| Self-Medicating |
[May. 18th, 2006|01:17 pm] |
Hot tea with honey and lemon, ibuprofen and decongestant, cough drops galore. So I got a cold from one of my baby friends. Ha, a cold. It’s about 110 degrees right now. It’s not the highs that are so bad as that is stays unbearably hot about 20 hours a day. It was 96 at 7:30AM today! One to five AM is still pretty sweet, as long as you’re sleeping under the stars, which all the cool kids are these days. I just finished reading Angela’s Ashes, hacking up my lungs and feeling glad at least I don't have consumption.
Earlier this week Leah and I convinced Andrew that life would be better with a shower and that we were willing to contribute funds if he had one installed at his house. He goes to ask his landlord about it and less than 2 hours later, he’s got a shower. I go over there at least twice a day now, ahh. Showering is practically therapy in this climate. It’s hot and dusty and nasty all the time.
Tuesday, when my cold became full-blown, I pulled myself out of school during recess and went to Andrew’s to shower and self-medicate. As luck and years of other people’s care packages would have it, I had all the makings of a home-from-school-feel-better lunch. I drank hot chocolate while making matzo ball soup and tapioca pudding. I rested the rest of the day and was able to go to class yesterday, though I’ve lost much of my voice. So teaching without a voice isn’t too much fun, but after I told the kids what was up (and kicked a few of them out for behaving like chattering donkeys), they were patient and we had a nice lesson.
Not much is going on in Kiffa, so Leah, Andrew and I have fallen back on our old pastime of cooking (and eating) up a storm. In the past month we’ve made delicious calzones, Pakistani, Chinese, and Mexican feasts. We’ve perfected pudding pops and Leah found someone in the market who makes actual ice cream. None of us has gained any weight yet, I guess we’re just sweating it all out.
Another Assaba pastime is the “off”, as in Cake Off (Luke’s carrot vs Caleb’s banana), Monkey Off (who’s the best at changing a lightbulb without a ladder?), etc. We just like having friendly competitions, thus was born the Cute Off. My host brother vs. Leah’s. Leah and I both being biased, we can’t decide. Leah’s created a poll on her blog (follow my friend’s link at the top of the page) among these two and a couple wild cards. Check it out and vote.
We’re busy at the GMC, having finally secured a second room for the computers. I’m working on a project with the girls to paint world maps on one of our walls and then we’ll do them at their schools too. Next weekend we’ll be taking a few of them to Kaedi on an exchange. The girls have been writing letters back and forth the the Kaedi GMC girls and Leah suggested that we have some of our girls train their penpals to can vegetables and learn how to crochet or tie-dye from the girls there, so that’s what we’re doing. I’ll get to see Jenny and my old old host family from training and the south one last time before the rains and the humidity.
My time here is winding up quickly and I’ll be out of this oven before you know it. My plans for the summer – and life – are still up in the air, but I’m hopeful for the future. I’m pretty sure that wherever I end up, I’ll be showering in my own house. |
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| Meanwhile…back in Kiffa |
[Apr. 16th, 2006|11:26 pm] |
While I was away, Leah and my counterpart had a cage fight over the electricity and other vital things over at the GMC. Nebghouha won, but I’m pretty sure we’re in for round two this week. Most of the time, all I can think is, Ha ha ha, I’m leaving, ha ha ha. Luckily, Leah’s championing our cause and taking care of business. Still, I’ll add dealing with Nebghouha to the list of things I won’t miss. See Andrew’s post for the rest of the list; we have a lot of the same experiences. It’s about a million degrees here, I’m not kidding, average day-time highs of 115F.
So since I’ve been back the new cute thing my host brother does is ask to borrow my phone to call Milagros. You don’t know who Milagros is? She’s the star of French-dubbed Brazilian soap opera that we watch on the Senegalese and Malian TV channels. She is a housekeeper, the illegitimate daughter of the patron. She’s a plucky tomboy trying to make her way in a difficult world and Allasane loves her. One night they showed a phone number on the screen at the end of the episode, some sort of trivia thing, but Allasane has it in his head that that’s her number. I said to him that she doesn’t speak Soninke, Pulaar or Hassaniya, so how are you going to talk to her? I’ll speak French to her. Duh. So we make fake phone calls to Milagros, pretty fun. Today Allasane and I went to Leah's so that he could play with her host brother, Bongaida. They're in the same class at school and are little buddies. They've been on break for two weeks and were both bored out of their skulls, so we arranged a play date. We also had the bright idea to have an online cute-off. She's going to put their pictures on her blog and you the people will vote, so we will know once and for all who's got the cutest host brother. You can access her blog through my "friends" link, if you haven't already.
