Garbey-Kourou, Greetings, and the Night Sky

My visit to the bush came about thanks to an evening out on the town with the Peace Corps lot which I've already talked about. It's an interesting organisation - more on that later - and has had a number of unexpected benefits. For example, one of them, Emily, worked at the National Hospital and this has meant I've had someone to have lunch with in the hospital café. She's now back in the US on holiday, as when you sign up for your third year straight as she's done you get a month back in the US. However, before she left - and possibly only because I was able to lend her the final Harry Potter book - she arranged for me to see some fistula surgery, and also took me round to meet one of the US ex-pats at his house, as she'd had a parcel sent from home to him. This was exciting both because I got to see how the other half live (in large, A/C guarded houses with pools, is the short answer), and because he had a dog called - honestly - America, who gets passed from person to person as they move on. Apparently his house was the smallest on the books, but had the advantage of some unexpected wildlife - at one point a noise on the roof turned out to be peacocks from goodness knows where. Anyway, we got talking, and after I'd run through what I was doing, I ventured:
Me: "So what do you do here?"
Him: "Er - I'm the US Consul."
Guess the dog's name shoulda given it away...!

Anyway, another upshot of that night out was a guy called Matt, slightly the worse for wear, asking if I'd come to his village and take a look at the wife of a friend of his who was pregnant and had had abdominal pain for several months. I wasn't sure if he was serious, but evidently he was: he called the next morning to confirm! I ran through the usual disclaimers - I'm just a medical student, she might be better seeing the local doctor - but he countered "Oh, no one really goes to see him. I'll show you when you get here."


So the following weekend I got in a taxi-brousse, that being French for a dilapidated minibus apparently on the point of decomposition and intended to hold 12 but in reality holding up to 20 or so people plus assorted chickens in the cabin and everyone's luggage plus-or-minus a few trussed up and disgruntled-looking goats on the roof. The first of these was in decent shape, and took me as far as a bridge outside Niamey which had been washed out, rather impressively, by the recent storms. To give you an idea of how quickly the water is soaked up by the sandy earth and/or evaporates, I took a picture of the not-so-raging torrent running in the valley. We picked our way across it on foot and got into a slightly dodgier-looking taxi-brousse on the other side, boasting a fractured windscreen replete with a dent consistent with the attempted escape of a goat from the roof. One of the other downsides of taxis-brousse is that they don't leave until they're full, so I had a two-hour wait for the thing to fill up. This was awkward, as the ferry I needed to catch doesn't run between noon and 2pm; in the event I was spared a two-hour wait on the riverbank by our arrival at the ferry at 11:58. Once across the river, I met Matt and we hiked out the 6km to his village.

I already knew he and Alex (his nearest neighbour) were agriculture volunteers, and so I was expecting farms; the reality wasn't quite what I had in mind. The area was essentially scrub desert, and farming takes place in a soil which to my untrained eye looked like a reddish sandpit. Despite excellent rains, the crops still looked vulnerable to pretty much anything. Apparently the real problem is floods cutting channels through fields and washing away whole harvests, along with young shoots getting scorched by the sun or sandblasted by the sandstorms which precede the rains. However, their peanuts were going okay, and are rather fetching plants; Alex's millet was positively huggable (see opposite). The standard layout is to plant millet with beans (which are apparently not beans but legumes, farm-fans) in between to replenish nutrients in the soil (I believe they are nitrogen-fixers). Matt also has several 10 metre-square plots of experimental seeds from various labs trying to breed super-millet, which were interesting - but his main project is Acacia Senegal.


Before coming out to Niger, Matt had served in Iraq, and had got into horticulture when he came out the army; he's off to New York soon to give a talk about it at a Veterans' convention. He's quite evangelical about farming, and intense with it, both in the best possible way! Acacia Senegal has lots of advantages out here - the trees give crops shade, they bind the soil and so make it more resistant to flooding, they release water into the atmosphere, they take nutrients from the deep soil layers which food crops like millet and okra don't reach, they give some protection from the crop-crushing sandstorms, and are themselves a cash crop. Acacia Senegal produces gum arabic, which you can harvest from the bark and sell to...the Coca-Cola company, who use it as a stabiliser in carbonated drinks and chewing gum. Their main supplier is Sudan, but for obvious reasons there have been some supply chain issues there of later - so if Niger can get its act together before the Sudan does, they could have an export besides the uranium (which an expat who works for the EU told me recently they sell to France for the same price per kilo as sugar).

