Here is a link to some of my thoughts about Peace Corps as a career option. The link is to a blog written by a current Cornell student, who is writing a series about what Cornell graduates are doing post-university.

http://cupamo.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/transition-story-joining-the-peace-corps/

I couldn't get the link to work but you can just copy and paste this and find my thoughts about the Peace Corps.

The other day, I gave a talk to a group of college students studying abroad in Europe and visiting Morocco for a short time. They were an interesting audience because they were new to Morocco. They were clearly an active, intelligent group who had already learned a lot about Morocco and made plenty of interesting obeservations, however they were still in the honeymoon phase enjoying the novelty of Morocco. This contrasts with almost everyone else who I interact with on a daily basis who is either Moroccan or a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) who has been living in Morocco for enough time for the novelty to wear off. After six months a lot of thing that have become normal to me were surprising to these students. After the talk the organizer, an ex-PCV herself, mentioned to me that, " it sounds narcissistic but speaking about Peace Corps to this group makes you realize how cool of an experience Peace Corps actually is."

One of the first questions was, "do you hang out with locals," " how do you meet them." I laughed and replied that living in Taroudant I spend all day interacting with Moroccans, everyone from the Director of the Youth Center where I work, to the guys I play soccer with, to the guy who sells me bread are Moroccan. The question reminded me how lucky I am to have the opportunity to interact with people from another culture on an hourly basis. PCV's often take for granted how easy it is for us to meet Moroccans and we are routinely invited to people's homes for tea or meals. Granted, the excitement often wears off after the 100th cup of tea or the 300th time we have to affirm the greatness of Moroccan tea. It's true, the tea is great, but exclaiming it's virtues four times a day for six months becomes repetitive.

I told them a story about a time in Mauritania when I spent four days at a wedding en brosse (in the middle of nowhere). They asked what I did with myself, a question that could be asked of nearly any four day period of my Peace Corps service. I replied that we played checkers in the sand using dried camel droppings vs. small sticks instead of the usual American style of red vs. black. This seemed to me like a logical way of playing in the desert, far away from the nearest Walmart, but judging by their reactions it sounds to the American ear like an unusual way of playing.

One person asked, "why wouldn't you do Peace Corps forever?" "If you like cross-cultural interactions so much why not just do it forever." Well, I don't think my mother would be happy about that. One of the things that I have learned while living abroad is how distinctly American I am. Spending time with people who have had completely different life experiences than mine, they have never watched Nickelodeon or played little league baseball, and I have never killed my own sheep, makes me appreciate my own culture and how deeply it is ingrained in me. Cross-cultural experiences are fascinating, but at some point we are all most comfortable living amongst people who grew up in the same culture that we did.

Keeping with the theme of narcissism, their questions made me appreciate how much I have learned about Morocco in in these six months. One person asked, "I heard we shouldn't use the word "Berber," is this true?" Berbers are the indigenous people to Morocco and still make up a significant portion of the population although they prefer to be called "Amazigh." I have had many conversations with Moroccans of varying opinions about a plethora of issues related to Amazight culture, including how they should be refered to, and while I don't claim to know nearly as much about any of the issues as the least-interested Moroccan, this question made me feel knowledgeable about Morocco.

On a random side-note, while watching Shrek the other day, I realized that Morocco is in fact a "Kingdom, far, far away." The King of Morocco is a real King with plenty of political power and while the donkeys here don't talk, however they do grunt a lot, Morocco does have its own type of magic.

For the past few months blog post have been few and far between. It's not because I haven't had anything too say: Taroudant and Morocco are incredibly interesting places and I could write about these places and my experiences until even my mother would get too bored to read any more. I haven't been writing because I have been busy, a problem I never had in Mauritania, getting to know various association in Taroudant, moving in to my own place and playing basketball. I realize that the following article that I wrote for our internal Moroccan Peace Corps newsletter, doesn't necessarily fill the role of a blog but I think that some of you might find it interesting. I'm sure others will find the article appalling. Anyway here is what happened on the evening of February 4th.

If you have never joked with your host family about your ability to eat 20 eggs, to finish a half-full tajine or to eat a blazing hot pepper, then your name is not Samuel G. One day his host father asserted that Sam couldn't finish 10 eggs, Sam countered that he could eat 11. His host father replied that perhaps 12 was within Sam's range and pretty soon the challenge escalated to the host father stating that there was no way that Sam could eat 20 eggs. This prompted Samuel to make a vow. A vow that he would prove his host father wrong and eat not just 20, but 21 eggs. In addition to personal fulfillment, they made a bet, or what Sam thought was a bet after his limited Arabic and his host family's rooster impersonations. The terms: If Sam could eat the 20 eggs, his host family would give him three roosters; but if not, then Sam would give the family his recently purchased, nice acrylic Spanish blanket. After discussing with region-mates, a Peace Corps training session was chosen as the venue for this bet. Juan Camillio Mendez Guzman, sensing a chance to prove his mettle, jumped at the opportunity to compete and the spectacle was scheduled for Thursday, February 04, 2010.

The preparation began after the usual 7:00 pm dinner when a troop of volunteers went to a local hanoot to buy the 42 eggs necessary for the competition. Upon returning to the “Auberge du dernier lion del’Atlas,” eggs were scrambled and hard-boiled and placed on two plates. Each plate contained a carefully crafted ring of ten scrambled eggs encompassing another ten meticulously shelled hard-boiled eggs and topped off with one last glorious, un-shelled hard-boiled egg set perfectly in the center of the feast - it’s brown shell glistening in the fluorescent lights of the Auberge dining room - just as Sam had envisioned the dish during that fateful conversation with his host family.

The competition started at precisely 10:04 pm amidst a crowd upwards of 30 Yd’ers eager for a break from the monotony of Peace Corps training. Samuel later commented that the initial crowd was almost overwhelming and he was glad for Juan Camillio’s attention-drawing charisma to deflect the attention. However, the loyal fans who stuck it out until the end made a huge difference. Side bets also played a critical role in providing motivation, or as Sam put, “ I love rising up to a challenge.” Gambling also played a role in Juan Camillio’s partial success. His entire strategy consisted of doing whatever it took to eat more than 17 eggs, which was the bet placed by the author who doubted that Juan could eat more than 17 eggs. He ate 18.

The match really started to heat up around Egg 15 when Samuel initially started shaking. A few eggs later someone observed his shaking and Sam kept his trademark cool and flatly stated, “I’ve been shaking since Egg 15.” The scrambled eggs had disappeared quickly, but the last few hard-boiled eggs, especially the yolks, were the real struggle. Sam remarked at one point, in response to unrealistic advice from the peanut gallery to chug an egg, “You don’t understand the yolks…man.” As Sam dealt with his final eggs, it was a solo effort. Juan Camillio had already gracelessly bowed out, his work as the pacer done. After a strong start he had been struggling. He nearly vomited, was shaking uncontrollably and even took his shirt off, much to the dismay of the crowd.

If an egg has ever been eaten slower than Sam ate Egg 19, this author has never seen it. In fact, one observer took a long break from the competition and was shocked to return and find that Sam had only finished one egg in the meantime. The final Egg 21 was especially dramatic as Sam crumbled the entire egg into pieces approximately the size of a grain from your favorite Friday couscous meal. He then proceeded to eat each grain of egg, one by one, in a process that seemed to take almost as long as the most drawn out training session. One loyal supporter later remarked that the final egg took, "so fricking long." Nonetheless, Sam persevered and after 1 hour and 19 minutes of continuous egg-eating - he finished his plate. He would later comment that for the final two eggs he had, “absolutely nothing on my mind.” When someone asked him what he would do next he replied, “I am going to eat an orange, then I am going to walk upstairs, and say hello to people.” That remark was immediately followed with a confused look and comment, "man that was a stupid sentence." Sam then remarked with a well-deserved smile, “ hey, I just won three roosters!”

Reactions from the Moroccan crowd were mixed. Malika, our language coordinater said, “This is dumb.” Amina, a new Arabic teacher, said that, “Americans are crazy.” I think that anyone who saw the competition would be forced to agree with her assessment. Aziz, the hotel owner, said that this was a zwayn adventure, but that he had once seen someone eat a scorpion and that was crazier. Aziz then suggested that Samuel follow up the 21 eggs with 22 oranges. He also generously brought out some oranges for the crowd who alternated between hunger and nausea as they watched the gladiators struggle to achieve their goals.

Numerous observers astutely noted that eating 21 eggs was not healthy and the competitors' post-match feelings supported all of the aspiring doctors in the audience. Juan Camillio reflected after the contest that his mouth tasted like a sponge and that if he stood up he felt, “Eighteen eggs rolling around in my stomach.” One witness observed that, “Juan looks worse than he did last night.” A reference to the previous night's activities in which another volunteer's birthday was over-celebrated by many. At the time of the contest Juan had been sporting one of the least attractive moustaches in the history of bad Peace Corps facial hair. As some egg became stuck in the mustache, one especially astute observer noted that, "eggs in a mustache are not appealing." Samuel’s first comment post-match was that he felt “xayb… I just feel bad. Not full, my stomach doesn’t hurt. I just feel bad.” He also remarked that, “If I had to do this frequently, I would hate my life.” Readers will be happy to note that the next day both Sam and Juan felt fine, although slightly full. Sam observed he felt pretty much how he would have felt if he had just eaten four or five eggs.

As a very American looking American living abroad people often immediately ask me where I am from. This is then followed by a question or a comment to their friends about their first impression of America. Sometimes this first comment is about politics or America’s role in the world, sometimes it is to ask if we drink tea or not in America but usually people’s first instinct is to ask me about Justin Timberlake or Celine Dion. It is especially amusing to me that the biggest supporters of Justin Timberlake, the Back Street Boyz and friends are teenaged or 20-something boys. The same boys who in America would be listening to death metal and disrespecting authority.

People’s perspectives of Americans are based on both television and the little that they interact with actual Americans. Americans travelling through Morocco have several objects that are unique to them. The number one prize of course goes to the Nalgene water bottle but following close behind is the frisbee. While Americans might think of baseball or apple pie as symbols of American and might not have any idea what a frisbee is Moroccans immediately identified the frisbee as an American game. After a game of catch with a fellow volunteer who came into my town for an errand I was walking through town with a frisbee and I was expecting to be met with surprise or at least lack of recognition. Instead everyone seemed to know what a frisbee was and while I doubt the accuracy of the average Moroccans upwind hammers they all seemed to have a general idea of how to throw a frisbee. I think a lot of this comes from the nature of people that travel through Morocco and Taroudant specifically. While Taroudant definitely sees its fair share of busloads of Middle-aged French and German tourists a good percentage of tourists in Morocco are of the frisbee carrying hippie type. Just enough hopefully to change the image of America from Justin Timberlake and Celine Dion (who is Canadian by the way) to my favorite disc-shaped object.

Yesterday Moroccans and their brothers throughout the Islamic world celebrated aid il-kbir. The holiday commemorates Abrahams devotion and his willingness to sacrifice his son Issac before a ram was put in Issac’s place. If you think that story sounds familiar you are right. The holy books of Abraham’s three sons share a similar narrative as well as many similar moral lessons. To remember this story everyone slaughters and eats a ram. Think Thanksgiving only imagine that the turkey is a ram and that the ram lives on your roof for the week before he is eaten. The atmosphere throughout the city was crazy last week as all of my fellow urbanites rushed around to buy, transport, and house their sheep. Kids rushed around with carts deliverying sheep to people’s houses and the weekly market last Sunday contained enough sheep to make the biggest American ‘Animal feeding operation’ look puny as everyone from the surrounding countryside brought in their animals to sell.

In the past year and a half a lot of embarrassing things have happened to me but I am not sure if any of them have been more embarrassing than what happened to me during my last session with my Arabic tutor. My tutor who speaks excellent English was describing to me in Arabic A Moroccans sheep cooking method. He mentioned a word in Arabic that I didn’t know so I asked him to clarify in English and he said that it was a ‘hearth’. I racked my brain to think of what a hearth was and came up empty. As I was thinking he spelled the word out on my paper-- h-e-a-r-t-h-- because he thought that he might have been pronouncing the word incorrectly. I told him that yes he was pronouncing the word correctly it is just that his English was better than mine. Note for the record that English is my tutors 5th language and that a hearth is a type of oven used to cook meat.

