I guess its been a long time since I’ve done a post. A lot has been happening…Our bike tourney went pretty well but it was so much work!! I was glad when it was over…We went around and sensibilized people about hygiene and hand washing..By the numbers:

12 villages

5 Peace Corps volunteers

1700 Nigeriens who came to our presentations

4 days on the road

50 kilometers

1 biker/ox-like animal collision (it was Kristy, before we were even out of Maradi, and the thing had sharp 5 footlong horns)

We did a skit and I narrated the whole thing on a megaphone in Hausa. The pictures are pretty funny with us dressed as Nigeriens. I’m babbling in busted Hausa into a megaphone and am surrounded by hundreds of Nigeriens.

What else is new…So I have a radio show!! I forget what its called in Hausa, but it translates into “The Chit Chat Show.” So I do it every Sunday from 5:30 to 6:00, at a radio station in Maradi called Radio Anfani…So far I’ve done shows on AIDS, hygiene, and tonight is the importance of putting girls in school. Its funny, because at the station, it’s just the sound technician guy and me. I talk into a microphone and I’m thinking no one is listening to this at all. No way, I’m a rock star in my village now, everyone wants shoutouts all the time now, and even when I hitchhike with NGO cars (hey its better than bush taxis!), when I tell them I’m Peace Corps, they’re like “You’re that girl from the radio!!” I just don’t know how I’m going to come up with a new topic to talk about every week…Also if anyone wants to send me burned CDs with some new music, that would be much appreciated!!

I also went to Niamey last week for the swear-in of around 40 new volunteers. It was so much fun. It was good to see all of my old friends that are in the Zarma-speaking part of the country, and we went out and ate lots of good food. This next month, Inshallah, I will be helping some of my friends in a different region, Konni, with a hygiene / handwashing tourney that they’re going to be doing, and also doing translating for some doctors who come here from America to give free surgeries to women suffering from fistula. That will be at the National Hospital in Niamey. Also in a couple of weeks, one of my closest neighbors (Frances) and I are going with a group of health workers from the government on a polio campaign. We will go to villages near our own helping give the vaccinations for polio.

So for the one week I was in Niamey, 3 girls from my girls club got married and moved to other villages!! Keep in mind, they are 15 years old!! I’m a little confused about the whole process, but here’s how it happens, I think. Word gets out that the girl is to be married and there is a celebration for a few days at the bride-to-be’s house. They call it literally “the washing.” Everyone comes over to congratulate her, she sprays everyone with perfume that comes over, everyone puts on henna, many people give her little gifts, and she wears the nicest clothes she has, with lots of makeup on. So they party like this, and then finally, on the day of the wedding, a group of the girl’s friends, singing the whole way (usually she’s crying, because she doesn’t want to leave home or her family and friends), take her to the groom’s house. Everyone eats kola nuts, the nastiest things on earth. They are the bitterest grossest nut, but if you chew on it for a few minutes, apparently you get a caffeine buzz…Really though, its so gross that I’ve never been able to keep it in my mouth long enough to get the buzz.

I miss everyone from home a lot! Can’t wait to come home…Talk to you all soon.

Love, KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

I hope everything is going well in GA – I’ve been pretty busy here! Lots of stuff has happened in the last month…Its finally getting hot again (no fun at all) and I’m dreading hot season which is starting officially in March and will last til probably June or July when the rains come…Right now, its so nice its like springtime!! Next week when I’m back in Maradi we definitely have a few days at the pool planned so I’m excited about that.

Work is going well here! Its good to actually have work and stuff to do, that’s for sure…I went to this bush village called Kwaila to do baby weighings, and it was a huge success the first time I went…I was afraid that maybe like 15 or 20 mothers would come to have their babies weighed, so I went out to the village (about 1 hours walk from my village) with two girls from my village to help me, and hung up the scale outside the chief’s house and waited on the mothers to show up, and boy did they show up. We weighed babies for 4 hours!! All the time the babies were screaming (not only were they afraid of the scale, their simply terrified of me and my white skin and blue eyes), and we ended up weighing 80 babies in all! And then I ran out of the baby weighing sheets, but there were even more to be weighed, so I’m glad there is a lot of effort in that village. I will be going back out there next week (once every month) to do that and talk with them about what they can feed their babies to help them grow and avoid malnutrition. It was so funny, this one lady came up to me and had 2 of her babies weighed, and they were both albinos…After they were weighed and left, my two girls from my village who helped me, looked at me, eyes big as saucers and said “Yasmina, those babies were whiter than you!”

What else, the girls group is going well!! So far we’ve been doing it every two weeks, we’ve talk about hygiene, oral rehydration solution, AIDS so far…The club is going really well so far…Shoutout to Devon and Sims for all the fun stuff they sent for the club!! The girls are going to love all the games and art stuff! ( : Thanks so much. Also I’ve been teaching at the schools, lessons on hygiene and conjunctivitis. You want an ego boost, you come be a PCV in Niger and walk into a classroom of kids. Its so funny, when I walk in and they realize that I will be teaching, the kids just burst in to screaming applause and yell “Yasmina!! Yasmina!!” its too cute. Also, me and three of my closest PCV neighbors are planning a bike ride from Maradi to Gidan Roumdji (50 km) where we will be stopping in 12 villages along the way, it will last 3 days and 4 nights, and we will be doing skits and presentations and sensibilisations on hygiene and cleanliness…It will be from March 2-5, we are biking the route tomorrow to go talk to all the chiefs to let them know we will be coming and find good locations..It should be fun.

Oh yeah, I know yall will think this is funny. So I’ve been farming again!! Hahaha. Now is cold season, and people have huge fields of gardens where they do tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, and cantelopes, so I went out with my favorite family in the whole village on their oxcart way out in the bush, and we picked tomatoes for like 5 hours. I was soooooooo tired!! The next day I felt like I had run a marathon…I don’t know how they do that every day. But it was fun, just talking to them the whole time…They are the nicest family, with lots of young women and teenagers so we basically just joked around the whole time, and at the end they gave me a huge bowl of all the biggest and best tomatoes…It was fun. The dad in the family said that come rainy season, hes going to give me some of his land and teach me how to plant and harvest millet, haha I can’t wait. Its going to be great.

SO unfortunately I had a thief in the past week -- they hopped my wall when i was out talking to a surrounding villages school about doing health lessons there at the school there. When i got back at 1030 in the morning, my phone and 700 CFA (not even 2 $, but a lot of money in niger) was missing. I went out and asked the women pounding outside of my house if they saw someone hop my wall or in my house and they said no. Word spread like wildfire through the village, people were pissed, within 5 minutes the whole village knew. I had all of the elders and men from my village in my concession, they were so mad, they were looking for footprints..A bunch of girls from my girls club came over, they were crying they were so upset, they're so sweet. SO anyways, i too was pissed, bc it was obviously someone that i let in my house often and am nice to bc they knew exactly where i keep my phone and extra change. In the afternoon, my friend Ila came over ( i trust him more than anyone else in my village, he brings my water and makes repairs on my house for free) came and was like, here it is yasmina!! He said he came in my concession and the phone was lying right on the ground. Who ever the thief was must have gotten scared by all the comotion and knew that the mess would be beaten out of them if they were found with my stuff and they threw the phone over my wall and ran. Oh well...from now on i will be more careful and lock my house every time i leave and not leave my phone outside. it was crazy.

The day that I had the thief was not good at all. My neighbors had a baby a little over a week ago, and she was the tiniest thing i'd ever seen. light as a bird with the littlest arms youve ever seen. I could just tell she wasn't going to live, and you could tell she was suffering. Well so taht day was supposed to be her biki (baby naming ceremony where they kill a goat and give the baby a name and everyone in the village comes to celebrate). Well anyway, so i dress up nice and am walking to the biki, and halfway there I met someone on the path and they told me that she had died in the night. It was sad. When people die here, youre supposed to go and greet them on the death, to show that you care. they call the people's house where the person died the "wurin gaisewa", or literally "the place of the greetings." Deaths are different here, people weren't crying, but everyone came out from the village to show their respects. basically you just go and greet the family, ask what happened, and say lots of different allah phrases, such as "May Allah give her a place to rest." May Allah give you patience. May Allah make the ground soft for her. Etc. and you can replace Allah with God, basically. It was sad. At the end, the dad gave me a watermelon. It was sweet.

All right, well that is about all that is new now! Hope everything is going well in GA, miss and love yall. - KTPThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Greetings from Maradi..Hope everything is going well at home! Things are going along here in Niger – I’ve been lucky enough to actually have work to do lately, and have been able to visit 2 of my closest friend’s here’s (Kristy and Mark) villages so that has been lots of fun.

I finally painted the world map…It looks good even if I say so myself. It is 4 feet tall and 8 feet wide, and the only place on the whole school where I could paint is this area that is in the middle schoolhouse about 20 feet off the ground…The only way I could paint is a few guys from my village pushed together about 8 schooldesks on top of each other, and I stood precariously on these painting…Needless to say, it was quite the spectacle…The painting part wasn’t too hard, it was actually tracing out the map that was hard…While I painted, Zita, my pup, sat under the schooldesks. Of course, at any give time, there were about 300 kids (seriously, I’m not kidding, I took pictures) watching me and running around the schoolyard tormenting Zita. Finally after she couldn’t take the temptation anymore, she would take off running after one kid, and every kid in the whole schoolyard would whoop and holler, it was pretty funny.

I also started my girls (actually young women’s) group!! I’m pretty excited, me and two of my favorite girls from the village went around and explained the club and told all the girls in the village when to come. The meeting was utter chaos at is calmest. Seriously. There ended up being 30 (!) girls coming, and every single kid in the whole entire village wanted to come too. I really wanted it to be something special for the girls, something they could be proud of and learn from, and didn’t want kids there. Well the kids didn’t listen. They crawled over my concessions walls like ants…I couldn’t make them go away fast enough. I decided for the next meeting, I’m going to get three teenage boys from my village to stand guard while we’re meeting, that should solve it, if that doesn’t work I’m going to get my chief of the village to come and make the kids go away. Anyway, for the first meeting we did hygiene and talked about all the ways to keep a clean house, wash hands, keep foods covered, burn trash, sweep your household, etc. I made all the girls nametags, they were really excited. One of the girls went and pulled a bucket of water from the well and i made a ton of Gatorade and gave out peanuts as a snack. They were so excited, so I’m glad there’s a lot of interest in this…Every day since then they’ve been asking when the next club meeting will be, so there is a lot of interest, hopefully they will go home and teach their families the stuff they are learning.

