Also thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has written me letters. They make my day everytime and I have lots of time to write back! Just in case I haven’t bugged you with this yet, my address is:

Lisa Curtis, PCV/Corps de La Paix/B.P. 10537/Niamey, Niger

Love and Sand from Niger,

Lisa

I spent the past two days huddled over a toilet, praying that I’d be able to make the pathetically short journey between my new porcelain throne and my infirmary bed. Ashley, my hutmate, and I got sick at almost exactly the same time. I had barely seen her off onto the Peace Corps RV when I found myself with an 103 fever and an absurd desire to sleep in the pit latrine because then I won’t have to move to go to the bathroom. Thankfully, Tondi, the director of PC Pre-Service Training, came once again to our house and picked me up before I resorted to sleeping with the roaches.

Tondi drove us to the Peace Corps Bureau in Niamey where we did every sort of test possible and finally determined that both of us had amoebas, a type of parasite. They put us on so many pills, I felt like I needed one of those pill kits that every grandparent in the U.S. seems to own.

I found myself thinking about my baby host sister who had been showing the same sort of symptoms that Ashley and I had. She definitely wasn’t getting the type of care and medications we were getting. My imagination went a bit ahead of me and I imagined us coming back to find her dead, the inequality in our health care having taken her life.

Thankfully, she was fine and feeling much better by the time we got back. But it definitely made me think about the drastic differences in health care according to ones nationality and money. I remember reading about Paul Farmer, a doctor who has opened up hospitals in Haiti and Rwanda with the idea that good health is a basic human right that shouldn’t be subject to financial constraints. I can better understand where he’s coming from. I don’t know what I would have done if she had died…

I only half-believed the packing list that said peanut M & M’s are the only kind of chocolate that can survive the Nigerien heat but its true, none of them melted! After a few days of rice and millet they tasted AMAZING, even though I accidentally burst open the bag into the sand. The accident resulted in a pinata like scramble as all of my seven host siblings jostled for the brightly colored candy.

 2.      Knees are Worse than Breasts

Yesterday I was reprimanded for wearing a skirt that didn’t fully cover my knees when I sat down. I almost laughed when, at lunch, my host mom pulled out her breast to suckle my baby sister and sort of left it hanging out for the remainder of the meal. There are very different cultural norms regarding nudity here….

 3.      Call it Exfoliation

In order to placate the part of myself that wants to scream every time the wind blows sand into my hair/bed/feet/soap, I’ve decided to think of my daily grit as exfoliation. Some people pay big money for this in the states right?

 4.       Heat: The New Boyfriend Replacement?

I no longer need anyone to keep me warm at night since I am ALWAYS sweating underneath my mosquito net. This is probably a good thing since my training class is 80% female. 

 5.       The World is a Better Place When You Laugh

Despite Niger’s status as the poorest non-conflict country in the world, I’ve never heard so much laughter. It isn’t so much that life is funny (although my attempts at Hausa certainly are) but more that people here really know how to enjoy the little things.

The Peace Corps welcome packet described Niger as “one of the hottest, poorest and dustiest countries in the world” but one that we would quickly come to love. In the mere week I’ve been here the description seems to be accurate. When its 110 degrees and the wind keeps blowing sand into  my hair/mouth/food etc. I start to wonder if I can really survive this place. But, as soon as I run into a Nigerien, exchange the many greetings and exclamations or learn more about my incredible fellow PC Trainees I become more excited to spend the next 27 months of my life here.

Given some of the negative things I had heard about the Peace Corps, I half-expected to get on a plane to Niger and end up in a tiny village, never to be seen again. Thankfully, the process hasn’t happened quite like that. On July 5^th, I arrived in Philadelphia where I met 33 other wide-eyed Americans who, like me, still weren’t quite sure what they’d signed themselves up for. In a jam-packed two days we attempted to get to know each other, understand the Peace Corps philosophy and attempt to cram in all the American amenities we could, such as showers, ice cream, cocktails, air conditioning and so forth. After a LONG ride we disembarked from the plane onto the steaming black asphalt and were ushered into a small airport. With the help of a tall Nigerien man named Tondi we somehow managed to get ourselves and all of oversized luggage onto two small white buses. I pressed my face against the window for the entire 45 minutes that it took to get out of the capital of Niamey and into the Peace Corps Training Center at Hamdallaye, taking in the sparse trees and brightly dressed people walking around small straw huts clustered at the side of the road.