The other day I was introduced to someone new. She asked me if I was French and I responded that I am in fact American. She then turned to her friend and said: "like Oprah?" and then started laughing.

On Novermber 12th I finished up my second round of Peace Corps training. Although I wouldn't recommend that anyone go through two rounds of Stage, as us West African volunteers like to call our training, it was still nice to through a little party to thank our host families and host communities for being so kind and generous and sharing their lives with us for the past two months. In order to say thank and bid adieu we decided to make a bunch of American food for the party. To me and to several others in the group American food meant one thing: pizza. While some Italians may have objected to our labelling we went ahead with the cooking. As a non-chef I quickly found my place in the cutting section of the preparation room. I was joined by some members of a stage-mates host family as we hacked away at enough tomatoes to make pizza sauce for our guests. In Morocco people usually cut the skins off of their tomatoes before cooking them. When I say they usually cut them off I mean that people look at you like you are crazy if you leave the skins on. Note that this makes perfect sense in a culture without shoprite and the FDA. I told my ten year old assistant to leave the skin on and she looked at me with shock, but after some convincing did as she was told. After the tomatoes, the next step was cutting, and grating the cheese. My assistant turned to me and with a very confused face asked, "do Americans leave the wax on their cheese, since they leave the skins on their tomatoes."

As I just mentioned I have never been known for my cooking, but as a gesture of goodwill a few weeks ago I offered to make my host family a spaghetti dinner. I made the meal my family pretended to enjoy it and I thought the subject was finished until last week. We had a small gathering before the pizza party to discuss how the training went. My host sister claimed to have had a good experience and mentioned that she had enjoyed having "real American spaghetti with vegetables." The next day the normally shy, reserved cook who makes our lunch every day and makes incredible dishes that I could only dream of making, nearly jumped on me to make sure she got the recipe for how to make, "real American spaghetti with vegetables."

After having gone through two Peace Corps trainings and one year of service I would like to point out one flaw in the cross¬cultural training. I realize the necessity of making Americans more culturally sensitive (especially the ones who insist that pizza is an American food), as well as the difficulties in developing cross¬¬¬cultural materials that are applicable for the wide range of cultures in the countries that Peace Corps serves. In this training Americans are stereotyped as the epitome of direct speech while Host Country Nationals (as Peace Corps so diplomatically calls the "natives")are seen as very indirect saying yes to any idea that the volunteer presents and then voicing disagreement by not showing up to meetings, etc. I have now served in two Peace Corps countries as well as lived in New York for most of my life and I can tell you that both Moroccans and Mauritanians can put the bluntness of the most forward New Yorker to shame. The other day a fellow trainee came to my house for some tea and my family flatly, firmly and kindly, told him that his Arabic was terrible. An experience that even the most fluent volunteers in either Morocco have surely had multiple times. It is not that my family was being mean, in fact they said it with a smile and offered him more cake, it is simply that the style of communication is more direct and honest than any New Yorker I know is used to. That being said I could still use a training session on figuring out how to be nice to people from the Midwest.

Like any proper bureaucracy Peace Corps has its share of acronyms, jargon and words that nobody outside of the Peace Corps community could possibly understand. The one (often funnier) difference between Peace Corps and your average overly-bureaucratized organization is that PC works in many different countries that speak hundreds of different languages almost none of which have good translations for words such as, “counterpart, sustainable, or feedback.” Since there are no proper translations for these concepts Peace Corps staff who, in Morocco at least, speak both English and the local languages fluently usually just use the English words while they are speaking with each other. So if I hear two Peace Corps staff speaking too fast for me to understand it often sounds something like this, “skdjkqdklsj feedback erekkkjrke sustainability sdksjkdlsklj computer skills.”

Last week as part of my training I taught an English lesson at the local youth center to intermediate level English students. In preparation for Halloween I adapted this lesson on the past tense to incorporate some Halloween specific vocabulary with words such as scream howl, and carve. The lesson went well, the students appeared to understand and my demonstration of howling was a particularly big hit. The next day at the Halloween party at the youth center I was standing next to a Jack-o-Lantern and I made a carving motion and asked what I thought was one of the better students how the Jack-o-Lantern was made. She said, “you screamed it.” Well at least she got the past tense conjugation correct.

In preparation for the party a few of us went to the market to buy the aforementioned pumpkin that would one day be screamed into a Jack-o-lantern. In Imouzzer there is a “souk” twice a week. This means that farmers come into town from the country selling their produce for absurdly cheap prices. Pumpkins are one of the kinds of produce. Pumpkins are not a stable of the Moroccan diet like eggs, cous-cous or tomatoes, instead pumpkins are a supplement usually added to cous-cous or in combination with other vegetables. Thus pumpkins are usually sold by the kilo which means that the farmer will sell 1/8th or 1/16th of a kilo. When we explained that we in fact wanted an entire pumpkin he wasn’t quite sure what to do and thought he had misunderstand. We then restated that yes we did want the entire pumpkin. Finally he ended up weighing the pumpkin and so we paid 4 dollars for the 20 pound pumpkin. As we left the market carrying the entire pumpkins peoples looks of astonishment reminded me of the looks on people’s faces as my former Mauritanian sitemate carried his pet turtle through the Tidjikja town center.

Last Monday Peace Corps announced our permanent sites where we will be leaving in Morocco for the next two years. Up until now I have been living in a training site where I have been studying the local Arabic Dialect and doing other training activities. In two weeks I will move to Taroudant a city in southern Morocco. It seems like it will be an interesting place to spend the next two years as well as good place for a visit or a short vacation if anyone is thinking of planning a trip to Morocco. Before the staff made the site announcements everyone was feeling some combination of dread, anticipation, excitement and nervousness. In order to calm the nerves of this group of 20-something future professionals the staff gave out bags of American brand name candy in the same style as t-shirts are flung in the stands at B-level sporting events. The twix bars floating into the crowds distracted us enough that they were able to make the announcements to a relatively calm dread-free group very different from the anxious, panic-stricken group that existed a mere 10 minutes earlier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taroudant

I have found my Achilles heel. Before coming to Morocco, I thought that I could eat anything. Whether it was dog meat or Goat brains I ate and enjoyed pretty much anything and everything. Since arriving in Morocco I have found my weakness in an unlikely place: olives. In Morocco olives are put in pretty much every meal and I have already tried numerous types and cooked or seasoned in various different ways none of which have been even close to edible. I never thought I would be in the position of individually picking off anything let alone olives off of the delicious pizza that our training groups cook makes for lunch on occasion. Olives do have one saving grace. My Arabic teacher lives on an olive farm in Southern Morocco and he brought us a bottle of homemade olive oil from his farm that is every bit as savory as plain olives are unsavory. In my last post I mentioned that the food in my site is incredible and with the exception of olives I still stand by that statement. However I am forced to eat some of my words, as I was bragging about the delicious ice cream that I recently learned that the ice cream shop has been selling the same batch of ice cream since July.

Yesterday I traveled with my host family to visit some relatives in the countryside. One of his family members was surprised and curious to see an American and judging from his reaction had never spoken with an American before. After a few of the usual questions, (What are you doing her, marital status etc.) he went through a long spiel about how he wanted to ask me some questions about religion. I have learned to dread such discussions but I said “no problem” because of the family setting. With a worried look on his face he asked me about circumcision in America. I laughed and told him that most American males are circumcises and then we went back to making jokes about donkeys.

On many American TV stations there is a brief introductory sound or clip before the show transitions into commercials. On one of the Moroccan there is a similar clip: A catchy tune plays in the background and then the word pub short for publicité or commercial comes on to let the world know that a commercial for shampoo or some resort in Dubai is about to come on. One of the first days of Arabic class one of my fellow trainees came into class with the following announcement, “I spent all day yesterday watching TV with my host family, we kept watching this one TV show called the pub all day.”

I’m in the middle of my training in Morocco and so far it is going well. The training is a little repetitive from last year’s training but I realize that without the training it would be impossible for me to learn Moroccan Arabic. It’s been an interesting couple of weeks learning a different dialect of a language I already speak. Many of the words are the same but also many words are different so for example I can say sentences like, “the most important thing about politics in my country is…” but I couldn’t say “I want to eat bread.” Also most but not all of the numbers are the same so I could say that I want an appointment form “4:48” but not “2:00.”

Morocco is a great place to live. It might just be the honeymoon effect or maybe coming from Mauritania makes living anywhere seem great but so far I am finding that at least my training site of Imouzzer has a lot of the benefits of a developing country: interesting and diverse cultures, unique cuisine, friendliness, openness and great hospitality without many of the problems: extreme poverty, garbage everywhere and lack of reliable public services.

It doesn’t hurt my perception that for the training period I am living with a part time pastry chef. The cuisine in Morocco is delicious. Most of the foods I have eaten so far are eaten out of a communal pot. Everyone has a piece of bread which they use to reach into the pot and dip into the meat or fish that is mixed with vegetables and the always mouth-wateringly appetizing sauce. Dinner is usually followed by melons. My host family quizzes my nightly on the word in Darija ( Moroccan Arabic) for melon and I disappoint them nightly by forgetting the name. Living in this mountainous region with its temperatures in the 40’s and 50’s Fahrenheit has not stopped my from enjoying the ice cream that tastes better than anything I have ever had in the States and costs about 75 cents for three huge scoops.

My Darija teacher speaks excellent English but it is still learning new words. Peace Corps has it’s own unique set of vocabulary that would be foreign to even most native English speakers. One word that is commonly used is “site,” as in “my site (the city where a volunteer lives and works),” or “final site ( the place where a trainee will move after training for his/her actual service).” Peace Corps vocabulary has seeped into my teacher’s regular vocabulary so this gem slipped out during a session on gender roles in Morocco, “After marriage a Moroccan woman will leave her family and move to her final site with her husband’s family.”

This is my second night in Morocco and the overwhelming sense I am getting is that I have already seen all of this before. After serving in a malaria endemic country you have to continue taking your preventative malaria medication for a month after leaving said country. I haven't even finished my Mauritanian malaria medication and already I have Peace Corps sessions that are eerily similar to the ones I had last June.

It has also been exciting to meet this new class of volunteers. It seems like a good group of people. The one major difference is that there are a lot more “experienced” volunteers in this class than in my Mauritanian group. Note that “experienced” is a euphemism for old.

Another difference is that the medical kit that they give us is a lot smaller than the one they gave us in Mauritania. I’m not sure if that’s because they assume that are luxurious houses in Mauritania have more room or if there are fewer diseases and medical problems in Morocco but I’m hoping it’s the latter. To give credit where credit is due this observation came from Kat who is a fellow Mauritanian Peace Corps refugee, also making the jump to Morocco. She is also responsible for many of the better pictures in the preceding entry. The rest of the photos are "borrowed" from my other Tagant Region mates as my camera was unable to survive even two months in the sands of the Sahara.

We haven’t started language training yet but unofficially I have been listening to Peace Corps staff speaking to each other (eavesdropping). The Moroccan language Darija is similar to the Hassaniya that I was speaking in Mauritania as they are both dialects of Arabic. This should make learning the new dialect easier although it has already caused me some problems. When a word is close but not exactly the same in the two languages it is really difficult to modify the words I have been saying for a year.

On the plane ride over I taught an Arabic newbie her first Arabic word: Mushkile. For the uninitiated it means problem. It is used in the context of “there is no tea: problem.” Or in this case, they keep turning on and off the cabin lights for the whole plane for no apparent reason: “mushkile.”

For the first few days in Morocco we are staying in a hotel on the beach doing brief introductions. Today we played a game of ultimate Frisbee on the beach with some Peace Corps staff and a few of my fellow trainees. While Mauritians could never catch anything, too much time playing soccer and not enough baseball in my opinion, this group of Moroccans could certainly catch a Frisbee and took to the game quickly despite it being played just before sundown on a hot day during Ramadaan.