I went out to Zinder to celebrate a friend’s birthday last week, that was lots of fun…Also I got to go out to one of my FAVORITE people in Peace Corps village, Mark’s, he is simply fabulous, and he lives in a village called Mirriah. In Zinder, all the Education volunteers have formed girls soccer teams in their towns and they play each other, we went to the match of Mirriah vs. Zinder…He is about the funniest person I’ve met in my whole life and not afraid to say what is on his mind and I’m certain that you all would love him to death. I’m sure you’ve seen him in the pictures on webshots, he’s the redhead. I really can’t say enough good things about him. Some of my favorite people in the country are posted out in the Zinder region so hopefully I will make it out there a lot.

Also this week I spent in my friend Kristy’s village…She lives in a bush village called Birni Lalle (literally, city of the henna tattoo). We went around and met all of her villagers, she is working on an AIDS awareness skit with her school, and also she did a meeting with all of the women of her village and they decided that they want to do a literacy group and also a sewing class, so she has lots of work to do…It was fun seeing another person’s village, and it made me miss my village so that was nice. We walked up about 10 km to this city called Dakoro when I caught a bush taxi back down to Maradi, and that was an adventure to say the least. First of all, the road from Maradi to Dakoro is the worst in the country, and in a country like Niger, that is quite the statement. Its horrible, not paved, and with tons of potholes…and its cold and wind season, and there is constantly tons of dust whipped up in the air. So I get on the back of this open bed truck with a frame, that is tiny…about 30 others (literally, I’m not making this us) get on in the back and we make it to the road. Everyone is sitting on top of each other. This Fulani woman was sitting in my lap, with her baby in hers. I only got peed on twice the way down, which is a feat, seeing as there were like 15 babies on board. The guy next to me was wearing an Alan Jackson Tour tshirt, and here I am hanging on for dear life as we tear down this road. We stopped twice so everyone could get out and do the Muslim prayers. I finally got out the Harry Potter book I was reading, and had one of those “Where the hell am I and what am I doing” moments. I was so happy to get to Maradi to say the least.

I’m heading out to my village tomorrow, January 20, and should hopefully be out there until Valentine’s day. Hope you all are doing well!! Write me a letter if you get a chance I would love to hear from home ( : Again, my pictures from Niger are at: Webshots.com

Username: Katiepafrica

Password: Elkolta

Thanks for reading! Love, KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

How bout them Dawgs! Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a good Christmas and a happy new year...We had a fun Christmas out in Zinder, and spent all christmas day making empanadas. That is a labor of love, let me tell you. They took forever, but they were yummy. It's cold season her right now and cold season is no joke here...I went out to my village for a couple of days in between Christmas and New Years, and it's so cold and windy I barely leave my house until noon. Even then it's with longsleeved shirts, sweatshirts, jeans, and a thick skirt over the jeans...There are harmattan winds coming in from the Sahara, and it's so windy that it whips all the dust up into the air, so you can't even see very far at all for all the dust. When I went and visited with some of my friends in El Kolta, they were all burning fires inside of their houses.

I went out to my village for a couple of days mainly to get my pup and to celebrate a bit of Tabasci, the Muslim holiday with my villagers...It was pretty cool, on the day of Tabasci, all the men went to the mosque to pray, and when they return, each family kills a male goat and basically they just eat the meat for days..I came back into Maradi on the 31st to celebrate New Years and one of my crazy fun friend's birthday(Becca). Since I was coming in on the day of Tabasci, I didn't think about it, but there were no bush taxis going to and fro because everyone was celebrating...i Also brought in Zita because everyone wanted to see her and I just didn't want to leave her alone in the village...I waited 3 hours on the side of the road and there were NO cars coming through...finally I flagged down this car that wasn't even a bush taxi, just a random car, and begged them to take me into Maradi. They said OK, but not the dog. My village friends finally convinced them to let me bring the pup, since my hausa didn't seem to suffice...Well Zita was in fine form, howling the whole time, peeing on me, she does not like being in a car. I was mortified the whole way. She's been good in Maradi, though, and everyone is in love with her. We had a crazy fun party for Becca's birthday. We dressed up 80's and had a dance party. It was fun. Hopefully, you will get to see the pictures soon!

One of the things we focus on as health volunteers is Vitamin A and better food to feed your kids so they're less malnourished. It's so hard because they can't give more variety of foods if there is not enough money for eggs, liver, orange foods, etc. Sometimes there is nothing but millet, millet, and more millet, with some sorghum thrown in there. And no money to buy the foods that their kids really need. In Niger, there was a "food crisis" or "famine" in 2005. Every year, just before Nigeriens harvest the millet, right after rainy season, there is "hungry season." This is when the millet harvested the year before is running low or empty. The harvest was good in Niger last year, so the hungry season of this year wasn't as bad as the famine of 2005. Unfortunately, the millet harvest was poor this year, so while people have enough food for now, hungry season is shaping up to look like the hungry season/famine of 2005. Keep Niger in your prayers that there will be enough millet to make it last until next harvest. Happy 2007! Love Lots, KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

This is a picture of me and my puppy Zita, she's the best puppy in the whole world!!! Please note that we are wearing the same necklace, hahaha, my villagers think I have lost my mind when they see the necklace.This blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

We are almost done with IST, in service training...we've got to go to lots of sessions and learn lots more about the work we're going to be doing...I've gotten lots of baby weighing carnets that i can give out to the women when i go do baby weighings when I get back, and we have lots of posters, etc. now to show people what we're actually talking about when we're giving health lessons...

On Saturday, me and most of my friends will take the long busride east to Maradi where we will spend one night, and get our mail and packages, etc. then on Christmas Eve, we will go a little further east out to Zinder to celebrate Christmas...Should be lots of fun...I think around December 30, there is the second biggest Muslim holiday of the year, Tibasci in French or Sala Baba in Hausa...It occurs 70 days after the end of Ramadan and I learned and have since forgotten the meaning of the holiday, I guess I should look it up before I go back to my village!! But anyway, each family that has the means to, kills a sheep, and they pretty much just eat meat for days until it runs out...My villagers have been talking about how much fun it is since I have been in El Kolta, so I think it will be fun to be there then.

Oh yeah! This was funny, at least to me, the other day, I got to the hostel in Maradi a day early, before anyone else, so I put in a CHristmas CD and sat down and was writing some Christmas cards, and am feeling all CHristmassy, and at 6:00, I could hear the call to prayer from like 3 different mosques near the hostel...talk about surreal, to be listening to "Silent night" and the prayer call at the same time! Anyway, it made me giggle and I wished someone was there to laugh at it with me haha. Oh yeah, and my other favorite moment that I'm not quite sure will be funny to yall bc of cultural reasons, ok so in Niger, everytime you enter someone elses concession or yard, or another room, you're supposed to call out "Salaam Alekum!" (Peace be with you) and you dont enter until they say "Amin. Alekum Asalaam!" (Amin, and Peace be with you). I think its a Muslim thing but I'm not sure, the words are in Arabic...So before I left my village, some of my neighbors whip out this doorbell, that when you push it says "Ding dong! Salaam Alekum!!" Anyways it made me laugh so hard that they just straight up gave it to me and i nailed it up to my door, its pretty funny.

Oh yeah, I will be coming home sometime in late June for around a month!! I can't wait!!!

ok so I need help!!! Lots of people have asked for ways that they can help out here and what they can send for my work or to the people here and I finally have some stuff up that yall can send if you want to or have the means. I have been making lots of plans for my girls club and all the stuff that I want to do, but I'm working with very few resources...These are the things taht would be WONDERFUL if people could send:

A Frisbee

Soccer ball (deflated)

Pump for soccer ball

Long jump rope

Beads for them to make jewelry and stuff

Coloring books

Glitter and glue

One of those blow up globes would be perfect

World map, Africa map, or Niger map (folded up, I want the club to be about geography and learning about the world too, these girls just have no concept)

ALso, we need tshirts!! (I want the girls to have a tshirt we can wear to every meeting, and also for when we have soccer games with other PCV's villages. I can get the tshirts custom made here, and they are only $4 dollars per person, if you want to pledge a certain amount, that would be just awesome...also, just to send american dollars if just the best bc i sure can't cash checks here..There will be about 25 girls in the club, so I need about 100 dollars, and I know the girls will just DIE if they have the club tshirts)

And basically anything else that you think a bunch of teenage girls would enjoy doing!! If you want to send any of these things, maybe just make it as a comment on the blog so others will know not to send the same thing you sent...also, you can email me at marpcvs@intnet.ne to let me know, and I can tell you if someone has already sent that or not.

Please send to:

Katie Prescott

BP 226

Maradi, Niger

West Africa

Thanks for reading!! Hope everyone has a great Christmas and eats lots of good food ( : I miss you all!!

Love lots, Katie

Also, my pictures are up on Webshots.com, username: Katiepafrica and password: elkolta

There should be new pictures up soon!This blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

How is everything going in the States?? Its true what they say, you don’t know what you have til its gone, and I really miss friends and family a lot these days…Things are going pretty well here in Niger. My Hausa is so much better than it used to be…I don’t dread leaving my house anymore because I won’t have any idea what they are saying. Its crazy how fast you learn it here…A lot of PCV’s already here have told me that I have a ton of good Hausa, which is comforting bc in the village where Hausa is my only option I feel like I don’t speak any hausa!

Its weird how PCV’s here in Niger find hausa-isms creeping into our english speech. For example, “Sai hankori” means have patience…In hausa, you say “have patience” in about 100 million different situations…when you’ve been waiting 2 hours on the side of the road for a bush taxi, you say to another person “sai hankori.” If there’s a death in someones family, you say “sai hankori.” To a beggar, you say “May Allah give you patience.” And for about a million other situations you say have patience…So its funny, if a PCV here is wondering where a package that was sent 6 weeks ago is, we say “have patience.” When you are standing at the post office in the sun for over an hour while the post lady takes her time getting your package, you can only say “sai hankori.” My host mother back in Hamdallaye, when other trainees quit to go home to the states, she said “sai hankori with Niger.” Really, if a person with no patience came to this country, I think their head might explode.

Oh yeah, and the post people here like to mooch off of our packages!! They have the peace corps’ number, and know that for most of us, what we get is food, and good food at that…So before they give us the packages, they demand to get some of the candy/what not is in the package…So on the outside, if someone sends a package, it is smart to include that the package includes “christian religious materials” or “pencils” or things equally as interesting to them…The lady at the post office asked me today what are “snacks” bc that’s that it said on the outside of the package…I told her it was “materiel religeouse chritiane” in my busted french, haha. Also, i have tons and tons and tons of drink mixes now, thanks so much! Yall probably don’t have to send more of those for a while…I could own stock in Koolade and Chrystal light.

Things have been going ok in my village…Its frustrating because next week I am headed into Niamey for more training, peace corps calls it IST, In Service Training…Its where we learn the really technical aspects of our job, and some more Hausa…I am really excited because I will get to see all my friends from training that I haven’t seen in 2 months that are spread out all over the country, and hang out, and share stories and basically just have a few weeks of fun. So in our villages, we were pretty much just supposed to learn some Hausa, and think up ideas, and get a feel for what the community needs…Its frustrating though to do that for 2 months, to not really feel like your getting anything done! And there are only so many things one can do in an African village in one day…But i will say it worked bc i learned a lot of Hausa and came up with some good ideas for projects to start after IST.