While I was gone, Hawa’s father in law died and she went to Kaedi to present her condolences. Then her husband, Buna, came to Kiffa for a few days. He’s in the National Guard, stationed in Rosso, in the extreme south-west of the country, so they don’t get to spend a lot of time together. The last time he came here was at the end of Ramadan and they’ve gotten together a couple of times since then in Nouakchott when Hawa’s travelled there for work, but the majority of the time they’re apart and missing each other. He calls her every night, it’s really sweet and kinda sad because their work keeps them apart. Anyway, a couple days after I got back I went for a run while she and Allasane were still asleep. When I got back from my run, Allasane was having his breakfast at the table and Hawa was sitting in her room, getting ready for work, but she looked so sad. I asked her what was wrong and she said that she’d just gotten her period. I said something sympathetic, because nobody likes getting her period, then I realized that she was sad because she’d hoped to be pregnant. We talked about that a bit and she’s been checked out and is all systems go for babies. She said, “but if Buna’s got a problem, I don’t know what we’ll do…” I tried to reassure her that it could just be timing and sometimes it takes a while. I told her that one of my aunts was married for ten years before she had her first baby, and now she’s a grandma. That seemed to make her feel better. She’s only 29, so they’ve got time yet.
Anyway, gotta go to bed now, school starts at 7 during the hot season! |
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| Midnight at the Oasis |
[Apr. 16th, 2006|07:53 pm] |
So after COS conference, a big group of us (~35) went up to the tourist capital of Mauritania, the Adrar region. Keith, a volunteer in Atar, the regional capital, organized a trash clean-up and fun run. I came to run and arrived the night beforehand. We got up at 5, had breakfast and were at the start by 6:30. Once the water stations were all set up, we started the race, a bit after sunrise, at 7:15. It was already heating up. We took a rocky-washboard dirt track out of town through a gorgeous little canyon. There were some scrub trees and cool rock formations and by a few kilometers out, I was running by myself. It was just me and the Europop (love my ipod) and every once in a while I’d see Andrew and Andy ahead of me, or just a tumbleweed. It was so cool, running solo through the desert. Every few kilometers there were a couple volunteers with water and candy for us, which was really nice and kept us going. Past the canyon, about 12k into the run, there’s a monster of a hill, but at least it’s paved. I just went slowly up till that point, enjoying the scenery and the view of the village at the base of the hill. The volunteers at the water station at the top of the hill threw water balloons at us, which was refreshing. Once I got to the top of the hill, Andrew wasn’t far ahead of me. I caught up to him in the last 5k (ok, he was walking at that point) and finished 20k in 2:15. Keith, Jarad, Jeff, Sam and Andy were all ahead of me, but I finished first among women. I hadn’t even trained that much and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to finish it. I credit carbo-loading and the supporting volunteers with that, especially Alison, best cheerleader in Mauritania!
After the race, we were all glad to get a shower and some rest before lunch and the trip to Tergit. We mostly sat around Keith’s house until we were supposed to go, talking. I remember that Tyler and Sam were having what seemed like a recurring conversation about musicals. Pro and con, basically. Then there were last-minute negotiations with the driver and the first group was off. I went with the second group and ended up sitting with Tyler on the way there. Sure enough, he talked about musicals the whole way there! I’d heard about Tergit from other volunteers and I’d read Will’s description of it, but I was still bowled over by the place. It was about 45 minutes away from Atar, half of that off-road. Once the truck let us off, we walked into the mouth of this box canyon and immediately it was ten degrees cooler. There were plants and palm trees everywhere and a little creek running out to meet us. The farther we walked in, the cooler and greener it was, it was just unreal that such a cool, lush, green place existed in the middle of this barren hotness. Don’t ever pass up a chance to go to an oasis; it’s like stepping back in time. At the very end of this canyon, there’s a natural pool and a place where you can drink spring water dripping off the rock face. It’s cool and pure and wonderful. The creek twists around in these limpid pools full of pollywogs. Further up into the closed part of the canyon are stone steps that take you up to a cooler, cement-lined pool and then steps up to the top, where you can overlook the palms and the slate walls of the canyons to the escarpments beyond. Near the low pool, there were khaymas (local tents) with mats and matelas set up for us. We stayed for about $6/person instead of ten, friend prices.
The boys had borrowed a car battery and hooked it up to a stereo so we’d have jams and Christa, Nicole, April and Rachel made a playlist that we danced to all night, well, till midnight, when the music stopped. Periodically, we’d go cool off in the pool and then go back to dancing. I don’t know where I was when some old French tourist came up to the group to curse us out. I guess he didn’t appreciate the music, but he had other issues. He called us deplorable people, living off our parents in France. He was so uninformed! In the middle of his harangue, he slapped Christa. She wasn’t hurt, but still, how rude! The boys got all up in arms about that and Señor Frog beat a hasty retreat, fortunate for him. Later on Rachel, Sam and I sat under a palm tree surrounded by glowworms and fireflies and just took it all in. I kept waking up in the night, but then I’d look up to a starry palm canopy, an almost-full moon, the breeze that kept us warm and smile. The place is magical and I hope it stays that way. After the first group left in the morning, before dawn, the rest of us picked up all the trash and took pictures. Ari said it reminded her of Cinqueterre in Italy. Anyplace like that is a place I want to be. Don't take my word for it; take a look at the pictures: adriana.smugmug.com
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| Fun Overload |
[Apr. 6th, 2006|05:39 pm] |
Whew! I'm exhausted! Six days of good food, fun times with friends and learning how to get back into life in the US...I know, doesn't sound like much, but when you're used to the (slow) pace of life here, having meetings all day and parties every other night will wear you down fast! The group of second-year volunteers, most of whom will be finishing up our service this year, spent a great few days together, ostensibly learning how to readjust to life as productive members of American society (in America!), but also spending some QT together as a group. We stayed at a cute little bayside resort in little thatched-roof bungalows. Jenny was my roommate, ever so nice to hang out with her again. We had a Midsummer Night's Dream-themed party, which was fun, of course. Our facilitator for the conference, the ambassador's wife, was herself a PCV in Turkey in the 1960s, so it was an especially warm and personal time together, one big Peace Corps family.
