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