updates

September 26, 2008

Well hello there friends!

Update time: I moved in with a family into a nice small termite infested (its actually kind of cool, they are surely natures architects!) corner room with a really great and friendly French speaking Pulaar family. Many of them speak bits of English and they are all very friendly and they all make a fantastic effort to talk with me and keep me entertained, which is why I feel really guilty right now for not having been there all day. I am back at Kim’s and I spent last night here because Sam and Sari are in from their villages so we all hung out last night, had dinner, and got caught up. We also went to the tailors and I got a blue and black embroidered sparkly type thing (although I don’t actually know what yet, my French is no good so I just tell the tailor to make what he would normally make with the fabric and let him use his creative genius to make whatever…I’ll find out what it is when I pick it up tomorrow) and Sari got one that’s blue green and yellow; whatever they come out to be, they will be our outfits for the fetes at the end of Ramadan. I am excited; I’ll surely have to take pictures.

In other news, I don’t have much other news. I’m still working one week at the health center, one week at the hospital. I have been teaching people to make neem cream mosquito repellant and that has been my only recent contribution. I’m going to read up on nutrition and malnutrition for a presentation me, Morgan, and Sari (Health People) are hopefully going to do with Levin and Sam (Agro-Forestry Folks) in the middle of October at a school in Gourat, a little village south of here right on the Senegal river.

I don’t really have any other updates so I’ll share a silly story. I was sitting the Peace Corps Bureau (Room with a computer in it where I can get online) the other day and in walked a gentlemen off the streets, this happens quite frequently as the person inside the bureau is almost guaranteed to be American, curious folks often wander in to make small talk. He tried to give me some perfume oil, first on the hand which I accepted and then he went for the cheek which I refused. He told me his name was Samba and he likes toubobs (for those of you that don’t know, toubob = white person) and wanted to know if I was American, which I obviously am. He told me that he knew a guy that met an American here and they got married and he lives in the United States now, which is pretty standard small talk for anyone around here, everyone knows someone who married and American and why am I here if not to interview interested parties? I said that was lovely and tried to continue my work. He then asked if I was talking to my family to which I replied I was composing an e-mail to them and he requested that I compose one for him in French to his friends (because he would much prefer me do it then have to do it himself and have to pay for the time at a cyber café) to which I replied that this was in fact an English computer and had the incorrect keyboard for composing French emails (which is a lie but he was trying to take advantage so I just told him to go to the cyber). The fellow hung around some more and then got to the point; here is our conversation in a nut shell:

Samba: So are you married?

Me: No, I have a fiancé, he’s waiting for me in the United States (also a lie, don’t worry)

Samba: Do you know any other white people?

Me: Some…I’m working now though. I have to do my work.

Samba: Yes, work is good. We’re friends now right? We can be friends?

Me: um…sure..

Samba: Good, I’ll give you my number, and when you get back to the states you call me. Help find me a toubob wife and then call me. I want a pretty one, who’s rich. I’d also like her to speak Pulaar. Very rich, if possible.

Me: Yeah…ok…good luck…there are tons of women like that in the states.

Samba: And your man, in the states, you tell him we’re friends too now. All three of us are friends. Next time he calls, you tell him that.

Me: ok….

Samba: And then ask him to help look for my wife, because he’s there and you’re going to be here for 2 years and I don’t want to wait that long.

So ladiessss….if anyone is interested in a Mauritanian husband I’ve got this friend here…

September 27, 2008

It seems like whenever I write these early in the morning they come out all weird and deep, but that just might be because it’s early in the morning and everything seems deep right now. At any rate, here are my “deep thoughts” for the day.

Every once in awhile here I slip up and without paying attention, an American thought pops into my head that doesn’t really apply here. Little shadows of the life I left over there just pass by and then they’re gone. This morning as I was closing the latrine door I thought “did I flush?” FYI, I haven’t seen a flushing toilet since I got here 3 months ago. Sometimes I see a piece of garbage on the ground and think, oh that’s just a plastic lid to a disposable coffee cup, or a bit of toilet paper, or a take out container, or some other remnant of the things I left behind when I came here. These little moments don’t make me sad, it’s not as if just the site of the piece of plastic piping that looked like a coffee lid made me start to examine all of the things I don’t have here, its just for that fraction of a second I forget where I am, and in a little place in my head I have the “land of plenty” mindset still intact. I still expect to find MacDonald’s wrappers in the garbage heaps, I still think “oh, if I make too much I’ll just stick it in the fridge and finish it tomorrow,” occasionally I even consider swinging by a café for a cup of coffee. Here though, there are no MacDonald’s, there is no refrigerator, and the only cafes we have are called cyber cafes and they are just buildings with a few computers in them where you can go and pay by the hour to surf the net. In fact there isn’t really even real coffee here, its all Nescafe, not my favorite.

So through all of this I wonder, these few things that still pop into my head, they may fade with time, or stick around, who knows, but for every one of those little slip ups there are a thousand things here that don’t phase me anymore even though I would never have seen them in the states. These things, like going to a restaurant and being given one cup for all 4 people and a big bucket that says bob’s mayonnaise on the outside full of cool water to dip the cup in and share, or having to haggle and fight and bargain and sometimes walk out of stores just to get a good price on anything in the market, or bathing, doing laundry, washing dishes, and carrying drinking water all in the same bucket. These things are normal for me now, and will be normal for me when I leave here, so in 2 years am I going to be compelled to bargain for the price of a bunch of bananas or a kilo of sugar? Am I going to assure the waiter at a restaurant that I don’t need a water glass or my own, surely I can just share with my friend? I probably won’t try to do my laundry or my dishes or take my showers in a bucket, I do miss running water and the various machines we have there that do all of that stuff for us.

It’s a funny feeling to be torn between “the land of plenty,” as I like to call it, and life here, the land of very little but so much at the same time. I feel incredibly wasteful when I think about things I used to do there, but at the same time wasteful things happen here too. Garbage is everywhere, just tossed all over the ground. Every time you go to the store you are given a tiny plastic shopping bag to carry your purchases, these bags end up every where; clear, blue, green, pink, and white, all tangled in the thorny trees like so many Christmas ornaments. You can buy a tiny packet of 4 cookies, a tiny bag of raw peanuts, a bag of soda, a bag of cold water, a bag of 4 garlic cloves, or a bag of rock salt, and if you do buy one or more of these things they’ll put that bag in a shopping bag for you. I’d say probably 50% of my trash is various sized plastic bags. Volunteers try to find ways to reuse them, discourage the distribution of them, encourage the use of reusable shopping bags, anything, but we often fail. I’ll tell the merchant I can just put my purchases in my purse and they will put it in a bag for me to put in my bag. Little things like this are every where. These things frighten me because they represent the influence of the developed world, I remember having the same conversations about dealing with the huge quantities of price chopper bags we used to have around the house over there, but over there things are slowly starting to change, stores give you discounts for reusing bags, canvas shopping bags are showing up all over the place and the waste is becoming less; here though, it will take years for something like that to happen, because the current method is so easy and the negatives are not really a concern for people here. When you cook your dinners according to how well you can afford to feed you family today, the fact that the plastic baggy you got your potatoes in is going to be around longer than they are is not a major concern.

Those are just my thoughts for the day, I best be off now. Hopefully I’ll send this today or tomorrow. Love and miss you allllll!

Shelby