A Nia-merry Christmas

The following is a backdated post of sorts; while written presently, it addresses past events in a past world. It is intended to be read with an awareness that not only can everything change at a moments notice, it often does. I promise to explain my current situation soon, but for now let's turn back to what was a much more solid reality.
The holidays have come and gone in a cloud of dust. Cold season ushered in green peppers, lettuce, cabbage, vermin, hard amber globs that mysteriously manage to be neither salty, sweet nor particularly pleasant, and a sea of drippy noses, and I woke one shivery morning to discover the air had grown significantly drier than I ever dreamed possible. While temperatures continued to climb into the 90s during the day and evenings dropped no further than perhaps the 60s, I was often bitterly reminded, on the windiest of mornings, of that sweeping landscape in Planet Earth with the snow that evaporates before it can melt because the air is too dry to support a liquid state. No one misses sweating, but this is just a new type of nasty. As the chilly breezes sweep through Kollo, carrying swirling garbage and invisible blankets of dust, my greetings change. "How is the sun?" is replaced by "How is the cold?" It has arrived, everyone agrees, and subsequently forced me into a sleeping bag under my mosquito net (and apparently most of my training class into their houses at night...whimps).
Also, as much as I've grown to love bucket baths, the cold is, well, unfortunately discouraging. Standing on my JICA's (Japanese volunteer) white-tiled floor, in his huge well-lit living room, behind it's tall metal-gated concession, I glanced down at my bare feet, as I often do, to discover they were startingly caked with a level of filth I cannot fully describe but had failed to notice, now in glaring contrast to his own attention to cleanliness. Oh my. To be fair, he has a shower.
And a mirror.
There are few things that describe my existence in Niger more poetically, and emphatically, than the conversations I now believe to be normal, and hold casually.
"All I want for my birthday," a friend recently stated, plopping down into the chair next to mine on the hostel porch, "is to poop."
And it needs not be said aloud that the same friend would not want her zaara, her skirt, if she didn't have its headscarf. "Oh, no, you're right." What good is that?
Two days ago, or something like it, we strolled through the market hunting for inexpensive sneakers to cover our chilly, if dirty, toes. Teems of thin men walked past carrying slices of watermelon or bananas on broad serving trays, balancing stacks of medicine and cigarettes atop their heads, or pushing wheel barrows overflowing with chunky salt, lime green peppers, purple onions. We meandered around and over the piles of little eggplants and oblong tomatoes, past men with stacks of fabrics, through the dank, narrow aisles that reeked of piss. Women in their Niamey-best, each with a baby tied with a zaara to her back, its tiny head bouncing with her steadily swinging strides, chatted or bargained with the men selling shoes and cheap sunglasses and mattresses and used socks. As we exitted the marche, stepping into the blazing sun and blaring taxi horns, we comfortably ignored the shouts of "Anasara!" or "Chinoir;" they were interrupting our thorough discussion of the differences between goat and sheep turds.
After that, perhaps, on some other night, we were in our regular spot in the capital, faces lit in the dark by bouncing neon lights, bare feet in the sand, shouting over the usual Bob Marley and soccer game. Some volunteers were visiting from Benin on their trip around West Africa, and we'd all stopped in for a Beire Niger. We talked about our lives, genuinely interested in the differences, humorously delighted by the similarities, glad for the new faces and perspectives. We righted, I hope, a few rumors (No, Niger volunteers are not issued either a bike or a donkey) and attempted to well-represent our country to these guests, who seemed so like us. We sat together swapping stories long enough that peeing became necessary, but when our new friend returned, she leaned over to her boyfriend and muttered into his ear that there were "little plastic teapots" in these bathrooms too. What were they expecting? Toilet paper?
This environment changes the content of your thoughts. You become so used to Niger that you forget the world before, or that there was once a time when you didn't know, for example, the butta. There was once a time when a half-hour conversation about rainbow pants or methods of sweeping one's yard or the size and blackness of one's boogers were impossibilities in my life. I once didn't expect any random child on the street to do my bidding. I used to think that thngs were "gross;" I used to wash my hair.
In many ways, these changes are coping mechanisms: "What do children in Niger play with?" we were recently asked, sitting in a group.
"Trash?"
"Abandonned shoes."
"Broken glass." ::snort::
"Rocks?"
"Um, batteries mostly."
But I spotted an older child not long ago who had built a kite from the black plastic bags littered everywhere across Niger and a few pieces of millet stalk, and old tires are an infitie source of entertainment. With some sticks, a bit of string and a few old flipflops, children make toys (cutting circles out of the soles for wheels). My (brilliant) little brothers even fashioned functioning headlights on theirs, although I still have no idea how they managed it. Only after the shock wears off, only when you can master it, do these magnificant things begin to appear.
Thus "desensitization" is an ill-fitting title for the process we go through here. I am more sensitive to the beauty, more receptive to the gifts hidden in the muck, than I was when I began. It is a change, but not a toughening one. As we begin to accept Niger for what it is, and accept our role here, as we put roots down and feel the enormous embrace of our communities, we are changed.
The state of Niger is undoubtedly unique in this world, I must admit, as I pass a child squatting in an open stretch of land (and therefore trash) on my morning walk to work. I can see from her posture that she is pooping, but I smile and holler the "N'Goyya" to her "Fofo!" I continue on, stepping out of the path to make way for a passing cow cart. I arrive to the Inspection and am greeted by every person there; they each smile as they offer me water or tea or copto or whatever they have. Because, the longer I am in Niger, the more I see the beauty in that afforementioned "state of Niger." The Sahelien sand has only begun to wear the scales from my eyes.
As many of you have heard, I have recently been ripped from this home that I have created and been forced to abandon the foundation I spent six months building slowly slowly for my next two years. I have many things to say about the process and about Morocco, but for now I'm content to dream back to my world, and the families that I left there. Niger, as a friend recently pointed out, has made us better version of ourselves.
And I am nothing but grateful.