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  Niamey, Niger
Friday, June 29, 2007

Well, ladies and gents. My first entry actually in Niamey.

Weirdly enough, Niger, with it's 40+ degree weather and incredible humidity has been quite refreshing for me. A larger group of Aussies, a bunch of people my own age, church in English, being flat-out busy in the office, reliable internet access, meat you can chew without having to cook it in a pressure cooker, the list goes on and on! Oo, oo, and the American rec centre with air conditioning, lasagne, and sattelite TV from the states, with shows I recognise, like CSI and Supernatural! The strangest/littlest things can make the most enormous difference way out here in the middle of nowhere.

Being here has really highlighted to me that, whilst Parakou is essentially Benin's 3rd city, it really is a bit of a bush town

Mr. Curious

. For me, it's not really about the restaurants or the shops here, although they clearly demonstrate that Niamey is a big city, it's about attitude. In Parakou I can't get away with walking down the street without greeting every single sole I meet, and I've become friendly with my neighbours because, essentially, I've had no choice. Whereas here, I couldn't pick the neighbours out in a line-up and the only person who regularly greets in one of the 15 guardiens I walk past between my house and the office. Also, in Parakou I am one of, at most, 30 white people. Niamey, on the other hand, is absolutely crawling with white people! Having had far more significant (and well publicised) drought and famine problems, Niamey is full to bursting with development organisations - UNICEF, World Vision, you name it, they're here and each of those organisations comes complete with a good stock of white people. So, whilst people rightly describe Niger as the least francophone country in all of West Africa, I've never encountered so many English speakers in the one place - even people on the bus on the way up here. I must say, I enjoy the small town attitude a lot better. It has allowed me to get to know people (locals) a lot better and feel more like I'm in Africa and part of African life, whereas here you can feel very apart from that life. It also made sure I took being part of a local church seriously and not just fall back on the English services. And I will be really happy to get back to 8.00am starts in Benin - they start at 7.30am every morning here, which is even more uncivillized that 40+ temperatures, if you ask me.

Oh, hey, that brings me to the bus trip up here. I've written about it in emails to a few people, but it just occured to me that I hadn't written about it here. I actually quite enjoyed it, although I think we can attribute a lot of that to novelty factor. In the end it took something like 11 hours, but it really didn't feel that long. I've felt a lot more sick and tired of the bus on a 7 hour trip from Cotonou to Parakou than I did on this particular trip. I've only been as far as Kandi previously, so from about 3 hours in I was in territory I'd never seen before. And once you cross the Niger river/border, 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 very wrong) gave me by a British woman who came to Benin, hired a taxi driver and had him take her all over the country and see Benin as it really is, villages and voudou/fetishm, everything. It was good fun reading about her travels through the north whilst driving along the very same roads. 
Also, I was a single white chick on a bus full of Africans who clearly thought I was probably quite out of my mind and needed to be very well looked after, so I scored a double seat to myself (just as well really, double is a fairly generous description - they're more like 1 and a half and are sometime occupied by 3, plus kid/s on lap/s). When we got to the border, I had my own little line for foreigners, which I only had to share with two very confused men from Sudan and whilst everyone else on the bus had to walk accross the bridge, the bus company had a zemidjan waiting there for me, so I wouldn't hold everyone up because it takes a lot longer to do my paperwork than everyone else. I was constantly complemented for being very 'pique, pique', which is essentially someone who is strong and adventurous and full of joie de vivre, which was a nice boost to the ego. The zemi driver assumed I was a tourist and would be quite timid about getting on, but I jumped on with ease after so many months of them being my main form of transport - he was really very surprised.

There was a young Tuareg artisan (Tuareg is a african/arab mix tribe in Niger) who chatted with me at the stop in Parakou and decided we were going to get married - even called his mother to make sure she was okay with his decision. Of course, he hadn't caught on to the fact I was an Aussie and not Swiss, so really I don't think I was all that important in the transaction. He was terribly polite and gentle, though, so it wasn't so bad. Certainly it was better than the man who got on not long before the Niger border and got off not long after, but had enough time and enough English to suggest really rather graphically that a casual thing would work well for him - NO THANK YOU! Just as well he was only on the bus for 45 minutes, I can't imagine what he would've managed to say in 11 hours.

After we crossed the border, the trip shifted more into the realms of the Lonely Planet story. At the stop just this side of the border we took on a whole lot more passengers and their luggage. It wouldn't fit under the bus, so it got pile on the back seat, directly behind me. So I spent the final 6 hours or so with a very large box of ducks two inches from my head. At least, I never met a box that makes such convincing quacking noises whilst not actually containing ducks, I decided not to open it up and went with the old 'sounds like a duck, smells like a duck, must be a duck' approach. Another half an hour along the road it started to rain and we discovered very quickly that the roof of our bus was a long way from waterproof. So there was a lot of shifting around for those under leaks (thankfully I was about a row back from the nearest one) and a lot of water sloshing about everyone's feet after not long. It wasn't the greatest, but I'll take that over cooking to death any day, thanks.

