The End

I only have a few entries left to write. Now that all ninety-eight Peace Corps Volunteers have been safely evacuated from Niger following the kidnapping and subsequent deaths of two Frenchmen living and working in Niamey, I am free to blog about these not-so-current events and the fate of PC Niger.

On January 11^th we were informed by our fearless and saintly training site manager, my truest confidant, and our surrogate father, Tondi, that the PC Niger program was being suspended. He read a prepared statement from Washington; it was dry and conclusive.

The implications quickly started to be understood. All of our villagers wouldn’t quite understand why something that happened in Niamey means that I, Saadou, have to leave my safe and secure home in Koré Maïroua. The volunteers who were in the most dangerous positions were obviously those stationed in the capital, working alongside NGOs and other organizations. But the more rural volunteers live in a network of houses, a neighborhood and community that would never allow something like a kidnapping to happen. So why did we have to leave? Eventually we the volunteers accepted the rationale for the evacuation and began to think about our futures, but what came first was a set of goodbyes. All my friends in the small town of Koré said, “Sai wata rana,” (until another day) mostly because I didn’t have the courage to express to them the gravity of the situation. Others with whom I could employ my French understood more deeply what this meant for our budding friendships. Fortunately, as is not the case in all evacuations, we were allowed to go back to our villages for one day, gather our things, and say goodbye to our work partners and our amazing friends, some of them people we had grown closer to in those few months than many of our friends in America.

Goodbyes were, and always are, painful. I usually convince myself that they don’t have to be, but these were so brisk and unexpected that I found myself tearing up all too often. As Tondi said once, “you know, Nigeriens say that you aren’t supposed to cry in public, but right now…you need to cry, you need to do it.” There were many expressions of confusion, disbelief, disappointment, and sadness on people’s faces. I gave away chairs, mats, tables, my bed and mattress, pots and pans, string, a hammer, and countless other small items. I was giving away small but significant pieces of my Nigerien identity, the things, simple and scarce as they were, that had come to represent my new life, a wonderful and inexplicably rich life. Sure, some of you will say that I am idealizing this period, pretending like I loved every moment. This is true. When something is taken from you it becomes much more desirable than it was when you took it for granted. But to say the Nigerien people were the most sincere, honest, and hospitable people I’ve ever met, is not an idealization or an exaggeration.

I left my village like a ghost, putting on my turban so only a few people would be able to recognize me as I drove through town for the last time, not wanting to exchange greetings that I had come to love. Eventually, people trickled into the hostel from the far out regions of Maradi, Zinder, and Diffa, some of them in the beloved Peace Corps Magic Bus. The last night there we invited many of our Nigerien friends who lived in the capital, our past ‘formateurs’ during training, to spend some time with us on our last night in country. Emotions were all over the place. 2AM rolled around after our all-nighter and we loaded and left the hostel with a convoy of five Land Cruisers, one pick-up truck, and two all the sudden not-so-magic buses. Cruising through the streets we took familiar turns but the avenues were barren, deserted, unrecognizable. We didn’t pass a living soul. Sometimes the silence was heavy but being the amazing group we are, our favorite inside jokes bubbled up to the surface for the last few times. Most of us loaded the plane to Morocco in a state of sleepy disbelief and general numbness.