No place

The other day Yusef came over.

We're in Tijikja now, so he's no longer my neighbor. He lives with his aunt and young cousins in a little run-of-the-mill house, over in an outlying section of town called Arguub.  Arguub means ‘tendon’ which I thought was a weird name for a neighborhood, until someone explained to me (demonstrating) that it meant, specifically, ‘Achilles tendon’, - the one that connects the heel to the leg- and then I decided that this was even weirder.

Before he came over, he called me to let me know he was coming. Last month, I bought him a used (okay, probably stolen but don’t judge me) telephone from Nouakchott. Ahead of time I put out a casual smattering of magazines on the table (we just got a table! This is literally the best thing in my life right now). I displayed them, nonchalantly, as though they had accumulated by chance, just in case the conversation sagged (it’s good to have a back-up plan). But in reality I had to cull the magazines scrupulously to make them Mauritanian-appropriate, ensuring that they weren't peppered with scandalous pages of feckless American hussies.

Okay, just kidding. But seriously, not every magazine that arrives in the care packages make the cut -no ‘People’, no ‘Us Weekly’ and definitely no 'Stuff' magazine (look it up). That leaves us basically with, like, The Economist and Worldview, the mind-numbing Peace Corps quarterly, neither of which are replete with pictures (he can’t read English of course) so sometimes I just throw in the hoochy magazines and figure it will be good for him – builds character.

Nine months ago, Yusef came to Tijikja to live with his aunt’s family, and study for the bac or college entrance exam. It's today, in fact. He finished school two years ago (he’s 24) although he is allowed to continue attending, like any other student, for some reason I don't entirely understand, but which I think has something to do with "connections".

He’s already taken the bac three times, and failed each one. And I don't think he'll pass the one this afternoon, either. This feels like an awful thing to say - a betrayal- but I think it’s the truth. This is not because he’s stupid. He’s not. He is, in fact, rather smart. It’s because education in El Qidiya is a tremendously un-funny joke, and because the situation in Mauritania generally is hardly any better.

What's more, I have, at best, limited faith in the integrity of the bac as a legitimate exam. Take this: frequently, young people that I tutor informally in English will bring me copies of the English sections of past bacs. Almost always, they are riddled with careless, amateurish errors, or filled with arcane phrases and tortured wording, which any native, or even competent, English speaker could have plucked out in 30 seconds. Seriously Ministry of Education? You couldn’t find one native speaker to proofread the national college entrance exam?!

English portions of the test take the form of text paragraphs and subsequent analysis questions, but the topics of the texts are apparently chosen by aliens. Two that come immediately to mind, were, respectively, about "Neuroscience", and "Cryogenics".

Okay, hold up. These are students that live in a poor desert nation, often under a tent, surrounded by animals. The majority of them have never seen a computer, never been inside a modern hospital, and most likely they have never constructed even the most basic sentence in English. Now you’re giving them texts filled with words like "synapses" and "liquid nitrogen"? Talk about a testing syllabus, and an entire government agency, divorced from reality.

This is to say nothing of all the shiny new (paperback) textbooks, recently put out by the Ministry of Education, filled with colorful animations, and cartoon-ish, laser-printed characters, that are written entirely in French, a language most of the students I see carrying them cannot read! This is akin to me trying to learn science through a book done entirely in Spanish. No matter how well the material is presented, I’m still just going to use it as kindling.

Anyway, Yusef misses his family terribly, in a heartbreakingly unabashed way. His experiment here in Tijikja, (which, btw is about four, grueling, off-road hours away from the village), is his first extended stay away from his family and his home in his entire life. Again, he is 24. He has never been to Nouakchott, not even once, and it's hard to explain how significant that is to someone who doesn't live in this country. Nouakchott is the only place in the nation that even approaches modern Western civilization, and it doesn't even approach it closely at all. Like, binoculars recommended.

