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Letter from Niger: November 2004
By J.R. Bullington*
In this installment our favorite Peace Corps Director describes two hazards in Niger: locusts and bush taxis. We also learn about the wonderful work being done by two volunteers, Cindy and Amanda. Readers interested in learning about and possibly supporting Amanda's work in the village of Keraye may visit the following website www.karayeclinic.org. –Assoc. Ed.
The Plague of Locusts
And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand over the land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come up upon the land of Egypt, and eat every herb of the land, even all that the hail hath left.
And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. . .
They covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left; and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt.
Exodus 10:12-15
Niger, though overwhelmingly Muslim, often evokes Biblical images. Except for the people being black instead of white, daily life in the Nigerien villages where most of our Peace Corps Volunteers live and work recalls pictures in American Sunday school story books for children: Women at a well filling earthen jugs with water; a shepherd with a long stick tending his flock; women riding on donkeys and men on camels; bearded men in long white robes kneeling in earnest prayer. . .
I tell new Volunteers in my orientation talk that should someone from the time of Jesus or even the time of Moses be magically transported to a Nigerien village today, he would find relatively little that would be unfamiliar.
This summer and fall, such a time traveler could have encountered a plague of locusts not unlike that which Jehovah visited on the land of Egypt.
In September, while driving out to visit a Volunteer in her village in the Dakoro area, I encountered a locust swarm. I can't match the magisterial language of the King James Version in describing it, but it was dramatic. From a distance it looked like one of the sand storms that occasionally blow down from the Sahara. When we reached the swarm, the locusts swirled around the Land Cruiser like a blizzard of big, bright yellow snowflakes. I looked at the odometer, and noted that we drove through the swarm for five kilometers before reaching the village. I don't know how far beyond the village it may have extended. Not only did the locusts fill the air, they also covered the ground, settling on every plant and even carpeting the laterite road.
It was a memorable experience, and gave me a new appreciation of the sort of suasion being brought to bear on Pharaoh in the Exodus story.
On a more scientific basis, I've learned that the desert locusts gather in swarms that number 40 to 80 million insects and can spread over hundreds of square kilometers. On the ground, they can reach densities of 800 per square meter. They consume their own body weight (about 2 grams) every day in vegetation, and they can devastate a crop in a matter of minutes. The swarms are highly mobile, sometimes riding the wind to cover 100 kilometers or more in a day, making them difficult to locate, monitor and control.
Ironically, locust plagues follow seasons of good rains, and the rains were very good last year across most of Niger and other countries of the Sahel, the semi-arid region stretching east to west across the African continent between the Sahara to the north and the savannah region to the south. This created excellent breeding conditions for the locusts, and with this year's rainy season (June—September), they emerged in their billions.
Mauritania seems to be the country hardest hit, with the loss of half or more of its food production. Swarms even invaded the capital, Nouakchott. According to the BBC account, "Within minutes, the sky was brown. Whole trees were bending over with their weight. (They) turned green trees to brown skeletons in a matter of hours and even ate the grass from the pitch of the main football stadium."
Unfortunately, my camera batteries went dead and I didn't get pictures of the swarm I experienced in Dakoro. Here are a couple of pictures from the U.S. Embassy in Nouakchott, sent out in an email by Joseph LeBaron, showing the locusts eating the leaves they had stripped from an orange tree, and what was left of the tree. Evidently, they don't eat oranges.
In Niger, the locust attack was limited to the agro-pastoral zone that extends across the country between the true desert to the north and the main agricultural zone along the southern border. Like Egypt in the Exodus account of the locust plague, which followed a plague of hail that had destroyed most of the crops, this agro-pastoral zone was already facing hard times, even without the locusts, because of a poor rainy season this year. The overall crop loss for Niger was much less than in Mauritania, but the national food production for this year is estimated at 11% below the average of the past five years.
For a country that achieves only marginally adequate food production even in good years, this qualifies as a very serious shortfall. Moreover, since the rains were excellent in the southern agricultural zone, this entire production decline took place in the agro-pastoral zone, where perhaps a quarter of Niger's 12 million people live. There, the losses qualify as disastrous. Many villages had no harvest at all, and even pasturage for the animals is sparse. Large numbers of able-bodied men are leaving the region to seek work elsewhere, and the people that remain—mostly women, children and the elderly—are facing hunger. The price of animals has dropped precipitously as people are forced to sell them for money to buy grain. And when there are no more animals to sell???
The Government and aid donors are already planning relief efforts. Our Volunteers in affected villages (about 30 out of the 120 Volunteers in the country) will help with food-for-work projects, seeds for irrigated gardens, and other measures; but the overall needs are massively beyond Peace Corps' capacity to meet and can only be addressed by major donors such as the UN, European countries and USAID. The U.S. Embassy has formally declared a "disaster," which brings in $50,000 of USAID emergency money immediately, and more importantly begins a process that can trigger much more substantial U.S. assistance.
Riding the Demon
Early in my tenure as Country Director in Niger, I became convinced that the greatest threat to the safety and security of our Peace Corps Volunteers is not terrorism (as one might be led to conclude from the amount of attention and resources devoted to it) but bush taxis.
What are bush taxis?
There is a good definition in a book published in 1999 by Peter Chilton, a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, called Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa. He writes:
Bush taxis are dangerous, dilapidated, slow, crowded, demoralizing and suffocating. . . More specifically, bush taxis are private cars rented out to transport goods and people. They are unregulated; they leave when they are full, and arrive whenever. Bush taxis are cheap, are used by all levels of society, and are an important means of transporting trade goods. Any automobile (or truck) can qualify, but most come secondhand from Europe.
