Come to prosperity

I went to my family's house at 1pm, like usual. There was hardly anyone around on this particular day, but I figured they were at the market -- Saturday is our market day when vendors come from all the surrounding villages to sell produce, and a few vans come from Boghé (the "big city") with fancy things like dangly earrings and perfume and jugs of cooking oil. It's an important day for my family to make money (or not) with what they've grown that week.

Just before 2:00, my sister brought me a single bowl and spoon (Mauritanians all eat with their hands, and I do this on occasion to "integrate," but my family knows I prefer a spoon and they are great about providing me one). No one seemed to be joining me. Had they already eaten? I didn't question it too much because there are frequently things that I don't understand here, so I just started eating. It was a decent hunk of fresh fish, a slice of squash, cabbage -- and neverending rice. Whenever they give me a personal portion, it's absurdly huge. I ate a bit dutifully, and then they dutifully asked me if I was really only going to eat so little, and to please have some more. Finally they gave up and my sister Kadia started picking at it, and she called the smallest children over. I immediately felt bad that I'd eaten as much as I had, as they scrounged at my leftovers.

I sat there awhile reading the magazine I'd brought with me, even though still no one was around. The old man came and sat in silence with me. Finally he said my name. "Today is not good," he announced in Pulaar. Why, I asked? He looked tired. "It's not good," he repeated. Then he said something else in Pulaar, but I didn't understand. He gave a tight-lipped, wry smile.

I looked up the word in my dictionary when I got back to my room. It means "poor person." As in we're so poor today we couldn't eat lunch? But they still fed me...

Talk about giving poverty a face. It's not "somewhere in Africa people are starving." It's Kadiata Ann. It's Abdoul Thille. It's my favorites whom I love and who love me and love life. I want to give them all the money they need, I thought, so these children never have to miss another meal.

But they're only one family.

But still they are one.

But money doesn't solve the problem. That's such a typical Western response. Will education help you? I pray to God it does.

As I struggled with these thoughts in my journal, the sunset call to prayer came over the mosque loudspeaker. Haya ala salah -- come to prayer. Haya ala falah -- come...

To prosperity.

"Yes, we can" vs. "No, you can't"

Today Barack Hussein Obama is President of the United States of America. I was so fortunate to be able to come to Boghé and watch the ceremony live on a friend's satellite TV (dubbed over in French). As our new president spoke of reaching out to the world, I sat between two black African Muslims. A child of three years old fussed in the corner and was reprimanded by his parents as he kept loudly calling out the names he's heard so often now: "Wah-sheen-ton! Leen-con! BARACK OBAMA!"

It is a happy day.

Now that we have begun our second trimester of school, the size of my English classes has leveled off a bit from what I was originally assigned. Here are my current numbers:

1st year (ages 10-17) : 15F + 18M = 33 students
2nd year (ages 12-19) : 24F + 48M = 72 students
3rd year (ages 13-20) : 19F + 35M = 54 students
4th year (ages 13-22) : 7F + 25M = 32 students

You can see that in each year there are more males than females, and this only becomes more pronounced in the higher levels. I'm sure you can guess the reasons: young pregnancies/marriages (as young as 12 is not uncommon), responsibilities at home, lack of importance given to girls' education.

So I have 191 students altogether. I want very much to know all their names -- this was crucially important to me as a teacher in the States. But it's quite difficult here when I see my kids each only once a week. Also, here all students are assigned numbers, so when I take roll, I am not calling out their names. It's just "Number 1? Number 2?" I don't like it. It feels a little too Auschwitz to me. But besides that, many kids have similar names. I have two girls in 1st year with the exact same first, middle, and last name. I have 10 boys named Oumar and 13 named Mamadou. It's a constant effort.


In America we have a general notion that with enough positive reinforcement, children will gain confidence in their abilities and thus achieve great things. (Look at Obama with "Yes, we can!") It is the opposite here. Lately I have been helping my sister Goggo with her French homework. She is in the 4th year of primary school. Traditionally teachers here use a lot of rote memorization, so I sit with Goggo as she painstakingly repeats the same short paragraph out of her book, over and over and over. The other night she sighed at last and asked me, "Am I getting it or not?" "Yes, of course you are! You're doing great," I told her. "No, she's not," her older brother interjected, "she's terrible. She can't do anything." The thought is that this will make the girl want to work harder and she will eventually succeed.

I disagree. I wanted to slap him.

And now for something completely different... I leave you with a fun picture of me and Amanda a few weeks ago in Nouakchott. We found a Mexican restaurant called Fiesta, which was very exciting to us. On the tables they had little napkin holders with various names of Mexican towns. This one is "Matamoros," somewhere I've been, a border town with Brownsville, TX:


Why was this humorous to me? Because the name Matamoros in Spanish means "Kill Moors." (This here in Mauritania, literally "Land of the Moors.")

