Christmas this year involved a mustache, a clutch, and egg cheese bacon croissants.  My Christmas present was a little leather box.  I gave away some locally made perfume from the Diffa region, which is far East.

A man can spend the day in fur-lined red Christmas shorts, a Christmas hat and a tank top and not realizes he looks completely ridiculous until he sees pictures of himself.  Those pictures are on facebook now, much as I detest facebook.  Flickr has limited my photo account so I can’t really put pictures up on my blog anymore with much ease (though I’m looking into other solutions).

I made apple pie, which is become trademark.  I’m losing interest in it.  I also watched David (from Guinea!) make eggnog, which, not surprisingly, consists of a crap-load of eggs, some whipped cream, and whatever alcohol you desire.  We used rum.

I had a good old time, staying up late, getting up early, and generally wearing myself out.  We played some of our astonishingly small number of board games.  I won and lost at scrabble.

So yeah, David, a volunteer from my time in Guinea, was here over the weekend, and we went to see the giraffes the day after Christmas.  It was a lot of fun.  Better was the time we got to spend just chatting.  It’s been a while since I’ve been able to hang out with a guy and just talk about life.  I think Eric’s visit this past summer was the last time.  The proportion of male to female volunteers in Niger is a little ridiculous, so it is more difficult than you might think.

Peace Corps Christmas is always a homey affair, full of wonderful smells, good hugs, and lots of tomfoolery.  The best meal was by far the eggplant parmesan, courtesy of Katelyn.  I drank eggnog and once again engaged in some emergency plumbing.  You find all kinds of foul things unclogging pipes.

Still, a Peace Corps Christmas is always lacking something.  Maybe it’s just snow.  But more, I think it’s a sense of warmth that you just don’t really get in a place that doesn’t feel like home.  Home for me conjures images of specific friends and family.  At Christmas is also conjures a warm light cast by a fire and the smell of a pine tree.  Thus do our childhoods weave themselves into the rest of our lives, not unlike verb-tense when writing a story, actually.

I end this year much as I ended last year: with the need to be like iron.  Only this year a cold brittle iron has been replaced by iron that is tempered by the warmth of my people: those who I would go to the ends of the earth for, and who would return the favor.  You are my foundation.  Thanks for that.

The adventure continues in 2011.

There are certain benefits to being a transfer volunteer. You start out new and interesting and you get to do things a little bit differently from everyone else. Unfortunately, you also tend to be forgotten.

My close of service date doesn’t match up with any group of volunteers coming through, so I tend to be left out of important things like, oh say, visa renewal. I realized the other day that my visa expired sometime around a year after I entered the country, which was back in the beginning of November. Surely they keep on top of that, I thought. But I better ask just in case. I asked and they assured me that they had, but when I asked to see it, it turns out my visa had expired over a week prior.  They hurriedly got to work.

Later I noticed my ID was going to expire (as of yesterday in fact).  When I asked for a new one they said they couldn’t just send one to be renewed, it had to be as part of a group and they had already sent the new stage’s ID requests in.

Great.  So the next eight months I’ll walk around with an expired ID because you can’t just make one?  Seriously? Yep, seriously.  ”Maybe they can make a temporary one,” they said, with a sort of ‘please leave me alone’ dismissive air.  I hope I don’t get asked for ID at any of the checkpoints…

Peace Corps offices seem to have a sort of ‘happy go lucky’ approach.  Site preparation requirements?  More like optimistic recommendations.  ”It isn’t a problem if the volunteer will be flooded in six months out of the year because we’ve already invested time and money in this site and one of the staff has family there,” I’ve heard they have said (I know, I know, rumors).  ’Tech training that prepares you for work at site’ is in reality ‘topics so general you could think of them on your own.’

I shouldn’t be too harsh.  Sometimes things work so haphazardly.  If Peace Corps wasn’t flexible on site requirements they probably wouldn’t be able to fit all the volunteers in a site.  But then again, that says to me we should have less volunteers, not that we should start being flexible on site requirements.

Flexibility is a word on a pedestal for Peace Corps.  Unfortunately it tends to mean, ‘accept whatever you have because we aren’t going to change it unless you get assaulted or robbed,’ rather than just that you should have patience and try not to have too many expectations.

I don’t rant often about the bureau these days.  I like everyone that works there.  They generally do a good job and they care about what they are doing.  But visas and IDs are not the kind of thing that you are ‘happy go lucky’ with.  I’ve been turned away from the hostel because the guard misread my ID and thought it had expired.  In adjacent countries (admittedly not here) I’ve been almost arrested for not having a valid ID.  Happy go lucky works until something goes wrong, and then everything that you’ve been cavalier with comes back to bite you in the ass.

Also, yesterday I went for a camel ride into the bush.  It was a lot of fun.  No photos though.  I didn’t bring my camera, sorry.

This past weekend I spent the night in a village outside of Niamey. It is a potential new village for a volunteer from the current stage, and I was asked to go check it out. Site development is of course done in 4x4s, so no one actually knew how to get there. I was given some marginal information that included “get out at the place with the blue door.”

But all was successful. I took a taxi and then a minibus out to the crossroad, and then walked down a dusty path that looks like more of a temporary motorcycle trail then a road. In truth, it is, because there is only one car that drives that road with any regularity. I had been told that the village was only 6k from the main road, so I figured I’d just walk. It was a nice peaceful walk and did a lot to remind me of things I miss about living in a village. Niamey, like all cities, is a hectic place.

When I arrived I was shown into the volunteer house, where they were in the middle of constructing the latrine. I was given a bed and sheets and even a pillow, and we went out to see the health hut because it is going to be a health post. The hut itself is a tiny little building out on the edge of the village. It looks rather forlorn amidst the millet stalk remains. The health agent explained to me that no one comes to the health hut because there is a clinic by the airport, and even though it is further away, everyone prefers to go there. I didn’t really get an explanation as for why.

They killed a chicken for me and I ate some of the best rice and sauce ever. Really I ate four dinners: copto (a peanut butter mixture with plant leaves), rice, rice and beans with onions, and lastly chicken in sauce over noodles. Dear lord it was delicious.

We stayed there chatting until it was too dark to see anything, and then I did a quick hand-splash bucket bath and went to bed, where I spent the night sweating under my extremely fine mesh bug hut I.

The morning was cool and at six I left to find the car that goes to Niamey once a day, but when we got there the car wasn’t to be found, so I walked back out to the road and caught a minibus back to Niamey.

I had a lot of fun. I also learned that a minibus will take you from the grand marche to the outskirts of Niamey for 100 CFA ($0.20), while a taxi will cost 10 times that. Good to know.