Vegetables

My garden is looking very sad. The little veggie babies that weren’t destroyed by goats have been buzzed by grasshoppers. There are still some lettuce plants hanging on, though. Vegetables! I just want vegetables!

This week the weather has turned fantastically cool. I’ve been chilly in my house and taken to wearing a muleffa inside just for warmth. Comfortable, uninterrupted sleep has finally returned to my nights. Gone are the fitful, sweat-drenched nights of the rest of the year. I’d forgotten what it was like to sleep through the night, without waking up to cuss the heat and splash water on my face. Delicious!

School is going well. The director has been really supportive and the atmosphere is entirely different from last year. I didn’t realize how many of the teachers speak French! We sit on the mat between classes and chat a little, not much, but enough to make me feel welcome. Most of the classes have been just fine, even enjoyable, with no we-hate-you troubles. I’ve found that kids here are more literate than in Chad. They generally know how to write. But there’s a cultural note that seems to have carried over into the classroom. In Moorish conversation, they yell over each other and interrupt and get very very loud. They definitely do this in class and I’m not sure how to deal with it. Only the second years (7th grade) have given me we-hate-you trouble, what with the girls refusing to look at me and the boys muttering. I used up my day’s reserve of Hassaniya confidence to tell them that students who wanted to learn English were welcome to stay but anyone who didn’t want to study could get the hell out of my classroom. Think that would be considered a good classroom mangagement technique in Amerca? Eh. When in Rome…

After class, I told the director about the troubles. His smile dropped and he started yelling about how I’d come here as a volunteer, far from my family, to help Mauritania and these ungrateful donkeys dared to disrespect me? He called over all the kids still in the school yard and harangued them in Hassaniya, while I stood in the shade, feeling like a tattletale who can’t fight her own battles.

Throughout these two years, I’ve been pretty cut off from current events. Since being in Mauritania, I’ve gotten my only news from arabic AlJezeera (who recently launched an English broadcast. Check it out! You’ll see stuff that’s never broadcast on CNN.) When the Chad situation started tanking again, I was dependent on Greger’s text messages from Aleg. But bless his Wisconsin heart, Greger lent me a shortwave radio (he for some reason had two) and now I’m far more up to date than I ever was in the states and have in fact become a bit of a news junkie. I LOVE that thing. I cradle it in my lap, ever fiddling with the dial and antenna as the tinny voices of BBC reporters crackle and bounce, blare and fade. I’ve become very loyal to the BBC. They’re always saying things like “You can hear the BBC in any city in the world,” and each program has a segment when they read listeners’ email and text message responses to stories. “Yacoub from Dakar says delegates to the UN convention on climate change should cooperate to blah blah blah.” It all combines to make me feel part of this grand BBC listening community, like the stuffy-sounding British reporters are my friends: “Oh, Stephan Rowe! I wonder how he’s doing in northern Uganda! That piece of his on the Lord’s Resistance Army was great!” Maybe part of the reason I’ve come to love that little black box so much is that it offers me a kind of companionship. It’s a buddy to help me through my day. My short wave radio is like the site mate I never had.

The situation continues to worsen in Chad. The government declared four regions to be in a state of emergency and announced that in order to preserve order, it would be imposing curfews, searching houses, and censoring the media. Ethnic arabs (like my host family, who believe themselves to be of Arab descent) are said to be slaughtering non-Arabs (like Kaka or Josephine) and burning their villages. The regions affected are in the east, bordering Sudan, and I haven’t yet heard of any troubles around Bol, on the other side of the country. But imagine how tense things must be in N’Djamena where people from all of Chad’s ethnic groups mix everyday.

I recommend giving up on sending me mail. It just isn’t getting to me. The Aleg address hasn’t worked either. If you would like to send me something, trying sending it to my mom in Arizona and she can carry it to me when she comes to visit in January.