Brad’s Blog

And so it was that we found ourselves at the Maradi depot of the Air Transport company, a bus line serving Niger with connections to Nigeria and Benin. It was 4:30 am, and we had slept for 4 hours.

Two days earlier, I had gone to the depot to buy tickets for our group, plus another Canadian from Grande Prairie, Alberta who would be traveling with us. His name was (and I suppose it still is) Mark Larson, and he was a fluent Hausa speaker, having previously worked in Niger for some 16 years. It turns out he teaches with Lynette’s cousin Keith, thereby reinforcing the smallness of the world. I was glad to have him along, since my Hausa consists of some blank stares and a shrug of the shoulders followed by some mumbled French.

There wasn’t really a waiting room – it was more of a waiting lean-to constructed in the local fashion – but inside the concrete building we found a tall desk behind which sat a couple of ticket sellers. At a single desk back in the corner sat the station manager, a pinstripe suited man (with flip flops, of course) wearing a fancy watch and playing with his cell phone.

Mark told one of the ticket sellers that we needed 10 tickets for the Wednesday morning bus to Niamey. He had us write out the names of the people in our group and proceeded to write out the tickets using carbon paper (it still exists!). Eventually, he handed me the tickets, but there were only eight of them. He had not written out tickets for Lynette N. or Karen. Mark asked him about their tickets, and he said that he knew there were 10 of us, so not to worry and just show up on time.

So I paid him 93,000 cfa, the amount for 10 tickets, and we went on our way. I told Dwayne and Brian that their wives didn’t really have tickets, so they might need to bring them along in their carry-on bags.

Sitting in the lean-to with our luggage, a man came along to tag our checked luggage for the trip. He used a specialized luggage management system which would be recognized by those readers from back home as masking tape and a black marker. He placed a foot-long piece of tape on each bag and wrote "MAR -> NY" on it. Then another guy came along and carried the bag away to the bus.

To use NY as the code for Niamey was interesting, since the airlines use "NIM". But I didn’t really care, so long as the bus wasn’t going to try to make it all the way to New York.

For a while, we felt like we might be the only passengers, but then a stream of people started emerging from behind a small wall and we could tell the bus would fill up fast. Not knowing if our tickets actually held seats for us or whether they simply allowed us to contest for seats with agility and elbow power, we moved quickly into position near the bus door. Close enough to be in a good spot, but not so close as to pronounce our sense of entitlement. 

At 5:00 am sharp, the driver started the engine and a guy with the book of carbon copies of our tickets began calling names. "Mark Larson" he called. We rushed forward as the crowd closed in behind us, presented our tickets and proceeded to board.

As if by magic, two tickets appeared in the ticket guy’s hand written out in the names of Lynette N and Karen. Indeed, they did remember, and no shenanigans were on offer.

It was dark inside the bus, which may have been a good idea. Later on in the morning after the sun rose, we would find ourselves packed into two rows of dirty, sand encrusted genuine pleather seats which may have once been purpley-grey. A few of the seats did not have holes in the upholstery and we might have had one or two of these.

This bus was smaller than the average Greyhound bus back home, which generally seats 53 passengers. With a seating configuration of 3 seats on one side of the aisle and 2 on the other, this bus was set up for about 70 passengers, and judging by the crowd forming by the lean-to, it was going to be full. There being 10 of us and 5 seats in each row, we took two rows and jammed our stuff into the tiny overhead rack. Then we jammed ourselves into the tiny seats and watched everyone else board.

Men wearing Fulani style turbans, rural women carrying luggage and small children who are naked from the waste down, urban women headed back to their villages, ripe-smelling old guys with gnarled hands and feet, and a young woman wearing designer jeans. And most of them had a cell phone. Some even took off their MP3 player headphones long enough to hear their name called.

One row in front of us had three women and three children in three seats. Another row of three adults behind us featured an enormous fat guy of 350+ lbs on the aisle. I was glad he wasn’t sitting with me.

We made several short stops to let passengers off prior to a station stop at Birni-N’Kwani. At the unofficial stops, the bus was swarmed by beggars and merchants selling bags of onions, nuts, and many unidentifiable food objects. At Birni-N’Kwani, we pulled into the bus company’s private compound, which was equipped with bathrooms (read a hole in the floor of a dark private room) and a small "food court" of people selling things such as a traveler might need.

As I write this, the "flight attendants" are passing out plastic bags of cold water. Earlier, they passed out plastic bags of yogurty-milk stuff. I passed for fear that I would pass it anyway.

We are now off-roading through a highway construction area that goes for many miles. But our driver wants to make time, so he’s got one hand on the horn and the pedal down.

——
12:30 pm – Somewhere past the halfway mark

Well, it’s afternoon and were fighting our way through the construction with massive off-road detours while we dodge large trucks of all descriptions primarily hauling onions, wood, or shipping containers full of goods. The trucks are a lot like European trucks and feature makes like Renault, Mercedes, Tata, and some lesser known brands. I have seen one massive Freightliner, but that’s it. Lots of these trucks are in horrible condition, tracking sideways down the highway at crazy angles, missing windshields, and more.

The highways are littered with broken down trucks in various states of disrepair. Wheels off, engine disassembled, guys sleeping on cots underneath while others weld various bits back on. All the while, the air is thick with dust, making seeing and breathing more difficult and making the athsmatic quake in their boots.

About 1.5 hours ago, Dwayne and Lynette were arrested because Lynette (I think) took a picture of a soldier who she didn’t know was a soldier. They were hauled off the bus for interrogation at the police post. After dancing on the head of a pin, accompanied by Mark, our trusty Hausa speaker, they were released, just in time for the bus’ departure. I bet they won’t take a picture of anyone wearing green for some time to come, including their own children.

We’re down to the last 4.5 hours of the trip, which means the road should start to improve from approximately equal to a Saskatchewan thin membrane surface highway (except that they are improving this rapidly) to better than a Saskatchewan primary weight highway as we near the capital. All the while, we race past villages full of mud huts and thatched roofs, electrical workers stringing more transmission lines, while locals chatter away on their cell phones, replenishing them occasionally by buying pre-paid phone cards from boys selling them along the highway. Cell service has been very good here, and I have been able to send text messages from some of the most remote villages which still lack electricity and are a 10 km walk from the closest well.

Speaking of cell phones, using US-based call-back services, it is possible to call Canada from here on a cell phone for $0.20 per minute, including long distance and air time. Between the cell phones, ubiquitous text messaging, Internet cafes, shipping containers from all over, chewing gum from China (it’s not bad, but it lasts about 30 seconds – kind of like when you order Chinese take-out), and Celine Dion MP3s on the cell phone of the guy behind us on the bus, globalization is everywhere and giving people once cut off from the world access to it. Critical tools like education are still greatly lacking, and a sufficient food supply is always a big question mark, particularly when you are a subsistence farmer with little by way of cash income.

We toured an agriculture project last week that promises to improve the soil and diets of the locals while providing a reliable supply of wood at the same time. This approach to agriculture provides a high possibility of moving out of subsistence into generating a surplus which can provide both additional food security and cash incomes to help pay for better nutrition and education.

——
Later that afternoon

The rest of the trip was so uneventful, it hardly bears reporting. The floor of the bus was strewn with garbage when we arrived, just like one of the villages we had passed through.

Upon arrival in Niamey, we passed the stadium, which is a serious stadium. It has nice green grass, which is not something you see in Niger. The people from Sahel Academy said the stadium can be rented for $10 per day.