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When I first visited Maradi last November, it was the day after the Islamist riots in which two churches and seven bars were attacked and burned. I was passing through on my way back to Niamey from Zinder, and I stopped long enough to pick up four Volunteers who were at the Peace Corps transit house in town and take them back to their villages, where they would be safe.

When I visited Maradi in February, conditions had long since returned to normal. The Government seems to have the Islamist extremists under control, at least for the time being. Both churches and bars have been rebuilt and are open and functioning normally.

Local authorities are confident of their ability to maintain order in spite of continuing Islamist pressure. However, Volunteers and others in the area have noted increasing conservatism in dress and other customs, as well as vocal support for the recent imposition of Sharia (Islamic) law in neighboring states of northern Nigeria.

While religiously conservative, Maradi is perhaps the most economically dynamic place in Niger. Maybe this is because it is so close to Nigeria, with which it is linked by a good road. It is reputed to have an unusually large number of "El Hadjis," people who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca and are thus entitled to put the "El Hadji" honorific in front of their names. Most of them are merchants. In fact, Peace Corps slang for a general store in Niger, the local version of a 7-11, is "El Hadji shop."

When visiting a Volunteer in a village north of Maradi, I met one of the El Hadjis, in whose compound our Volunteer’s house is located. A grain merchant, he is a man of considerable means by local standards. He lives in a large mud hut, has two wives, and is sending his eldest son on the pilgrimage to Mecca this year.

Maradi is also home to a burgeoning number of "telecenters," private shops where people can go to place phone calls, send faxes and emails, and access the Internet. Per capita, there is a much greater number of such businesses in Maradi than in Niamey.

Our Regional Representative in Maradi, an experienced Volunteer who has a small house and office adjacent to the Peace Corps transit house, is Kristin LaSor. Her father, Fred LaSor, is a recently retired USIA Foreign Service Officer, who served mainly in African posts. Thus Kristin, like our daughters, spent several years in Africa as a child, and also like them, attended French schools. She speaks excellent French, as well as Hausa, which she learned in Niger; and she is very much at home in the African environment and culture. She takes her work seriously, and is doing an excellent job.

The Guest House
Maradi’s best hotel, by far, is The Guest House. Clean, well maintained, air conditioned, with spacious, comfortable rooms and a restaurant that serves good, safe food, it would be an adequate hotel anywhere in the world. For rural Africa, it is a rare gem indeed. I’ve seen nothing comparable in quality outside capital cities and major tourist attractions.

Chuck, the proprietor, is the son of American missionaries in Africa. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon in the early 80s. He stayed on in Africa, first as a United Nations Volunteer and then as an employee of various non-governmental organizations, one of which stationed him in Maradi. There, he married his Hausa language tutor, and the couple opened The Guest House. At first, it was a side business for Chuck’s wife, but it was soon sufficiently successful that Chuck was able to leave his job to become a full-time hotelier.

A convivial man who looks a bit like Ernest Hemingway in his 40s, Chuck seems remarkably well suited for the role of hotelier in a remote town in eastern Niger. He is friendly with all the Maradi Volunteers, who patronize his restaurant whenever they are in town and can afford it.

	Sabrina, left, gets the news from Kristin that she has been accepted to Dartmouth Medical School

Sabrina has been living for the past year and a half in a mud hut in a village south of Maradi near the Nigerian border. She works in a rural dispensary there, and assists with maternal and child nutrition, vaccination campaigns, health education, and a variety of other projects. She attributes her success in her recent medical school interviews (for which she returned to the US in December) in large measure to her Peace Corps experience. "They were impressed with what I’ve done in Peace Corps," she said – and well they should have been.

Sabrina is a bright, engaging, committed young woman. She has been a great Volunteer, and I’m confident she will become a great doctor.

Plastics
"Plastics," said Mrs. Robinson’s friend to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. "That’s where the future is, in plastics!"

This 1968 prophecy seems to be coming true in Niger’s cities, towns and market villages, in the form of a plague of plastic bags.

One of the few modern conveniences to have reached a mass market in Niger, small plastic bags, black ones, white ones, and clear ones, are used as containers for almost everything, from purchases at the market, to water and other drinks, to tree seedlings. They are used by the millions, on a daily basis.

	A field of plastic bags, downwind of a Maradi market

The problem with this is that there is no waste disposal infrastructure except in Niamey, and even here the waste is simply dumped along a road leading into the countryside. Being non-biodegradable, the plastic bags accumulate from year to year; and being lightweight, they are blown over the fields and into the trees by the constant desert winds.

Thus, vast fields of plastic bags and plastic-festooned trees are ubiquitous downwind of every market area. Not only are they ugly, but also they degrade the environment and harbor disease vectors such as mosquitoes, flies and rodents.

The bags are cheap, convenient and highly useful; but they are also another growing problem to add to the long list of problems plaguing this poor country.

Malaria
While the developing AIDS pandemic gets much more news coverage, malaria remains the greatest single health problem in much of Africa, including Niger. It’s highly debilitating, constantly recurring, and, if untreated, can be fatal – an altogether nasty disease for which even the best modern preventatives are only partially successful.

At the request of members of the Norfolk Rotary Club, who are considering a new international project focused on malaria, I gathered some information on malaria in Niger. As with virtually all statistics regarding Africa, these are gross estimates at best. This is because, among other reasons, Niger’s health system (hospitals and rural clinics) reaches only about a third of the total population (which is itself a gross estimate – probably 10-11 million).

• During the period 1991-97, an annual average of 850,000 malaria cases was recorded by the health system. Probably at least twice as many cases went unreported and were treated at home (if at all).
• Between two and four percent of the reported cases were fatal. Children under five are the highest risk group
• The percentage of Nigerien children infected by the malaria parasite varies from about 25% in the northern desert regions to more than 80% in the more densely populated southern part of the country.
• In addition to sickness and death, malaria has severe economic and social consequences, including reduced productivity, absenteeism from school, and high medical costs. It is one of the (many) reasons for Niger’s extreme poverty. (Niger is ranked 173 out of 174 countries on the UN’s "poverty index.")
• Studies have indicated that only about a quarter of the population is aware that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes.
• A pilot project undertaken by UNICEF in 2000, involving an information campaign and distribution of insecticides and mosquito nets, reduced the number of malaria cases in one area by two thirds. However, in spite of several anti-malaria campaigns over the years, the overall incidence of malaria in Niger has not changed appreciably in recent decades.

Man of Many Talents
Recent ad in a Niamey newspaper:

"Doctor Professor P. Singh, great yogi, fortune teller, healer, palm reader and astrologer from India, is visiting Niamey to help solve your problems in matters of love, luck, work, health, evil spells, legal affairs, school exams, evil spirits, and getting back your wife who has left you. Specialist also in sexuality, impotence, high blood pressure, asthma, hemorrhoids, diabetes, sterility, ulcers, headaches, and rheumatism. Office hours daily from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Hotel Moustache, room 12."

How comforting to know that the good Doctor Professor Singh is on call to take care of whatever ails us!