2010 August | zot in Niger

Call Me Mario

5 comments By potterzot Filed in events, humor, in service, niger August 30th, 2010 @ 10:11 am

Life is really good at giving you just enough to go on that you begin to think you are awesome and then coming up behind you and knocking you flat. In my head I call it the god complex. If you start to think you are god, you are getting ready to get muddy.

I spent the weekend doing exactly that. Literally. By Friday I had found out that I will be living in my current house for the rest of my service, which means having a roommate for the next couple of months before he goes home. I got a bed from the bureau that is awesome, and I was all set to clean up some and get really, finally, moved in. I was feeling pretty good.

Then I broke the water main that goes into the house…

It had nearly rusted through and after messing with it for a little while I figured out that I could replace the parts pretty easily. I biked over to a plumbing shop, where i purchased a new piece. Equipped with a lock-wrench, I spent the next 30 minutes fixing things before discovering that another piece was also rusted. No problem, I’ll just nip on over to the plumbing store again…

At this point I’m feeling pretty awesome, because I’ve fixed my own plumbing, and that with a massive shortage of tools. And so now you know what comes next.

I spent the next four hours attaching everything, seeing that things leaked, and taking them apart to reattach. They use some kind of grass instead of plumbing tape here, so that was part of the problem. I was muddy. It wasn’t working. Maybe the pipe was too short. Oh yeah, and it started pouring rain.

I announced to the world that I was already muddy enough and hardly needed more help in that respect.

At present we have very leaky water and are hoping for a plumber to come by and fix what I couldn’t.

Sometimes you just have to laugh…

Also, Mario is the plumber from Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros, for the uninitiated.

Boondock Saints Wisdom (Or is it Insanity?)

1 comment By potterzot Filed in in service, niger, thoughts August 27th, 2010 @ 9:13 am

I really like the movie Boondock Saints. I hear there might even be a sequel coming out. One of my favorite parts is when they are trapped in the mafia guy’s basement and getting their asses kicked and their italian friend gets shot. The dark haired brother says “Oh yeah I love this shit,” or something like that. His friend just got SHOT.

I’ve always taken it as a sort of exultation of life in the midst of tragedy. We love the high flying moments of success, achievement, love, etc… But we hate the moments of loss that are inevitably all mixed up with the good times. There is something sort of Buddhist in this, and usually people think that means one should try to be level and calm, seeing the highs and lows as attachments. I prefer the view exemplified by the brother, who seems to love the ride of life, the roller coaster ups and downs, the passion of our human struggle, of loss, of love.

I feel asleep thinking of that, and then when my alarm went off this morning I was grumpy with life. There is a question of control in all this. How much of life can we control? We don’t like it when we think we have control over something and life throws in our face the fact that control is an illusion. The struggle to manifest what we want in the face of a laughing mirthful world is what life is all about right?

Still, I don’t imagine that if I was laying in my friend’s blood as he was dying and I was tied to a chair that I would be saying “I love this shit.” Maybe that is insanity. Maybe I didn’t hear it right the fifth time I saw that movie. Maybe I’m just musing.

As far as my living situation. I still have no house, and it appears that I won’t be getting one, which means that I have a roommate for the next two months until he COSes and goes home. That’s not terrible, since at least I know where I am staying and I can start doing things like fixing the place up and putting in a garden. Still, I won’t really be moved in for another two months, and that kind of sucks. But if there is anything that I have had practice with in Peace Corps, it is the impermanence of things.

I wonder sometimes about other volunteers, and how they spend two years in one village. That must be a completely different experience from mine, where I will have lived in three different sites over my two and a half years of service, not including two months at training in Guinea, one month in Mali after evacuation, and one month in training in Niger. My service has been characterized by short stays in different places. Most volunteer’s services are characterized by staying in one place the whole time. How much have I missed out on really getting to know people and a community by moving around so much?

In Praise of Winter

0 comments By potterzot Filed in humor, in service, niger, thoughts August 23rd, 2010 @ 1:52 pm

I hold a special place in my heart for Gossip Girls. Don’t judge me. It is shameful but I am not ashamed. From Niger, New York City in high fashion looks like a wondrous world, and when in winter, it makes a triple alliteration, which is basically just irresistible. So, as the rains fall and the sunny days swirl with a hot sort of death squad humidity, I find myself dreaming of snow in all it’s glory.