Holiday travels

Happy New Year to everyone! I have been having a wonderful vacation -- and it's not over yet. ;) December 23rd I bade so long to my Dar El Barka family, sang Christmas carols to myself as I sat on the side of the road at 6:30am to wait for the Boghé car, and made my way into town to see all the PCVs from my region of Mauritania. Our halls were decked with paper snowflakes and care-package tinsel, and we even made everyone little stockings -- stuffed, too, of course!


Then on Christmas Eve it was off to Nouakchott, our promised land. Strange that I'd been in this country over six months and still hadn't seen the capital. Lonely Planet describes Nouakchott as "hastily constructed," "lacking charisma," "discombobulating," "shambolic," "unbelievably filthy" -- but for us it is truly, to borrow phrase, a land flowing with milk and honey. Peace Corps put us all up in hotels that blew my mind... Real beds! Hot showers! Western toilets! Bathtubs! TV! Remote-control air conditioning! Fridge! Wireless internet! And don't even get me started on all the amazing things you can eat here that aren't available most anywhere else in the country -- cheese, ice cream, pizza, Italian & Chinese food. We didn't know where to begin! Plus our country director generously hosted all 120-some of us PCVs at his home for an exquisite homemade dinner.


Although Mauritania is an Islamic republic and all its people are Muslim, ex-pats are free to practice their own religion. So a group of us found the one Catholic church in Nouakchott and attended mass on Christmas morning -- what a cool experience, about 400 people from all over Africa and Europe. And I also squeezed in some time to watch my favorite "It's a Wonderful Life" on my laptop. It was about as good as Christmas could get without being home!


After all that, my training sitemates and I headed back down to PK7 to visit our old host families for a few days. When we asked the taxi driver to let us off on the side of the road, he was sure we were mistaken, because it's definitely the middle of nowhere. But as we walked through the sand, past the power plant that does not power PK7, our families spotted the white kids lugging hiking packs and came running to hug us all. They were sooo overjoyed! We were served endless tea (of course), and my family made a special trip into Rosso the next day to buy the finest fish they could afford. I am continually humbled by the amazingly selfless Pulaar people.


The next stop on our agenda was historic Saint-Louis, Senegal, the former capital of all French West Africa and now a quaint little beach town that many call a "run-down New Orleans" (no surprise, as the French influence is still quite evident, and the town hosts an international jazz festival every May). My mom asked me if Senegal is much different than Mauritania. When you take the ferry across the Senegal River, the people still speak the same language and have the same religion and come from the same families -- the border town even has the same name -- but it's an entirely different world. Immediately. Over 90% of the people are Muslim, but they are almost all black (unlike in Mauritania, where there is racial tension between the roughly equal numbers of Arabs and blacks). Dress is much less conservative in Senegal. Alcohol is not prohibited. Infrastructure, i.e. roads and available transportation, is infinitely better. And even in the smallest corner stores, there is such a variety of *things* that you just can't buy in Mauritania. Potato chips, roasted peanuts, and yes, beer -- we were impressed again and again.


It was hard to leave, but all the first-year PCVs made our way back to Nouakchott for our Early Term Reconnect conference, where I am now. We were surprised to find out about this mess in Gaza (hard to keep up with the news when you're on the road), and even more surprised to see the reaction in Nouakchott. Mauritania is one of three Arab countries to have diplomatic relations with Israel, and many people here are not too happy about that. There were some marches this week, some tires burned and rocks thrown, but nothing you all should worry about. We watched some of the demonstrations from afar, high up inside the Peace Corps Bureau (it's in the tallest building in the country). We are safe and sound, as we were assured yesterday in person by the U.S. Chargé d'Affaires to Mauritania. Just makes life a little more interesting...

May all your Christmases...

The other day, my brother Alassane held up an eggplant and asked me what it was called in English. (Everyone in the family enjoys learning as much vocab as possible.) I told him, and he repeated the new word. Then the 15-year-old sister Kadia informed me that in Pulaar, it's called aubergine. "Actually," I told her, "aubergine is French. In Pulaar it's batayse." Everyone roared appreciatively. "You're right! Kadia doesn't know Pulaar, but you do! Raky is a true African!"


