More photos on flickr

Check it out, I uploaded some more photos onto flickr.

Food is Not Enough:Without Essential Nutrients Millions of Children Will Die

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/issue.cfm?id=2396

This is a good link with both uplifting and distressing news. It was sent to me by our newly reinstalled USAID Program Manager who I had the pleasure of breakfasting with yesterday. Note that Mauritania is smack dab in the middle of the Sahel.

Where Ever You Go, There You Are

There's been quite a lull in the action as of late which is what I find the most challenging about being in the Peace Corps- aside from the poverty and the heat. I get on real highs when the CereAmine training is active, the feeding center is active and it appears as though something is about to happen. But the weeks of lull send me into a funk. Also, when I am working, I am spending lots of time with Mauritanians which makes me feel productive. If I am not working I don’t really get a chance to interact with them, as I don’t enjoy simply socializing. I love the interaction while we are doing something productive, flipping bean skins, roasting grains. But laying around, sweating, in culturally appropriate garb, trying to make small talk isn’t my idea of fun. I'd rather be home reading a book or writing a blog, or taking a nap. That is pretty much how I feel about doing it in the US as well. It just proves the adage, where ever you go, there you are!

Thankfully I have been a stay at home mom for the last 3-4 weeks with little Miss Kitty, and she has occupied me. But like the sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. Yesterday, Miss Kitty moved to Chinguetti. The house seems very empty. I had to do my laundry without her help. The upside, I did manage to get an extra hour of sleep this morning. Hallelujah. I have been sleep deprived since I scooper her off of the road.

The big news, I ran into Genevieve aka Achia, 2 days ago on the Carrefour. She is the woman who runs Les Enfants Du Desert. Or rather she came in for a quick landing. I am not sure how much coffee she’d had, but she was really wired. She stopped her car in the middle of the road, hopped out, kissed me, then another women she knew drove up and also parked in the middle of the road then Genevieve proceeded to have a meeting in the middle of the rond point. I had a hell of a time hanging onto her French as she was speaking a mile a minute. I can speak African French and I get to feeling a little cocky until I try to have a conversation with a French person. Then my bubble is burst pretty quickly and I spiral into depression that I will never be able to speak this language. I did however; manage to get out that I wanted to put together a meeting with her, my counterpart and the women’s coops to discuss the CereAmine trial. She was ready to do it right then and there, but Morella wasn’t due back in town till that evening, so I opted for 10 am the next day, converging at the rond point. Then off she tears, nearly fishtailing out of the Carrefour, like a mad woman, or a woman on way, way too much caffeine.

Yet, from our brief conversation, I could tell that she had been doing her homework on CereAmine. She was a wealth of information; she even knew the price that the ladies and I had agreed would provide them a reasonable profit. She proceeded to explain all of the benefits to the holistic solution of CereAmine to the other lady who pulled up next to us. Man, this is a small town and/or wow, is she well connected. But okay, I have made some progress after lo these many weeks of stagnation. I have a meeting finally scheduled with her to discuss the trial, the trial that was suppose to start around Easter. At least I think that is what the meeting is for. After she drove away, I was left wondering if I was suppose to go ahead and set up the meeting with my counterpart and the women for 10 the next day.—or what? Oh well.

Fast forward to the next day. I helped Jessica get over to the Chinguetti garage with Kitty then hightailed it to the Carrefour for our rendez-vous. Where Morella and I sit. And sit. And sit. Crap I must have misunderstood our lieu de reunion. 10 am; Carrefour; demaine. How hard is that? I really need to get more sleep. We try to call, but her phone number hasn’t been working for weeks. Then, after about 30 minutes we see her blue SUV pull up at the rond point. Yeah, I didn’t miss understand, she was just running late. So we hop in her car and off we go. Where we are going, I have no idea; who we are seeing, I have no idea; but off she zooms. She drives directly to my counterpart’s office. Theyhave known each other for years and have apparently already spoken about the benefits of CereAmine both for the feeding center and the creation of income for the women’s cooperatives. She is completely onboard.

