Harmattan (2 page)

Monsieur Boubacar once showed me a wonderful book with a map of Ireland, where they live. It looked so tiny I could hardly believe that anyone could live there. On another page, Africa looked so big – and Niger so far from its shores – that I doubted if I would ever see the ocean. But Monsieur Boubacar said that anything was possible. He had travelled – to Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Liberia – so I had no reason to doubt his words.

That was before my twelfth birthday. 

Mr N Boyd
Member No. 515820
Ballygowrie
Co. Down
N. Ireland
BT22 1AW

Dear Sponsor,

Good morning! Your sponsored daughter is very happy to be your new child and my parents greet you a lot for this. They are very happy. I am very happy to receive your letter and your beautiful photograph. Thank you very much, you and your family.

May God bless you.

We live in a village called Wadata – in a house made with bricks. The weather is so warm in our country. I have a sister called Fatima who is two years old, a brother called Adamou ten years old and a grown up brother called Abdelkrim. My father grows millet and sorghum and my mother is a house keeper and grows okio and ground nuts.

I am schooling now, but I am in primary one. Friends make the world go round.

Some of my friends help me to draw our country map (Niger Republic). I like so much to draw. I and my family are greeting you. It is my supervisor
Richard
Houeto
that helps me to write this letter.

Affectionately yours,

Your child Haoua (8 years) 

***

I first heard about Katie and Hope when Sushie, an
anasara
nurse, came to visit my parents one day. I had just turned eight and had never seen an
anasara
before. Sushie was strong and tall and elegant, with large white teeth and brown, wavy hair – not braided, but bunched together, untidily, in one gathering at the back of her head. The oddness of her pale face unsettled me at first, but soon I grew to think of her as beautiful.

I was pounding millet in front of our little house when she called out to me.
‘Ira ma
wichira bani,’
she greeted me, in Djerma. ‘Is your mother here?’

I stared at her without answering. It was not fear that kept me fixed to where I stood, but the strangeness of this creature before me.

She smiled at me, her great white teeth flashing in the sunlight, then made the hand gesture which my people do whenever they want to say, ‘Well, what?’ without actually saying anything: the right hand is swept, lazily, to the left, then flipped and dropped, palm outwards, under its own weight. It can be used as a question, as Sushie had done, or as an insult, in which case it is usually accompanied by air being sucked in noisily through the teeth.

I dropped my pestle and went to fetch my mother.

Later, when my father came home, he and my mother went inside and talked for what seemed like a very long time while I bathed Fatima in the red plastic basin outside. I will always remember how happy my mother looked when she came back outside to tell us that our family was to join the Seed Loan and Education Programme run by Vision Corps International
.

‘God has smiled upon us,’ she said. ‘In time, they may even give us a sewing machine!’

Not long after that, I started to attend Wadata’s school. Soon, letters and packages began to arrive from Katie and Hope together with the photographs and postcards which gave me glimpses of their lives. The first package contained gifts for my entire family - candies, brightly coloured trumpets and whistles, picture books, a little doll for Fatima, a rubber ball for my brother Adamou, and watches for my father and mother. Even my older brother Abdelkrim – who had joined the Nigerien Guard – received a gift. Some weeks later he sent a note from his barracks in Niamey, asking me to thank Katie and Hope’s parents for his tiny transistor radio. I felt proud to be able to read a few of his words myself. (He had learned to read and write in the army.) I think it was then, really, that I began to understand how lucky I was to be at school, while many of my friends would continue to spend all their days pounding millet, washing clothes, fetching water from the river, herding animals, cooking, gathering firewood and tilling the dry ground.

My father immediately took his watch to the market and sold it. A few days later my mother was unable to find hers.

