Ok I’m going to write about another malaria dream and it’s kind of weird. First, a little context. There are dung beetles everywhere here, so they’re on my mind. You can’t really lay on the ground at night without them crawling up your pants and whatnot, it’s kind of annoying. I’m sure you’ve seen their pictures on tv. They’re always rolling little balls of crap around with their back legs, which is funny because there is no way they can see where they’re going like that. Where are they going? What are they going to do with it when they get there?
So there’s that.

Anyway, the dream started out that I was a pile of shit- as in manure. I know that sounds pretty bad for dream interpretation purposes, but it wasn’t really. It didn’t have any of the shit connotation, per se; it wasn’t any different than being something like a chair, or a piece of string.

So there I was, lying there, doing what shit does. Not really thinking about anything, just being myself. Then this dung beetle starts rolling me up, and I thought, hey, this isn’t how I thought it was going to be, and it was really stressful. The dung beetle rolled me around for a little bit and when we got to the place where dung beetles take dung, it started eating me. I was really upset about the whole thing.
Being dung, I didn’t have any sensory organs or anything. I don’t feel that these things were happening, I just knew. I had an idea of what was going on with my self and that was about it. So being eaten didn’t hurt or anything, it just really bothered me. And I got to thinking that, you know, this doesn’t really hurt, and in the end it is probably right that this dung beetle should eat me. I am dung and it is a dung beetle, and I should try to accept the rightness of that arrangement. After all I probably came to be through a similar arrangement.

When I let it go I became the dung beetle that was previously (voraciously) eating me. As my self percolated into its, its jaws slowed and we thought, wow, I had no idea that dung had that experience, I have had a totally wrong attitude toward my food. Then I went back to eating.

That was the dream.
I have completely given up on having pictures be related to the articles.

Tomorrow is the last day of cbt. Normally the peace corps would have a party for all the cbt families, but that isn’t happening since we already spent all our money. So instead we’re all going to throw in and do it ourselves. Apparently party here means meat, and we just so happen to have a goat, so we’re going to eat it.
And who is going to cook for 50 people you ask? Why that’s no problem at all (apparently). We’ll just tell the women to do it. Isn’t that a relief?
Without these ladies this village would fall apart.
Anyway, Huley and Haroun have model school tomorrow, so they’ll buy all the goods and I will sit on my butt and do nothing. Fifteen kilos of potatoes!
cooking for a village
Fast forward one day-
It’s party day and it turns out that 30 baguettes of bread can’t be had en brousse, no matter how sure the locals are that it can. So our facilitator had to take a taxi into town to get 30 loaves of bread. About an hour later I saw him struggling to drag something back to town from the road (200 M or so).
How much bread did he get?
I walked out to give him a hand and the thing he was dragging through the sand wasn’t bread. It was a goat, laying in a pile on the ground. It wasn’t dead, or hurt or anything, but it knew the score and it wasn’t about to move one muscle to help us. It was a little confusing that our facilitator had just gotten out of a taxi with a goat, because we already had a goat, and we had given it to a guy in town to butcher for us.
why did god have to make me so delicious? It turns out that:
A)the new goat was not a goat, it was a ram.
and
B)the butcher had forgotten that we had given him our goat, and he had let him out with the rest this morning.
So our goat was out wandering around the bush somewhere, and our party got a little more expensive. Our facilitator was kind of pissed, because we’d had an agreement that the butcher guy broke and it cost us some money. But I guess that’s life.


The four toubabs threw in a little for a pool for when dinner was going to start. There was a four hour span and it really could have been anywhere in there. Huley won.
Ram bonafa! There is no way this meal could have been better.
We had bonafa (sp?), which is kind of like a stew with potatoes and potatoes and onions and garlic and pepper (which we never get here). It’s all served on one big plate for five or six people, and everyone uses bread to dig food out. Aaand dinner was amazing. Not just good for africa; there was no way to improve on that meal.
We also had a bucket of bissap, which easily rivals sprite-in-a-bag. Will the wonders never cease.
This girl is freaking adorable. Also, bucket of bissap.
After dinner the girls got some crazy puudi (henna), and all the kids had an insane dance party. At first the music was just the noise from the radio, but no one was really paying attention to the beat. Everyone was just sort of clapping and “dancing” meant flailing all of your limbs as fast as you could. After about 5 minutes they gave up on the radio and the music came from a metal bowl that someone was banging on with their hands. One girl, the 15 year old (married, but we never saw her husband. They assured us he exists), was ruling the dance party with an iron fist. Everyone really wanted to dance but if anyone was dancing that she didn’t want to dance, or if someone wasn’t dancing that she did want to dance, she had a slipper that she would hit them with. Most of the time she just hit everyone until they all sat down and watched her dance. Sometimes if the whole party seemed to be getting too uppity she would just go around and beat everyone as fast as she could. When something caught her attention outside of the hangar and everyone seized the opportunity to flail freely, she would come flying back in and start hitting everyone within reach. And that was the dance party. It was probably the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s kind of sad leaving now. I have to be sure and come back whenever I’m in rosso.