We scheduled a meeting the coops who will be producing the product for next week. She would also like to witness the actual production to ensure it is conducted in sanitary (a relative term) conditions. I also, want them to make each other aquaintance as I feel it is vital to creating a sustainable relationship between the two parties. Morella and I have explained to both my counterpart and Les Enfants du Desert that we do not want to be in the middle of the transaction. Again, Morella explained that the CereAmine, although we trained them, is the ladies product to sell. Providing all goes well, which it will, we should be in full production to make 120K of CereAmine for the 5/1 trial start. The trial has been expanded to two of the centers.

So once again, all is going well.

Atar Trash Marathon

It has been awhile since my last post…frankly nothing much has changed. Kitten is growing and thriving. I am anxious to find her a home, although she is still really small and dependant.

We held the annual PC trash pick up/marathon a couple of weekends ago. I had thought I’d participate in the 20k walk but I found myself assigned to hand out water and bananas at kilometer 10. So there I sat, at the intersection of two small dirt roads outside of the little town of Azougi and believe you, me.....I was the local spectacle. Every person that passed slowed to examine my doings. I sat there for over an hour before the first runners/walkers showed up so the town folk couldn't imagine why i was sitting on the ground, in the road, wrapped in my blanket (it was a chilly breeze at 7am) doing a sodoku puzzle beside a tub full of plastic bags filled with water....just sitting at this intersection in the middle of nowhere, lazin away the day. And honestly, I didn't mind it a bit. I have become exceedingly patient in the last year.

A cultural exchange note, whenever you are out on the road, all drivers, to a car, unless it's filled with toubabs, will stop and ask if you need a ride. It has never,ever failed to happen. When i am out on my power walks, every car that passes, sometimes go a few yards, but inevitably stop, reverse and ask if I need a ride. That comes from living in this harsh climate. You'd never leave a soul stuck in the middle of the Sahara. Unless you are white, then you drive on by...

The marathon was a full of mixed emotions. 40+ RIM volunteers came up for the event, and sadly, it might be the last time we see some of them. The second year’s just went to their COS (close of service) conference and will be leaving over the spring/summer. Apparently, the time does fly.

As for the rest of my life and work, it’s pretty slow. The CereAmine trial still hasn’t started. I do not know if the lady who runs Les Enfants du Desert has returned from France. We stopped by a week or so ago and left her a note, but the wind could very easily have blown it away.

The weather is getting really hot. To give you an idea, it’s now 9 pm and the temperature on April 5th is 95 F. …………and now it’s 10:30 and 92 F. I think I can safely speak for all here, we are apprehensive about the summer heat and stillness. The Senegalese souvenirs hawkers are now gone, the teachers will leave as soon as the semester ends, mid June, and we will be left alone. Then comes the gethna, which is the date harvest. This is a time to party the night away amongst the date palms. It takes place sometime over the summer and brings in a whole new crowd. From what I hear of past experience, it's a trying experience. Volunteers have to reacquaint and reeducate the new inhabitants about who we are and what we do. Let's see if after nearly a year of this, I can muster the patience yet again for that task at 120 F. God help the poor fools.

I did well in my French class. I know because they announced the grades in front of everyone. Not only do they announce them but they make you guess who number 1 vs 2 vs 3 vs 4 vs 5 etc. I was flabbergasted. It’s apparently worse at real school. There, the grades are announced at an assembly which includes parents.

Anyway, that is all from me. Go see my new hyma on the flickr photos. I’ll tell you the story later.

Cheers from here

MAURITANIA: Record hunger predicted in 2008

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77366

It Was Bound To Happen

Well it was bound to happen. Kelsea and I were just minding our own business, finishing up a walk and at the very same time we hear this loud, disturbing cry. In unison we turn around and see this teeny, tiny kitten along the side of the road. We looked at each other and both thought “Crap”, feeling a little hoodwinked by fate. How she got there is a mystery, but we sure as heck knew that she didn’t get herself along the road. So we swooped her up and with reluctance brought her home. Reluctance, because neither of us wants a pet. I already have two little buddies waiting for me in San Diego. Thank you Jane. But what could we do? We are Peace Corps volunteers for Christ’s Sake. If we were capable of just walking on by we sure wouldn’t be living in Mauritania.

