It's That Time of Year

Happy Halloween!

It's a very happy time here in this, my beloved Islamic Republic.  With Eid al Fetir (literally "Holiday of Tiredness") in Arabic, the end of Ramadan celebration last Monday, behind us, I am free to eat, drink, and be merry all the time.  It is amazing how ridiculously happy I was to be able to walk down the street in my village munching on donut holes again- yes, technically eating and drinking in public is still somewhat rude, but I think they all forgave me this lapse as I was in the middle of me I'm-not-fasting-anymore-and-the-donut-lady-is-back-at-last high.  This is also because during Ramadan, inexplicably, a man with an ice cream cart was glimpsed around town in Rosso.  That's right, an ice cream cart.  Hallucination?  We all thought so, after all, the sun is hot, and we were thirsty.  But no, Nicole looked inside one day and said that yes, there was, in fact, ice cream in there, and cones!  I have yet to find him since the end of Ramadan, but the thought that I might see him at any time while I'm in town brings a smile to my face.

Things that don't bring a smile to my face, my continuing discovery of my own mechnical ineptness.  The memory of my wheelbarrow failure is still fresh in my mind, and last time I was in town I purchased a mousetrap.  I have  no problem with the mice when they are only in my room at night, I sleep outside, and if they don't leave a mess on the carpet.  But lately Mrs. Frisby and friends have been running amuck during the day- and they don't even seem that scared of me.  The time has come for them to die.  But when I brought my shiney new trap home, I couldn't figure out how to set it.  There was the big bar you pull back, I got that part, but then there were three little bits that didn't seem to fit in anywhere.  My only memory of mouse traps was Pops making me empty one when I was 12 after I had complained that I could hear the rats running around in the attic above my room at night.  Mom thought I shouldn't have to do it,  and I learned not to complain about the mice anymore.  Tomorrow I'll just have to go to the store, buy another trap (retail value 30 cents) and make them set it up for me.

Other than glaring at unrepentant rodents and gorging myself, it has been a quiet time.  School did actually start, but no one has come the week of the holiday, and with the election campaigns starting soon, who knows what will happen.  but in an attempt to make school a more stimulating environment, I have been drawing a large map of the world on the wall of the 5th and 6th year classroom.  it is 3 meters by 1.5 meters, and I had to draw the large grid first using a two foot straight edge, so it has taken some time, but it is going to be magnificent when it is finished.

Speaking of magnificent things to be finished, my community counterpart and I have been working on a project to renew the village health clinic.  It's is basically falling down, and there are no toilets, or window shutters, or all that many windows for that matter.  We put together a proposal and a budget and I have just finally gotten it through the several hoops Peace Corps Washington lights on fire in order to get a proposal approved.  Through a program called Peace Corps Partnership, Peace Corps enables donors to contrrbute funds towards volunteer projects.  As a requirement, my village is providing a little over 25% of the costs to rennovate the clinic.  The rest, inshallah, will come from interested donors ( i.e. people like you).  So if you or anyone you know is looking for a worthy cause to donate some funds to, you can find my project proposal at :

http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.volproj

 

Just scroll down to Mauritania, and you should see my name, I'm the only volunteer in country with a project up right now.  It is project number 682-079.  Clicking on the link takes you to a summary of the project, and on the summary page there is a link to donate.

Every little bit helps, so if you were planning on sending me any Christmas packages or anything like that I would rather you save the postage and put it towards the clinic.

 

Now I'm going to go enjoy eating lunch.

love

Amy

 

