le 20 decembre

Yesterday...

Will leave the note I typed in frustration. A mostly very frustrating day. Didn't know what to do in A.M. when I had to decide what to do for the day, and felt I didn't really have any control over my situation as it depended on what other people would have me do, how much money I had...external things. Many times, when I can't get a run and cals in without interferrance, I'm a little bit thrown off for the begining of the day, until I get re-settle myself. It's why I really want my own space at site where I can do cals, study, read, just collect myself. I always feel better when I am organized than when I am disorganized, whether this be physically, mentally, emotionally. But enough of that.

In addition, yesterday,

I have...
- saw how talking to a real person is so much a relief, even though I blog and journal a lot, it's not the same. I sit down with someone and actually talk and it's like I want to say a million things that have been swirling in my head...in Eng. I imagine this gets exponentially worse when at site. I'm hoping my phone will help allay this feeling some, which is why I'm waiting to get/ use my phone until I move to site.
- eaten bread that fell on the ground. Jam bambata. The girl dropped it and it like cartwheeled off the table, wiza (again, meaning "much to my suprise") Didn't want to be rude and just toss it so I said no prob. I was on antibiotics at the time, to I anticipate no problems...
- (again...a few times over the past week) felt the itch to pick up the pace in the run. Also bumped my runs up to a whopping 20min. My goal at site is to just run 30min every day. This is a fine base.
- for the first time, felt the itch to move to site. I started the app process maybe like 11mo ago. My primary job over the last 5-6 months has just been learning FR then Zarma, with no "garuntee" that I will be a PCV. I want to get sworn in, get my official PCV passport, feel like I'm a PCV, and settle into someplace I can make my own and not live out of bags...which I did for most of last year anyway. Of course, although this will be the biggest move of my life, and I just want to START, it will not be so dichotomous (well, I will be dropped alone in a strange town where I have no Eng speakers, but the learning will not stop and the doing will not being so abrupty).
- got much laughter from my host fam formy pronunciation of the Zarma word for to cry. It's a nasally "hin" or "he" sound, and I tried to articulate this by saying I have to say it with the nose and exaggerating the crinkling of my nose and I felt like I hit the sound, but they cracked up.
- ended day on high note, with, despite getting to bed later than planned, a fun conversation with a friend which included suprise pineapple eating.

Today, a person, ideally our "supervisor", from our villages came to site. Today and tomorrow we have a sort of conference with them, which based on today, I think is done pretty well. We get to chat with them, talk abuot Peace Corps mission and method, and talk about cross cultural differences and how both sides can be sensitive to each other. Given the timing and the crowd, I think it has a proper balance of specifity and general ideas, but other people were def falling asleep.

In addition, I have...
- felt like a millon dollars when putting on one of the pair of pants I had tailored from material I bought in the market (real pant material this time). For about..$12USD, I got material for two pairs of pants and then got the pants customed tailored. The have belt loops, side pockets. on back pocket, two buttons above the fly zipper (which is a sick neon green), and were cut perfectly for length with sweet hems at the bottom. The pair I wore today is a beige; I'm saving the pinstripe black pair for my secret swear in outfit. I put on the pants, and got that pang of nervousness like, Wow it can't get any better than this..I don't want to get these pants dirty, which of course are both silly. At the height of realizing the importance of the day, before I habituated to it, I thought I should have worn a tie.
- been reminded that I like the PC approach and am excited to be a part of this and...terribly nervous about having to like DO something. Afraid of straight up failure, which would be silly kinda, if I hadn't proved I could come quite close to complete failure with my thesis.
- just thought it was super cool how four languages were floating around the conference: English, FR, Hausa, and Zarma. The person from my site who came, not comeone from the clinic, but some farmer who may know someone at the clinic, does not speak FR. He went to Arabic/ Koronic school and speaks/ writes Arabic. This is intimidating kinda, but it means someone was translating from FR to Zarma for him and gives us a solid fifth language being used.
- gotten several compliments on my Zarma
- been very grateful and proud of my host family and wanted to give back to them and been a little frustrated that despite the many little habizes (petit suprises) I bring them, I cannot really articulate my thanks in FR or Zarma
- felt some better about my site when more people said the river is safe to boat on (hippo's are scared of people, right?!) and when I found out I DO have my own concession...it's just in another person's concession. I think I can make this work.
- felt super intimidated about my site. In addition to my town having 2500 people, there are four smaller villages within 3k or so that all use the CSI (clinic) in my town. In addition, there is an NGO that does agriculture work/ reseach either in my town or nearby. The program director said he put me there in part because I expressed an interest in FARM stuff, too. It just seems like too much bloody stuff going on, it's going to be real difficult to focus in on a manageable project/ job to do.
- been real dialed in and excited and thinking well about ideas, projects, methods of living at site. I get so excited I get worried I will forget stuff or not be able to pull it off or get tired and can't sustain the level of energy...I dunno. Nervous about all sorts of stuff.
- kinda felt Christmas coming when people were practicing Christmas carols. Of course, it's still probs 90-100 degrees during the height of the day, and we're in a kind of desert, so...yea, the Christmas spirit is easier to set aside here, which is good because it hopefully means I will remain less homesick about missing the holidays.
- thought that one trainer sounded waay more articulate in FR than Eng. From just the way he talks, what I can catch, and what a friend caught. We think we're so cool for learning a few Zarma phrases, but we must sound like idiots. It's a really hard lesson to learn, and sooo easy to forget when yours is the dominate language or discourse, but when language impedes communication you can never really know what is behind the other person's eyes...what wheels are turning in that brain of theirs. There was a good quote by someone that unfortunately, people often equate intelligence with the way people talk. In cross cultural situations, this simpistic algorithm doesn't really work.
- felt our list of facets of American culture that Nigeriens should try to understand got some lost in translation to FR. Not all of it, but some.
- gave a quick demo on American vs. Nigerien dancing...with commentary in Zarma of course to great applause and laughter...and a curtain call which was too bad because I was out of tricks. My hand stand thing is no good in this crowd cause one kid can do a backflip.
- when coming home late from the site, kinda walked into the house when my mama berre didn't have a shirt on. Now, I'm not sure what to make of this because women openly breast feed (not like American women being very careful about revealing themselves, Nigerien women just pull the whole breast out) in public, but from the way she acted it seemed like she was suprised so..I dunno. I stopped advancing into the house and talked to a kid from the doorway kinda. Kinda awk I guess.


