Let me update you on what’s been happening around here:
We had blessed, unlimited dsl, for a brief time. It was a taste of what’s to come. Some fella loaned us his sexy little USB gizmo. It connects your computer to the internet sans hardwiring, just a little antenna, so that we could fix our bureau computer, which crashed with yet another power outage. So for the 2 days when not working on the bureau computers, those of us with laptops wrestled for the gizmo. I posted my last blog, hung out on You Tube and Skyped whoever I could. I am going to be the hippest 45 year old on the planet when I’m done with this gig. As I seemed to have lost track of the time changes around the globe, my deepest apologies to those of you that I called at the crack of dawn. We should have that handy, dandy usb gizmo up and operational in just a few weeks. Naturally, they are cheaper in Nouakchott than in Atar. However, they are out of them in Nouakchott. Inshallah, it will be on the next shuttle up here on the 27th. As it stands, we have no internet at the bureau as we dumped Mauritel in anticipation of the switch to Chingatel. I bet you never thought you’d know so much about the telephone/cellular/internet services available here in Mauritania. In the meantime, there is a brand new cyber in town which is very fast and thus far, free from all of the viruses that the other cybers are infected with.
I planted my garden, finally.
Pictures to follow. Inshallah, the seeds sprout, don’t get eaten or die of thirst while I am in Senegal for WAIST. I have a volunteer tomato from the dirt that they used to plant the palm trees. I also have 2 volunteer tomatoes from the compost pile that I have transplanted into the plot. There are, in order of rows, bottom to top: Sweet Peas (for shade for spinach), Radishes, Spinach (please god let it live), Peppers orange and yellow (for shade for the cauliflower), Cauliflower (a long shot), Beets, Lettuce, Carrots (purple) and finally Tomatoes (again for shade for the lettuce) I also have a few Sunflowers along the Southern edge, again to help shade the delicates from the blazing Saharan sun. In 10 days I am going to try another crop of spinach and lettuce, you know, so that I can have a salad day after day after day. It could happen! 
Chateau Deatrick is back to full production after a holiday break. I even had to hire additional help. We anticipate a full house when we host a Trash Marathon at the end of March and the casks are running low.
We reset the GMC schedule due to the fact that the College (Jr High) changed their hours from a continuous day to a split day making it impossible to schedule classes for the College girls during the week. Okay, no problem, we’ll teach the Lycee (High School) girls Tues, Wed and Thurs and leave Sat for College. It’s not fair but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. The College girls now have class till 5 and need to be home before dark which is 6:15. There is no way to fit in a weekday class. Then this past Thursday, at the end of the Lycee’s French class, the girls inform me that the Lycee has also changed its hours to match those of the College thus eliminating the Lycee girls from our center as well. Grrrrrrrrrowwwwwwwwwllllllllllll. It’s a pain for us but it is a much bigger imposition for the families. Some of these kids walk an hour each way. To cut up their day from 8-12 then again 3-5, will require them to walk or take a taxi 4 X per day. Honestly, what does the Ministry of Education think this move will do to the dropout rate? Yes, if they offered lunch on campus that would be helpful; but the schools have neither the infrastructure nor funding for that kind of off-the-cuff change. In this culture, actually any culture, what parent would leave their teenagers unsupervised, in the big city, for 3 hours each afternoon.
I am continually amazed that enormous changes are enacted over here with little to no fanfare. About 3 weeks into this school year all of the directors (principals) were rearranged throughout the country. This process took 1.5 months to settle down. These folks had to uproot their families and move hither and thither around Mauritania, with literally, one weekend, 3 days notice. After that little exercise, the teacher’s class schedules have changed no less than 3 times in the fall semester. Now this, a complete restructuring of the school day. I can’t believe the entire educational system staff has not up and quit. I am sure they would have if there were any other jobs available in this country.
As you can read, my days are very full. Between gardening, wining; the daily chores, (see previous blogs) writing blogs, reading War and Peace (page 1200), there is little time for much else. I have dropped my journaling as I just run out of steam. It will be difficult to piece together the book at the end of this.
What about the French, you ask? That seems to be at a stand still. I blame it on Mark as he is bogarting all of the good French books. Not really, I just wanted to use the word “bogarting”in a sentence.
Work, you ask? Work, French, would you stop with all of the questions already!
