Letter From The Country Director.

WE VOLUNTEERS IN NIGER are fortunate that we have Jim Bullington as our country director. He takes an active interest in supporting the lives of volunteers. He speaks with a Southern twang that is especially noticeable when he speaks French. And his wife Tuy-Cam makes sure volunteers do not leave Niamey without eating her trademark carrot cake.
The following, which I copied from the Friends of Niger website, is a letter he wrote providing more information about the food crisis and Peace Corps' involvement with it:

The developing food crisis in Niger has gotten increasing attention in European and American media in recent days, and many Niger RPCVs, current PCVs, and their families and friends have been asking for more information and looking for ways in which they might help. Therefore, I thought it would be useful to provide this summary of the situation and address the question of Peace Corps involvement.
Last year's harvest was very poor in the agro-pastoral zone, i.e. more or less along the 14th parallel: Tillaberi-Ouallam-Filingue-Tahoua-Dakoro-Tanout. Forage for the animals is also scarce. This zone includes about a fourth of the population, some 3 million people. In the rest of the country, the harvest was normal or better.
Thus, while the food crisis is not country-wide in scope, it is very serious for those in the affected zone. The usual coping mechanisms (temporary emigration, animal sales, "famine food," etc.) have been employed sooner and more extensively than in normal years, and various relief operations by the government (sale of reserve food stocks at subsidized prices) and donors (food for work, grain banks, etc.) have already begun. However, there are reports that some people (estimates of the number vary widely) are not just hungry but starving.
A major problem in addressing this crisis is that food grains are in short supply throughout West Africa, and prices are very high; so simply providing money, while needed, is not a sufficient response to meet the overall requirements for more food. The government and donors are seeking to import additional supplies.
The rains began in late May, and crops are planted in most areas. However, the harvest won't come in the agro-pastoral zone until about September. Moreover, as always, there is no assurance that the rains will continue in a sufficient amount or timely manner.
This situation poses challenges for PC/Niger and our PCVs, about a fourth of whom are located in the agro-pastoral zone where the problem is centered.
For many good reasons, it is not appropriate for PCVs to simply pass out free food to their villagers:
* PC focuses on development, not relief; and therefore we are not trained and equipped for such operations, which require special expertise and professionalism. Well-meaning amateurs can do more harm than good, while getting themselves into trouble.
* Since PC as an organization has no resources for food aid, there is no waythat an individual PCV could be able to feed everyone in the village. Thus the question inevitably arises of who gets food and who doesn't, with the PCV caught in the middle. This could endanger the PCV's security as well as undermine his/her effectiveness as a development agent.
* If one PCV hands out food in his/her village, this creates expectations for successor PCVs and PCVs in other villages, expectations that cannot be met (and should not be met if our primary objective remains long term, sustainable development).
On the other hand, PC is also a people-to-people organization, and we are acutely aware of the humanitarian imperative to do something when friends and neighbors are starving. This is not only a moral issue but also a practical problem: Development work is not possible when people can't eat, and the PCVs' own safety and health (physical and mental) may become problematic in such conditions.
Thus, while we can't and shouldn't get involved in direct food relief by PCVs, neither can we turn our backs and do nothing, particularly in those places where PCVs may be living among starving people.
Here are some things we are doing:
* CRS has received a grant from USAID for an emergency food relief project. They would like to have a few PCVs to help administer it. PC staff is currently assessing the situation of PCVs in seriously affected villages to see if it would be appropriate for some of them to work temporarily in this project.
* We are looking at the possibility of collaboration with other NGOs, including Africare and World Vision, that have access to food aid and the expertise and means to deliver it effectively.
* PCVs have organized 13 village food banks, and the government has agreed to our request to provide an initial stock of 10 tons of grain for each (although they have not been able to give us a date when this will be done).
As the food crisis develops, we will continue to monitor the situation and look for ways in which PC could effectively respond.
RPCVs and family members who would like to make a personal contribution to food relief in Niger might wish to consider donations to the UN's World Food Program, the lead agency in addressing the crisis. You can go to: www.wfp.org, click on the "donate" box at the left of the page, click on "WFP operations in" and scroll down to Niger.