Anyway, she is staying Chez Moi until she gets on her feet. I wasn’t sure she’d last through the first few days but she seems to be thriving. We started her out on milk, which seemed to work, at least for the first few hours. But it quickly turned ugly. She couldn’t digest it. She exploded from both ends. She spent an evening miserable and whimpering. I wasn’t sure she’d last the night. The next morning she refused to take any more milk so I thought we were sunk. There is no such thing as Science Diet or Purina here in Atar. Possibly Nouakchott, but not Atar. Never mind a vet. Thankfully, I had one of those precooked chicken packets left from a lovely package from the US. So I rinsed off the teriyaki marinade and offered it to her. I wasn’t sure she was big enough, but let me tell you, she got one whiff of it and nearly took my fingers off. At first I tried breaking it up into teeny tiny pieces, thinking that it would be easier for her. No such luck, all she could accomplish was to push the tiny pieces around with her whiskers. She isn’t big enough to get her mouth around her whiskers. Now we go for big hunks, which she can get a hold of. I put the little pieces into water, which entices her to drink water. Thank god I have the fridge because I was able to freeze most of the chicken packet and can thaw enough for her to eat each day. This one little packet should last her 4 days. I am the parent of a new born. I can hear her screaming for me from the bathroom, which makes it a little hard to relax and concentrate on the business at hand. She is so small that I don’t want to leave her alone for more than a couple of hours at a time. I have no idea how we are going to care for her especially when the summer hits and it is so interminably hot. That is a bridge we will cross in a bit. As the days wear on, she and I are becoming thick as thieves. It is nice to have a critter over here that is not absolutely terrified of us. Thankfully, everyone in the region is devoted to her as well, so inshallah, we can work out a suitable living arrangement. For now, I am just trying to keep her alive.

Cheers from here,

Ps It is hot as blazes here. Someone said 50 C today.

CereAmine Queen

Undoubtedly, you will soon be receiving an invitation to my coronation as the Queen of CereAmine. I have just finished my 3rd training. To be more precise,1 training and 2 in a supervisory role, and I can toss the skins off of beans and hot peanuts with some finesse. To be candid, I didn’t expect too much or rather what I expected was much chaos for this particular session. Zeina had spent much of the original training in the tea maker role and didn’t seem very dynamic. To be fair, she was kind of the lone man out if that can be possible in this small town where everyone know, in infinite detail, everyone else. She was the only representative of a cooperative that was not a member of the Union of Women for Self Sufficiency. Her cooperative is a member in good standing of my counterpart’s lending institution. But I’ll be darned if she didn’t have the session really, really well organized. There was enough equipment so that everyone could work at full tilt and much was accomplished with half of the workers. As for the ingredients, we were a little heavy on the peanuts, this particular batch was 10,10,5,5,3 (should have been 2.5) but we always seem to lose a lot of peanuts during the grinding process. A substantial amount of the nuts don’t get ground finely enough to be siftable into the end product thus we end up with a pile of teeny but not teeny enough unusable peanuts. And, I ask you, can you have too many peanuts? Inshallah, it doesn’t throw off the proportions and destroy the complete protein aspect of the batch.

During the tea break Zeine read aloud from the booklet that Kristen so painstakingly created. This was refreshing, as the Union didn’t even bother to bring their copies along on our last batch. She also took fly control and hand washing seriously. It was helpful that her cooperative makes soap. When we arrived to do the final step all of the doors and windows were draped with old fabric. Flies hate darkness and a light breeze.

