Unit 3 niger: night sweats
Activity 1
Read the text.
CLOSE MY EYES, pretend to sleep. Maybe I am sleeping. In Africa it's hard to tell. Coiled in a dirty sheet, sweat-soaked, my hair matted with the day's dust and grains of sand in my mouth, I dream about work, storylines, plots; I edit pictures in my head. I wake gasping for breath, unsure where I am. Niger. Rwanda. Somalia.
In Africa there are too many pictures, too many contrasts. You can't catch them all. It's like sticking your head out of a fast-moving car—you suffocate; it's too much to take in. Amputations. Executions. Empty beds. Shuttered stores. Crippled kids. Wild-eyed gunmen. Stripped-down corpses. Crashed cars. Mass graves. Handmade tombstones. Scattered ammo. Half-starved dogs. Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that don't exist in offices that aren't there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of the car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubble—roofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.
At some point though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. There is an adventure waiting. Life happening. It's not your life, but it's as close as you'll get. You want to see it all.
One minute you're there—in it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sun—then you're gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass. You are gliding above the earth, laughing.
I'M IN MARADI, Niger. Its late July 2005. A few days ago, I was in Rwanda with friends on vacation. I'd gone to see the mountain gorillas and to tour the new genocide museum. Not everyone's idea of fun, perhaps, but I've never been very good at taking time off. I burn on beaches, and get bored really quickly. I had a couple of days left in Rwanda, and was watching TV in my hotel room, when a short report came on about starvation in Niger.
"According to a report by the United Nations, 3.5 million Nigeriens are at risk of starvation, many of them children," the news anchor said, then moved on to something else.
I called CNN to see if I could go. My travel companions were pissed off, but not all that surprised. They were used to my bailing out on them at the last minute.
"Why would you want to go to Niger?" one of them asked when I told him of the change of plans.
"Why wouldn't you want to go?" I responded. "Um, because I'm normal," he said, laughing.
I wished I knew how to explain it to them. It's as if a window opens, and you realize the world has been re-formed. I wanted to see the starvation. I needed to remind myself of its reality. I worry that if I get too comfortable, too complacent, I'll lose all feeling, all sensation.
The next day, I was on a plane, on my way. I'd been relieved of the burden of vacation. I was in motion once again, hurtling through space. Nothing was certain, but everything was clear.
BY ALL ESTIMATES, Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. Ninety percent of it is desert, and even in good years, most people here barely get by. The average Nigerien woman gives birth eight times in her life, and one out of every four children dies before he reaches the age of five. One in four. It's a staggering statistic, but not hard to imagine when you see how poor Nigeriens' diet is, and what little access they have to medical care.
Even for adults, the summer months between the planting of crops and harvest is a difficult time. Nigeriens call it the hungry season, when they rely on grain stored up from the previous year to get by. In 2004 there was a drought, followed by an invasion of locusts. Crops were decimated, devoured, so now it's 2005, and there's no grain stored up. People are foraging for food, eating leaves off trees.
When you land in Niger, by the time you reach the end of the runway, Niamey International Airport is nowhere to be seen. On either side of the tarmac, sand and scrub brush stretch to the horizon.
The gin-swilling British businessman sitting next to me on the plane stares out the window and bursts into tears. "They have nothing," he mumbles; to no one. "The children are dying."
"What's your problem?" the Air France flight attendant asks as he saunters by.
"People are dying" the businessman repeats. "I know," the attendant says. "People are dying every day, all over the world." He was tired of dealing with drunks.
It is hard to see the hunger at first. In Niamey, chauffeur-driven Mercedes glide down potholed streets. Businessmen and bureaucrats shuttle about, car windows firmly shut. A layer of dust seems to coat everything.
"This isn't a famine, it's a sham-ine," I hear one European reporter mutter in the hotel, concerned that the images he's gathered aren't going to be what his bosses back in the newsroom are expecting. That's how TV works. You know the pictures you want, the pictures you're expected to find. Your bosses will be disappointed if you don't get them, so you scan the hospital beds, looking for the worst, unable to settle for anything less. Merely hungry isn't good enough. Merely sick won't warrant more than a cutaway shot.
The hunger is there, of course—you just have to look close. On the drive from Niamey to Maradi are fields of corn, sorghum, and millet. Crops are planted, but harvest is a long way off, and there's little food to get families through until then. Adults can live off leaves and grass; kids need nutrients, and there are none to be had.
"It's not so bad," I say to Charlie Moore, my producer, and as soon as the words come out of my mouth, I wish I could take them back. "It's bad enough" he responds, and of course he's right. It's bad enough.