29 April 2006 - 17:25
So after a few days in Agamamine, we took a pickup truck to Nouakchott. Caleb’s dad had rented the truck, so it was a free ride for me, and one of the most comfortable I’ve ever taken in this country – after an hour of being shoehorned into the back with three other people, I realized that the bed of the truck was full of our clothing-filled luggage. I got out of the truck, tied myself to the fishnet covering our bags, pulled my turban over my face, and promptly fell asleep. In no time, we were in Nouakchott.
I set up base camp at my friend Miriam’s apartment because I was going to be in and out of Nouakchott for the next month, and I didn’t want to carry all my luggage around with me and have to bother checking in and out of hotels all that time. Caleb and I put Denis on a plane, then took off the next day to go to our Close of Service Conference in Keur Massene, a Mauritanian resort in the south.
The COS conference went really well – it was a lot of fun having everyone in our training group back together one last time. Most of the group will be leaving Mauritania in August and September, but the English teachers will be leaving in July. The last night of the conference, we had a slide show, complete with cheesy music and an awards ceremony. I won “Most Likely to do Five More Tours of Peace Corps and Become a Country Director.” Hmm. The last two days of the conference were mostly spent at the beach and at a bird park. We got to see a lot of cool birds, monkeys, and warthogs. And then we had the hotel staff kill a warthog for us. That’s right – our last day there, we had Pumba for lunch. He was delicious.
Back in Nouakchott for a couple days, I worked with my boss on revising our Health sector Project Plan for the next couple years and interviewed for the position I was applying for as the Administrative Coordinator for the three-month training program for the new volunteers who will be arriving in Mauritania at the end of June. I kind of felt like that guy in ‘Van Wilder’ who practices for his interview with “I know this interview is a bit of a formality, but I think it’s good that we take this time to get to know each other better…”. In fact, I was actually going to say just that, but my new boss for the summer beat me to it by starting off the “interview” by going over a checklist of what I needed to do to move out of Tidjikja and set up the program for the summer in Kaedi. He informed me that I’ll be handling “2.1 million ougiyas” this summer, which isn’t really all that much money, but it sounds pretty cool to say that anyways. I got the job, which I start June 8.
I took the Foreign Service Written Exam on Saturday, April 8. I decided that this year, I would actually bother myself to write the essay so I could potentially pass. Man, I forgot how much fun taking standardized tests was!
That afternoon, the few of us left in Nouakchott joined 30 other volunteers up in Atar for a half-marathon/ trash cleanup that my friend Keith was hosting. Only one Mauritanian showed up for the race, presumably because it started at 7 a.m., and Mauritanians are loathe to rise that early, despite the fact that it is one of the few times of the day when it’s actually pleasant to be outside. Anyways, the lone Mauritanian had no legs, so he didn’t actually run, but he registered, and then he told jokes and did tricks. After the start of the race, he decided to climb a flag pole and light a fire at the top, and he was arrested (I didn’t actually see this happen, as I was riding around in the support truck passing out water and checking on the checkpoints at the time).
After people had cooled down from the race, we all headed out to Terjit, an hour away from Atar. Terjit is a little oasis that pops out of nowhere in small canyon tucked into rocky mountains. There is a natural spring that flows through it year-round, and you get drinking water there that drips from underneath a cliff overhang – it has filtered through the mountain, so it is clean and safe to drink. The spring has been dammed up in places so that you can wade in the water. All in all, a really cool place. We were playing music from a stereo hooked up to a car battery (no electricity there), and around ten p.m., some stinking French tourists sent their Mauritanian guides up to our camp to tell us to shut up. After arguing with them on and off for an hour, I told them to go get the cops, and we would see who they sided with – the stinking French colonizers, or the Americans who live in their country, speak their native language, and work for free to help their people. Problem solved.
Back in Nouakchott…again…Cailin, Caleb, Keith, and I put together another issue of Nouakchott Notes, our PC-Mauritania newsletter, and then I came home.
Then I began my three-week countdown, of which I am currently two-thirds of the way through. In one week, I leave Tidjikja for good. I’m heading back to Nouakchott to buy supplies for a project that I’m doing in Selibaby immediately after that. Then I’ll be in Selibaby for two-ish weeks, teaching artists down there how to silkscreen print. And then I’m back in Nouakchott, setting up for the new volunteers’ training program. I move to Kaedi on June 13, but I’ll officially be a resident of Nouakchott from June 1 onwards. So now I’m saying my goodbyes, packing up my stuff, and making arrangements to leave. I found some water balloons in my house the other day, so I filled them up and several of us volunteers had a water balloon fight with the kids from my neighborhood. We won, but the kids got Jordy (fellow PCV visiting Tidjikja) with a bucket of water...
