Friday, June 13, 2008

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Vacation Wrap Up/Sorry I haven't posted lately

Long overdue update, I realize I haven’t posted in over a month, I’ve been pretty busy as the mercury continues to rise higher and higher out here in Mauritania,

A few highlights:

I went off to Jazz fest in the beginning of May, it was quite a fun trip, once you got past the amount of time it took me to travel out for a 4 day long festival. Granted, Saint Louis is practically Disneyland to me at this point and I always have a good time. But to get there I have to spend 2 days in the car just to get to Nouakchott, overnight there and then head onto Saint Louis. But the clincher is that I have to cross into Senegal at Rosso, and then get across the river itself. Crossing is always an adventure based on the mode of transport you choose to go across on. You have three choices – the BAC ferry, which is a swarming mass of people, cars, semis and sometimes camel herds. You also have the pirogue option- a small boat that is always on the verge of sinking, you have a motorized option or a non motorized option. What baffles me the most is why nobody has bothered to build a bridge in the last 50 years? More goods and people could move between the two countries if we could try to smooth out this border crossing nightmare! The worst part is the customs officials, as soon as your little pirogue lands on Mauritanian side, a gendarme jumps on the boat and seizes every westerner’s passport and makes them wait around in the heat for hours till they realize they cannot extort any money from us, we’re peace corps volunteers for crissakes we look like refugees. There is also the “exit” fee, that some random guy with a booklet of yellow papers demands from you to exit the customs area, which is gated. Some days its 200 UM, sometimes its 100 UM. Its basically just a bribe, run by one man who pays the police to look the other way when he does it. When it’s a group of 10-20 westerners, the man makes quite a haul in the space of 2 minutes! All of this is done under these giant glaring posters, (paid for by your tax dollars) that say CORRUPTION HURTS ALL OF MAURITANIA which I find to be hilariously ironic. But, we’re Peace Corps volunteers so we do everything we can do avoid the fee, which involves me sneaking out a side entrance, avoiding the green ticket bribe guy and a scuffle ensues with the next 10 people who tried to follow me out. All 10 or so of us emerged victorious from the potential scam.

But anyways, Jazzfest was a blast, lots of Jazz music at night that you had to pay for at night, lots of fun drumbeats during the day. I spent most of my days at the beach, a Senegalese volunteer even dragged out a sawed in half windsurf board, which I proceeded to use. The surf was pretty rough but it was totally worth the scrapes and bruises!! I discovered two pretty great edible things in Saint Louis- YogoGlace and the EggBurger. YogoGlace is just that, basically a bag of frozen yogurt, no, not froyo from a food court mall, which totally grosses me out on a scatological level and I still cannot eat to this day. Just imagine a small bag of vanilla yogurt, straight from your freezer. This is a genius Senegalese product that only cost about 50 CFA, (maybe 10 cents American) and had all the goodness of yogurt. If you find that when I go home I have a small stash of Ziploc baggies full of yogurt in my freezer, do not judge me. Also, I have to get down to business about the culinary practice in Africa of putting a cooked egg on things. Where in America we might put cheese or another slab of meat on sometime (triple whopper from BK ringing a bell here anyone?) instead a fried egg is placed on top of said item. Restaurants put eggs on pizza, burgers, and schwarma sandwiches. And if you are a PCV in west Africa, that’s just about what you can afford on your salary. But anyway, I have to say the first time I tried an egg on a burger ( I had resisted it now since December) it was somewhat of a religious experience. I went into a hole in the wall joint one of my first nights there, ordered a burger, knowing that it had cheese on it and had my mind blown by the combo of egg, cheese, burger and delicious bun. Its like half breakfast sandwich/half burger. It was sooooo tasty that as soon as I had one I instantly wanted another. But I restrained myself, a little. Being as the burgers were so tasty and cheap, and the place stayed open till 4 am and then reopened at 10 am, I was there with my friends approximately every 12 hours! It was worth it.

After that I returned back to site, as its getting hotter and hotter than ever before. Lots of things are starting to break down in the heat. Mainly my patience for things out here and the power grid. Which leads to a lot of problems. Mainly the ice crisis of 2008 in Nema. For the last week or so power has been browning in and out at random intervals, my computer classes have been a mess due to lack or power, and power doesn’t stay on long enough for fridges to work and ice to freeze! This is a big deal, I (and many other Mauritanian kids) start roaming the streets like a zombie asking at every boutique for ice, but all they can sell me is a plastic bag of cold water for the same price!! So here is the issue, when its this hot outside, every item in your home is the same temperature, warm or hot to the touch, the walls, the floor, your clothes, the metal water filter where you keep your water. Imagine being thirsty and gulping down a hot glass of water in 120 degree weather. It’s the opposite of refreshing. So its wearing on my sanity a little bit, but I’m hanging in there and wake up each day hopeful for ice…

Also, I filmed a cooking show last night with my sitemates, expect that to be posted soon!

Sweatingly,

Heather

-Also, new invitees get off the internet and go hang with your friends/fam/pets! There is no insight you can glean from this post. You’re ready for Mauritania, see you in a couple of weeks!