Also, I am getting a small vocabulary of Arabic, which was convenient because for this session we had no translator. Here’s some cultural exchange for your edification. Goomee means Move It, Hymee means Hot. Hymee is particularly useful when one is roasting grains for hours without hot mitts. Next time, I have got to remember to bring a dishtowel. The ladies simply use their mulafa’s for this purpose. Heck they use their mulafas for everything: hot mitts, dishtowel, handkerchiefs, bedding, baby butt wiper. But even with no translator we were able to communicate. I took on the afternoon session of roasting solo as Morella was previously engaged with a hand washing sensiblization. The washing lessons were to commemorate the opening of spanking new toilets at 3 local elementary schools built as a Peace Corps project. Even without Kristen, I was confident that I could supervise the roasting of the grains even without a common language. Thus “goomee, goomeee, goomee, hymee, hymee, hymee” translates to “stir it faster before it burns because the pan is really hot”.

It was a lovely afternoon and I finally feel that I am back on track with what I can accomplish here. The women respond to my silly nature. Whenever Zeine’s phone rang, her ring tone was reminiscent of 60’s beach rock, think “WipeOut”, I couldn’t help but dance. This, in turn, livened the mood and they, Ziene, Zeine, Mariam, Tarbe and Aicha proceeded to sing to me as we worked using plastic oil tubs as drums. At one point I was offered a lovely cadeau, gift. There was a beautiful new born girl, 2 months, with us and she is either mine for the taking or they have named her Sharon. I am still not sure which. Alas, nuance remains my problem. However, when asked if I was a Madame or Mademoiselle, this time I responded with Madame. It’s just easier. If word gets out, I’ll say that I got hitched over the weekend. It can happen that quickly around here. One of our neighbors (she’s Mauritanian) met a man when he walked into her family’s boutique to buy some cigarettes. She was married the following weekend. They take love at first sight to new heights. Anyway, the terrorists may have scared my tourists and taken my fete, but they can’t take my hungry children or women in search of income.

When doing these trainings, which are 2 very full days, my schedule gets overwhelming. I end up running a Western calendar without the Western luxuries. In the morning I threw in a load of laundry (into a washtub) then hustled over to the coops where we cleaned and dried 33 kg of grain; then I ran to lunch; then home to finish up the laundry, and grab my notebook and dictionary for my French lesson; back to the cooperative for an afternoon of roasting grains. I spent this time stretched out, if I can describe it that way, between 4 huge Marmites (those large pans you see in my photos) over charcoal, teaching them the smell and sound of roasted grains. As you would expect, the roasted corn smells incredible (I am a Hoosier and I love my corn) and you can hear it start to pop; but what you probably don’t know is that millet does the same thing only smaller. When it is ready, the little tiny grains, which are about 4X larger than a couscous grain of 4x smaller than a small caper, pop and make teeny tiny pieces of popcorn, or rather popmillet. As for lying between all of these roasting marmits, you know it is hot when your knee pits are sweating. The ladies were very kind to me; they bought me a bottle of water, which in their estimation must be a terrible waste of money. I offered it around but they shook their heads no, pointed at it and me and said Nassraniya, meaning that they could drink the well water but knew that I could not.

After a brilliant afternoon, I had to hightail it to French classes. At this point I am still covered with the shriveled bean skins, dirt and specs cleaning from the grains and I smell at best of charcoal and roasted grains at worst..…… After 2 hours of French I headed home for dinner and to hit the hay to start it all over again the next morning with the ladies.

French is looking up too. I am enjoying this session much more than the last. It may help that the French isn’t particularly challenging as I have studied the grammar before. That in and of itself is encouraging as Mona pointed out, I finally know enough French to be more advanced than a class. The review gives me the chance to explore more advanced usage rather than barely hanging on to the basics in a class too advanced and feeling lost and frustrated. I can understand much of what is said to me but I still have a hard time spitting out phrases freely. I’m okay if I can spend a few minutes reflecting on what and how to say it. But it is rather problematic when I run into someone on the street. I inevitably end up tongue-tied and they are left just confused. Luckily, they are getting rather used to this and are satisfied with simply stopping and acknowledging each other. It is important to keep expectations low. I have done it so many times to one of the nicest Senegalese Souvenir sellers that the last time he invited me for tea; I rehearsed an explanation (in French) for my abruptness. He just smiled and said he understood. I will sure miss him when he leaves, which is soon. I like the Black African culture and feel very at home within it. Though they are also Muslims, they come from Senegal, the land of music, nightlife, cocktails, western clothes and cuisine and are kindered spirits up here in Atar. He said he was presse (in a hurry) to get back South. Good lord, when I was in Dakar I saw a garbage truck. It seemed the apex of civilization. It struck me, how can Dakar have garbage trucks and not more than 300 k up the road, across the river, we have none? So the souvenir shop is our little oasis in a desert of Moors. The last plane is April 5. On April 6, the streets here roll up and everyone goes back home not to return until the day before the first plane, which isn’t until late October. It makes me a little sad.

