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Originally uploaded by er1nh

I’ve been corresponding with a first year elementary school French class in New Jersey. After receiving letters from the students, I wrote a group response in November, which I think helps illustrate certain aspects of life here in Niger. Enjoy!

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Bonjour classe!

J’espère que tout va bien avec vous et que vous avez commencé de bien apprendre le français. C’est difficile au commencement, mais soyez patients! Comme on dit ici au Niger, “Sannu, sannu bata hanu zua” (Hausa) ou “Petit a petit l’oiessau fait son nit.”

Thank you so much for writing to me! It was so much fun to get your letters in the mail. Since I am so far from my friends and family, it is always a wonderful treat to receive mail that reminds me of home. I am glad that you are enjoying my blog and pictures. The world is very big and diverse, so it’s important to learn all about it! You asked very good questions. I’ve been busy moving into my new town and house, but now I have a chance to try my best to respond to your questions.

When I came to Niger, I had to take four weeks of French to refresh and get a little better- so I had French class three hours a day, five days a week, for four weeks. Wow! But it did get a lot better. Then my language classes switched to Hausa, which is REALLY hard! Now that I’m here in my town, I don’t study French because I speak it well enough, and I focus on Hausa.

I described the food here in Niger a little bit. People eat similar things most of the time, and they always eat their food all mixed together in one bowl- some type of starch with a sauce on top. Almost everybody in the country, including people in towns and cities, grow most of the food that their families eat themselves. For instance, I live in a big town, but on the outskirts of the town, everyone has plots of farmland where they grow crops. They plant them during rainy season (June- September) and then harvest them afterwards (October – December). They grow sorghum, maybe corn, beans, and mostly millet. The whole family works together all year long with the crops. After they harvest, they store most of the food in a grain hut in their concession because this food needs to last them until next harvest. Then, to prepare the millet, the women shuck the seeds off of it and then pound it using a big wooden mortar and pestle, then they add water and cook it into a thick consistency, kind of like baked mashed potatoes. Then they put sauce on it for dinner. It’s actually pretty good. It doesn’t have a strong taste, but takes on the taste of the sauce (like tofu). They cook in pots over an open fire, so in order to make lunch or dinner, the women also have to go get firewood from the bush (unless they’re in a city, where you can buy it). Most people in towns (and no one in villages) don’t have running water, so getting water is also the women’s job. In a village they have to go to the closest well (sometimes a mile away) and pull all the water they need, every day. In towns there are often pumps where you can pay to get water. Then they carry it back to their houses on their heads. Needless to say, life is extremely physically challenging here, especially for the women! Their work ends when they go to sleep and begins again when they wake up at dawn!

One person asked me about telephones. There are landlines here in Niger, but not very many, and mainly just in the capital, Niamey. Over the past few years something interesting has been happening in Niger and throughout all of Africa. As you know from your own neighborhood, to have a landline telephone, you need a lot of cords and cables that connect your house to the telephone pole, then to the main system. We’re lucky in America because people started installing those cables decades ago, right after the telephone was invented. In Africa, however, no one ever did that. We’re also lucky in America because it’s pretty cheap and easy to hook up new cords, build buildings, etc. In Africa, it’s really expensive to do those things. So it would be really expensive and take a long time to start to try to give everyone a phone in their house. Luckily, cell phones have been invented and all you need to make cell phones work are to have cell phone towers and a cell phone. So there are cell phone companies all over Africa that are busy setting up towers all over the place so that people can use telephones. Especially in cities, everyone has a cell phone and that’s how they communicate! Most places in Africa just skipped over the landline phase of telecommunication. I, too, have a cell phone and it’s great! My other Peace Corps friends and I can text message each other and my mom and dad can call me, so I’m able to talk to them about once a week. It’s really cool to be so far away and still be able to talk on the phone to America!

A few people asked me about water. I described water generally above, but I’ll give some more details now. In southwestern Niger, the climate is more tropical, and the Niger River flows through part of the country, so some people get their water from that. I live in the eastern half of the country, and pretty close to the Sahara Desert. I live in a region called the Sahel, which means it is very dry but not quite the desert. There are no rivers nearby, so all water comes from the ground. In a lot of places here in the north, the water table is very deep (because it’s so dry), so people have to dig very very deep wells and pull the water all the way up from there. I live in a big town, so the water company gets the water out of the ground and then runs it through pipes to pumps (like in towns in America). The difference, though, is that most people don’t have faucets in their houses; they get the water from a neighborhood pump and carry it to their house. This is the same for me. The 12 year old boy of the family I’m friends with next door, brings me 2 big buckets of water everyday from the pump across the street and I pay him a little bit each week. We’re lucky to not have to use a well!

One person asked me about traveling and where I like best and where I’d like to go. It’s really hard to say, since every place is so different. I’ve been to Chile and Puerto Rico and I really like Latin America because I like the food, the dancing, and the way people enjoy life. Having been living in Africa for almost four months now, I think that I can say the same thing about the people here. Although they have very little (I make a very good salary at about $250 a month), people appreciate and enjoy life and the families and friends in a way that we often forget to in America. I think because they have so little, it’s easy for them to remember what’s really important in life- the people around you! I hope to do more traveling in West Africa over the next two years that I’m here in the Peace Corps. Afterwards, I’d love to go to India and Brazil at some point.

I hope I was able to answer some of your questions. Please send me more! It’s fun for me to tell you about life in Niger. It’s very very different here, but the people are basically the same as Americans- they work hard, take care of their families, love their friends and families. It’s really hard for me to be away from the people I love and a culture that’s familiar, but I’ve made good friends here both other Peace Corps Volunteers (and also Nigeriens in my town) and it’s exciting to learn about another culture too!

Bon courage avec le français!

Amités,
Erin