Happy New Year!

January 11, 2009


Holy Cow!

It’s a new year! I have completed over 6 months of my Peace Corps service! Man time sure flies when your having fun! I hope everyone back home had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I wish I could have been there, but alas, I was here, on the beach, eating (REAL!) cheese sandwiches and drinking homemade sangria in the sunshine…gosh my life is rough…I don’t know how I do it. All that’s over now though, and I just arrived back at site this morning, at approximately 2 am, slept until now, and here I am! Its 8:30, which might be the latest I’ve slept in 6 months! So…about my trip, it lasted a grand total of 21 days, including a stop in Boghe (for a little party and to break up the trip to Nouakchott); Nouakchott (for Christmas festivities at the Peace Corps Director’s house); Rosso (oh my old home, this is the city where I had “stage” so we crashed here for a bit to break up the trip to Senegal); San Louis, Senegal (sun, sand, and sea to ring in the new year); back to Rosso (to break up the trip back to Nouakchott and for more visiting); Nouakchott again (for Early Term Reconnect and In-Service Training); then homeward to Kaedi (to break up the trip back to Selibaby and celebrate John and Tanya’s birthday); and finally back to Selibaby (the garbage filled streets of Selibaby have never looked as inviting as they did last night at 2 am after something around 7 hours stuffed in vehicles made to hold 9 people with 20 strangers)….oh its good to be home!

So I bet you wouldn’t mind hearing some tales of my adventures would you? I didn’t think so. Here are some highlights:

We did all of our traveling in groups to be safer and happier on the road and when six of us were ready to leave Nouakchott to head for Rosso after Christmas we grabbed a pair of cabs, piled ourselves and all our luggage into them, and said “Le garage Rosso” to each driver, separately, which seemed like a perfectly fine idea considering there is only on Rosso garage…only our assumption proved to make an ass of us as some cab drivers have friends who are drivers and they will bring business straight to them instead of the actual garage. Myself, John, and Emily arrived at a Rosso garage, and the other cab with Sari, Tabatha, and Rob arrived at the Rosso garage, but by the time they did John had bargained us down to a great price for the cab where we were so we decided to have the others meet us there. While waiting for them it became clear that there had already been 3 passengers in the car we had bought out for ourselves who had been booted for us, because we were going all the way to Rosso and they were going only part way so the driver would make more money off of us. These people were not exactly thrilled and a small scuffle broke out between a small collection of cab drivers and the disgruntled man who wanted vary badly to put his things back into the cab…and in fact succeeded only to have them tossed out again by our driver. Being foreign we simply backed up, stayed out of the way, and awaited the outcome of the scuffle. Naturally we won (money always does), and the man left in a huff while our friends loaded their bags and we all stuffed ourselves into our car and headed for the gas station to fill up for our journey. There happened to be another car there with a man in it who happened to be friends with many of the Peace Corps “higher ups” and recognized us as new volunteers. He greeted us and we chatted for a minute and then gave our driver a stern talking to in Hassaniya which John used his awesome language skills to decipher and it was something like this: “I know these people, they are my friends so don’t try anything stupid because I know your name and I know your car and I’ll find you.” This made us a little nervous and reassured at the same time. Okay, we’re all gassed up, stuffed in, loaded up, and on the main road out of Nouakchott, toward Rosso, and ready to relax the short 3 hour trip away when our cab swerves down a little side road and we’re like okay, he probably knows where he’s going, and then he stops rather suddenly and hops out…to retrieve Rob’s bag, which has fallen out. Great. Off to a good start. We reload and head back towards the main road where we hit the gendarme stop we’re now quite sure he was on the back road to avoid but miscalculated a little because there, waiting for us, was the gentlemen who had been booted from the car and hey, good news, he’s a cop. Our driver is instructed to follow him and we set off once again, back in the direction we came from. Down another side road, and our driver slows, the space is growing between us and the other car, and suddenly, sharp left, he floors it, we’re flying down a back dirt road, and Sari in the back, holding all the bags says “are we making a run for it right now?” Indeed we were, we were racing off through the back streets of Nouakchott in search of a police officer that was friends with our driver and would take our side. We found him, stuffed him in the front seat with Rob, and beat the other man to the police station, presumably because he was still searching for us. All parties convened inside the station while we sat in the car and waiting, not really sure what to do. Eventually everything was worked out, and our driver returned to make the rest of trip, which was fairly uneventful, thank god.

Hmm…what else is there to share…it feels like there should be so much but so much of it is just the experience as a whole, being in Senegal, on the beach, with strange men coming to try to sell us things and hoards of children watching our every move. I went out to collect some shells off the shore and an army of children handed me more shells then I even wanted within minutes once they realized what I was doing. One day a (possibly drunk, definitely strange) gentleman came up to us on the beach wearing a pointy beginnings of fat dread locks, a stretched out old tank top, and a big goofy grin, and that’s all. He tried to make conversation but we did our best to ignore many of the locals on the beach because they were always either selling something or begging for something or hoping to steal something and so our friend, not to be deterred, began singing to us. He stayed for quite a while, just singing away to no one in particular. It was an interesting experience.

On another day Sari and Tabatha and myself took a day off from the beach and wandered across the bridge back on to the mainland to shop for some fabric and spend some time in a real market, not the tourist trap that is the island. The market in San Louis was amazing, narrow alleyways of tiny booths stacked with veggies, barrels of raw grains, heaps of fish, and skinned goats and sheep hanging from above. They seemed to go on forever, getting smaller and smaller then larger and than smaller again, twisting and turning, we were good and lost when we came out all of a sudden, facing the river and the bridge back to the island. I could spend days in the food market in San Louis, but instead we headed back to the island across the bridge and to meet some friends for dinner. What an amazing trip! By the end of it though, I was ready to go home to Selibaby. A few days in Nouakchott for training was enough to exhaust my patience with a city that feels like it has more cars than people and basically no traffic regulations, just crossing the two streets to get to the Peace Corps bureau felt like a live version of frogger. It was good to have a bed though, and a toilet with toilet paper, and air conditioning, a tv with 2 whole English channels! It’s the little things in life!

Alrighty, I’ll bet you’re all tired of reading now, or were hours ago, so I’ll wrap it up! Hopefully I’ll get to the computer soon to send this out. Much love and happy thoughts to all of you back home, hope your holidays were as fun and exciting as mine! I’m going on 7 months here now, so I’ll see you all in about 17 more!

Love, Shelby