Yusef doesn't have any photographs of the people he left back home because he doesn't own a camera. Over the years, his family has accumulated an arbitrary rainbow of snapshots of loved ones and relations (including one of me), but these are kept inside the house in a cheap plastic photo album to be brought out and perused only sporadically.

But I have pictures. Before I left El Qidiya, I tried, with limited success to snap un-awful photos of those people I wanted to remember. I assure you, this does not refer to everyone, but it most certainly includes all of his family, his mother, his sisters, most of his friends. I hooked up my snazzy, decadent digital camera to Ellie's computer and we had a little show right then and there, like a traveling theater.

As the photos came up, he got that surprised, big smile on his face, like the one a baby gets when you tickle it, the one only he can make, and then he put his head down a bit, and looked away a little and laughed, his mouth wide, and covered his mouth with his hand.

Yusef is one of the sweetest people I have probably ever known, in a sense. It was really very touching, and funny and sad to be witness to such an obvious, unstudied display of emotion, which is something I'm quite sure I've never expressed in my life, unless it was in anger. I showed him how to peruse the pictures - I thought that the left and right arrow buttons on the keyboard were something he could handle - and I went to make us some tiny, sweet glasses of tea, like the good Mauritanian I have so painstakingly become. 

I miss you when wheels turn

This was written about a week ago. Many many things to write about Mali, and they are going to come, when and if they come at all, in non-chronological order. Sorry for spelling and grammar mistakes, but this was done quickly, and my brain has holes in it.


I'm in Segou.

Segou is an elegant, quiet, too-dignified to be threatening town (despite being the ancient center of the Bambara empire) on the banks of the Niger River. Yesterday I arrived after four hours curled on a foul bus seat, brown and soaked with grime and the old sweat of legions of previous occupants (sorry, that's gross), the air inside the miasma that is the only logical result of clusters of humans, being in spaces which frequently approach or exceed our own body temperatures.

On the way, during one of an almost endless series of stops, I ate 3 small bananas and two bars of a sort of thin, sesame seed wafer, conglomerated by honey and perhaps other things, which was impossibly good, much better than anything sold from the top of a little girl's braided head has any right to be.

Otherwise, I mostly slept in a sweaty doze of half consciousness listening to, among other things, Soulajboi (forgive me) in my earphones, oddly juxtaposed with the staticky Malian music videos, B movie quality, playing on the one lone tv screen, with their highly stylised, almost kabuki-like gestures expressing emotions which I, not speaking Bambara - much less the siren-shrill nasal variety which singers use-, could only guess at. The stars are all highly gussied up Divas in shiny cloth and nuclear war-ready hairdos, their colorfully robed back-up dancers swaying and prancing about in the odd, it-would-be-geeky-were-it-not-so-earnest moves which are their signature. Tupac, O iconic one, rhymes, sharp as a razor, in my earphones about "just my luck that I be fuckin' with the wrong one" while the grand dame of Mali pans out her up turned hands in front of her beseechingly, before clutching her heart and averting her trowel-caked make-up'd eyes in some inexpressible sadness. Life is strange.

Segou is unequivocably beautiful, by almost any standard, but to a degree to which anyone who had not lived in Mauritania for a time, or maybe just anyone who isn't me, couldn't really get. Even its errors are correct. (I just stole that from Nikki Giovanni, so sorry). I feel extreme jealousy of, mixed with my characteristic defensively arrogant disdain for, the Americans who live here, and who I'm convinced don't appreciate it, but that's the way it goes. It is, indeed, one of our things, (but how many of those things there are is both, the quadrillion dollar question, and, as of yet, deeply, darkly undiscovered by yours truly). Humans are cellularly, impossibly bad at imagining either the future, or other, worse presents, and so we settle into our own little slotted situations, all along the spectrum of conditions, triumphing and bitching at all our petty and profound challenges, respective to our niche, no group being, in general either happier or more miserable than others, and blocking out all visceral (not intellectual) knowledge of all the other infinite levels above and below, separated by nothing more than the skin of a bubble. It's in our blood, it seems, which is at once despair inducing and beautiful.

