Life Without a Mirror

I’m regularly shocked, once a month to be precise, when I step out of the shower in our lovely Peace Corps Hostel and catch a glance of myself in the mirror. It’s not so much that I’m surprised by my horrible farmers tan or the large number of freckles that the sun has bestowed upon me. My astonishment derives from the fact that for the majority of the month, I don’t ever see myself. The back of my I-pod is shiny enough that I can pluck my eyebrows or judge if there are still white blotches of sunscreen covering my face, so I’m not entirely bereft of my reflection but I’m not constantly confronted by it either.

The decision of whether or not to own a mirror never really crossed my mind: I simply never bought one. But, now that I’ve lived almost six months without my reflection, I’ve decided that I sort of prefer life this way. I’ve come to terms with the fact that despite my best attempts to dress Nigerien, I will always be “strange-looking” in this country. Just as long as I keep my knees and hair covered, I can wear whatever I want without feeling as those I’m “unfashionable.” As I’ve quickly learned, in this country, a brightly colored shirt and a brightly colored skirt with a completely different pattern can still “match.”

It’s also been rather nice to have the entire village constantly telling me that I “don’t have a body.” Although they certainly don’t intend it as a complement and consistently do their best to feed me piles of millet, it’s a nice change from the anorexic magazine cut-outs/celebrities world of America that always seems to tell me that any bit of fat must be exterminated as soon as possible. In that way, Nigerien culture rather resembles the Victorian age when plump men and women were regarded as high-class because they could afford enough food to make them fat. While I certainly have enough money to add on a few pounds of millet, I think my preference for tofu and fresh vegetables (and their relative scarcity) is going to keep me strange-looking for quite a while…

Coming to Terms with My American Dream

I was walking down the street, calling out my usual Hausa greetings when suddenly a man greeted me in perfect English. That stopped me short. In a country where less than half of the men and less than a third of the women have even attended primary school, foreign language skills are a rarity. Most of the time that I am greeted in English, I’m either greeted in the confused English of the middle school boys (i.e. “Good morning sir” to me, a woman, at 5:30 in the evening) or the broken English from the men who have spent time working manual labor jobs in Nigeria (such as: “Wherez you goin?”). There are three men who greet me in proper English; all three of them are teachers. This man was not one of them.

So I stopped and chatted with him for a bit before finally asking him, “Where did you learn English?” He responded that he learned it in the middle school and that he was the best in his class. I couldn’t help but ask him, “So, what do you do now?” He told me that he is a builder and my heart nearly sank to the floor. It wasn’t so much that there is anything wrong with being a builder but simply that there isn’t a lot of architectural skill to building in Niger. You build bricks out of mud. You let them dry in the sun. You mix clay and manure and put it in between the bricks in a square-like formation and then you throw a tin roof on top. I’m not trying to downplay Nigerien construction—its hard manual labor and I certainly couldn’t do it. But that’s the thing: its hard manual labor, not the type of labor that requires English or any education at all for that matter.

I teach English in Safo’s middle school. I have close to 100 students, all around fourteen years old. I would like to think that their hard work will pay off, that the ones who succeed at their studies will go on to high school and then university. Unfortunately, I recently read a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell that thoroughly destroyed my belief in the rags-to-riches American dream.

The book looked at success stories—everyone from geniuses to lower-income kids who overcome the statistics against them and attend college. In every story, there were a series of factors that led to success: hard work, timing, culture and just plain dumb luck. At one point Gladwell looked at the births of hockey players and decided he could accurately predict who would become a professional simply by looking at their birthday. This has nothing to do with horoscopes but rather is shaped by the cut-off birth date for each age group; players that are old for their age group are simply more likely to do better since they are more mature.

Of course, there’s not a ton of hockey in the Sahel Desert but what I took from Gladwell’s book is that hard work alone doesn’t lead to success. The probability that any of my students will make it to university is very, very slim. First, they need to graduate my middle school with unbelievably high scores on a test that is given in a language that none of them speak at home (French). Then, they have to have the money and the connections to move to a large town where there is a high school. Lastly, they need to have the money to move to one of four major cities to attend a Nigerien university or, if their English is good enough, a university in Nigeria.

