16 October 2006 - 16:11
I took a short post-worst-job-on-earth vacation last weekend to recover from the trauma of my summer job. Actually, the first part of the trip, I was working, checking in on new health volunteers to verify their progress on the new community health analysis that I designed for all of the health volunteers to do in their first three months at site. I wound up doing protocol with local officials again, which, again, was a breeze. I had a productive couple of days of work up in Atar, tourist capital of Mauritania, which I don't find all that exciting. Then came the "fun" part...I jumped on the roof of the cab of a pickup truck headed to Choum for a dusty three-hour ride to where the World's Longest Train makes a five-minute stop to pick up passengers with six other RIM volunteers. We made pretty good time, which didn't really matter, since the train wasn't scheduled to pass through Choum until sunset.
With the moon rising over the mountains behind it, the train, loaded with iron ore, came around a bend right on time as the town's mosques erupted with prayer calls, signifying to Mauritanians that they could break their Ramadan fasts. For one reason or the other, there were only two other Mauritanians that got on board with us, leaving the train with one boxcar full of seven toubobs, two others with a single Mauritanian passenger each, and hundred others completely empty, stretching out behind us further than we could see.
The iron ore train comes from Zourat, Mauritania's biggest (only?) iron mine, deep in the northern interior of the country. Every day, the open-air boxcars are filled up with iron ore (either rocks or dust) and shipped to Nouadhibou, Mauritania's industrial shipping port (and coolest city). There, the cars are emptied onto ships and the ore is sent off to other countries to be refined (some of which, undoubtedly, is sent back to Mauritania - the fact that there is no secondary industrial production in this country is one more reason it can't climb out of debt and poverty). Empty, the cars are pulled back up to Zourat the next day. As far as I know, Mauritania's iron ore train is the longest train in the world (not the longest track - that's in Siberia, I think - just the longest train), meaning that I should get a merit badge or at least the admiration of all of my less-adventursome friends for riding it. For someone wanting to travel from one point on the tracks to another, there are two options: pay for a ticket in a crappy passenger car, filled with thieves and inconsiderate people who take up too much space and don't shower often enough (and animals, presumably, since it is Mauritania, afterall)...or ride on top of the iron ore for free.
The upside to riding on top in the open air is that it's free, and free-ness is next to godliness for Peace Corps volunteers. The downside is that you are subject to the elements, namely cold (it is a common misconception that the desert is always hot - on the contrary, nights, especially in the cold season, get really cold). However, being experienced Boy Scouts...err...Peace Corps volunteers, we had all come prepared. We had packed food - pasta salad in plastic bags, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, beef jerky, crackers, and a lot of water. And we were dressed for the occasion in stunning Western-style castoff clothing from circa 1987.
Before leaving Nouakchott, each of us had visited what some PCVs call the "dead toubob stores," but I like to call by their African name, "foukadiayes," which means "shake-and-sellers." These stores sell clothes that were donated to charities in the US and Europe and sold to companies that buy excess clothes from the charities (because the Goodwills of the country can't sell or even store the massive amounts of clothing that are donated to them each year), which bundle them up like hay bales to ship them to overseas buyers, making the excess-buyers a sizable amount of money. So these cast-off clothes arrive in Africa, after spending a decade in a closet after they went out of style, a couple months in a storeroom, another couple months on a boat coming from the US, and potentially years in the foukadiaye stores here. Then we, and Africans, buy them for about the same amount of money you can buy clothes for in second-hand stores in the US (which is cheaper than you can have clothes made here, undermining the local clothing industry...weeee!). Since the clothes have been bundled up hay-style for months, foukadiaye owners are called shake-and-sellers because they receive the bundles, cut them open, shake the wrinkled clothes out, and sell them out of tiny shops that look like a giant laundry machine threw up inside of them.
The whole idea behind hitting the foukadiayes was to have warm clothing that we can throw away upon our arrival. Whether you get the iron rock, which is extremely uncomfortable, or the iron dust, which is very invasive of body cavities, you are guaranteed to get very, very dirty over the course of the 12-hour, open-air, overnight train ride to Nouadhibou, our destination.
We got iron dust, which we immediately set about pushing around to make chairs out of for the few hours we would be up talking before succumbing to sleep in our hollowed-out-iron-ore beds. The ride was relatively uneventful - much as expected, we were really cold, but our clothing preparations and food provisioning had spared us a miserable trip, as has been had by several other volunteers on previous train rides.
We unloaded the next morning in Nouadhibou, showered and cleaned up as best we could at the house of another volunteer that lives in Nouadhibou, then passed four days of beach-going, ship wreck-seeing, American movie-watching, and seafood restaurant-enjoying. Just what I needed/deserved after a long, sweaty, frustrating summer and a busy move-in to Nouakchott.
Now it's back to the grindstone.