On the last day, we took a trip to a bird park, where we saw some warthogs. They were huge! I couldn't tear my eyes away long enough to take a picture before they spooked and ran off, tails in the air. I was expecting something the size of a bulldog, but they're like full-grown pigs on long legs with huge, curvy tusks. Just like Pumbaa in The Lion King, but huge! Even the fact that I was left behind for an hour or so at one of the stops wasn't so bad; I had the chance to talk to some nice local women. And clean up. Since I got stick in the mud and couldn't get back to the cars before they pulled away. The mud was thick, black ooze, the kind of stuff that would be tar, if you gave it some time. Ick! I lost a shoe to it. But we had warthog for lunch, so that was good.
We're back in the capital now, but a bunch of us will be going to Atar this weekend for a trash clean-up/fun run. I haven't been training as well as I could have been, but I feel ready to at least attempt the half marathon.
In other good news, much more exciting, my cousin had a baby! A surprise girl! And she's a cutie; I can't wait to see her at home! Love, a. |
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| Fat Sunday |
[Mar. 25th, 2006|11:10 pm] |
So I’m over at my Malian friend, Karim’s, house, mostly chatting with his three-year-old, Diko. We’d already “read” a copy of Newsweek & she agreed that the Palestinian suffragettes were pretty, but that the “policeman” (a Hamas militant, complete with ski mask and RPG launcher) was not. Then she pretended to braid my hair, but really checked me for nits (all clean!) and then swirled it around some. We’re pretty comfortable with each other, so I didn’t mind when she decided to rest a hand on my left breast. When she started squeezing and asking who it was (her Hassaniya’s not that great), I swatted it away, but her curiosity motor was gunning. She tried to be nonchalant with, “Oh, you’ve got boobs, me too. Mine are biiiiig, see? Okay, now you!” She’s at least 10 years away from being able to hold up a two-piece, but you’ve gotta admire the strategery. When Karim entered the room, she explained to him that I had boobs and that she wanted to see them. He asked her why and she replied that she just wanted to drink a little. The fact that I’m dairy-free doesn’t much matter to her, since she still apparently likes to chomp on her mom from time to time despite Hawa’s milk being long gone.
Then Karim told Diko that if I did nurse her, she’d turn white or “become a toubaboo,” my very favorite member of the toubab, touback, toubacka family and the one most commonly uttered by Bambarans, the dominant tribe in Mali. She stopped asking me to show her my boobs and started asking me to give them to her. Luckily, her mom set down lunch right then, saved by the Mafé! It’s one of my favorite local dishes, a peanut-butter based sauce served over white rice. Hawa’s is the best and she’s even shown me how to make it. So we busied ourselves, washing hands and splashing each other (OK, that was all me). Diko forgot about my boobs during lunch, and afterwards I blew raspberries on her belly, we played “this little piggie” on each other’s hands and feet before making some fake phone calls. That’s one of my favorite activities to do with Allasane, my little host brother, and it made me miss him. The Hawa I live with has been in Dakar for the past two weeks at a UN training and Allasane’s been staying with a friend of hers. I had lunch with them last week and he’s having fun playing with Mariem’s kids. Our house is pretty lonesome these days, so I’ve been hanging out at Andrew’s and the French volunteers’ houses some. I’ve also taken to picking up strangers’ babies in the market and asking how much they cost. Everyone knows it’s a joke, but sometimes an older sister will act scandalized or quote me something around a dollar, in which case it’s my turn to act scandalized.
At yet another Hawa's house, this one a girl from my GMC, I saw an owl for the first time. Her brother saw it in a tree outside of town, shimmied up and brought it home. It was too little to fly and it hadn't eaten since he'd captured it, four days prior. It was sad, but also cool to see something that may as well have been made up, for all I'd seen of them. It was really soft and reminded me of David Bowie in Labryinth. I took pictures of it because it was just so beautifully tragic. I told them that a thing like that can't live in a house and that it wasn't happy. The things a goner for sure.
