Quiet Reflections on Tranquil Domesticity

I think, besides the whole indoor plumbing and consequential lack of people defecating in the street that sharply divides America from Mauritania, the second biggest difference that is going to take me a while to get used to is the ability to sleep through the night, without moving, regardless of the weather.

 

After returning to the village my evenings took on a simple routine.  I would return from visiting friends and drinking tea and take a bucket bath in my blessedly clean douche.   Read, listen to the BBC, and then crawl into my mosquito net outside.  It being the rainy season I have already abandoned the use of the thin foam mattresses, my door being covered in mosquito netting and a matila being too big and bulky to get through there quickly.   Instead my net itself sits on top of a reed mat that lives outside, and inside is the plastic mat that used to cover my floor in my old house.  It is now folded to a third of its width and rolled up, I simply unroll it a few feet and sleep on that, with the extra roll as a pillow.  Sleeping on the ground is good for your back, right?   Anyway, depending on how loud my neighbors are listening to their radio I either fall asleep peacefully gazing at the fuzzy stars – I miss contacts-, or listening to the dulcet tones of "Tunia FM" the Senegalese station.

 

If I am lucky, I wake up in the morning when the truck leaves to take the radio boys out to the road construction, or when the goat that has burst through the back door starts munching near my net.

 

If I am not lucky, I wake up to find the stars gone, replaced by dark and angry looking clouds, and the wind gusting so that the palm trees in my yard thrash back and forth as if the Tyrannosaurus Rex were about to burst through at any moment and eat Jeff Goldblum.

 

This is my cue to grab my torch, collapse my mosquito net, and run for the house.

 

When I said the rain had come in my last letter I had no idea.  That had been a little shower, a pleasant drizzle.   We have had two real rains since then.  Real, flood the streets, bend the trees, destroy the kheimas, Amy-cowering-in-the-corner-singing-the-complete-score-from-The-Sound-of-Music-type rains.

 

This was about the time I discovered that Thomas's house leaks.  Well, not so much leaks as the window shutter is wired open on the outside wall with no way to close it and the door doesn't close from the inside.   This means that when the wind blows the rain in there is precisely two square feet that are not soaking wet, which is where I sat hugging my pillow and trying to think like Julie Andrews.   By the time I made it through "Eldelweis" I was all right, although I can't honestly say if that was from the singing or from picturing handsome Captain Van Trapp coming to my rescue and carrying me over the mountains to Switzerland (when I was seven Alexandra Vastardis and I would watch this movie and we always fought over who got to be little Gretel, although Brigita was also a favorite of mine).

 

Broadway scores aside, I spent a good part of the week adjusting to life in the rainy season.   My window had to be dealt with, which I did, rather ingeniously I must say, by constructing a shade out of palm fronds, duct tape, string, and a plastic coloring mat sent by Tia Marita that I never got around to using this school year.   You see, this is why Peace Corps Volunteers are banned from being on Survivor- we're just too good. 

 

After that there was the dead goat that suddenly appeared in my backyard.  Truth be told I never really used my back yard since I moved in, it was a kind of lush wilderness, but a lush wilderness of an overgrown date palmery, and date palms, like all African trees, are pointy and painful and do not encourage exploration.   But after the first rain the village chief and the man who had fixed my door, Malik, arrived in my yard, apparently discussing the yearly maintenance of the property- it being a date palm garden and this being the ghetna, or date harvest.   It was as they were poking around my yard that I followed them and discovered the dead goat lying in the kitchen building.

 

"You should get rid of that, Mariem."

"That is not my goat.  I don't have any goats; that is not mine."

"It can't stay there, it would be bad, smelly."

"Yes."

"You should get rid of that, Mariem."

 

The chief said he would pay someone to take it away, then that someone demanded 1000 ouguiya, and suddenly I had to pay.   I needed to think it over, and the man left.  And that was when I discovered it.  Every person has a line, a boundary, a limit, if you will.   And I discovered that, big, brave, brouse volunteer that I was; my boundary stopped about six inches before "hauls away dead and bloated animal carcasses".   If it had been my goat, maybe things would have been different, but it wasn't, and I mean, you really can't put a price on that kind of work, now can you?  So it was as I was going to find the chief to tell him I would pay the bandit's price that I passed by the boutique of my lovable landlord, Siddi Moktar.

 

"Mariem!  Yatma says you have a dead goat in your yard!"

"Yes. It is very smelly, but it is not my goat."

"But it is in your house, you must get rid of it.  Take a string, tie it around, and take it away."

 

I did not dignify this suggestion with a response.  And, as if sensing my reluctance to play with festering corpses, one of my students popped up from his seat on the steps and said he would take it away to the forest for 200 ouguiya.

 

"You," I said, "come with me now."

"And you will pay me 200 ouguiya?"

"Absolutely."

 

On the way he changed his price to 300.  But after watching him tie a string around the goats one remaining horn and drag if across the yard, heave it over the threshold, up the hill, and across the soccer field, the string repeatedly coming loose and having to be retied, I gave him 500.   The goat was bigger than he was.

