On Friday, the workshop culminated with a demonstration for RAV's board and some of the artists in the network, as well as administrators for some local NGOs. It went really well--the participants described the process, we showed various steps in the creation process, including tableaux, and then presented one of the short forum pieces and two of the participants, Rachid and Edouard, joked the forum together. Everyone agreed that it went really well. This group was challenging in a way that the group in Ouagadougou wasn't in that they are all so experienced that at first I think they felt like they didn't need another workshop, that they knew everything already, but by the end, they were really appreciative.
Friday afternoon we left Niamey for Maradi, the third largest city in Niger and the commercial center. It's about 10 miles from the Nigerian border. RAV has been supervising a training conference in forum theater there for the last several months, so a team of trainers needed to go back to provide additional training and observe the work that the local teams had accomplished.
So a road trip in Niger is very different than a jog from SF to LA in the United States...the highway is two lane (barely) with stretches where they are repairing it and you have to drive on a dirt side road, cows and goats in the way, huge trucks that seem to break down everywhere with no shoulder, etc etc etc. Maradi is about 450 miles from Niamey but it tooks us more than 12 hours altogether...the first surprise for me, though, was how beautiful the landscape is, particularly because it's the rainy season. The land is very flat, with an occasional red dirt hill, so you can see for miles...red earth and very green trees, fields of grasses and vegetables, and grass huts with domed roofs that ended at a point like a meringue...at night we saw incredible lightening storms miles away. At sunset we were passing through a nature preseve and Djibrine told me to turn around...and there was a giraffe hanging out on the side of the road. I think I read that Niger has one of the only remaining giraffe herds in West Africa.
We arrived in Doutchi, the halfway point, late at night, in the rain...and once stopped, the car would not start. Long story short, after trying to push start it and then wandering around for a while and finally hiring some local boys with motorcycles to drive us around, it was clear that a mechanic was not available until morning. So we left the car and found a hotel.
It took most of yesterday to fix the car, turned out it was the alternator. Now I have a bunch of new french vocab...car parts! We got on the road again late yesterday afternoon and arrived in Maradi at 1am this morning. Driving across Niger, through tiny villages and towns, was fascinating. There were times where we stopped the car to buy food or drinks and I sat there, surrounded by crowds of people going about their small town Africa Saturday night business with nothing but flashlights to light the way, speaking Hausa, and realized that I was the only white person for miles...but aside from the occasional crowd of kids begging, just like in Burkina, people are so welcoming...you never just say hi when you see someone, you ask them how they are, how their health is, how their family is, how they are dealing with the heat, if they slept or ate well, etc etc.
I have also eated some seriously interesting roadside food. Here it's grilled meat here there and everywhere...we stopped for some, guess what, grilled meat, and the first thing I noticed was a cow tail sitting on the grill. Apparently that is put out so that you know what animal is currently on the grill, kind of like a little advertisement or menu...
So this morning I am going to observe the training. I like Maradi so far, it's more calm than Niamey, but has an energy all the same...fewer cars and more motorcycles, white sand instead of red, and it's not as hot.
So, more from Maradi later...
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