Hotel Terminus Niamey

... intensive care hospital for critically malnourished children) around the area. There will be four or five expats and lots and lots of local staff managing the project. My title is "Admin-Fin" and I am in charge of HR and the Accounting for the project. Not having much (or any) experience in Accounting, this will definitely be a challenge. As part of my job I will have to visit the hospitals a lot, which is fantastic. I wonder if they will let me use a sphygnomanometer ...

... Calvin was supposed to meet me in Benin but his passport was stuck in the benin embassy, so since i could get into ***** for free, i caught a bus up th**e asap: it was too lonesome not speaking french and having to be in by dark because i couldnt tell if it was safe to be out alone aft** dark: so i got to the bus station ...

... chaud que le pays est obligé de s'arrêt** de 13 à 16 heures! Le soir venu, je dis au revoir à mes amis car mon bus pour le Burkina Faso part le lendemain à 5h30 et j'ai décidé d'all** dormir dehors devant la gare routière. Pas d'au revoir qui tiennent, mes amis m'accompagnent et passent la nuit à mes côtés, allongés par t**re ou sur un banc, la solidarité Africaine en manche courte dans la nuit "glaciale"!

... actually came from Togo. The pastor himself was from Togo and felt called by God to plant this church in Niamey. I'm always impressed and humbled by the incredible missionary spirit of African believ**s. I have met many who are crossing great boundaries and enduring great risk and struggles in ord** to carry the gospel to oth**s. Its amazing. From h**e, and on such a sweet note, I left for the airport to return to Chicago.

... cookies in the street if one so chooses! Vehicles have to be v**y careful to navigate through the streets so they don't get stuck. In fact, we did get stuck at one point and had to get out and push the car. The irony of this to me was that at the same time we w**e pushing the car out of a drift of sand, back home in Chicago a snowstorm was hitting and many cars w**e being pushed out of drifts of snow. The contrast is v**y int**esting.

... from about 3 hours in I was in t**ritory I'd nev** seen before. And once you cross the ***** riv**/bord**, the land changes almost immediately, as do the sights along the road. I read a book the Van Langenburgs (sorry about the spelling, I expect it's v**y wrong) gave me by a British woman who came to Benin, hired a taxi driv** and had him take h** all ov** the country and see Benin as it really is, villages and voudou/fetishm, ev**ything. It was good fun reading about h** travels ...

... camping trip and the next morning left Niamey in diff**ent directions. Around the paramet** of the Sahara des**t exists a zone called the Sahel in which tuffs of grass, shrubs and little tortured trees sort of grow. It was east through the Sahel to a small village called Dogondoutchi that my bus brought me. H**e in a town of nothing particular to see or do I p**fected the art of aimless wond**ing and took photos of rocks. The evening found me having a pointless drink when ...

... the silv** work is amazing and we w**e able to get some nice jewelry. Our most amazing exp**ience in ***** was seeing the last h**d of wild giraffes. In town we picked a city taxi that drove about an hour out of town to the guide stand, which was a grass lean-to. We picked up a guide, for a fee of course, and he directed us down a VERY sandy bush path that our driv** had apparently maneuv**ed before. He was driving like a madman and we w**e spinning out and getting ...

... 11 gallons of wat**, 3 days worth of dry food, a blanket, 3kgs of chewing tabacco (for the village chief), 3kgs of tea and a turban. The bus was 34 hours late. Yes, 34 hours. Eventually the bus (which looks more like a tank: res**ve fuel tanks, sand ladd**s, winches, wat** supplies etc.) leaves acconpanied by the obligatory military escort, which consists of about 10 sunglassed, turbaned, semi-uniformed guys all holding giant black machine guns, in ...

... of pajamas with feet. So, our little guide leads our small but courageous taxi off the paved road and into the bush. Pretty soon, we aren't on a road anymore. Our driv** squeezes between short trees and shrubs scraping the sides of his car and more than once protests that we could not POSSIBLY go down that path. Some of the paths, that are more like miniscule openings between trees, he does accept to drive through are so narrow that I wond** how the car will fit, and it is I ...