the sound of sunshine

It’s hot here.

Sweat-dripping-down-your-back hot; well-over-100-in-the-shade hot; rubber-band-melting hot.

And it stays hot.

It seems we’ve crept across the threshold of October’s mini-hot season at the same moment we all entered our New Lives as PCVs. After a long, busy week of wrapping-up training and prepping for our futures as Volunteers (and saying one disatisfying, heartbreaking goodbye), our awesome efforts were rewarded with a day to relax before shipping out to our regions. (Once there, we will each spend our first month exclusively in our village, and the following two within only our region.) As a member of the smallest region, I find myself facing Kala Ton Ton’s to 25 of my stage-mates, an overwhelming circumstance after an infinite 11 weeks together, literally until January 2011. So, I was grateful for a day to savor what we’d made of ourselves together.

But it was hot: gruesomely hot, oppressively hot, three-showers-in-the-day hot; stop-wearing-underwear hot.

And it stuck around.

Since it was my day to enjoy, I woke up early and accomplished all of my goals in the morning, the largest of which was packing everything I own back into bags and boxes to take with me to Ville. The plan was to finish early and have some time to waste.

But then it got hot, excruciatingly hot, constant-dehydration hot, turn-water-to-tea hot.

Naturally in such circumstances, I stayed in the shade, rotating throughout the afternoon and evening between a low-slung metal chair and a heaven-sent hammock generously hung by a fellow volunteer, trying not to die. Occasionally, someone would trek up through the sand, past the volleyball courts, past the infirmary, past the sleeping huts to where we sat, and sometimes we’d brave the Satanic sun to reverse the journey down to the water coolers in the Réfectoire. But it was vastly hotter outside our square of shade, the sun noticeably burning every bit of skin exposed to it, so mostly I just sat or swung.

It was in such a situation when, late in the afternoon, a heavy cloud swept across the sky and settled to the west, dark and thick and thundering. At first, its breeze felt refreshingly cool, but then it began to grow and gather sand. Within moments we were surrounded by sand and debris blown up and around the way Midwest wind forms snow drifts on freezing winter days. Wrapped in the hammock, I was protected from its sting, but the long minutes inside the storm were another world.

The sand storm ushered in slightly more reasonable temperatures for a while, which I celebrated with a pre-dinner nap, but after the sun called it a day, I was back to marathon sweating until after I'd tucked myself in too.

The storm also served as a brief reminder of the speed with which life changes. I’m in Africa; training is over; I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Little ol’ me in the Sahel of Africa with 30 sundry, effervescent and frankly brilliant characters, the kinds of people who burst from their skins and echo from the walls, together just chillin’ in a sandstorm? Who would’ve predicted?

Life in Niger is beyond comprehension in a lot of ways; poverty of this magnitude is ripe with contradiction and unpredictability; Nigerien culture is still hugely foreign and abstract; the problems are both dense and deep, spiraling out from every direction.

And its hot.

And it'll continue to be hot.

But I guess it’s time to start doing something.