Money isn’t the only problem. Particularly for the girls in my class, their culture is a major impediment to their education. Most Nigeriens simply don’t believe that women need to be educated. A Nigerien women plays a very simple role in society: have as many children as possible (preferably male), keep the house clean and cook good food. Obviously, none of these tasks require so much as a primary school education, much less a university one.

This does not mean, of course, that I am giving up. There is always a chance that one of them could make it and, despite the near impossibility of my very American dream, one of the many quotes on a wall of my mud house says “you’ve got to have a dream to make a dream come true.” Cheesy, maybe but when you live in the poorest country in the world, you’ve got to have something to keep you going.

“Winter” in Niger

Last week, after a slightly chilly night, I opened my door and immediately bursting out laughing. Judging from the fluffy parkas, woolen hats and layered clothes of my neighbors, one could only surmise that I live in a small mountainous village, perhaps somewhere in northern Russia. But no, this is Niger; the streets were full of their usual sand, entirely without a sugary white frosting that might merit such clothing. My neighbors looked at me and were equally amused. Apparently, my long-sleeve t-shirt and running pants were unfit for the 70 degree weather that they call winter.

Ina sanyi? They called out to me. Ina can either mean “where” or “how is” while sanyi means “cold.” I used to think they were asking where the coldness was, i.e. “Niger is too hot, where is winter?” But now I’ve discovered that no, this is winter, and even when I felt as though the sun was beating through my hat and turning my skin new shades of freckled pink, they were asking me “how is your coldness?”

Sometimes I miss the white snow blankets that cover Walla Walla and the misty gray of the San Francisco Bay in December. But Niger’s “winter” is not without beauty; after laughing at my neighbors I went on a run through fields of brown millet, stalks slightly bent as though congratulating themselves on their ability to feed an entire country. Brightly colored hibiscus flowers stretched upwards, out of the millet, reaching up to the big orange sun that was rapidly rising over the brown mud houses of my village. Many of the trees still kept their green leaves and I silently thanked the Peace Corps for putting me in a part of Niger that actually has trees.

Children rode by me on bicycles, a few of them recognizing me as their teacher at the middle school and shouting “Good morning Miss Laila” and they rode by. A group of girls, decked in pants under their long skirts and hi-jabs, broke into a run as I passed them and kept up with me for longer than I would have thought possible in sandals and bulky clothing. I reached another village and decided to turn around, sucking in the deliciously chilly air that enabled me to run with ease.

Then, only a week later, I came down with a cold. Perhaps my memory of my infrequent colds in America is faulty, but I’m pretty sure that this was the worst cold of my life. A few weeks before, during Tabaski, I’d come down with a cold that had left my nose running and my throat voiceless. At the time, I thought that might just be the worst cold of my life. But no, once again, Niger has proven that my body can become sicker that I ever thought possible.

I’ll spare you the details of the mucus that began to cover my clothing (I ran out of tissues/toilet paper), the pounding in my head that made me feel as though all three of my village drummers were banging on my brain and the intense fatigue that made it difficult for me to remain standing during my morning English classes. The funny part of all this, if I can call it that, is that I began to dress like my neighbors. Although I know scientifically that cold weather does not cause the virus we refer to as a “cold,” I felt it better to be on the safe side.

Lacking legitimate warm-weather clothes—who packs a parka when traveling to one of the hottest countries in the world—I began to layer in ways that would make my two, very fashionable American sisters, cry in shame. Socks under sandals, pants under skirts, double headscarves; it is a good thing that I own the only camera in my village as these are certainly not outfits I hope to remember.

Noticing my change of attire and my obvious sickness, my villagers became telling me sanyi ta kamakki, meaning “the coldness has gotten you.” Fine, Niger, you win, maybe you do have a winter after all.

Drinking Pain

If you were to come to Safo and ask my villagers to describe me, they would probably tell you that I am small, loud, pale, like to dance and, most importantly, that I like to shah wooyia “drink pain.” I have come to understand this to be a key characteristic of mine as my villagers are forever telling this to me.

This morning, I ran from Safo to Maradi, the big city 7 kilometers away. Most of my villagers know this route well as they motorbike, bush taxi or walk—depending on their wealth—to Maradi every Friday for the market day. Most of the women walk, since being a housewife doesn’t pay all that well. They rise early in the morning, put their babies on their backs and heavy buckets of oil that they’ve pounded from peanuts to sell in the market. That morning, I rose, put on my running shoes, put a couple of CFA in my pocket to buy a Sprite once I got there and waved to all the women who greeted me as I ran past. They always ask me where I’m going and when I respond Maradi, they gasp and laugh at this crazy foreigner who loves to shah wooyia.