I have not...
- (for the first time I think) really liked a meal put in front of me. A potato salad. Maybe because we had that the day I was sick on lang immersion.
- been super pumped that PC gave us very little prep on this day. They kinda explained the supervisor conference two days ago. Yesterday, it started to hit me that this would be improtant, and then it REALLY hit me today. We met someone from our site! We made our first impressions. And the very first activitiy we did was talk to them one on one for like 20 min. I would have liked to prepared some questions. I talked a bunch, but felt the pressure, and there were several moments of silence. I was a little more free making chit chat during breaks but also hid among the annassaras at other times. Some teachers were going around to help people, but some saw me fumbling through and decided I was doing fine, so no one sat down to traslate, so the conversation depended on my Zarma (my minimal FR does not mesh well with his Arabic).
- been super pumped about my Zarma when talking to the guy from my town. Again, it's one think to understand when my baba will talk slow and repeat things five times, but whens someone is talking fast, and soft like one dude, and going off on tangents, I really have to be dialed in to get anything at all, and many times I got close to nothing.
- transcended the confusion and poor planning when asked to kinda organize people to wait tables for our supervisors. Long story short, they did not plan it out properly, but it got done.
- performed our song/ rap during the song competition. All in all, it seemed an obvious choice: best case scenario, our supervisors think, "Huh, these kids are funny" or "Huh, they know Zarma pretty well to make some mildly innapropriate rhymes", while worst case scenario, they think "These kids are a joke, they are totally out of their mind, and we don't want to work with them". Yea, we're saving the rap for a more appropriate time...like Christmas.
- been satisifed that my Zarma has erased much FR. If I haven't noted it already, FR is the common language among educated people in Niger. All the government and official documents (e.g. any written documents I will encounter at the clinic) are in FR. I bloody wish I was fluent in FR.
- disagreed with my baba when he asked/ commented that PC's approach to invest in people, to "teach people how to fish" is not enough. I commented that, personally, I don't want to say PC says our approach is comprehensive. It's really hard, if not impossible, for a single organization to have a comprehensive approach. Peace Corps focuses on having people on the ground. Proponents of this approach sometimes criticise organizations of people who donate only money or come into a place, build something (like a well) and then leave. Proponents of the money donation or build-something approach sometimes critize the person on the ground approach as inefficient or too expensive or too fuzzy (what did you actually accomplish?). But I think both strategies are incomplete. Without someone providing the money for our projects (sometimes people at home, sometimes through collaboration with other NGO's or American non-profits) or our salaries (thank you tax payers), we could not do much of anything or even be here. Without people spending the time to learn the local language and live in individual commuities for any extended period of time, any attempt to help develop these communities will be aloof and ignorant of the community's own needs and perspective. I said something like that and received some applause...and then caught bits of the FR translation and wasn't entirely satisfied with it.
- been entirely convinved that the process by which they assign people to sites is much more than a kinda educated, kinda guesstimate, kinda coinflip that the person, in my case, may think about for 3 days, but that affects the next two years (and beyond) of my life.