Hot dry dusty sand, a world where spirits and humans live assembled in the same gaudy, mocking stew. Life is subdued, due in part to the saturation of the air and earth, even, of the meditative tones of Islamic practice. Yet I think, too, life is subdued because life is barely hanging on, and to expend too much is to lose it all.
I am thinking about the man I saw sitting on the corner of the road in Niamey, as I'm waiting at a stop light. He has dwarfism, and his body was not made to help him in this world where men, women and children need their bodies to serve them and each other through the day. He is sitting on the ground near a number of people begging roadside, and on several sheets of smudged and worn graph paper, he is working out complex math problems.
Some people seem stretched up to the rooftops while other have been squashed or pulled into twisted shapes. There is a circus of life on the streets, yet everyone is moving or not moving purposefully, every one has a task, has something to accomplish for the day. Camels lope through the streets with heavy burlap sacks, burdens of sand strapped across their backs, goats meander, and people work. The work of people is to survive.
It feels we are living at the edge of the world, the edge of the world as it was, looking out into the future, vast in the Sahara, where our existence is slight and secondary.
~~~~~
Niger is the country of our planet’s first global warming refugees. As the forests and water sources disappear, and the desert creeps in claiming more and more land, I sometimes feel as if I am looking out into the future of our planet, a snapshot of our lives in 25-50 years of accumulated global climate change. I can’t help but ask, what can we learn from the Nigeriennes?
Most news outlets show us that the image of Niger, a stamp of the country’s identity encapsulated, is a starving, skeletal child, malnourished, a victim of drought or, if the coverage is more sophisticated, a victim of economic trade systems, rising market prices, and poorer conditions for livestock and harvest. Yes, malnutrition and health, food and water accessibility are major concerns for Nigeriens (within a much more complicated situation), yet Niger is much more than this simple image. Niger is a country where its citizens are dedicated to staying and making their nation stronger, healthier. The streets of Niamey are not teeming with beggars—almost everyone on the streets seems to be moving with a purpose, engaged in a task at hand, working hard to create opportunities to make life better.
In the 1980’s Niger established a national solar energy center to make use of one of their greatest resources, the sun. Sustainable development agencies are constantly working to find ways to incorporate PVCs and other alternative and sustainable energy systems into their overall programming. A high level of attention is being placed on disaster mitigation, prevention, and preparedness work, working with regions to develop contingency plans—rather than the usual humanitarian community’s tendency to react only once a situation has become severe and alarming (and visible to the international community).
I heard some Canadian missionaries complaining about the black plastic bags permeating the town dump outside of Niamey. Yes, it is true, the plastic bags are a problem (and I do my own part to avoid using them), but frankly I have seen much worse, and for a country coping with such extreme poverty, they have done a good job, as collective individuals, at keeping the waste and refuse to a minimum. There is a NGO that works to collect and recycle the dreaded black plastic bags into infrastructural building materials and other products that must be long-lasting and sturdy. Most people separate out their organic/bio-degradable garbage and bury it (some even apply a form of composting to gardens), and much of the remaining garbage is burned (not ideal, but within the infrastructural and finance constraints, this is the current solution). What is left for the dump is mainly mulch and black plastic bags. Plastic bottles are re-used continuously, and resold on the market, which contributes to economic development. Compare this site outside of Niamey to our better-hidden dumps and landfills in the United States, and again, there is something to be learned about using everything you have, re-using it, and being careful about waste creation and disposal.
Nigerien villages and pastoralist/nomadic societies have been continually and increasingly challenged to adapt to the earth’s changing landscape, to shift and move entire communities in search of water, food, a means for survival. The pressure to survive is increasing as the rains have not been falling in the same regular patterns as have been dependable for farmers and pastoralists alike for generations upon generations. Traditionally non-nomadic agriculture-based villages are finding themselves forced into the nomadic or semi-nomadic life, as a matter of absolute necessity, seeking water, seeking food, seeking sources of income and means of livelihood elsewhere.
People are forced to find new ways to function to survive, and while supporting that process, opportunities also offer themselves up for learning, for thinking about the way our entire planet can prepare for the changes we are experiencing.
This outlook can be very frightening when we consider the accelerated rate of global climate change, with the planet’s tempests rolling over us at an alarming rate, the common phrase in emergency after emergency becoming, “I’ve never seen things this bad before, in all my years,” or “worst/highest/strongest levels in documented history” with every hurricane, every flood, every massive earthquake and tsunami.
We could very easily fly into a panic and sound the alarm bells until we stroke out, or fall into a despair, become overwhelmed and give up, we can shut down and move into denial, or we can start to think about how we are going to move forward, in the healthiest manner possible, into this changing, new, and unknown future.
Niger offers us a case study to learn from the Nigeriens and the international agencies within Niger, how we can better move into our future.
By all means, slowing the past and preventing progression of global warming is an urgent and pressing priority, and our investments in the Kyoto Treaty and other collective treaties and mandates, in developing solid infrastructure based on solar, wind, and other alternative energies (bio-fuel and electric cars, for example) while making changes in our lifestyles—walking, riding bikes, carpooling, using less, making more of what we have, investing and engaging in local organic food systems, incorporating eco-friendly energy systems into our homes, etc. as we can afford….all this should be done from the most global to most intimate levels of our lives. Simultaneously, we must recognize that not only is change coming, but that change is HERE, it is happening now, and we cannot duck our heads in the sand and hope it will magically repair itself. We need to learn NOW how we will cope, as societies, as a globe, as individual families, with our potential future, in order to direct its development with intentions for health, peace, harmony and balanced with the Earth.
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