Sometimes I see the same women at the well later in the day and when they see me carry my large plastic bucket the whole two blocks to my house they clap their hands and tell their friends about my morning run through the hot sand. They all laugh together that I clearly have babu hankali “no sense” as I am just chugging down that wooyia.

After showing a few of my Nigerien friends a picture of myself and Obama from last summer when I interned in the White House, they turned to me and asked me why I would come to the poorest country in the world after working for the president of the most powerful country in the world. I just laughed and told them that maybe I just like shahing wooyia.

Oh Holidays

Holidays in general are often stressful. Celebrating a holiday in a country where the the culture, religion and traditions are completely foreign and everyone is constantly watching you is completely overwhemling. Needless to say, my first major Nigerien holiday wasn’t exactly perfect. Here, in a fun, chronological order, is a list of my Tabaski mistakes.

1. I didn’t kill a sheep

Tabaski or Eid al-Adha, is an Islamic holiday that involves the slaughter of a sheep or goat to commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael as an act of obedience to God, before God intervened to provide him with a ram to sacrifice instead. As a vegetarian for the ten years prior to my arrival in Niger, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of an animal dying specifically on my behalf. Even though my reasons for vegetarianism derive more from my hatred of factory farming than they do from my love of animals, every time my neighborhood butcher kills a goat it sounds like the screaming of a child. Despite the constant questioning of my villagers as to whether or not I was going to kill a goat, I decided that I could avoid the question by joking and telling them I was going to kill a camel or, if they kept questioning, telling them that since I’m a Christian I would kill a goat for Christmas instead. This worked fine until the chief asked me if I had purchased any meat. When I told him no, all of his four wives turned to me in shock. Apparently, what I hadn’t understood is that even if I am not particularly carnivorous myself I should still buy meat to give it to others. By not even purchasing a small amount of meat—and my pale skin advertising to the world that I had the ability to do so—I was like old Ebeneezer Scrooge, except worse, because England never suffered from the famines that ravage Niger.

2. I didn’t put my face in the dirt

Somehow I’d assumed that the morning of Tabaski would be something like Christmas, with all the children waking up at the crack of dawn to start the festivities. Since I normally wake up around 6:30 am for my morning run, I simply decided to skip the run in get dressed in my most formal Nigerien outfit and go out in the village. Much to my surprise, all the kids were still wearing the same dirty outfits they’d worn the day before and all the women seemed to be busy as usual carrying water and cooking millet. As I walked around, people greeted me and asked me if I’d “prayed in health.” This confused me to no end until 9:00 rolled around and my semi-adopted twins escorted me to what they called “the big mosque.” To me, the “big mosque” was simply a dried up riverbed but as the dirt began to fill with people sitting on small prayer mats, I began to understand. The iman led the prayer and I mimicked the women surrounding me as they bowed half-way and then finally planted themselves face first in the dirt. However, unlike them, I had already gotten dressed in my best clothes, including my new white headscarf. Needless to say, I wasn’t all that into the face plant part of the prayer and simply pressed my face close to the ground, hoping no one would notice the difference. But while everyone else walked back from the “mosque” with a proud spot of dirt on their foreheads as a sign of their submission to God, my face sparkled with insolence.

3. I didn’t sleep inside

Now that it’s no longer rainy season and we’ve moved into “cold” season (still in the 100s during the day…), I’ve relished the ability to sleep outside under the stars every night. Even though it is becoming slightly chilly at night, there is a part of me that refuses to believe that I could ever truly be cold in the Sahel Desert. My insistence on shahing wooyia was all well and fine until I came down with a horrible cold and last my voice. This, of course, made the required Tabaski tradition of wandering from house to house and greeting everyone very difficult indeed. My villagers laughed at my inability to speak and my friends scolded me for my stupidity of insisting on sleeping outside.