In happier news, Caleb’s dad’s visiting all the way from America and he brought loads of goodies with him, including my iPod, so I’m back in music thanks to my mom, Madeline and Denis. I also have Girl Scout cookies, heh heh heh. He brought a jar of salsa and I couldn’t help but hug him! We had an awesome Mexican feast; each time we do, it just gets better and better. Of course, I ate so much that I was in gut-wrenching pain all the next day. Luckily, we had an off-night before the next dinner party. We’d invited the French volunteers over partly just to do it, partly because they’d not yet been to Andrew’s new place and partly because we had a can of turkey gizzards we didn’t know what to do with. We’d inherited a can of “gesiers de dinde” from some old volunteers who’d probably gotten them from French expats. We’d heard that they were really good sautéed atop a green salad. So that was one dish, it got even crazier from there. Our resident Belgian decided to make a typical Belgian dish, tuna and peaches (surprisingly yummy). Jeremy made bruschetta, Andrew did scalloped potatoes. I recreated a creamy pumpkin soup with local squash and had just received a care package from an awesome former Kiffa volunteer, so we had (pork!) salami and pistachios to start and chocolate fondue-dipped fruit for dessert. Heather sends me packages and words of wisdom every so often, it’s really cool. Who would know better what I need at this point in my service? She sent me travel guides for my Close of Service trip, magazines, sweet and salty snacks, lotion and nail polish, Kenyan chai, top-shelf toothpaste and a massive bar of 70% cacao heroin. Unfortunately, it wasn’t ziplocked, so it ran all over the place. As I was lugging my precious booty home from the post office, a local shop owner asked me what it was, since the corners of the box were all grease-stained. Sardines? Nah, I don’t think so. Are you sure you don’t have sardines? I dunno, let’s have a smell. Mmm. Cocoa butter. Chocolate, much better than sardines. So my twenty-seventh year on this planet finds me licking molten chocolate off most everything else in the box. At first I thought it was mint chocolate, but that was just the toothpaste interfering. I stopped when I got to the magazines and just put the box in the fridge. So once the chocolate hardened up, I carefully scraped it off the magazines and box. The bar was so big that I’d salvaged a good deal of it and by melting it with cream, butter and a shot of booze for fondue, it was really good. The magazines all still smell like cocoa butter, mmm.
This weekend at the GMC, Andrew’s teaching the girls how to preserve fruits and vegetables so they can enjoy them all year round, instead of just during the peak of the season. Right now the markets are chock-full of cheap local produce and in a few months there’ll be nothing but expensive yucky imports. Man, is he awesome or what? Tomorrow he’s supposed to be teaching the girls how to make hibiscus syrup, but he’s taken two big naps today and is still out cold, so I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I hope he’s not sick; he’s the heartiest of us all.
Next week’s midterms at school and I’m not scheduled to proctor exams until Wednesday, so I’ll have lots of time to catch up on my emails and reports before my director comes at the end of the week. I’m going to Nouakchott with him on the way to our Close of Service conference, where we’ll learn how to tie up all the loose ends here and have one last hurrah as a group. And then many of us will go to Atar to pick up trash, run and have another last hurrah at the beautiful oasis hideaway of Tergit. I’m uploading pictures now too, check ‘em out: Adriana.smugmug.com |
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| Any Requests?! |
[Mar. 6th, 2006|12:23 pm] |
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Apparently several (lots?) of people I don't even know read this, so let me know what/whom you'd like to hear about. Like if you're the parent/friend of a fellow volunteer back home and I hear some juicy gossip about him/her, I can totally clue you in. And if you're my friends or family and you're wondering about any certain aspect of my life here, ask me about it. |
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| Rapid-Fire Highlights |
[Mar. 2nd, 2006|08:32 pm] |
So it’s been a while and Andrew’s preparing a scrumptious Pakistani feast, so this is going to be brief, but intense. I had a wonderful time at WAIST, can’t believe I ever entertained notions of not going. I’ll tackle my inbox soon, sorry if it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me.
Before WAIST: Brock came to Kiffa with his MOM, the lovely Donna, a brave and charming lady. We had a delicious dinner thanks to Caleb and good conversation, natch. It’s always cool to see Mauritania through the eyes of a visitor, like seeing it again for the first time. And apparently there are people who read my blog that I don’t even know, people in New York, a man named Ed, and probably more too. A little weird, a lot cool. Donna told me, “It’s like you have another angel.” Very sweet.
Then Jeremy and I rode to Nouakchott together, which was a good chance for us to bond a little. Bridging that first-year, second-year gap is tough sometimes, because we share so many experiences with our respective classes, especially during training. Leah and I are at the same site, so we spend lots of time together, but Jeremy’s my only other first-year region-mate and we only get to see each other sporadically. So cheek-to-cheek in bush taxi, that’s where you get to know a person. It’s always better to ride with someone you know, even if it’s just to complain about everyone else.
After eating and showering the country-side dirt-cake off, I felt like going out. I texted like everyone I knew and only my faithful party-partner Andrew agreed to try to hit the town with me. Bad news, Wednesday in Nouakchott, not a great night. The cool bar/club was closed and the sketchy one was empty. So we had ice cream, not bad.
The next day was our Safety and Security session, where we were told lots of stuff we’d already been told and learned some new stuff. A couple of the embassy guys came out to brief us on the political situation and other Ameri-Mauritanian issues. It was the first time in a long time that I’d heard the phrases “good guys” and “bad guys” bandied around like they were going out of style. You know, the Team America mentality, we’ve got the white hats and really cool weapons, they’ve got the black hats and hearts to match. Whew, I’d nearly forgotten about that. I guess that’s just not the way I think. One of the reasons I’m not taking the Foreign Service Exam this time around.