Morella and I, along with her APCD met with the feeding centers, Les Enfants Du Desert, last week to present CereAmine. Scheduling a meeting in the country is rather tricky. The APCD’s (I can not tell you what that acronym stands for but we have one for each of 5 PC sectors working in this country and they run the sector) come into town for just a day or two; one isn’t quite sure when they will arrive, how long they will stay and what their intentions and goals are while in town. Throw in the obligatory protocol with the town officials and the long, long, long Mauritanian lunch and you are left with very few usable hours with which to work. So after 3 reschedulings, we finally meet up with the Les Enfants Du Desert. Stepping into her compound was like stepping into paradise. She has furniture, trees, foliage, shade, a breeze, the place is tidy as a pin and a teenage pup who wants to nibble on your toes and/or skirt hem. We arrived just before 9 and the place was abuzz with the volunteers who were getting ready to head out to one of the 7 feeding centers they have in Atar. It was a treat to feast one’s eyes on a dozen, young, virile frenchies. They shake your hand, kiss your cheeks and embrace you; men and women alike. It’s a wonderful thing. There are also half a dozen folks there just to meet with us. All, except for Aicha, are volunteers in town to help for 2-3 months. One couple are a repeat volunteers who apparently come down each year. She is a nurse. He, I never learned what he does, but his T-shirt bore the word Spiruline (or something like that...not sure how to spell that) which they kept referring, so I suppose he does something with that. The conversation was, naturally, in French and since Mark has been bogarting all of the books I was a little out of the verbal loop. Praise Allah that Douda was with us (APCD) and could speak to the history and fill in many of the specifics of CereAmine, because although I have had a thorough 45 minutes of training on the product. I still didn’t feel quite up to pitching it. Anyway, we sat around on couches, sipping café, discussing nutrition and feeling fine. After about 45 minutes and dumping our literature on a flashdrive (god bless technology) for them, we headed out to tour a couple of the centers. We followed them through parts of this city that I have never seen. Many areas of this town look like scenes from The Pianist; they are just in rubble. I have no idea why. These centers are run differently from the other one I described to you a few blogs back. This one is open all morning and is for children that are not yet old enough to attend school. Each serves about 50 kids. There is a room for the infants and toddlers and a room for the older children. The older children are taught their colors, numbers, letters, etc. The centers are run by a combination of Mauritanians on staff and a couple of French volunteers in each. The children receive a meal, are weighed, their general health checked, are administered vaccines and other medicines. There was one little boy there who had received a horrible burn a couple of months back which they felt compelled to show me. Ouch. His initial visit was to the hospital, but after that the dressings were changed by the staff at the center. His family, no doubt could not afford the trip (via cab) or the visit to the doctor so thankfully, the center staff could administer this care. All of the information is kept on a chart for each child.
In our research of CereAmine, Morella and I came across an anecdotal account of how much 0K should serve. According to that story of 11 children, 2 meals a day for almost 2 weeks brought us to the belief that 10K should make 300 servings, which we present to the center. This combined with the sheer nutritional impact of a complete protein convinced them to try CereAmine at their centers in February. I later learn that they felt that the increase in cost was offset by the nutritional benefits the children would receive. God love the do-gooders.
Holy crap, they want to start in February. It’s mid January and we haven’t trained or rather re-trained, the cooperatives on how to fabricate it, let alone be ready to supply a group that feeds 4-500 kids a day. Not to mention that we are headed back to Senegal mid-February for WAIST (West African Invitational Softball Tournament) But Morella and I as well as Douda are feeling very pleased with ourselves and our work. I don’t recall if I told you, but I became acquainted with the name Les Enfants Du Desert when I purchased some of the cards in the airport and turned them over to see who published the little gems. Then, one Saturday back in early December, while sitting around at Tent City doing handwork with Zeinebou a couple of their volunteers came by and spent a hour or so sitting around too and having tea. They gave me some brief information on where they were located. I mentioned this to Morella, the health volunteer here in Atar; and lo and behold, once back from Christmas, off we go in search of them. She’s only got a few months left of her service (she’s a year ahead of me) and we need to get moving on this.