J. R. Bullington
Country Director
Peace Corps/Niger

Pick Your Google Language.

YOU CAN PICK many languages for the Google search page, from Afrikaans to Zulu. For the eminent scholar, there is Latin. For those tormented by wascally wabbits, there is Elmer Fudd. For those who preferred they lived in the 24th century in a fictional universe (i.e. Trekkies), there is Klingon. And, my favorite, as it is the elusive fourth language in the country where I lived for three years: Romansh.

A Car Tale.

I STARTED TO WRITE about my suburban hometown, and I somehow ended up with this story about an automotive family of four.

Minivan, daughter of Station Wagon and Van, and Sports Utility Vehicle, son of Pick-Up Truck and Winnebago, had both reached 30,000 miles, so they were looking to park and start a family. Their married friends, Harley and Moped, set them up on a blind date at the Gas Station.
It was love at first sight. SUV was attracted to Minivan’s perky headlights and was impressed by her high gas mileage, seating capacity, and crash test rating. Minivan was attracted to SUV’s firm bumper and was impressed by his four-wheel drive, cargo space, and towing capacity. The date went so well that they went to the Car Wash!
Soon SUV and Minivan were married and bought a garage together. Their first child was a boy whom the nurses say was the biggest baby they had ever seen. They named him Hummer. Their second child was a girl who got even better gas mileage than her mother. They named her Hybrid. SUV and Minivan usually shared parental duties, but sometimes Minivan got annoyed with SUV because he would refuse to change the children’s oil.
When the children went through puberty, SUV and Minivan had new problems to solve. Hummer was growing so fast that he needed new Michelins every three months, and he just ate so much gasoline. Hybrid kept getting phone calls from Sports Cars, and for some reason she decided she would only eat ethanol.
SUV and Minivan both had issues because they were reaching 50,000 miles. SUV’s health was not good. He nearly had to go to the Junkyard because he overheated, but he was towed to the Auto Repair Shop just in time to receive a new engine and transmission. Minivan was insecure about her looks, so she went to the Body Shop, where she got a new paint job and a second passenger side door.
The children are now in college. Hummer goes to Talladega where he is an All-American defensive lineman. Hybrid goes to Daytona where she is majoring in Import Relations. SUV and Minivan retired, bought a ferry, and are now somewhere in the Caribbean.

There Is No Food Here.

