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.
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.
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