Coming to Terms

I feel as if I am beginning to come to terms with living here. By tomorrow evening I will have been here for a week and it is starting to feel very familiar. Last night (Sunday) Nigel brought me a printout of an email Cathy had sent on Thursday. I read it six, seven, ten times? I was staggered by my reaction to the email. I needed to read it over and over to ensure I'd assimilated every bit of information. I needed to know that I hadn't overlooked anything, even though there is absolutely nothing I can do with or about the information it contains. How did Nigel and Carolyn cope during the time of her father's illness and passing? How do these people cope with the snippets of information that arrive? Is it just that I am new to this situation and have come here alone with Dorothy and Cathy back in Belfast, that I am more aware of the isolation? The knowledge that another email will be on its way to Belfast this afternoon (Monday) seems strangely comforting. What must it have been like before this means of communication existed?

Harmattan. I have some vague memory of reading about it in geography in school. It belonged to the realm of the taught but meaningless material you gathered on the way to an 'O' level. Today it is much more real. I'm sitting in the middle of it. My keyboard is suffering from it, my tea is polluted by it, my nose is full of it! Harmattan is the name give to the winds that originate over the Sahara during the cool season. These dry winds blow from the desert in a West, South Westerly direction to the African coast lifting sand and dust as they go. Niger is the thoroughfare over which the wind chooses to travel. Today it is what the TV weather people at home would call 'strong to gale force'. The trees are bending, the people brace themselves as they walk into it and anyone with any sense keeps out of it. Actually that's impossible. You can stay indoors but you can't avoid the pervasive influence of the Harmattan. You can run, but you can't hide. In the absence of double glazing and the asthma inducing hermetically sealed housing we value in the west, no nook or cranny of the house escapes the deposits of the Harmattan. House proud housewives wouldn't last an hour out here in the bush. If the lack of electricity to power the Dyson didn't give them a nervous breakdown the Harmattan would!

In Hausa one of the greetings is 'yaya iska' - it winds - to which the reply is 'Akwai iska' - yes there is some or 'iska lokoci ne' which means 'it’s the time for it'. A delightful understatement that reflects the taken-for-grantedness of the conditions under which the people live.

To next part.
To journal from Niger.