IN A COUNTRY on the edge of a desert roughly the size of the United States, hunger is a way of life. Even in years when the rains are satisfactory, villagers’ stock of food dwindles while they wait to reap next year’s harvest. The period is what Peace Corps Volunteers call “hungry season,” and roughly, from June until harvesting begins in late September, one meal must suffice. That meal is made of millet, which women pound into flour and cook into a thick paste, the consistency that would result from putting too many oats in boiling water while preparing oatmeal.
This year hungry season has begun many months earlier, and in the unluckiest villages, the supply of millet has long been depleted, forcing large families to forage for berries and leaves, sell their livestock, and migrate south, away from the desert, to find work and beg for food. The current situation is so desperate because nature was particularly cruel to Niger last year. In certain areas of the country the rain did not fall often enough, and swarms of locusts devoured the crop that somehow managed to grow out of the sandy soil. Altogether yields fell by 80 percent. What was harvested was quickly consumed, and livestock had nothing to graze. The hunger set in earlier than usual, and without food for such a prolonged period, people are now beginning to starve.
The international organization that has been sounding the alarm the loudest about the food crisis in Niger is Doctors Without Borders (DWB). Well-known for its quick response in providing emergency care to hotspots worldwide, DWB also intervenes in countries where the health care system does not have the resources to provide adequate care. Since August 2001, DWB has operated a malnutrition clinic in Maradi, the city where I lived until March, when I moved nine hours west to Niamey. Treating children up to five years old who suffer from severe malnutrition, the clinic is the center for what DWB calls “one of the organization's biggest nutritional operations in the past 30 years.” At the beginning of this year, the staff at the clinic noticed they were treating an abnormally high number of children, and the numbers confirmed their suspicion. In February an American doctor with DWB came to Peace Corps Volunteers in Maradi and asked them about the state of their villages, specifically those clustered around Dakoro, a prefectural capital of 10,000 eighty miles north of Maradi. My friends’ matter-of-fact testimony—“my villagers will run out of food soon”—corroborated what the numbers said: the situation was already serious and would only get worse.
The most glaring aspect of this ordeal is that unlike a natural disaster or war, the evidence that such a food crisis could occur was available in October. In its briefing document released June 28, DWB begins by asking, “Tens of thousands of lives threatened in Niger: where is the humanitarian assistance?” It continues, “No money, no food aid. Such is the reality today in Niger for families suffering from food shortages. And yet, the government and institutional donors had announced in October 2004 that one-quarter of the population – around 3.5 million people – were threatened by this serious crisis.” Pleas for aid have mostly been ignored, and now the disputed question is how to distribute the food. DWB and the World Food Program are calling for free distribution while the government has been subsidizing sales in worries that free food will threaten long-term food security. In the latest news, a UN representative who visited Niger this week said, “The response of the international community to the Niger tragedy has been shown to be totally insufficient.”
While DWB questions the response of other international development organizations and the Nigerien government, it has managed quite well on its own. To handle the influx of severely malnourished children, nearly triple the number of children treated than at this time last year, DWB has increased its capacity, opening four more malnutrition clinics, including one in Dakoro, and expanding its ambulatory, outpatient capabilities.
The food crisis has now reached its breaking point. Rainy season has begun promisingly, and if the rainfall continues to accumulate at its current pace, famine will be averted.
The alternative is unthinkable.
On The Edge
I have done my best to convey this problem—people need food—that at first seems so simple yet becomes more and more complex once you begin to mull it over. The paradox is that action must be taken swiftly to prevent people from hopelessly dying, yet the delicate measures that need to be taken to insure that Nigeriens do not depend on aid for survival require time to consider.
After living here for two years, I still am continually amazed by the fact that people live on the edge of the Sahara. The nomadic Tuareg and Fulani peoples still carry on their nomadic traditions as pastoral herders, some even venturing into the desert itself.
The closer you move to the endless seas of sand, the signs of civilization you spot—mud huts, rusted chassis, a lone man leading a donkey by his hand—begin to vanish. My urge is to grab that man by the shoulders and tell him to keep walking and get as far away from the desert as he possibly can.
Yet by some means people survive here with unparalleled fortitude and resourcefulness, treating death as just another incomprehensible fact of life. A typical greeting to mourners: “How is the thing that happened?” The answer: “Have patience.”
Insufferable Sadness
Having not dealt with death back home, volunteers are shocked when faced with its grim presence in Niger. The sadness is staggering. As volunteers in a country where one of four children die before the age of five, spending two years in a village where the meaning of such statistics is witnessed first hand places an understandable burden on each of us. The feeling of helplessness and powerlessness is overwhelming, and it is a difficult concept for our family and friends back home to grasp.
I talked to a volunteer who recently returned to the States, and she described the horror in her friends’ eyes when she told them about the suffering in her village.
“They cannot understand why I didn’t do anything,” she said. “They cannot understand why I would watch it all happen.”
We volunteers are not doctors. We are not loan officers. We are just bright-eyed do-gooders with adventure coursing through our veins. When villagers ask us for medication, we generally refuse. When they ask us for money, we say no even more forcefully. But, in some cases, for those Nigeriens whom we call our friends, who have shown us such unconditional love and patience during our stay in their country, it would break our hearts if we did not help. We understand that for them to approach us for medicine, money, or food violates their personal and cultural values. We understand that it is truly their last hope.
But just imagine if one volunteer decided to buy sacks of grain and distribute them indiscriminately in his or her village. Perhaps certain families would accuse the volunteer of favoritism toward certain families, or maybe the village chief, because he owns the most fertile farmland in the entire village, would decide his family deserves more food than others. It is conceivable that neighboring villages, hearing the news that some white person is giving out free food, would send out representatives to demand their fair share. Two things are certain, regardless of what happens: The volunteer’s credibility is shattered, and the reputation of Peace Corps as a development organization is endangered.
The village in this example is a microcosm in the current debate about aid to Africa. I am frankly tired of all the grandstanding when it comes to this discussion. When a rock star meets with politicians, perhaps he should scrap his shades and leather jacket for a suit and tie. The bottom line is alleviating poverty is not a cut-and-dry exercise. It is not a noble exercise, but one in humility. Simple proclamations and shocking statistics are beneficial for the headlines, but kind words and photo opportunities do not save lives. We must admit that we may not have the answers. We must admit that we do not know if our actions will end up doing any good.
I cannot ponder these issues for too long, or I would go crazy. Whenever my mind gets too heavy, I think of one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day, featuring my favorite actor, Bill Murray. In the film, Murray plays Phil Connors, a miserable, egotistical weatherman who is fated to live the same day over and over again before he gets it right—meaning, among other things, he performs the Heimlich maneuver on an overzealous steak eater, learns how to sculpt magnificent figures in ice with a chainsaw, buys an entire insurance portfolio from hapless Ned Ryerson, and, predictably, gets the girl. Yet before performing all these feats, he must abandon one of his dreams: saving the life of a homeless man. He feeds him and takes him to the hospital, but the man’s ultimate fate is to die on that Groundhog Day.
I close with a paragraph from William Langwiesche’s excellent book Sahara Unveiled: “The Sahara is the earth stripped of its gentleness, a place that consumes the careless and unlucky. But all you need to navigate it is a suitcase, a bit of cash, an occasional bus ticket, the intention to move on. Such a simplicity appeals to me….The route [through the Sahara] would take me through the desert’s hyperarid core—a place where plateaus nearly sterilized by drought, where bacteria cannot survive, and where cadavers, partially mummified, decompose slowly like sun-dried dates. The Sahara has horizons so bare that drivers mistake stones for diesel trucks, and so lonely that migrating birds land beside people just for the company. I lay in Algiers in a hotel in a storm, thinking there is not better sound than the splash of rain. The desert teaches by taking away.”
That desert, remember, is the size of the United States, and rather slowly but quite surely, it is moving southward. For such forces, we do not have an answer. In fact, we do not even have a prayer.