I’ve been going up to the school in my village a good bit to observe classes and talk with the teachers about what they need and what I can do to help…My school director and teachers have a lot of effort and motivation, so they are open to all the ideas that i have. I finally made my peace with the kids in my village…they have finally chilled the heck out. They give me my space now, and that is a good thing…It doesn’t hurt that I finally learned how to say in Hausa “if you don’t stop climbing over my wall right this instant I’m going to go tell your father that you are a bad child and wont leave me alone and he’s going to beat you with a millet stalk.” That gets them to scatter really quick haha…School is really different in Niger, and they have a different way of doing grades, in my village, there is only the equivalent of 1st through 6th grade, meaning that those who end up making it all the way to the 6th grade are just out of luck after that. I sat in on each of the grades, and the kids are just too cute…Every time I, or another teacher, walks into the classroom, all the kids rise, fold their arms and bow, and say “Bon-jour.” Its so freaking cute. And when the teacher is teaching and asks a question, instead of raising their hangs, every kid in the room raises a hand and snaps frantically until called on. I have my favorites among the kids in the village, and they would all keep cutting their eyes at me and making faces at me…too funny. My favorite kid in the whole continent, names matty, he is 6, and he cutest thing ever, he is missig his front two teeth, and couldn’t keep his eyes open during class…I guess some things about school span all continents!

Anyways, as far as project for the school, I’ve written a proposal for money to buy paint to paint and paint a world map, africa map, and Niger map on the side of the school…The teachers are really excited about it, and I am too, except i don’t know how i am going to paint this all by myself…supposedly there are stencils etc in Niamey, i think I’m going to make a couple of other volunteers come out and help me for a few days. Also I’m going to start doing health lessons once a week over hygeine, malaria, simple medicines, and health issues at the school. Also, they are going to start writing letters to Betsy’s kids in Atlanta!! Her kids are writing the first letters, and then when they get here I’m going to get another volunteer who knows french to help me transcribe them to french, and then just clip them together…I think it will be good, for the kids here and at home, to make friendships and see how other people live. The kids here are really excited.

One of my other projects when i get back with be a girl’s education group…Niger has the proud distinction of having the world’s lowest female literacy rate, with the fewest amount of girls in school, getting married the earliest, and having the most kids. So basically, my work is cut out for me. So i think I might do it ever 2 weeks or so, have a girls club, or “fada en-mata” in Hausa. My girls are really excited, and I think I will pretty much copy from the things we did at the girls fair here in Maradi. I am going to try it so each week we do something fun, like fancy henna or learning to make something good to eat, and also something about health, like family planning so you don’t have 80 kids, about AIDS, about simple hygeine etc. I think I will also have a drawing each week for a prize, because i have lots of cute little things that I think girls would like, like jewelry, crayons, and what not. I am going to try to have a community focus, about community service, but so far, the only 2 things I can think of doing are having a mosque cleanup day, where we can sweep and straighten, etc. and maybe on World Youth Day, we can plant a bunch of trees in the village…Trees are sorely lacking here in the Sahel desert, and there are lots of seedlings in Niamey that Peace Corps encourages us to plant, and I think that would be a good opportunity. Please please please email me with ideas!! I’m intimidated bc ive never lead a girls group and i need ideas for what to do at the meetings and community service ideas, and yall have fresh eyes so please tell me if you have any ideas for things we can do.

My other big project will be doing baby weighings once a week in 4 bush villages that surround El Kolta, they are called Mesaurare, Kwaila, Kaihi, and Teke. When I’m there I hope to talk to the mothers about better weaning foods, vitamin A, etc. Every Saturday, and NGO called Enfancia Sans Frontieres comes to my village and weighs babies and gives out this stuff called “cwamasou” which is a mixture of dried milk, sugar, flour, and oil to the mothers of malnutritioned kids, which is pretty much everyone…The main doctor is Cuban, and when I talk to him, he only hears Spanish and french, and I only hear Hausa and English, I realize that my spanish is completely gone and replaced by Hausa…Good thing because my hausa is going to be oh so useful when i return to the states!! So basically i just help them mix up the cwamasou and talk to the mothers.

My puppy is doing just wonderful and says hello!! Really, she is the cutest dog on the continent…I feel terrible for leaving her at home for a month without me, but i can’t exactly take her to Niamey. My friend is bringing her food while I’m gone, he brings her food and plays with her 3 times a day!! so I can’t feel too bad…and my yard is huge so she has lots of room to play…Every day when I’m walking around my village, i have the same dialogue, literally:

- Greetings Yasmina!! Hows the morning? Did you wake in health? Hows the work? Hows the tiredness? Where’s your dog?

- Greetings to you!! The morning is in health, I am in health, I’m thankful for the work, there is no tiredness, the dogs at the house, and she greets you too!

That usually sends them into a fit of giggles…Since village life is frustrating and boring at times, I am happy to be out of the village for a few weeks, but I’m excited to come back in a month to be with my puppy and get my work started.

Thanksgiving was fun here, if not a little sad bc we weren’t at home. The AIDS bike ride left from maradi the day after thanksgiving, which meant that there were lots of volunteers in maradi from all over the country, it was fun seeing lots of people…We made TONS of food…No turkey, but we had guinea fowl, which is yummy…someone even figured out how to deep fry them…yum. And 2 kinds of dressing, candied yams, green bean casserole, 8 pies, eggnog, devilled eggs, mashed potatoes, gravy..i was surprised by all the yummy things we could make in Niger…I made mashed potatoes for 40 people can you believe it, and they were good. There wasn’t a big enough bowl to serve them out of, so i have to clean out this bucket with bleach that we wash our clothes in and put them in there haha…hey in peace corps, you just have to make do. The bike ride was awesome when they came though my village…they put a huge projector and played a movie about AIDS and all the volunteers slept over at the school area…it was fun, bc now my villagers are like “Omigod Yasmina, youre amazing, you brought all those white people HERE!!” So i basically earned a lot of street cred with my villagers through that, haha.

Oh and there are mangos now!!!!!!!!! For the equivilant of a quarter you can get the best mango. They are yummy…also guavas are everywhere too, i’d never had a guava before I came here. Half the food i eat here, I bet there isn’t even a word for in english…the other day my neighbor gave me this “thing”, and i have no idea what it was and i’ve already forgotten the hausa word, but it tasted like a potato until you got til the middle and it was like a squash with seeds…Its just stuff you thought never existed.

Anyway, i miss you all and look forward to hearing from everyone!! Send me an email anytime ( marpcvs@intnet.ne ), and mail is always wonderful ( :

Hope everyone enjoys the holiday season for me! I miss yall. Love KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Well I survived my first month in my village in one piece!! I am in Maradi for the first time in a month, and i have to say, it is fabulous to be here....One can only be in a village cut off from good food, internet, mail, american english speaking friends for so long!!! All of my friends are back from their first month too right now, so we are eating drinking speaking english like crazy right now...Everything went pretty well my first month in my village.....There were times when it was frustrating, tiring, boring, etc. but also times where i laughed my butt off and learned a lot and people in El Kolta really are so nice.

Oh yeah, ps good job on sending mail and packages, to everyone!! ( : I had by far the most mail of anyone when i got in....I read mail for over 2 hours, and that was wonderful...thank you sooooo much, and I am writing you all back asap!! Well there's so much to say about everything that I dont even know where to begin so I guess I will just jump in...When we first got to my village, the Eastern Regional Peace Corps Director, Ousmane, callled a village meeting and someone went around to round everyone up who wanted to come to the meeting...About 150 people were there, Ousmane explained what Peace Corps was, who I was, what I would be doing there etc...Thank God, bc at that point my Hausa language skills were poor at best...Anyway, everyone had lots of questions, the doctor at my local health clinic asked if I would be able to fill in when she was out of town, etc. delivering babies, giving shots.......ohhhhhhhhh was she mistaken...He explained that my work would be mostly preventative and I would be working with ways to help people improve sanitation, improve maternal and baby health, etc.

So the first week I just spent getting my house to look good and walking around and trying to meet everyone in my village...My house looks good, if I say so myself...I hung up my UGA flag and a bunch of UGA posters so I represent my state well hehe...I also bought this huge millet stalk mat and wove a pagne (african print fabric used for skirts, curtains, everything) through it, and put up tons of pictures from home....Basically I decorated it nicely, I figure Im going to be here long enough, I want my house to be somewhere I like to be!! My concession is huge!! Concession is basically like a yard, here in Niger, every family has a concession, it is an area that has high walls for privacy...Mine is huge, and my friend that brings my water says that in 2 weeks, we can start a garden in one side of it!! I think we are going to try with tomatoes, cabbage, cucumbers, and maybe onions??? I hope he knows how little I know about gardening..anyway it should be fun, and it is something to do!! THe first week I about had a nervous breakdown with all of the kids..lets get this straight, I love kids, i work with kids, i have younger siblings, i have lots of patience.....but the kids in Africa use up every bit of sanity thtat you think you have!!!!!!!! really...the chief of my village gave me permission to beat them haha with a millet stalk, and believe me I've come first...Anytime I go anywhere, ther eare immediately at least 50-300 kids that follow me screaming YASMINA!!!!!!!!!! OMG ITS YASMINA!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah and that probably sounds cute, but just imagine it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.....my hausa finally got good enough for me to say, "hello...please go away now." Of course I have a couple of kids that I really like that i let come in a lot, but for the most part, they're crazy overwhelming. I read before I came here that Niger has the highest number of children per mother in the whole wide world...I believe it!!!!!!!!!!! They're everywhere.

So I went around and tried to meet as many people as possible...Taht really helped my Hausa improve a lot...At first, everywhere I went, everyone said "Ba ta jin Hausa" (she hears no hausa) and that was not fun, bc here I am, trying as hard as I can...after a few weeks though, those magic words started appearing, " Ta iya Hausa!! Ta jin Hausa kware!" (she understands!! She hears so much Hausa!!) So basically I learned all the greetings in the whole wide world and as much as I can, and fooled everyone into thinking I have at least a little understanding of the world...My favorites are in the afternoons, I go out for walks in the bush with my puppy (she's so cute!!!) and we will be out in the middle of nowhere bush and we'll pass a couple of Africans who clearly have no idea who I am, and this is how the conversations goes...

Me: Hello! How are you?

Them: OH MY GOD!!! its an ANASARA!! (white person)...she has a dog...and she hears hausa!!

Its pretty funny, it makes me laugh every time...THey just love it that I speak hausa, and not French...Here in Niger, French is spoken at the schools, and only lucky few get to go to school, so it means that few people, especially in the villages, speak French...Already my Hausa has far surpassed my French...After a few months when I really have Hausa, Im going to try to get someone in my village to give me French lessons...