I had a great trip home this past month with one regret that I didn’t have a chance to get in any ultimate so I’m glad I was able to rectify that problem. I also had missed the Super Bowl last year and the night before I left while I was in Philly, Steelers vs. Cardinals in the Super Bowl XLIII happened to be on TV and I was finally able to watch Ben Roethlisberger’s throw that game-winning touchdown. Also worth noting is that when I signed into Facebook from my computer at home in New City it said, "You are signing in from an unfamiliar address please enter the following information..."

Also Mauritania seems to be getting the short end of the deboos (stick) lately. Major flooding has happened in Rosso where I had my Pre-service training learning about Peace Corps policies last June.

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/LSGZ-7VPJBZ?OpenDocument

So it looks like I won’t quite make it to my 801st Mauritanian night. The Peace Corps is leaving Mauritania because the security situation became too dangerous. It’s been a crazy past couple of weeks during the evacuation process as we were first all moved to Senegal while a security team evaluated the safety of Mauritania. We waited in limbo for a while not sure if we were going back to Mauritania or not. Last week they moved us to a really nice hotel and then scheduled a meeting. Some Peace Corps staff had come from D.C. to give us the news, and as soon as we saw the oreo’s and cheez-it’s that they had brought for us we all new Peace Corps in Mauritania was over.

I will be transferring to Morocco and continuing my Peace Corps service with two more years in Morocco. I will be doing youth development continuing with my Arabic and I don’t know a whole lot more than that.

The good news also is that I will be coming home for a couple of weeks in the meantime. I will fly into New York August 18th. I will leave for Peace Corps September 8th. That leaves me about 2.5 weeks to enjoy all that makes America great, eat as much as I can, see everyone, and prepare for leaving again. I am excited to be going back to the States after over a year away.

July 18th 2009 was the date of Mauritania’s most recent round of elections. If you spend 5 minutes doing a google news search about Mauritania you can be better informed than I am about the parties and candidates. Additionally Peace Corps prohibits me from taking a political stance However it was exciting to see the similarities and differences between American and Mauritanian campaigns as well as to be around for a (I hope) transition from a military dictatorship to a peaceful democratic government.

Every weeknight before the elections most of the major candidates held parties in Tidjikja. This meant that they set up big tents and blasted music (including one place directly in front of my house) until late in the night in a manner very similar to the party part of a Mauritanian wedding. Many of my friends would just go to the parties for candidates they did not even support just as a place to hang out for the evening. Also each candidate opened up as many voting offices as they could which again secured places for Mauritanians to drink tea.

The elections were originally scheduled to be held June 6th, but were moved to July 18th to allow more candidates to run legitimate campaigns. This strategy worked as before June 6th only one candidate had a visible campaign or was talked about. This time around before July 18th there are about a dozen candidates and several of them seem to be serious contenders. School closed early this year to make room for the July 6th elections and with the change to July18th I didn’t hear anyone talking about adding more school days.

Last month I spent some time working in rural Senegal, Mauritania’s southern neighbor on the project “one laptop per child.” It was an interesting experience seeing the stark differences between two countries who share a border, several languages and a common colonial legacy.

The divide between the Wolof speaking groups in Senegal and Southern Mauritania and the Arabic/Hassaniya speakers is vast. While everyone in Mauritania is Muslim and most people in Senegal are Muslim as well Mauritania and Senegal are at the frontier of the divide between the Arab world and the African world. The Senegal River is the political boundary between Senegal and Mauritania. African’s (people who speak the languages of Wolof, Soninke and Pulaar) live on both sides of the Senegal River while northern Mauritania, where I live, is home to Arabic speaking people. Both groups are in constant contact with each other with Arabic speaking shopkeepers throughout Senegal and African, artisans, cab drivers, and teachers throughout Mauritania.

The relationship between the two groups is not friendly although as an outsider who has spent some time with both groups I think that both sides have more in common culturally than either group would care to admit. Their commonalities range from cultural similarities, to making similar jokes, to similar styles of eating, drinking and just living their lives. Both groups tend to regard me as an innocent and empathetic outsider so neither group hesitates in telling me about their dislike for the other.

Whenever I told Senegalese people that I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mauritania they looked at me with horror and without fail said to me, “How can you live with the Nar.” Nar is a pejorative word in the Wolof language for Mauritanians. After expressing their horror at my living in Mauritania, then offering to have me live with them in Senegal they would speak to me about the events of 1989. In 1989 this divide between African and Arab culture erupted in a huge outbreak of violence and leaves with it a lingering tension that is rarely talked about in Mauritania (although people are certainly not shy about their contempt for “Africans”) but was brought up without hesitation in Senegal.

So a lot has happened since the last time I updated this blog. I guess it makes sense that a lot would happen in the past two months or so since this last post given my glacial writing pace. Anyway a brief run-down of major events is probably in order.

1- With the organization “one laptop per child” and the local Tidjikja school district last april-may we had planned a distribution of 100 child size laptops in Tidjikja for this summer. That plan was foiled by the Mauritanian government who denied visas to the two people who were actually going to implement the project one of which was my brother Eli.

2- Thus the project was moved to a small town in Senegal where the teachers were happy but also surprised to have this project fall into their lap. I spent a couple weeks in Mboro Senegal helping out with the project mostly by showing teachers informally how to use the computers. I also got to visit with my brother in Senegal as he suffered from the hardships of life in Africa including cold beer brought to the school every afternoon, eating heaping plates of chebbougin (the delicious Senegalise rice and fish dish) as well as eating freshly caught fish on the beach.

3- Since the Mauritanian Government stopped giving visas to Americans the incoming class of Peace Corps trainees was cancelled. Usually every June there is a new class of 60-70 new volunteers so losing an entire class was a huge emotional and logistical blow to the Peace Corps Mauritania program.

4- And then to top it all off an American was killed in the capital city of Nouakchott prompting Peace Corps to offer all of the remaining volunteers “interrupted service.” This means that if any of us were worried about our security we could leave the Peace Corps and receive the full benefits (there aren’t too many) of returned Peace Corps volunteers. Out of the 70 or so people in our class about 20 decided to leave. When the class who is about down with their two years of service leaves Mauritania, Peace Corps Mauritania will have about 50 volunteers down from over 120 during the past year.

5- This all may have been a blessing in disguise as for the 50 of us that are choosing to stay we were all forced to take mental stock of our service and make a decision to stay meaning that we are all excited to be here for the next year and ready for the challenges that await us.

6- After making the decision to spend another year in Mauritania, I went to Kankossa a village in Southern Mauritania to help out with an environmental health camp. Girls came from all over Mauritania to spend three days in Kankossa, doing health and environmental lessons, planting trees, playing sports and making friends from all over the country. I think everyone, the girls, their chaperones and the volunteers all had a great time and hopefully learned a thing or two.

7- Now is the “geytna” or date harvest in Tidjikja. Moors have basically two traditional food sources their animals for meat and milk and dates so the date harvest is something that they take very seriously. Many families in the Tidjikja area have their own personal palmeries. Many native Tidjikjans who have moved on to bigger an better things (like say driving taxi’s in Nouackchott) come back to Tidjikja to spend time with their families and/or sit around and eat dates. So for now I am back in Tidjikja sitting around eating dates doing the occasional computer or English Lesson and waiting around for the next school year to start in October.

The other day I was sitting in the Tagant Governor’s office (they call Governor’s Wali’s like that robot guy in that movie) when I got thirsty, this tends to happen frequently when the temperature is above 110 degrees. One of the security guards asked me if in America we drink water out of huge plastic containers wrapped in goatskin. I finished my drink and told him that in America every house has at least five or six faucets with running water 24 hours a day and realized that the way Americans and Mauritanians consume our beverages is about as different as any other cultural difference.

A bidon is a plastic container that holds about 10 liters of water and was formerly used somewhere in the developed world to hold vegetable oil or something similar. In Mauritania there are all bright yellow colored. Almost all of them are wrapped in either cloth or goat skin to keep them cold. Some people even store their water in an actual goat skin. They hang up what appears to be an empty goat in a shady area and use it to store water. It does a better job then the bidon of keeping the water cold. Most families have many bidons to store the majority of their water although there are methods including concrete reservoirs.

Many people keep bidon’s of water in public places for public consumption. Many houses leave a bidon in the street in front of their house for any thirsty passerby’s to drink. They usually have a cup tied to the bidon for anyone to use to drink from. This is probably not the most hygienic method but nobody really seems to mind. Most public places including the aforementioned governor’s office have bidon’s lying around for anyone to drink from and even outside of town I will sometimes find a yellow bidon in the shade of a tree waiting for any thirsty wanderers. It is also worth noting that a thirsty person can knock on anyone’s door and that person is obligated to give the thirsty passerby a drink of water “no questions asked.”

In Tdjikja, most people have one water faucet in there yard. My house is pretty typical in that I have 1 water faucet sticking up a foot out of the ground in the middle of the yard. I then have running water for a varying amount of hours every day. When I have water I fill up my concrete water reservoir as well as several other water containers. For people that don’t have faucets a man with donkey cart will come around selling bidons full of water every few days.

I have just received really big news. My brother, his friend James and I had been working on an application with an organization called one laptop per child. The organization has developed an innovative computer that is designed for children in developing countries. The organization was looking for people to bring these computers to communities across Africa to teach people basic computer skills. We applied to be those people and we were selected to distribute the computers in Tdjikja. You can see the details of the program at this link:

http://laptop.org/en/participate/get-involved/OLPCorps.shtml

The other day a friend told me an anecdote about the initial colonization of Mauritania that I think is worth sharing. My friend told me this story because while I was teaching one of his sons English another one of his sons who hasn’t yet started English kept saying “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” over and over again. When the French first reached Mauritania they obviously were faced with a language barrier. The French didn’t speak Hassiniya and the Moors did not speak French. One day a moor learned the word “encore” which means again but didn’t learn the meaning. For some reason or another Frenchman started hitting this man. He then kept saying the word “encore (again)” in an effort to get them to stop. The Frenchman was more than happy to comply with his request and kept hitting him again and again.

One of my favorite qualities about Mauritanians is that they are always eager to help someone out whenever they can even if it a strange request from an American. Last week I did a tree nursery project with one of my elementary schools. I wanted to use goat manure as fertilizer for the project. I walked into a random house near the school that had a few goats and asked them if I could take some goat manure for the school project. Note that finding a house with goats in Tdjikja is a little like finding a house with a TV in my hometown of New York City. It’s almost a 100% chance, although in America they probably wouldn’t give me their TV, even if I asked really nicely. These people not only gave me the manure but also insisted that I stay for tea and we even started a small tree nursery as their house.

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When professional writers use up all of their material they often recycle old material and show it in a new way to get more mileage out of the same material. My mother has been going around to classes in the elementary school where she works and giving presentation about Peace Corps, my service and the country of Mauritania. The kids seem to enjoy and ask a lot of questions. I have been answering their questions and I think that some of them may be of general interest. So here is my recycled old material:

How do they make bread?

The baker makes bread in a big oven. The oven is heated by a fire and

they use the oven to bake the bread. Almost everyone eats bread for

breakfast.

How many markets are there in Tdjikja?

There is one main market in Tdjikja. There are many women selling

vegetables and there are many small shops. There are also a lot of

small shops around the town.

How far is the market from your home?

The market is about a 10 minute walk from my house. Most people walk

everywhere they go instead of driving a card.

Have you seen any baby camels?

I have and they are very cute.

Do you like riding a camel?

Riding a camel is very fun. They are very big so it is very scary. It

is very scary when they stand up. You got on the camel while they are

kneeling on the ground. When they stand up it is very scary.

Do you like it there?

I like it in Mauritania. I have a lot of friends and it is interesting

to live with people from another culture.

How cold and hot is it in Mauritania?

It is very hot in Mauritania. During the middle of the day it can be

over 120 degrees. Most people just sleep between noon and 4 because it

so hot. It does get cold in winter but never cold enough to snow.