My most treasured of these gifts was a small, soft bear with bright orange glass eyes and the photographs and postcards which our new friends sent to us. I usually kept the bear hidden in my
pagne
, but at night time I wrapped him carefully in a piece of fabric and placed it under my bean hay mattress, along with Katie and Hope’s letters and pictures. One morning, not long after I had begun going to school, I discovered that the bear was missing. I was sure that Adamou had taken it, to sell or swap for something else. I went outside, into the cool morning air. My mother was cooking sorghum and
beignets
and preparing tea for my father.

‘Adamou has taken my bear!’ I said.

‘You do not know that, child.’ she replied. ‘It is wrong to accuse others without just cause.’

‘But he has taken it from me before, Mother!’ I protested.

After school, my friend Miriam Kantao and I went down to the river and found Adamou and a handful of his no-good cronies, up to mischief, as usual. We all knew that we were not supposed to go there without an adult, but it was a favourite pastime for the boys of my village to taunt crocodiles with sticks and stones from the safety of the river bank.

‘Give me back my bear, Adamou,’ I pleaded.

‘I don’t have it, stupid girl!’ he said, looking to his friends for confirmation.

They grinned at each other. As far as these boys were concerned Miriam and I existed – like the crocodiles – only for the pleasure of tormenting.

‘Fawako enjoyed it very much!’ one of the boys called out, pointing to the river. Fawako , ‘butcher’, was the name we had given to the largest of the male crocodiles. There were stories of how he had devoured many people over the years, and of how two children from the neighbouring village of Goteye had gone missing and only their water pitchers had been found. But there was only one incident which we knew to be factual. It had happened the previous year when a government surveyor, while preparing a report for a proposed water tower and borehole for the Wadata region, had lost a leg. We also knew that crocodiles do not actually devour their prey instantly but, having drowned it, lodge the carcass underwater, on a submerged tree trunk or the like, where it can rot and be picked at according to the creature’s urge.

I looked out over the lazy, fetid water and knew that I would never see my little bear again. As we turned to go back to the village, one of the boys fired a stone at us from a slingshot which he’d fashioned from a twig and an old piece of inner tube. It struck me just above my right buttock, stinging sharply.

‘I will tell Father!’ I promised, through my tears. My threat was greeted only with wild cackling.

The walk from the river to Wadata takes thirty minutes – twice that if carrying water. When we got back, my father and three or four of the other village elders and griots were sitting on palm-leaf mats in the shade of a woven reed canopy, playing dominoes and drinking mint tea. I was fearful that he would be angry with me for being home late, and that he would guess that Miriam and I had been to the river. I greeted him and his friends respectfully, all of whom remained engrossed in their game. My father patted my back, barely pausing from his game to even look at me.

‘Help your mother now, Haoua,’ he said. ‘There’s a good girl.’

I decided not to mention the bear.

Mademoiselle Sushie visited our house quite often, sometimes bringing with her other
anasara
workers – doctors, photographers, teachers and interpreters. One of our visitors – Richard – had grown up in Goteye, studied in Niamey and Washington D.C. and now worked for Vision Corps International, the same organisation that had brought Sushie into my life. Richard opened up my world further still. Through him, the strange words which Katie and Hope and their father wrote to me became real, mine. Richard translated their letters from English to French, and, when necessary – which was often at first – from French to Djerma. At first I had nothing much to say to my new friends in Ireland. Monsieur Boubacar showed me how to make a thumb print, in ink, at the bottom of a little drawing, but it did not occur to me that I might actually reply: I did not think that they could really be interested in my life in Wadata. But Katie and Hope wrote often, asking me questions about my family, my school, my village. They enquired about my father, my mother, my sister and brothers – even Abdelkrim – and I began to want to tell them more.

***

Haoua Boureima 
Child Ref. NER2726651832
Vision Corps International 
Tera Area Development Programme
C/O BP 11504
Niamey
Republic of Niger
West Africa
3rd July, 1995
Mr N Boyd
Member No. 515820
Ballygowrie
Co. Down
N. Ireland
BT22 1AW

Dear Noel Boyd,

Thank you very much about the gifts that you sent me. Every one of us have received gifts from you. My mother got one perfume and one watch, my father one watch and all my brothers and sister they got gifts. Thank you very much, you and your family. May God bless you always and your Mrs Boyd and your daughters.