A Book, A Movie, A CD, A Nickname, And Some Math.

A New Book I Want to Read: Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. Talk about muckraking…
A New Movie I Want to See: March of the Penguins. The penguin is my favorite animal.
A New Album I Want to Hear: Illinoise, Sufjan Stevens.
A Regrettable Omission from Yesterday’s Post
I must apologize to my friend Ben for neglecting to mention one of my most memorable nicknames: Diesel Driscoll. In his comment, Ben wrote, “Let’s not forget…that name was integral to your collegiate development.” He is definitely right.
The nickname Diesel Driscoll was coined my senior year. Paying homage to my middle name—of which I am proud because it is my mother’s maiden name—this designation illustrates the giddy-yup, sleigh-riding side of my personality.
Ben, I look forward to breaking out Diesel at an event which you will soon begin to plan—gasp!—your wedding. Congratulations, buddy.
An Amusing Math Trick
I enjoy puzzles of every variety. Crosswords, mazes, cryptograms, jumbles, paint by numbers, the Rubik’s Cube, word searches, acrostics, logic problems, math stumpers, and riddles—to name a few. Here’s an amusing trick with numbers that should make you grin:
Take the number of nights you like to make love per week. Multiply it by 50. Then add 44. Next, multiply it by 200. If you have celebrated your birthday this year, add 105; if not, add 104. Subtract your year of birth.
Your result should be a five digit number. The first digit is the number you first chose. The last two digits are your age. And the remaining digits signify your preferred position.
COMING UP…
Tomorrow: There is No Food Here. People are starving in Niger. Due to last year’s poor rainfall coupled with an invasion by locusts, millions currently face a food crisis. If the rains do not fall in the few months, famine will set in.
Friday: A Suburb Quite Like All The Others, Part I. Where have I lived most of my life? You will soon find out.