Last night I was watching an episode of Gossip Girl in which it is snowing, and the phrase “Holy cow I love girls in winter clothes,” burst out of me before I could tamp it down. These sorts of comments were received with mirth by my fellows, who promptly suggested that I was in the wrong country and I should make my way to Peace Corps Mongolia en tout vitesse.

With some fellow volunteers from Guinea whispering of early COSing in December, and my move to a place with both electricity and water (though no house), visions of America are filling my head at all hours. This tends to happen from time to time, usually with respect to the weather more than the food. Lack of American food has never been a big issue (though I will devour much good food when I return in a year). The truth is that I like the cold. I like heat also. Heck, I just like variation, and harbor an unbridled malaise against humid heat.

Gossip Girl has also convinced me that I need to work on two big things: most excellent timing and witty references. Being witty is mostly just looking out for the chance to make a witty comment, so I’ll leave that. Most excellent timing is a more difficult issue. From what I can tell, it consists of walking into rooms full of conversations that people don’t want you to hear. I figure the best way to do that is to walk repeatedly from room to room whenever there are people around and then sort of standing there as if I’ve heard some damning evidence of something. Unfortunately these two things conflict, since it is hard to converse enough to be witty while I am busy walking from room to room in pursuit of most excellent timing. Just how do those Gossip Girl characters do it?

Thanks for letting me waste your time with this one.

Hemmingway

1 comment By potterzot Filed in in service, niger, thoughts August 21st, 2010 @ 1:22 pm

I found a book of Hemmingway’s short stories amongst the things left over from COSing volunteers. I had forgotten the profound ache that his writing imparts to me. I just read “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. His portrayal of cowardice and courage, and the plain meanness of people toward each other, shows the deep painful side of life, and there is no denying it. In Africa I laugh as I have never laughed before. I have found a confidence and finally given up the ghosts that were attached to my heels (at least for now). But the impermanence of life, the inevitable breakdown of love into some vague annoyance, the quiet suffering of great persons, these things do not beckon me to laugh or to shout my happy defiance into the rain. They ask instead that I sit quietly and alone and give that inner ache the bearth that it demands. Life, so opportuning of rapture, is joyously malicious.

There are many ways to struggle. I admire Hemmingway’s.

Two Kinds of Ruckus

1 comment By potterzot Filed in events, in service, niger August 17th, 2010 @ 9:37 am

Here is a picture of my new cat, whose name is ruckus:

She is pretty awesome. Her mom brought her into the hostel one day and left her there, so I brought her to the house I am staying at.

Speaking of which, I still don’t have a house. I can’t really complain, because my roommate is pretty awesome, but I still have all my stuff packed away and I’m living out of the closet. I would like to have a real house one day.

The second ruckus is this past weekend, during which it seemed like nearly every white person in Niger freaked out as a result of information that was released over two weeks ago (to the extent that AQIM might be planning retaliatory attacks after the French raid that happened at the end of July). They flew a whole bunch of aid workers out of the east and into Niamey, even borrowing planes from Chad to do it. But as of right now, according to the US embassy, there is no reason for them all to be reacting now any more than they should have been two weeks ago. I get the feeling that someone finally got around to reading the warden message two weeks later and they reacted in a CYA kind of way.

As volunteers tend to do, we gossiped a lot and acted superior because we didn’t think anything was going to happen and everyone was overreacting. Come to think of it, I should have made some bets. In short, it was a lot of ruckus over very nearly nothing. The Reuters article is in keeping with creating panic. To be honest I don’t think I’ll be able to read anything in the news about Africa again and think that it is anything more than management trying to make sure no one gets hurt on their watch. I know that is kind of their responsibility, but they get a little carried away sometimes. Its sort of like a farcical comedy.

So we said goodbye to a COSing stage, and that was sort of sad except that I didn’t really know them, but it was sad for some other people, and it was a hint of what we will likely be going through a year from now. I am having a ball living in the capital and working for this NGO. And when I read about things like the controversy over the mosque that is going up two blocks away from ground zero, it makes me wonder whether I really want to go back. So much posturing by politicians. Muslim does not equal terrorist people…

It is pouring rain here, and I am exceedingly happy to have found a rain jacket in a COSing volunteer’s stuff (thanks Mary!). You may have read the other Niger news about flooding, which is sort of just like a cruel joke on the heels of the food crisis. The mosquitoes are out of control ridiculous. I killed at least seven in the bathroom this morning, and all of them had my blood in them. Gross.

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