Updates, observations, and other interesting news

THANKS FOR ALL THE BIRTHDAY WISHES!

The trees in the two tree nurseries that I helped people make are selling like hot cakes, unfortunately, despite that fact the people who own the trees and would benefit from their sale are reluctant to take them to the market. After telling a kid to take them myself for several weeks and thereby proving that people would buy them I stopped ordering the kids to transport them and asked them to order their own kids to transport them. This apparently was to much to ask and having tried to take the trees once and found the store closed, they have not been able to problem solve taking them at a new time on their own. At this point I have resigned myself to let them sell them at their own pace which means that many trees will die in the nurseries before they are sold. I have decided this because the act of actually selling the trees is a key part of growing trees to sell and they need to do that for themselves. Also, I have proved that the idea of growing trees to sell works very well and can therefore try with new people as soon as seeds are available again. I should clarify that I do not believe these people to be stupid or lazy, in fact they are some of the most active and intelligent friends I have here, they are just Mauritanian. Some how they miss the importance of actually making the final effort of selling the trees to the whole process despite the fact that there is a lot of money in it and this is the reason that they grew them. It is purely a cultural phenomenon and one that I cannot beat. All in all, I am happy because as far as I am concerned the project has worked; we were able to grow the trees, can now profitably sell them, and they are being sold, although painfully slowly.

For the last week it has been over 120 degrees in the sun and 110 in the shade. It will stay about like this until the rainy season starts in July.

Having found a washboard that a previous volunteer had left, I am now attempting to get some one here to start making them and selling them cheaply. It’s funny what technologies don’t exist here. It’s also funny that whenever I try to make something here, people tell me that what I want to do is absolutely not possible. Twenty minutes later after I have made it, I tell them they are absolutely wrong.

Getting your kid to eat all of the food on his plate by saying, “There are starving kids in Africa” works well until that kid goes to Africa and always finishes his plate, leaving none for the hungry kids who would eat what he does not. ;)

Together with a bunch of other volunteers I will be holding a three day environmental and health camp at my site in the end of July. There will be about 50 girls from all over Mauritania attending.

The group of students from MIT that might have been bringing 100 laptops to my site did not have their project approved. This is too bad but also a relief because it would have been a HUGE project to manage.

I am starting to investigate another HUGER project: taking 15 Mauritanian youth to the UNFCCC Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December, where the next international climate change agreement will be decided.

UNDP has some how decided to fund a local NGO to build another set of biogas digesters in a different village for the 5th time although they will be using the same design that has failed in all of the other villages. I am desperately trying to get that NGO to some of that money (20,000 dollars) to fix one of their old systems rather than use it to build a new one that they already know will not work. By my calculations, at this point UNDP has given them over 50,000 dollars to build biogas systems that they should have known would not work. I am not really pissed at the NGO for continuing to build them, but at the UNDP for continuing to give them money.

Since I arrived here with the intention of acclimating to the experience the novelty of being here did not last long. However, there are still times when I have been reading a book in my room, using the internet at the World Vision office, or talking with some one from home on the phone and I step outside into the blinding sun and oppressive heat into a world where half of the houses are made of mud and think “ok, this is still pretty surreal.”

I will soon be experimenting with two different means of getting rid of shower water which currently runs into the streets and provides a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The first is to make a vertical garden by stacking old tires on top of each other, filling the center with dirt and the very center with a column of rocks. Vegetables would be planted in holes around the outside and it would be watered from the top. That way the used shower water would never touch the parts of the vegetables that people would eat. The other idea is to plant a bush that animals do not eat right next to the pools of water in the street hoping that the bush would both use the water and also loosen up the soil so the water could drain into the currently compacted ground. I really like both of these ideas because they cost absolutely nothing.

A friend of a previous volunteer who visited here earlier this year is giving me 15% of the profits she made from the photos she took which means that I now have enough money to very large maps of the world and of Mauritania in each of the three primary schools over the summer break.