20 August 2006 - 22:47
Last spring, Bagga, the PC assistant director for the Education program, showed up at my house in Tidjikja and announced that he was going to place a volunteer in El-Qaddiya. OK, I said, why do I need to know that? Well, it’s in your region, Bagga responded. I’ve been all over the Tagant on various vaccination campaigns, and I had never heard of this place, and Bagga didn’t seem to have too much information on it either, despite the fact that he had just come from the village.
As Regional Coordinator, it was my job to look out for the safety of all volunteers in my region, current and future, so I did a little investigating. Most of my friends in Tidjikja had never heard of El-Qaddiya, and the few that had just said that it was difficult to get to. Well, if there was a transportation problem with getting into and out of the site, then it didn’t meet Peace Corps site requirements, so I brought that fact to Bagga’s attention, which started a month-long argument between he and I. Eventually, I won a minor concession from him – he was going to continue to plan on having a volunteer at the site, but he had convinced the Agriculture program director to post a volunteer there as well. I figured two volunteers could support each other better than one could survive on his own, and being worn out from arguing with Bagga so much, I caved. He would get his El-Qaddiya volunteer, but at least now the volunteer would have someone else to help keep him sane and safe.
Fast forward five months, and now I’m working at the training center for the new volunteers. Most of the staff goes on the Site Visit that occurs two-thirds of the way through the training program, and the Training Director asked me to take all of the volunteers up to the Tagant since I knew the region better than any of the other staff. I agreed, and then I found out that not only was I the only staff member going (usually a Mauritanian staff member is sent to each region to do protocol with officials and translate for the volunteers), but I was also assigned to accompany the two volunteers that would be visiting El-Qaddiya. Ironic indeed.
Kids asking for candy on the way to Tidjikja
So we took off last week, heading up to Tidjikja to meet with the regional governor before we headed out to the individual sites. I was a little scared at first that I wouldn’t be able to do the protocol alone, but we met the mayor of Tidjikja and the governor of the Tagant, exchanged pleasantries, and moved on with no problems. We left Tidjikja the next day, dropped one trainee off at his site, then headed out to the village, 35 miles off of the paved road.
We arrived before dark, but promptly got stuck in the mud for an hour and a half. We eventually gave up, grabbed our bags, rolled our pant legs up, and started walking in the dark, through several knee-high branches of the seasonal river that flows through the town. When we got into the neighborhood we were looking for, we found out that the person we were supposed to contact, the director of the high school, wasn’t in town, so a friendly neighbor put us up in one of his empty houses, gave us mattresses, and fed us.
The next day, we got started on meeting people. Again, the protocol with the village chief/mayor went smoothly, and we met several people in the village and had a good look around. One of the men in the village invited us to his house for lunch, for which he killed a sheep. After lunch we did a little hiking into the mountains around the village. My previous experience with finding cave paintings in Lehweitat came in handy, as I was able to pick out a place in the mountains where we were likely to see some pictures. Sure enough, we found grinding bowls and several cave paintings.
cave paintings
After this little excursion, we were ready to go until one of the man’s sons mentioned that they had crocodiles in the village…would we like to see them? Of course! So off we went. Not far away, the village had built a small dam to block water in around the palmeries – this was where the crocodiles were supposed to live. We didn’t see any crocodiles, but there was a really nice waterfall that cascaded into the pool. It turns out that El-Qaddiya, which sits at the base of a wide plateau, is situated at the place where all of the water runs off of the plateau, collects, and then flows southward to larger seasonal lakes. Hiking up over the waterfall, we found an even bigger waterfall, and then, further back, a natural slide.
me, standing in the waterfall
I never expected to see waterfalls in the middle of the Sahara desert, and certainly not large pools of water, so I took advantage of it and did a little swimming. After we had finished exploring, it was too late to leave the village, and our host was insisting that we stay to help him finish the sheep he had slaughtered for lunch, so we headed back to the house for the evening. At dusk, thousands of bats came out of the surrounding mountains and flew around for hours, catching insects. This, I suppose, is why El-Qaddiya has so very few mosquitos even though they have standing, still water for most of the year.
sliding down the rocks
The plan was to leave the next morning, but that night, a large storm came through the area and dumped quite a bit of rain on the village. The rain was pleasant, but our host informed us that, contrary to the information on getting into and out of the village that we had been given by Bagga, we were stuck. The driver and I searched in vain for another way out, but we eventually gave up and decided to try to cross the shallow branches of the seasonal river in the middle of town. We made it through the first branch, but not the second. Fortuately, several men from the village came over to help us out, but they and the driver insisted on doing it the Mauritanian way, which meant putting grass and small plants in the tracks and trying to back out, which resulted in the car digging deeper and deeper into the mud. I tried to explain that the car needed traction, and even went to the trouble of having the other volunteers help me find large rock that we put in the tire tracks after we had dug the wheels out. The Mauritanians immediately took them out without even giving it a try, so I left.
Four hours later, they finally got unstuck, and a boy was sent up into the mountains to find me. I had figured it would take them a little while to get the car out, so I took advantage of the free time. The water system that fed off of the town’s water tower was broken in the neighborhood of the house we had been staying at, and it was difficult to bring water to the house, so we had to forego showers for the time we were in El-Qaddiya. So while the Mauritanians tried to bury the car in mud, I took a piece of soap and some shorts up into the mountains with me, found a nice little waterfall that filled up a small pool, swam for a while, then took a shower in the waterfall. I was asleep in a cool cave when the boy came to fetch me – I don’t think I’ve been that relaxed in months.
The car had finally been extracted from the mud, and our driver had found a trio of saviors – three men in a pickup had come into town from another village, and they said they knew another route out that was always dry. We packed up and followed the truck out of town, only to find the path blocked by even more water than there was in El-Qaddiya…four hours later, and just before nightfall. It was too dark to make it back to the village, so we found another village closer to us to pass the night. The very generous people in this other village fed us and gave us a place to sleep, and the next day, we returned to El-Qaddiya, which was almost dry enough for us to pass through. We decided to give it a try, and we made it most of the way before the truck came to a halt in the mud again…but this time, we got it out MY way and we were back on the path on the way back to Tidjikja, and eventually Kaedi, in fifteen minutes.
All in all, Site Visit this year was an interesting experience. I was pretty proud of the way I handled being in charge of the PC mission for the week, and El-Qaddiya is definitely one of the most beautiful volunteer sites in all of Mauritania. It’s pretty remote, so I’m glad I got the chance to go out for a visit, since it’s nearly impossible to get there without having your own car (which means that I was right – it doesn’t meet PC standards). Hopefully the two volunteers there will enjoy their stay…until they have to be moved to a new site…
PICTURES