I had no end of visitors that week.  The very next day Siddi Moktar, that colorful character, and Myelika, a woman related to the family that owns the property, came by to further discuss the maintenance of the palmarie.   They found Thomas's trash pile, the cement ruin next to the kitchen-of-the-dead-goat where he had been tossing his garbage since 2004.

 

"You should clean that Mariem."

"That's not mine!  That's from Thomas."

"But Thomas left."

"Yes, to America."

"You live here now."

"Yes."

"You should clean that Mariem."

"You never made Thomas get rid of that."

"Thomas is a man."

"Yes, but you never made him get rid of it."

"Thomas is a man."

"I suppose."

"What?"

"Yes, yes I said."

"Men do not sweep, women sweep.  Sweep up the trash into your wheelbarrow and take it away."

"No.  It isn't mine.  And if Thomas didn't have to do it than I certainly won't."

"It is not good to live with this."

"Thomas did."

"Thomas is a man."

"I thought we already established this?"

"What?"

"Yes, yes he is."

"Men can live amongst the filth.  Women can not."

 

This last bit is an interesting observation.

 

What followed was more affirmation Thomas was a man and I was a women and in Mauritania women swept and cooked and washed the clothes and took care of the children and gathered the wood and made the fires.  I asked Siddi Moktar what men did.

 

"We pray. And eat."

 

In the end I continued to make fun of Mauritanian men and their apparent fear of real work until they left, and ultimately the same very sweet mute man who cleared out the brush also took away the trash.   I now have a pleasant little oasis with huge palm trees that seem to grow along the ground and then up, making for good seats to sit and read.

 

This is where I spotted my owl.  Last night at dusk a large white bird swooped out of the palm tree over my head and flew across the street.   Sorry Rice people, but it is not named Sammy.  This being a snowy white owl, it could only be Hedwig.  I had suspected he existed since I spotted what resembled owl pellets and the carcass of a small mouse in the far side of the yard that morning. His presence is really vastly reassuring, since it means that those disembodied screeches that I hear in the night are not actually, as previously assumed, a pack of velociraptors.   Although when the donkey's bray it still sounds remarkably like the T-Rex and I begin to glance around anxiously for tell tale ominous ripples in nearby puddles.

 

That is about all the fun news from the rainy season- oh! Wait, with all the fun at my new house, I forgot about my old one.   With the rains flooding the streets, navigating Jidrel Mohghuen to get by beignets in the morning has become a kind of maze, I feel like I'm in a video game a la Chip's Challenge or Zelda.   Only certain paths lead all the way on dryish land, and you frequently have to turn back.  One path takes me by my old house, and after the first storm I noticed a pile of the shiny corrugated metal that they use to make the roofs here, and some familiar looking beams.   Then I realized they were familiar because I had been sleeping under them this past year.  The roof had blown off the veranda of my old house. A peek inside showed more falling beams, one spearing down exactly where I once slept.

 

If that isn't God's way of showing me that I was meant to move to Thomas's house, I don't know what is.   Despite the fact that Thomas's house also has a resident bat.  Although this one seems slightly more clever: he only circles the room once or twice, and he never bangs into things. As a result his display seems more like an assertion of dominance as opposed to the blunderings or my old, myopic bat, whose pathetic and prolonged flights always seemed like more of a cry for help than anything else.

 

And that really is all.  I'm going to by a can of ravioli and a Snickers.

 

Love

amy

We love you Miss Hannigan!

I still see them in front of my eyes.  Running. Yelling.  Eating up all the juicy black dates before I can sit down leaving only the nasty red ones that taste like dust.   And that was during the "rest period."  It's really a miracle any of us are still alive.

 

It was pretty fun though.

 

The event to which I am referring is EcoCamp, a five day funfest for elementary school girls that has been organized by Peace Corps Volunteers in Mauritania for the past three years.  Every village with a volunteer is invited to send two girls and a chaperone for a week of environmental lessons, games, and activities.   This year it was organized by Keith, a man with superhuman speed and endless energy (he is also the stage coordinator for the new EE trainees, so during the first real "break" he had once the newbies went off to homestay, he instead ran EcoCamp)- formerly a volunteer in the northern city of Atar for two years.   Therefore, the camp was held up in that area, in a little village about 30 minutes away called Tawaz- the hottest place on earth.  As volunteers at the camp we were put in charge of logistics, like keeping the plastic water jugs filled and the burlap casing wet to cool the water, and monitoring the level in the cistern so it could be filled before we ran out.