Okay, it’s the next day and Morella and I need to make a plan. My stomach is in a knot trying to figure out how we can get enough kilos of CereAmine in their hands within a couple of weeks. There is no way the coops can get this pulled off in this short timeframe. Not only is there training to be made; there is also an awful lot of financing that needs to be secured in order to get that volume pumped out. Morella and I meet in the bureau to brainstorm. Do they want to do the trial at just one center with 50 kids or the entire Atar population of 350 kids? There are also another 125 or so, kids out in the environs of Atar. Wow, that’s a lot of mouths, a lot of monthly servings. I (of all people) work on the numbers. 300 servings per 10K for 1 center for 24 days (Feb is a short month) is about 40K. All 350 mouths are about 130K (or something, I’d have to look at my notes) For fun, I quickly run the revenue for the coops if the trial proves successful and they decide to proceed with this project. The ladies will make quite a tidy sum. Lord, we might have to get a factory. Who needs the tourists and their fickle travel plans. There is always a market of hungry little mouths in Atar.
However, when we try to plug these numbers into a spreadsheet some volunteer formulated for CereAmine and Feeding Centers the numbers are WAAAAYYYYYYY off. In dissecting the formula, the spreadsheet has a serving at anywhere from 125 - 187g depending on the age of the kid. We settle on 150g’s with which to work. I’ll let you do the math but let me tell you, it ain’t 300 servings in 10,000g. Damn the metric system. Who can work in those amounts? Why can’t I have gallons, ounces and pounds? Why don’t we have serving information on our product? Shit, shit, double shit.
And this is where it stands at this moment. Morella and I have to get back in there and find out exactly how much cereal they are currently purchasing and take our numbers from that. Possibly they weren’t listening when we said that 10K would feed 300. Although, they did ask us a couple of times for clarification on that specific detail. In retrospect, they should have been skeptical at what we were saying as they are experts at little mouths. But instead they must have been amazed at this miracle power we were presenting. Being Peace Corps gives us far more credibility than we deserve.
I was going to wait to write a blog until the above situation had resolved itself. But in rethinking it, I thought it would be much more edifying for you to live through this process with me. Stay tuned.
Cheers from here
Here is a website for you: http://www.lesenfantsdudesert.org
Also I hear that www.france24.com piece on Mauritania has an English translation, just click around. Here is the youtube site thanks to Lisa, another hipster....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YS9ayJWbu4
We had blessed, unlimited dsl, for a brief time. It was a taste of what’s to come. Some fella loaned us his sexy little USB gizmo. It connects your computer to the internet sans hardwiring, just a little antenna, so that we could fix our bureau computer, which crashed with yet another power outage. So for the 2 days when not working on the bureau computers, those of us with laptops wrestled for the gizmo. I posted my last blog, hung out on You Tube and Skyped whoever I could. I am going to be the hippest 45 year old on the planet when I’m done with this gig. As I seemed to have lost track of the time changes around the globe, my deepest apologies to those of you that I called at the crack of dawn. We should have that handy, dandy usb gizmo up and operational in just a few weeks. Naturally, they are cheaper in Nouakchott than in Atar. However, they are out of them in Nouakchott. Inshallah, it will be on the next shuttle up here on the 27th. As it stands, we have no internet at the bureau as we dumped Mauritel in anticipation of the switch to Chingatel. I bet you never thought you’d know so much about the telephone/cellular/internet services available here in Mauritania. In the meantime, there is a brand new cyber in town which is very fast and thus far, free from all of the viruses that the other cybers are infected with.
I planted my garden, finally.
Pictures to follow. Inshallah, the seeds sprout, don’t get eaten or die of thirst while I am in Senegal for WAIST. I have a volunteer tomato from the dirt that they used to plant the palm trees. I also have 2 volunteer tomatoes from the compost pile that I have transplanted into the plot. There are, in order of rows, bottom to top: Sweet Peas (for shade for spinach), Radishes, Spinach (please god let it live), Peppers orange and yellow (for shade for the cauliflower), Cauliflower (a long shot), Beets, Lettuce, Carrots (purple) and finally Tomatoes (again for shade for the lettuce) I also have a few Sunflowers along the Southern edge, again to help shade the delicates from the blazing Saharan sun. In 10 days I am going to try another crop of spinach and lettuce, you know, so that I can have a salad day after day after day. It could happen! Chateau Deatrick is back to full production after a holiday break. I even had to hire additional help. We anticipate a full house when we host a Trash Marathon at the end of March and the casks are running low.
