Idaoudene and Abarakan

Eventually, we started seeing real mountains rising above the sandy valleys.

A lot of the landscape was very stark, almost lunar, but became beautiful as the sunlight played on it and reflected different colors.The first selected village was Idaoudene, where the chief, picture here on my right, was at least 6 foot 8 inches.
Our military escort sat down and started making the traditional Nigerien tea - they were not fasting. Nigeriens often carry around these little wire stands for charcoal, and tiny teapots, so they can sit down anywhere and make tea. The Nigerien tea ceremony is very complex and exact, and consists of three "(shot) glasses, the first "as bitter as death", the second "as mild as life", and the third "as sweet as life" (and boy, do they pour in the sugar!!) I really enjoyed their hospitality, as they always offered me a glass.

We couldn't do Abarakan, the next village, that night, so we camped out at their health center and did it the next morning before continuing on to Timia.

Sunrise over the boulders rising behind the health center. It was Sunday morning, and I climbed up to have some prayer time, which sparked an interesting conversation when the gals asked what I had been doing up there.

This is the health center, and all our vehicles, looking down from the boulders - rather pretty with the light behind it.

Saley, one of our surveyors and one of my favorite people, with some of the women in Abarakan. Poor Saley had a simmering malaria practically the whole time, for which she was sporadically taking chloroquine (difficult on your stomach when you're fasting). She finally gave up and took artesunate near the end, and felt much better.

Arlit and the Air (pronounced I-Ear) Mountains

Arlit is a three hour drive north of Agadez and could not be more different. While Agadez has been settled and important in th history of the region for over 1000 years, Arlit was built in the 1960s when uranium was discovered under the sands of the Sahara. For several decades, Niger boomed, and while the price of uranium has fallen, still is responsible for 1/3 of Niger's exports. We had to visit one of the mining company offices at the mines to get permission to conduct our survey in the miner's quarters, which had been randomly selected for the survey.

The miner's houses are built in very mod (1960's) squares, with blocks and straight streets, very unlike the rest of Niger.
Arlit's climate is noticeably different than Agadez, as Arlit is in the true Sahara. It was about 105 in the shade and I pulled my thermometer out of the sun after it hit 115. It was a dry heat, and even 95 degrees at night felt pleasant with the desert breeze. After we finished mapping the quarters in Arlit that has been selected, we set out for the villages that had been selected in the Air mountains. You have to get across about 60 km of desert first, which is not trackless, but has many intersecting tire treads, and unless you bring a good guide to set you on the right one to enter one of the narrow passes into the mountains, you could end up in Algeria.

The sand and fine gravel are occasionally punctuated by large boulders and few sparse, stunted trees. When it rains it the desert, water puddles stand all around for a few days.

We traveled in a convoy of our vehicle, two teams, and a logistician. In the end, we were glad we had so many of us traveling together. It was a lot of fun to race across the sand together.
Since there had been sporadic banditry in the mountains, we picked up an armed escort from a military base in Arlit. They were Tuareg, and I really enjoyed interacting with them.

One rode in our vehicle in front, and three piled into the back of the logistician's (Idrissa's) truck. With their fatigues, turbans, and rifles, they looked like some sort of desrt militia, but you feel so safe when you know they're your guys. I love this picture of Idrissa with the thumbs up out the window!

Eventually, the desert gives way to rocks, which give way to boulders, and you start climbing into the mountains. We stopped for a photo op here.

Agadez 5, ChezTateye

The next day, we tried Chetateye (as it was labeled on the map) or Tateye (as it was spelled on our list). We did the usual thing of stopping and asking folks as we got close, and sure enough, everyone knew where it was, as it was practically on the main road. We finally approached the man in the bottom right of this picture, and asked where we could find Tateye. Turns out, he's Tateye! (which makes the alternate name of chetateye, or chez tateye make sense) The village goes by a different name. He is the patriarch, so it makes sense that this group of people goes by his name. He had scores and scores camels, sheep, and cattle, which all made me think of Abraham. Do you think he might have looked like Tateye?

In this picture, I'm drinking fresh cow milk out of a calabash. Yes, I am a public health official. :)
Finally, pictoral proof that I was on a camel. Wore pants this time! :) Still made a horrible noise.

Guinea fowl are semi-domesticated in Niger, and sometimes must breed with chickens. You run into an occasional bird with the head of a guinea fowl and the plumage of a chicken. They're very funny looking. The meat is delicious and better than chicken. The little village chickens are sometimes called "poulet bicyclette" - pretty self explanatory even in English - well describes how scrawny they are!

All the lambs were napping in one of Tateye's tents - these are just 4 of 20 or so in the tent.

