20 December 2005 - 10:27
Two days ago, I was in Bamako, where, even though I don’t speak Bambara (surprisingly, there’s not all that many people that speak French well in Mali for some reason), the people are nicer, the streets are cleaner, the foliage greener, and fruits and tourists are found on every corner. Fresh off the overnight train from Kayes, I headed straight back to Mauritania, crossing the river at Gouray and missing the last car to Selibaby by half an hour. In Gouray, I found out that the volunteer who lives there was out of town, but I crashed at his host family’s house anyways. Mmm…cous cous for dinner again. Michael’s family owns a pet monkey (it’s not Michael’s monkey, since Peace Corps forbids us to own monkeys), who either thinks I have fleas or just enjoys pulling out my arm hair and eating it. I’m glad Michael’s host father spoke French, since Soninke sounds closer to Martian than to any language I speak. Mike’s dad has two wives.
So now I’m waiting for the car to Selibaby to leave. It was supposed to leave an hour ago, but we’re not taking off because the car is just full, not dangerously overloaded yet. An old(ish) man just sat down next to me. He’s slapping the dust off of his feet much like I would smack the dust off of my backpack after pulling it out of a pickup after a long trip. The bottoms of his feet look like a dry riverbed, like dried, cracked mud.
The clothing is colorful here – both men and women are arrayed in brilliant purples, greens, whites, blues, reds, pinks, and yellows in a wide variety of shapes and patterns on various styles of clothing, a stark contrast to the dusty earth-tones of their environment and to the dull clothing of the Moors in the North.
Most of the people around me don’t speak French or Hassaniya, reminding me that even though I’m back in Mauritania, I’m still not “home.” It’s no wonder that Mauritanians have little sense of national unity or community – I feel like a stranger here, much as I imagine most Moors would, or like most southern Mauritanians would feel in the North.
Some of the people waiting with me just bought bananas and oranges. I wish I lived somewhere that has fresh fruit more than a handful of days a year. The people eating the fruit throw the peels into the street, joining the wrappers, fish scales and heads, chunks of concrete, broken flipflops, plastic bags, bones, pop cans, animal crap, scraps of cloth, and other trash already there.
The baggage for the trip is lined up in front of me – foam mattresses folded up and tied; plastic buckets, basins, and barrels; Chinese-made luggage; sacks of Senegalese concrete from across the river; large plastic bags; grain sacks (not full of grain, just other stuff); cloths tied around bundles; and two sheep. If arranged well, it could be relatively comfortable riding in the back of the truck. It will not be arranged well.
One guy is making tea. Of course…always making tea.
Women walk by, loads on their heads, coming and going to the market.
A donkey keeps coming over to eat the sheep’s food. The ticket-seller yells, again, to scare it off. The donkey ignores him, again. A child is dispatched, again, to hit the offending donkey with a stick.
Two women are eating roasted corn on a cob, something I’ve never seen before in Mauritania but seems relatively common here.
A woman across from me is breast-feeding her screaming, mohawked child. I love seeing kids from the countryside with their hair shaved in all kinds of bizarre hairstyles that rival those of punk rockers.
Another woman nearby has a bag that says Prada on the side. Yeah, right.
One man has a radio on. Of course…there’s always someone with a shortwave radio, turned up full volume, tuned into the “all static, all the time” station. There’s a piece of scrap wire attached to the top of the antenna, obviously improving reception.
Some kids come by. As usual, they ask for a gift. As usual, I ignore them. They kick their ever-present, punctured soccerball back to the street. There’s always kids playing in the street here, no parents in sight. I guess that’s because everyone in the neighborhood watches after all the kids, no matter whose they are.
The girl taking tea around looks at me like I have two heads when I tell her I don’t want tea.
One of the girls waiting with me is really cute. A lot of African women are really beautiful, very elegant…until they start having children every other year and are constantly burdened by child-rearing and doing all the work for their families.
The truck is loaded now. I hope I don’t have to sit by the sheep.