4. I didn’t hand out enough money

During Tabaski, adults often give out presents to each other and to children. More often than not in Niger, this present takes the form of small coins. Although I had been told this ahead of time and certainly have the money to spare, when hordes of children came to my door asking for their Barka da Salla “Happy Holidays” present and men I barely knew on the street asked me the same question, I freaked out. I had no idea how much money to give them or the small change to give a present to all of them. I lied and told them I’d run out of change which worked until a horde of children and one of my neighbors saw me on the street buying bananas and clearly receiving change. The children crowded around me and when I’d finally managed to satisfy them, my neighbor came over and scolded me for not giving money to him and the other guards of the chief. I handed him the same 25 CFA that I’d given to the children and he scorned it, muttering that it was hardly enough. I added another coin and then retreated into my house where I locked the door and collapsed on my bed, close to tears. Oh holidays…

Cottage Cheese?

I think I just made cottage cheese. Either that, or I’ve been in Niger for so long that I don’t know what cheese looks like and I just ate rotten milk. On the upside, I’m already having some intestinal issues so even if I do manage to give myself food poisoning I’ll still be going to be going to the bathroom the same amount. It’s like killing two birds with one really messy, smelly stone, right? Maybe I have been here too long; among me and my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), discussing bodily fluids has become akin to sharing celebrity gossip.

I was trying to make yogurt. In Maradi, the big city near my village, sweet, cold, drinkable yogurts can be purchased for something like the equivalent of $0.25. Given that Safo, my village, lacks electricity, anything sweet and cold is pretty much out of the question. But, according to PCV Niger cookbook, it is possible to make yogurt in village by using one of the sweet, cold yogurts as a starter.

The only problem: after buying a yogurt, carrying it to my village, laying it in the sun until it turned to powder and then adding a bit of that powder to milk, the cookbook instructs me to “put the yogurt in the fridge.” Really, cookbook, really?!? If I had a fridge that would mean that my village has electricity and more likely than not, given the popularity of yogurt in Niger, I would be able to BUY already-made yogurt.

After ranting at my cookbook for a while, I decided to make a fridge. My neighbors have three large clay pots that they’ve buried deep into the sand until only the rim is visible. I asked them what was in the pots and they told me sanyi “cold” and promptly poured a cupful of almost-refrigerator-cold water over my hands. They told me that they make the pots in a village that is about a half hour walk away.

The next morning I put a couple thousand CFA ($4 worth to be exact) in my pocket and turned my daily run into a scavenger hunt for a clay pot. It only took me ten minutes to run there but it took me a good half hour to get away from the women who immediately surrounded me.  I’d arrived on a food aid day and given the lack of melanin in my skin, all of these women promptly assumed that I was also there to distribute nutritional supplements to their malnourished babies. My Hausa isn’t quite good enough to explain that I was in search of a fridge to make yogurt so I just told them I was “moving my body,” a concept that is just as strange but known to be a trait held by foreigners who don’t get their “exercise” from the hard labor of farming.

I made my way out of the women and found a clay pot that looked about the right size for a mini fridge. But now the problem of getting it back to Safo…One of the many people staring at me (Nigeriens ALWAYS stare at me) suggested that I pay a small boy, probably no more than seven years old, to carry it on his head back to Safo for me. I was so offended by this proposition that I decided to put the clay pot on my own head and carry it back. This of course, made not only my audience at the pot store but everyone I saw for the next five minutes double over in hysterics. Apparently, little white girls with big clay pots of their heads are funny—someone should make a show.

Sadly, the entertainment only lasted for five minutes because the pot was HEAVY and my neck was starting to cinch up in pain. Thankfully, a man with a motorcycle offered to carry both me and my pot back to Safo. We rode off into the rapidly rising sun, my pot rattling in anticipation of the cottage-cheesy yogurt it was about to bring into the world.

‘Starving’ Children in Africa

Thanksgiving tends to entail quite a bit of overeating. Often, even within the Peace Corps Niger community the phrase can be heard:

“You better finish that. There’s starving children in Africa, you know.”

Somehow, when we were within the Westernized safety of the Peace Corps training village such an utterance seemed deliciously ironic. But, now that those “starving African children” are my neighbors/friends/villagers, “finishing my plate” has a new meaning.

It isn’t, of course, anything like what you see on those Christian aid commercials. I have yet to meet a child that looks as desperate and helpless as that child they show with the single tear running down his dusty face. “My” children are full of laughter, games and songs, despite their protruded bellies. Their ingenuity is amazing; now that the millet has been harvested, my village is full of small millet-stalk cars, artfully constructed by children no taller than my knees.