Lambs are the world's sweetest, most docile creatures, and quite cuddly. Lamb hardly sounds like a name for God after holding one. It starts sounding so blase to western ears, and you don't realize after hearing it so often how shocking it was in its original context. Also had a lot of time for meditations on sheep....one, they are pretty dumb animals, always crossing the road at the wrong time, they usually do run around mixed in with the goats (although I would separate them by the fact that sheep are the ones with the floppy ears and tail), and they're also pretty docile and trusting, after watching them be tossed up on top of a minivan and strapped down.

Feeding a baby camel - they can make the same horrible sounds as the adults, but all babies have this cuteness...

Agadez 4, or what became of Anoujjab

So, we never found Anoujjab, or Ajjab. Instead we came to the closest previously chosen replacement village, Fagochia, which is on most maps, even though it only has 18 households. We decided to call it a day and do Fagochia. It's a Tuareg village, and the people were so incredibly hospitable.

Here's a shot of me in front of a camel, with a bunch of gorgeous kiddoes. I learned, although I don't have pictoral proof, that you can't ride a camel side saddle. I was in a skirt and couldn't get my leg over the other side of the saddle. Camels do not get up or down evenly. When they sit down, first the front legs fold half way, then the back legs fold all the way, and the front legs fold all the way, tilting crazily, and they are usually making the most horrendous half roaring half moaning sound. Quite a process!
The children in Fagochia were spectacularly beautiful. While the others were mapping, they took me to the chief's wife's tent, where somehow about 20+kids crowded in around me in a tent not more than 12 feet across.

I used the opportunity to take pictures and passed the camera around so they could see their pictures. I also learned my first Tamashek (Tuareg language) word - tanimert - which means thank you.
I passed my camera to one of the Tuareg women and showed her how to take a picture. Got a couple decent shots, too! The necklace I'm wearing is Tuareg made - bought in Agadez.
There were mosquito nets hung in many of the tents. I love this shot of the kids playing underneath the mosquito net!
One of my favorite pictures - I'm not sure why this woman was covering the lower portion of her face as the others were not, but her eyes tell a thousand stories.
One of our surveyors administering the questionaire in the tent, with the guys looking on.

With the chief's wife - she is wearing one of the ornately embroidered outfits in the Agadez market picture, as well as the real indigo head scarf. Guess I needed my head covered, too. I thought she looked so elegant.

Agadez 3

How do you find a nomadic village?
Our sampling strategy made it possible for very small, and sometimes mobile villages to be chosen. One of theses was Anoujjab. It was supposedly about 25 km south of the town of Ingal. I was very excited about seeing Ingal, because it is the site of the Cure Salee, and huge gathering of nomadic pastoralists who bring their livesstock to the area at the height of the rains when the desert is covered with water, which is very salty due to the high mineral content of the water. The cattle are brought to drink this water, which acts as an anti-parasitic. It's also an important social and cultural event. We were too late by three weeks - the water was gone and the nomads dispersed. Oh well. Anoujjab was not on the map in the health center, but one of the older men knew of a nomadic group often in the area called Ajjab, and we thought this was probably the same group. We brought him with us as a guide, and stopped at the market, where we found out that this group had migrated to an area north of Ingal, and they told our guide approximately where, so we set off across the desert in search of our "village". On the horizon, you can sort of make out the mirage, which I learned that day is especially compelling in the desert - it really does look like a lake in the distance!
On the way, we ran across several nomadic families on the move. This is a small family with their donkeys, but coming up on a large group traveling with numerous camels was amazing.

One thing that cannot be said of men in Niger is that they don't stop for directions. The way you find a village, or find out whether your team has passed through that village, is to stop and ask the group of men under the nearest tree, or on the nearest camel, or with the nearest flock - we were constantly stopping and asking directions.

Our guide (in the lighter blue) was great about jumping out of the vehicle and inquiring the whereabouts of Ajjab. On this day, everyone seemed to know this group - they were always just a little further.

They went that a'way!
Stay tuned...

Agadez 2

The most famous landmark in Agadez is mosque built by the Muslim saint Zakarya in the 16th century. Nigeriens call it the Eiffel Tower of Niger, though it significantly pre-dates the Eiffel Tower! It's not that tall, but impressive for when it was built, and for withstanding the centuries! The Sultan's palace is next to the mosque.

The mosque standing above the big market. Agadez is still a center of trade in Niger and the market is very busy.One of our team members buying food in the market. There are huge basins of all sorts of herbs, spices, grains, vegetables, and fruits grown in nearby oases.

One of the campaign nets hanging in the market - clearly not all of them were distributed as originally intended, but good to know that there is a demand for them!