 After jam-packed two days at Hamdi (as they call it) we met our host families and were led to our own straw huts in our families compound. Most of us live with another trainee; I live with a girl named Ashley who is absolutely wonderful. She also speaks French which is a bonus since I speak neither French nor Hausa or Zarma, the two main national languages. Although thanks to my intensive Hausa class, I can now greet people profusely and tell my host mom that I really don’t want to eat any more food, both phrases that come in handy. We’ll be living with our host families for two months before we are dropped off in village. Hopefully between all the language, culture and health classes I’ll feel prepared although right now living by myself still seems like a very scary prospect.

As a high school senior, I was bewildered by the vast number of colleges to choose from. I remember flipping rapidly through a huge Princeton Review book, pausing only when one category, happiness, caught my eye. I wish I could say my decision of where to spend four years of my life involved a complex, logical process, but it didn’t. I came to Whitman largely because at the time it was the ‘happiest school in the country.’

Now I’m about to graduate and I find myself in a familiar state of bafflement regarding my next move. Like many college seniors these days, I am without a definite answer when everyone from the clerks at Safeway to my grandparents ask some version of the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I’ve started answering, “I want to be happy.” This may sound flippant, but allow me to explain.

Studies have shown that the more engaged you are at work, the more satisfaction you have in life, lending more credence to the idea that you should do what makes you happy. Sadly, a Gallup study found that 73 percent of Americans are disengaged with their workplace, meaning that they’re sleepwalking through their workday, putting time—but not energy or passion—into their work. When asked if they had gotten the things in life that were important to them, more than half of engaged workers said they had while only nine percent of actively disengaged workers said they had. More than half of these disengaged workers said that negative feelings at work have caused them to behave poorly with family or friends.

This widespread dissatisfaction might be behind the high rate of turnover in the American workplace. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, between the ages of 18 and 42, Americans change workplaces an average of 10 times and spend less than five years at each job. The transiency of younger workers is even higher; among jobs started by workers age 18 to 22, 72 percent end in less than a year.

I would be remiss to overlook the fact that many people, particularly in this economy,  have to take what they can get to pay the bills. But many Americans, and especially graduates of prestigious colleges like Whitman, have a choice. We can choose a job that merely pays the bills or find one that enriches our lives.

So how do we find a job that makes us happy? The growing interdisciplinary field of hedonics (the study of happiness) draws on neuroscience, applied economics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology to answer this widespread conundrum of what makes us happy. Different research has shown different things; everything from engaging in local politics to having a steady income and living in a healthy environment makes us happier. What all of the happiness-index models seem to agree on is that the more control we have over our lives and our environments, the happier we are.

For me, having control means finding a job I truly enjoy without pressure from family or passersby. I don’t want to be someone who suddenly wakes up in medical or law school and realizes that they’re only there because someone told them they should be, not because they truly want to be a doctor or lawyer.

Making happiness my primary criteria for my college search brought me the best four years of my life. I’m hoping that searching for happiness in my career will bring me the next best 50.

While the term “failed state” is usually reserved for sovereign states that have been taken over by warlords or Somali pirates, it also applies to one of the 50 domestic states whose government cannot address or solve the problems it faces. That pretty much sums up my home state of California.

Only three states in the country have the supermajority requirement, that is, the requirement that both houses of a legislature have two-thirds votes to pass a budget. Sixteen states have the same supermajority requirement for raising taxes. California got this second supermajority requirement—commonly known as Proposition 13—because of an ill-advised experiment in direct democracy.