At the same time, the village doctor tells me that he sees close to 800 children each year that suffer from moderate to grave malnutrition. The number would likely be higher but for “PlumyNut,” a nutritional supplement that Doctor’s Without Borders frequently distributes.

But, as anyone who has read a little about world food production knows, the problem of starvation is not caused by a global lack of food. According to a great book I recently read, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the world’s farms currently produce enough food to make every person on the globe fat. Current global food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030.

So why, then, are 800 million people chronically underfed each year? As is clearly evident in my village, where I eat fresh produce and my neighbors eat a constant diet of millet, the problem is money and nutritional knowledge. The bellies of my village children protrude not because they are starving but rather because their families can either not afford or do not know the importance of a varied diet.

Although I have the great fortune of being able to open my door and give my leftovers to those “starving” African children, I am hoping that over the next two years I will be able to do more. Local solutions for malnutrition—such as an amazing plant called Moringa mixed with locally produced peanut butter—exist and I hope I can help at least a few of those bellies regain their normal flatness.

Surprisingly, even in America, there are easy ways to combat global malnutrition. The UN FAO estimates that over 25 percent of arable land in the world suffers from soil erosion, salinization, desertification and loss of soil fertility, largely due to industrial farming practices. While farming practices in Niger more closely resemble 16^th century hoes and horse plows than anything else, many developing countries suffer from large-scale commodity crop production that destroys the soil and turns farmers into laborers on land owned by multinationals. Organic farming techniques that use cover crops or animal manures for fertilizer improve the soil while producing vegetables that have consistently been shown to be more nutritional than non-organic produce. At the risk of sounding like a pamphlet, there really are a lot of good reasons to buy organic, protruded bellies just being one of them.

Sunflowers in the Desert

There are sunflowers growing in my front yard. Yesterday morning I discovered them; after taking my daily bucket bath I went to pour my waste water on what I assumed to be a row of sandy soil when I found that my gray water was cascading down on a line of tiny green seedlings. I half-dropped my towel with excitement—an act that would have been rather unfortunate had one of the many village children chosen that moment to peek over my mud wall.

Years ago, one of my elementary school teachers had casually mentioned that she loved sunflowers because they were such a happy flower. Being a rather strong-willed 10 year-old, I would stop at nothing until my mom agreed to drive me to the local home décor store where upon I filled our shopping cart with every plastic, happy, yellow flower the store possessed. The same plastic—although now slightly ragged—sunflowers followed me to college, where I decorated every dorm room and cramped apartment I inhabited.

Sunflowers began to take on real meaning in my life, their strong green stalks telling me to reach for the sky and happy yellow faces telling me that nothing in life is so terrible that it can’t be overcome with a happy smile and a positive attitude. It was around this time that I began writing down the best part of my day on a small calendar square each night before I went to bed. It helped; no matter how stressful my day was, I could always find one small moment of joy.

But, somehow, plastic sunflowers weren’t on the Peace Corps packing list and, although there was a part of me that thought they might be just as useful as the GRE books, long skirts and trail mix that made up my allotted 22 kilos, I ended up leaving them by the side of my bed in a small pile and walked out the door to Niger with a suitcase filled with logical items.

Thankfully, one of my younger sisters knows me far better than I know myself, and mailed me a large package of sunflower seeds. On the back of the letter she drew what she imagined my mud house to look like. In my front yard, she carefully drew a multitude of sunflowers, yellow faces reaching up to the hot African sun. Her instructions couldn’t have been clearer: plant these sunflowers and be happy.

I was skeptical. Sunflowers are not native to Niger, they don’t belong here and are superfluous in an agriculturally-dependent country that fills every empty patch of ground with millet, their main staple. Unlike the sturdy, thick brown millet stalks, sunflowers are slender and delicate—how could they ever survive in the desert?

Perhaps it is silly to tie my fate to a bunch of seedlings but, when I saw those small green stalks begin to form, I knew we could make it.

Somewhere in Between

So there I was, pulling frantically at my mosquito net, squinting against the sand that the storm was blowing into my face, attempting to undo the knot and pull my bed into the relative safety of my hut before the rain rendered everything soggy. My hair, freshly braided, was still hidden under my headscarf. I gained a new appreciation for the Muslim tradition as my hair was the only part of me to come out of the ferocious dust storm unmarked. I stared at my fingers as they pulled clumsily at the knot. Covered in henna as they were, they almost seemed to belong to someone else. And, perhaps, they do.