What is my house like?

My house has two rooms and one hangar. A hangar is like a permanent

tent in my yard. I spend most of my time there because it is too hot

in the other rooms.

Is camel meat good?

Camel meat is very good but it is also very expensive. So you can only have it for special occasions like weddings. You can eat everything on any animal except the feet and the skin.You can eat the hump of the camel and it is especially delicious although very fatty. I rode a camel for fun but some people still use camels for

transportation because they are very strong in the desert. They do not

need a lot of water so they are very good in the desert. They are also

very fast. People also use camels for meat and milk. Camel milk and

camel meat are both very good.

How do you bathe?

To bathe, I take bucket baths just like everyone else in Mauritania. First you fill up a bucket with water. Then you take a cup and pour the water over yourself. Then you clean yourself with soap. Finally you rinse yourself off with water. After that you are just as clean as after taking a shower in America.

How many hospitals are there in Tdjikja?

There is one hospital in Tdjikja my city. However, there are no hospitals in the rural areas surrounding Tdjikja. This is very difficult for the people who live in the rural areas who have to pay to come into the city when they are sick.

When do people join the Peace Corps

Most people join the Peace Corps after they finish college or in their twenties although there are people in their 50’s or even older who join the Peace Corps. Most people have a degree from college.

What do people wear?

Men wear boubou’s almost every day. Boubou’s are cloth garments that cover everything from your shoulders to your feet and often have fancy embroidery. Women wear Mulehfa’s which also cover the entire body and their hair. Since the culture is very conservative women keep their whole body and hair covered at all times.

What do you drink?

I mostly drink water and sometimes I drink milk. I drink fresh milk

because most people have goats or sheep that make milk. Sometimes I

also drink camels milk which is very good.

How do you get water?

I have a faucet in my house where I get my water. Some people don't

have faucets and have to get there water from a well. That is a lot of

work because they have to pull all of their water for cooking,

cleaning, and drinking from the well.

What do you do?

I teach kids about the environment. Mostly I plant trees and garden

with children and teach them about trees and gardening.

Do you have friends? What are there names?

I have many Mauritanian friends. Some of my friends are named: Dihan,

Habib, Mohamdi and Tijane. American names are very difficult for

Mauritanians to say. For example very few Mauritanians can say my

name: "Seth."

What do you eat?

Every day I, like most Mauritanians, eat rice for lunch and cous-cous

for dinner. Usually the rice has fish meat or beans with it. The

cous-cous usually comes with meat or beans.

I have been in Mauritania for 9 (count’em) months. After that much time eating rice for lunch and cous-cous for dinner I feel that a description of a typical Mauritanian meal is in order. This process is almost exactly the same everywhere in the country (at least among Hassiniya speakers) and in almost every household. Note that I am describing the meal from the mans perspective and that a women’s perspective would undoubtedly be different and include a lot more work.

Before the meal, the men wait in the nicest room in the house usually watching television or talking or just lying there. Nobody has any idea when the meal will come you just sit and wait. It feels like the meal is just going to fall out of the sky rather than from the work of the lady folk. Before the meal does fall out of the sky you have a couple of warning signs. First about 5 minutes before the meal is ready a little kid will bring over a mat like thing which the plate of food will later be placed on. Then they will bring out the handwashing apparatus. This consists of a plastic item called a “makeresh.” The makeresh looks like a plastic teapot and is used to pour the water for the handwashing. Hands are washed over a plastic catchbasin witch usually matches in color and size the makeresh. The makeresh is used before and after every meal and the odds of having soap included in this equation go up exponentially after the meal. Then all of the men sit around a big bowl of food. In America everyone has their own individual plate. Not so, In Mauritania everyone site in a circle around the same big plate. The meal consists of a starch base and meat or beans or if you are lucky some vegetables piled on top of the rice or cous-cous. Rice is almost always the starch for lunch and cous-cous is almost always the starch for dinner. Once everyone has washed their hands and has gathered around the table it is time to dig in. You eat the starch from your section and compete with everyone else for the goodies that are piled in the middle. You eat by rolling the cous-cous or rice into balls and then placing the meat, or vegetables into the middle of the ball. Note that this is all done with the right hand as the left is used for other purposes. If you are a guest, not just an American but any guest, you will be clearly instructed to “ewkel” or eat. This is not a request. At first I would just keep eating but now I am learning to say such pleasantries as “I ate” or “I am full” or “I ate so much that I can not eat any more,” which usually satisfy the hosts. When you are done eating you look the cous-cous off of your hand to indicate that you are finished. After everyone is done eating we all wash our hands and lean back on our mattresses and get ready to drink some tea.

On a completely unrelated note, the other day I told a Mauritanian that the number 13 was unlucky in America. He asked me why and I said that there was no reason. He seemed absolutely and utterly perplexed that the number 13 would be unlucky for no reason just as I have been absolutely and utterly perplexed at many Mauritanian beliefs.

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I apologize to my country and to anyone I have ever played volleyball with for what was probably the most embarrassing athletic defeat in a lifetime of embarrassing athletic defeats. In the first ever volleyball game in the history of Gnimlane (small village outside my site of Tdjikja) the American team lost to the Mauritanian team 3 games to 1. At the request of the Gnimlane’s physical education teacher we played this game so his students could watch and see how the game of volleyball was meant to be played. It turns out that we got the lesson in front of a crowd of probably around 100 people.

Just 25 kilometers (15 miles) away Gnimlane is a very different place than Tdjikja. I think one of the things that make it the most different is that most people in Tdjikja have television or at least the opportunity to watch television semi-regularly. In the absence of computers and newspapers, TV is an significant window to the world. The average Tdjikja high school student follows international soccer and can name the starting 11 for most major European clubs. In Gnimlane the teacher, introducing physical education, asked his students if they could name any professional soccer players. They all said Ronaldinho and that they knew him because he was on the back of some of their friends jerseys by virtue of the second-hand clothes market which makes up a good portion of a young Mauritanians wardrobe. He asked them where Ronaldinho was from and they said Brazil. He asked where Brazil was and they all thought it was a neighborhood in Mauritania.

In other culinary news, lunch the other day included goat eyes and brain and so now I can say that I am a person who has eaten both goat eyes and goat brain. The brain tasted like tuna. They told me that eating the brain would make me smarter. I am not sure about that but I do know that something gave me diarrhea. I am also not sure if they were implying that a goat was smarter than me and that if I ate the brain I might catch up.

I am back in Tdjikja, after a brief vacation in the promised land (Senegal), for a softball tournament and I have to say that I really enjoy being back at site. While, I have faith that work will continue to be slow, I am starting to feel established in the community and everyday Tdjikja becomes more like home.

One interesting side effect of becoming more established and improving my language and the cultural awareness is that now I am more alert to people being mean, either to me or to other people. Insults, conversion attempts, or simply actions that are inappropriate in this culture might have once passed by my naïve eyes in a blur of lightning-fast language. As I live here longer, I am getting better, (although I am still very far from perfect or even stellar), at understanding the insults, following the logic (if you can call it that) of the conversion attempts and generally becoming more aware of when someone is being insulted.

It is difficult to describe the air of jubilation that fills Mauritanian volunteers as we cross the border into Senegal into what feels like another world. We leave behind all of the frustrations of futile work in the middle of desert as we try and squeeze every last drop of fun out of our time in Senegal. This time we were in Dakar, the capital of Senegal and a surprisingly modern city of 8+ Million people, for a softball tournament, fitting titled WAIST (add an ed to the end if you are confused about the reason for the tournament). Peace Corps Volunteers from several West African countries as well as a handful of other random teams compete in the U.S. embassy sponsored tournament. The fields were incredible; the pool was beautiful and after 8 months in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania being able to order a cold beer from the bar was about as much as I could possibly ask for. And to top it all off I got to play a real game of Frisbee. Most of you reading this blog are probably aware of my unhealthy obsession with this sport. Yes I have been able to throw the Frisbee around occasionally here and I have even had some pickup games with other volunteers but never anything resembling an actually game. Between the other volunteers and a couple of American expatriates living in Dakar we were able to get together a decent game. When everyone ran into the center of the field to form a stack I nearly cried. I missed a diving lay-out catch in the end-zone but simply laying out was enough to bring a huge smile to my face.

Traveling in West Africa is certainly different than traveling in say western New York. I will use two examples to illustrate the difference: one example is mishwii and the other is the border crossing between Senegal and Mauritania. After a 5:00 clock departure from our hotel in Dakar we reached the garage in Rosso Senegal by mid-afternoon. Interestingly enough there is a town called Rosso Senegal directly across the Senegal River from Rosso Mauritania. Taxi’s that travel between cities will only drive between the garages of those cities. Think of a garage as a combination, bus stop/ taxi stand/restaurant/market much like a Senegalese Penn Station. We got out of our taxies which was not in walking distance from the river (Yes, Dad I know that anywhere is walking distance if you have the time, but we were tired from the 5:00 am departure). About two dozen Senegalese men surrounded the taxi and just started shouting various languages at us to see what we would respond too. English? Francaise? Espagnol? Pulaar? I chose to speak Hassiniya to gain some local credibility found someone that spoke Hassiniya and negotiated the price for a horse cart to take us to the river crossing. Three of us and an adolescent Senegalese boy climbed into the horse cart throwing our bags on the back of the cart. We held on to our bags with one hand and the cart with the other as we covered the distance to the river. Once we got to the river we hopped into a large canoe with about 30 of our closest Senegalese and Mauritanian friends for the short trip across the Senegalese River back to Mauritania. Travel tip: don’t do border crossings at lunch time. Upon reaching Mauritania we had to wait an hour and a half for the inspector to return from lunch and stamp our passports.

The most delicious part of traveling in Mauritania is Mishwii. On the overnight drive from Nouakchott to Tdjikja one usually stops along the way to eat Mishwii or barbequed meat. The driver usually pays for a plate to feed everyone in the taxi. Mishwii poses no dilemma for this carnivore as there is literally nothing but barbequed meat straight from the goat (you can recognize just about every body part) and a few scraps of bread which most of the men actually turn up their noses at and don’t finish. Someone will just cut the meat off of the bones into bit size pieces and everyone grabs little pieces of meat until everything including the bone marrow is gone, then everyone washes the meat down with the customary three cups of tea and then resumes the rest of the journey slightly more content and with much fuller stomachs.

By the way if any of you are interested in learning a little bit more about my experience there is an excellent book called Feeding Desires by Robin Penenoe (not sure on the spelling). She is an anthropologist who did here research with a group almost exactly like the Moors of Mauritania. Almost all of the words she uses are the same as Hassiniya, and her analysis and descriptions are very insightful.

So I haven’t written in a while and I apologize for keeping you all waiting with baited breath for my next entry but I do have what I think is a legitimate excuse. I spent three weeks away from site around christmas time in a crazy whirlwind trip that had me moving from Nouackhott, Mauritania’s capital for an incredible Christmas Dinner at the County Directors house, then to San Louis Sengal, the former capital of French West Africa for a New Years celebration and then back to a quiet Mauritanian village for a surprisingly useful and [plea training session. I arrived back to Tdjikja after all of this with a lot to write about only to find that the internet connection here was not working. But now just as I am about to leave for another trip to Senegal the internet is back and working (fingers are staying crossed) so I’ll try and give you a quick update of what I’ve been up to and then hopefully return to a more frequent writing schedule.

My work has been progressing rather slowly as I have taken my first couple months to focus on language learning and getting to know the people that I will hopefully be working with. However, two weeks ago I managed to accomplish the surprisingly difficult task of getting all of the unexpectedly high number of stakeholders to agree to do a tree planting at one of the schools that I work at. The lesson went really well, the kids seemed to really enjoy it while learning (I hope) something, the teacher who helped me with the planting was skeptical at first but after a while came around and seemed to be enjoying himself as well. However, a few days after the planting I returned to school, planning on doing a lesson on individual tree fences that afternoon. One little girl came running up to me before I reached the trees and said, “les garcons, les garcons, the boys have killed all of the trees.” And sure enough there were no surviving trees. Most of the students had made little rock enclosures around their trees and now the rocks were on the spot where the trees had been. One student had even brought in fencing from home and that fence was laying next to the wall of the school and there was a hole in the ground where a small tree had once been.