All the time, people bring me over tons and tons of food..Every morning, my neighbors who I share a wall with hand over a huge bown of hura (well water, unpastuerized curdled sour milk, and millet flour...yum, right??) Everyone drinks tons of hura here...I dont have the heart to tell them that I simply cant drink it, so i usually give it to my puppy or to some kids taht come visit...They also bring lots of kunu and koko, which are millet porridges and they are yummy!!!!!!! esp after putting in tons of sugar and cinnimon...but I think they only drink that mostly during Ramadan, and that is over, so i probably wont be seeing that wonderful food for another year...They also bring over tons of tuwo...I'm trying to learn to embrace tuwo...Its millet flour cooked with water, molded into patties til it is the consistency of rice that has sat out all night, and then serve it with sauce, and you eat it with your hands...At first, I thought it was nasty, but I'm starting to like it slowly, considering I dont have much choice...Also peanuts...there are peanuts galore here!!!!! People eat them raw, roasted, boiled, mashed, etc...I have enough peanuts in my house right now to start a peanut butter company. Usually, all the food is way too much to me to eat, so I share it with people who come visit.

Everyone always asks me about "chan Amerik" (there america). They always ask me about my village, America. I have to tell them that no, there is no bush, millet, camels, hura, etc in America, and they just cant believe it. I've had offers of about 500 kids to take back with me to America..Its never because of what you would think, that he's hungry here, no education, limited opportunities, etc., They always just try to give me their kids as a joke..I always come back and pretend, ok, we'll go tomorrow!! The mom always starts laughing and the kids screams in terror at the thought of going back with me...If they are under 3, every kid in this country is DEATHLY afraid of us white people...I guess with out pale white skin and ghostlike light eyes, we are pretty scary to a baby whose never seen anythying but black people with dark hair and eyes.

Ramadan finally ended!!! At the end of ramadan, people were pretty happy for it to be over...Ramadan is hard man!! I dont know how everyone here does it..when its so hot, and not to drink and eat all day...now that is piety!! Everyone always asks me if I do ramadon, and I have to explain that no, I"m not muslim, we dont do ramadan in america, I'm christian...At the end of Ramadan (its ended this past sunday), They have the biggest celebration of the year, its called sala, and basically everyone buys new clothes and shoes for everyone in the family, everyone gets henna put on their hands and feet, the women put on this kohl eyeliner, and the families make food like rice and pasta that there would normally not be any money for...And then everyone goes around a visits with one another for a few days...The kids go from household to household saying "Barka da Sala!! (Greetings on the holiday!) and its customary to give a ilttle bit of money or candy, so I bought a big bag of candy and gave that out..It was pretty fun...kinda like Halloween.

My puppy is simply wonderful!!! She's the cutest puppy in Niger...I love her to pieces...She goes with me everywhere in the village, and even my villagers like here, and this is a feat, bc nigeriens typically dont like dogs at all! Her name is Zita...I told my villagers she hears no Hausa, only English, and they always get a good laugh. She cuddles at night.....the only complaint, is that in the morning, there is the 530 call to prayer, that i used to wake up to, then promptly fall back asleep to...but no not now!! Zita hears it and thinks it is time to get up and play, and gets up and starts prancing around, pawing my mosquito net, chewing my hair, basically just trying to get me up...So i get up at 545 to start the day...I have to light a lantern to boil my water for coffee, can you believe that?? But its worth it because shes just so cute...Its like they say all old people should get a pet, it makes you live longer, i think all peace corps volunteers should get one, they keep you sane!!

My typical days started out like that, then getting up and cooking breakfast and just reading whatever until about 9 i would go down to the health clinic and talk with evryone there.....I can't really offer my doctor much help now since my hausa is so poor, but its good bc it makes my villagers think I'm really working (haha) and its a good way to meet people...I would tell them the ORS, oral rehydration solution, to give their kids if they have diahrea or were throwing up, and what to do with conjunctivitus, which there is a lot of here...SO I would stay there until about 12 and then go hom and rest during the hot hours, like every other Nigerien, until about 3....Then I would go out and greet people at their homes, and then when it got much cooler, Zita and I would go out for walks out in the bush...There must be 50 paths that lead out into the fields that lead out to the bush or to surrounding villages, and I tried to take a different on every day...Its so pretty!! At night, I usually fix me and Zita some dinner, or go buy some tuwo from the little market that sets up camp next to the road, and then write letters, read, text my friends in country on my phone, and listen to the bbc.....Niger was actually in the news, as the headlining story, i about fell off my chair when I heard it...I doubt it made news across the atlantic, but the governor of Diffa, a province to the east of maradi, is kicking all of the arabs out of the country, sending them to chad. Its caused a big deal over there but apparently doesn't affect me here in Maradi...Everything I hear about chad is that things are getting worse and worse, and I never hear anything good about Nigeria to the south...but things in Niger are peaceful, and I dont see of feel any danger here at all.

The random things I did were getting henna on my hands and feet, farming (!!!) with my villagers, we pulled peanuts and millet, going out on a motorcycle into the BUSH with one of the schoolteachers from my town, this supernice guy, who zipped me around from village to village, it was so fun...Also, every week, I went and met my friend erin in her town called Guidan Roumdji...SHe is an education volunteer so she is in a big town and has water and electricity (such luxury!!) so me and another bush volunteer, Frances, would go visit here and we'd talk english til we couldn't talk anymore, and eat good food, and charge our phones...

I decided for my first big project, I want to start a baby weighing program in El Kolta and in three surrounding villages that I can just walk to with the scale...I figure it will get the mothers invested in their babies health, and also it is a good opportunity to talk to them about vaccinations, vit. A, weaning porridges, etc. So i went out and found the three villages that I wanted to go to, and talked with their chiefs (the first step to doing anything in a village....you always have to talk to the chief first...they're always so nice and welcoming...for one of the villages, the chief was blind, and my friend had to tell him that I was a white foreigner...can you believe it, i had enough hausa that I fooled him into thinking I was african...I was pretty happy about that....the chief of El Kolta is great, he's only about 30, which is superyoung to be chief and he is always grinning with me, he's just tickled pink that I will actually be there for two years) Anwyays, they are all happy and excited about the baby weighings, so I should hopefully get those started pretty soon.

Here in niger about a month ago, there was cholera all over the country...can you believe it, its like its the Oregon Trail!! Only 2 people in the Maradi region couldnt go back to their villages as a precautionary measure, and right now, there is no cholera so that is good! In my town, I liev about 50 yards from the main road of the country, the only cars that go down the road are bush taxis and NGO cars..>I see ngo cars all the time, there is Medecines sans Frontieres, Care, unicef, world vision, etc. etc. I had some interesting bush taxi rides this month but those stories are for another time...Its so funny, all my villagers always ALWAYS ask if I'm married or have a boyfriend, so i finally just made up that I have a boyfriend in Maradi, named Abdou (dont ask haha, its all i could think of at the time) So now every time i talk about going to maradi, they say, you just want to go see abdou!! This one time, my friend Gunner visited to bring a cat, and everyone was like "finally! Abdou came to visit you, its about time." Its too funny.

Well Ive written tons and I'm sure there's tons I'm forgetting but I'll try to include that in the future...I started to miss home lots this month, so it was good to get lots of mail etc. Hope yall are doing well!! Eat lots of good food for me!! I will be here in Maradi until Sunday, so feel free to email me at the marpcvs@intnet.ne with my name as the subject line...Love to you all!!

Love lots,

KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Hey everyone - I am leaving tomorrow to go out for a month at my post! I am excited, but nervous because this is the hardest part of Peace Corps service. I went today and bought tons of stuff in Maradi for my new house. I am excited to decorate and meet all my villagers!! We are not supposed to leave our clusters for the 1st month, but this means that I can go to my friend Erin's market town once a week and meet with her and another PCV for shopping and dinner every Sunday...She also has electricity and showers so I know I will be making it there! haha. On October 31 is when I come back into Maradi to celebrate the first month at post. The last week has been crazy. All of the PCV's all over the country came into Niamey for our swear-in week. We had a huge Gender and Development Auction, where PCV's auctioned off stuff and trips, food, etc. to raise money for gender and development projects...they raised over 3,000 dollars! On Thursday, they threw us the craziest party I think I have ever been to, and I went to UGA so that says a lot. For my mother's sake I will spare the details, but it was fun. Friday we swore in and it was beautiful! It was at the Ambassador to Niger's house that is on the Niger river. I took tons of pictures...Three of us gave speeches, in Hausa, Zarma, and French. Right now we are in the middle of Ramadan...As for everything else in Niger, there are special greetings just for ramadan, "Barka da Sala" (greetings on the holiday) and my personal favorite, "Barka da Sha Ruwa" (Greetings on drinking water.) All the Nigeriens are fasting during the day, and not even drinking water...You cant imagine the endurance!! When we were still with out host families, I would sit with my host Mom at the end of the day and it would be just about dusk, and she would just be sitting there waiting for the prayer call to start, and the second they started calling it from the mosque, she just drank and drank and drank and drank. There are 5 prayer calls during the day, and the final one when the sun goes down...During Ramadan, it is especially long...I went down to the mosque with my host mom just to see what it was like and it was beautiful and so peaceful to watch the prayer and hundreds of them doing the same thing. All of the men sat in the front, and the women in a big group behind them...Being a woman, I had to cover my head, I didnt' participate, but just sat with the kids on the side watching...Let me tell you, the women were just tickled to death that I came down there. They would turn around in the middle of the prayer and giggle, and beckon me over to pray...They thought I was going to finally turn into a good little Muslim! OK so millet is the Nigerien staple food that EVERYONE grows here...seriously, millet is like grass here...In America, people use it for birdseed, but here, it is all people have to live on. So i totally had a Forrest Gump moment with my host mother the other day, I was reading this little dialogue, and it mentioned this food named "fura" so I asked her what it was. She said it was a strained millet porridge. I got curious, and asked her to name all of the things one could make out of millet. So she said, there is "tuwo, fura, kunu, koko, hura, gari, etc. etc. " (millet porridge, millet drink, millet gruel, millet milk, etc.) and named about a million different things....So funny, all I could think of was that scene in Forrest Gump where Bubba Gump said, "shrimp scampi, shrimp gumbo, fried shrimp, etc."In November, my team, Team Maradi will be doing a young girls fair in the hostel in Maradi...all of us bush volunteers are bringing in 2 girls from our villages that are not in school, and doing a fair where they will learn how to cook certain things, AIDS awareness, self esteem, etc etc. I am excited, now I just have to go out and find which girls I want to bring in. Also, at the end of Novermber, Peace Corps Niger has this awesome event called the AIDS Bike Ride, where like 30 volunteers and Nigeriens bike across the coutry from Maradi to the West and stop from village to village and teach AIDS awareness, do skits, ways to prevent AIDS, and it will end on Dec. 1st, World AIDS day. I can't participate this year because I am too new, but I'm definitely doing it next year. They are stopping in my village though!! Mine will be the last stop of the day so they will spend the night in my village, so that will be lots of fun.My Hausa is getting a lot better recently!! This will no doubt be a hot commodity when i enter the American job market again, haha...When i was in the market today, about 5 people were shocked and told me that I "hear so much Hausa!!" All right, well I wont be coming in from the bush until Halloween, so until then you can send me an email at marpcvs@intnet.ne (with my name as the subject line) or send me a letter. Miss you all and hope you are enjoying cool weather in the States!! Hope the Dawgs will still be undefeated by then!! Love Katie This blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Hey everyone,

what a big day for football!! Of all of the other football fans here (notre dame, oklahoma, and nebraska) mine was the only team with a victory yesterday! I cant believe those scores of the other sec games...its going to be a good season!! Did you see what we are ranked now, did we go up?? Kristy said that ND dropped to like 10 or something. What are the dawgs at by now?

