cindy sanders, peace corps

Cindy Sanders is currently working for the Peace Corps in Niger, and we spent about three weeks e-mailing back and forth, during which time she talked about her daily activities, the differences between working for an NGO and working for the Peace Corps, and whether or not she thinks it’s all worthwhile. Talk about what you're doing in Niger, how long you've been there. I've been in Niger since the beginning of 2007. I'm an agriculture volunteer, which means that my basic function is to work with the farmers (who, in Niger, constitute 95% of the population). This is a process that includes several things: helping farmers increase their yields, introducing new planting techniques, introducing new pest control techniques, introducing new crop species, and acting as a liaison for various NGOs that might want to do work in my village with me and the villagers. Niger is a hard place to do this (actually, it's kind of a hard place to do anything). All the farmers are subsistence workers who have roughly 4 months of the year in which to grow an entire year's worth of food for themselves and their large families - population growth rate here is 3.3%, with an average birthrate of anywhere from 7.2 - 8 children per woman, depending on which statistics you read. Rains fall in Niger from June to September, and that's it. The “fields” where farmers plant are in the desert surrounding their villages. The sand is quartz-rich, prone to erosion and desertification, and basically without nutrients. In it they plant their primary food crop, millet, as well as sorghum, beans, and peanuts, if they can afford the seed. Rains started early this year, in April, and the men went out to plant. The rains then, of course, immediately stopped until June, and all the previous plantings shriveled up and died, wasting the men's time and money (especially money). Hunger season, which generally starts in March or so when the grain reserves run out and lasts until harvest time in October, was particularly hard this year. We lost a lot of kids in our village, so the fact that the rains were playing games with us was very difficult. People haven't been too happy with Allah lately, but have tried for forgiveness by observing Ramadan very strictly this past month. Most people won't even swallow their own spit during daylight hours, hoping that Allah will notice and bring better rains next year. This has given me a very different view of Islam than I held before. Did you know anything about farming before you got to Niger? How'd they get you up to speed? I had gardened with my father since I was small, and then I worked on an organic sheep and vegetable farm in the Catskills for a while when I was at NYU. Then before I left for Niger I worked on an organic farm in West Virginia, which was great. But nothing adequately prepares you for farming millet in the desert. It's all new once you get to post. What made you want to join the Peace Corps? I don't know why I joined the Peace Corps really. Maybe it had something to do with reading Amanda Gardner's Myspace blog. She made it seem like a lot more fun than it is. Maybe that's because she was in Mozambique. What did you think about doing besides joining the Peace Corps? A lot of things. I'm still thinking about them/doing them. I saw Peace Corps as a bridge to other things, which a lot of people do. Prior to leaving for Niger I was doing a lot of really fun stuff. I was assistant executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Frederick County, MD. I was a freelance newspaper writer. I ran an ultramarathon. I had my own home-based vegan baking business, which was awesome. I was writing and painting and running a revolving art gallery out of my house. I was traveling all over the place. Things were really fun. But I don't know, I also wanted to live abroad and I had kind of wanted to do Peace Corps since middle school, so now here I am. I'm still busy here too: I just finished applying to grad schools for fall of 2008, and I've been writing, drawing, painting, reading... there's a lot of free time here, like every afternoon when the temperatures are above 100 degrees F and everyone just lies around. And now I speak Hausa, which is relatively useless but kind of interesting, so yay Peace Corps. It's not fun? It can be fun. But American fun and Nigerien fun are different things. Nigerien fun is (only men) sitting on mats all day drinking very sweet, very hot green tea and staying up all night. Fun for women consists of pounding millet grain into flour with your friends while all the men sit around. Fun for children consists of running around and periodically staring at me. This is a very traditional Islamic society. But honestly though, fun can be had. You just have to understand your context. Why'd you choose Africa? Did you have a type of country in mind, like a post-conflict country or a more developed North African one? When you apply for Peace Corps you can state which “region” you want to be in. These are clumped together in basic parts of the world, like Central and South America, Africa, Asia, etc. My recruiter did 3 years in Vanuatu in the Pacific Islands. His walls were covered with pictures of him bungee jumping into green verdant rainforests and smiling on fishing boats with villagers who adored him. This, for some reason, didn't influence me, and I said I wanted to go to Africa The only place I really didn't want to go was Eastern Europe, because it didn't seem “Peace Corps-y” enough to me. Most Eastern Europe volunteers have things like electricity and running water and I didn't want those at the time. Electricity and running water seem pretty pie in the sky to me now. I was a fool back then. Why Africa? I don't know. At the time it seemed like the right place. I thought, as I think most Peace Corps volunteers do, if even briefly, that the place I'd somehow end up might complete me somehow, that it would offer me this chance to connect to a world that I otherwise wouldn't experience. I wanted to broaden my perspectives, to have a more thorough understanding of the world. 