Despite problems with work, and general life in a country like Mauritania the the most frustrated I’ve been so far in my service has been trying to watch the Super Bowl on TV. Watching the Super Bowl in the states I always remembered hearing that the game was televised around the world and in 17 billion languages or something ridiculous so I figured it had to be on here. Despite the Steelers making it look easy with 7 Super Bowl appearances out of 45 Super bowls, it’s still a rare enough occasion to be worth staying up late and walking across town to find tv and an owner willing to indulge this Steeler fan. Unfortunately, despite the satelite dish and 100+ channels I’m still hoping to find a recorded copy of what I hear was a great game.

On a more positive note, I spent the past couple days at a wedding, “en brouse.” Brouse is the french term for the mostly unoccupied landscape which covers most of Mauritania. A rough english translation of the word would be the “bush”, or the “countryside.|” It was one of the coolest and most interesting things I have done so far in Peace Corps. Basically they set up three big tents in roughly the middle of nowwhere, killed a camel for dinner made a lot of couscous and just had a party. I was there for a few days and more and more people just kept showing until the wedding night. In the city most people know me and assume that I speak some Hassiniya. At the wedding people, everyone was really friendly, people were amazed that I spoke Hassiniya and did their best to meet me halfway by using the handful of French words that they knew.

Camels are really cool. I’m not really sure why but the afternoon of the wedding 10 men did a camel ride from our little tent city to the nearest town and back. Before the ride they did a couple laps around the tents and it was really impressive. Camels are very big and very fast and these guys really knew how to ride them. Everybody stood and watched them mount the camels and circle the tents. It wasn’t just me that was impressed The Mauritanians who have spent their whole lives around camels were more impressed than I was. The first day I was there everyone kept asking me if I was going to ride a camel. I decided to give it a try and as I said before camels are big and they don’t get any smaller when you are sitting on top of one. I went for a little walk and made a promise I’ll probably end up regretting that next time I’ll go for a little run.

Some people took me around and showed me some of the plants and their uses. Because of all of the grazing by goats and other animals Tdjikja is a biological dead zone with only a handful of trees and bushes that are goat resistant. En brousse people and animals are less densely populated so more plants can survive and I was amazed to see the contrast in biological diversity between the towns and land only about 30 miles away.

Recently, I answered a bunch of questions from an Elementary school class in America. The general answers to some of the questions may be interesting or useful for understanding some things about Mauritania. As always if you have any other questions please ask and I will do my best to answer in more detail. I could go on about any of these topics for several pages so these are just some basic oversimplified answers

Tea

I drink a lot of tea. People drink tea here in sets of three and I drink two or three sets a day. So I Drink 6 or 9 1 ounce cups of tea every day.

Languages

There are 5 languages spoken in the entire country but in Tdjikja my city there are only two languages spoken: Hassiniya and French. Hassiniya is an oral language which means there is no alphabet and the language has never been written down. Since there are 5 languages in Mauritania it makes governing the country very difficult because everything (TV, documents, textbooks) must be translated.

Money

In Mauritania the money is called Ougiya. 230 Mauritanian Ougiya = 1 American dollar.

Computers

In Tdjikja nobody has any computers in there house because they are too expensive. There is an internet café where you can pay to use a computer for an hour or two. However, most people don’t know how to use computers.

Food

I really like the food here. Most days I eat a piece of bread for breakfast, then a big bowl of rice, goat meat and cooked vegetables for lunch and cous-cous and goat meat for dinner. Usually the men and the women eat from different bowls.

TV’s

There are TV’s here but only some people have them and nobody has more than one for their house. People here watch too much TV just like in America.

Work

My job is to do environmental education in two elementary schools and teach children about, trees, gardening and environmental problems such as desertification.

Games

There are a lot of different games here. The most common game is soccer but also people play a game where they throw 8 sticks on the ground at the same time and see how many land facing the same way. That game is very complicated and I don’t yet completely understand it.

Sleeping

Most people put mattresses called a “matella” on the ground and sleep on their matella inside their houses. If it is really hot they will sleep on their mattress on another mat outside in their yard.

Most of you probably know that my decision to join the Peace Corps had little to do with philanthropy, humanity, cultural understanding or any such rubbish but instead had everything to do with extending the global reach of my favorite sport: Frisbee. My normal daily routine had been to play soccer every evening with a group of high school students and young adults around 5 o’clock as the sweltering midday heat dies down. Usually everyone sits around and waits for the one kid with a soccer ball to show up before starting to warm up. Voila, the perfect time to introduce Frisbee; a captive audience with nothing else to do, and the predisposition of being athletic and liking sports. The first day I brought the Frisbee out there was immediate curiosity with everyone asking me “haddhe shinhu (what’s that),” I replied that it was called a Frisbee and then I said in English that one throws the Frisbee “like this,” and then demonstrated a basic backhand. Most of the other players have taken 4-6 years of high school English meaning that they have about enough English to ask me “How are you fine” and not a whole lot else. However they grabbed on to the phrase “like this” and mimicked me in a simian motion grunting as they threw the Frisbee and yelling the phrase, “like this, like this like this,” with every throw.

Which brings me to my next point, the way language particularly French and English has seeped into the lexicon of Hassiniya-speaking soccer players? They all watch soccer in at least French, Arabic, and English on TV, all play video games and none of them speak conversationally much of anything besides Hassiniya, yet global culture and languages has managed to seep into their game. For example, they all use the English word “corner” for a corner kick even though if I asked them what the English word for the place in a rectangle where two straight lines meet, undoubtedly they would have no idea. Also, they use the English word pass as well but they only use it as an object as in “Aane adelt pass” or “I made a pass” rather than “I passed him the ball,” which is an interesting example of how words change as they are adapted between languages. It is also interesting for me to see how they have adapted their language to work in new concepts borrowing some words and then adapting others (soccer, I assume came with the French in the early 1900’s). They borrowed the French words “gardien, attaquer etc” for soccer positions while using the Hassiniya word meaning “friend” for teammate.

My language skills are at their worst while I am playing as I am embarrassingly struggling to keep up with kids who eat little else besides rice for lunch and cous-cous for dinner. In the intensity of play, I can never understand things that would otherwise be perfectly luminous. Also, as the game gets more competitive I end up speaking to myself in English half the time yelling things like “my bad” or other less appropriate comments that nobody (I hope) understands. Although when I do something good I am occasionally rewarded with a “very good.”

On another rant the French word for foul is “confron.” Try saying it with your snootiest French accent and then add a factor and a half of snootiness and you will be almost there. What kind of language reserves it’s snootiest word for “foul” something that is supposed to be harsh, abrupt, quick and is so often said in anger.

One of my friends has a bread stand in the market where he sits all morning and sells bread. He sells small single serving loafs of bread, which basically everyone in Tdjikja eats for breakfast for about 25 cents. The bread is stacked on a small tray and he has a little bench behind and occasionally I sit with him on the bench and listen as he makes fun of me for eating vegetables, or I tell him that Americans eat spiders or some other fascinating topic of conversation. The other day a lady came and just took a piece of bread with out paying. His response was “it’s cool she’s crazy,” and then as I got up to leave he gave me a piece of bread because “we’re friends.” Hopefully it’s not because I’m crazy.

If there is one lesson that one will learn in Mauritania it is that if something can go wrong it will. Or to modify it to my weekend, “as soon as you have finished planting 100 trees the water will go out.” After an astonishingly successful morning of guiding the students of “école jdide” through the tree planting, disaster struck. It is also interesting to note that “école” is the French word for “school”, and that “jdide” is the Hassiniya word for “new,” which gives you an idea of the mixed up nature of the school system. Anyway, with a few exceptions the morning went very well, as we taught the students how to transplant the trees and supervised as they did the work. Given the stress of transplantion, we knew that if we didn’t water the plants most of them would not make it through the brutal heat of the Mauritanian afternoon. The schools one water faucet had cut out for the day early in the morning and since we did not have access to a car there was only one option to transport enough water to the school, which happened to be located on the outskirts of town: donkey cart. But first, we needed water, and something to carry water in. Most people have yellow plastic containers called “bedoons” that they use to store water. They hold about 20 liters of water. We needed to beg, borrow or steal about 8 bedoons in order to get enough water for all of the trees. We started in the market and asked about half a dozen people until we were able to find enough bedoons. Explaining to people why I needed to borrow their bedoons in Hassiniya was one of the most difficult language tasks I have had so far and drew some pretty strange looks, but eventually we got the bedoons, through them on a donkey cart, the most common, cheapest and easiest way to transport goods within town, and got to the school. Serendipitously, there were a few kids hanging out around the school to help with the watering and everything ended up working out fine in the end for this one quixotic Peace Corps project.

With Obama’s victory last week, news reports ubiquitously mention the overwhelmingly positive global reaction to Obama. Unfortunately I can’t corroborate those reports. The general response here has been indifference. While a few people have congratulated me enthusiastically, the vast majority of people have told me that whoever is President of the United States does not really matter or that they preferred McCain. Without getting in to a lengthy discussion of Mauritanian ethnicities, it is interesting to see how the reaction has differed along ethnic lines. Most of the people who congratulated me are affectated professionals from Southern Mauritania, mainly Pulaar-speaking, who are in Tdjikja teaching French or working for a Government ministry. The vast majority of the population here is “Moor,” and most of the Moors expressed indifference or even disapproval towards Obama.

I have been helping a friend’s son with introductory English. In between exercises like “My name is Ahmed, I live in Tdjikja,” and explanations of the script and manuscript alphabet, I stumbled on a cultural note. Apparently, and I quote, “Hi and Hello are interchangeable greeting that can be said at any time of day and greetings are typically short as people say “hi” or “hello” quickly and then continue walking.” After constantly reading and learning about Mauritanian culture it was interesting and instructive to get the reverse perspective on my own culture.

So peace Corps is supposed to be about failure. Failure to speak properly, failure to not get half of your dinner on the ground, failure to even know how to rest properly (always out of any speck of sun and without at least two pillows propping you up, and even failure to properly put on your clothes. However, one day last week there was an almost inexplicable success. There is an international NGO in town that had been planning a major tree planting for August but due to political complications the trees were never planted. Thus they had a huge tree nursery that they needed to get rid of before the trees go to big. My sitemate met a women’s gardening cooperative that could benefit from a windbreak (a row of trees set up to protect the garden from the formidable Saharan winds). The garden had a good fence, which due to the overabundant goat population is the most important criteria for planting anything in Mauritania, and a good water supply so the NGO was amenable to us taking 100 trees for the co-op. Peace Corps training had prepared me to work with halfhearted, entitled-feeling people but I could not have been more impressed with this co-op. We started digging a few holes and then the gardeners jumped in and finished the job without a hint of lollygagging. We then showed them how to transplant the tree seedlings which is a simple process but is still complex enough that it must be taught. We taught a few people how to transplant and then they promptly showed everyone else and by nightfall the job that we were expecting to take days was done. We picked up the trees from the NGO in 4 shifts and on the last shift there was nobody at the NGO office and after knocking a few times we saw that the gate could easily be opened from the outside so we just let ourselves in and took the last batch of trees. I have no doubt that any of the NGO employees would have been perfectly fine with us picking up the trees and would not have felt bamboozled at all but nonetheless I still felt a little bit like Robin Hood stealing from the rich international organization to give to the poor cooperative.

I was astounded, well I guess actually not all that surprised, to learn that in 1958 when Mauritania was founded there were only 8 (count’em 8) buildings in Mauritanbia’s capital city and the first cabinet meetings after the end of French colonial rule were held under a tent. Today Nouakchott now holds over 1 million people which is more than a third of Mauritania's population and is a moderately thriving metropolis.

