Sunday, April 26, 2009

The Slacktard Email: Aka, what I have been up to for the last several months.

For some reason, both times I have returned back to Mauritania from America, I find my life as a volunteer turned upside down.

December: I spent the month at home for the holidays. It was time well spent and I got to see alot of people. I didn’t plan on going home but Christmas at home was great for me, considering the circumstances.

January: I returned back to site just as Israel starting bombing Palestine. I was honestly shocked to see how many Mauritanians took to the streets to protest against Israel. Nouakchott and Aioun were hotbeds of protest. I was driven through tear gas ridden protests upon leaving the capital to head to Aioun. The protests went on for several weeks. At times it was impossible to leave the house to go to the market. Students voiced their outrage by throwing rocks at the high school in an attempt to destroy it. Neighbors looked after us (to keep us from being injured in a protest) but it was extremely difficult to carry on as normal as the Arabic news channels blamed the US (by extension) for the deaths in Palestine. I really did not think that Mauritanians had the capacity to be this belligerant, ever. This is a complete turn around compared to how people behaved after the coup. The government succeeded in throwing out the Israeli Ambassador. I have another, angrier blog post about this, but I decided not to post it.
Mid January I recieved the news that a close family member had died, the day of his funeral my house was broken into.

By the end of January things were normal as they could be in Aioun, and I started up work again with the Aioun CFPP. The director assigned me 18 hours of class in 4 hour blocks, without a tutor. I was to teach computer theory to students who only knew Arabic. It started off as a struggle, and I realized that there really isn’t any point to stress myself out and bash my head against the wall trying to get people to learn in the wrong language when the CFPP has perfectly capable professors who are fluent in Arabic. I begged the director for a translator, he laughed at me and told me to “force” my students to learn French. I told him that was impossible and told me to contact him when he found an appropriate translator. He never called.

At this same time I encountered an amazing woman through my sitemate. Khadjia Mint Kardidi runs an NGO in Aioun and gives trainings to women. She is very successful but low on cash for trainings. She is a case example of something we in Peace Corps call a Community Power Broker. She’s smart, talented, and well respected, when she talks, people hang on her every word. When she plans a meeting, people actually attend. Best of all, she was on board with Peace Corps goals and wanted to work with us. In the end of January, my sitemate Susie gave a training on canning vegetables, Khadija led the training, and I led the business component, trying to get the women to figure out the cost of materials and how to set prices. The training was successful, and we did follow up several weeks after the training, the women knew the method for canning vegetables by heart. It was very impressive, considering they didn’t even write the steps down (Mauritania is not a literary society, books do not exist except the Koran). It’s something I wouldn’t have been able to do, and I had the directions written down in English!

After that first training, Khadija mentioned interest in training the Cooperatives in Aioun. She wanted to educate women on the basics of running a cooperative and responsibilities required of the executive members. I wanted to stress the importance of critical thinking and decision making before starting new business ventures. Our plans meshed well together and we decided to hold a 3 day long training. We invited the president and secretary general from 10 women’s cooperatives based in Aioun in February. The training was a success.

In early February I took a trip to the south of Mauritania the hard way. I met up with my friend Edna in Kiffa and we took a 15 hour long offroading trip to get to Selibaby. I actually had bruises on my head and shoulder from bouncing around in the cab of a toyota hilux. It gave me a ton of respect for the volunteers of that region, they offroad like that whenever they have to leave site! Selibaby was a great town, a 360 degree change from Aioun. People were friendly and spoke French. I was able to give a neem soap training to the Girl’s Mentoring Center and it went incredibly well. The students were so polite and well spoken! It was amazing how shaky my french was considering I’m used to peppering it with Hassaniya so people actually understand me in Aioun.
After Selibaby I headed down to Dakar to attend my second WAIST. WAIST this year was amazing. The Mauritanian pirates won the social league division, our country director was there and my american style homestay was amazing. Over 100 Mauritanian PCVs attended. Dakar, as per usual, was amazing, and crazy and bustling, and I got the sushi plate I look forward to every year. In the market near my hotel, they were selling tee shirts that say (in french) “If you piss me off, I’m going back to Senegal.” The sentiment made me laugh, because it is probably the reigning attitude of PCVs towards their communities on bad days. I didn’t buy a shirt that said that because I couldnt get a decent price.

