22 December 2005 - 10:34
Selibaby is a pretty rad little city. It feels like a totally different country down there. And it feels like I’m going to another country when I try to get between my site and that city – it’s the last regional capital that is not connected to Nouakchott by paved road, mainly because the white Moor-controlled government knows there’s not many white Moors in Selibaby.
There’s not a lot of rock in the area, so most houses and walls are made out of mud. It’s pretty incredible what the people there can do with mud – the structures almost look like they were made with concrete, and they’re pretty sturdy…until it rains. Because the heavy rains cause a lot of houses to fall every rainy season, there’s a housing shortage, so most of the volunteers there live with host families, but they all have 3- to 5-room houses to themselves, and Suzanne even has an extra mud hut for storage. It’s pretty surreal staying in a house that you know is built entirely of mud, and yet is still wired for electricity.
Everyone’s host families that I met were really nice. They’ve got much larger families, probably due to the fact that a lot of the men have multiple wives, not something you see much in the North. I felt really welcome all over town – there’s just a general feeling of comfort and openness there. People are really friendly around town. Selibaby has a huge market with lots of fruit. And it seemed like a lot of people around town had gardens in their compounds too. I think there’s about 20,000 people who live there in a mélange of Pulaars, Soninke, Bambara, and Moors.
Suzanne’s host family is pretty typical – 9 kids, a black Moor mom and a Pulaar dad, pretty big compound with a spacious mud house (and Suzanne’s 5-room plus hut ensemble – just like a photo from a Peace Corps ad or something) and large garden with banana trees, baobob, peppers, hibiscus, etc.). The family has a pretty big desert tortoise, ducks, sheep, and chickens. The interior walls of the house are “painted” with several colors of mud – blue, white, reds, browns, and yellows in elaborate designs – a tradition carried on by Soninke women since who knows when.
The Guidimakha (Selibaby is the regional capital of the Guidimakha region) group of volunteers is a lot of fun. They are pretty good cooks, so I ate well while I was there.
But probably my favorite thing about Selibaby (after the volunteers, of course) is Demba. Demba is a Malian artist, who for some strange reason, has decided to live and work in Mauritania. One thing I’ve learned here is that you don’t realize how much you miss certain things until you have them again. In Selibaby, I found out that that is true for me when it comes to art. Demba says he was trained at an art school in Mali (why couldn’t I have been posted to Mali?). He paints on canvases and on cloth, in both traditional designs as well as modern (abstract and realist) designs, sometimes using commercial paints, but often using traditional pigments that he makes from tree bark, roots, leaves, and clay. He has a computer, and Suzanne is teaching him Photoshop, but that only helps him out a little bit if he has no way to transfer the images from the computer to his artwork. He also wants to expand his business to include printing on t-shirts. That’s where I come in to help him with both problems. In February or March, I’m going to go back to Selibaby to teach him how to silkscreen print. I knew that art degree would come in handy someday! It’s going to be cool getting to hang out with an African who appreciates aesthetic beauty, something I had given up on after my first couple months in Mauritania.
On my last day in Selibaby, Cailin’s host family had a baptism celebration for their newborn infant. The “baptism” doesn’t actually have anything to do with water, it’s just a celebration on the day that the baby receives its name, seven days after it is born. I learned something about naming children from talking to the mother – Muslims have a name for each of the seven days of the week (Monday is Mohammed, etc.), and families often name their children according to whatever day they are born on, which partially explains why there is such little variety in names here. Cailin’s new baby brother is named Hussein…because he was born on Wednesday.
Selibaby has its downside – there’s no running water in most parts of town, and there’s lots of mosquitos, but it’s the first city that I’ve visited in Mauritania that I actually like better than my own – the volunteers there are far away from everyone else, but they’ve got it good…
