a shared bowl with a group of people you've just met. With your hands. It is not hard to see why infection control is a problem here.


I felt part of the day in a way I hadn't expected to, anyway, and the whole thing was an example of Nigériens being welcoming well above and beyond the call of duty.

That afternoon, back in Niamey, it was time for Curious Happening 2. Before coming here, I'd asked pretty much all my friends if they knew anyone who'd been here. Only one - Isanna - replied, saying that she thought her boyfriend Alex knew someone. Sure enough, Alex's friend Nicola had been here - but had now moved on, so he gave me lots of useful advice (well, the thing you really need to do is to see the North, but of course you can't at the moment because of the rebellion and the mines) and the e-mails of Baptiste and Caterina who were still here. So it was that I met Baptiste one evening and explained that effectively he was a friend's boyfriend's friend's friend, and that it was pretty nice of him to ask me around. He's been really helpful - I've been drinking the Niamey water (i.e. tap water) since week two because he reassured me that he'd seen the test results and it was probably safer than in the UK, except after heavy rain when it goes a bit muddy - and when the conversation turned to the World Cup, he mentioned that an Italian friend of his, Lorenzo, played for one of the two teams here in Niger (the other being the army team). So I called Lorenzo (my friend's boyfriend's friend's - never mind), and headed out to the national stadium on saturday afternoon to train with the only civilian rugby team in Niger.

Sadly we weren't actually in the national stadium, but the training was fun - lots of touch rugby with about 20 Nigériens, a handful of expats, and three French nursing students who had just finished a few weeks out in Zinder. The Nigériens were all fit as the proverbial butcher's dog, and one six-foot six monster later turned out to be both a 2nd row and a three-times national boxing champion; happily I was very nice to him on the pitch. Afterwards, one of the team got the French students and I in to the national stadium, where we obviously ran a 100m race which was won by a Nigérien who started about three metres behind the rest of us but was training there when we arrived. I finished a respectable third. We collectively bottled the weightlifting component of the national games, however...