We have had a running joke that everyone at the agricultural agency is named Ba because the first three or four people we have met have had that name, which isn’t that surprising in a country where somewhere between 53.7% and 62.4% of the men are named Mohammed. We let a Mauritanian who knew two of the Ba’s in on the joke and he promptly explained to us that we were stupid and that one of the people was named Ba and that one was named Bah a difference that was lost on my imperceptive American ears.

Three cheers to UNICEF for donating all of the books, bags and school supplies to all of the elementary schools in Mauritania. I of course can't compare it to anything before but the teachers seem really happy about the books and it seems to be making something of a difference. Although they could have introduced a little variety as every single student walks around with the same light blue backpack, an interesting color choice in a country where there is more sand than just about anything.

For the record the word Madrassa means school in Arabic, it doesn't mean terrorist training camp it simply means school, as in elementart school. I say the word at least 10 times a day. So the next time you read a sentence that something such as " we need to do everything we can to keep people out of the Madrassas" that sentence says "we need to do everything we can to keep people out of school."

Joining Peace Corps I was expecting to live in another culture that was totally different from the American Culture l that I grew up with. I expected that I would be exposed to another way of thinking, living and most importantly eating that was outside the realm of anything I had previously experienced. Instead what I have found in Mauritania is a culture that is in many ways completely opposite to the one I grew up in. For example in a stereotypical African Village, in my ignorance I would expect a belief system that even if influenced by modern religions still was based on some traditional elements. I pictured people dancing around a campfire, or animal sacrifices or face painting. These beliefs would be different than what I am used to but not directly contrary to my upbringing. Instead the Moors, who practice a religion which has many customs surprisingly similar to the one I grew up in, believe that my lifestyle is immoral and that I am doomed to an eternity in hell.

Seeing that, I composed an imaginary dialogue between a Mauritanian and an American to illustrate the differences in thinking between Moors and American Peace Corps Volunteers. Note that I don’t think either culture is better or worse than the other American and Mauritanian cultures both have their strengths and weaknesses and what is really important is how people act within their respective cultures. When you read this you will I assume be surprised at some Mauritanian customs and beliefs. Mauritanians have a very similar reaction to many aspects of American culture. For example whenever I tell people that I live alone, something I think relatively normal for a single twenty-something, and not with my site-mates because Peace Corps has a policy against volunteers living together people are inevitably shocked and almost horrified.

American: Your country of Mauritania is so weird

Mauritanian: Your country of America is so strange

A: You are so weird that you think dogs are dirty and that goats are a part of your family

M: You are so strange that you think goats are dirty and that dogs are a part of your family

A: It is so weird that you are forbidden from drinking alcohol

M: It is so strange that you have to throw all of your garbage in a can

A: Your country is so weird that you don’t allow men to socialize with women

M: Your country is so strange that you think men and women are exactly the same

A: You are so weird that you think that rotund, large women are attractive

M: You are so crazy that you think sickly looking skinny women are attractive

A: It is so mean that your society forces women to cover up so completely

M: It is strange that you allow your women to prance around and show their skin like whores

A: You hit your kids…That is so cruel

M: You punish your kids by making them sit alone without any company….That is so cruel

A: Your country just had a coup…That is an insult to democracy

M: You actually believe in democracy…That is a silly thing that could never actually mean anything because the powerful will always have control.

A: You are a man and you think that Akon, Justin Timberlake and the Backstreet Boyz are the best music to come out of America.

A:You waste all of your time greeting each other

M:You thank everyone “so much” for every little thing that any person would do for any other.

A: Git’er’done

M: InshAllah (Literally means God willing but is used to express the fact that one never knows what will happen in the future and that all things are uncertain)

On a lighter note. There is a playstation 2 in Tdjikja that the owner lets people play for 25 cents or so a game. They couldn’t figure out how to make Tekken 5 a two-player game so I spent this morning using my magical skills of being able to read English to show them which option led to a 2- player game. This brought me back to a different era of my life because it took over an hour of fiddling with the console to reach the appropriate screen so that I could help them.

Also I got mocked in an unusual way the other day. In my own humble opinion I feel like I have become quite adept at eating with my hands in my time in Mauritania. However the other day I was mocked for eating cous-cous in the same manner that one eats rice.

This past week, I ventured out of Tdjikja for the first time in a month to visit a region-mate at a rural site called Gnimlane, for the celebration to commemorate the end of Ramadaan and then for a camping trip at a site called Matmata in the Tagant Region.

The Id-Vitter was a lot like Thanksgiving on Steroids. My friend’s counterpart, who essentially hosted us, killed a sheep and we spent the better part of the day eating said sheep. Our first meal of the day was mid-morning and was a plate with nothing on it but meat that was shared between 5 people. That meal would have been a big lunch on it’s own but it was immediately followed by a huge plate of rice and more sheep meat. After that they very considerately gave our vegetarian friend her own special plate with Potatoes, bread, peas and oh more sheep meat. After helping her polish that off I was about as stuffed as I have ever been. The day was then topped off with a huge plate of macaroni and more meat for dinner. I noticed a few cool things about the holiday. Since the holiday is based on the lunar calendar nobody knows the actual date until an announcement the night before proclaiming the holiday over based on if people can actually see the full moon or not. Everybody listens to the radio the night before and waits to hear if the next day is either going to be a huge party or a day of fast. Also everybody donates a big bag of cous-cous, or rice to the poor which is I think a good way of supplying food to people who need it. One depressing conversation occurred while watching a soccer game. I was chatting with a high-school student who spoke excellent French and seemed to actually care about school and other things. I told him that I was doing environmental education and he had no idea what I was talking about. After much discussion he told me that my sector was “agriculture.” If this seemingly excellent student didn’t even know the word for the environment then I certainly have my work cut out for me.

After that all of the volunteers in the region went down to Matmata for a brief camping trip. Matmata is a massive gorge/canyon like structure. Water drains into it after it rains leaving small swimming holes throughout the canyon and making it one of the greener spots in the region. When we got to our camp spot there was an interesting cultural juxtaposition. Next to the Americans with our backpacks and mosquito nets, there were two Mauritanians in our party. They were just staying for the day not camping out. Our driver who brought nothing but a hunting rifle which he used to either look cool or because he thought he had a realistic chance of heating tiny birds 100 meters away, and another volunteers friend who brought with her nothing but a small stove and tea-making supplies. After the car ride and lugging our stuff down to the camp spot in the mid-day heat I have never appreciated the Mauritanian tea-making ritual more. We went for a walk through the canyon and my first impression was that it reminded me of the place in the Lion King where Mufasa is killed rescuing Simba from the stampede of Zebras. On the walk down we found what we thought were wild watermelons but in hindsight our excitement was unfounded as the watermelons actually turned out to be the most disgusting food I have ever tried, and which one region-mate quite accurately described as tasting like our Malaria medicine. If you haven’t tasted Mefloquine that is about the lowest descriptor you could give to a food somewhere in between leftovers from Shoney’s and cow manure. After tricking a few people into trying the unripe fruit and a few tosses of the Frisbee we found a swimming hole which while the water was certainly not potable was decent enough for a little dip. After swimming for a while we looked up and saw the clouds moving into position for one of Mauritanians famous sand storms. Given that we were already in the water about 30-45 minutes from our camp and that staying in the water would minimize our exposure to sand we made the decision to wait out the storm. Let me tell you that playing games of “500” with a Frisbee in a sandstorm is not very effective. Finally as dusk approached it was duly noted that we needed to get back so we walked the half hour back to our camp through the sandstorm.

Given my current state of relative unemployment, one day this week I pulled a page out of my father’s book and got up at the crack of dawn and went for a walk with no particular destination in mind. I dragged myself out of bed because despite the beauty of the desert under the intense glow of the incandescent sun, the mid-day heat is often oppressive. I chose a path parallel to the water runoff channels and not coincidentally parallel to the row of palmeries that dot the side of the channels and used the water from the channels for some irrigation. I swang by the local bread maker and picked up a veritable feast of two big pieces of the Mauritanian bread that is rapidly becoming my favourite and most frequently consumed piece of Mauritanian cuisine. I walked for about a mile outside of town on a path marked by the track of donkey carts, greeting and chatting briefly with everyone that I passed by and then I stopped under a tree for a snack and a rest. As I resumed my walk I returned to the path just as someone was walking past. We walked together for a while and then he invited me to his palmery. I watched as he used an electric motor for flood irrigation of his garden from a well and also observed his displeasure upon seeing how low the water level was from the wall. After sitting, and watching him work for a while, I’m not really allowed to touch anything in this country, he offered to give me some of the tea leaves that were growing in the garden under the shade of the big date palm trees. I politely (by American standards) refused, saying that I didn’t make tea and then he handed me two watermelons and an eggplant. The watermelons were subpar in size, compared to their American cousins, more like cucumbers but still delicious. After that we walked home together and I spent a little time with his family. This story might seem a little sketchy but I am realizing that what is and isn’t awkward is different based on the culture and in that situation my new friend was just a good chap and did what any Mauritanian would do and there was nothing awkward about it.

Another day this week I was visiting a neighbour and found an interesting juxtaposition of levels of religious tolerance. The family had a son in high school, who had a friend also in high school also visiting. Our conversation filled the typical pattern, first they asked if Tdjikja is good, then we discussed American pop culture with me trying to guess what on earth they were talking about as they made sounds that probably somewhat resembled American celebrities such as Usher, Jackie Chan, or the Backstreet Boyz. Next they asked, as usual if I was fasting and I said that as a non- muslim I was not. This time however the visiting friend persisted asking why I wasn’t Muslim and if I know God. We all quickly agreed that we all worshipped the same God with the only difference being different prophets and different practices. This wasn’t enough for the visiting friend who kept persisting that Mohammed was the true prophet and that I should convert, and that I should be studying the Qu’ran instead of Hassiniya. My hosting friend countered that Muslim’s and non-Muslim’s could live together in the same house “no problem,” and defended my position as many other Mauritanians also have. This wasn’t the first unpleasant religious conversation I have had, it certainly won’t be the last, and it wasn’t even close to the most intense but it was significant because of the contrasting reactions. These two friends probably spent their entire lives within 5 blocks of each other and probably studied religion from the same wooden tablets yet their reaction to a situation was completely different based on their personal interpretations of the same text. It just goes to show how much of religious disagreements and debates are based on personal interpretations rather than technical readings of important texts. I should also note that I have had a number of interesting conversations with Mauritanians about religion, that this conversation was not the norm, and that often when someone even slightly presses me on religion Mauritanians will jump in and defend me.

Also because Mauritania is never boring. This happenned: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/world/africa/16mauritania.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=mauritania&st=cse&oref=slogin

Don't worry this has about as much affect on my life as it does on yours.

So I found a house. I wanted to live with a family, both for the chance to practice my language, as an introduction into the community and for the opportunity to live with a Mauritanian family. For a few reasons, living with a family didn’t work out, so I found a place on my own. I have two rooms, basically square cement blocks, a li-mbar which is a tent-like structure, for lounging and sleeping, a decent size yard, although I would certainly prefer grass to sand, but as a wise man once said, PCV’s in Mauritania can’t be choosers, in addition to a bathroom and cooking area. The place, which I have to myself, is significantly bigger than my entire family’s residence in Rosso.

Since, I am not living with a family and I don’t have any formal work to do until October...ish, I have to look for ways to practice my Hassiniya and integrate into the community. With that in mind, I have been going house to house in my neighborhood introducing myself in much the same manner as a Meghan’s Law offender. During Ramadan people are the least miserable in the morning, so I have been walking around in the mornings stopping at each house, saying “salaam aleey-kum (may peace be upon you),” and reciting the same few Hassiniya sentences every time: I will be living here for two years, I am working on environmental education, I am from America blah blah blah. After my Hassiniya conversational material is exhausted we sit and stare at each for a while and then I move onto the next house. My other language learning strategy is to go to the market, find a person who is intrigued enough by my pale skin or inability to properly wear a boubou to want to talk to me. The conversations go something like this:

I say something as distinctive and original as I can, something to the effect of “that shovel is brown,” then the guy I am talking to, always a guy at least this month, says something ridiculously fast that on a good day I can understand half of. I smile and nod. Rinse and repeat until I get too hot and/or tired and retreat back to my new house.

