Last month I returned well-rested (and five pounds heavier) from my trip to America! It was so wonderful to see my family and friends again after spending over a year apart. Fortunately I didn’t suffer from too much of the dreaded “reverse culture shock.” I think this is mostly thanks to my earlier vacation to Paris in May, although I did get overwhelmed during a trip to the grocery store and had to sit down in the middle of the aisle to rest. You can probably imagine the strange looks I got!

Even though it was difficult to leave my family for a second time, I was ready to get back to my village and finish my last year of service. I ended up spending the majority of October in the bush working on reintegrating back into my community and remembering how to speak Zarma everyday. It hasn’t been too difficult and I’ve enjoyed reconnecting with my friends and finding out what I missed during the three weeks I was away.

I recently just took a break from village life to come into our regional hostel in Dosso to follow the U.S. Presidential election with some fellow volunteers. What an exciting night it was! Since we don’t have cable television, one of my friends brought over a satellite radio and we stayed up all night listening to the results come in on the BBC and NPR. Since the four of us are pretty ardent Obama supporters, we were not disappointed by the outcome.

While it would have been fun to watch Obama’s acceptance speech on cable television in America, I have to admit that there has been a special charm to experiencing this historic election in Africa. Even in this small, largely unknown corner of the Sahel, all the Nigeriens I spoke to were incredibly interested in this election. There was a pretty firm (and not surprising) bias for Barack Obama, who everyone knows has a father from Kenya. In my area, some special prayers were said at a few local mosques in support of Obama’s success. Like many Americans, they believe he will be able to bring a positive change to the White House and the world at large. I have a great deal of hope that the America I return to next September will be greatly changed for the better than the one I left in July 2007.

Until then, I have a number of projects I’m working on keeping me busy. One of the ones I am most excited about is the AIDS Bike Ride coming up at the beginning of December. This is an annual event in which volunteers spend a week biking to a number of villages in a region, stopping along the way to do skits in local language educating villagers about the danger of contracting HIV and how to prevent it. This year the bike ride is taking part in the eastern part of the country, Zinder. Since I don’t speak the local language of that region (Hausa) I will be helping out with French translation.

I can’t overemphasize how important AIDS education is in Niger. Although Niger suffers from many problems which make development difficult, unlike many other African nations, HIV/AIDS infections are not one of the biggest contributing factors. Low HIV infection rates are an enormous advantage for Niger and a trend that must be supported.