Why Am I Here?

NO, PEOPLE. This entry is not my stab at that metaphysical nightmare. Rather this post will attempt to explain why I bother to express myself in cyberspace.
The answer simply is that I need to write. The activity is my spiritual sustenance. If I do not write daily, I cease to be myself.
This unfortunate event transpired when I matriculated at Northwestern University. I promised myself that I would branch out in college, meaning that I would expand on the persona illustrated in my high school newspaper column I Schmenn, Therefore I Am – the sensitive, pensive overachiever. I would be like the genie forsaking his lamp or the jack springing out of his box. Or something like that.
My first gambit was to drop the first syllable in my name and introduce myself as Drew. At the beginning, my subconscious was quite confused that people were not calling me Andrew, but with the jumble of experiences that overwhelmed me during my first weeks outside of Carmel, Indiana, my new moniker was one of just countless befuddlements my psyche had to deal with. At my first Cubs game I witnessed Sammy Sosa hit his 60th home run. At a taping of The Jenny Jones Show, I told Dana and Danielle, two loud, buxom sisters from New Jersey that were vying for title of “America’s Sexiest Big Babe,” “You say you’re a quarter. You’re more like a roll of quarters, and I be goin’ to the Laundromat right now.” At the University of Chicago I saw an advanced screening of American Beauty after which Kevin Spacey and other stars from the movie answered questions from the audience. I made out with a girl whom I had known for less than one week. Yet the most shocking event of those fledgling days as Drew was this proclamation, “I don’t know what I will major in, but I know it won’t be English.” Limits were being tested. Barriers were being broken. World records were being set. I was, in one word, dangerous.
The high jinks continued. I was elected co-social chair of my dorm with an ingenious campaign, featuring myself in doctored ads, including Schmentos, the Schmen’s Wearhouse, and Mountain Drew. Traveling by myself for the first time, I went to Boston for spring break. Near the end of freshman year, I went to Art & Science and got the tips of my short brown hair frosted blond. Over the summer I grew my hair out for the first time ever, causing my mom’s friends to ask her if I had gotten a perm, for one day, when I looked in the mirror – eureka! – I discovered that my hair was curly.
Sophomore year my hair got out of control. It was not trimmed for more than ten weeks. I got my eyebrow pierced and then got a ring in my upper right ear. I decided I would major in economics. Clearing something was wrong.
Groping for stability. I stumbled on an activity that sustained me – writing poetry. Instead of poring over problem sets, I spent my time composing hokey transcendental verse. Instead of examining the wonders of supply and demand, I read books that were recommended by staff at Border’s Books and Music. While reading Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius in my room, a bleary-eyed friend laden with a backpack popped in and asked, “How do you have time to pleasure read during finals?”
The sensibility stuck. Dropping my economics major completely, I enrolled in the poetry sequence of creative writing program, got a thrill from reading such obscure works as George Eliot’s Romola, and completed the English degree requirements in the nick of time, enabling me to come to Niger as a Peace Corps Volunteer….
…And here I am now—writing for sheer pleasure and naked necessity—and I could not be happier. You can call me anything. I go by Andrew, Drew, or Razak, my Nigerien name. My nicknames include Drew Down, Drewsifer, Drew Doggy Dogg, and Sir Chumps-A-Lot – thanks to my brother.
In archaic English: Hence I embrace the beauteous weblog.
In modern American English: That’s why I blog.
Take your shoes off. Make yourself at home.

It's Rainy Season!

Dust Cloud
Originally uploaded by drewniger.

YOU CANNOT MISTAKE a thunder(dust)storm in Niger because a giant dust cloud racing toward you is quite the meteorological wonder. Obviously an umbrella is futile here.
Niger is in desperate need of rain because of the current food crisis. Precipitation falls from only June until September, and ample rainfall is needed for an adequate harvest. Thankfully, the heavens have answered. This weekend, in fact, more than two inches fell in Niamey.