After that, I got in touch with my friend Khadija, who owns and operates her own beauty salon. On the eve of WAIST, I wanted to get my hair did. The boys had grown mustaches and shaved Mohawks for the occasion and it was decided that we girls were to get our hair braided à la pirate wenches? Bo Derek? I don’t know, but a lot of us did it. Lots of girls had it done at site, but I’d seen Khadija work and wanted her to do my hair, so Cailin and I went to her house around 6. Would you believe that my hair didn’t get finished until after midnight? Six! Hours! Halfway through I realized that I wouldn’t be going to dinner and dancing like I’d been jonesing to, and I got sad and mad. But then like an hour into that, Khadija showed me a mirror. I couldn’t be mad anymore, she was doing such a kick-ass job. How vain am I? I’m in love with my braids! It’s been two weeks and I’m not taking them out! Ever! They’re so comfortable and cool-looking. This is really a milestone for me because when I first got here, the white-girl braid-job was soooo anathema to me. Slowly but surely I’ve gotten comfortable with a lot of stuff, like covering my head, but I never thought I’d like having my hair braided. Now I do, go figure. I still can’t get behind the henna-hands and –feet, but maybe that’s just because I hate the smell of henna. Jenny gave me this pomade to put in my hair and it looks like clear Vaseline, but it smells exactly like old-school Strawberrry Shortcake dolls, mmm.
WAIST: We drove down in a caravan of three buses. Sixty of us, what a scene. The two other buses kept getting flats, five or six in total. My bus didn’t get any flats, but as we were caravanning, we stopped when they did. Since we’d piled all our luggage against the doorway (no storage space), we had to jump out of and climb into the bus all day long. The beginning was pretty comical, but by mid-day we were just like the Dukes of Hazzard. Jeff boosted (catapulted) me into the bus many a time, which was fun and funny. I sat between him and Zack the whole way. We had a good time talking about Adam Sandler movies, chewing Bubble Yum, listening to and passing around iPods. We were on the road for sixteen hours that day, from 6am to 10pm, and the only time it got dicey was when about half of the bus decided to have an impromptu sing-along and the rest of us sucked it up and tried to tune it out.
But when we arrived, it was all worth it. Dollar beers all around, then Jenny, Heidi, Stephanie and I met our host for the weekend. Julie is the Political Officer at the embassy, lives in a big house with her huge Rottweiler pup, Baby. She lives next door to the President of Senegal and her pad is phat! Her chef made us a big tray of lasagne and sugar cookies, Julie gave us carte blanche on the DVDs, hi-speed internet, Vonage (free calls to the US), her home gym, a fully stocked fridge and pantry. We tried to go out that night, but we’d missed the rendez-vous with our friends and spent an evening arguing with cabbies. Not fun, and the third night in a row that I’d gotten all dolled up to go out and then been shafted. Luckily, it was the last.
Jenny and I slept in a room with matching comfy twin beds. The next day we slept in and had a pancake breakfast with Julie and then joined our friends out at the field. Our teams had been winning and there’s just something about ball games and hot dogs and beer that’ll bring a tear to your eye if you haven’t seen them in a while. Good clean American fun, batting cages, skee-ball, roller rinks, oh home sweet home! So we ate, drank and were merry all the live-long day. Then we went out for Ethiopian food, good, spicy stuff and then out Dancing, yay. The next day we played more ball, won the tournament, just like last year. It’s a bizarre phenomenon, how a team that’s never practiced, much less played together, manages to win this thing twice in a row. There’s just so much energy coming from all of us, it’s really awesome to be a part of.
After WAIST: On the way back, I rode from Dakar to the border with six first-year volunteers, which was another good opportunity to get to know some “new kids” better. Some of them are super duper cool. When we approached the Mauritanian border, I just wasn’t ready to go back and I suggested that we go to Richard Toll, a sleepy little town about 20k away and swim in the pool. I wasn’t serious when I said it, but one of the newbies took me up on it and we went with it, called our director and asked permission to stay an extra night in the land of plenty and got into another cab while all our friends prepared to cross the river back to dullsville. When we got to Richard Toll, it was a little too late in the day to swim, but we got beers, watched a big riverboat (like Disneyland style) roll by, had some food, and played some pool.
The next day, I made it to Nouakchott just in time for BLTs with Molly and some friends. Oh man, do I love BLTs. Keith, the Bacon Connection, brings it from Canada once every couple months, sooooo goooood! And he brought some Philly cream cheese too, oh man, I was in food heaven. The next day I rode back to Kiffa with Caleb and Jeremy. We bought out the whole back seat, instead of rolling with four in the back, like “normal.” It was comfortable, pretty fast, and the company was good.