Matt also took me to see the "doctor", who has a nice office on the way to the fields. He proudly showed me his logbook, revealing that he saw about 12 patients a day...in a village of more than 6,000 where I would estimate at least 300 have malaria at any one time during the rainy season. He did explain the healthcare system a little - outfits like his are the local health operations - the equivalent of GPs - except that he's only done two or three years of studying - i.e., less than I have. Then there are the CSIs, which are nurse-run intermediate centres where they decide whether to send you off to a regional hospital or a referral centre like the National. Even the GP equivalents charge - 500CFA (50p) for children aged 0-5, and 800CFA thereafter, plus 400/700 for follow-up visits, although those prices do include any of his meagre supply of medication he deems necessary.

Not so hard, suddenly, to see why no one goes to see him. His treatment options, too, were largely past their best-before-dates, in one case by three years. Even the posters on his wall were - they showed cartoon-style pictures of malnourished children with kwashiorkor (swollen, crying), marasmus (thin, crying) and one normal child (smiling, playing with toys, an inexplicable shade of green). The NGO involvement in local healthcare is that they give him kit now and then, like the posters, scales, and tape-measures, plus they come in and do vaccination runs intermittently. None of it sounded very organised and certainly wasn't getting the access it needed to the local population.

The village itself was exclusively mud huts with thatched rooves; I wasn't completely clear how they stood up to being pounded by rain and flooded, but when things get very bad apparently the bricks at the bottom collapse, making repairing them awkward. The flooding had partially demolished the fence preserving my modesty while using Matt's bucket-shower/toilet hole, too, but there wasn't much to do about that. And it was exciting to have a bucket-shower again. The only exceptions to the two-room mud hut layout are the radio station, which has a building made from Real Bricks, and the mosque, which is about ten times the size of any other building in a 20-mile radius. Apparently the Wazos are perfectly pleasant to Matt - he figures they are mostly preaching to prevent the Christian aid organisations winning hearts 'n' minds - but he does get irritated by greetings. When he doesn't say salaam aleekum to the more extreme local religious sorts (who are thankfully a minority), he is criticised for it, and when he does they criticise him for not coming to pray with them. Thus his standard greeting is "fandagoy", which means "congratulations on your work".

Greeting someone is an involved process in Niger in any language. In French, the standard exchange goes:
Person 1: "Bonjour" (or bonsoir at any time from about 10am on) (Hello)
Person 2: "Bonjour - ça va?" (Hello. How are you?)
Person 1: "ça va. ça va?" (I'm fine. How are you?)
Person 2: "ça va." (I'm fine.)
You can then extend this:
Person 1: "Et la santé?", "Et le travail?", "Et la famille?" (and your health / work / family?), and, beloved of those talking to les blancs, "et la chaleur?" (and the heat?)
The pattern is similar in Djerma and Hausa at least (I can't speak for Tamachek, Peulh, or the other one I've forgotten temporarily). In Djerma, as well as "salaam aleekum", you can say "fofo" (how are you) and reply "bani samoy" (I'm fine), whereupon the same sequence as above ensues; "amaté nrongo" means roughly the same as "fofo". In Djerma, however, the responses translate as "Thank God for...", so when one of Matt's villagers greeted Alex in English, she replied "thank God for the work", and "thank God for the people of Tilley [her village]", and so on. It's rather sweet, but was outclassed after dinner, when we ate fish and rice from a shared bowl in pitch darkness. Afterwards, I was admiring the stars, which were stunning, and Alex explained that the Djerma word for the milky way translated literally as "the full road", because - just as I was doing - when you finished eating, you sat back in your chair and looked at the heavens while digesting your meal. This seems to me infinitely preferable to naming it after a chocolate bar. In a similar vein, Matt refers to the filtered water he drinks as "white-man's-stomach-has-no-strength water" in reference to the number of times he had to get ill before the villagers stopped pressing well water on him.

All the Peace Corps volunteers take a local name, often one given them by the host family they stay with during their induction - so Matt is "Zachariow" and Alex "Medina". Some, though, choose names of their own devising - so there has been a "Han Solo", a "Chewbacca" and one volunteer out here at the moment took the name "Genghis Khan". You may or may not find that funny in and of itself, but the locals heard it as "Gengis kanu", which means literally "bush life is not sweet". Apparently the villagers loved it.

After dinner I went back to Matt's to go to sleep - the only way to do this without a fan (and he doesn't have electricity) is (a) outside and (b) under a mosquito net. The mosquito net doesn't however, protect from other local wildlife like the small scorpion patrolling the yard. He didn't put me in the most restful of moods before bed, so I lay awake a while looking at the stars overhead, clear and bright in the cloudless desert sky.

