Hazard lights flashing we make our way through the city ignoring lights and stop signs as other cars pull over to the side to let us pass. We arrive at the President's guest house overlooking the Niger and the irrigated fields crowning its banks. A sumptuous, yet simple supper awaits us. Air conditioned rooms, white table cloths, sodas and cold water on the side and comfortable couches welcome us in style. Conversation flows easily as we are from time to time interrupted to meet more important people in dark suits.
The next morning starts with a tour by Jason Brooks of the ADRA office and school where bright kids in sharp uniforms smile and shout out English phrases they have learned. The school is an impressive combination of underprivileged kids sponsored to go where they'd never have the opportunity to go otherwise, and rich kids who pay big to get a good education. All have become equals in their matching uniforms.
Then we're off to see the big wigs starting with President Mamadou Tandja himself. Circling around the winding, well-guarded roads up the the governmental palace is a little surreal. We climp up the massive steps and enter through a metal detector into an inner courtyard with high ceilings, traditional carved horses on stands, pictures and maps on the walls and a 10 foot giraffe carved out of the twisted root system of a tree.
We are finally ushered into the President's office where we are presented by Bill Kirker as the group possibly willing to take on the management of the Maine-Soroa Hospital, which just happens to be in the President's home town. I translate for Dick as he presents the President with a gift from Loma Linda University. The President is very gracious, poses for photos with us all at the end and decides on the spur of the moment to give Dick on of the carved horses in his lobby.
Whirlwind tours with more Mercedes and Land Cruisers and flashing hazards take us through the turbaned Tuareg Minister of Health, the distinguished, glasses-on-the-nose Minister of Education, and the plump, take-no-prisoners US Ambassador.
The next day we fly 800 km across the desert, east towards Chad with a quick stop at the only Christian hospital in Niger. A quick, chicken dinner probably providing the source of our later diarrheal illnesses and a too short crash on floor mattresses inspected by a mouse and many mosquitos and we take off again the next morning for the last 600 km to Maine-Soroa. Two flat tires and mostly good roads later and we are stopped at the side of the road in the middle of a desert with widely spaced scrub trees, and goats, sheep, donkeys, horses and camels wandering through.
As we get out of the cars, a crowd gathers around as we are welcomed by the governor, the mayor, the prefect and a host of other dignitaries from the region who then escort us into town in front of the king's quarters, in front of the central mosque and next to the market. A crowd has gathered. Brightly decorated horses mounted by robed, spear-and-sword-toting cavaliers prance on the sidelines. School kids in uniforms wave and chant. Turbaned, shirtless boys twist and contort in front of drum-pounding musicians beating out a fast rhythm accompanied by a bulging cheeked flute player. We push through the crowds to where chairs and couches have been arranged. The toothless, ninety-year old king nods and shakes hands as his eyes bulge out from behind coke-bottom glasses.
Speeches are made, kids dance and sing and recite and shout poems and slogans, horse-men dress out and shake their weapons, traditional dancers move and shake, and Dick is crowned "Wokil". He is brought crosslegged onto a mat in front of the king while his side-kicks circle around dressing Dick in a traditional, blue robe with elaborate embroidery, a red, felt skull cap and crowned with a turban. The "Wokil" is the king's new ambassador to the world, and in the absence of the king, his word is law. The ceremonies ended we end up at Bill and Barbara's for a feast of goat with couscous cooked in it's belly.
The next morning is another whirlwind tour of Barbara's Second Chance School for kids who have never been to school and are passed the country's maximum age (9 years old) for entering elementary school, the king's court, the Prefect's office, on to Diffa to see the governor and back to Mainé to check out the ancient air strip. Friday morning we finally get to see the hospital newly named the Kirker Hospital in honor of Bill and Barbara's efforts as first Peace Corps volunteers and then as the only doctor for years in this extreme eastern city of Niger founding a hospital where before there was none. Now, the hospital is being revived after years of neglect with some new hospital wards and the hope of a new management team, nursing school and maybe even specialty services to serve the underserved populations of Eastern Niger, Western Chad and Northern Nigeria.
We all crash Friday evening and Saturday with staggered episodes of vomiting and diarrhea. Another feast of splayed roasted sheep and couscous goat on Saturday night with the hospital staff finishes off our stay in Niger. Sunday morning, Sarah, Dick, Kari and I head off in Bill's Land Cruiser across the desert, up north and around the top of Lake Chad. 13 hours of desert, many camels, much sand, a few Lake Chad thick-horned cows, one gazelle, one desert fox, a large bird whose name I forget, clusters of white brick mud huts with flat, horned corner roofs, one half-hour stuck in the sand barely getting out episode, one border crossing where we are the only car to have passed in two days and we arrive in Chad at Bol.
I am welcomed back to my host country by a couple of moto taxi-men trying to scam us into believing that the airport is a long ways away and only they can show us. We ignore them and continue through the one road town to the hospital where the charge nurse who happens to be on duty informs us that Gary and the Bere Hospital chaplain, Noel, have just arrived and are over at the regional medical officers home.
The regional medical officer is a friend of Noel's and he welcomes us with a big smile and a feast of macaroni and tomato goat sauce which we partake together on a mat on the floor with the tray of noodles in the middle. Everyone digs in with his own spoon and washes it down with bananas and cold water. The next day, we fly off with Gary over the vast expanse interconnected lakes which is what remains of the great Lake Chad. Massive herds of cattle wander in long lines like ants across the green fields watered by what is still one of Africa's largest lakes only to end abrubtly in the sands of the Sahel. After landing in Moundou and showing Dick and Kari the progress on our Surgery Center project there, we finally arrive back in Bere.
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