We reset the GMC schedule due to the fact that the College (Jr High) changed their hours from a continuous day to a split day making it impossible to schedule classes for the College girls during the week. Okay, no problem, we’ll teach the Lycee (High School) girls Tues, Wed and Thurs and leave Sat for College. It’s not fair but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. The College girls now have class till 5 and need to be home before dark which is 6:15. There is no way to fit in a weekday class. Then this past Thursday, at the end of the Lycee’s French class, the girls inform me that the Lycee has also changed its hours to match those of the College thus eliminating the Lycee girls from our center as well. Grrrrrrrrrowwwwwwwwwllllllllllll. It’s a pain for us but it is a much bigger imposition for the families. Some of these kids walk an hour each way. To cut up their day from 8-12 then again 3-5, will require them to walk or take a taxi 4 X per day. Honestly, what does the Ministry of Education think this move will do to the dropout rate? Yes, if they offered lunch on campus that would be helpful; but the schools have neither the infrastructure nor funding for that kind of off-the-cuff change. In this culture, actually any culture, what parent would leave their teenagers unsupervised, in the big city, for 3 hours each afternoon.
I am continually amazed that enormous changes are enacted over here with little to no fanfare. About 3 weeks into this school year all of the directors (principals) were rearranged throughout the country. This process took 1.5 months to settle down. These folks had to uproot their families and move hither and thither around Mauritania, with literally, one weekend, 3 days notice. After that little exercise, the teacher’s class schedules have changed no less than 3 times in the fall semester. Now this, a complete restructuring of the school day. I can’t believe the entire educational system staff has not up and quit. I am sure they would have if there were any other jobs available in this country.
As you can read, my days are very full. Between gardening, wining; the daily chores, (see previous blogs) writing blogs, reading War and Peace (page 1200), there is little time for much else. I have dropped my journaling as I just run out of steam. It will be difficult to piece together the book at the end of this.
What about the French, you ask? That seems to be at a stand still. I blame it on Mark as he is bogarting all of the good French books. Not really, I just wanted to use the word “bogarting”in a sentence.
Work, you ask? Work, French, would you stop with all of the questions already!
Morella and I, along with her APCD met with the feeding centers, Les Enfants Du Desert, last week to present CereAmine. Scheduling a meeting in the country is rather tricky. The APCD’s (I can not tell you what that acronym stands for but we have one for each of 5 PC sectors working in this country and they run the sector) come into town for just a day or two; one isn’t quite sure when they will arrive, how long they will stay and what their intentions and goals are while in town. Throw in the obligatory protocol with the town officials and the long, long, long Mauritanian lunch and you are left with very few usable hours with which to work. So after 3 reschedulings, we finally meet up with the Les Enfants Du Desert. Stepping into her compound was like stepping into paradise. She has furniture, trees, foliage, shade, a breeze, the place is tidy as a pin and a teenage pup who wants to nibble on your toes and/or skirt hem. We arrived just before 9 and the place was abuzz with the volunteers who were getting ready to head out to one of the 7 feeding centers they have in Atar. It was a treat to feast one’s eyes on a dozen, young, virile frenchies. They shake your hand, kiss your cheeks and embrace you; men and women alike. It’s a wonderful thing. There are also half a dozen folks there just to meet with us. All, except for Aicha, are volunteers in town to help for 2-3 months. One couple are a repeat volunteers who apparently come down each year. She is a nurse. He, I never learned what he does, but his T-shirt bore the word Spiruline (or something like that...not sure how to spell that) which they kept referring, so I suppose he does something with that. The conversation was, naturally, in French and since Mark has been bogarting all of the books I was a little out of the verbal loop. Praise Allah that Douda was with us (APCD) and could speak to the history and fill in many of the specifics of CereAmine, because although I have had a thorough 45 minutes of training on the product. I still didn’t feel quite up to pitching it. Anyway, we sat around on couches, sipping café, discussing nutrition and feeling fine. After about 45 minutes and dumping our literature on a flashdrive (god bless technology) for them, we headed out to tour a couple of the centers. We followed them through parts of this city that I have never seen. Many areas of this town look like scenes from The Pianist; they are just in rubble. I have no idea why. These centers are run differently from the other one I described to you a few blogs back. This one is open all morning and is for children that are not yet old enough to attend school. Each serves about 50 kids. There is a room for the infants and toddlers and a room for the older children. The older children are taught their colors, numbers, letters, etc. The centers are run by a combination of Mauritanians on staff and a couple of French volunteers in each. The children receive a meal, are weighed, their general health checked, are administered vaccines and other medicines. There was one little boy there who had received a horrible burn a couple of months back which they felt compelled to show me. Ouch. His initial visit was to the hospital, but after that the dressings were changed by the staff at the center. His family, no doubt could not afford the trip (via cab) or the visit to the doctor so thankfully, the center staff could administer this care. All of the information is kept on a chart for each child.