The trees have a lot to do with it (back to the beauty) honestly, though not everything. They line the boulevards. They are, in fact, what is meant, that little picture in your head, when you say "tree lined boulevards", tall, tall, tall, old growth crooked green-capped trunks of knotty, world-wise, slumping character. I don't know what these trees are called, though they are of course not Neem, for the most part because, (though I love you!) Neem is largely personality-less in a workmanly way. Instead these trees are magicians. It's much too easy, (apparently) and not at all new, to personify these giant, lurching boughs shading the streets, as benevolent protectors, but maybe there are worse things to do with them.

Last night I took a walk down to the Niger River- it is 2 minutes away- to watch the sun set, though it was hiding behind a giant, impromptu cloud formation the size and shape of a cropped mountain top, so...so much for that. Instead, I watched the river, which was in no uncertain terms an irridescent silver-gray which bled periwinkle blues from frayed, floating edges.

It was really lovely. Honestly, it was so beautiful that it made me uncomfortable. I seriously kept shifting positions on the cement, sun-warmed sidewalk, cross-legged, and then knees up, and then arms akimbo and all such nonsense. It seems I don't know what to do with things like that. I mean, what do you do with beauty? I don't know how to meditate -I'm not Zen (Jesus, I am so not Zen, though I can do a reasonable imitation of it) - or to even begin to quiet my mind. I can not 'take-in' peace as an entity. I can't cry (no joke) from some sort of transcendent 'joy' but even if I did, I'd probably stop again almost immediately from sheer embarassment at all the weird pathos.

So instead, I just 'gave it an hour' (meaning a few minutes) -which is one of those Hassaniyan expressions that sounds awkward when translated because of its sheer no-frills kind of accuracy, which I've grown to depend on - watching the two lone fisherman (I'm not making this up) messing with their net -tall, black, and thin sillouhettes (sp?) standing in their crescent-shaped dugout canoe like illustrations in some book you might have read before bed a long time ago.

The young men nearby, down below, took their evening baths in the river, demonstrating that interesting truth that even dirty water can make you clean(er) and I watched them while simultaneously trying to not seem like I was, until I became unavoidably conscious of being a (perhaps more than) vaguely creepy voyeur (the difference between tourist and voyeur is much, much smaller than we like to admit) and so I got up, with neither ceremony nor grace, and left them alone with their honest splish-splash.

to be continued......

Exits

Hi everyone,

I'm in Mali. More specifically in a town called Mopti which is a busy, dirty little thing on the banks of the Niger River, so everyone get their maps out. Everything is fine, wonderful, awful, beautiful, vibrant, exhausting, exhausting and exhausting.

Besides that, I just wanted to freak everyone out a little with a security message that our County Director sent out a few days ago about an accident involving a bus, and some people, one of them being another Mauritanian Peace Corps volunteer. This is the same bus route that I will be taking to get back to Mauritania in about a week. Presumably it will neither be the same bus, nor the same driver but one can never tell.....


Hello Mauritania Volunteers and Trainees:

Please excuse the interruption. I wanted to take a moment to brief you on two issues that may be circulating in the general PCV discussion forums:

First off, as many of you may know, a Mauritania Peace Corps Volunteer was attacked (.......blah blah blah, this is something else......)

Secondly, early this morning at approximately 04h00 a bus traveling from Bamako to Nouakchott was involved in a serious accident 15 kilometers West of Kiffa. The driver reportedly fell asleep at the wheel and the bus rolled off of the road. One Mauritania PCV was traveling on the bus at the time. I am grateful to be able to report to you that the PCV was not seriously injured and is doing fine. Sadly, three Malian citizens were killed in the crash and 10 others were seriously injured. The Mauritanian national information service published an article on their website (see attached).

So anyway, there is that. This will almost probably most likely maybe not happen again, but if I die in a horrible crash, just know that it was worth it, and I love you! (and at the time I was probably really hot, tired and uncomfortable anyway, so it was almost surely an improvement).

-Coltie