Hello Hello Everyone!
First let me say that I am okay, the state of Mauritania is no different, and if I hadn’t gotten an e-mail from Obie, the country director, telling me that there 12 members of the military are “missing” way up north in a place called Zouerate, I would have had no idea. BUT on the off chance that you have seen the word Mauritania in the news and panicked about my well-being, think of it this way: This incident happened in the EXTREME NORTH of the country, that’s the tippy tippy top for those of you who are directionally challenged, I live in the Guidimaka, that’s the EXTREME SOUTH (very very bottom, practically Senegal) and the only reason Obie even sent an email was because apparently some form of media mixed up the location and incorrectly reported Nouakchott so he just wanted us to set the record straight. The actual extreme north of the country is extremely inhospitable (go figure…its not fun to live in the middle of the Sahara…huh) and very little like where I live, in the green jungle of Selibaby (for now, but the rainy season is officially over-so no more rain at all until June-ish….yuck!).
In other news, I found a home! Hurray! I’m getting a room with an amazingly nice family with nooooo little kids! Double Hurray! They had us for dinner and they were fun and talkative and jokey and teaching me Pulaar and helping me with French and when I got shy and became quiet because I could depend on Kim to hold up the conversation they would ask me why I wasn’t talking, which is good, I need to practice my language skills. We went back to discuss rent and things, its 6000 ouguiya per month (roughly $17) and that includes water and electricity (a tap on the property and one light and one outlet in my room!) and when we asked about meals (did that include food or did they want to add more onto my rent for that I was told that I am now a member of the family and as such I can eat there whenever I want and its just fine. I can’t wait, I move in on Saturday, inshallah.
Here’s another story about life here, just because I have the time. I work 3 or 4 days a week, every other week at the Health Center CREN alternating with the pediatric ward at the hospital. This week was hospital, but there were pas beaucoup de maladies cette semain (not many sick people this week) so I spent a lot of time making small talk with the pediatricians and nurses. When I work at the hospital I am supposed to be there at around 9 so I head out at 8:30 and make the 45 minute walk just in time to arrive at the same time as everyone else. My job as a pedestrian here is to walk wherever I damn well please and ignore the taxi’s, whose job is to drive wherever they damn well please and beep their horn at every pedestrian, goat, sheep, camel, or donkey in the road, other vehicle, and as turn signals. They drive on both sides of the road, going both directions, sometimes two or three abreast, through ditches, around potholes, through herds of goats, between people, around other cars, and well, everywhere. Sometimes people hit things, one time we hit a fence in the Peace Corps car, but it wasn’t very hard and no one cared, we just back up and keep going. One time we hit a wall when we were driving down a road so narrow I would have had trouble navigating it with my little Toyota Paseo (my babyyyyy…my heart is broken without my lil car) but this was in a peace corps land rover, so there was roughly a quarter of an inch of leeway on either side, and we just scraped off a little…well actually mud…from both the side of the car and the mud brick wall we were scraping.
The streets are narrow and bumpy. They are filled with garbage and goats and donkeys and naked babies. If I watched my world through a black and white filter then I would be living in one of those Christian children’s fund commercials, strategically posed and filmed to show the sad little faces of children covered with flies traversing garbage filled streets in bare feet, that’s roughly my daily life save one thing. These kids are not just sitting around looking pathetic, they are smiling, laughing, playing, they all want to shake your hand and greet you, they build toys out of empty bottles and bottle caps and string. They laugh and smile and yell, they eat and sleep and work and play, and they are rarely too tired or depressed to swat the flies off their faces. There is one exception to this rule, well several but one prominent one, and that is a group of boys known as can kids. These kids come from the bush around cities to study the Koran. Not all Koranic schools work this way, but some require the kids to beg for food and for fees to pay for their schooling, they justify it by saying that it teaches the children humility. These children have been basically abandoned by their families to move to the city and depend on the generosity of others to survive. They carry with them old tin cans which they store any food they are given in. This can is often their only possession.
The system works for a number of reasons, the greatest being the lack of refrigeration here, thus when a family finishes a meal for which they have inevitably cooked way too much just in case someone happens to stop by within a few hours of meal time and can be persuaded to stay and eat with the family, the leftovers are generally given to the closest available can kid(s) and/or the goats. These kids are accomplished beggars and are quite capable of putting on the saddest little faces and holding out their hands with their big sad eyes, they know how to get you; but when they realize you have nothing to give, or you have already given them something, the act is dropped and they are usually just like any other kids. My host family in Rosso frequently gave to the can kids, who would walk into the salon during lunch and my father would take their cans and fill them with rice and vegetables from our cheb. Giving money to the can kids is discouraged but if I have food I usually share. This is one of the saddest things about living here, but as with all other hard things, it has simply become part of life here. The sad, happy, exciting, boring, busy, empty, friendly, well fed, ridiculous, amazing life of
In other news, I broke fast with a different family two nights ago and the woman who ate with us was very pregnant, but here they will never mention it lest it bring bad luck on the baby. So this pregnant woman cooked and served us dinner, never mentioning the pregnancy at all, and then after we left at about 11 pm she gave birth, finishing at about 1:30 am to a beautiful healthy baby boy. We got a phone call yesterday informing us, and we went to visit today, he’s adorable.
That’s all I got for now, much love and happy thoughts!
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