Twenty-four states have the referendum and initiative process that allows citizens to place proposals on the ballot. California is the only state that does not allow its legislature to amend initiatives that its voters have passed, no matter how crazy. As it turns out, voters like to receive benefits from the state but they don’t like to pay for them.

Prop 13 exemplifies that insanity. It was passed in 1978 in order to lower property taxes and keep them from exceeding 2 percent per year while at the same time specifying the supermajority for future tax increases. Lowering taxes and virtually preventing future tax increases sounds great until you think about what those taxes pay for, like schools, libraries, fire departments and other public services.

The combination of the supermajorities required to pass a budget and raise taxes has made solving California’s $30 billion budget gap virtually impossible, as evidenced by the reoccurring budget stalemates. Since they can’t raise taxes, the state legislature has resorted to cutting public services.

In the 1950s and ’60s California had the best public education system in the world. Now the legislature is dismantling it. Tuition, fees and other costs for community colleges, state colleges and universities and the UC system have skyrocketed. For me, the education cuts hit home. My sister at the University of California at Santa Barbara will have to pay an additional $1,344 in tuition next fall. My cousin recently dropped out of a community college in Hayward because she couldn’t get the classes she needed to graduate.

But education isn’t the only issue facing the golden state. Los Angeles has the biggest homeless population in America, one of over 85,000, a third of which are veterans. The L.A. County Jail is the largest mental health facility but it doesn’t seem to be working since California has the worst recidivism rate in the country. California has started paying courts with I.O.U.s, causing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to say that California “no longer administers justice” because the courts are closed part of the time and cases are absurdly backlogged. California uses too much water and has let the infrastructure to transport it crumble. It has the worst credit rating of all 50 states and the unemployment rate has reached a new high of 12.6 percent.

The situation is dismal but it is not hopeless. Instead of mindlessly reviewing its 23-issue platform, the California Democratic party should have been calling for a constitutional convention. Repair California, a group pushing for a constitutional convention, found that 71 percent of Californians would vote yes on a proposition to call a convention to fix California’s broken system of government. Unfortunately, the organization has since run out of funds, just like everything else in the state.

Many Californian leaders have said that it is too risky to have a convention because “anything could happen.” What they don’t seem to understand is that “anything” would be better.

In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama critiqued McCain’s proposal to increase offshore drilling as a policy that would “have long term consequences for our coastlines but no short term benefits since it would take at least 10 years to get any oil.” He further stated that the proposal would “only worsen our addiction to oil and put off needed investments in clean, renewable energy.”

So why, after gaining a major victory on health care, would President Obama renege on his campaign promise in an apparent attempt to compromise with the Republican ‘Party of No’ that did its best to derail health care? Has Obama suddenly been persuaded by Newt Gingrich’s calls to “drill, baby, drill?”

I interned in the White House Office of Political Affairs last summer; these are not stupid people. If the White House has decided to  make a move that will obviously infuriate much of its Democratic base, there has to be a politically strategic reason behind it.

Although it all but disappeared during the endless health care debate, comprehensive energy and climate legislation has already passed the House and is predicted to soon be introduced into the Senate. According to E&E News, Senate staff are busy writing the legislative text of the bill that Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are expected to release during the week of April 19 to 23.

At the same time, a bipartisan counter proposal by our own Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) has proposed to give consumers some of the money raised from pricing carbon. Politico lauded this as “a critical improvement in Washington’s thinking about climate change policy “because using cap and trade policy as a deficit-reduction tool has not been making it popular during this recession.

Given the recent reemergence of energy and climate legislation, Obama’s all too timely announcement to expand offshore drilling is clearly a calculated and political decision by the White House to help win political support for action on climate change. But is it working?

The Washington Post reported that a string of senators, including Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and James Webb (DA-Va.), have praised the strategy. Many of them expressed their support for Obama’s new approach to energy, given that he has recently offered support for more nuclear production.

