What I saw on my way home from work.
Zuma’a
What is zuma’a? It means everyone in Hausa. It was one of the first Hausa words I learned on my own outside of Peace Corps training. I was trying at the time to write a speech in Hausa. My friend Hassan suggested I start by the traditional Asalaam Aleykum Zuma’a-May peace be with us all. Every time since then that I have spoken publicly I have started with it. It has a heaviness to me that I can’t explain that much in words. It makes me think of faces. The scent of the sand here, that when I came back I recognized immediately. Nigerien PTA meetings. Friends’ laughs. Niger. Friendship itself. Amen, Amen, Amen, sounding off by the crowds around me. I love this word.
It’s a place of refuge in a tucked away courtyard in National Hospital in Niamey. The 50 or so women laughing, telling jokes, hounding each other whilst stringing beads have suffered from post-natal fistula. It’s a condition oftentimes caused by difficult childbirth, when blood flow is cut off and tissue dies enabling urine and feces to leak out of the mother. Surgery for around $300 can fix the problem, but abandonment from husbands and communities are a darker facet to fistula. Around 100,000 women world-wide develop this condition each year. The Fistula Women’s Group at the National Hospital support themselves off of hand made bracelets, stomach beads, odd packs of cigarettes, little candies, and their humors—at one point one woman ambitiously removed her hand from eating and to sell me her jewelry, then her friends reminded her with their howling laughter that she had couscous and sauce all over her face. Another older woman suggested the other volunteer with me satisfy himself by donning some glow in the dark stomach beads. In the sunlight, in this small courtyard, Niger and the jewelry has never looked or felt so good. There is a community there, a refuge for women who have suffered, but continue.
Didier Awadi, le lion de Senegal, performed at the Franco-Nigerien Cultural Center this week. A figure head in West African hip hop, his soulful performance saturated the evening thoughts on the African soul and Thomas Sankara’s pronouncement to “dare invent our future”.
