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