They have urged the administration to use a climate bill to help boost domestic energy production, through expansion of oil and gas drilling and nuclear power. Furthermore, Begich and Gregg said Wednesday’s announcement made them more optimistic about a deal on the bill than they have been in months.

Noting that Obama has also offered recent support for more nuclear production, Gregg said such moves show that the administration is “genuinely trying to approach the energy production issue in a multifaceted way and a realistic way, rather than listening to people on their left.”

But many liberals have criticized this new approach, saying that Obama is essentially giving away conservative priorities of nuclear and offshore drilling when he should be using it as a bargaining chip. As health care and stimulus reform have shown, preemptively compromising is not a savvy negotiating strategy.

At the same time, Republicans have  criticized the decision, calling it halfhearted, and business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the administration didn’t go far enough.

Clearly the announcement has angered both liberals and conservatives, which may be a sign that Obama is doing something right.

Politics aside, what is more offshore drilling going to do to reduce gas prices, improve our our national security and keep our oceans safe?

America has only two percent of world oil reserves but we consume over 20 percent of the world’s oil. According the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there likely won’t be any oil from these new offshore areas until 2017 and even when full production ramps up, it will only produce 1/1,000 of total global supply. Such a minute figure will do little to make America less dependent on foreign oil and the Energy Information Administration has said that impact on oil prices will be “insignificant.”

The environmental problem is a little trickier. Obama has been careful to keep the oil-rich areas offshore of California and Alaska off-limits, thereby protecting some pristine areas and offering an olive branch to liberals. At the same time, oil spills have greatly decreased over the past decade and the majority of petroleum that enters ocean waters comes from land-based activities such as runoff or airplanes. Less than eight percent of the 29 million gallons of petroleum that enter North American ocean waters each year come from tanker or pipeline spills. Since American offshore drilling operations are subject to much higher regulations than those of many countries, it is arguably better that America drill its own coastlines as opposed to drilling coastlines all over the world.

In essence, Obama’s plan to expand offshore drilling was a political move with little benefit to American oil consumers or our national security. While it clearly isn’t an environmental disaster, offshore drilling is not the type of energy transformation we need. It remains to be seen if this controversial act will live up to the White House’s goal of securing support for energy and climate legislation.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases endanger public health and therefore could be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act. Although a bill instituting a cap and trade system to regulate ghg emissions narrowly passed the House this summer, climate legislation has stalled in the Senate, prompting the Obama administration to call upon the Environmental Protection Agency to begin regulation.

In response, Senator Murkowski and her lobbyist friends drafted an amendment known among environmentalists as the “Dirty Air Act.” While widespread citizen outrage—including from Whitman’s Campus Climate Challenge, who called the Senate all last week—has thus prevented Murkowski from introducing the amendment, she is expected to try again later this month.

Last Wednesday, Murkowski publicly accused Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson of conflicting statements regarding greenhouse gas policy due to Jackson’s stance that agency regulation can complement comprehensive energy legislation.

Murkowski told Jackson, “I don’t know that I’m any more clear based on your statement this morning as to whether or not you think it should be the Congress and those of us that are elected by our constituents and accountable to them to enact and advance climate policy.”

Murkowski’s comment is laughable for a few reasons. First, it implies that Congress is actually on track to enacting climate policy when even top Democrats have said that it is unlikely to pass in 2010 due to the negative push-back expected in the midterm elections. Secondly, her comment implies that members of Congress are actually accountable to their constituents as opposed to the coffers of the energy and pharmaceutical companies.

The inability of politicians to take action on climate change doesn’t only have dire implications for the planet. It is also affecting our ability to get ourselves out of the current recession and compete in the global market.

Over these past couple of years, while the general economy has tanked, the green economy has greatly increased. Pew Charitable Trust reports that the clean energy economy grew by 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007, compared to growth of just 3.7 percent in traditional jobs. The Obama administration has estimated that occupations in clean energy and sustainability will grow by 52 percent between 2000 and 2016. With other careers only expected to see a workforce increase of 14 percent in the same time period, the green sector is becoming increasingly attractive.