I returned to Aioun after WAIST and held another business training with Khadija. This time we trained 20 cooperatives. It went well and it became clear that the cooperatives have a serious lack of artisinal skills that was limiting them from achieving their full potential. I planned to have a tie dye training when I found out that the funding I have been using dried up. There was a special Gender and Development fund that I was using to pay for the supplies for the conference (mainly lunch each day and transport money for the participants). We planned on holding the next training immediately but couldn’t.

March 8 was International Women’s day. I met multiple times with the Director of the Condition Femenine (Government post that deals with women’s issues) to try to make the festival a big deal. Last year, both Aioun and Nema had really huge parties to celebrate Women’s day. It was a good time to exhibit the work of artisinal cooperatives, as well as skits and performances by womens’ groups and girls’ clubs, not to mention local food vendors. I spoke with the director, and explained my plan of renting a large tent (and paying for it with Peace Corps $$) and having music and food, she seemed not enthusiastic. She then commenced in blowing me off, and I figured they had some sort of plan. Well, Womens’ Day arrived, I put on a veil and headed to the place where they were holding the ceremonies. The scene was a total mess, the cooperatives were stuck in the back of the meeting hall, trapped and no one could see their wares, the front of the room was choked with VIPs and the rest of the people attending were stuck outside in the sun for hours. There was no food or drink for sale and people were loud and pushy. All the dignitaries were hours late (you cannot start anything formal in this country unless you get a speech from the mayor, hakem, and wali) all of them were men. The CF director kept trying to drag me around to show off the white girl in the veil (definitely a downside to keeping in line with local customs). At this point I was dizzy and tired from sitting in the sun and wouldn’t have anymore of it, I left before all the bigwigs made their speeches.This might be my perspective as an embittered 2nd year volunteer, but what’s the point of having a womens’ day if you treat it like a total joke? Why even bother if you have to stand around waiting for men to show up and justify even having a day such as this? I took this a little personally, and am still frustrated that they turned me down even though I showed up with a plan for the day and money! I guess there are reasons why this woman is ignored by most of her colleagues. Its frustrating that they have money for skills trainings for women but it just gets wasted on whatever frivolties the CF Director wants.

The end of March was marked by our Close of Service Conference. It was a 3 day long conference that focused on handholding and trying to process our last 2 years in country. There was also a lot of career advice as well as pressure to apply for government jobs. It was also the last time I would see alot of our class of 60+ people who came over with me in 2007. I’m no longer afraid of entering into the job market, even though the economy remains a mess. It was also great to see old friends and hear about what their plans for the future are, many are going on to grad school, also there’s a large chunk of people heading on to Peace Corps China. It was a plan I myself considered.

So herein lies the big question, what are my plans for after August 6? I applied to 5 graduate schools in December, I got rejected by all but one. I am on the waitlist for Columbia University and plan to stick it out. I actually got rejected by my Alma Mater (AU grads who read this, the next time they call you for $$, tell them to go to hell for me!). I blame alot of this on the crappy economy. Needless to say, this was probably one of the toughest times being in Mauritania, all the waiting and rejection has made me miserable. There is nothing in Aioun to keep my mind of the crushing amount of defeat and rejection I feel besides old beat up paperbacks in our library. No food, no beer, no entertainment. Just heat and misery to get you through the day.

So at this point, I return home to insanely high student loan payments and no job, woo! I plan on moving to DC (sorry New Yorkers, I tried but NY doesn’t really have a develpment industry like DC does) probably by mid August-early September. At that point I will be applying for the spring term at a couple of grad schools in the area, and working my butt off.

So yeah, I haven’t posted in a very long time, but I just kept putting it off because I had nothing really positive or exciting to post about. So I just decided to clump it all together in a big fat whiney blog post, all negative-style. Sorry about that, but this isn’t a blog about how I moved to Africa and started censoring my reaction to things.

My official Close Of Service date is August 6, 2009. I will be bringing my dog, Nancy Sinatra with me. Take some pleasure in that.