Hello again to everyone! As always I will start out by apologizing for the gap in posts, but maybe when you see this picture of the transportation I use to get in and out of my village, you'll better understand why it's so difficult!




February was a great month in the village. My garden is coming along nicely and I will hopefully be able to enjoy my own homegrown salad in the next few weeks. My language progress is still frustratingly slow, but I no longer think people are asking me to go to the market when they are asking me if I want my house swept. That has made life much easier!

My mayor's office still hasn't moved to the new building yet, even though they were scheduled to relocate over a month ago. I keep reminding myself to "have patience" as everyone is constantly advising me to, but it's still frustrating to not have an official job. Very little work is actually being done since the office has pretty much been packed away. I'm trying to stay busy and active by planning secondary projects, and so far this has helped a lot.


(My mayor's office)

I'm continuing to do radio shows with my neighboring volunteers in the sub-regional capital of Birni. Last week, we had to reschedule our program because there are traditional wrestling tournaments going on throughout the area and all business pretty much stops so people can go watch them. I went to one in Dosso which was a lot of fun.

I'm also working with the local primary school to try and paint a world map on the side of their building. Right now, the only resource they have for geography lessons is a crumbling globe which still depicts the USSR and Zaire. When you talk to the kids, and even some adults in my village, they think that the United States is just over the border from Niger. I'm currently in the process of trying to secure money for the paint, brushes, etc. and will hopefully start working on it before hot season is in full force (sometime in mid-April).

Although I can't really take the credit, I've also become involved in an informal English club in my village. It started when two teenage girls from the local middle school started coming over to my house to hang out and practice language with me. It now consists of about five girls who regularly come over to my house and study my Zarma-English-French dictionary and beg me for books they can use to practice reading English. There are very few books in the village in any language, let alone English, and the nearest library is in Birni about 20km away.

The persistence of these girls and their desire to learn has inspired me to look into possibly starting a small municipal library in my village. This would be an enormous undertaking (as older volunteers remind me), but if my villagers are willing to put forth the effort, I would love to work with them to find a way to bring books and a place to read them to the village. A library would be a very long-term project, but I have a year and a half left in Niger to work on it and I think this would be a great way to spend some of that time.