My village is like the mayberry of Niger...I am really close to maradi, and my house is like 50 yards off of the THE main road in Niger, which is such a luxury considering lots of my friends are like 3 hour walks into the bush before they get to their villages...and even though its the major road, there are practically no cars on it because no one here can drive...anyway there is a school right next to my house, and i met the schoolteachers, apparently they sit outside a lot under the trees and talk a lot...theyre the most educated in the village, they speak hausa, french, and english!! I cant believe it. School starts here right after ramadon ends i think...ramadan is on saturday...That means we'll be getting to our posts right at the time where no one in the village is eating during the day, its supposedly when the people are the most cranky bc of that. We as volunteers obviously arent expected to fast, but they said it would be culturally sensitive of us to eat and drink inside during the day. Anyway, eve said her kids at school ask questions a lot about africa, i told her maybe once my language skills are up, i can do soemthing with the school and see if they want to do pen pals in america...eve said her kids would need a lot of help though, haha. I was thinking about part of my health projects doing like a health session once a week at the school, and incorporating health lessons, peace corsp gives us a lot of help with that. My first couple of months im sure will be spent trying to get up my language, and after that im going to start some projects i hope...I have 2 huge concessions...I'm going to try to do a garden, apparently the best season to garden is "cold season" (that phrase makes me laugh), so that is like november and december, so i think im going to try to do millet, tomatoes, onions, and cabbage. I want to do a community garden project so i might use one of my concessions for that. Oh yeah, i went to the health clinic and met the doctor lady there, i am going to probably start volunteering there when i get back to post.

Anyway, my village also has it own market, they have lots of food there and camels, goats, etc. Each night, all of the goats come home by my house from out in the bush where they have been grazing, and at least 300 goats walk right past...its funny. Also, when Chris (the pcv that introduced me to the ppl in my village and got me settled in for my first night, he speaks tons of hausa) and i were walking around the market, we walked out to this lake behind my village and following us were literally 200 kids....i dont think they had ever seen a white person before, much less two. Yesterday, i got settled into my house, and i was taking a break in the afternoon bc it was hot and was sitting outside reading under a tree, and like 30 kids kept coming into my concession, just to watch me!! No lie, they watched me read for like 45 minutes until they got bored...every time i turned a page, it sent them to whispering...when the sun moved and there was like a quartersized piece of sun on my mat, there were like yasmina, move!! the sun!! and picked up all of my stuff off of the mat, shook it, and put it under more shade.. they are too funny. Everyone in my village is just too nice, the come up and bless me constantly...WHen Chris and i were walking around, they come up speaking "hausa hausa hausa" and chris would translate for me, but the gist of what everyone was saying was " may allah bring you happiness, health, luck, blessings, love, joy, and to your family too, etc etc." Hausa people are the best!!

There is this family who is already "taking care of me". They pretty much built my house I think..The guy, Sama'ila is in charge of brining my water to me, he brings it for 2,000 CFA per month, or 4 dollars...SO WORTH IT!! water is a pain to pull here! I keep it in this cistern thing that is buried under ground about half way, and you would be amazed how cold the water keeps. The first night Chris and I were there, Sama'ila's family brought us over this millet drink called "koko" (sp?) which is so good!! its this millet drink that is strained, and then you add sugar, and it tastes just like hot baby food, which doesn't sound good, but you come live in Niger for a couple of months and your ideas of what is good food start to change.

I dont have the best cell phone service in my village, but if i put my phone up in this really tall tree in my concession a couple of bars magically appear...Chris said there is a way to bush-rig a cell phone tower in your concession and that is by rigging up a rake on the top of ones shade hangar so that is a definite project i can do in my first month when i dont know what anyone is saying to me! I am going to try to leave my phone on at night from 8 to 11 so you can call anytime then if you are trying to reach me...

Tommorrow we are heading back to Hamdallaye to train for 2 more weeks, then swearing in as volunteers on the 29th, then after that I will be out here for good in my village.

Hope yall are doing well!! I miss yall a latte, you can email me here (marpcvs@intnet.ne) or better yet write a real letter. Love and miss you lots,

Katie

(oh yeah and if you email to this address, put my name in caps as the subject line and it will be sorted to me accordingly, thanks!! Also, if you send pics via attachments, send it to my gmail address, bc this one can't recieve pics...I will probably have much more frequent access to this email address though)This blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

I just wanted to add a short post, bc a lot of people have wrote what is good to send, and that is food!! I will probably have my villages market as my main source of food, and for every meal here in Niger, it is some kind of combination of tomato paste, peanut oil, leaves (yeah, leaves), peanut butter, and onion. What variety!!! so anything you could send to help me fix food would be great...Im nervous i am heading out to my site this week and will be cooking for myself for the first time, i dont know what Im going to do!! haha. Peace Corps provides a stove top gas stove. So say a little prayer for me this week!!

~any kind of packaged meat is as good as gold here, like tuna, chicken, spam (go on and laugh) etc

~Also good are dried fruits and dried meats

~anything you can just add water to, like grits packets or those flavored oatmeal packets

~spices or anything you can add to food to make it taste good

~soup packets you just add water to

~candies

~Crystal light

Today we went to the national hospital in Niamey and they gave us a presentation on fistula, something that affects lots of young mothers in the 3rd world...it is quite sad, i saw it on oprah sometime this year, she did a program on it down in kenya i think. but anyway, we got to meet about 100 women who were in town for the next few weeks to get the operation, and learned about what we could do out in our villages to prevent it from happening. tomorrow we are headed out to our sites!! apparently since it is rainy season, a lot of the roads out east are flooded so we should get there, as the nigeriens say ``Inshallah'' (godwilling)

Hope everyone has a great week!! love KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Hello!! well i found out i am going to Maradi!! i found out just a little bit about my village...Its called El Kolta, its off of the main east west road that goes throughout the whole of Niger, there are 2500 people that live there (which is quite large for a health volunteers village) Also, i will most likely have a disponsaire in my village to work in and also a school. I am only 25 km from the city of Maradi, which is the 2nd biggest city in Niger...This is good bc it means i can get into Maradi easily and without a 6 or 7 hour bush taxi ride which some people have to do...I head out to my village for live in on Wednesday!! i cant wait...some of my favoritist people in my training group are heading to Maradi as well...Maradi is about 9 or 10 hours east of Niamey and where we are training, see if you can find it on a map. I cant wait to get out there and actually see the village. Oh anddddddd the best part is; my friend erin and i have been talking about the whole time that if we were posted anywhere near each other, we were going to split a camel between the two of us. that way it would be half the price and also we could take turns taking care of it, etc. well guess what!! Erins only 35 km away....were so getting one!! They are about 400,000 CFA, or about 200 dollars, so that would only be about 100 dollars apiece...thats just a steal hehe...now we just need a name. any suggestions??? and im getting a kitten named fausto, haha.

Here is my address for the next two years:

Katie Prescott, PCV

BP 226

Maradi, Niger

West Africa

Mail is better than Chistmas here ( : So start sending mail to this account rather than the old one. Maradi was hit the hardest by the famine last year, so hopefully this year will be much better...as a result; there are a lot of NGOs like UNICEF, CARE, Doctors without borders, etc so i may get a chance to work with them potentially.

Oh and i got a phone!! its nicer even than my one in the States ironically...its free for me if you call, but make sure you get a phone card before calling. Without a calling card, rates may be as much as $15 connection fee in addition to the $7 a minute (depending on carriers)....so calling cards are great! and you can get them for as low as 9 cents a minute.

Cell number:011 227 96139615

The only thing is, it might be hard for me to keep it charged, so if you cant get through, send a text maybe and next time is it charged i can text you back to call.

So i saw that the dawgs killed South Carolina!!! yeah! Oh yeah and i guess i should give a bush taxi update. Last week we took one, like 10 volunteers; the rest africans, in a bus prob meant for 12 ...wanna know how many people they crammed in there??? 25!! and that is with goats on top!! ok on the way back to Hamdallaye yesterday, its like a 40 minute ride, we broke down 4 times. and in Niamey today, the taxi we rode had no brakes...so he just used the emergency brakes...every 50 feet. its just so ridiculous its funny.

Oh and this is funny too, the women here are fabulous...they love nothing more to joke with you and gossip and mess around....so anyway, one of my fellow trainees told me; '''Katie, last night at dinner, my host mom told me that you have a boyfriend and you go for long walks at night together.'' What?? totally made up...so we realized that our host moms just pair all of the trainees up and gossip...so that night at dinner i was messing with them and asked who my boyfriend is because i would like to know. anyway, i figured to play their game and told them my boyfriend was my friend here, Mark, aka Mustafa. well they about died with that...they were convinced mustapha had bought my cell phone so he could keep tabs on me...then i told them i had two more boyfriends, both Nigerien teachers up at Peace Corps that they knew, and they just lost it....its so fun to mess with people here, because they dish it out all the time.