The very next day, I had people coming to town for the GMC Mentor’s Conference that had been foisted upon me. I don’t even have mentors! The homestays worked out fine and Caleb cooked us amazing meals all weekend. There were only a few minor bummers: someone who stayed at Andrew’s house stole his brand-new bottle of shampoo and the banana cream pie leftovers, how rude! The other was more indicative of my shortcomings as far as my work here goes. Like I said, I don’t have mentors. When we invited the GMC girls to participate in certain conference events, at least one of them got upset that all these other centers have women working at them and we don’t. She started arguing with the facilitators while I was getting lunch and it was apparently a big scene. I went to Hawa’s house to speak with her afterwards and tried to help her understand that I do want mentors, that I am very conscious of the language barrier and we’re all working to get these things up and running as best we can. I’ve focused on academics, so I’ve found a lot of teachers to come in and work with the girls, but I haven’t yet found mentors. The mentors are the people who’ll take over the place once the volunteers leave, in the big sustainability pipe dream. Hawa had apparently suggested a woman from her family to work with us and I’d shot her down. I don’t remember this, but I probably happened and I just didn’t understand what she was saying.
So since this episode, I’m trying to give the girls more of the reins. I’m asking them to find teachers and mentors and they made the calendar of activities for March yesterday. The calendar has always bewildered to them, and yesterday I learned why. When I had them do it, they wrote the days from right to left, starting with Saturday and ending with Friday. It’s hard for me to read it, but now I understand why they had a problem conceptualizing the calendars I’d made in the Western style. Leah’s working on getting someone trained to teach them computers, get this: in their local languages! That’ll probably work a lot better than the two of us trying to mime computer lessons. So I’m starting to give up control and am sure it’ll work better for everyone this way.
My home life’s pretty awesome, Hawa’s cool as ever. Alassane’s gotten over his bronchitis and, sadly, lost his tooth while I was away. But he’s got a whole mouthful of them and I’ll be the tooth fairy yet, I’m sure. Andrew’s house is all set up and nice, and across the street from our new office, sans creepy landlord. All is well, and Caleb’s dad is bringing my iPod from America. I'll be in shape for that half-marathon next month, ha ha ha. Luckily, the full marathon's been cancelled. My training is happening in fits and starts, due to an inherited bum knee and lots of lazy bones. A bunch of little kids ran with me today. I had the bad luck to pass them while they were on their way to school. Normally, such a situation would make me want to brain them all, since I'd rather not be mocked while I exercise, but it was pretty funny. After a couple minutes, they were all huffing and puffing and dropping like flies. Ha! Brevity, alas, is not my forté. XOXO, a. |
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| Much slow news |
[Feb. 8th, 2006|12:08 pm] |
Mr. Miyagi Died. Yeah, Pat Morita, of Karate Kid fame died some time ago. I just heard about it recently and that’s the biggest reason I can think of why my running mental soundtrack is said film’s theme song. Why don’t we have more power ballads these days? Having the Karate Kid song in my head helps cheer me up when I feel like throttling my students. It’s been a rough week at school. I’ve had to have the directors come in and yell at the kids, and I’ve kicked more of them out and confiscated more phones than usual. Nice phones, phones with digital cameras. Their houses probably don’t have running water, but the kid’s got a Razr. Go figure.
It’s all part of the back-assward priorities problem. When I went to Venezuela just before coming here, one of my uncles there explained to me why Costa Rica is better than Venezuela. If a person has some money in Costa Rica, the first thing he would get is a house, second would be an education for his children, third, a car. But in Venezuela, the first thing everyone wants is the newest Nikes. Here it’s cell phones and cool clothes. Not education or infrastructure. Sure, they want that stuff too, but they’d rather someone else paid for it. The bling they’re willing to shell out for. My school administration is really supportive and come yell at the kids when I ask them to, but things aren’t getting any better. One kid stuck his head in my class window today and made some lewd suggestions. How am I supposed to teach in that environment? How on earth is it that I’m getting propositioned by fifteen-year-olds? I’ve had my fair share of experience with creeps, and young creeps are way more disturbing to me than old creeps. Blech. I only understand half of what they’re saying, but I wish it weren’t even that much. Anyway, it’s the Karate Kid song that takes me back to my happy place.
The other song I’m hearing a lot these days is the Mauritanian national anthem, which is reminiscent of the “Dragnet” theme song, only with much less drum and much more bugle. Or as Andrew said, high school band practice. Bad. And the reason I’m hearing this is that Herr Interim President had been making speeches all this week, one about how the former president sold Mauritania’s soul to the oil people, the others probably having to do with the furor over the Danish cartoons. I’m sorry, but I can do nothing but scoff at heads of state these days. The dude also welcomed the presidents of Senegal and Mali to Nouakchott this week, and the news coverage is just plain silly. No less than fifteen minutes of hand-shaking at the airport. Real-time, but not live. Literally hundreds of people lined up to shake visiting big dudes’ hands. That’s the news in Mauritania.
I think all the demonstrations have wrapped up, which was the old news. The last day of drama here was this past Thursday, but I heard that there were some “strikes” again on Monday in other cities. All weekend, from Friday morning until Monday morning, I was operating under the misinformation that one of the students who’d been injured here had died in the hospital. It turns out the dead guy came from a fight in the market, not school. Fortunately for me, I guess.