If the clean energy economy can provide 38 percent more jobs than any other industry even without congressional support, imagine the impact that climate legislation could make. You don’t have to fantasize too much; simply look at what other countries are already doing.

A recent study by the Center for American Progress clearly showed that the United States must make long-term investments in clean energy or  risk being shut out of a $2.3 trillion industry. The report hails Germany, Spain and China as “early winners in the next great technological and industrial revolution.”

Although many Americans might think of China as a carbon-intensive country, China has more renewable energy capacity than any other country in the world. It currently produces 16 percent of its electricity from hydro and wind power. America produces a mere 7.3 percent of our electricity from renewable sources.

Feeling pissed off yet? I dare you to call your senator.

On Feb. 14, Vice President Biden and former Vice President Dick Cheney had a talk-show showdown that focused on which style of governing is better at keeping our country safe from terrorism: one that utilizes civilian trials or one that disregards the constitution in favor of military tribunals. Unfortunately, neither is getting at the well-oiled root of our foreign policy problem.

After 9/11, Bush made a dramatic change from the policy used worldwide of treating terrorists as criminals to one where anyone found to be an “enemy combatant” could be tried by the military and put in Guantanamo.

Recently, Republicans have begun to slam the White House for the decision to treat Christmas Day bomber Umar Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant rather than turn him over to the military as an enemy combatant. Sarah Palin recently received much applause at the Tea Party convention for criticizing Obama’s policy of “lawyering up” Abdulmutallab and calling for a “commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

There is a multitude of problems with this critique. The first is that Bush actually didn’t use the military tribunals. Out of the 153 terrorists that the Bush administration convicted, only three were tried in military tribunals.

This is probably because, despite popular rhetoric, the civilian court system actually works better than a military tribunal. Bush himself must have recognized this during his administration when Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, was given a mere five-year sentence from a military tribunal while Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” was given life sentence without parole from a civilian court.

But the real problem behind the polarizing rhetoric and finger-pointing is America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Ever seen the bumper sticker that claims “Osama loves your SUV”? Unfortunately, that might not be so far from the truth. TheNatural Resources Defense Council estimates that Americans spend more than $13 million per hour on oil and over $25 billion per year in the Persian Gulf alone.

Bin Laden’s wealth comes from a family construction company that made its money from Saudi government contracts financed by oil money. But our energy purchases have done more than just help the founder of al Qaeda, they are strengthening the most intolerant, anti-Western, anti-women’s rights strain of Islam—the strain propagated by Saudi Arabia.

As Thomas Friedman explains in his recent book “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” the Wahhabi ruling family in Saudi Arabia follow the Salafiyyah movement in Islam, a strand of the religion that believes Islam should return to its purest roots. This movement wasn’t very popular until radical fundamentalists took over the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 and the royal family realized it could only protect itself against religious extremists by empowering them.

Although Saudia Arabia only has one percent of the world Muslim population, it now funds 90 percent of the expenses of the faith.

The effect of this is immediately evident.

As Greg Mortenson wrote in “Three Cups of Tea,” the power of the Saudi Wahhabi sect to build mosques and schools in areas where none existed was overwhelming.

“Many of their schools and mosques are doing good work to help Pakistan’s poor. But some of them seem to exist only to teach militant jihad,” Mortenson wrote.

When governments make the majority of their money  from drilling a hole in the ground, they have no incentive to educate their people or provide them with freedoms to encourage their creativity. Governments that don’t rely on taxation are unlikely to represent their constituents. In fact, according to Larry Diamond, author of “The Spirit of Democracy,” of 23 countries that derive a clear majority of their income from oil and gas, none are democracies.

“Making America the world’s greenest country is not a selfless act of charity or naive moral indulgence,” Friedman wrote. ”It is now a core national security and economic interest.”

If our politicians really want to make America safe, they should start by looking inwards.