I am back in my lab after a two week hiatus. Never did find out why they decided I needed to be locked out for a bit. Different people have suggested different things. It was perhaps simply that the administration wanted me know that they had the power to drive my work to a halt. Perhaps though there was a specific infraction that I was being warned not to commit again. Unfortunately social mores prevent me from finding out directly, so unless it happens again I’m just going to let it stand.

I’ve recently made what I’m hoping is a good step in the cultural integration battle: my first non-acculturated Maure friend. I’ve got a professor friend at the university, but he lived in the States for 10 years and we talk in English. His perspective is decidedly more cosmopolitan than the average Mauritanian. I’ll ask him sometimes for opinions on why people do things (like lock me out of my lab), but other that asking explicitly I don’t get as much Mauritanian life out of him.

I’ve got other friends who are university English students. They are all black African though. I’m definitely getting a sense of Soninke and Pulaar cultures from them, but the Maure culture I’ve only really gotten so far from my homestay during Stage and it being the dominant culture for this part of the country.

Enter Dah. Like most everyone else who hangs out with me and isn’t American, he wants to learn something from me. In this case English. He is assigned to a newly opened branch of Halliburton here in Nouakchott and though business is conducted in French and Arabic, all the documentation is in English. So, he has dedicated himself to picking up a new language.

He is doing really well with it. I went last night and hung out with him for a couple of hours and he was telling me proverbs, a feat which would be a real challenge for pretty much all of my English student friends. When I first met him he told me he was planning to speak English in another two months or so. I thought he was goofy since I’ve been working on this damned French thing for a year and am still wretched. He mentioned last night though that he has only been learning for three weeks so far and given his progress he will almost certainly speak better English than I do French within two months.

He is a cool guy and I like hanging out with him. I went with him and another volunteer to the newly opened Mexican restaurant and had my first enchilada in over a year. Then last night I just went over to his place and hung out chatting for a couple hours.

Interesting tidbits learned to date:

A Mauritanian force feeding camp is called a “bahdah” in Hassaniya. If you have the misfortune to find yourself there you night have your hands put in pincers resembling the tongs for assembling fajitas (this was a Mexican dinner note) and squeezed until you eat.

Mauritanian men of the younger generation are moving away for the past ideal of “the bigger the better.” Nowadays the men don’t want a woman to be huge, but it is still important for her to have some meat on her. Dah emphasized this while encouraging my female volunteer friend to eat the rest of his fajitas.

The mint in Mauritania is fertilized using waste products. Which type though varies by region. Our tea last night was mintless because the mint from the cinqui?me is fertilized with “eaux d’?gout” aka. sewage. The mint from Ka?di is fertilized with goat poo which is cool. Myself, I’m not sure that I want any of it other than the fact that the mint is boiled as a part of the tea making process.

The evening was kinda cool because he paced the making of the three rounds of tea out over about two hours. He would boil the water and then let it sit for a bit and we’d chat. A little bit after the last casse he asked me if I was in a hurry to get somewhere. I took that as the sign to leave and I’m pretty sure I was supposed to go when the tea ended. He just had to give me an extra prompt because of my cluelessness.

I really want to try and get a better sense of Mauritania in the next year. Volunteers who live in villages have so much stronger relationships with the locals and I really admire them. My language is to a point where I still sound stupid, but at least I can generally make my point. We hit the one year anniversary of our swearing in on the 12th and I think this next year has a lot of potential to be interesting.

Love,
Will