Another bit of news floating around is that a volunteer was raped by some locals a while back. When it happened, I got a call from Nouakchott saying that a “serious incident” had occurred and that while the Peace Corps isn’t keeping information from us, they can’t say anything about what happened, in order to protect the volunteer’s privacy. So when Hawa, the Mauritanian lady I live with, came back from Nouakchott, she asked me about it and I of course didn’t know what had happened, but she did. She’d read all about it in the Mauritanian newspaper, including the volunteer’s local name, the location, lots of stuff. Due to that and other things too, we’ve all got a mandatory security briefing with some embassy folk next week, right before we head down to Dakar for WAIST, that’s the West African Intermural Softball tournament for the uninitiated. AKA the best weekend of the year for Mauritanian volunteers. I didn’t think I’d feel like traveling again so soon, but I do.
I haven’t completely settled back into my routine since the holidays. I’ve been meaning to get up and run most every day, but have only made it out a handful of times. Part of the reason is that I haven’t been able to get to sleep and stay up reading most of the night. When I do finally get to sleep around 3 or 4, there’s a slim chance that I won’t ignore my alarm at 6:30. I try to sleep, but it just ain’t happening. I’ve taken to keeping books on either side of my bed and alternating them. Read for a while, try to sleep, pick up the other book, read that for a while, repeat. I finished a couple books about Vietnam vets and one about the Hell’s Angels that way. Chain-reading, if you will. When that gets old, I start organizing my room. In one such effort early this morning, I discovered that the mouse that had magically disappeared from our kitchen has taken up residence in my room. It’s so nice and cozy that even mice want to live there! That’s the bright side, that and I don’t think there are any babies. Yet. I thought maybe I’d get up the courage to trap it with an oatmeal can, but then envisioned freaking out and waking up the whole house to boot and decided against it. So I filched a mouse trap from Andrew’s house this morning and soon my room will have one teeny tiny murder scene. I’ve got the chalk all ready for the outline.
Yesterday I started Julie Powell’s book about mastering “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” I’ll probably finish it today. It’s not just that I’ve got like six extra hours to read at night, but it’s really good too. Even if she’d just cut and pasted her blog into book form, I would have gladly read it all over again. Better still, the book incorporates all the great stuff from the blog and tells more about what was going on in her life at the time. I love her writing soooo much. Bonus: it came to me from my mom via Lisa in an intercontinental Christmas package. The books from her went right to the top of the trunk-full of books in my queue. I’m back in the picture-taking business too. Or I will be once I get to know my new camera a little better. It’s not that I’m technophobic, it just takes me a while to trust my machines. It was after well over a year with my previous camera before I dared try the “video” feature. And now it’s dead. So the new guy sits in my room and we eye each other warily. I’m sure I’ll get down to reading the manual soon, since I’ll want to be taking pictures at WAIST. Alas, I am still mourning the loss of my iPod, but things are getting better (Karate Kid strikes again). And I’m sure that one of these days, I’ll start running again. Not in time to train for a marathon by April, mind you, but approaching that.
At least I’ve stopped watching Oprah. I thought it made me feel better, but really it just made me feel glad not to be addicted to smack, porn, Manolos or whatever the obsession du jour is. It’s healthier for me to read, study French, exercise or even interact with people than to sit around watching the poor slobs on Oprah and Dr. Phil. The TV’s always on, but I can read or hang out with Hawa and Allasane without getting sucked in. They almost exclusively watch Malian music videos, Senegalese news and this one Brazilian soap opera dubbed into French, none of which much interests me.
Allasane spent almost a month in Nouakchott and came back knowing more French than before, which is pretty rad. He's about six and his maternal language is Soninke, but he also speaks Pulaar, another tribal language. He walked into the living room the other day, where I was reading, TV off, and said “Ça c’est quoi?” which is broken West African French for a polite “WTF?” His Hassaniya’s getting better too, so we have caveman conversations now. He’s about to lose one of his front teeth; he wiggles it for me about five times a day. His little gums are changing and you can tell the new teeth are all getting ready to come in, so cool. I’m going to try to convince Hawa to let me be the tooth fairy. The local version is not nearly half as fun: wrap the tooth in a piece of fabric and throw it onto the roof at night, wake up real early the next day to look for the rooster in the tooth’s place. You usually don’t see one, according to Hawa. And we don’t have chickens, so the odds of Allasane seeing one are pretty slim. Yes, I could dig some tooth fairying, and I think the little man would too. Hopefully it doesn’t fall out while I’m in Dakar.
Andrew got back on Monday and in his nearly two whole days here, he’s fixed the fridge, organized the house, and found a place for our new bureau. I’d spent two unsuccessful weeks looking, but didn’t find anything nearly as cheap, clean or convenient as the place he found. He puts me to shame and I love him for it. I can’t even feel bad about comparatively biffing it; he’s just super good at finding stuff. It’s like his superpower. He and Leah are leaving tonight for Agmamine and Kankossa. There’s a nutrition training happening and Leah’s never been down there. Last night around midnight I got a text message saying that we’ll be hosting a mentors’ conference here in two weeks. Hah! While we have no mentors, there’s no shortage of nice Kiffists willing to feed and lodge complete strangers for money. So we’ve got that to plan too.