In our research of CereAmine, Morella and I came across an anecdotal account of how much 0K should serve. According to that story of 11 children, 2 meals a day for almost 2 weeks brought us to the belief that 10K should make 300 servings, which we present to the center. This combined with the sheer nutritional impact of a complete protein convinced them to try CereAmine at their centers in February. I later learn that they felt that the increase in cost was offset by the nutritional benefits the children would receive. God love the do-gooders.
Holy crap, they want to start in February. It’s mid January and we haven’t trained or rather re-trained, the cooperatives on how to fabricate it, let alone be ready to supply a group that feeds 4-500 kids a day. Not to mention that we are headed back to Senegal mid-February for WAIST (West African Invitational Softball Tournament) But Morella and I as well as Douda are feeling very pleased with ourselves and our work. I don’t recall if I told you, but I became acquainted with the name Les Enfants Du Desert when I purchased some of the cards in the airport and turned them over to see who published the little gems. Then, one Saturday back in early December, while sitting around at Tent City doing handwork with Zeinebou a couple of their volunteers came by and spent a hour or so sitting around too and having tea. They gave me some brief information on where they were located. I mentioned this to Morella, the health volunteer here in Atar; and lo and behold, once back from Christmas, off we go in search of them. She’s only got a few months left of her service (she’s a year ahead of me) and we need to get moving on this.
Okay, it’s the next day and Morella and I need to make a plan. My stomach is in a knot trying to figure out how we can get enough kilos of CereAmine in their hands within a couple of weeks. There is no way the coops can get this pulled off in this short timeframe. Not only is there training to be made; there is also an awful lot of financing that needs to be secured in order to get that volume pumped out. Morella and I meet in the bureau to brainstorm. Do they want to do the trial at just one center with 50 kids or the entire Atar population of 350 kids? There are also another 125 or so, kids out in the environs of Atar. Wow, that’s a lot of mouths, a lot of monthly servings. I (of all people) work on the numbers. 300 servings per 10K for 1 center for 24 days (Feb is a short month) is about 40K. All 350 mouths are about 130K (or something, I’d have to look at my notes) For fun, I quickly run the revenue for the coops if the trial proves successful and they decide to proceed with this project. The ladies will make quite a tidy sum. Lord, we might have to get a factory. Who needs the tourists and their fickle travel plans. There is always a market of hungry little mouths in Atar.
However, when we try to plug these numbers into a spreadsheet some volunteer formulated for CereAmine and Feeding Centers the numbers are WAAAAYYYYYYY off. In dissecting the formula, the spreadsheet has a serving at anywhere from 125 - 187g depending on the age of the kid. We settle on 150g’s with which to work. I’ll let you do the math but let me tell you, it ain’t 300 servings in 10,000g. Damn the metric system. Who can work in those amounts? Why can’t I have gallons, ounces and pounds? Why don’t we have serving information on our product? Shit, shit, double shit.
And this is where it stands at this moment. Morella and I have to get back in there and find out exactly how much cereal they are currently purchasing and take our numbers from that. Possibly they weren’t listening when we said that 10K would feed 300. Although, they did ask us a couple of times for clarification on that specific detail. In retrospect, they should have been skeptical at what we were saying as they are experts at little mouths. But instead they must have been amazed at this miracle power we were presenting. Being Peace Corps gives us far more credibility than we deserve.
I was going to wait to write a blog until the above situation had resolved itself. But in rethinking it, I thought it would be much more edifying for you to live through this process with me. Stay tuned.
Cheers from here
Here is a website for you: http://www.lesenfantsdudesert.org
Also I hear that www.france24.com piece on Mauritania has an English translation, just click around. Here is the youtube site thanks to Lisa, another hipster....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YS9ayJWbu4
LET ME KNOW IF ANYONE IS READING THIS...IF YOU ARE, MAKE A COMMENT OR SEND ME AN E-MAIL.
1 comment:
I read it.....I have to keep tabs on you all the way on the other side of the world! I like hearing about what is happening in your world since I have absolutely no point of reference from the little hoosier state!!
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