Just over a year ago, we arrived in Niamey in the early afternoon and stared raptly out the window of the armored vehicle that picked us up from the airport. We drove 30 minutes through pretty moderate traffic to our new house, surrounded by a tall wall topped by razor wire. The social sponsor gave us the quick house tour, showed us how to operate the radio, how to turn on the generator in case it didn’t kick on automatically during an inevitable power outage, gave Ma her work phone and contacts list, and said goodbye, promising to pick her up for work the next day.
We wandered around the house and yard in a daze, then unpacked our two checked and two carry-on bags. The house is fully furnished in dark, deeply scratched, ubiquitous Ethan Allan Drexel Heritage furniture. There are well-loved beige rugs in the living room and one of the bedrooms – the one bedroom with a mosquito net, the one that happens to have a window right next to the generator. The first order of business was to move that mosquito net to the bedroom at the front of the house – away from the generator. The three bedrooms are all huge and come with ensuite bathrooms. There’s also an office, a huge living room, a storage room where the upright freezer and storage shelves are, a small kitchen, and a standalone bathroom off the living room. The house is stocked with a welcome kit that includes basic bedding (pro tip: bring your own sheets, as the ones provided here are microfiber – in a hot climate like this, you’ll sweat like a sinner in church), basic kitchen items that include cheap, scratched pots & pans, cooking & eating utensils & Corelle dishes, and really dull knives. The funny thing is that in all the (many) foreign service forums, expert advice includes bringing your own kitchen knives in your checked bags. Now I know why. I watched Ma almost hack off a finger trying to cut a pineapple with a dull blade. Once Ma’s shipment arrives, we’ll pack all the welcome kit into a box for use when we pack out to head to our next post, in two years.
The next day, Ma went to work in a jet-lagged daze, and I sat by the pool drinking fresh ginger juice and ogled the wild life… birds I’ve never seen before, so many lizards, and at dusk, the cauldron of straw-colored fruit bats that live in the largest of our five mango trees woke up and swooped around. It really was magical.
We’ve got a pool (barely visible through the hedge to the right (above), and a whole separate building for the washing machine and dryer, which, for obvious reasons, we’ve dubbed “the wash house.” This place really is a little slice of heaven. It’s going to take a bit of work to make it feel like home, though.
That said, I think I’m going to like it here!