Thanks for reading!! lots of love, KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

ok just so everyone knows even though i couldnt come to the game yesterday it was the best day of my life!! we got to see the giraffes!!! we had originally been told that there wasnt enough money in the budget for a guide to take us out to see the wild giraffes (the last in west africa) so i was sooooooooo bummed bc i had looked forward to that all week...my teacher Souleyman said at best, keep your eyes peeled you might see them off of the main road leading back from dosso to hamdallaye our training village...wouldnt you know that i was in the last seat on the bus, having have my eyes glued to the bush out the windows looking for the giraffes, AND I SAW THEM!! I yelled giraffes, everyone just freaked out, and the driver slammed on the brakes, we piled out of the bus. They are just amazing and majestic and beautiful and breathtaking!!! there were easily 30 girraffes, about 200 yard from the road; they were all just walking. we slowly walked out there to them and all just milled around amidst them taking pictures and thanking God for such an opportunity. it was just go beautiful you could cry. they werent even scared of us!! i got some of the best pictures, i was as close as 30 feet to the closest one. you just cant imagine!! it was just the best most wonderful thing. you would think giraffes would run from us but they really didnt!! they did stare at us; im sure they were thinking what are these white people doing out here?? haha. i got the greatest pictures.

oh and guess what????? I WAS ON THE RADIO IN NIGER!! heheheh...it was so awesome...we all prepared a little health related sensabilisation and read it out loud in our language ( for me hausa) and will air tonight..so im pretty much famous. haha just kidding. Oh yeah, and my sensabilisation was for what to do if your kid has diahrea, so I said how to do the oral rehydration solution of water, salt, and sugar....pretty much i talked about diahrea on national radio, it was great. My hausa is coming!! Everyone here is so nice....

the day before yesterday we saw a "snake charmer" in the market in dosso....he removed this snakes fangs and there was a big group of people surrounding him that were like in awe (course they didnt know his fangs were removed) So anyway, this guy was selling medicine traditional, that apparently you could use if you were bitten by a snake or a scorpion....all a scam really, im sure it was just like dirt and some salt or something.......anyway i got pics of this mamoth snake!!

Things are going good here...I am getting excited to get out to my village and start doing work...It all depends on my village and the facilities available, but I think I will be doing stuff a lot with the kids and teaching cooking classes for feeding the kids with malnutrition and also hygeine and disease prevention...I am anxious to get out there an see what I will be working with. as i said, i will be going to konni, maradi, or zinder....most likely maradi bc they need a lot of health volunteers out there...maradi was the hardest hit in the famine in niger last year. That will be pretty intense if I go there...from what I've seen, there is food here...but its all bland no nutrition whatsoever food, so its no wonder the kdis are malnourished..its really the exception if the kid doesn't have a belly swollen with malnutrition...its sad to say I've gotten used to seeing kids like that, you would think that that's something you would never get used to.

We also visited a hospital yesterday in Dosso...being here makes you realize all the stuff you ever took for granted in the states, for me it has been food...I've never wanted some decent kind of food so much ever...and also health facilities..There are so few doctors and clean facilities.

oh yeah my little host brother mamansani is home from the hospital!! he is just precious, when i got home, he got up and ran over to me and just jumped in my arms laughing and chattering away...he is just too freaking cute!! my host mother said he talked about me all week long at the hospital. I want to steal this child so badly.

i saw that the dawgs pulled through with a victory !!! yayayya...i saw the highlights of the game today in niamey at the rec center on espn. gary and shelly, i even saw yall in the crowd!! haha just kidding...Ok thanks for reading! love and miss you all!! pray that i get a great village this friday when i find out.

Love lots,

KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Since I wrote last, there's been a lot of stuff that has happened. Last Sunday, we had the day off from training, so me and abut 8 people went into Niamey to go use internet and go to the American Rec Center (by the way, the best place on Earth). So our only option to get from Hamdallaye to Niger (about 30 km) was public transportation, by either bush taxi or bus. We caught a bus for 250 CFA, or about 50 cents. Souleyman, my health training teacher happened to be on the same bus. Well anyway, this bus is like 100 years old, there's about a million people packed on it (we were standing), its about 500 degrees outside, and I didn't eat breakfast that day bc it was these greasy donut things that I just couldn't stomach. Needless to say, I passed out!! It was bad news, but thank God I passed out into Souleyman's arms and was with my friends!! Learned my lesson, never take African public transportation on an empty stomach.

Anyway, we make it into Niamey ok, and went to the Rec Center. It is most fabulous. They have a swimming pool!! we must have swam for like 6 hours...and tv and air conditioning!! It was a huge treat....best part, they even had american food. I had a cheeseburger, chocolate milkshake, french fries, AND sweet tea. I think I'm pretty much going to go into Niamey for the Rec Center for every Sunday for the rest of training. Well we had another fiasco on the way back to Hamdallaye, but at least this time I didn't pass out!! We had to take a bush taxi back in, and for those of you who dont know, bush taxis are pretty much how everyone gets around in Africa...THey can be a station wagon or a van, and they have to be at least 20 to 30 years old, probably the doors dont even close and they tie the doors shut, and there is not limit to how many people will fit in there...Imagine with the heat and 20 sweaty people in the back of a van!! Its not a rare sight AT ALL!! And 9 times out of ten, there are like 2 goats tied on top...Basically they're no fun, but what can you do but laugh?? So anyway, there were eight of us, and we somehow comandeered our own station wagon, but it was definitely 4 in the middle row an 4 in the back, all with no air conditioning and the hot sun...Dont worry I got pictures, they are hysterical.

Im sad because my little host brother Mamansani is still in the hospital in Niamey!! Kids get sick here so much. I hope he comes home soon...appanently, from my broken hausa, I have deciphered that at least he is better, according to the rest of the family.

This is a funny story, So in Hamdallaye where we live, there is like a section of town where the richer people live (meaning they have electricity), and theres a few PC trainees with those families....And we're split up with families according to what language we speak...SO basically I live in the back of town in what is definitely the poorest, so we've termed it the Hausa ghetto!! There are like 8 of us back there in the ghetto, so we stick together. This week, we had this really good good dinner (by good, i mean there was cheese!!! yum) up at site, and they asked us to do like a poem, or song, or anything in the language that we are learning...so me and the rest of the hausa ghetto (represent) translated the words of "ghetto superstar" into Hausa and performed it in our most thug clothes that we brought to Niger...It basically brought down the house...I took some funny pictures.

We are all getting anxious to know where we will be placed in country!! I can't wait to find out where my village will be for the next 2 years and who in PC that I will be around. We find out our site placement on Friday Sept. 8, and then we do this thing called "live in" where we go live in our future village for a week and start buying everything and making sure the hut, etc. is ok, then we go back to hamdallaye for one final week of training...So that will be from Sept. 13 - 18...I'm excited to go meet my village!!

Ok so I will also be getting my cell phone, probably around the week of the 18th - 25, so be on the lookout for the number and see if you can maybe get a calling card i would love to get calls!! Ive been decorating my hut, and its finally feeling homey...I bought this really pretty tapestry like thing in Niamey of girraffes in the sunlight and mesas, and between that and my big UGA flag, my hut is looking good!! I could use some decorating tips ( :

I can't believe that tomorrow is the first football game and I wont be there!!!!!!!!! Please send me details of tailgates and the game!! I hope you all that can go or watch have a blast...Me and my fellow football fan Kristy (Notre Dame) are going to wave our flags proudly tomorrow...we're also going to teach everyone the fight songs hehe...

So now I am in Dosso, all of us health trainees have come down here for a little field trip...unfortunately we are not seeing the giraffes this weekend, like I thought, apparently there wasn't money in the budget. today we went to a health clinic (gidan likita) to observe and see some volunteers work. We saw some baby weighings, some sensabilizations on hygeine, and a cooking class for the mothers of malnourished children on good nutritious food to feed their babies. It was great. I am so excited about my work here, I definitely see it as it will be gratifying...Its fun to meet the other volunteers, and see them speak this language that I am struggling so bad with, speak it perfectly!! SO i have faith that the language will come...We also met today the most powerful religious leader in Niger!! It was so cool, we were really lucky to meet him...He is the sheik, and i think there are only 3 of them in Niger...Apparently on the major muslim holiday of Mohamed's birthday, people come from alllllllll over west africa to come meet and be blessed by him. He was the coolest nicest guy, and he offered us blessings on a long life and a lot of money!!

I miss you all a lot!! Send letters if you get a chance, i want to know about your exciting american lives ( : Thanks for reading!! Hopefully next post I will have my new address and where I live!!!

Lots of Love!!!!!!!!!

Katie

Ps Niger is just getting more beautiful every day...It is just beautiful in about a million ways, i can't wait for yall to see picsThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