Here is a very excellent article on Mauritania’s political situation.

And here’s another one by the same guy regarding 2005 coup.

I’m guessing that everyone who reads this has already found these, so the links are mostly for posterity. Let me know if they die.

Language class - Huley, Khalidou, Jeneba, Haroun, Baila

I wrapped up my first real peace corpsing type activity this week, and it was of questionable value. That’s not actually true. It was as much for us as it was for the guy we were consulting. More, probably. So it was of questionable value to him, but it turned out to be great for me.
Everyone in SED/ICT met with a local entrepreneur (in groups). We were supposed to spend a month getting to know our contacts and how they run their businesses, and then give a presentation with suggestions for improvements.
Working on group projects like that has been pretty difficult because I’m the only one out in brousse. We never really had a good place to work on things since they didn’t want us at the training center outside of tech sessions (we’re supposed to be integrating into our communities, but you try to break out a laptop in a village that doesn’t even have electricity and see how much work you can get done). I tried to only schedule meetings for when there already happened to be a peace corps vehicle going into town. I was the only one in our group who could really speak french, but my group mates did go a couple times without, and a couple times I flagged down a bush taxi. So it mostly worked out.
I don’t know. I don’t want to complain too much about it because I’m glad to have had a taste of the brousse experience. It’s worth the aggravation and I’d definitely want it again.
I ended up having to spent the night in town the night before our presentation so that we could put it all together. Rosso is a magical place. I haven’t really spent much time there and the conveniences of the city are stunning. I wanted bread and a sprite-in-a-bag, and then two minutes later I had bread and sprite-in-a-bag. There were showers and satellite television and a two freezers in the house. Two. Incredible.
Anyway, we had tried to meet during the day but it turns out that two hours wasn’t enough for us to put all of our material together. Plus I had to do all the typing since I was the only one who could translate. It took a while. I didn’t get a lot of sleep.
The whole thing went off pretty well the next morning, I think. I did all the talking and the other two guys did a skit. It was a good presentation. We kept it light and he seemed mostly engaged. On an informational level we didn’t have a lot to say. The guy has the same (more or less) degree I do from a university in dakar. There wasn’t anything we could have told him that he didn’t already know. The best we could do was remind him that financial records wouldn’t hurt. I doubt he’s going to take our advice though; he does well enough and they are very much on the work-to-live side of things here.
But whatever. We probably had the best possible audience. I guess some people’s presentations turned into a cultural disaster. Someone said she got cut off a minute into hers and was told that that’s not the way things work here and there was no way they were doing that (keeping a check book, basically). Another person had their consultee start yelling when she interpreted the american gesture for I’m thinking to be the (identical) the mauritanian gesture for you’re crazy. Nice. I wish I had been there for that because it sounds pretty hilarious and I probably could have learned from their mistakes. I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time I hear of something like that going on.

laying around before the big party
laying around before the big party
laying around before the big party
ha ha I ruined a perfectly good picture

For those who asked, my address is:

My Name
c/o Corps de la Paix Americain
BP 66
Kaédi, Mauritania
West Africa

Thanks to everyone who sent me things! It really makes my week when I get mail.

I haven’t heard of anyone having their packages messed with (even the big ones), but it’s probably not a good idea to declare anything expensive. Write something benign like letters from home or unsolicited gifts or christian literature or something.
And by expensive I mean it’s uncomfortable even having people see the postage sticker on the outside of my envelopes. My family was making fun of me for being so upset about my sandals, because I can just get them sewn together in rosso. I don’t really see that working. I wonder what they would say if I told them how much they cost.
At least I have jelly bellies. Precious, precious jelly bellies.
Also, whoever sent two-euchre-winland that enormous box of candy and doritos, her site mates thank you.