I must have done something to anger the travel gods. Travel troubles find me. But, at least they give me something to write about. My flight out of Niamey was supposed to leave around 3 am. It actually left around 7:30 am. So, I spent the night stretched out on metal African airport seats listening to rain and thunder. I arrived at my next stop where, fortunately, another flight to Paris was scheduled. That flight left about two hours late. It’s a good thing I never keep schedules. I throw schedules away as soon as I get them. I arrived in the town where my French school is located and made my way from the train to the bus station. I tried to pay for my bus ticket with my visa card (I had successfully used my card just 30 minutes before), but the transaction could not be completed. And of course, I had left my small stack of euros back at my house in Niger. I was stuck. I had dollars but there were no banks in sight, and it was Sunday. Did you know that almost everything in France outside of Paris closes on Sunday? Who knew? So, I pleaded with the bus guy to help me. He said, “Sorry.” I left the station, walked around the building, and returned to plead some more. I thought he might buy my dollars out of the kindness of his heart. Instead he said, “You’ll just need to ride the bus with no ticket; people do that in France.” Okay.
I have been attending French language school for the past few weeks. I am conversationally fluent and carry out daily life alone in French, but my oral grammar is terrible and my written attempts are worse. We have many languages in Niger and much of the population does not speak French even though it is the national language. It is because of this that I can get away with bad French. It is also because of this that I have many bad habits. Every time I speak French, I feel like I enter the House of French with a large bat and break something new with every phrase. So far, I have discovered countless words that I have used in French for years that are… not French words… not French words in any form. I really wonder how I ever communicated or how many dumb looks I just never noticed. No one ever corrected me. So, either people were just being nice or there are a bunch of Nigeriens out there practicing bad French that they learned from the American guy who surely knew what he was talking about. However, I did learn that ‘zizaguer’ is a legitimate French verb. That’s nice. In French, the direct object is abbreviated as c.o.d. I have watched enough American crime dramas for this to have such a wonderful depth of meaning. Whenever my teacher starts discussing grammar, she goes to the board and writes c.o.d. I can’t help but laugh every time. French grammar is my cause of death.
There is a boy in an orphanage in Niamey. I call him a boy, but he is about 17 years-old. The orphanage is run by Christians, and the boy and his two brothers wish to be Christians as well. However, (due to extensive family networks, few children in Niger are truly orphans in the dictionary sense of the word) his family is not Christian, and they are vehemently opposed to any members of the family being Christians. Nigeriens are usually very tolerant of other religions, but this tolerance often disappears when a close family member wishes to take a new path in faith. The militant Islam as seen on television is quite rare here, but social pressure is almost always extremely intense. I was speaking with this boy before I left, and he called his two brothers over. He raised their shirts and exposed scars where the boys had been whipped for not following the family’s religious choices. When his brother had left, he proceeded to ask me to look for an Android phone for him while I was in Paris. Ancient and modern realities of life mix together. Pray for children who think they like the message of Jesus but have no support to follow his leading. And pray specifically for this boy and his two brothers; you can pray for him as Lee.
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