Last week I was at the airport at some ungodly hour of the morning to welcome Brad and Andi of the plane. Not Andy and Brad (of the unnaturally tallAndi is a fellow MBCer, so it was great to see a familiar face, and since my arrival in Benin was a touch traumatic and didn't involve any English speakers, I though maybe it'd be a little easier on them, too. They were here in Niamey for a week before picking up sticks and jumping on a bus to travel through the SIM stations going out east and generally get a sense of the work. Having them around also gave me a chance to get to know some more of the people working here in Niamey and their ministries - you only get to meet and understand so much from a desk. Brad and Andi were staying on the same compound as a couple, the Van Veens, Sjoerd (don't ask me how to pronounce it, it's the Dutch version of Stewart, though) and his British wife Rachel. They are at the begin of a long-term out here working with the Fulani, still mostly doing language learning, but also spending some time on friendship evangelism in the market. They are really impressive people. They also have a blog at www.lifeinniger.bogspot.com if you want to have a look. Particularly the latest entry, which details a trip out to see the last wild giraffes in West Africa (more on that in a moment) as well as a story from the market, some of which Andi and Brad were present for and more than a little excited about.

Okay, so the giraffes... I dragged myself out of bed at yet another uncivillised hour of the morning on Saturday morning and set out with the Van Veens, Brad and Andi in the Banke's 4WD for a place about an hour west (I think) of here where one can (must, the sign says obligatoire) pick up a guide and drive out into the bush and see the last wild giraffes in all of West Africa. Now, I must say at this point I was feeling a little ambiguous about taking our 4WD out and invading the privacy of any animals, but animals in such a precarious position even more so, but none the less of we went. With our guide on the roof directing us with a big long stick, which made me think of the old carrot and stick metaphor and everyone else think of the hand of God.

There were a couple of car loads of Southern Baptist short termers there too, and we started out with them. Our first giraffe encounter involved a bunch of very skittish girrafes who promptly nicked off. I can't really blame them, I think I woulda, too. So, our guide decided he didn't really like the other people's guides and that he didn't really like Americans, because they made too much noise. We were all right, because we weren't Americans, in general we weren't very noisy and Rachel spoke his language (Hausa), so we clearly weren't a bunch of silly tourists.

So we head off further out and eventually came to a little group of giraffes eating Acacias (a little touch of home) by a pond with a lot of frogs that put even Americans to shame on the noisy front. These guys weren't put off by us in the slightest and kept on happily munching away while we got so close I could here them chewing. That is, except for the young ones, who pretty much started a game of cat and mouse with Sjoerd, which he appeared to very much enjoy. Andi and myself ended up about 8 feet from the leader of their herd (?) and after he was done with one of his trees he decided it might be a good time to check out what these brightly coloured little things running about on the ground were. He lowered his head and had a real good, close-up look at Andi. Close enough, in fact, that Rachel wondered out loud if we were certain that giraffes were entirely herbivorous, because the big guy could easily have taken off Andi's outstretched arm if he decided to give it a go.

So, we discovered that girrafes are entirely herbiverous, that they really are the colour you see in kids books, that their tales are kinda weird and icky, that they look truly ridiculous when they run, and that they are a lot more compact in the torso that you would expect (their torsos are more like a hyenas than a horse, and really very small). We also discovered that Andi does a pretty good impression of a giraffe running - you should ask her to show you when they get home, MBCers.

I've put a photo up for you. It's actually one I stole from Sjoerd & Rachel's blog, because I was a really smart girl and didn't bring the little cord to connect my camera with my computer. Also, my camera battery died just after we got to that second herd, so their photos are much better than mine. So, you'll have to wait till I get back to Parakou for them, and I can't guarantee they'll be any good.

Speaking of going back to Parakou, I have decided to bypass the 11 hour bus trip, expecting it would a whole lot less pleasant now the novelty factor has worn off. So I'm tagging along on a SIMAir flight going down to Parakou to pick up some people from Galmi who've been there for a conference. A light plane over West Africa, less than three hours, completely duck free and hopefully weather-proof, if not a little nerve-racking. Hey, coming out here was all about experience, and I'm certainly collecting them! I'll be going back on the 7th (of July), just in time to watch the prologue of the Tour de Fance on our one French satellite channel - and I won't even have to stay up 'till 3 in the morning for it.

Sarah.

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