4 billion of the 6 billion people on earth live in 3rd World countries. I wanted to go there and see what it was about. It was the opposite of America, so it had some inherent interest for me. I didn't have a say as to where within Africa I would go, however. For some reason I was almost positive I'd get sent to Mali, but when I got my letter from Washington and it said “Niger”, I was pretty slack-jawed. I didn't even pronounce it right. I said “Ny-jer”. It's “Nee-zhair”. Or, as Chris Rock says, “that N country”. Chris Rock is funny. You've been there for 10 months now, so you have about 14 months left. Do you feel like you'll be happy with your contribution at the end of the program? No. My contribution will be minimal and unsustained, and that's the reality of it. Most of what I'll do in my village will be trashed by the time I'm gone, local corruption will take off with any money my income-generating activities might accumulate, and my work with the education and empowerment of young girls will be absolved by hundreds of years of repressive religious tradition. This is how it goes. Niger has remained the least developed nation on earth for years for a reason. For many reasons, actually. As a person, however, I will be remembered. Peace Corps volunteers are famous here - you get talked about for decades. I will honestly always be remembered as the weird white woman who came to live in the village, always wore sunglasses, and rarely covered her hair (I balk authority! Ha!). And if entertaining throngs of children who watch my every move, allowing them to have stories to tell their (many) grandchildren, is my only contribution - which it will be - then so be it. I'm not terribly happy about it, but it is what it is. I'd think that most people that do PC in Africa go into the program with little specific knowledge of the context into which they're being placed - like you probably weren't particularly informed about Niger, Muslim communities, millet farming, etc. What do you think your role is, as a foreign service worker? There are two distinct roles: the role Peace Corps tells you to play, and the role that you actually perform. Peace Corps' mission (paraphrased) is to send “qualified men and women to other nations to help their need for manpower and for these people to act as ambassadors of America, and for them - through letters and upon returning to the States - to be ambassadors of the country in which they worked”. We actually have pretty specific project plans we're supposed to follow, i.e. helping increase yields, crop diversification, etc. This is what the Peace Corps wants to believe we do. What we actually do, however, is quite different. No other non-profits or NGOs work quite like the Peace Corps, placing these “qualified men and women” directly into small communities and making them live there at the level of their villagers. Even PC Niger is rare in that we learn local language (Hausa, in my case, or Zarma), rather than the colonial language (which for Niger is French, and which just about no one actually speaks). Being in the village has its pros and cons. Pro: you know exactly what issues the village faces and can ascertain these needs accordingly. Con: the forest for the trees thing, you know? [here] Additionally, by becoming a villager I've found that I automatically lose any and all authority I might have once had. As a fellow villager in a society deathly afraid of people stepping out of line or doing something non-conforming, they are far more reticent to take my advice. Thus, my role being has been relegated to that of neighbor and woman (neither of which hold much water, especially being female), and subsequently my projects don't get done. To be honest, my real role in this whole thing is to show the village that people outside of the village exist, and that sometimes they look different to boot. There’s also the sustainability issue; most PC people will leave after 2 years, and new workers will come in. Do you have any thoughts on the turnover? Villages generally only have about three volunteers in a row, which means, if all volunteers complete their service, they have an American for six years. Sometimes the volunteers are all in the same sector (health, education, agriculture or natural resource management). Sometimes they're different. Sometimes volunteers early terminate and leave after a few months or a year, and the village has a lull of months between volunteers. Sustainability is as pie in the sky as my hopes for running water and electricity in my village - it just won't happen. I'm sorry about the negative tone of most of my answers. PC has taught me that I really don't agree with international development or aid, and that it's definitely not my life's work. Most aid is just sugarcoating other countries' foreign services agendas. PC, for example, is just America trying to say that we actually do help those third world countries we hardly care about. It's a depressing thing to realize, especially when you only get it once you're abroad. But then again, there are a few organizations out there that are doing amazing work. GOAL, out of Ireland, is one of them. They've got it right; Peace Corps not so much. PC just celebrated its 45th anniversary in Niger. 