“Zahara”

A hearty “As-salaam-alekum” to all! I hope all is well! Things are going along here and the days keep tick, tick, ticking down until my visit home on September 16. I think about it constantly. I daydream about all of the ordinary things I’m going to do with the family – washing the dishes, listening to Mom play the piano, hearing the garage door open and knowing that Dad will walk in, in a flurry of shrill Buddy barks. There are a million things that I haven’t done for two years and are now only a month and ten days away.

I recently started some classes for girls and women and Magtalahjar has suddenly become a different, nearly welcoming place. Before starting the classes, I was still feeling quite ambivalent about being in Magta…and by ambivalent, I mean slightly miserable. It didn’t help that other volunteers frequently refer to my region as the ahem…rear-end of Mauritania, and given its position in the region, I’ll leave you to guess what Magtalahjar might be called. My students are mostly high school girls, but some are women who left school to get married. I’m teaching English and basic French. The fact that I’m teaching French should tell you something about their French level. Now the ladies and I greet each other in the streets, we walk home from class together; they invite me over for lunch. Not only do the classes keep me busy and make me feel useful, but they have opened up a circle of women who make me tea and make me feel welcome. And Magtalahjar is suddenly not such a bad place after all.

Once school starts, I’ll be working at our Girls’ Mentoring Center. The GMCs are a Peace Corps initiative, part of their Gender and Development program. The previous Magta PCV, Jordy, started the Magta GMC last year with her intrepid Mauritanian counterpart, Limnaya. This year I’ll be working with Limnaya, which is cool, because she’s become a great friend. We will select about 10-15 member girls, who will come to sessions three days a week. Last year, Jordy and Limnaya did all kinds of awesome stuff with the girls, like geography, health, computer skills, public speaking, self-esteem, and environment lessons. They brought in speakers and had a career day and on and on… The Center is a place where girls are supported, encouraged, and hopefully challenged in ways they might not be otherwise. I can’t wait to get started! (And I won’t deny being particularly excited about the geography lessons).

You may recall my descriptions of Bol during the rainy season as a mucky, mosquito-clouded place of cruel, clinging heat and cruel, clinging BO. Rainy season is now upon Magtalahjar and I must admit that it sucks ways less than in Bol. For starters, the puddles soak quickly into the sand, it being Sahara sand and not old lake bottom silt. This means fewer mosquitoes (actually, none yet, knock on humidity-bulged wood) and minimal muck trudging. Temperatures have been just almost comfortable, except for these last few weeks since the last rain. I watch hopefully every day as clouds puff up and coalesce, only to feel cheated as they drift west and evaporate.

Yesterday, I awoke to a hazy sky and still, humid air that reminded me of wet mittens on a steam radiator in my elementary school. “Ah! Today is the day!” I thought. I cast hopeful glances at the sky all morning, scanning the horizon for a puff of cloud. But hope and haze evaporated into the blue. To make a long story short, though really, it’s not a long story at all, a nice grey cloud bank eventually built up in the afternoon. After three weeks of frustrated hopes, I was skeptical of its personal commitment to actually raining. But, holy crap, when that sucker blew in, it looked like the end of the world. It came rolling in with this red-black-brown roiling, boiling wall of sand and cold air and proceeded to howl and pour most of the night. It was wonderful sleeping under the tin roof, though I had to keep getting up to empty the drip-catching pots and pans.

Mauritanians are terrified of storms, which I guess I would be too if I only saw them a few times a year and they tended towards end-of-the-world intensity. Youma rocks and chants when she hears thunder. The neighbors congregate at the house across the street to sway and plead for protection and mercy from Allah. Thunder really freaks them out. In a sterling example of the Peace Corps’ second goal (facilitating the development of host country nationals’ understanding of American culture), Youma now knows that “it rains all the time in America” and “I’m going to bed.”