I don’t have dog, but we possess goats, sheeps and hens. It is quite cold now because of the rainy season. My family is greeting you. My supervisor Monsieur Richard Houeto helped me to write this letter.

Kindly your daughter,

Haoua

***

Not everything that the foreigners brought to Wadata was pleasant. Before Sushie’s arrival, the old folk in the village had revelled in teasing children with stories about monstrous, pale-skinned
anasaras
, and how they would come and
pique
us with their needles if we misbehaved.

Every child in Niger, whether at school or not, was familiar with the story of Captaine Paul Voulet, the French officer who, a century ago, had ravaged our country; destroying whole villages and ordering his troops to slaughter men, rape women and throw children down wells! Now, here was one of these monsters, flesh and bone, in our midst!

To we older children (Miriam and I were eight when Sushie first arrived) the promise of health and protection through Sushie’s medicines and injections, and the fact that both our teachers and mothers actively encouraged such practices, seemed reason enough to grin through our tears and fears: Wadata had seen many infants die – of malnutrition, dehydration, dysentery, malaria and AIDS. Before Adamou was born, my own parents had lost two children. Both were boys, little more than babies. My mother rarely talked about them.

In one of Katie’s letters she had told me that her great grandfather was still living. He was ninety-five! That in itself seemed good enough reason to take the
anasara’s
medicine. I had never known my father’s parents, or my mother’s father.

My grandmother, however, continued to treat Sushie and her ‘potions’ with the deepest suspicion, right up until her death. Bunchie, as we called her, was equally wary of Monsieur Boubacar, Richard and anything to do with my school.

She would shake her head and click her almost toothless gums. ‘These ways will do you no good, Little One,’ she used to tell me when my mother was not nearby.

It seemed to me to be the only subject on which my father and grandmother agreed: ‘Educated girls argue with their parents more!’ my father would say.

Bunchie was fifty-two when she died; her skin hard and leathery and wrinkled as a dry date. She had been a widow for over three decades and had never even visited Niamey. Perhaps, looking back, she was right to warn me, but back then my greatest wish was to see more of the world, and slowly I had begun to believe that, one day, I might do so.

Little Fatima had just turned two when Sushie came into our lives. At first, my sister became hysterical each time she set eyes on the kindly white nurse. My father and his friends took great delight in Fatima’s terror. Whenever they saw Sushie or one of her colleagues approaching, they would call out,
‘Attends! Attends!’
before disappearing into our compound and reappearing with Fatima, or one of the other babies from our part of Wadata. The child would then be held up, in front of Sushie’s face, whereupon it inevitably began to squeal – much to the delight of my father and his cronies.

Sushie would make great play at being angry with the men, swearing wildly in Djerma, much to their amusement, while at the same time trying to pacify my sister or whatever unfortunate child had been seized from its mother.

One day, when I had been attending school for nearly three years, my family received a letter from Abdelkrim. Although it was still necessary for me to carry out many chores at home, I had also worked hard at my studies and so took great pleasure in being able to read my brother’s news to my mother and father, Adamou and Fatima.

The letters from Ireland had also continued, and I enjoyed replying to Katie and Hope. Richard or Monsieur Boubacar were never far away if I got stuck with either reading or writing, so that the process now felt like a natural and important part of my life. Abdelkrim wrote that he had some leave to take and that an army vehicle, en route to the military base at Tera, was going to drop him off at Wadata for a short stay. We children were overjoyed, as was my hard-working mother: she had grieved for a full year since the death of my grandmother and had not seen her eldest son for four years.

With each day, my father grew more agitated by my mother’s sadness and inability to pay attention to his needs; indeed, he made no secret of his dissatisfaction, and Miriam’s brother Dendi had heard talk in the village that Father planned to take another wife.