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(I will put all sorts of tales here as soon as I get through my inbox.)

MALI! SOCCER!

So the school year has just finished, or is finishing depending on whether or not the schools are actually observing the end dates of the school year. My Eco Clubs have finished and I am very pleased with how they went. For the last lesson I did a review of all of the lessons that I had done and while no student retained all of the pertinent information I tried to teach, as a group they could answer all of my questions. I also gave out certificates of participation, quite possibly the only certificates/diplomas they might get in their lives. They loved them.

Now that I no longer have the obligation of teaching, I still have the 15 or so projects that I have started, but none of them require my presence at any given time. This means I can go to the World Cup qualifying match between Mali and Ghana in Bamako on the 6th of June and participate in second quasi annual soccer match between Mauritanian PCVs and Malian PCVs on the 12th. In between I am going to book it down to Dogon Country to hike around with some other volunteers. Everyone who has been there raves about it being the coolest place they had visited in West Africa. I post more info and pictures of those adventures after I have them.

Always a Best Friend

Journal Entry from the 15th of May

“For all of the time and events I have experienced, both good and bad, it is this moment that finds me writing here again. I have gone through and reflected on much, but not in these pages. Currently I find myself searching for an inner calm that transcends balance and rests firmly in the domain of peace. To keep one’s life in balance is a struggle, but to live in harmony is to resonate with that which already exists.
“Last night I found myself deeply in need of a friend, someone that I could really “play” with. As I was walking home from my friend Macina’s house after watching the Last Samurai, feeling lonely, and avoiding talking with the people in the road, Abba’s dog found me and started to play with me. While I was initially resistant, he was insistent, bobbing and weaving trying to get me to chase him. It was exactly what I needed at the time; the magical moment lasted through him accompanying me all the way home and then him not returning home until I returned the courtesy.
“As long as I keep pushing along the ridge line alone, I lose the opportunity for others to support me when I falter. Yet if I descend and take the valley path instead, I do not loose so much in purpose and vision as I gain in fleetness of heart and foot from traveling with companions.
“(This was written while covering the journal with sheets of paper because even though it is midnight, I am still dripping sweat at a constant beat.)”

Update: Abba’s dog now follows me around town everywhere. If I am walking across town, I will stop by Abba’s house and “pick him up” and then we’ll walk together. I also have started calling him “Sehil” the Pulaar word for friend. People around town are starting to know him as “Zach’s friend” and think that it is funny that I pet him because the closest relationship I have ever seen between a Mauritanian and a dog is one where the dog did not get beaten and that was it.

Gettin Angry

When talking about my experiences here, people often say, “You must be learning so much!” I feel that I am, but often the lessons are so experiential that they are hard to share. Yet one lesson that I can share with you is how being here is teaching me to use anger.

Normally I pride myself on being a generally patient and tolerant person, perhaps to a fault. For example, if someone is slighting me, I generally shrug it off. However, being out of my culture and being in a situation where I feel that I am often slighted or overlooked, I am learning that it is not appropriate to bear every situation, sometimes it’s good and wholesome to get plenty pissed off and to make sure other people know. This may seem like an obvious statement, but for a long time I was pursuing a path where I was hoping never get “irrationally” angry. What I have realized now is that a lot of what I thought of “irrational anger” is pretty rational. Here are some examples of situations where I have profited from getting angry at rather than just dealing with:

Kids – I don’t know if you have ever had 20 or so kids follow you around town chanting “white person” to no end, or if this has ever happened to you everyday. When I first arrived I tolerated it because they did not know any better, even though they should have. Now, I give them the option of greeting me and chatting for a bit and then moving on and if that does not satisfy them, I give them a physical message that it has to stop.

Lines – There is no concept of lines or “your turn” in West Africa. I have spent hours sitting on busses while the driver and sometimes police sorted out where people should be sitting because no one sat in the seats that their tickets said, these being people who can read and have ridden busses before. They just don’t get the concept of that sort of orderliness. I used to tolerate it and let people budge ahead of me, now I don’t put up with it. If I piss people off by yelling at them for treating these situations with complete anarchy, so be it.

When people lie – It is not exactly accurate to say that people lie a lot here. It is more like they don’t always mean what they say. The difference is subtle but important. Since the culture is so indirect, often it is more impolite to tell the truth in a situation than to lie. For example, it is generally impolite to refuse anyone for anything, if you get an invitation to visit someone’s house and you don’t want to go it is general practice to accept the invitation and then just not show up. People take that better than saying you would rather not go. People also view life as very uncertain, a lot depends on Allah. So maybe you say something that you don’t really mean or maybe you did mean it but the will of Allah interferes. I used to take these situations in stride, but because it makes it difficult plan a day, I now let people know how displeased I am that they did not show up or do the work they promised to do.

In all of these situations I have been surprised to find that people actually respond positively to my anger and will often modify their behavior. I liken it to someone poking you with a stick. Perhaps the person does not know that it is bothering you and if you share a little of how you are feeling, you can get them to modify their behavior rather than trying to learn to like being poked with a stick.

This is how I am learning to use anger.

So I spoke to soon

Alright, I may have jumped the gun on denouncing my friends and their tree nurseries. While I was busy complaining about their in action, one of them, called Woni, went and sold over 50 trees for a profit of more than she could make off of an entire garden in a year! Needless to say, I am very happy. Yet, I was even more happy to learn that one of the persons who bought a bunch of trees was the director of the one primary school that I do not work in! Turns out my work here is not needed after all ;) That's of course not true, but it would be great if it was. Ideally the goal of every PCV is to work ourselves out of a job. I just may have succeeded in creating a sustainable project. If I can just get Woni to buy some tree bags while she is in the capital, the cycle will be complete.

Woohoo!

I'll put it this way...

I have blisters on my hands from picking up tools that were sitting in the sun while I trying to make a washboard (I made the folded metal part just fine, but the wood frame is giving me some problems because the only wood available here most closely resembles balsa wood.)

Also, the tops of my feet are burned from touching the insides of the tops of my sandals.

yup.

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.