School Gardens

Ever since I arrived at site I have wanted to start school gardens and in fact the directors of the schools have wanted to start them for years as well. What lacked were the motivation and the means. I provided the motivation and was trying to provide the means but since I have no budget and the only way for me to finance projects through the Peace Corps is by a system of asking family and friends for to donate money, the process of procuring the means was going to be a long one. However, in the absence of the community financing it, I was very much willing to do the work. In fact, as of last week I had done the work; I researched and wrote a proposal and secured a significant contribution from the community. However, as I was explaining again why it was going to take so long to get the money to Ball Oumar, the director of primary school 2, he said “Well, hang on, why don’t we try calling the Mayor and see if he will finance the fencing.” Which made me both a little pissed and very happy because this is what I had wanted to do when I first arrived at site, but was told was useless. A day later we had the fencing.

As much as it would be nice to leave products of my labors here, I would much prefer that those products were really the products of Mauritanian labors that I just happened to be a part of. I think I may have mentioned this in an earlier as my idea of “Jujitsu development” where I my role is more that of a catalyst than typical international (financial) aid. While I cannot claim full credit for the things ending up the way they did, due to some other factors the Mayor has started paying attention to the schools in a way that he was not when I first arrived at site, Ball has wanted to have a school garden more and longer than I have, and it was Ball who made the call, the two schools in which I work now have 50 meters of fencing each that they are already putting up. In the end I achieved the result I wanted and do not think it would have happened without me, but I am not sure how responsible I am for it. Oddly enough that right there is how I measure my success here.

Update: I have a tree nursery of a couple of hundred trees and 10 garden bed planted at one school and will be planting the tree nursery at the other this week.

My Marabout

So my two roommates moved out, one managed to leave without paying me which earned him a shrug from me and my other roommate who was also not paid (or lied and has my money, either way, still a shrug.) My other roommate just relocated because the 7,500 Ouguiya (~$25) a month rent was too much and is now paying only 3,000 at another house. As soon as he left my landlord rented his room to someone else for 3,000. Yup, economics to not function well here. Someone told me that Mauritania is one of the few places on the earth where the economic laws of supply and demand do not function, that when there is a surplus people will raise the price and lower the price when things are scarce. This is true. Maybe I already told this story but I was once buying oranges and was asked if I wanted to buy a single one or a kilo. It went like this:
Me: "How much is a single orange?"
Woman: "50 Ouguiya"
Me: "And a kilo?"
Woman: "400 Ouguiya"
Me: "How many oranges are in a kilo?"
Woman: "5"
Me: "So I could buy 5 single oranges for 250 or buy a kilo for 400"
Woman: "Yes"
Me: "So its, less expensive to buy single oranges than a bunch?"
Woman: "Yes, its not good if I sell just a single orange"
At this point I bought a single orange and gave up trying to do anything productive for the day.

So anyway, the point of this post is to talk about my new roommates. One is a marabout (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marabout), think Muslim shaman, who claims he made someone rich in the states, and the other is a guy who is going to be reopening the post office in my town, I'll let you know when it happens. I don't know how I feel about the post office guy but the marabout is really interesting. Mostly he is monkishly modest, generous, and nice. He spends the majority of his waking moments praying, starting at 3am every morning, and a lot of times I have trouble telling if he is praying or sitting in silence being bored, so I don't really talk to him much. We get along well, but there is not really much of a relationship to speak of. I don't know if it works for nonmuslims, but if you needed an spiritual work done, I invite you to come visit.

President's Visit

So, if you remember not long after I arrived here there was a military coup and much international to-do that amounted to nothing. The guy who led the coup, General Aziz, was the same one who led the last coup that resulted in the first legit democratic elected president, who he ousted from power in this most recent coup. This led to the withdrawal of lots of international aid and was generally to believed to be a step backward, although a lot of Mauritanians were indifferent. At any rate, he is still in power and will soon be holding elections, only this time everyone expects him to make sure he gets elected again. (See previous article about the importance of good governance.) As part of his election campaign he visited my town. I kept my distance from him and his bodyguards with the uzis and mostly just took pictures of the people partying in the streets. In talking to my friends about how they felt, I got the sense that while most of the town and many people from the surrounding towns were gathered together, it was less of a support rally than it was a social event for the people. It is safe to say that the democratic spirit does not exist here and having seen the results I need to tell you too vigorously keep that spirit alive back home.

Water Again

Right, so the lack of water for 5 days was a bigger deal to me than it was the rest of the town, as running water is a relatively new thing for them not a supposed necessity like it is for me. Eventually some one came out from NKT to fix it and now I am back to being a spoiled volunteer. Note though, if you are ever in control of a developing country, do not concentrate all of the power and authority in an inept central government, (See previous article on development.) turns out the problem was that all of the water bill money went back to NKT so there were no local funds available to have the pump fixed and we had to wait on the central government to disperse the funds and a technician.

Misleading Africa

To anyone interested in African development, or development in general, from my experience I could not agree more with this article:

Misleading Africa

http://www.coss.fsu.edu/files/materials/MisleadingAfrica.pdf

"...The global development elite might just be the most innocently narcissistic group of otherwise intelligent people on the planet..."

To Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Senegal, and back

On the trip that we took, there are three categories of experiences that stood out; the places that we saw, the people that we met, and the food that we ate. I had expected the places to dominate the experience of the trip, but because I was already used to being in Africa, much of what would have been new and unusual for a typical Toubab tourist was sort of old hat for me. As such the people that we met and the food that we are were just as interesting as where we were. Therefore, I will break up my description of the trip into these three categories. However, I will give more attention to the places that we went than I did on the trip because I expect that they will be the most interesting to you and also because that is what I am best at writing about. First though, a little background on the trip.

We were four, Ginger, Rocco, Manna, and myself, all PCVs from Mauritania and all working in the environment sectors. It was Rocco who found out about the conference in Accra, Ghana that was the reason for the trip and it was him who planned and orchestrated the whole thing. Each PCV gets 48 days of vacation to use throughout their service and normally we could have not gone an extended trip like this, but because the conference was within our field of work, our bosses gave us free vacation days for the travel down, the conference, and the travel back. Without that the trip could not have happened. The conference, “From Conservation Science to Policy in Africa,” was hosted by the University of Ghana and the Society for Conservation Biology and our plan was to travel overland down to Accra, attend the conference, and then spend a week touring around Ghana before heading back to Rosso, Mauritania where we would meet up with the rest of the Mauritanian volunteers before attending the West African Invitational Softball Tournament (WAIST) in Dakar, Senegal. Given the uncertainty of public transportation here in West Africa we were impressively able to stick to that plan. There were only a few times we ended up in the wrong place, bought the wrong ticket, were lied to, or overpaid. Yet, even throughout all of that we managed to more or less stay on schedule. In order to sum up a month’s worth of traveling through five different countries, I will give a description of the whole trip in three parts; the places, the people, and the food.

No Water

Broken water pumps, Muhammad's birthday, the president of Liberia visiting, and an enept government have conspired to leave my town of 8,000 people without water for the past three days. No one seems to expect the pumps to be fixed today either. Hopefully they come back on before the tree nurseries all die and before I start smelling too bad. Right now people are hauling jugs of water out of the river 3km away.