Niamey... Again

So it seems like I've been spending a lot of time in Niamey as of late. I was here two weeks ago to set up our peer support network and now I'm here to finish a proposal for a student government conference and to attend another conference on monitoring and reporting. What monitoring and reporting means I have no real idea and it's going to be all in French so maybe I will never know. But really my French is getting better.

UPDATE TO BLOG:
Check out the links to my facebook photo albums off to the right. They're higher resolution pictures than the ones here and there are many of them. I'm going to try to keep those growing.


A story about a newspaper:


Le Monde is a French newspaper. The Peace Corps gives us 10000CFA (~$20) a month to pay for tutoring or language learning material. I had the great idea to order the weekly version of Le Monde to be shipped to me in Gaya. Would have worked out to 5300CFA (~$10) a month, leaving plenty left over to cover other tutoring expenses. Seeing as how in Gaya I really don't have internet access, I called my friend in Niamey and talked her through the process, gave her my credit card number and presto I was in. Then I checked my credit card account about two weeks later, after finding that the radio station has internet access.... there was a charge of $880 from Le Monde in France. Much more than the $130 I had been expecting. Turns out that she signed me up for the daily paper and not the weekly. I've spent the last three weeks exchanging e-mails trying to get this figured out. Up to this moment it has not worked out well. I have succeeded in having them change my subscription to the weekly selection, but for 307 issues. Don't think I'll need six years of papers sent to my address here in Niger. Still working on getting that straightened out; they're pretty bad about responding to e-mails.

So here’s a little philosophical meandering:

In my garden I only have one type of tomato, one type of green pepper, one type of lettuce, et cetera. I was working in the garden the other day thinking about this fact and how in general in the world, the number of different types of species is shrinking. Thinking about the large number of different types of seeds Grandma Joyce and Russ sent me I thought “really, I only need one type of tomato. It’s nice to have others, but not necessary.” At that moment I thought that species loss was maybe inevitable and could I really tell the difference between the different types of tomatoes I received anyway?
Well, pace of life being what it is here, yesterday I had a long conversation with my buddy Josh and the topic of species loss and the general flattening of the diversity of life came up. I told him of my garden observation and how I really don’t need a variety of plants to make life possible, while it may be a luxury to have and a major shame to lose diversity, we could make due. He responded that maybe we don’t understand the importance of diversity enough. For instance, what about in terms of disease or epidemics? There may be one tomato plant that could survive much better than others. That’s important. Extremely important. In my garden for instance, I have green peppers. I have one variety of green peppers. They didn’t do too well. Speaking with a friend in Gaya, a farmer, he told me that peppers all over hadn’t done too well. Maybe of the same variety since I had bought them at the local seed dispensary. It could be the fault of a single variety of green pepper that I won’t be eating any this year (and I love green peppers). Makes me wonder about the potato famine in Ireland of long ago and if they were all using the same potato. Here’s my point: In this day and age, it is really easy to see the loss of species. Yes, change is inevitable, but we need to hold onto our diversity of life, if not for its amazing breadth of scale, but for the hidden importance it has, even in my garden. I plan on planting the variety of seeds I have.