16 May 2006 - 22:41
The president (well, actually, the head of the military council that overthrew the last president) came to Tidjikja a few weeks ago. He is on tour to promote a change to the country's constitution (limiting presidents to two terms of five years each). I helped one of my English Club students translate some Hassaniye into English for a poster he was making for the rally (he wrote his message in Hassaniye, French, and English for some reason) and convinced three of my regionmates to get dressed up in bedsheets...er...Mauritanian clothes (none of us really wear them except on special occasions) to go to the big event. A lot of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers who have had the president visit their sites told me that their towns really got cleaned up before the visit. Tidjikja had no such cleaning...I pretended that it was because Tidjikja is cleaner than most other cities in Mauritania and didn't need cleaning, but in reality, it's probably because the Tidjikjans were just lazier.
Anyways, we all showed up at the rally. I think the term limits addition to the constitution is a great idea, but I really went for the social aspect of the event (which was good, because I only understood one sentence of the entire speech..."We will build a road from Tidjikja to Atar within the next two years"...yeah, right.). Mostly, I was hoping to use it as an opportunity to get a lot of goodbyes in, which I did. I was planning on moving out of Tidjikja about a week after the event, so hanging out at a city-wide party seemed like a good way to say goodbye to a lot of people that I didn't see very often and didn't have the energy to hunt down before I left. That idea worked out well. Better than I had hoped for, actually, because, being one of the four white people in the crowd of several thousand people, I was predictably filmed and shown for a couple days on the Mauritanian nightly news program. Glad I got dressed up for the occasion!
For a few days after the event, I kept receiving calls from Mauritanian friends in different parts of the country, mainly Nouakchott. They wanted to say hi, tell me they saw me on TV, and ask when I was leaving. I informed everyone that I would be moving to Nouakchott for a third year, which excited some, and disappointed others (mainly the ones I had promised to smuggle back to the US with me when I was supposed to leave this fall). It was also nice to re-connect with friends in Nouakchott that I hadn't heard from in a while, who now know that I'll be living near them, which takes the burden off of my shoulders to find them and tell them that. Whew.
So then I started packing. Or rather, thinking of packing, because I didn't actually start until the day before I left Tidjikja...as per the ritual. Fortunately, packing was less stressful this time than it was all those endless times moving in and out of apartments in college because 1) I had significantly less stuff, and 2) I didn't have my parents sitting in a moving van outside my place, irritated that I had once again delayed packing until the last possible minute. Buuuuuut...that was a week later.
You see, after I went to all of the trouble to say my goodbyes, my artist friend in Selibaby that I am training to silkscreen print next week called me THE DAY BEFORE I WAS SUPPOSED TO LEAVE to tell me he "absolutely had to push the start of the training back." That sucked. I didn't have anything to do, and I was pretty irritated because I was looking forward to heading to Selibaby, so I just left Tidjikja anyways and went to hang out for a few days with a new volunteer who transferred here from Chad after the Peace Corps closed their program recently after some rebels marched on their capital. Then I came back to Tidjijka, packed, said goodbye once more, kissed my dog and tortoises goodbye, handed over my house keys to Amanda, and peaced out.
So now I'm in Nouakchott. Everything I own is in about 20 boxes in my old house, waiting to be shipped here, except for a notebook and four changes of clothes that I'll be wearing for the next month that I'm carrying around in my little backpack (when did I learn to get by with so little?). I'm ordering equipment and materials for the silkscreen training, setting up bank accounts and housing contracts here, reserving tickets to fly home at Christmas, filing project reports, paying my taxes online, arranging things for the training program I'm managing this summer, and enjoying air conditioning, restaurants, and TV until Saturday, when I head down to the hellishly hot Selibaby for a few weeks.
