Well, what now?

As I mentioned last time, I was planning on traveling down to Kirtachi again to bring materials to our Young Girl Scholarship student. It was supposed to be May and I, plus I was trying to convince Jimmie or Kurt to come with us. Well, Kurt and Jimmie are lame, and May got sick. So it was just me, all alone, to get the job done.

Let me start by saying that I feel that this trip has been my quintessential Peace Corps experience. You'll see why in a bit, but I really don't feel like I've done anything, or will do anything, that better matches what I was expecting when I signed on, or feels more like the pinnacle of my personal independance. It was an awsome, challenging, wonderfully rewarding trip.

In a nutshell, I rode a bush taxi 60km, then took a boat another 40k down the Niger river (5hours with no shelter from the sun), and walked another 3k on foot, just to deliver schoolbooks to a young girl in the African Bush. I have a hard time imagining how I'm going to top that.

So anyway, the trip itself. It started off fairly uninterestingly, like anything trip back to post or wherever. May and I woke early Tuesday morning, packed everything up, and headed to the Say Tessum (bush taxi station) to get a car. It didn't take too long for the car to fill up, so that was easy. And the hour or so ride was fairly uneventful, I was even somewhat comfortable. Mostly in bush taxis these days, I just kind of pass out once I'm suitably wedged in. It's quite easy when you don't actually have to support any part of your body. It's like being back in the womb.

In Say, we went to the inspection (the headquarters for the school district basically) and inquired about Fati, the scholarship recipient who had transfered to Say. We had told her to meet us there that day so we could give her the books and money and set up tutors and all that. But May was sick so we didn't stay long before we went back to her house. The school teachers also told me about the boats that left for Kirtachi and said I should go down to the river around noon, so I wasn't able to make sure Fati got her books.

I wandered down to the river front at the appropriate time, and was dissappointed to see that the boats, while the moto kind, did not have a canopy. Luckily, the dust is so rediculous right now that the sun was not actually too bad. Though rather than wait in the boat under the sun, I was told to go and wait under a mango tree until it was time to leave.

There were a bunch of men under the tree and they all knew about the Peace Corps and started talking about all the old Kirtachi region volunteers. Apparently many of them used to go through Say to go to the hostel in Kirtachi. It was actually a lot of fun hanging out with them. One of them was a guardian or something for the hostel and he seemed to know all the old volunteers and knew all the PC drivers and such.

Anyway, the boat finally left about 1pm...more or less the hottest part of the day. Once we were underway, however, there was a decent breeze since we were on the river. Promptly after setting off, I heard some commotion in the back and when I turned around...there was a sheep in the middle of the river swimming toward the shore. Apparently it had not been tied up and so jumped out of the moving boat, forcing us to loop around again and fish it out.

The river was absolutely glorious...for about the first 2 hours. I took several pictures (all uploaded to a new album in picasa) of the passing landscape. Some of the river side villages looked awsome. Part of me wished I had been posted there. There was actually grass, and lots of trees, and also, of course, the river.

After a while though, I got sick of sitting on a 4x4 bench in the sun and I started to suffer. This was eased somewhat by the fact that there was a guy selling hari yeno(cold water) and kossams (yogurt in a bag) in the boat. Also people were really good about sharing any food and stuff. The boat was overall a pleasant journey, especially once I shifted to sit on some sacks of millet instead of the bench.

After the 5hr boat ride, it was only a short walk to Kirtachi itself. I still find it kind of an amazing accomplishment that I, all on my own, was able to travel down an African river, to a village I had only been to once before, where no one speeks any English, alteast 40km from another American, with no cellphone service, and have them provide me with a bed, food, and water to drink and bathe. On top of this I was able to, in a local language which I have barely been speaking a year, carryout a meeting where I negotiated an arrangement for tutors for a young school girl and manage all the financial decisions involved. Like I said before, I really don't see myself having a more stereotypical Peace Corps experience than this.

Kirtachi itself was also awsome. It is gorgeous down there, as you can see from some of the pictures I've posted. It's green. There are trees. There's water. There's sandy beaches. I wish I could have been posted down there. The people were also amazingly nice and thankful. They seemed to actually understand Peace Corps and why we were there. Part of me likes to attribute that to the fact that they are so far from all the NGO/AID work that happens closer to the big cities.

After the meeting I had Wednesday morning with the school teacher getting everything set up, I went and hung out in the market for a while. Mostly I just hung out under a shade hangar until there was a car ready to go. This is the truck I took back. I was riding in the front, squished in with two fat alhajia's (large bitchy women). For the 80km of the laterite road, this was not a pleasant ride. The road was such we had to slowly maneuver around dips and bumps and trees and such. It took us about 5 hours to finally get to Niamey. While I was able to get back to Niamey in one day, I think in the future I will opt to take the boat in the evening after market and just spend the night in Say.

Part of me looks at this experience and how thankful the people were and I am reminded that Peace Corps can do good things. I feel good and want to do more small scale helpful things. On the other hand, part of me feels like anything else I do is going to be frustrating and discouraging and not do any good anyway and I should just walk away with this one highlight awsome experience.

I would say most of us have probably hit a similar mid service hump. I'll just have to seek out more of these fulfilling experiences.

BTW, there's some more pictures posted in my picasa albums.