hello!!! Africa is awesome, i am loving it and having a blast....we have been brought into niamey the capitol for the weekend for a tour and to use the internet, we were all so excited to use the internet hehe...bear with me and forgive the typos bc the keyboards are so different here its like learning how to type again. Sooooooooooooooooooo much to tell all of you!!! First off, we are having a lot of fun and learning lots. Its totally safe here too, i havent felt endangered at all; the Nigeriens are the nicest people. The Peace Corps staff here are so fun and nice; they make training a lot of fun and are so nice it hurts, haha: Niger is a muslim country, and 5 times a day there is a call to prayer from the mosques here in town...The first one is at 5 am....I live pretty far from the closest mosque, so I dont hear it at 5, but some of my friends who live closer to the mosque hear it every morning, blasting on the loudspeaker...Hey at least I only have chickens to wake me up...actually some mornings its the goats, sometimes the cows, haha...The call to prayer is really pretty and melodic actually, beautiful. When i get up sometimes the boys in my concession are on their mats doing their prayers. Also bc they are muslim, smoking and drinking is very frowned upon here, you barely see it anywhere among the nigeriens. The africans here have the prettiest clothes, they make ours look boring, haha. Ive gotten a skirt made from a pretty pagne that I bought from the market, its bright yellow and teal. Im going to try to get a few more made, and also there are tons of good thriftstore finds to be found here, stuff that goodwill couldn't sell in america so they send to africa. I'll admit, i did get a good laugh the other day when I saw a muslim man wearing an "I love Jesus" hat bc im sure he had no idea what his hat said. My host mom, she sells these fried dough balls in the market, theyre actually good rolled in sugar, sometimes I sit down there with her on market days and pretend to help her sell. We are positively celebrities here. Everywhere we go people stare...its definitely hard to get used to people staring at you no matter what your doing. All over the village its so funny, random kids that I swear ive never seen before in my life will come up to me " fofo yasmina!!!!!!!! fofo!!" I dont know how these kids know me. (yasemena is my african name...I like it!! The flight here took forever!! but it was so cool when we flew over the sahara; just beautiful. We are in training in a village called hamdalaye, the training site it like 4h camp; its cool. All of us trainees live down in the village with our host families..I got lucky, my host family is so sweet and the kids are so beautiful. The oldest girl is Ishatou; she is amazing; this girl does; everything, she cleans, gets water from the well, shows me around hamdy (hamdallaye), takes care of her brothers and sisters, and cooks my dinner every night...and shes 10!! love her. My little brother is Mamansani, seriously the cutest kid ever...he needs to work for baby gap. Hes 3, and my namesake is the baby of the family; Yasemena, shes a cute one...Ive taken tons of pics, i cant wait for yall to see them. I have pics of mamansani in UGA gear; and of me carrying yasmena on my back african style; they are too cute. We really are having a lot of fun...during the day we have tons of lang classes; Im learning Hausa, which means Ill be put somewhere in Hausaland; the provinces are Konni, maradi, or zinder, you should look them up on a map. We have started a few lessons on our health training; but we are mainly focusing on lang now bc that is so important...i get a lot of practice with my host fam and with the kids. people could greet here for days!! in nigerien culture, its rude to start any conversation without saying; how is the health? how is the tiredness? how is the hut? and your goats how are they? what about the family?? and so on!! but its kinda fun just to banter; and good language practice. Anyway, the other health volunteers and I have learned a few simple health lessons and how to say the, in hausa for when we get to our villages; such as medicine for diarrhea and conjunctivitus; and basic sanitation lessons. So we learn language and culture during the day; and after class is over, we usually play volleyball or soccer; ping pong. Peace Corps has set up a little bar at our training site, i guess for our sanity, haha. The Nigerien beer is good!! The best kind is called biere niger, and its most definitely better than natty haha. I love all of the other trainees here, they are some characters. We do have a lot of fun; and im glad i have some fun people to spend the next two years of my life with if I cant be with yall!! My friend mark has the best quote of the trip, one time we were all cutting up and he said "Somehow, I dont think were what JFK had in mind." hahhahah. Ive started a quote book of all the crazy stuff people say. Each stage of trainees gets their own tshirts made, and the slogans are quite funny...Old ones say: Everythings hotter in Niger. Niger, where everybody knows your name: ANASARA!! (anasara = white person) I can't wait to see what our says hehe. I am seriously missing some american food!!! One can only have rice and sauce for so many days in a row before it gets old. Please send food!!! Sometimes during breqks we just talk about food, its so funny. I am planning my homecoming meal now!! The cooks up at the training site are good cooks though; it will just be a rude awakening when i am out in the bush and have to cook for myself though!! They do have these really good yogurt drinks, they are like gogurts, and called kossum here; and are about the closest thing to ice cream one can get in the village...a lot of times after dinner; we go get them at night. So far Ive only been sick twice, which is much better than some of my friends. The worst thing people have gotten has been amoebas, which is absolutely no fun. We are on some serious malaria drugs; and they do give me some vivid dreams; but thats the only side effect ive felt. Sleeping under the stars and my mosquito net at night is so nice!! it gets too hot and stuffy in my hut, and outside there is breeze and about a billion stars. You can see for miles; and shooting stars are a dime a dozen here. Its so amazing. Sunrise and sunset are just beautiful too; the horizon goes on for forever and there are so many types of clouds and colors in the sky it just takes your breath away... I saw my first african rainbow yesterday!!! I learned how to say it in hausa but ive already forgotten, whoops!! haha. Thanks so much if youve sent me mail or messages!!! i love you!! mail day is so exciting here...SO far my letters have taken about 2 or 3 weeks; but my friend mark got a letter from PA that was postmarked only 4 days earlier!! You can send mail on bush taxis here; and they,re called bush notes. Mark came up with moàst of the best quotes of the trip; "Call me BushMail." hahahahhahahah. love him. what else, my birthday was lots of fun; the trainees all made me a card, the cooks cooked a cake; and everyone sang; and i even got a happy birthday beer! yay it was fun. There are camels everywhere!! they are the funniest things. I seriously want to get one when i get to my village!!! how much would you laugh if i got a camel. Im for sure getting a kitty. I cant wait to find out where ill be put in country. The PC volunteers that are already in their posts are a lot of fun; weve met a good many. A couple of weeks ago; we did this thing called demyst, where we spent the weekend out in coutry one on one with a volunteer. I was in Konni with a girl named Natalie, we had a lot of fun; and all of the volunteers from the Konni region threw us a big party at the end. They had bush pizza and burritos; and even bush hunch punch!! so fun. first african hangover, not fun haha. And we spent the night in the hostel and were able to call home, that was nice. We had a fashion show last week!! all of our host moms dressed us up in african fashions, mine even put this crazy makeup on me; i took about a billion pics that night. I havent laughed so hard in a long time. The Nigerien staff dressed up in all of our american clothes; and they all got a good laugh out of that. After the fashion show; these people called the Wadabe people came in and did a show for us; they were amazing!!! look them up on the internet. They sang and dance and did this beauty contest where the men make the whites of their eyes and their teeth really visible to attract women and dance... Seriously; look them up!! I got pics and video. Next week, all of us health volunteer are going to DOSSO TO SEE THE GIRAFFES!!!! I am superexcited; i cant wait. Oh yeah and this was funny, a couple of weeks ago, Peace corps threw us a party and there was flipcup, beer pong, AND circle of death. Friends, you would have been proud I represented the south well. I miss all of yall so much, we just sit around telling stories about our families and friends and the crazy stuff we did in college. There are so many african kids running around here with your names; bc they all want american names bc we have african names; so chances are ive given your name to someone. I dont know when I may have internet again; hopefully i will come into niamey next weekend and get to use a cafe. Please send letters!! and news is much appreciated. I listen to my shortwave a good bit; and get Voice of America and BBC, and tons of random international stations; but really; the celebrity gossip is lacking here hahah. I love and miss all of you so much!!! and i think about yall every day. Thanks for reading and caring, KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Katie has called the United States. "I don't need an alarm clock. The chickens and rooster (and other livestock) are close by."

Katie is aware of the recent events in London, but reports no actions by Peace Corp.

As part of her introduction, Katie is learning the language and has met the Nigerian Ambassador. In addition, she is immersed in the local culture and continues to capture lifetime experiences.

Katie's name is Yasemena.

Katie thoroughly enjoys her host family and appreciates their hospitality.

What is the going rate for a camel these days? Well, we don't know, but a colleague in Katie's group has purchased one. How often do you have the opportunity to purchase a camel?

Although packages have been mailed they have not arrived in Niger. Moreover, this applies to the group, not just Katie. As a side note: If packages are mailed to the current address and Katie moves to the village, packages will be forwarded.

All in all, Katie is doing well, sounded very upbeat and excited to be in Africa. She is expected to make another call to the US later this month.This blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Hello from Philly!! I have found out that we arrive on friday and spend out first night with the host families on Sunday. Next friday, we will have a big party at the embassy and meet the US ambassador to Niger! that will be so fun I am sure. About 5 or 6 weeks in i think we will have access to internet and phones for a day, so dont take for granted the internet you are using to read this!!

Otherwise, the group thatt will be going with me to Niger is 43 people, pretty diverse, pretty much everyone is just out of college, and are really from ALL OVER...there is no one else from GA and only a couple from the south, there are a lot from the west coast...its probably 2/3 girls. I like all the people in the group a lot already, I am glad to have people that I like going over with me, if it has to be anyone other than my friends from the US. I miss yall tons! We have gone out a lot, eaten Mexican food, drank margaritas, and done karyoke...I mean, am I in athens?? hehe.... I am sad to leave because it is so real now, but I couldn't be more excited to be leaving and having this big adventure with a lot of fun new people. Hope everything is going well!! I miss yall already and I haven't even left!!

Love

KTPThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Well I am leaving on Tuesday, and I wanted to thank everyone and tell everyone that I have gotten to see the last few days how much I love yall. To anyone who came a long way to betsy's, you are amazing and I love you. Betsy thank you and everyone who helped with the party, i was a huge surprise and I love you forever. Thanks to EVERYONE for all of the advice, knicknacks, pictures, gifts, thoughts, prayers, well wishes, and farewell parties. And food!! I have probably eaten enough food in the last week to last me two years, which is kinda the idea. As Tommy said, I will probably lose it in the first week anyway. Africa - best diet ever. Anyway, I am overwhelmed with the love that I have gotten the last few days and I love love love you all and it is hard to leave. Of course I am so excited to go, but sad to leave. Its not goodbye, more like seeya later (later being 2 years.) Thanks again to everyone SO MUCH!

Another question that many people have asked is what am I taking. THe answer is way too much!! I have tried to cut down on what I'm taking but it includes: shortwave radio, flashlights, insect repellant tshirts (there IS such a thing), long skirts, a coffee press, journals, digital camera, a flash drive, a small sleeping bag, scrapbooks from my wonderful friends, nalgene bottle, pepper spray/whistle/airhorn (all of which Tanner bought for me "in case I get attacked by anything"), haha, lots of stuff to give away to kids (thanks to miss alex), spices, a thermometer (so i can have bragging rights to say just how hot it was in africa), a headlamp, some candy and tons tons more, but you get the idea. I dont know how I am going to get it all in my suitcase and backpack, but Nikki is coming over tomorrow to help me pack and I've heard she can make miracles happen.

Here are some pics from the farewell parties and such...notice in the last picture that some people are anxious for me to change my mind about going to Africa, hehe.

A lot of people have asked me for information about coming to Niger, and I hope you do!!!!!!! If you do come I'm sure that by the time you get there, I will know tons of things that we can do. There is a huge game park in Niger with all the animals people associate with Africa so we could do a safari (park w, look it up), camels to ride, food to eat, dunes to see, sweat to be sweated, and tons more. I'm just going to cut and copy the information that Peace Corps gave us about the steps that travellers should go through for when they visit volunteers:

Information and Advice for Families and Friends Planning to Visit Niger

The following points of information and advice have been compiled from various sources (previous visitors, former Volunteers, staff, etc.) for people planning to visit Peace Corps Volunteers in Niger. Visitors and Volunteers have learned that advance planning, communication between the Volunteer and visitor, and flexibility are very important aspects of a successful and satisfying trip. We hope that the suggestions and information below will be helpful. You may also wish to consult various travel books such as The Lonely Planet’s Africa on a Shoestring, or West Africa on a Shoestring.

Please note that Trainees are not allowed to have visitors during pre-service training, which takes place during the first few months in Niger. After swearing-in as Volunteers, they should not take leave from their post for vacation for the first three months. Visits from family members and others during this time often have a negative impact on the Volunteer's successful settling-in and integration into their community and their work. Thus, visits should be planned to occur well into the Volunteer's service and not during peak work seasons. We recommend a visit at some point during the second year of service.

1. Planning. Start planning at least six months before departure since several things have to be done sequentially which can add up to several weeks/months. Keep in mind that communication takes a long time, so arranging the logistics through the mail will require a lot of lead time. Make sure that the timing of your visit is convenient for the Volunteer you are visiting. A Volunteer's primary obligation is to her/his job assignment, so be sure that your visit will not disrupt any work plans.

2. Passport. If you do not already have a passport, obtain a passport application and application instructions from a post office or a travel agent. To apply for a passport, you will need the completed application with two passport photos and the application fee.

3. Visa. To apply for a visa to Niger, obtain an application from the Nigerien Embassy, 2204 R Street, NW, Washington, DC 20008; website at http://www.nigerembassyusa.org/embassy.html; their phone number is (202) 483-4224/7, and their fax number is (202) 483-3169. After completing the application, send it to the Embassy with your passport, two passport photos, W.H.O. records showing the required yellow fever vaccination (see below), the application fee, and a copy of either your tickets or your detailed flight itinerary. You will be issued a single entry visa only, unless you specifically request multiple entry. You must have a multiple entry visa if you plan to leave Niger and return during the period of the visa’s validity. Be sure to call the Embassy and verify with them that procedures have not changed since this mailing.

