Happy Easter!

Easter Sunday was celebrated with our church family here in Niger.  With temps hovering around 110° all week there was not even a fleeting thought that it would be any cooler on Easter Sunday.  And it wasn't!  But we spent the day in a mango grove across from the lush, green rice fields and next to the Niger River. As we walked the mile+ to the site,  there was a breeze to make the morning temps that had already climbed to 100° seem tolerable.  But this post isn't about the heat, even though it seems like much of our lives and conversation revolves around it these days.

Back to the Mango Grove celebration of Easter.

 There was a bit of GREEN and a trickle of water that was pumped out of the river to irrigate the small garden plots.

Others with vehicles had arrived earlier to bring the chairs from church and everything was arranged under the trees.

The promise of a pop to accompany the noon meal made it a REAL celebration albeit the temperatures of the day didn't lend itself to ice cold anything.

The service was scheduled to begin at 10 am.  We started when most of the people arrived, many in new Easter clothes.

Many had been up at daybreak making food and preparing for the celebration. The hot, cooked food arrived.

The service started with singing in both Hausa and French, accompanied by our excellent drummers.

The Easter story was read by our pastors, once in Hausa

and once in French.

 Our church service always includes special numbers from the different groups in the church and today was no exception.

A group of girls, who are learning English, sang with their teacher.

 The children's Sunday School group sang.

 The women's group...

A beautiful duet in German by two of our short-term missionaries.

The Youth Group sang as well , as did the Youth Group #2 (the group of "older" youth otherwise known as missionaries.) No pictures of these groups.

The offering was taken by group:  men, women, children danced up to the front to give their gifts.



Someone forgot to bring the offering basket so a motorcycle helmet filled the need.

Announcements and a lengthy sermon finished off the service by 1:00.  

Then came Easter dinner:  1/2 of a baguette and a tasty tomato sauce with a chicken leg. With a bottle of warm coke to polish it off.

Some neighbor boys collected the plates and ate their fill of left-overs.

Eating and visiting done, we left to walk home at 3 pm while others stayed to play some organized games.

Happy Easter to all of you!

The Princess and the Pea on Mulberry Street

We can purchase foam mattresses, locally made, cut to size, in a variety of denseness and thickness.  

Transporting them around town and around the country makes for some interesting and sky-scraping loads.  

There's More to See on Mulberry Street

What to do when it is 96.6 degrees inside the house at 6:00?  Go for a walk!  It's 106.6 degrees outside!  But life goes on as usual.  We took a stroll and remarked to each other again that life is indeed lived outside here.  Here are some of the sights we saw today:

Groups of men shooting the breeze, playing cards, or just watching life go by.

 Women building their fires, setting up their little mini "drive-by restaurant"  and beginning to cook their evening cakes to sell to passers-by.

Camels finished with their days work and relaxing in the shade.  I love their tufts of hair on their hump.

And taking the family cow home from grazing, We didn't get a picture of the neighbor's dozen goats all coming home "to roost".

And To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street

I don't live on Mulberry Street, but the title often comes to mind as I walk/taxi around my part of the world.  In fact, I don't think my street even has a name.  We call it  "Our Road" or the "Chinese Road" because the Chinese financed/built it, or we call it "The Road Between the Old Bridge and the New Bridge", or "The Road That Goes the Opposite Way from Burkina Faso."  There is no street sign to be seen.  So maybe, just maybe I'll call it Mulberry Street until further notice.

Our street is a new one and this is what it looked like when we moved in almost 3 years ago.  We watched the road building process from start to finish.

This is what it looks like now:

It is very noisy and often busy, especially with some major road construction going on that moves a lot of traffic to our street.  Big trucks, motorcycles, taxis, cars, mini buses and a whole lot more pass in front of our house 24/7.

Every day as I walk, take taxis or even just step out of my gate onto the sidewalk in front of my house, I see fascinating sights.  I carry my little camera wherever I go and I thought it would be fun to share some of the fun things I see on my jaunts up and down my street.

This noon as we walked home from the office,  I saw this: (those are some heavy pots)

 

and Tom saw this!

As we walked out of our gate at 4:00, our local "Tupperware" dealer had parked his load and was taking a nap on our front stoop.  Our thermometer read 110 degrees so it was a well-deserved break under one of the two trees on the block.

That's what I saw on Mulberry Street today.  Stay tuned for more.  Have a wonderful day.

The Grades are Posted!

Coming from a land of "computer-generated everything" and the non-negotiable value of privacy, I never cease to be amazed at the seemingly utter lack of privacy in our host country. 

Not wrong, just different...

 
This week I saw another example.  Last week I was meeting with a student for Bible study on campus and as we were walking to catch a taxi, we noticed a large crowd of students trying to catch a glimpse of something that was thumb-tacked onto an outside wall of the English Department. It didn't take too long to realize that the results from several recent exams had been posted. 

I saw the name of someone I knew and two of her grades for two different classes:  a 17/20 on one which is very good, and a 3,50/20 on the other one which is pretty bad.  Everyone's scores on the exams, including their first and last names were posted for the whole world to see (or at least anyone who happened to walk through the English Department).  

The grading scale is out of 20 points.  In French, they use a comma rather than a period in decimals.  As you can see,  there are also a couple words noting the meaning of the grade:

                       16-20 is Très Bien (Very Good);
                       14 -15 out of 20 are Bien (Good);
                       12 -13 are Assez Bien (Average);
                       10 -11 are Passable (Passing)
                       and below 10 is Ajourné (Didn't pass, take it again)

Sometimes students scratch out their names if they are ashamed of their score.

I tried to explain the extreme effort educators in my home country put forth to give the students the privacy they consider so vital to their well-being and self-esteem.  Even parents aren't allowed to see the grades if the student hasn't given them permission to access them.  The response here was a quizzical "why?"  

Did I already mention that just because it's different doesn't mean it's wrong?

Niamey Farm Show

It was fair time this past week in Niamey.   Saturday morning we grabbed a taxi and spent 2 hours wandering around the exhibitions.   We LOVED it!  So many fun things to see. It reminded us of a state or county fair in the US because every region in Niamey brought the biggest and best of their produce, including animals, crops, vegetables, machinery , etc.

This mama goat had 4 kids.  

The baby camel with his mama.

A cow who birthed triplets.

I'd never seen such clean and white sheep and goats.  They washed up well.  

There were onions and more onions and all sorts of ways to use onions. 

Spear-head millet.

Tom loved visiting with the vendors.  

He even was interviewed by the local TV station.  When asked what it was he was hoping to see here but hadn't seen, his comment was  "a tractor".  

Lots of different beans.

And, of course, no fair is complete without the giant pumpkins.  The largest weighed 40 kgs or 88 pounds.

Tom loved checking out the wheat, raised in Agadez.  It looks like ours but we know it didn't survive any winter temps so it's not hard winter wheat. 

Hot peppers. I love the colors. 

That's some tall sugar cane. 

There wasn't too much machinery there;  except what could be run by human or animal power.

A ox pulled plow and other essential tools of the trade. 

A peanut sheller and a peanut oil press (below).

You can take the boy from the farm but you can't take the farm out of the boy!  A great time.