Hawa’s birthday’s on Monday, the big 2-9. I’m trying to figure out what kind of cake to make. I’ve been cooking at home some recently, which is nice. Nothing fancy, just stuff like pasta and sauce, but they like it, so I’m feeling confident enough to whip out the good old American pancake breakfast sometime soon. I think they can handle it. |
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| Local Unrest! |
[Feb. 3rd, 2006|11:42 am] |
So I was on my way to school the other day when I noticed a lot of kids in the streets. One little bastard even threw a rock at me. Didn’t hit me, not even close, but still. I’m not talking about little kids, these are the junior-high and high-school kids I see most every day. So something’s up. I continue on to make an inquiry at the electric company, as part of my quest for a new office, there are all these other things to think about, like the utilities. After we talked about that a bit, I asked the electric dude what was up with the youth. A third party chimed in that they were unhappy about a cartoon that appeared in a Danish newspaper defaming the prophet Mohamed. Blasphemy thousands of miles away! I know, let’s go on strike!
So the kids are on “strike.” But strikes here have a very local flavor. Not only did they walk out of class at 10, the proceeded to throw rocks at the school, breaking windows and causing general mayhem. I’d heard about this before, when I asked about all the broken windows at my school, but I hadn’t seen any “action” until this week. So they call out the national guard and the regional director of education (DREN) to restore order. I see all this happening and wonder, hmm, should I keep walking to school? Maybe not. So I call my director, Bagga, in Nouakchott and ask him if he knows what’s up and what he thinks I should do. He called up his buddy, the DREN, who said that order had indeed been restored, which is what I’d also heard in the meantime by calling my fellow teachers who were still at school. Bagga told me to lay low for the day, just in case. I don’t have class on Thursdays or Fridays, but yesterday the students went on strike again. The guard was called out again and this time they threw tear-gas grenades and beat kids. The only reason I know this is that I have a friend who works at the hospital and she says four kids were taken there, including at least one girl. And at least two of the kids have head injuries. The kids I ran into in town last night said they were planning to “demonstrate” again today and sure enough I saw guards riding through town, standing up in the back of pickup trucks.
Hopefully things will calm down by Monday, when I’m supposed to teach again. I don’t really know what the kids hope to accomplish by plundering their own schools. They want to be heard by the authorities was all I could get out of them, but why would the governor listen to a bunch of destructive punks? And they’re the ones who suffer broken-down classrooms. I mean, I guess I could see something like this in the past as a symbolic stance against colonialism, breaking down what the imperialists built. But our high school was the gift of another government to the people of Mauritania. Guess which government? Iraq. Ain’t that a kick in the head? So the school’s 24 years old and broken down, mostly because nobody maintains anything or values it enough to not throw rocks at it. And my school administration’s asked me when I’ll be building them a wall and latrines and fixing the doors and windows. |
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| Ingratitude Attitude |
[Feb. 3rd, 2006|10:56 am] |
So recently the lack of gratitude around here has been grating on me. In the beginning, we learned how to say thank you in the local languages and we also learned that we’d probably never hear it. What I am hearing is just a totally different attitude towards gift-giving. I’m trying to make my peace with it. Some examples. The man at the store doesn’t have change, so he gives me candy instead of my change. I give the candy to one of my neighborhood urchins, Youma, a crazy-headed girl of about 3 who roams the streets and loves to shake my hand. I give her the lolly and the response isn’t thank you, but “Aisha, give me candy!” Hmm, that’s what I just did. I just gave you candy, why are you asking me for candy instead of being grateful that I gave you something? Weird. So I go home. After lunch some days Hawa, the lady I live with, gives the leftovers to the brick-makers next door. They eat their own lunch, I’m sure, but when you’re humping cement ten hours a day, overeating’s not really a danger. So in the course of doing the dishes, I go over to the wall that separates our yards and recuperate the bowl. This time I got a thank you. Not a simple thank you, but “thanks, that was good, next time, give me more.” Hmm, yeah, that doesn’t jibe too well with me.
So I’ve been worrying this over the past few days and have decided that it’s just a completely different attitude to receiving gifts. Whereas if I were given a gift, I’d say thanks and think that it was kind of the person to think of me, to give me something that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Gift-giving here is just a billboard saying you’ve got extra stuff or money and the logical response from nearly everyone is, give me more. It can be discouraging at time, like no matter how much we do here, it won’t be enough.
In Caleb’s village, the local women’s cooperative president sat him down a while back and gave him a “what have you done for me lately” trip, the result of which was a grant for about $2,000 worth of materials to enlarge their garden and plant a bunch of fruit trees. After submitting the grant, Caleb realized he could reconfigure existing fence posts and make the extension without having to buy new posts, which are expensive. He talked that over with president big boobs and the local honchos and they all agreed on it. When the money came through, Caleb ordered the materials, but not the fence posts and used that money to dig a well in the garden. Come yesterday, when he and his band of merry men go to undo the fence to extend it on two sides, like they’d discussed numerous times, big boobs herself forbids it. Says that Caleb can’t take the posts from her garden for his garden. His garden? Like he’s not leaving in 6 months, like he didn’t get all this stuff for them? So Caleb’s here now, blowing off steam and meeting with World Vision, who built the original garden, to see if they can smack some sense into the local yokels. |
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