April 26, 2011
Today I am writing to say good-bye to a dear friend who has passed away. Seyni Soumana, the program assistant/driver for the Dosso region died due to high blood pressure. I had mentioned him a many times before in this blog, but never felt like I did him justice. So I'll try to say more now. He was my best Nigerien friend, one of the biggest supports in my Peace Corps service, and the heart and soul of Team Dosso. Though he was a dear friend, I really don’t feel like I know him well enough to claim I am writing about his WHOLE life, so I will just tell you about the parts of Seyni I knew.
Seyni was really tall. He always wore a pair of Nike sunglasses that make him look like Shaft. He had a huge scar up the side of his cheek to mark him as a member of the Songhai ethnic group. Basically, he would have looked like a total badass if it weren’t for the permanent smile stuck across his face. He’d worked for Peace Corps for more than 25 years when I was moved to the Dosso region, and when I was installed in Golle, he told me a million times “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.” And he did. More than anyone else on the Peace Corps Niger staff, I felt like Seyni was there to support me. He would come at any hour of the night to retrieve a sick volunteer. He spent countless days and weeks sorting through “village drama,” like what happened with my drug-abusing landlord, just to allow volunteers to do their work. I can’t even begin to explain the relief a volunteer feels for knowing that just one person is really on her side and is really there to help her. No matter what happened, what trouble I got into, I knew Seyni was only a phone call away.
Seyni was motivated in a way that few other Peace Corps staff members are, and that was that he truly believed in the mission of Peace Corps volunteers. “You guys is doing a really good thing for Niger,” he told me constantly. He also understood why we wanted to be Peace Corps volunteers—something most Nigeriens just didn’t get. After all why would anyone want to leave the comfort and abundance of America to live in a mud hut? “I used to think you guys is crazy for coming to live in the bush with nothing, but one time in America I did camping and I see being away from cities is really doing a good thing for you,” he said. Perhaps most importantly, he loved the volunteers like his own children. And I think for most of us, he definitely became a father figure.
He wasn’t well educated, but he was smart. This was evident to anyone who talked with him and after all self-learned English during his time with Peace Corps. He told me once, “If I finished high school, I’d be the president of Niger.” And, I don’t doubt it, because besides being absolutely adored by essentially everyone he encountered, Seyni knew how to get shit done.
“What the fuck you still sleeping for?” he yelled at me as he was backing his jeep out of the Dosso hostel compound. This is how Seyni let’s you know he’s ready to start work and wants you to come with him. When I took the job as the PCVL/RR in Dosso, I remarked many times how I felt like I’d become his assistant. I did a lot of other stuff, but most of the time I was with Seyni. He would give me a scrap of paper with some phone number on it and say, “Give this back to me on Thursday.” Or he would say, “Call so-and-so and let him know we’re coming to see him.” Other times he would rush me through to get in the car and do errands, only to discover he didn’t actually need my help, he only wanted company.
Once, after a long day on the road, we were driving back to Dosso together, only to get stuck behind the victory procession of Nigerien wrestlers. The crowd took over the road and stopped for several minutes in every village between Birni and Dosso, thereby taking forever and making it impossible to pass. Seyni’s solution was to (at one of the villages) veer off the road and rip through several millet fields, cutting around behind the village, back toward the main road, then racing the procession down the side of the road until he could cut ahead of them. He never actually slowed down for any of this, but when we made it back to the pavement he looked over at me with wild eyes and said something like, “That’s why they call me crazy driver.” I realized quickly after I started working with him it was better to just not look out the window when we were going somewhere.
Another time, we had gone to Kiota together to drop of supplies for a new latrine and had visited the Cheikh there. The Kiota Cheikh is a religious figure, one of the most important in West Africa. People travel from all around to see him, so I was just a little intimidated as I went to meet him. The meeting was short, but Seyni spent quite a bit of time whispering up at the Cheikh, who was seated on a plush sofa, while the rest of us sat on the ground. “What did you talk to the Cheikh about?” I asked Seyni on the drive home. “I asked him to pray for you guys,” he said. “Whenever I see him, I always ask him to pray for you, because you know, he is really powerful guy, the Cheikh. If he prays for you, it works. Unless…sometimes he forgets, but if he does it, it really works.”
I loved the way he would fall over laughing at my friend Katy and me when he came into the hostel to find us with green cosmetic facemasks on. I love the way he loved American food, and the sound he made when I fed him raw cookie dough for the first time. I love that, after picking up a volunteer with a severe malaria and sitting with him all night while the volunteer hallucinated, the next morning he told the volunteer, “Man, I think this guy really going to die.”
When we were evacuated, I watched Seyni’s heart break when I told him we were leaving. In the 72 hours following, before we left, he continued to give his job everything he had and more, though it was plain to everyone how upset he was. Peace Corps was his life and without it, not only was he without money, but seemingly without a purpose. Where else was he going to get a job where he would need to know slangy English, all the roads in Dosso, and how to drive like a madman?
Leaving Dosso for the last time, all the volunteers piled on to the short white bus we always called the magic bus, but Seyni stopped me and said, “You come ride with me. I don’t want to be alone.” I was expecting the usually gabby Seyni or even complainy Seyni, but mostly we just rode in comfortable silence. At one point Seyni, without taking his eyes off the road, said, “Hamsatou, I don’t know what I will do without you guys. I think I will die.” I was horrified to hear him talking like this, so I did my best to reassure him. The only thing that I could think of was the over-used, somewhat cheesy Zarma quip, Irkoy ga ni bana, God will pay you. And even though I felt like an idiot for using such basic words, Seyni relaxed in his seat and said, “You know, there is a God. That I know. I know it. Allah will provide.”
I don’t think Seyni was forecasting anything when he said he thought he would die without us, but I don’t think anyone was surprised to hear he’d died of high-blood pressure. The man took everything on himself tried to be everything to everybody, and I’m sure the task of providing for his family without the Peace
Corps paycheck was overwhelmingly stressful.
The thing that makes me the saddest is that we can’t be together today to remember Seyni. I'm sure there are generations of Peace Corps Volunteers--we don't even know each other. I imagine if we could gather all the PCVs who knew and loved Seyni, we would cause quite a sceen. I wish more than anything we could all curl up in the Dosso hostel tonight and tell stories about Seyni, share memories, laugh and cry. But the volunteers who knew and loved him are spread all over the world right now. So I invite you to join this group of facebook: Remembering Seyni, and we’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got.
Seyni, Irkoy ma cabe cere.