The Caterpillar Jihad

I was out of the village a lot this summer.  I had work in the north, in the east, in the west, pretty much anywhere outside my village.  That being the case it wasn't until the beginning of September, when the newbies were sworn in and settled that I got a chance to take stock of the state of the Moringa trees in my garden at the school.
The stock was not good.
They didn't have any leaves, or the ones that they had were all little and bad.
There was also grass growing wild all over the place, and as I crossed the garden every little step I took sent a cloud of grasshoppers flying up out of the grass to settle a few feet in front of me, where they would inevitably jump again with I reached that spot.  I felt kind of like PigPen, but instead of clouds of dirt I sent up clouds of grasshoppers.
Aha, I thought, the grasshoppers are eating my trees.  We had been taught that weeds are where unwanted pests come from, so I spent the next week going to the garden every morning and cutting and pulling up the grass all around the trees.  I took a rest over the weekend and came back on Monday to find the trees worse than ever.  As I sat there, willing the Moringa to speak to me and name their killer, rather like a forensics detective (CSI Mauritania, hmmmm), I saw a tiny movement down the trunk of the nearest sapling.  A caterpillar.
Little light bulb goes on.  Those leaves have the unmistakable look of being eaten by caterpillars.
Of course, I had no idea how to get rid of caterpillars, other than squishing them between my fingers.  So that's what I did.  Every morning for the next two weeks I went to the garden and looked above and below every single leaf of every tree.  It's a good thing only 8 have survived or I would have been there all day.  Needless to say I will never be able to read to my children that literary classic with the funny pages, "The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar," because the sight of its ravenous protaganist might make me burst into tears.  By the second week I pretty much considered myself on a mission from God, like the Blues Brothers.  God wanted me to kill these caterpillars, which were trying to destroy his delicate and fragile creation.  So I embarked on the caterpillar jihad.  In addition to simply hunting down and killing every caterpillar I could see, I also used chemical weapons- a insecticide made from the crushed leaves of the Neem tree.  It didn't seem to work that well, but it did give me a day with 2 entirely caterpillar-free trees.
My father loves "A Prairie Home Companion," and plays it often in the car on long trips.  There is a story that Garrison Keillor tells about Tent Caterpillars, and how a man from Lake Wobegone uses a rubber caterpillar placed on his neighbors tomato plants to terrorize the competition for the local fair.  It was not until now that I was able to appreciate how truly sick he was.
The first day of school was last Monday, which means the teachers should show up this week and classes might be going by next week.  Once the students return I hope to enlist legions of children to help me in my battle against all of larvae-kind.
Aside from the insect genocide the village has been quiet, and with good reason.  September 24th marked the beginning of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.  Adults do not eat or drink from sun up to sun down.  I had absolutely no intention of joining in these kind of reindeer games, until my counterpart told me I couldn't.  "You, fast, Mariem?  Oh no, you could not do this."  So I did.
What am I, five?
I don't fully fast though, I drink water, because not drinking water in this climate is suicidal.  And techinically Muslims are not required to fast when travelling, so when Nicole and I headed north, we stopped fasting.
We took a lovely 5 hour taxi ride to Atar, way out in the desert.  As it turns out, several other people were already there, and planning on taking our same trip, so when we left Atar the next day for Choum ("chume"), we were 7 in total.  Getting to Choum requires about three hours off road trek into the Sahara, but at least we were on the back of a pickup.  It provided spectacular views when we were coming down off the plateau.  Atar is on top of a plateau that is itself on top of a plateau, the result is that you never see it coming when you arrive, and when you leave, as you drive to the edge of the plateau, the worl just seems to end.  Until you start down and the whole desert starts spreading out before you.  I wish I had had my camera, we were all dumbfound- except for the one Mauritanian woman in the back who had her mulafa pulled over her face and kept her eyes covered with her hands until we were down the cliff.
Arriving in Choum we then got to wait, all day, for the arrival of "the train"- which was the whole reason Nicole and I had come north in the first place.  The company that mines iron ore in the north ships it out of the port city of Nouadibou- and there is a long train (a kilometer or two in length) that transports the ore from Zourat, way up in the north, south to Choum and then westwards across the remaing third of the country to the ocean.  Choum is where the train turns from going south to heading west.  The train is well known, it has actually been written about in Lonely Planet- which is actually not that surprising considering how little there is to write for tourists about Mauritania.  But whenever a tourist talks about the train, they always seem to think that you are supposed to ride the train east, from Nouadibou to Choum, in the empty cars.  "You can't ride that train in the other direction, it's full of iron ore!"
Sissies.  That's the only way volunteers ever ride this thing.  Now, technically there is a passenger car on the end of the train, but it costs money and is usually ridiculously full. (After you have smelled an unwashed Moor you can then tell me how you would feel about riding in a enclosed car with them for the next 14 hours.)
The passenger car is for sissies.  Here is how you are supposed to ride this train:
Just after sundown it pulls into the stretch of track that the village of Choum is built around.  It stops for 10 minutes, during which time you climb onto an ore car, swing your bags up, and clamber on top of the ore.  We were lucky, as you can either ride on top of pointy, rocky ore, or finer ore that looks like sand.  We had a train full of sand.  It was the devil when it got in your eyes, but it made for comfy sleeping.  You then pull on as many layers as possible, wrap your hawli- or turban- around your head to keep your face from becoming back and save your lungs from the dust, and sit back and enjoy the ride.  We even had a full moon, so you could see far out into the desert as we raced along.  It was very cold at night, and we ended up all clustered together like kittens to go to sleep.  We made good time, getting into Nouadibou the next morning at 8:30 and heading to the home of Mark, quite possibly the nicest guy in the world. (Who else would open up his house time after time to hungry, sleep deprived Mauritania volunteers covered in black dust?)  He had a pot of soup waiting for us and a warm shower.  This is yet another reason why riding the train in the other direction is stupid.  Why would you go through that cold, miserable trip, only to end up in Choum- the armpit of Mauritania -and that's saying something- with nothing to look forward to but a rough and tumble 3 hours back to Atar?  When you could ride the other way and get to Nouadibou, with its electricity, it's beautiful climate (70 degrees!  I was cold in the middle of the day!), it's Chinese food, and its beer?  I think all evidence points to the volunteer-wagons-west method being far superior.
Nouadibou is probably one of the coolest cities I have visited in Mauritania.  It is on a peninsula, so it has a normal climate, as opposed to the rest of the country.  And lots of seafood.  And beer.  And a Catholic church that had mass in English, French, Portuguese, and Wolof.  In the same mass.  I think the Lords prayer chanted in Wolof was one of the coolest things I have ever heard in church.
I enjoyed Nouadibou.  I didn't want to leave.
But I did, and now I'm back.
The question is will the caterpillars have left me anything to salvage?
love
amy
ps. I think I still have iron ore dust in my ears.