Niger feels like a world away from my US home in more ways than one:
1 - Washington's skies in February are typically grey and cloud. Niger's are blue and hazy.
2 - Washington's landscape is green, with prominent topographical features like hills and mountains. Niger's landscape is orange and flat, flat, flat.
3 - Washington's roads and cities are full of pavement, concrete, differing building shapes, slanted roofs, florescent lights brightly illuminating vast areas of space, huge box stores, and transportation predominantly being accomplished by cars and truck. Niger's roads are dusty and sandy, with mud-and-straw structures being commonplace, or houses tucked behind 8-foot high walls with broken bottles or barbed wire at the top, flat roofs, tiny, open-fronted or tented shops, random long, florescent tubes sticking out in various locations, and streets crowded with some cars, but mostly scooters, motorcycles, donkeys, camels, carts, and lots and lots of people.
4 - In Washington I turn on the heat before I climb into a bed piled high with blankets, down comforters, quilts, afghans, and fleece throws. In Niger I make sure the fan is on, my 2nd sheet is pushed down to the foot of the bed, and my mosquito net is tucked in tightly under my mattress.
5 - In Washington I have a network of acquaintances that has been growing and expanding for 23 years. This includes, my family, our friends, various church bodies, my work peers, my students, and the loads of faces that I share this geographical community with that I've run across countless times over the years. In Niger, everyone I know was a stranger 3 weeks ago.
6 - In Washington my attention is divided in many ways - with work, responsibilities, priorities, desires, other people's wishes, and the ever-present possibilities of the future. Niger doesn't hold so many options for me: I have no cell phone, the internet doesn't work well, and watches don't matter because people think of time in generalities rather than specific minutes. I walk or ride with someone, rather than driving a car. My clothing options are limited due to both a limited amount of clothes with me, but also much more extreme ideas of propriety and modesty, and I don't even worry about how my hair is done, because it's tied under a head scarf anyhow.
7 - In Washington I find myself usually chilled, with cold fingers, a cold nose, and never leaving my house without a sweater and blanket and scarf. In Niger, being in the shade and maintaining all opportunities for a breeze to blow over my heated skin is an ever-present reality.
8 - In Washington I drink liquids in their hottest form, usually to try to avoid the chill. I'm not even sure I would have to drink anything if I didn't want to, because my epidermis would probably absorb enough moisture from the air to sufficiently maintain my body operations (OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea!). In Niger, I just drink liquids as much as possible, because if I don't, my skin dries out, my lips get chapped, I get a headache, dizzy, and could suffer other, much worse repercussions of dehydration.
9 - In Washington I really hate getting the bottom of my trousers wet from the pooled H2O that accumulates on the ground almost all the time. In Niger, I just try to avoid dragging my skirt through any kind of excrement, and make sure I wash my feet and ankles before going to bed.
10 - In Washington the common noises are ambiance jazz music, big-store announcements, car's driving, radios running, and machines running. In Niger, ambiance sounds are animals making noise, people talking, vehicles lacking mufflers, horns, the call to prayer, and music that I can only think to term "wailing" in nature coming from radios.
The differences are astounding. All of my senses support this fact.
As a result, sometimes it seems a little... shall I just say, "strange," to move from one of these worlds into another within a relatively short amount of time.
Granted, my trip home from Niger was pretty long. Thursday afternoon (after doing a final set of rounds with Dori, snapping photos, and watching a cleft palate surgery and uterine cyst surgery simultaneously in "Salle 1" (ie: one of the operating rooms), I hugged my new friends on the Galmi Hospital compound goodbye and hopped into a 5-passenger airplane for the 90 minute flight back to Niamey (ground previously covered in a 8+ hour drive). It was fun to see the Nigeran landscape from the sky - it looks like the Sahel, alright!
We spent the night in Niamey, then were able to explore a couple things in the city on Friday. Chris dropped us off at the airport about 10PM, and we swatted mosquitoes and visited with people that a member of our team had met in Niger 25 years ago that "just so happened" to be leaving Niger on the same flight we were on (yeah, a VERY cool little God-ordained intersection there, I think!), amid various security checks. Apparently Niger is going to strictly enforce the security of the people coming in going from their country's one (yes, ONE!) official airstrip!
other than my luggage deciding to exert a little independence and spend more time in Paris than the rest of our team, we were on the ground in Holland in plenty of time for a little sales shopping (on my part - it was 75 degrees COLDER in Amsterdam than in Niger, and my jacket, closed toed shoes, socks, and hat were all packed in the Paris-visiting backpack!), and some touring in the quaint little town of Haarlem outside of Amsterdam for a few hours.
I split from the group in the afternoon to head to the YWAM base in search of some friends that I'd stayed with in the past in Amsterdam. I had no problem finding it, even after 3+ years, but unfortunately my friends had moved on to Singapore during that time. However, once again, God did his God-things, and after buzzing the doorbell, I met some girls that had JUST seen my friends the week before when they were in Singapore (of all places!) at a little training thing, and they were able to give me the report on my friends, and then invited me to come have a cup of tea while they worked on dinner preparations for the 45 people currently at De Poort. I agreed to the tea, but didn't sit to enjoy it, rather I grabbed an apron from the stack, a knife from the knife rack, a cutting board from under the sink, and the garlic that was sitting on the counter, and THAT is how I found myself a part of the YWAM community for about an hour on my way home from Niger! I didn't visit with my friends, but I did make new ones (!!!), and felt so blessed to spend some time with other people my age who are passionate about the same things I'm passionate about!
A very long, hot shower and tasty panini dinner out of the way a few hours later, I crawled into bed and slept until it was time to do the final repack, grab some breakfast, and check into the Delta counter for the final flight home. It was a little sad to hug my teammates goodbye in the baggage claim of SeaTac, but it's fun to know that I'm a bit of an adopted member of a church community in Seattle.
My cousins and sister met me at the airport, and we headed to a Jamba Juice in the mall for a little bit of catch up time. I think walking out of Macy's into the mall center is when it really hit me - the vast difference between Niger and Washington. I grabbed my sister's arm as I stopped in the middle of the white tile floor, and said, "Hang on, I think I need to go through about 5 seconds of cultural readjustment shock here!" There were too many white people, and everyone was speaking my language! I don't recognize these things until I've been away and out of this environment, then it seems like such a glaringly obvious fact that I'm surprised by my lack of acknowledgement!
As long as this blog entry is, it still feels inadequate to articulate exactly the process of traveling 9 time zones and being on a different continent for a few weeks. In some ways, it feels like I'm two different people leading two different lives, but I can't be both people at the same time. So when I'm American Dani, I'm here, living here, but when I go overseas, it's like American Dani gets put on pause - and her life along with her - and the overseas Dani takes over and that life resumes. Then when I come back, I re-enter American Dani's person and life, someone hits the play button at some point during the flight, and I come back to my world here.
The difficulty is in reconciling these two lives - the constant struggle to let one life impact and permeate the other life, while still valuing both lives, and continually striving to find a way to dissolve the line that seems to be drawn between the two. I really don't know exactly how to do that! But I hope that the more I do this back and forth thing - or at least, the more I think and talk about this two worlds thing - the process and steps to take will become easier.
To all of you new readers - thanks for following along on this little adventure! To all of you who've been praying through my list 16 things, or praying of your own initiative, thank you. It's impossible to fully know how impacting those prayers of have been on this side of eternity, but I'm completely confident that they HAVE been heard and answered in more ways than you or I are aware. I appreciate them greatly!