I've mentioned that I still don't know how the 17 people in my family are all related. There are many reasons for this. First of all, it's considered rude to ask people directly how many children they have. It is not strange for children to call their parents by their first names, or, alternatively, to call relatives who are not their biological parents "Mother" and "Father." Husbands and wives don't typically wear rings, nor do they publicly show any affection. Women always keep their family surname. And oftentimes in villages like mine, the husband lives and works off in a bigger city and only comes to visit on major holidays -- so a woman may be married and you wouldn't even know it, although she will live with the husband's family. And similarly, children from very small villages without a school often go to live with relatives where there is one. Thus, you can see where my difficulty arises... I have learned some helpful hints, though, such as the fact that many children are given their father's first name as their middle name. This is how I discovered that Fatimata Samba is the daughter of Samba. But then there is the practice of a mother and father giving their child two totally different names. That same child is called Fatimata by her father (and everyone else), but her mother calls her Mariam. Confused yet??

In any case, I got to meet a few new family members to add to the mess during the Tabaski celebration the week of December 8th. It was nice to be off from school for a few days and to eat some good food. Banafe is my favorite dish -- a mutton stew with big chunks of potato. I also had a very traditional outfit made, which really impressed my family. They gushed, "When you wear that in America, everyone will say you are so beautiful!" I don't know, you be the judge:


I gave my Trimester 1 final exams this week, and now my vacation has officially begun! I am headed tomorrow to our national capital, Nouakchott, to spend Christmas at the country director's house with all of Peace Corps Mauritania. Then my friends and I will travel back down to PK7 to visit our host families from training this summer. After that we will ring in the new year with a few days in Saint-Louis, Senegal -- the land where alcohol is not illegal! ;) And finally, all the first-year PCVs will be back in Nouakchott for our five-day Early Term Reconnect conference. I won't be back in my village until January 10th. I am much looking forward to these amazing couple of weeks spent with friends (and electricity and running water and showers and real beds)!

Are you familiar with this song "Do They Know It's Christmas Time At All?" It was a collaboration of musicians for Band Aid, raising funds to eradicate poverty worldwide. U2's Bono was the driving force behind it, and while I respect him and appreciate his efforts, I find this song so absurd. "And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas..." No, there won't, but there won't be any in Austin, TX, either. Is it less of a Christmas? "Do they know it's Christmas time at all?" No, Bono, I'm here to tell you they don't -- but did you know it was Tabaski?

True, there won't be snow, but there just might be rain -- which is nearly as unexpected! The wet season here runs from July to October, and it is very rare for any rain to fall outside that time. But a few nights ago, I was awoken in the night by a distinct pitter-patter on my roof (and by the grumpy goats outside my wall, unhappily stirred from their slumber). And my first thought was -- it's not possible! It's a Christmas miracle!

And so, may your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases... be wet.

Where the love-light gleams

OK, first of all, I take back what I said about the cold season. Even with a hoodie, I was shivering waiting for a car to Boghé yesterday! And I laughed because I'm sure it couldn't have been much below 68 degrees. What would I do in Boston these days, I wonder? But we PCVs all keep complaining, "I was freezing last night!" Guess we're fully "integrated" and are already wusses about our tolerance of cold.

Thanksgiving was a great time spent with friends here. There aren't exactly any turkeys in Mauritania, but we did find a duck! (Bought live, of course, but I did not take part in the subsequent slaughtering.) We had quite the spread, including some helpful goodies sent from America. Our menu comprised: duck, chicken, mashed potatoes & gravy, stuffing (Stove Top & homemade), cranberry sauce, cornbread, squash, beef & veggie kebabs, ranch dip, okra casserole, macaroni salad, "pumpkin" pie (actually a squash), carrot cake, and banana cream pie. Not bad for Africa!


Teresa and I were really excited to have our own little "Black Friday" shopping, as we browsed the market for fabric to make new outfits. With all the ceaseless bargaining and crowds of people, it felt almost as stressful as in the U.S.!


My mom sent me a little cardboard "Christmas tree-in-a-box," so I happily set that up in my room this week. I even indulged a bit and used some of my precious laptop battery power to listen to holiday tunes. It seemed appropriate to start with "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas." I find it so hard to really comprehend that it's the Christmas season in America. Time kind of stands still here. The next song on my playlist was "There Is No Christmas Like a Home Christmas" -- and I couldn't help it, I got a little misty-eyed. But then Bing Crosby reassured me that "Christmas Eve will find me / where the love-light gleams / I'll be home for Christmas / if only in my dreams..."


And I have good times to look forward to here. This Monday is Tabaski, the biggest Muslim holiday of the year! Everyone gets a fancy new outfit made, and relatives travel long distances to be together. My family has been eating rather cheap dinners the last few nights, and I know it's because they're saving up for the big FEAST next week. I am told there will be endless portions of goat (the traditional celebration meal). And of course, we're off from school for a few days!

So, I'm having hybrid holidays. The best of both worlds, perhaps?