I am part of a Nigerien gang. Gang, is, of course, not the correct terminology to describe the group of men that gather together each night to drink tea and chat until the wee hours of the morning. In Hausa, it is called a fada, but I can find no way to translate such a concept into an American culture that has so renounced such gatherings that we no longer have bowling leagues.

My life is getting harder and harder to translate.

“You carried what on top of your head?”

“Water, Mom, its much easier than carrying it by hand. You should try it.”

“When is the best time to call?”

“Well, in the mornings I go to the school and drink tea with the teachers while the students spend the day waiting expectantly in the classrooms for school to start. Then I go to the mayor’s office where I drink tea and fend off requests for money from the staff there. Midday I spend dying of heat in my hut. When the sun starts to fade, I revive and go to the hospital where I stab babies with needles to test them for malaria. So, really, you can call anytime.”

One of the men in my fada told me now I am from Niger. Feeling patriotic, I replied, “No, I’m from America!” Then I looked around at my hennaed hands, braided hair, long skirt and sandy feet. “Okay, maybe I’m somewhere in between.”

Life Update

In case I somehow missed you on my mass email list. Let me know if you want to be added! I promise that I’ll only send an email every couple months. It’s not like I have a lot of internet access…

Dear friends and family,

Hello from Niger! It’s been almost four months since I stepped off a very long plane ride and began my life as a Municipal and Community Development Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger. Although Niger is just as hot, dusty and poor as my Google searches had forewarned me, even Wikipedia couldn’t describe the kind, jovial and infinitely patient nature of Nigerien culture.

Upon arriving, I spent three months in Pre-Service Training—a mixture of summer-camp and college that gave myself and 32 other Americans in my training class the language and cultural knowledge necessary for the two years that we will spend here. Or, as is often said in such a deeply Muslim country like Niger, inch’allah “If it pleases god,” we will stay here.

I’ve now been in my village for what seems like forever, but has actually only been one short month. My village is called Safo, and although it’s very small, it is only 7km from one of Niger’s biggest cities, Maradi. I’ve been lucky enough to receive a nice house with two rooms, and have lost no time in adorning my mud walls with pictures, maps and letters from home. I’ve seeded my sandbox of a yard with what will hopefully soon be a garden. Just the other day, I made bread in a mud oven that I built myself. Fitting my new “make-do” attitude, I’m currently reading Robinson Crusoe. At the same time, I have a feeling that life on a shipwrecked island is far quieter than the donkeys, children and calls to prayer that consistently resound through my life.

My days have taken on a schedule of sorts, although certainly not one to be found in America. In the mornings, I can be found in a classroom made entirely of millet, with an upwards of thirty wide-eyed thirteen-year-old’s staring up at me from their “seat” on the sand. Although I’m no English teacher, Safo’s headmaster told me quite pointedly that if I did not teach them then my two classes would spend the hour staring at a blank blackboard—there simply aren’t enough English teachers to satisfy my village’s growing population.

After school, I walk through the hot sand to the mayor’s office. Given the recent coup d’etat, Niger’s government is far from functional and my mayor’s office is probably on the lesser end of that. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining to spend an hour or two drinking tea with the few employees who actually showed up. Like any good Nigerien, I give myself a long lunch break (from 12-3:30), after which I either head again to the school and conduct an English club with a few older students or I go to the hospital and help give tests for malaria. At night, I walk next door to my chief’s house and drink tea with a few of his 60 children. Yes, he actually has SIXTY children…

Life in Niger is far from easy, but my head is full of projects and ideas that I hope to carry out over the next two years. Perhaps my greatest fear is losing touch with all of you so if you will forgive my long-winded mass email and drop me a line, I would love nothing more than to hear how you’re doing! And if you’re of the letter-writing type, my address is below and I promise your letter will not go un-answered!

Love from the land of sun and sand,

Lisa

P.S.  I have fairly decent cell phone reception, it’s pretty cheap if you call me through Skype at (011-227)-91-38-61-88 or 98-42-16-65

Lisa Curtis, PCV

BP 291

Maradi, Niger

West Africa