I am back in ville since Monday. In that time I have felt oddly productive. Yesterday I met with a youth group to talk about maybe holding some seminars, one for boys and one for girls, to cover a variety of topics but basically just give them a chance to hear some health things (for probably the millionth time), but also to think about what options are available to them and how they can achieve them. I suppose I envision it to be a little like those group counselling sessions in high school where they try and get you to think about your future, only I hope it is about (-1)*(1,000,000) times better (I figure they had negative value, so you have to multiply by -1 to be positive).

Bad math jokes aside… I also had a productive discussion with the general secretary of my commune in which he looked at my objectives and we talked about potential projects and he brought up the idea of funding for anything I might want to do. I am having trouble figuring that out, because nothing I want to do requires funding, but he was almost pushing me to find a way to need funding so that we could ask for it from ONGs. My cynical point of view kicked in at about that point, but I really don’t know what exactly he was driving at.

Today I went to a New Year’s Eve celebration in which we danced and ate food. It was a lot of fun until it came time to go home, and then it turned out that many of the boys were spending the night in that village and many of the girls wanted to go home, and there were a lot of rather forceful attempts to convince the girls to stay. I have trouble with that sort of thing anyway, but this being not the United States it was particularly difficult to be around. Still you can’t jump in and tell the boys they can’t do that, because some of the girls are egging the boys on and it clearly isn’t a cut and dried situation. Maybe I should have a gender relations discussion group.

I think I am getting a cat. One of my friends has a bunch of kittens and they are definitely old enough, so probably tomorrow I will go pick one out and start again. Male so that it pees on my clothes or female so that it gets pregnant?

I am reading “Lies Your Teacher Told You” or something like that, all about history and the heroification of our historic figures. It is interesting, if a little repetitive at times. There is so much I don’t know about american history. It makes me think a better way to teach would just be readings from a selected number of original documents.

So as a result I have been thinking about race a lot, and then walking home from the fete I was thinking about how I feel like the vast majority of aid is counterproductive and may even harm communities. It certainly doesn’t help them in a lasting sense (with the clearer exception of having water pumps where the community is in charge of repairing them). But anyway, I have never really been sure what the alternative is, but today it occurred to me that it is a little like Iraq: Europe and America spent centuries raping and pillaging Africa, and the resulting level of development is not what would have occurred otherwise. In a sense we are obligated to do something about it if nothing else then because we messed it up so bad for so long. And even if you don’t buy that, we are messing with people in Africa because there are enormous resources here. So yeah, I don’t know that aid the way it is now is at all helpful, but I also don’t think we can sit around and do nothing… What to do though? I know it is much easier to criticize than to think up a solution.

My feeling of the ineffectiveness of my work is a huge downer. I try to take the perspective that changing even a few people’s lives for the better makes it worthwhile, but actually I don’t know if by giving people some of my perspective I am making their lives qualitatively better, except if a some kids wear a condom and as a result don’t get AIDS. But that has been sensibilized into most kids skulls, so even if I was doing seminars on that it wouldn’t be adding to their knowledge. I have said this before, but the really valuable part of Peace Corps work, in my mind, is the cultural exchange aspect. People’s conception of the U.S. is so skewed, and our conception of Africa (as if it is one giant place all the same) is skewed as well. I feel like our stereotype of Africa would be soldiers sitting in a jeep with a ton of weapons. Niger’s stereotype of America would be a New York City in which every person drives a hummer and is a rap star. You can imagine all the problems this causes, on both ends.

Okay, sorry for the preaching. I am doing well, feeling good if not “satisfied.” Happy New Year!