45 years of continuous service, hundreds (or maybe thousands) of volunteers in and out of country, hundreds of villages playing host to an American or three. But is Niger better off now that it was in 1962, just two years after the French granted them independence? The old men in the village say no. “When the French were here we got paid for work,” they say. “Now we don't have any work or any money.” If you could stay longer than 2 years, with the same Peace Corps structure, salary, benefits, etc., would you? No. In fact, I probably won't even stay my full two years here. I have already finished applying to grad school for 2008 and may be leaving as early as next March. I have no regrets about this however. I'll have lived in Niger for over a year and tried my hardest to work as well as I could. I came up against a society that plainly doesn't want me to do anything other than cook and clean. So is the Peace Corps a good thing or a bad thing? Peace Corps is a good thing. There's a saying that every volunteer creates their own service and no two services are alike. There are a lot of people in Niger who are having amazing times, life-changing experiences, and are really happy with their lot. Perhaps if I were in a different village, in a different position, or maybe if I just wasn't a woman and therefore less respected, I'd be one of those people. I'm not though. I'm trying my damndest but it's just one of those things. Peace Corps, for Americans and the villages where they live, oftentimes ends up being a very good thing. The village, in principle, does profit from the volunteer's stay, and the volunteer obviously comes away with a greater world view. It's a global education in the most literal sense. We come away speaking another language, knowing about different cultures, and having traveled and seen some of the most remote parts of the world. The US's foreign policy people constantly tout Peace Corps volunteers as making differences across the globe in the service and spirit of the States. So Americans definitely benefit, and even if the volunteer doesn't do much in his or her village, they at least come in and spend money (buying food, souvenirs, services, etc). Maybe this sounds cynical, but it's true. Honestly though, I do support Peace Corps for the most part in what they do. I'd even consider doing it again later on in my life, albeit making it very clear during my second go-round in the application process that I'd want to live in a country where gender quality is more of a reality and less of an impossibility. How would you change it to make it better? Structure. PC Niger has been here for 45 years and we're still tackling the same problems we were tackling in 1962. Farmers are still working at subsistence level. Schools are run-down and few children go. Health problems have grown worse, not better, since more people still die of preventable diseases in the sub-Saharan region than most anywhere else in the world. Maybe it's the American in me, but if they had handed me a job with a specific set of goals (rather than "let's not let these people starve"), I'd be better suited for it. I've found that a lot of my friends feel the same way. It's hard to be dropped in a village and told to do good without having any real idea of what to do, other than a few suggestions we were given in training. It's my belief that this is the issue worldwide with Peace Corps. A program launched in 1961 that has remained essentially the same for 46 years obviously needs a few alterations to keep up with the times. Certainly there's more of a focus on AIDS now, and in some other, more developed, countries, PCVs work with internet and computer training, small business development, and other, more advanced, practices. In Niger, however, we're very much so in the same place as we were in 1962. As I said before, it's taught me that international development isn't my thing, so deciding exactly what has to change about Peace Corps and its programs is difficult for me. Was you doing the Peace Corps a good decision or a bad one? If you could go back, would you still do it? I have this weird feeling that people reading this interview are going to think I'm terribly wishy-washy and can't make up my mind. Here's the summary of it, as best as I can explain: I am happy to have done Peace Corps. Very happy. The decision has been good for me. It's been my first time living abroad for an extended period of time, and my first time in Africa. Some of the people I've met here, Nigerien and American both, are excellent people, people I'm honored to know. Some of the work I've done here I'm proud of. Some of the things I've seen are going to stay with me forever, and certainly influence how I live the rest of my life. What this experience has also taught me, however, is that I cannot live in a society so utterly, stoically, and seemingly happily repressed (I say this because no Nigerien woman will complain about her subservient role in society - a common adage is "What Babba [the big one, usually meaning father or husband] says, you do." Most women cannot function on their own and fear independent activity). Gender inequality kills me, it really does. I feel like it steals little pieces of my soul that I can't get back after being treated this way. So I have been placed in a very difficult situation; it's not the terrain, the heat, the desert, or the constant sickness and diarrhea that bothers me. It's the way I've been treated just because I'm not a man. Do you feel more completed? Even if that completion is just knowing your limitations? It's hard to say. I believe that's one of those things that can only be answered once I return to the States. The completion originally sought, or perhaps hoped for, has certainly has not occured, but that was such an outrageously high expectation for the experience that it could never have happened anyway. The changing of perspective, a certain objectivity where subjectivity once was, and maybe even some, oh I don't know, personal growth or something - those things occured, and for those I'm grateful. But completion? Maybe I'll know more about things like that when it's over. Maybe that's the only time to know about these things.