It is our understanding that the Embassy does not have the means to return your passport to you and you must send a pre-paid express mail envelope. If you are in the D.C. area, you can pickup your passport at the Embassy.

Separate visas are required for almost all African countries you may plan to visit, except for intermediate stops where you will not go outside the terminal while en route to or from Niger. Each embassy requires that you send your passport with the visa application, so you can only apply for one visa at a time.

You can consolidate and expedite your passport and visa applications if necessary by going through a private company that handles it for you for an additional fee. (Ask a travel agent for details.)

4. Health. In order to enter Niger, you must get a yellow fever shot and have it logged in a World Health Organization (W.H.O.) medical card. For more information on what additional shots are required or recommended, contact your local health board or the Division of Immunization at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, (404) 639-1870, (www.cdc.gov).

You should also plan to take anti-malarial prophylactic drugs (such as mefloquine) during your stay in Niger. Contact the Malaria Hotline at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, (404) 639-1610 or (www.cdc.gov) for information on what drug(s) to take and where you can get them.

While in Niger, precautions must be taken with food preparation and water treatment. Drink only water that has been filtered and chlorinated or boiled. Vegetables should also be soaked in a dilute iodine or chlorine solution if they are not being cooked. Your Volunteer family member will receive extensive training on how to prepare food and treat water and will be able to advise you once you arrive in country.

You should be aware that there are some health risks related to traveling in Niger, and medical facilities there are not comparable to facilities in the U.S. By law, Peace Corps medical staff cannot care for family members or friends who require medical attention while in Niger. We strongly suggest that you consider extra insurance with emergency evacuation coverage from a company such as International SOS Assistance, Inc. (P.O. Box 11568, Philadelphia, PA 19116, 1-800-523-8930 or 215-244-1500 in PA).

5. Money. The unit of currency in Niger is the CFA (1 USD=~519 CFA). Travelers’ checks are recommended. You may want to take at least some travelers checks in Euros, since switching US dollars to CFA in Niamey can be more expensive than switching dollars to Euros in the U.S. and then Euros to CFA in Niamey. Some of the big (and expensive) hotels in Niamey will accept credit cards. Note: There is no American Express office in Niger. The best person to answer questions about money (and how much to take) is the Volunteer whom you are planning to visit or the Administrative Officer at post (best reached by email: AO@ne.peacecorps.gov). Individual circumstances differ and practices change, therefore post can provide better information on a case-by-case basis.

6. Baggage. Have all your suitcases locked. On most airlines, you are allowed 80 pounds of baggage per passenger for trips from the United States to Europe, but only 20 kg (44 lbs) for intra-European or African flights. Therefore, you may be charged an excess baggage fee for anything over 44 lbs from Europe to Africa unless you check your baggage through to Africa directly from the U.S. (If you check baggage all the way through, be sure the baggage ticket has all appropriate code letters for the trip; the code for the airport in Niamey is NIM, and the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is CDG.) Consult your airline/travel agent for further info.

7. Flight Check-In. If you fly through Paris, arrive at the check-in counter for the flight to Niamey at least two hours before scheduled departure. Airlines start checking passengers in then and you may not be able to get a seat assignment until this time. The check-in process goes very slowly, so be prepared to stand in line for a long time. Most airlines will not allow large carry-on bags.

8. Arrival in Niamey. You must have both your passport and W.H.O. card for immigration when arriving at the Niamey airport. Only French and local languages are spoken at the airport, so ask the Volunteer you are visiting to try to have someone meet you at the airport. You may have to open all bags for inspection. Each bag will be marked with an “X” in chalk to show it has been inspected. Be sure that they mark it plainly since this “X” will be verified again at the exit. Try to keep all your bags in sight once they come into the baggage area. There will be men pressing to carry your bags for payment. Carry your bags yourself if you can. If not, negotiate a price with one person before allowing anyone to take your bags. If no one is going to meet you at the airport, get instructions ahead of time from the Volunteer on how to take a taxi to your next destination. Above all, try to be prepared for a very hectic airport scene.

9. Accommodations. Your best source of information about where to stay is the Volunteer whom you are planning to visit. The Hotel Sofitel Gaweye is recommended by Peace Corps staff in country.

10. Photos. Picture taking is highly restricted in Niamey and you should ask permission before taking any photos. Photos are never allowed at the airport or any military installation. The same policy applies to camcorders.

11. Identification and Registration. During the course of your stay in Niger, you may have to show your passport to the police several times, therefore you should carry it with you in a safe place at all times. If you stay in any village, you must register with the local police where they will check your passport and stamp it with the local seal just like most countries do when you enter or exit the country. This should not be a big inconvenience; it just takes time and patience.

Hope that helped if you are trying to come to Niger. I will put pictures up from in country as soon as technology allows. I miss you all already. Thank you for reading and caring!!!!!

Love lots, KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

Hola! Here is all the information I’ve gotten regarding sending and receiving mail while I’m in Niger. During the first two months when I’m in Niger I will have no access to email or phone…just mail, so write!! In two months, after I get to my post I will have more access to using phone and email, it will just be up to me when I can get into town to use it and how close I am to a bigger city that would have internet/phones. So for the first two months, I wont be able to update the blog but what I’ve seen a lot of other people do is have their friends and family post up letter’s (on their blog) that the volunteers have sent home, that way everyone can kind of be updated. If I send you a letter and you want to put it up on the blog, its really easy, just email Nikki (nikkig11@uga.edu), my mom (sprescott@pappclinic.com), my dad (marcus0056@aol.com ) or Gary and Shelly (gsergent@bellsouth.net) and they’ll tell you how to do it. Maybe that’s enough options, hehe I know you’ve got to know one of those people. This will be my address for the first 2 months. It will change and I can put up my new address then, but I’m under the impression that if you send a letter and it takes a while to get to Niger and I’ve since moved to my post, I can still pick up mail sent later to this address (did that make sense?) Katie Prescott, PCV Corps de la Paix B. P. 10537 Niamey, Niger West Africa Also, they recommend writing “AIRMAIL” or “PAR AVION” at the bottom to ensure faster delivery. I don’t know how long it will take for mail to arrive or get to the US from Niger, but I’ve heard everything from 3 weeks to 2 months (probably for packages it takes longer). To send a letter to Niger from the post office is only 84 cents, here’s a site Gary found for more Niger mail info: http://pe.usps.gov/text/Imm/immicl/immiclnr_009.html If you send packages, they say it’s better to use a padded envelope vs. a box because boxes are taxed more heavily and I would have to pay more to pick them up. But trust me I wont complain if I receive a box of goodies ( : A lot of people have asked me what to send in the mail, the best thing would be just a letter because I’m sure after being in such a foreign culture for so long, I will be wanting to hear from people in the US and home as much a possible. But if you do send a package of want to stuff an envelope, here would be some good things to include (I added some things that other volunteers had made a list of in the past): - Newspaper clippings about the Dawgs!! - Tom and Katie’s baby pictures (ha! just kidding) - Food!! Pretty much any dry food that will make if in the extreme heat all the way to Niger. Dried soup, pasta mix packets, dried fruit, hard candy, actually any kind of candy, drink mixes like Koolaid or Crystal Light.) - Magazines aka tabloids or US weeklys, haha or just any old magazine that would be news to me. Also if you see newspaper clippings you think I might be interested in that would be good, because I’m a nerd like that. - Pictures! - Little things for the little kids, like crayons, cars, stickers, etc.

On the Customs Form only claim the contents are worth $0-10. I may have to pay taxes on the money on the amount in the customs form. I also found out that I will be flying to Philedelphia for “staging” on Tuesday the 25th, staying there a couple of days, taking a bus to NYC on Thursday the 27th, flying from NYC to Niamey, Niger via Paris. I’m under the impression we’re taking the airbus, so that should be interesting. There are 40 people in my training group who will be with me for training in the first 9 weeks, their jobs are all going to be in 4 categories: English language education, Nutrition, Community Health, and Community and Youth Education. All right well that’s all I think, and I guess I will update the blog as soon as I can when I am in Niger!! Don’t worry about me I will be fine, I promise!! Love, KatieThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

This is an image of the world at night...Just goes to show you the difference between the West and the rest of the world. I can't wait for Niger.

After working at the African Youth Camp this past week at UGA, I am so excited to go and jump into a completely different culture. Those kids were here long enough to be American in many ways, but their African traits were what made there so unique. My favorite quote of the week ( and there were tons ) was "everone at school says we have drive-by blowdarts in Africa." haha, anyways I learned lots, there were lots of touching moments, and the camp reinforces all of the things I am looking forward to in Africa.This blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

At the risk of being a complete nerd, I created this blog so that I can have an easy way to stay in contact with people for when I am over in Niger. This might be a completely futile effort, seeing as that from the information that I have gotten about Niger, internet availability is few and far between. Anyway, at least I will be able to post when I get the chance, and I will have my address where you can write me at on here as well.

As of now, I'm scheduled to leave on July 25, 2006 for Philedelphia for pre-service orientation with 30-40 other volunteers, from all over the US, that will be in my training group in Niger. From what I hear, there will be get to know you exercises, more info about Peace Corps, and tons of fabulous shots!! I am realllly not looking forward to that, but what can you do?? I guess it sucks much less to take the shots than to end up with some creepy exotic African disease!

I believe on July 28th, we fly off to Niger! The capitol of Niger is Niamey. After much debate, haha, I have finally found the right way to actually pronounce Niger: nee-ZJAIR. When we all arrive, we will go to the PC training center in Hamdallaye where we will be training for 9 weeks, studying both French and a national language, get cross-cultural training, and recieve technical training for our particular assignments. We will also be living with a host family, and I am happy about that because that will be such a good way to practice the language and really get a feel for Nigerien culture. I loved loved loved the family I stayed with in Brussels when I studied abroad, although I think the cross-cultural differences are probably going to be a little more stark here, hehe.

I will most likely be an extension worker in Niger's maternal and child care services and my 4 main activities include: Monitoring children's growthMonitoring the health of pregnant womenTeaching sound nutritional and health practices to mothers and familiesRehabilitating malnourished childrenHere is the info for my actual job description:conducting home visits to observe and evaluate household health practicesdemonstrating how to improve weaning foods by using locally available foodspromoting production and consumption of vitaminA rich foodspromoting oral rehydration techniques for malnourished kidseducating the population in better sanitation, nutrition, and healthteaching about transmission and prevention of AIDSand pretty much tons moreAll right well thats a ton of info for anyone who cared to know ( : I will hopefully write more when I know more - KTPThis blog solely expresses my opinions and does not reflect any position or policy of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.