30 August 2007 - 17:44

There's a lot of stuff here that makes you do a double-take when you see it, and you eventually get used to living in a world where everything seems a little bizarre, but even after three years here, there are a few things that I just can't wrap my head around...

When I was in training, my host family said they were too poor to afford electricity, so we ate dinner by the light of cell phones.  That never made much sense to me - they could afford cell phones, but not electricity?

In Tidjikja, there were houses built out of stacked stones that were wired for internet.  They couldn't even build houses with modern techniques, but they could surf the internet in their living room?

Then there were the mud huts in the south of the country that were wired for electricity.  These huts fell apart every year during the rainy season, but the owners just patched them back up with more mud/animal crap and buried the wires in the mud walls again.

On vaccination campaigns that I helped with, we would often end up in the middle of the desert, miles from nowhere, and the children of nomads who had never been to a city larger than a few hundred people would be dressed in American basketball jerseys.  Weird.

And I don't know how many university-educated people that I've met that still think it's perfectly acceptable to crap outside in the street.

In Nouakchott, even people who are squatting in empty lots, living in scrap-wood shacks, have satellite TV in their houses...

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