03 August 2005 - 19:22
Well, things settled down significantly after my return to site, and I spent most of mid-July hanging out with Mauritanian friends and working on projects that Jill handed over to me after she screwed them up as much as she could.
One of the things that sucks about living in Tidjikja is that we’re pretty isolated from the other volunteers in the country and we don’t get a lot of visitors. But the nice thing about that is that when we do get visitors, we know they’re here to see us, and not just using us for a free house on their way through town. So I was excited to hear that two of my best friends in Mauritania, Jae and Julian, were both coming up to see me for a couple of days.
Julian rolled in first with a Spaniard who had picked him up when Julian was hitchhiking his way up here. Pépé was a firefighter from Barcelona in the process of driving a donated ambulance filled with medicine overland from Barcelona through Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal to Guinea, where he plans on handing the vehicle over to a poor village, meeting up with his wife in Senegal, and then continuing his journey with her by bicycle down to Mozambique over the course of the next two years. En route to his final destination in Guinea, he decided to take a little touristy side trip to the Fabulous Tagant (an increasingly popular destination for tourists and Peace Corps volunteers alike since the completion of the road and the arrival of a pool at my house!). So the next day, Julian, Pépé, Andy (who was in town because he got kicked out of another host family’s house for the second time this year), and I took off in the 4-wheel-drive ambulance to check out the cave paintings in Lehweitat and the village of Rachid with me as the guide, since Pépé’s GPS was broken. Good times. We picked up David, a French photographer, and Steven, a Ghanian barber, in Rachid for the ride back to Tidjikja, where Pépé made us a delicious Cuban dinner to round off our day of international interaction.
Jae showed up the next day, and we hung out for a few days, visiting palmeries , eating fresh dates from the palms and such, then Pépé decided to continue his journey, and Jae and I decided to take advantage of the free ride he offered in gratitude for our food, accommodations, and hospitality. He dropped us off halfway to Boghé, where we were headed to meet up with several other volunteers who were converging there en route to training sessions, vacations, and returning home. After a few entertaining days down there, another good friend, Brock, showed up in the monthly PC ride to pick me up for our trip back up to Tidjikja to do a cereamine production training (for more info on cereamine, check out Brock’s livejournal – it’s all he can talk about these days).
The trip down to Boghé was rather impromptu – I got the call that people were meeting there around noon, Pépé decided to leave at 12:30, Jae and I were packed by 1 and on the road by 1:15. In all the excitement and bustle of leaving, I forgot to mention to my APCD (the boss-man) that I was popping down to Boghé for the weekend. Oops. He caught me completely by surprise as the PC ride was stopped by the side of the road in Boghé (five minutes later, and we would have already been on our way to Tidjikja and wouldn’t have even seen him) as he was passing through town. Good thing Alassane is quitting his job this week – I don’t think he would have cared if he caught me in Senegal at that point.
On to Tidjikja, where Brock and I fixed Jill’s mistakes and powered through the training in record time. Then I got a call. “Matt, where are you? I’m in Tidjikja now, but I will leave for Kaedi tomorrow. I want to see you.” Remember Martial? That’s right – he was back in town for a one-day job, and the light went off in my head as soon as he said Kaedi.
Brock was headed down there for his next training, and Boghé is on the way there – it so good the first time that I couldn’t help but go back for another round or two, so I scored my third free ride of the week. We left at 1 a.m. (for reasons completely beyond my comprehension), argued with the police at the checkpoint at the edge of town (they were looking for a little going away gift or something), and made it to Boghé in time for breakfast.
A few days later, Andi (one of the volunteers in Boghé) and I hitched our way up to Aleg (free ride #4!), where Nina cooked dinner for use before we weathered a torrential downpour in Julian’s leaky house and parted ways the next morning – me hitching back to Tidjikja to weigh babies at my feeding centers and Andi to Nouakchott for what she thought would be a hassle-free start to a vacation in Mali (coups are so inconvenient to schedule around!).
