The Peripatetic.

Story request by Rimma Ayzen.

After seven years, this is what I remember.  Changes may be made later, but for now:

I lived with an old Persian couple in Niamey, Niger for a year before college. Everyone calls them Maman and Baba, even government officials when they call the house will ask, “Is Maman there?”

They have been in West Africa for the better part of their lives. They came with another family back before the internet and any real knowledge of Africa could reach their homes in the Middle East. Two women and their children left Iran while the husbands stayed home to take care of business.

They did not speak French, Hausa, Djerma, or any of the local languages. The other mother, Maman’s friend, now lives in the Cote d’Ivoire and came for a visit while I was in Niamey.

Open market

She told me that when they first saw the Tuareg riding their camels down the street, wrapped in turbans and prepared for desert treks, they speculated that they were special police, some clandestine branch of the military or something. In reality, they were just nomadic herdsmen carrying on with the quotidian routine.

Between the two families there were perhaps five children. One of the youngest contracted malaria, and before they could figure out how to reach a doctor or what was going on he passed away. He was five years old.

As far as I know, his mother never left West Africa. Someone once asked her why she didn’t just leave when she lost her son. She said, “I have given Africa my most precious gift, and I will never leave it.”

Things did not get easier. The fathers eventually came and the two families and multiple characters with colorful personalities shared a tiny home in the city. Maman worked as a seamstress to help keep the family going. She sewed dresses for the French ex-patriots.

Her children would bring friends home to ask about their funny religion. She would keep her eyes on her work, hands at the machine, and she’d tell them, “See that book over there? Pick it up and read it to me.” That is how Niamey came to learn about the Baha’is.

"King of the desert" working more like a mule in the Niamey streets

When I lived with them, there was a wonderful cook from Benin, Raffia, who Baba told me was really like their daughter (and to me, she was like an older sister). She started to pick up sewing and saved up for months to buy her own machine. I asked Maman why she couldn’t just use her old one, but Maman held up her hands and declared that once she no longer had to sew, she got rid of everything.

She spent hours each day, for decades, doing something I don’t think she even liked to keep the family going. Decades of sewing for a woman scholar who taught herself English and studied both Persian and Arabic writings at the most advanced levels, and that — saying she wouldn’t touch another machine if she didn’t have to — was the closest I heard her get to complaining.

There isn’t too much more I know about their stories because, to be honest, they don’t talk about themselves. It took a year and several other visitors just to cull that much from their lives. The rest was about the present.

I like the Kennedy quote, asking what you can do for your country, but they played it better: what needs to be done?  It wasn’t about looking at your own capacity, since none of us knows what that really is. It’s not about you. It’s about the tasks at hand, the causes, the needs of the age in which you live.  They forgot themselves completely.