Clothes shopping in the market - the shirt in the upper left is a richly embroidered Tuareg woman's blouse. The team member pictured is trying on a head scarf made of the famous Tuareg indigo fabric that rubs off on skin and earned the Tuareg the nomer "blue men". This is an example of real indigo cloth and is very expensive, though there are cheap knock-offs.
Stopping for a coke and a yogurt with the team

Donkeys still don't get out of carrying grass, though I'm not sure where they found that much grass near Agadez!

Agadez 1

After a week in the Tahoua region, we headed north to the region of Agadez, which was once a very important city, is still the seat of the Agadez sultanate (now mostly ceremonial), and was a major stop for camel caravans going both north-south and east-wewst across the Sahara. Niger is an incredibly huge country, but is mostly inhabited in the southern one-third. The northern two-thirds is largely desert, with huge dunes covering most of it. That area is fairly inaccesible unless you are in a camel caravan, or the more modern motorised version of it across the trans-saharan "highway".
It is over 400 km from Tahoua to Agadez on a mostly pretty well tarred road. As you go north, it gets drier. Millet cultivation stops, and trees (and hence places to hide behind to use the restroom) become scarcer.

In the end, this didn't really matter. In the domain of TMI, Niger it's a place where it's possible to drink 2 liters of water in the morning and still not pee until 10 pm that night. I probably spent most of my time pretty dehydrated, but it was more convenient.
When you did get out to walk around, the little grass was often covered with these incredibly painful, tenacious little burrs that you then had to spend the next half hour removing.

There is an escarpment south of Agadez that has some amazing rock formations and has been the site of rich archeological deposits. Many important fossil finds have been made in this area.

Standing water is a litle scarcer here, and so large herds are usually congregated around them. Here was a good sized bunch of camels. I thought camels were some of the most curious creatures I had ever seen. One, they're huge! I think they're the same size as giraffes, only the neck doesn't go up as high. It's so fun to see herds of them grazing, or scattered like Saharan ice bergs above the sheep and cows. And running - I heard they have camel races in some places. It has to be a sight! It's the most disorganized thing I've seen - legs flying everywhere. I loved watching a bunch of them run across the road in front of a vehicle, but never really satisfactorily captured it on film.

Sunset - so many were just gorgeous. And during Ramadan, much looked forward to. Ramadan started in the middle of the survey, and made already grueling work (house to house mapping all day in the sun) much harder. Our teams got up at 5 am to eat and drink, and then didn't eat or drink until sunset. Some of the especially religious ones, don't even swallow their own saliva, something that was particularly annoying in our driver. Every 5 minutes, the vehicle would slow down, he'd roll down the window, and spit. Anyway, everyone knew exactly what time sunset was every night, and we'd stop right then so they could have a drink (we'd often spend the previous hour procuring ice and drinks) and a snack, and then prayer. Dinner was much later. In most Muslim countries, more food is bought and consumed during Ramadan than during other months!

Here is Moussa breaking his fast with dates. Moussa Malam Barke was easily my favorite supervisor - absolutely brilliant, very hard working, very upbeat, and total problem solver. He was just terrific and I enjoyed working with him.

Tahoua 5

In the village of Dan Doutchi with one of the teams - we made the painful 50 km drive over almost trackless scrub, sand, and rocks twice!A woman in the village preparing millet - removing it from the stalks with her bare hands in the hot sun. After that, she will separate the grains from the chaff, and then pound it. Talk about a woman's work being never done!

Me with some of the women and children in the village - in the first picture they were all looking at me and it was pretty funny, but we finally got them to look at the camera. People in Niger seem to really like having their picture taken, and it was especially fun to be able to show them their picture on my camera. These gals were especially tickled that I wanted to be in the picture with them.

And of course you get scores of kids following you around - couldn't resist sharing this picture!
I thought this little girl was just gorgeous - took me a while to get her picture.

Tahoua 4

More things that have remained relatively unchanged....
A family and their camels looking over the low wall of their courtyard

A traditionally dressed Fulani on his horse - these hats keep one quite protected from the sun!

In every village, meat, usually mutton, is grilled - all of it! The sellers will cut chunks off what's on the fire for you. Our teams loved buying meat for a snack - chunks of grilled liver, heart, intestine, etc., all mixed together. I tried some, but really couldn't stand it! I much prefer brochettes! At least you are pretty comfortable that it's safe if it's on the fire.

Meat is also cut into thin strips and dried/smoked.

Here's how you get around villages if you don't have your own vehicle and/or can't ride your animal. I have never figured out how so many people can cram into the back of a truck, and why more people don't fall out!

Kids playing video games - wait, what country am I in?