Those of you who have been with me from the beginning will remember my borderline schizophrenic description of Bol Kate and American Kate, that schism between my censored Bol self and regular, complete self. The split has intensified, or rather, solidified here because the good people of Magtalahjar know me only as “Zahara.” There’s a weird trend among Mauritanian volunteers to take Mauritanian names and Jordy (who I blame for the Zahara/Kate split) is known in Magtalahjar solely as “Aziza.” I was asked on my first day in town what name I would take, and without reflecting on the rather grave psychological ramifications of creating a new persona, fell back on my old Bol name, Zara.

Being known by and constantly called a name other than my own was at first unnerving, a stifling sense of un-being enhanced by the new and detested muleffa, that cursed, tripping veil. But I have adapted to it and have even come to see the benefits of a non-me name. When kids in the street scream “La-illah-illa-allah, Mohammed ar-rasul allah,” they scream it at Zahara, leaving me free to ponder the tragedy of kids taught to scream a profession of faith as if it were an insult. Zahara (who actually is a more grown-up version of Bol Kate, tempered by the fires of evacuation and relocation) relies on gestures and silly faces to get her point across, whereas Kate only does that when she gets excited (no? She does it all the time, you say? Dang.) Zahara not only visits Mauritanian neighbors and friends, but she actually enjoys it sometimes, whereas Kate would much rather sit in her house with a book. Zahara now strides about town in a flawlessly wrapped muleffa, though Kate still yearns for corduroys and a t-shirt. Yes, Zahara gets the job done and a little psychosis is a small price to pay for it, in my questionably lucid opinion.

However, one cultural difference even Zahara can’t abide is child abuse. I have grown a little desensitized to the constant kid-whacking that goes on in Africa. That’s not to say hearing Achta (remember my 15 year old spark of a host sister?) getting beaten with an electric cord for going out at night without permission wasn’t extremely upsetting. But physical punishment is constant and accepted and I’ve grown a little numb to seeing a kid swatted with a switch. BUT. For the last week or so, Youma has had it out for her little three year old baby girl, Hassina. A kind word for the child has not left her lips for an unexplained week. Youma’s taken to smacking her for every little offense so that she cringes and shrinks at every move Youma makes. Youma has started force feeding her. If Hassina stops eating, she bawls at the little girl that she’s stupid and worthless and she better eat if she knows what’s good for her. I don’t know if this is connected to Moors thinking fat is beautiful, or what. She’s THREE. Yesterday, Hassina came back from playing somewhere with black charcoal dust smeared all over. Youma grabbed her by the arm and jerked her down on the mat. She pushed Hassina’s head down into a basin to wash her face and punched the back of Hassina’s neck with her fist. I lost it. I screamed at her in nonsensical Hassaniya to stop, then fled to my room to put on my muleffa and get the hell out of there. Youma came in saying, “Zahara, pardon, I hope there is peace. Hassina is a stupid, bad little girl.” I tried to make my point that it’s an awful thing when a three year old cringes from her mother, but Youma just smirked at my Hassaniya. In the end she said, “Okay, god willing, I won’t hit her anymore.” I grabbed my keys and stormed out, not knowing where I was going, but needing to get away. I ended up in the dunes behind town, breathing hard and making plans to move out. I don’t want to live with a woman who craps all over her own kids.

In more upbeat news, Greger and I received our stuff from Chad! The Peace Corps Chad drivers went out to all our sites and painstakingly packed, organized, and shipped it all. My host family took all of my CD’s, CD player, clothes, lotions/soaps, hiking boots, running shoes, etc, which is a bummer. But I got everything that was truly important to me like my journal and special saved letters. It was a strangely emotional process to unpack the bags. It was like my life frozen on April 4, or whenever I left Bol for NDJ the last time. Even my calendar was crossed off up until the day I left. Weird. And now I have all of my Chadian Arabic manuals, which will be fun to look through with Hassaniya speakers in Magta. Ah, such simple amusements!

I hope everyone is happy and healthy! Happy new school year to all!

Love,
Kate