 

 I was put in charge of breakfast.  Unfortunately, we had no large pot to heat water in for coffee, only a little jug that held about two litres.   So I would start heating up batches of water at about 6 o clock and by 7:30 I had filled the bucket with enough hot water to satisfy at least the adults.   We had bread delivered, and I enlisted the help of volunteers in Pulaar villages to make "zrig" also known as "toufam"- basically water with sugar and powdered milk.  I would then walk out into the middle of the school yard with a bucket of bread and a bucket of sugary milk- I felt like I was dropping off steaks in the lion pit.   The children would fall on the bread and jam like ravenous wolves, while the chaperones would recline on their mats and "psst" and snap at me, pointing for me to bring them a bowl of milk.   Ha. I don't think so.  Honestly, the children were better behaved than their chaperones, who seemed to have confused EcoCamp with "day spa."

 

The children were all divided into teams for activities, with 2-3 volunteers in charge.  My team was the Lions.   It included Pulaar, Hassaniya, and Sonnike speakers, so I'm not sure how many of the little dears actually understood what I said, but they smiled a lot.   They were a fiercely competitive group, and absolutely hated losing.  We arrived back second from the scavenger hunt – the first group back included 5 girls from Tawaz, and in my opinion should have been penalized as dirty, dirty cheaters- only to discover we had forgotten an important item, and came in 4 ^th out of 5.  The Olympics were better.  Fadila, a girl from my village, was assigned to the first race.   All the other girls are hunched over, ready to start, and Fadi is just kind of standing their, looking bored with it all.  Then Keith yells go and the sandals fly off and she is miles ahead of the other girls.   She wins, smiles, and then goes back to looking unimpressed.  They also won the relay race. And one of the long jumps.   But the coolest moment had to be the high jump.  This event involved Loic and Adam holding a piece of cord tight and the girls jumping over it and landing on a pile of mattresses.   I was one of the people standing behind the pile- I'm not sure what we were supposed to do if a girl jumped beyond it, but thankfully this was never an issue and all we did was rearranged the mats after each jump.   One of the Lions, Hawa, a Sonnike girl from Michael's village, had already cleared the cord and was now going for an even higher level.  Up til now she had, like all the girls, jumped over the cord by pulling up her knees.   On this jump, suddenly she hits the jump point, spreads her arms, and flys like superman over the line.  It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Especially as Nicole, Mike and I were standing behind the line and saw her flying towards us.   She didn't win, but there was no one to match her style.

 

So we come to the last activity, the girls came in second in the Olympics, btw, and they are rearing to go.  It is a treasure hunt.  Ten flags have been hidden for each team outside the village, and by following clues the girls need to progress from flag to flag until they find all ten and then race back to the school.   I handed the clues to Mike, since I didn't speak Pulaar, which over half of our girls spoke, and our Pulaar speaker, Nicole, was assigned to help monitor the teams.   The idea was that Mike's girls could translate from Sonnike to Pulaar.  Unfortunately for me, this meant I had no idea what was going on.  From the word go Mike would shout out the clue in Sonnike and the girls would be off like a shot.  Of course it helped that, being the lions, our color was yellow and the easiest to spot, so often they didn't need the clues.   Also, keep in mind, these are the girls that won most of the running events the day before, and Mike's sisters are incredibly fast- often they wouldn't bother to translate for the rest, they would just take off.   What resulted was me and Mike frantically sprinting after manic twelve year olds who had scattered across the rocky desert field, pleading with them to stay together and slow down.   By the time we returned to the school, Mike and I were nearly dead.  But we were at least dead and in first place.  

 

Needless to say, by the time Friday morning came around we were exhausted and ready to leave.  I had taken to singing Carol Burnett's song from Annie "Little Girls, little girls, everywhere I turn I can see them…"   The pick up trucks that would pull up at the gate to the school yard began to closely resemble helicopters landing in Saigon.  I eventually got out on the third round of cars, sitting high atop a stack of matilas.  The cars dropped us at the garage in Atar.   Six hours, two flat tires, and a lift in a pick up truck later, we were in Nouakchott, land of the shower –due to the water shortage in Tawaz, most of us hadn't bathed more than once all week.   I spent a blissful afternoon cleaning off dirt and watching cable television in the air conditioning.  Then Keith arrived and took his hard working crew out to dinner in the fanciest restaurant in town.   I had stuffed crab and white wine and fell asleep in a bed.  It was incredible.

 

And now I'm back, looking forward to a week or two of quiet before a two week long training I'm handling for the stove project (since Nicole will be on vacation in the states) in August.   However, the good thing about it – other than the valuable skills it will provide for Mauritanians and the opportunity for cross culturalal blah blah blah- is that events like this will make Nicole and I masters of large scale planning, so that when we do EcoCamp next year in the village of Dieuk, it will be nothing we haven't handled before- inshallah.

 

Oh, and two of the newbies have left, including the one that was supposed to be posted in the village between me and Nicole.   Sadly, that means no new girl nearby to entertain Zack.  He'll get over it eventually.

 

It rained last night, alhamudulilah.  I never thought I would be happy to see this place turn back into a sewer.   But eight months without rain is too weird.  Plus I know the little anklebiters aren't watering the Moringa trees and I don't want them to die.

 

Still hot though.

 

~amy