Great Balls of Sand
I never thought I'de be so glad to leave Nouakchott.
Two days of meetings to discuss the future of the Environmental Education Project in Rosso was about one and a half days too many. I lost the toss among the Trarza volunteers, so while Nicole spent her Nouakchott days on the computer and watching TV in the air conditioning, I got to listen to French for 12 straight hours each day, desperately trying to comprehend the discussion- this was somewhat complicated by the fact that I was sitting behind a man who would not stop talking; a very large, very loud Pulaar school director bearing a striking resemblance to Jabba the Hut.
We eventually decided to keep the program autonomous, and it remains to be seen what changes will occur. The team that had evaluated the program in the field presented their findings, as well as their reccomendations for what kinds of changes should take place, including what type of volunteers should be recruited. They suggested volunteers with a high level of maturity, a strong level of French, and previous classroom experience. At first I was discouraged to find that I no longer fit two of the three criteria to hold my job- then I remembered how I alleviated my boredom during the meeting by making origami swans and quoting Star Wars with Ben. So I guess I just completely fail the profile now.
It's kind of like at Rice when we all assumed we were the admissions mistakes.
In less mind-numbingly-dull news, the storms are brewing down south. The other evening I looked up from where I was reading in my house and saw orange clouds rising in the sky over my compound wall. I ran out the door and up to the river bank to see orange, seething clouds boiling over Dagana, Senegal across the river. The river was still blue and relatively unpreturbed at this point, so it was fairly pretty. The clouds kept growing larger, and it is somewhat disconcerting for someone who always thought clouds came from the sky down not the ground up, and inside you could see blackness behind the swirling dust. As the buildings along the far side of the river were obliterated the rest of my village, including the occupants of the canoe that had just arrived -after pulling for all it was worth across the river, began to shout at me to get inside. When the clouds began to move across the river I picked up my skirts and ran. By the time I reached by door it was already dimming outside and within five minutes it was as dark as night, I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Naturally I wanted to see everything, so I stayed outside to watch the sky turn back from red to orange to yellow to white. This, of course, meant that I was rubbing dirt out of my skin for the next four days. But all in all it was pretty cool.
A few days later Christa decided to quit.
Thus ended an interesting week in the Trarza.
The newbies are coming in at the end of the month, I'll be going back to Kaedi to meet/teach/scare them their first week in country. I'm looking forward to it, plus I get to see my host family.
Internet has been lousy, so I'm taking advantage of the computers here at the office. I also uploaded some more pictures, you can find them here:
posted by amy at 1:58 PM
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