Niger - day one

07 Nov 2011

Making good use of the morning hours before the interviews began, we visited the mosque and an open-air meat market, and experienced the crush of city traffic. Traveling about 50 kilometers beyond the city of Niamey, we turned off the paved highway, drove passed a golf course where both fairways and greens are hard clay and sand, parked the car on the edge of a road leading to the edge of the Niger River,
and walked down the bank to a pirogue for the river crossing.

We circled close enough to a hippo - at home in the Niger River - to watch her roll and tumble in the water.  Reminded that she can move through the water at 45 mph we kept our distance.

A generator charges cell phones and irrigates the gardens, otherwise daily life in this African village  appears unchanged from a much earlier time.

Homes of mud and straw in varying sizes, two small schoolhouses (one built by the French the other by the Americans); well – defined vegetable gardens, a Tabaski meal cooked in a battered pot over a small charcoal fire, an intergenerational community of islanders: these are images that identify and give character to this village of Kanazi. 

Two or three young children soon became two dozen who walked with us through the village and followed us to the river's edge at the end of our visit.