Few Africans own cars, and African governments cannot support large public transportation systems. Bush taxis fill the void, making up most of the rural motor traffic.
Chilton also gives a good description of one of the bush taxis he rode in. Unfortunately, it was not an exceptional vehicle, but typical of the genre.
The danger from the vehicles themselves is exacerbated by overcrowding and overloading, underqualified and overworked drivers, poor roads, little enforcement of traffic regulations, and the lack of emergency response services when accidents occur.
I've made a major effort to lower the risk to our Volunteers by reducing the need for travel through creation of regional offices and transit houses; banning night travel; instituting monthly shuttles with Peace Corps vehicles and drivers; developing relationships with international organizations such as CARE that can provide safe rides; publicizing staff travel in advance so Volunteers can plan accordingly and ride along; and urging Volunteers to avoid bush taxis whenever possible.
Still, even after all these measures, one of our Volunteers, Reagan Graham, found in a survey I commissioned him to do earlier this year that:
98% of Volunteers use bush taxis at least once a month;
75% use them more than twice monthly; and
bush taxi travel averages 290 km/Volunteer/month.
We haven't been able to find any good accident statistics for Niger, but according to a recent World Bank-WHO study, vehicle accidents number 8 to 10 times higher proportionately in underdeveloped countries than in developed countries.
I presented these findings and my concerns to the annual meeting this August of Peace Corps Africa Country Directors. There was broad agreement that bush taxi travel is a serious threat to our Volunteers, and while we can't eliminate it we should do all we can to reduce it. In response, Peace Corps Headquarters has begun a Peace Corps-wide study of transportation safety. I'm hopeful it will produce some concrete results.
The Peace Corps/Niger Experience—Cindy
One of our more eloquent Volunteers, Cindy Powell, wrote an essay reflecting on her first year in Niger. Following are some excerpts:
Yesterday on the phone, my favorite Belgian in all of Peru asked me, "So, how are you feeling about your Peace Corps service? Are you enjoying it? Do you count the months and days? Are you looking forward to it being over? Does it still seem like the right thing to be doing now?"
My response: "Yes. All of the above."
Being in Niger is exasperating, exhilarating, terrifying, challenging and relaxing. But despite all the ups and downs, so far I'm not bored and I don't regret my decision to come here. . .
Prior to coming here, I was in a rut. . . I wanted to see the world, learn another language and culture, and stretch my limbs and limits.
All of the above are happening. Even on the tough days, I feel more alive and stimulated than I have in years. To help me through bad times, my mantra is, "Just glide through this as gracefully as you can, girl."
. . .Meanwhile, good stuff happens, too. Mala Abdou, a man about my age and maybe 75 percent of my Peace Corps body weight, is now nearly four months into his regimen of tuberculosis treatment. He rides a bush taxi into Maradi every 10 to 14 days to report to Issoufou, the TB specialist, and obtain the next round of antibiotics or other pills with pictures of the sun rising, at high noon or setting to indicate when each pill should be taken. He typically knocks on my door to tell me when he's leaving Bantché to see the doctor, and shows me his collection of pills upon his return. Once, he proudly showed me the pasta he bought after the doctor had told him to eat a variety of foods, not just millet.
Mala Abdou is grateful to me, all because I noticed him cough, cared enough to ask, and encouraged him to see the doctor. He thinks I'm brilliant and kind for such a simple gesture.
Then there's Amina, who recently gave birth to her 15th child, a healthy baby boy. . . Amina's "door" is always open and I frequently seek her company in the evenings. Since all her children between baby Hamisou and 8-year-old Masa Udu died, her house is blissfully toddler free, and thus a calm place to sit under the stars and contemplate the day's happenings.
Amina and I talk about how Hausa women give birth alone, squatting in their hut, without making a sound. She doesn't wake her husband or children until the umbilical cord needs to be cut; only then is the village's midwife summoned. We joke about how cranky and hungry her two oxen are when they first come in from the pastures at dusk, and how they even recognize her husband's voice, which signals that food is not far. I repeatedly make her describe to me how she is able to sleep without a mosquito net, thus allowing Africa's nuclear-sized cockroaches free run of her body and her children's. She laughs at my squirminess, and marvels at the fact that I'm afraid of cockroaches and mice but not frogs. For Nigeriens, it's the opposite.
. . .Mala Jari, the father of Bantché's religious leader, is an adorable old man who handmade my bed with old stalks of. . .gosh, I don't know what. . .woven together with animal skin to create a lovely, aesthetically pleasing and very tough platform that I rest on four stones in my yard. Every time I see him, his face lights up like a carved-then-shriveled apple. "We like you, Sahiya," he gushes. "You make us happy!"
Amanda's Clinic
Another of our Volunteers, Amanda Ree, is trying to build a health clinic for her village, Karaye. It's a big project by Peace Corps standards, requiring $15,500 in outside financing, which Amanda is now trying to raise. Tax-deductible contributions can be made via the Peace Corps Partnership, a unit in Peace Corps Headquarters that exists for the purpose of receiving private sector contributions to Volunteers' projects.
Amanda, a very enterprising young woman, has developed an interesting web site (www.karayeclinic.org) that has all the information about the village, the project, and how people can contribute. I commend it to those who might like to become involved in supporting a Peace Corps/Niger Volunteer project.
November 16, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: J.R. Bullington is currently Country Director of the Peace Corps program in Niger. He was formerly a US Ambassador and career diplomat, with extensive service in Africa and Asia. Back