Scratching A living In Niger, Squeezing Water From A Pot …

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“Life was wonderful here,” says Maya Halida, 50, squeezing water from a pot of pounded millet, and remembering her childhood in Kassi-Tondi, a tiny village of mud bricks and straw thatched roofs deep in the arid, scorching sand and wind-blasted plains three hours drive north-east of the capital Niamey. It’s not so wonderful anymore.  Maya’s husband died last year “of a stomach ache,” she says matter-of-factly. Over the years, six of her 10 children have died too, “from fever”. The water in the well outside the village is almost too deep to reach now, even with a long rope, and the last harvest – which should have fed what is left of her family for most of this year – produced enough grain for just six days.
“Now I am a widow, some relatives far away gave me money to buy this sack of grain. But it is so expensive now,” says Maya, deftly feeding sticks into a small fire to heat porridge. It is quickly apparent that there are almost no men of working age anywhere in Kassi-Tondi. All have gone to Nigeria or Cameroon, or to Niamey, in search of work. Some had been in Libya, but were forced out by the war. Maya is a tough, garrulous, cheerful woman in a country where people accept hardship with a shrug. She yearns for the old days, when no-one needed outside help, and the government “left us to be free”. But now she acknowledges that her family’s survival this year may depend on a “food for work” programme set up by the United Nation’s World Food Programme.
I’m told Kassi-Tondi means “big stones” and this morning Maya and several hundred women from the district have been busy picking up rocks and stones and carrying them on their heads to shore up the sides of a giant series of intricate ditches scratched into the hard ground. The idea is that these water catchments will trap the next rains, preventing the water from skidding wastefully off the plateau, and bringing the fields back to life. “Maybe it will work,” says Maya, pausing for a moment in the baking sun.
But in the short term the scheme provides a more immediate benefit to the villagers. Each woman – and again it is shocking to note the complete absence of men – is paid the local equivalent, in either cash or grain, of $2 a day for their labour.
FRANCIS TAWIAH (Duisburg – Germany)
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