Not Good News So Far

Lets review:

End of June: I get a call from PC RIM saying that Eco Health Camp, which was for 40 6th grade girls that I was hosting at my site, is canceled because they wanted to consolidate all of the volunteers at the end of the July for a conference and perhaps offer us the option to go home. I get this call while I am talking to the Mayor about the conference. Five minutes later I get another call saying not to worry, they are not going to cancel the camp and I finish my meeting with the Mayor.

The American was killed. It was of course terrible, but anyone who is proselytizing Christianity in a 99.9% Muslim country has to know that he or she is putting themselves at a serious risk.

Beginning of July: All the PCVs that are in country are offered the chance to terminate our service early and receive full benefits. About 20 PCVs decide to take this offer, mostly not because of security concerns but because of difficult work situations where they feel they could not make a difference. Since there are no new volunteers because the Mauritanian government did not offer visas, and many of the second year volunteers have left the country since they finished their service, there are now only a third of the total number of volunteers that would normally be in country. Some regions of the country only have a couple of volunteers left in them and most of the remaining volunteers are the ones along the Senegal River. Spirits are very high among the group that is left after the Interrupted Service option was offered even though our numbers are reduced because we now feel more badass for sticking around.

Middle of July: I dedicate all my time to making the final preparations for Eco Health Camp. Aziz, the one who led the coup d’état, is elected by a landslide over the other 8 candidates. The general perception is that while there was some fraud in the voting, it was not enough to swing the election because he won by so much anyway. The real fraud that occurred was during the campaigning.

They catch the guys who killed the American, I believe someone was killed during a firefight and one of them was wearing a belt of bombs at the time.

End of July: After a couple of days of running around, all the preparations for the Eco Health Camp are made, I am in a shop buying food for 70 people for 4 days and handing the clerk the money when I get a call from PC RIM saying that the camp is canceled because all of the volunteers have to go to the capital and then leave the country. I put the money back into my pocket and begin undoing a $4,000 USD project in two days that took two months to put together. Fortunately we can sell off or return without payment almost everything, although we do get stuck with 4,000 doughnut balls that we made. I start giving these out by the handfuls. If you ever wanted to see an example of a highly effective communication system, start giving out free doughnuts to kids and see how long it takes for a hundred of them to come to your house.

The reasons for the need to go to the capital and especially to go to Senegal are not exactly clear and we are not told how long we will be in Senegal for. However we are told to pack as though we are not coming back even though we are promised that we will be back. I pack up everything, which fit in a bag and a half, and tell my friends in my village that I will be back soon. When we arrive in the capital we learn a number of interesting bits of information. One is that PC Washington had put out a call to shut down PC RIM a couple of weeks ago but then after talking to PC RIM they quickly rescinded that call. We are told that we will be in Senegal for 10 days while folks from PC Washington come in and do a security assessment of the RIM. Why it was necessary that we leave our sites as they do this assessment is still not clear.

We leave for the training center in Senegal, how everything can be so much better in a country that shares a border with Mauritania is confounding. Upon arrival at the training center and talking with the representatives from PC Washington who are here we realize that we are going to be here for longer than 10 days and our chances of going back are starting to look not so good. We settle into a routine that more resembles summer camp than any summer camp I have ever been to. We sleep in dorms, have a movie room, sneak around, have organized sports, shoot fireworks at each other, steal peoples clothes, have classes, and rent out a bar all in an effort to stay entertained and motivated while we await our fate. The strong feeling among the volunteers is that we want to go back. No one wants the program shut down and while we recognize that there are security concerns we believe that they are vastly outweighed by the positive contribution we can make. We are not being cavalier with our lives, just serious about the mission behind jobs we signed up to do.

We run out of entertaining things to do at the training center so they send us all to the beach for 3 days where we rent out two houses on the government’s dime. (Remember to pay your taxes everyone :) The beach was amazing, we all had a heck of a time, clean up the entire beach (I love PCVs), and are pretty blissed out by the time we return to the center. After dinner we have a briefing where we expect to hear the plan for the next day when we will find out that the first suicide bombing in Mauritanian history just took place outside the French embassy in Nouakchott. Only the suicide bomber was killed. This happened on the last day of the security assessment and seems like so many nails in the coffin for PC RIM, but is by far worse news for Mauritanians themselves. It potentially screws up my next year but this trend has long term implications for the future of Mauritania and its peoples. We are told that instead of getting the briefing the next day, they are pushing it back and we are being moved from the training center to somewhere that is closer to the airport, the same place that PCVs from Senegal right before they go home at the end of their service. That brings you up to today. The only thing going on now is a volleyball tournament.

Its impossible to have a clear plan of what I would do if the program was shut down, but I would definitely go back to my site to say goodbye to my family and friends there. I would also be looking to transfer to another PC program hopefully just for another year. It is likely that the transfer would not happen right away, in which case I would probably bum around Africa or somewhere else in the world for a bit.

It is not definite that PC RIM will be shut down, but things are certainly not looking good. Theoretically we should know definitively what is going to be happening tomorrow night, but we all know better than to expect that to happen. It will likely be a few more days until we know...