One Year and Counting...

I am in the regional capital of Kaedi. I arrived in this very city one year ago and had never heard a Muslim prayer call, eaten goat meat, seen a scorpion, been to a tailor, bargained for the price of oranges, made a free phone call to the USA over the internet, told someone that Toubab was not my name, and countless, millions, gazillions of other things that now feel normal.

It was with the arrival of the Newbies (the 80 something new Peace Corps Trainees) yesterday that I was able to see more clearly where I came from and where I am now. These bright eyed souls can not speak a word of a local language, Kaedi's bustling market is a source of terror and confusion, and the slooooow pace of life and work has not made itself known to these motivated and ambitious youngsters.

And I mean youngsters. In the health sector there is one person over the age of 23. I have a theory that Mauritania gets the most hard core and inexperienced applicants to Peace Corps. Physically, us twenty-somethings can handle the rough car rides, intense heat and amoeba-laden drinking water. Yet we lack any technical experience that would make us useful in a more developed country.

So, how do I feel about hitting the one year mark? Relieved, for the most part. It's all downhill from here, as they say. And as the people in Pulaar land say, "a year, if healthy, goes by quickly."

Inchallah, life will remain as sweet for the following 12 months as it has been for the previous.

Latrine Shizzle

In case my loyal blog viewers were in the mood for a "real work" update, here are some interesting facts for ya:

176 sacks of cement, each weighing 50kg, are necessary for the latrines. This is literally TWO TONS of cement. Which doesn't even include the sand, gravel, and water, necessary to make cement bricks. This is just one example of the immense amount of stuff necessary for a construction project on this scale.

The brick makers do not speak French, English or Pulaar. Yet we seem to understand each other with the help of charades type talking. If good for nothing else, living in a foreign country has been excellent for my miming skills.

My good friend the mason underestimated the prices for basically everything we need to purchase including but not limited to wire, PVC pipe, and latrine doors. I am maintaining the "not panicking yet" mode that I have been able to hold on to since day 1, when I landed in the hot hell of Nouakchott. With this new budget surprise we are talking about reducing the number of latrines to 7.

Only Allah knows what happens from here.

Building a house for Ly

Construction of new houses is in hyper mode all over the village. As we race to beat the rain, people spend hours every day pulling water from the well, lugging mud from a pit to the house, carrying dried mud bricks and drinking endless amounts of tea.

A typical day of construction includes the slaughtering of a goat and the preparing of several kilos of rice to feed all the volunteers. People show up with their work clothes and faces on, and chug through the physically demanding labor until exhausted. Tiny shots of sugary tea keep them fueled, but the hot sun prevents much work from happening after noon or one.

Late night excursions to the well use up any energy one has managed to store throughout the day. Moonlight isn't nearly as hot as sunlight, but as the Pulaar people say, the ground is never even at night, and with a bucket of water sloshing on one's head, it makes this exhausted American girl yearn for some of those nifty construction machines that she's seen in the past...

World Map Shennanigans

Us PCVs often joke about what our resumes should look like versus what they will look like. We all know how to incorporate action verbs and impressive sounding accomplishments into the paper versions of ourselves, but more normal summaries don't sound quite so good.

For example, this recently completed world map will allow me to brag about the impromptu geography lessons, creative outlet, and general community-building opportunity that I provided. However, what really happened was that paint got dripped on everyone/thing, and most of the people who helped me did not know where Africa was, or that there was a lot of water surrounding the land of the world.

The contrast in amounts of knowledge about the world was astounding for a village of only 1,500 people. Some men were able to read my labels and point out to me where many countries were, such as Brazil and Italy. Other people thought America and France were both connected to Mauritania.

I see lopsided education in my daily math classes as well. I have students who do not recognize the number four and are unable to translate the numbers they have memorized in French to their ecquivalent in Pulaar. At the same time, I review with adolescent girls the rules for fractions, and remind them how to do the long division they learned last year. Half the time I am thinking Mashallah (thank god) and the other half I'm thinking what is going wrong with the schooling here?

Mariam (Mom/Ma) Ba

People simply call Mariam, "Mom." Not because of what Mom means in English, but as a shortened word for Mariam. It is mere coincidence that a mom is exactly what Mariam is to me.

As a health agent for the village, Mariam works at the dispensary. She lives in the same building as me, just one room over. She cooks me meals, threatens the kids when they are bothering me, and teaches me Pulaar. If it weren't for me already having the best mother ever (mom, that's a shout out to you, in case you missed it) then I would have acquired that in Garly.

In this picture she is dressed up in classic Pulaar fashion. This is due to a little something I call the "jombaajo intrigue." If a woman's husband live outside of the village, when the husband returns for vacation, the woman is referred to as a newly wedded woman, or a "jombaajo." This means they dress up often, cook nice meals for their hubby, and get this: they don't leave the house.

I had an important latrine meeting while Ma Ba (what I call her) was serving her jombaajo duties and she didn't come. No one even questioned her absence at this crucial crossroads in the project- heck, she was jombaajoing it up.

Monday gloom and doom

Attending an AIDS workshop in Africa is downright depressing. While Denison trained me well to be a statistic skeptic, I heard several today that if slightly skewed or not, made me want to weep for this continent.

One statistic was that 75% of the 20 million people (as of some time in 2006) who have died of AIDS were living in Africa. Also, Swaziland has close to 40% infection rate of HIV/AIDS. Almost half of the population is living with this deathly diagnosis!

I was hoping that I misunderstood these frightening numbers, since the program is entirely in French and by the time we got to the scary numbers portion of the day my brain was fried.

Unfortunately, my French served me adequately for this and other sad stats.

On the up side, it is considerably cooler on the coast than in the interior. And this five day workshop, intended to train and motivate various health workers in Peace Corps sites, is located in an airconditioned building. Mashallah.

Posh Corps

Mali volunteers get bagels delivered to their front door. Ghana volunteers live among elephants in lush jungles. Some peace corps sites have satellite television, hot showers, and access to fruits and vegetables like any "normal" city. Posh Corps is the peace corps experience with a little extra cushion...

At this moment I am typing on a MacBook in the apartment of two volunteers in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. They have WIFI internet, a kitchen table with real chairs, and a television bigger than the one I had in my dorm room at Denison. I ate a hamburger today (with an egg and french fries in it = delicious) at the cafe that is in their apartment building.

This type of experience used to send me toggling between envy and self-righteousness. Neither feeling is all that great, so I've decided to simply embrace the camping-like atmosphere of my life and soak up my vacay days in posh style. While I can sit on couches and order cappuccino for the next 50 years of my life (inshallah/god willing) for now, I can handle waking up at 3am to goats fighting. I can write in my journal by candlelight and guess the time of day by the length of shadows.

There is no where I would rather be.

my zen retreat

In one month I will have been in Mauritania for a year. I have been reflecting on these past eleven months and realizing I have achieved what is impossible in the states: truly getting away from it all. I am not distracted by television, pop culture, traffic, computers, magazines, graphic news stories, petty social dramas, beer binging... In two words I am pretty much on a personal Zen retreat.

I almost forget the challenges of my early life in Garly. I love that I see at the most a car a day. It's great that an entire village knows my name and that I drink fresh milk in the market and swap friendship bracelets with women of all ages. Even lugging water from the depths of the well has become a quiet kind of fun.

The only thing this retreat is missing right now is a bald monk showing me the path of peace, or whatever it is they show. So if anyone is interested in being my spiritual teacher, come on over. The hot season prevents any activity between 11am and 5pm, so bring some books.