I Live on a Mountain

I looked at my blog today and thought, what’s new to write? As if there was nothing to say! The last time I wrote, I hadn’t even moved into my new village. At the beginning of March the Assistant Program Country Director (APCD) of Agriculture took a bus up to my old village, packed up all my belongings, and moved them down to my regional capital, Dosso. I had to sort through my life and figure out from there what to bring to my new village. Wodin banda, after that, I took a break by eating lots of salad and watching the Departed and episodes of Dexter. The next day I was moved onto my mountain. The villagers gave me a happy welcome and looked on curiously as they saw how much stuff one white girl needs to survive.

For a few days I entertained myself by unpacking and making my house a home before running off to IST. In Niamey I bought a Tuareg leather-framed mirror and some pretty fabric. I nailed the mirror to my adobe brick walls and I sewed curtains for my two windows (not one but two!!!) and my door (which is the perfect height).

Bug story: It was either my first or second night in the village that the women crowded into my hut to see how I set everything up. All of a sudden a huge bug sprinted across the floor, over my friend Helima’s foot and under the bed. I freaked out, thinking that it was a scorpion, and tried to run out of the house. There were too many people at the doorway so I settled for cowering in the corner. The bug turned out to be a chariot spider. They are so big that scorpions hitch rides on their backs. It’s gross. Just nasty. Anyway, Helima smashed him and picked him up with her bare hands to convince me that they aren’t poisonous, just big. That taught me that bugs really do exist in Niger so I might want to be more careful. The next morning, a friend came to pay me a visit and I was talking to her with my back turned to my house. All of a sudden she looked past me and said in Zarma, “hmm, I believe there are many ants coming out of your walls.” I turned around and as if it was a nightmare, I saw a literal river of ants, huge red ants, pouring out of my hut walls. For the next three hours, I commissioned women, children and chickens to help me kill the ants. And for hours, rivers of these things just kept coming. I’m gone for three weeks for IST and my biggest fear is that the ants have conquered my hut as an above-ground annex to their colony.