I’d also like to rave about one person’s Mauritanian hospitality. He had been friends with the previous volunteers in Tdjikja. He found me and one of my site-mates houses, and while I was being an American princess and holding out for my ideal house with a white picket fence, he insisted that I scoop up my current house before the post-Ramadan influx. After finding the house, he made sure that I got a good price and that everything was in good working order.

The other day I was surprised to see a pair of toubabs (white people) in the market in Tdjikja. I learned that these intrepid travelers were passing through Tdjikja because it is on the way to…well they should really learn how to read a map. They had gone overland from Atar which means that they had just spent three days in a jeep crossing an unfathomably vast, vacant section of the Sahara desert. It was interesting that I was shocked that anyone would come to Mauritania for vacation without a clear purpose or destination, while they were shocked that anyone would willingly live in Mauritania for two years.

Within the past week I have, finished my training, done a final presentation about compost in Hassiniya, swore-in as a volunteer, moved to Tdjikja and begun my adjustment to my new residence. As we speak I am trying to start my new life in Tdjikja, looking for a place to leave, getting to know the city a little bit, practicing my French and Hassiniya, now without the benefit of a teacher and learn about Ramadan the Islamic holy month.

Although it seems insignificant at this moment, I think a brief description of the swear-in ceremony is in order. The ceremony was a lot like graduation, a major milestone in one’s life/ Peace Corps service that comes with a wide range of emotions and an overly dramatic ceremony that can’t possibly do the occasion justice. Due to the Peace Corps budget crisis, as well as the current political situation in Mauritania the ceremony was less pompous than in previous years. We had planed to have the events in one large room at the training center but unfortunately the sewage system in the center decided that the day before the biggest event of the year was the ideal time to spring a leak. This rendered the refactoire unusable and so had to move the ceremony. Nevertheless we all dressed up in our best Mauritanian duds. The best speakers (not me) out of our class in each of the five Mauritanian languages (French, Hassiniya, Soninke, Pulaar and Wolof) gave speeches about something or other. More ceremonial things happened and then we ate an incredible chicken lunch. The American Ambassador to Mauritania attended, ate the chicken dinner with his hands in true Mauritanian style (he ate well spilling less than me) and answered some of our questions about the coup. This was all followed up by a festive gathering that I am happy to describe to anyone interested through another medium.

After that we had a day of recovery, gathered our belongings hopped into a bush taxi and drove from Rosso to Tdjikja to begin our new life. Now I am in the process of settling in looking for a place to stay ( if you know of any lodging in the Tagant Region let me know) working on my language and waiting for school to start in October. To me, one of the most interesting parts of my Peace Corps service is having the opportunity to live in an Islamic society and learn about the Islamic and Mauritanian way of life. Ramadan is an important aspect of Islam. This month, according to the lunar calendar, all of the able-bodied people of Tdjikja are not eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset. This means that people are generally tired, school won’t start until Ramadan ends and it impossible to do any work that involves the community. For example, I visited my counterpart the other day in the late afternoon and while he was friendly he was clearly exhausted. I will be sure to write more about my perspective as a westerner living through the Muslim holy month.

Last entry I forgot to describe my lesson on compost that I think I will look back upon as an important moment in my service. For our final project every environmental education volunteer had to give a sensibilization (basically as short lesson for the community) on an environmental issue. Given the abundance of animal manure and our training gardens success with using animal manure for compost and the local gardeners use of chemical fertilizer I decided to do my practice sensibilization on compost. Speaking in my extremely limited Hassiniya to a group of about 20 P.K.10 resident and a handful of Peace Corps people I was forced to keep my lesson short and to the point. I briefly discussed the benefits of compost and how to make a compost pit (which almost everyone in the audience already knew). I then showed them our compost which had become good soil after only a month. I picked up an assortment of objects and had the audience tell me whether each object was good or bad for compost. While one lesson certainly won’t change anything (and that was never the point of this lesson) it went amazingly well. A high point for me was a few days later when one of the audience members came over to my families dwelling and discussed my presentation back to me. It was clear that he had understood what I had said.

After giving the presentation I thought about how different it was from my last presentation defending my thesis, audience of American PH.D’s vrs. barely literate Mauritanians, Hassiniya vrs. English and so on and so forth. Then I realized that the biggest commonality was that both presentations dealt with animal fecal matter, either as a detriment to water quality or as a benefit to gardens. I guess some things don’t change.

With swear-in coming up in a couple days and training wrapping up we are all preparing to move to our permanent sites. I have been training at a rural site and haven’t had much internet access over the past month and a lot if interesting and exciting things have happened and I have learned a lot about Mauritania that I would like to write about but in the interest of time and space so I will try and write about a few of the more interesting events.

Only a few days ago one of my fellow trainees sister got married. My first clue that the wedding would not be like a typical American wedding was the day before the wedding when we saw a live camel being taken out of a van and tied to a tree in the center of town. Around noon the next day I was lounging under the family tent like usual when someone came over with a plate of delicious camel meat. As soon as we finished ravishing that plate we had another plate came with more camel meat, some sort of fancy rice and a few vegetables. After that meal we had our three cups of tea it felt a lot like heaven. The wedding itself was under a huge tent and most of the time consisted of a hundred or two hundred people sitting under the tent and watching 1, 2, or 6 people dance. The dancing was nothing like any dancing I have ever seen before and consisted mainly of the dancers moving their arms with the long fabric of the traditional Mauritanian bubu’s or mulefa’s. After approximately 3 million 7 hundred and 64 people commanded me to “irgiss,” “irgiss,” “irgiss” (dance) I along with the other American’s did a couple of in my opinion lame dance moves that the crowd loved. My dancing couldn’t compete with one guy who didn’t have legs, possibly due to polio although I can’t be sure, who walked and danced on his hands. I think he was with the musical group and he was an incredible dancer.

Another exciting event was the soccer final. All of the towns around Rosso fielded a team for the local soccer tournament. Every day there was a match or two, which culminated in the championship pitting the favorites from Rosso vs. The upstart talents from P.K.9 (I had my training in P.K. 10 one more kilometer up the road but for all intents and purposes it was the same town). There was a huge crowd at the game and everybody was decked it out in their best outfits and bluest gums (that’ll be another entry later). People were selling cookies and balbasticks (little plastic bags filled with frozen flavored water, kind of like a popsicle). The game was close and really competitive. After regulation ended in a tie, it was time for penalty kicks. Everybody made a circle around the goal with the players inside the circle. P.K. 9 managed to pull out a victory in penalty kicks and the crowd went crazy. Everybody mobbed the players and a huge group took a victory tour running through town and chanting about the greatness of P.K. 9. I appreciate the victory because it took the center of attention away from the strange foreigners and placed it on the soccer stars.

I guess that’s about all of the space I have for now but once I get to site in about a week I should have pretty good internet access so if you have any questions or comments just shoot me an email. Also people tend to glamorize Peace Corps as thrilling and exciting and it is, but there is also a lot of downtime. If anyone has any suggestions for interesting, fun or creative ways to kill time or new skills I can acquire with time please let me know. Especially now with Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, coming up I will have a lot of free time so suggestions are appreciated

In case you haven't been reading the Africa section of cnn.com Mauritania had a Coup d'Etat last night. Don't worry it was completely non-violent nobody was hurt and in fact the only effect it has had on my life so far was delaying a training session. A fellow trainee even commented that there was more violence after the Red Sox won the world series than with this Coup. If you are interested in learning more here is a link or just search Mauritania on your favorite news website. The only local insight I can contribute is that in the session immediately before we found out about the coup one of the Mauritanian Peace Corps staff members told us that trash management in Mauritania was improving in the past year due to more democracy in the country making politicians more accountable.

Completely changing subjects I would like to recount a brief anecdote from my training. For a homework assignment we had to gather a group of Mauritanians from our community, split them up into men and women and ask them to draw a map of their community prioritize what they thought was important and then make a list of things the community needed. Beforehand I thought that the event would be incredibly awkward and it certainly started out that way. I showed up at 4 with my host sister when the session started at 5. A few other Mauritanians hung out to the side while we had our usual Hassiniya language class. After the initial awkwardnesses it actually went reasonably well. The Mauritanians got really into the map and the men even started arguing or perhaps adamantly discussing the map. One minor snafu that we can chalk up to either language or cultural miscommunication was the women deciding that the most important thing in the community was the direction West. For comparasions sake the men chose the mosque followed by the school.

Peace Corps has told us probably a thousand times that the most important thing in cross-cultural whaterverness is being aware of one's own culture. I've noticed that my fellow trainees and I say thank you or shukran a million times more than Mauritanians. We thank every one for everything it's especially noticeable while drinking or three cups of tea with Americans saying thank you for each cup and the Mauritanians not saying thank you at all. It's not rudeness it's just that small acts and minor things just are expected because they would do the same thing for anyone else. I am speculating that the the role of thank you in culture is replaced by $greetings which play a huge role in the culture with people constantly inquiring as to how your are doing, how your doing with the heat and how your morning is going. Or at least that's my uninformed stab at cultural understanding.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/08/06/mauritania.coup.ap/index.html

I will most likely be away from computer access until August 22nd but feel free to give me a call.

I told Peace Corps that they could send me to anywhere in the world so they sent me to Mauritania. Then I told Peace Corps that they could send me to anywhere in Mauritania so they sent me to Tijidkja. Last week we received my site announcement that I will be going to Tijidkja the capital of the Tagant Region in central Mauritania.

The training coordinators drew a map of Mauritania on the sand outside our training center complete with buckets, rocks, leaves and a shovel to represent various features of Mauritania. All of my fellow trainees stood around the outside of the map as our assignments were announced site by site. Like captains choosing an elementary school dodgeball team our bosses read out our names as excited volunteers learned of their great locations in Naoddihibou or in a beautiful spot along the Senegal River. Like the fat kid in dodgeball I waited patiently for my name to be called as more and more of my friends were packed into Peace Corps dense spots in the South. Finally my name was called for Tjidkja and while the map was certainly not perfectly drawn to scale there was a lot of sand between me, my three region-mates and the next closest group. As far as I know there are three frisbee players in P.C. Mauritania and we are all within 4 hours of each other. Not quite the frisbee density of Ithaca but still good enough to keep my flick in shape for the next two years.

As part of the training we take a break from language training and spend a week in our permanent sites and so I got to spend a couple of days in Tijidkja. While the drive from Rosso was certainly not short and was definitely monotonous there were some really beautiful spots along the way. Tagant is on a plateau and the drive up out of the valley to the Plateau is beautiful and the first viewpoint from the plateau out into the desert is stunning. Tjidkja is actually a beautiful city, at least by Mauritanian standards. The city is divided by two sand canals and along the canals there are a lot of oases/ palmeries (it’s the same word in Hassiniya). My few days in the city actually went so well that I am worried that things are going too well. I met my counterpart who is the inspector for a few schools in the region and is really enthusiastic about me. He speaks some English and is really passionate about education in Mauritania. I found a great place with a teacher/ journalist right near the regional headquarters and I met a bunch of people. I was told that everyone would be aloof to us at first but everyone seemed to understand my position and be a good combination of patient and enthusiastic.

One of the nights in Tjidkja we had the sandstorm rainstorm combo that I am rapidly getting used to. The next day we had to get across town but the sand canals had flooded. Half the town was hanging out next to the canal watching the flood. We had to cross the canal so we did what everyone else does: jump on the back of a pickup truck going across the canal and then according to Mauritanian hospitality stay on the truck for as long as you want and then hop off.

Raves: Peace Corps Volunteers hospitality in Tjikja and Aleg, (great food, great booze, great hanging out, good times)

Palmeries: Beautiful and great places to relax in

Rain: The country is twice as green after the rains came.