On Sunday we got up with the sunrise, and went to try to plant some Acacia Senegal - but the locals were waiting for the arrival of some VIP with a car. Matt grumbled that we could just hire a donkey and cart, but after a futile couple of hours waiting for him and failing to find coffee, we gave up and went to do some work in Alex's field. After that - which was about as hard work in the heat as I'd been expecting - she cooked lunch for the three of us, and walked me back to the ferry while Matt went back to get planting. I missed the ferry as narrowly as I'd caught it on the way out, but this meant I got to take a pirogue back across, followed by a taxi-brousse with a door that didn't close and a small boy with half-a-dozen small birds tied unhappily to a stick sitting next to me. The cold water from the fridge back in Niamey has rarely tasted so good.

Niamey, offal, nicknames, and banditry

So I'm arrived on Monday morning, a little under two hours late, after an impromptu three-and-a-half hour wait for my flight out of Casablanca, which was two hours late. The only good thing about this was that I got talking to a Peace Corps volunteer called Tina who was heading back to Niamey after her holiday, so I had some insider info on the place when I got in, and thanks to her fluency in Hausa, I didn't get fleeced for the taxi into town.

It was 27 degrees when I landed at 5am and got progressively hotter from there, so I went to bed until just after noon under the AC, then headed down to the hospital to try to find my contact there. The third doctor I tried had heard of her and sent me off to a clinic up the road; I arrived just after she'd left, so then had to wait around for a Dr. Cheikh so I could get her phone number.

My slight unease at the absence of any central admin type office and my near-total reliance on one person was allayed by the fact everyone was so helpful - Dr. Cheikh was chatty, kept saying he was sure there would be no problems in a way which suggested pasty white people turned up in his clinic wanting to do electives roughly every second monday, and even lied about the quality of my French on several occasions.


So I left to wander around the city, which is quite pleasant. Although there's almost no grass, meaning that underfoot is either bitty tarmac or a reddish-orange dirt. The buildings are mainly concrete, although from the taxi ride in it looks like there are mud-brick and thatch areas on the outskirts. None of them are particularly attractive, however, and there's no Sheraton hotel here to dazzle among the shanty-towns and to allow Brangelina to stay in it while picking some poor orphan who will, over time, realise that they've traded the squalor of poverty for the degradations of a brief movie/musical/famous-for-being-famous career followed by a succession of stints in rehab and the front pages of most newspapers, culminating in a death from overdose or in a carcrash which may even be younger than they'd have got had they stayed put. There are some quite bizarrely attractive government buildings like the Ministry for Energy, which I will attempt to photograph later. Generally, though, it's a city plonked down in a bit of desert which happens to have a river nearby - so it's dry, dusty, and seriously, seriously hot. I got tanned yesterday wearing factor 40 - it's that hot.

Last night involved calling Dr. Marianne, and then heading out for dinner and drinks with a bunch of the Peace Corps lot (Tina, Noah, Emily, Whitney, and someone else). I say "someone else" because one of the first bits of info I got was that they are only all in Niamey every couple of months - normally they're out in villages (<1000 people, no electricity or running water, etc) where they work with the local people doing health education and so on. Part of the deal is that their host families give them names in the local language, i.e. which they can pronounce (apparently "Whitney" is impossible). The guy whose name I can't remember was given the nickname "Rashid", and although he is never called that by the other yanks, it removed any possibility I would remember his actual name. We went to a bar out west of the hospital (marked on the map above above the last R of 'river') and drank 60p giant bottles of beer; as ever, I fell asleep for about 20 mins in the middle of the evening, but woke up in time to head outside and find some street food. The others ordered rice and potatoes which the woman fished from the cauldron of meat sauce; thinking this a really poor option, I went for rice-and-meat. The sauce was great, but the meat was basically tubes - I couldn't decide if they were aorta or windpipe, but probably the former - so I think I'm going to stick to the potatoes next time...

This morning I checked out of the expensive hotel I'd been in the first night (28 quid a night!) and into the Catholic mission (7 quid a night) which is central, clean, and looks good. I also met Dr. Marianne in person, although this also involved running around with her while she helps Dr. Borreima organise a UNICEF conference on maternal and paediatric health. This will I'm sure be pretty interesting (and I may get to go), but meetings about it are not so interesting, and I battled manfully to stay awake. However, everything looks set for the elective, and I've decided to split it between paediatrics and internal medicine...so we shall see how that pans out.

The only other thing I must add is that if any of you are thinking of going on holiday, don't take traveller's cheques. Amex charge a flat fee of ten quid however much you exchange, and the bank takes another 2%; so if you try to change 100 euros, you end up paying 20% in fees. When you then try to change 400 euros, you get told you can only change a maximum of 200 a week. The fees on this mean that the bank gets 2%, Amex get just over 9%, and you get shafted. Had I taken it all in cash and been robbed, I'd have paid less for the excess on my insurance than I would in fees to Amex on the traveller's cheques I've brought...

I'm off to find something for dinner that isn't mostly offal. Bye for now.