In class on this particular day, we were working on Personal Ads. I have no idea who wrote the textbook for the French/Mauritania Alliance, but they will never, ever, ever, ever run into personal ads over here. A. This is an oral society, I don’t think anyone reads a newspaper and B. They don’t date; at least not in the sense that Personals would imply. I was cracking up at the teacher as he is trying to convince the class that a married man with 3 kids, free in body and mind would like to meet a woman to discuss culture, art and cinema was an honorable offer. I wasn’t buying it. He knew I wasn’t buying it and frankly, I don’t think he was buying it either. But I suppose, if they never run into this particular ad or a lascivious Frenchman, what’s the harm. Next the teacher explained sexual abstinence. I am not sure that is what the ad was implying. It seemed to me that he didn’t truly understand this particular personal. He relates to the class that all of these people are looking to find or be found a spouse. Or rather, that is the impression he needs to give, the line the Alliance must tow if they want to continue to exist here in the RIM. On International SIDA Day (just rearrange the letters, AIDS Day) the Alliance who was hosting the event made it clear that our speakers were limited to the topic of blood transfusion but certainly not unwedded sex or infidelity. Somehow it reminds me of the Bible Belt and that Intelligent Design malarkey. Don’t even come near a condom conversation unless it is with a married women regarding birth spacing. At that, I believe she has to secure her husband’s permission. It would follow that personals used for any other purpose than securing a spouse, would be out of the question. So while he was very seriously explaining abstinence, let me tell you, these folks were hanging onto his every utterance; their pens were a flying. Sex talk, no matter how innocuous, is a rarity here. They were scribbling notes faster than I have ever seen them. One never knows when one will need to know that l’abstenance sexuelle= ne pas faire de rapport. That turn of phrase, or set of words, might come in handy one day. Again I say, I was dying in my seat.

Often the teacher and I are in cahoots when trying to explain words. Words like sincere, solitude, sentimental, dynamic, these are easy for me as the English equivalent is rather equivalent. But try to explain “sentimental” to an Arabic speaker and it’s a whole new kettle of fish.

In class I have become the pied piper. All except 2 of my classmates are in high school and they delight in practicing their English on me. They also delight in swiping my pen and phone, and generally pestering the hell out of me. Just the other day, one shoved his phone before me and asked me if I recognized the photo. It took me a minute to but soon I recognized the person as our own volunteer, Ellen. I recall the day, many months back, when she had gotten a Mauritanian makeover. She had gone to a neighbor for lunch and come back looking like a streetwalker. Her navy blue eye shadow, liner and mascara (bare in mind she is a pale towhead) matched her new navy blue mulafa. She had said that when the ladies had finished with her “improvements”, they whipped out their phones and took photos. How this photo ended up on this teenaged boy’s phone is beyond something, frankly, and me that I don’t want to think about. I haven’t shared this bit of news with Ellen yet. But the kids are good-natured and I rather enjoy the interaction. So all is well.

Cheers from here

Recent update: The Union of Coops sold all of their CereAmine at the Fete De Femmes. They were the only group to introduce a new product at the event. All of the dignitaries who attended were pleased with the product, the ladies and the Peace Corps involvement. It seems that they are singing the praises of the Peace Corps around town. Warms my heart.