Rants: French keyboards (the q’s and a’s are switched surprisingly difficult),

drinking coffee and making plans to change the world

Some links about Tijidkja

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidjikdja

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=mauritania&ie=UTF8&ll=19.435514,-13.897705&spn=5.240706,9.84375&z=7

Life in P.K 10. has been going really well. I have developed a good routine. I wake up every morning drink three small cups of tea (shot glass size) loaded with more sugar than your average bowl of fruit loops. I eat a piece of bread made by one of my friend’s host fathers and drink a cup of milk (sorry not fresh but instead from a can). After that I go to language class to study Hassiniya from 8-12. Take a break from the heat from 12-4 , class again from 4-6 and then work on the garden talk to people, eat dinner and play dominoes until I go to sleep.

The class consists of 4 Peace Corps Trainees and 1 language facilitator. The class is a lot of fun as we improve our Hassiniya by insulting each other by calling each other mejnoom (crazy) and making phrases like Seth doesn’t have a head or figuring out how to tell Janna to shut her mouth. We’ve also made our share of mistakes as I accidentally said that I boiled myself (instead of water) and one of my classmates told her family that she was a story when she meant to say that she was sick.

It is also a really cool process developing language with my family. While my Hassiniya is still very limited and they don’t speak any French we have been able to communicate pretty effectively because we spend a lot of time together they are better able to understand my occasionally less than perfect pronunciations and they have a pretty good understanding of what words I know so I can understand them. We play dominoes almost every night, which is really cool for a couple reasons. We get to spend time together despite the language barrier, I am getting really comfortable with numbers in Hassiniya and finally I get to show that I am not an idiot. For all of my shortcomings in Mauritania, (take all of my flaws in the U.S. and then add not being able to eat, speak or dress myself) I can count it is surprisingly good for my self-esteem to be able to actually do something competently.

Part of living as an American in Mauritania is marriage proposals. One of my friends said that he was married to the rice fields to avoid proposals. My host family brought up my marital status and then brought up my friends marriage to rice fields. I then joked that I was married to macaroni. That has become a running joke with my host family and has been surprisingly effective in deterring proposals.

We discovered this beautiful spot just outside of town. As you walk away from the town there is a spot where the sand changes color from white-ish gray into a beautiful lush deep-red. The flat sand turns into rolling sand dunes as far as the eye can see and small trees dot the horizon. It is really incredible and only a 10 minute walk from town.

I went out to the rice fields with my friend’s host father the other day. We sat under the tent for a while and then this huge machine came (all of the people called it “the Machine) to cut the rice stalks. It was a really interesting combination of a very low-tech looking canal used for irrigation, little kids (and three crazy Americans) stuffing the rice into reused rice bags juxtaposed with a huge combine. It was also interesting to learn that they were using seeds that the farmers were buying pesticide resistant seeds which means that they were probably genetically-modified. It’s kind of crazy to think of how agriculture has changed to the point that small plots in Mauritania are using GM seeds.

I will post pictures of it as soon as I get around to taking my camera out. I have hesitated to take pictures thus far because taking out my camera would attract a lot of attention and I am trying to integrate into the community as much as possible.

If anyone has any questions or suggestions for what I should write about let me know or leave a comment and I will try and write about it in my next entry.

Also I got a phone and my Mauritanian number is 4598522 and the country code is 011222. I will leave my phone on Fridays and Saturdays and if you are reading this I would love to hear from you. It is pretty cheap to set up a skype account.

After a week in P.K. 10, I have been exposed to so many new things, people and had so much happen that, I have absolutely no way to begin attempting to describe my past week. Telling any specific story would require so much explanation and setting description that it would be impossible to even follow the story, so I guess I'll just do my best to convey some of the essence of life in one Mauritanian village. Despite some difficulties, I am having a great time, I like the people and the town of P.K. 10, I couldn't ask for a better experience and I am becoming increasingly sure that joining the Peace Corps was the right choice for me.

Last Friday, the Peace Corps van dropped us off in the center of P.K.10 where our host families picked us up. Since we didn't have language class until Sunday and my family spoke only a couple licks of French, I spent the first two days repeating Hassiniya nouns mostly body parts. For some reason, my family decided that the most important words to learn were the body parts and so they would make me repeat the parts of the body over and over again even though I can't imagine a situation where I would need to tell someone that I desperately needed an ear or the key to planting a succussful garden was knowing the Hassiniya word for knee. Eventually I was able to coax a verb out of them, to see, and put together my first Hassiniya sentence: aane reia terrab: (I see sand). One minor note on the difficulty of language learning without a common language is that someone pointed to me and said the word for drink and then pointed at a female trainee and said the feminine word for drink and for the first day I though that the word sherub meant man instead of two drink. Another language note, their is no Hassiniyian word for snow which provided to be difficulty for a fellow trainee. The next day we asked out language instructor and he said they just use the word "glace" which is the French word for ice.

I am staying with a really great, nice family. As far as I can tell, and that's not very far, the family consists of an elderly matriarch who has approximately three teeth, two of her daughters who both have kids even though to my American eyes, I can't see how there is any way that one of them is older than 14. There are a handful of small children running around as well and even though some of them are pushing 5 they apparently feel that pants are completely optional.

Short of writing a novel I don't have time to elaborate on any of these stories but I'd just like to point out that the following things actually happened to me. A boutique owner told another trainnee that she needed to eat to gain weight so she could be fat enough to get a husband before she got wrinkled, after a crazy sandstorm a friend found a cow in his bathroom, a 7-8 year old kid doing an incredible feat of climbing to rescue one of my tennis balls from the roof of a small building, using a dented trash can as a ladder,

It's also interesting to note that there are some things that I do that make me feel incredibly patron even though I would never have thought of these things as the hallmarks of a rich person. My headlamp which I use to help them see while they are cooking dinner will after dark. My notebook that I write down Hassiniya words. People keep looking through my notebook, even though they can't read it, and asking me to read it. I drink a lot of water and even add some gatorade mix and it is really awkward lying under the tent with my nalgene and then leaving to refill it, since that is more than they drink in a day.

That's all for now. Happy 4th of July to everyone.

Imagine that a clown moved into your house. The clown could do it's very best to integrate into the family and community even wear a suit and tie and sit in an office for 8 hours a day and try it's very best to learn English (translating everything in it's head from clown to English) but no matter how good at English he got or how well he is integrating you would still think of him as the clown living in your house. That is how one of the experience Peace Corps volunteers described what I will feel like tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning, I will become that clown moving into P.K. 10, a neighborhood near the Peace Corps training center in Rosso. A few hours ago we were placed into language groups and groups for our community based training. Myself and three other trainees, other environmental ed and agroforestry trainees, will be studying Hassaniya, a dialect of Arabic, with one language facilitator. We will be each living with a different family and struggling to communicate hisas the families don't speak French and we won't speak any Hassaniya. Rosso is a new training site meaning that these families likely won't have every had anyone from Peace Corps stay with them before so it should be an interesting experience. Some of the experienced volunteers performed a hillarious skit for us demonstrating the difficulty of moving in with a host family and a few of them said that this part of training is the hardest part of Peace Corps b/c you are clueless to the culture and don't speak the language at all.

Despite that challenge, after a few days of orientation, I have been extremely impressed with the Peace Corps training staff. From our brief lesson on greetings and some casual conversations in French I can see that the language facilitators are all incredible teachers and that the methodology is good. If it's possible for me to learn this language then they will help me get there. There is no better way than 7 hours on instruction a day followed by living in the community and with a homestay family and no other option for communication, not even French. The technical training seems really good to. The staff is great and most of the activities in the syllabus are practicing what we will eventually be doing including planting a garden to model the teaching gardens we will eventually be planting with our students. I can't wait to leave Camp Peace Corps and get started.

The first few days of orientation have been a combination of excitement, fun, cards, bad lectures, and anticipation. We have endured lectures, on health, safety, culture, Peace Corps policies and other topics inside the Center in Rosso. We have been learning the basics of Mauritanian culture: how to eat with your hands (only the right, and make the rice into balls), how to shower and do laundry and shower (with a bucket), and most importantly how to dress with Mauritanian style (pants, collared shirt sandals or Islamic dress (I already bought 2 pairs of Mauritanian duds)). The center consists of three huge rooms with a sandy area outside where we play soccer, frisbee, and an area under a tent where we play cards, chess, backgammon or just relax in our free time. The center is the kind of place that would be considered very basic in the States but is downright luxurious compared with the rest of Mauritania.

I have been practicing my French a lot with the language Facilitators and it kind of scary how much my French has improved in the past week. It was even good enough to pass out of studying French based on my oral language exam. My facilitator speaks a few languages including French and Hassiniya but not English. Meaning that if he needs to explain anything complicated he will explain it in French which will be pretty difficult. Two of the people in my group of 4 are pretty fluent and the other one is intermediate at about my level.

I also really like the other trainees. There are 76 of us from all over the country mostly the Midwest. There is a huge diversity of background, ranging from recent college liberal arts grads to a paramedic to a 57-year ex-EPA employee. Everyone is really enthusiastic and we have been having a great time just hanging out.

I'll leave you with one brief anecdote. One day we were throwing a frisbee around after dinner when someone (not me of course) threw the disc over the wall onto a neighboring property. With a boost I hopped over the concrete wall to get the disc. After throwing the disc back over, I couldn't summon the strength to pull my body over the wall so everyone watched my head come over the wall a few times but not my body. Eventually someone was able to give me a boost back over but not before I questioned my judgement of using help to climb a wall knowing that help would not be available on the other side.

As I write this entry I am getting ready to undergo a radical change in my life. On June 17th I will be flying from Newark Airport to Atlanta where I will spend a few days dealing with the Peace Corps bureaucracy before flying from Atlanta to Dakar Senegal on June 20th. From there a bus will take me to Rosso Mauritania where I will have three months of technical and language training before beginning my actual Peace Corps service.

It's funny to think about how different my life will be in about a week. I have spent most of the last four years in Ithaca, NY a land of beautiful waterfalls, monstrous hills freezing cold temperatures, and free-flowing kegs. I will be moving to the sands of Mauritania where the land is flat as far as the eye can see, the temperature rarely drops below, "unbearably hot," water is a scarce and treasured commodity and the sale of alcohol is forbidden. That's right I'm moving from the land of keystone light and kegstands to a place where foreigners are forced by circumstance to make their own wine in buckets.

Many people have asked me how I will be able to make it two years away from friends and family (not to mention frisbee). If you are reading this entry than you are a friend and I will miss you but it's that the difficulty of being away from everyone pales in comparison with the opportunity I have. The opportunity to travel the world, to live with people from a different culture, to learn languages (j'espere) and to try understand how a different group of people view the world.

Mauritania is a country that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes as la terre des hommes (land of men) for it's harsh conditions and other Peace Corps volunteers in West Africa often recite the phrase, "at least we are not in Mauritania" whenever they are struggling. Despite the harsh climate and sometimes difficult working condition I am excited to be going to what appears (at least from what I can find on the internet to be a fascinating country with a unique history, several diverse cultures sharing the same plot of land and an exciting future.

As soon as I found out I was going to Mauritania I searched the Cornell Library and the internet for information about Mauritania but couldn't find much. I soon realized that as a former part of "French West Africa" almost all of the writing about the country is in French. If I want to learn more I guess I'll just have to improve my French. I did manage to find two great books about West Africa. Blue Clay people about a frustrated AID worker in Liberia and an awesome book called "Riding the Demon" in which the author just rides bush taxis around Niger and writes about the culture and chaos of the road.

Here are some links to some information about Mauritania:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritania

New York Times page with lots of interesting articles covering Mauritania from a variety of perspectives: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/mauritania/index.html?8qa&scp=1-spot&sq=mauritania&st=nyt

Also I will be doing environmental education work. Here is a link to the Peace Corps environmental education page: http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=learn.whatvol.env.enved

I won't get my actual assignment and location until sometime in the next few months. The first three months in Mauritania will be training both technical and linguistic and during that time the Peace Corps staff will assess my strengths and weaknesses and pick my actual location based on that. Once I am at my site I will choose a project based on my skills and the needs of the community.