to be clean
What’s weirder than standing outside naked dumping water over your head, i.e. bathing in Selibaby? Standing indoors in your underwear with six of your closest friends before being scrubbed down by large Moor women in THEIR underwear… To kick off my second tour de Nouakchott I agreed to go to a hammam, or Turkish bath house, for some de-brousseification. First we negotiated the price with the mulafah wearing women out front, then after washing off in the steam room lay down on tile slabs for the loofah rubdown. It was amazing. I can’t lie. Sadly my sense of shame came not being almost naked but from the discovery that my skin has apparently been harboring secret cells of dirt. The good news is I think I might be clean again.
So yeah, I’ve broken my silence of over a month to tell you THAT.
January was a slow month in Selibaby. Through some unfortunate scheduling, there were only two weeks between the official “Christmas” vacation and Tabaski, the year’s major religious fete. As no one came back the week following vacation-it’s basically protocol-of course they didn’t come back the week before the fete. I taught a few small classes but mostly just played Scrabble in French. In fact, in a seven-hour stretch of Scrabble during the third day of the fete, I more than doubled the score of my Mauritanian-ex-pat-practically-French friend. So bring it.
Equally important, the Girls Mentoring Center of Selibaby officially opened its (one) door in the month of January to an underwhelming seven girls. This was mostly due to the problem mentione above about nobody being around. It was sort of discouraging, but as the girls who came had been involved in the center last year it gave us a chance to chat about things that worked and didn’t work… and to agree to wait until after the fete. When we officially reopened our door on the 31st of the month closer to 20 showed up.
This aspect of my peace corps responsibilities (which I will at some point discuss further) is by far more rewarding than teaching middle schoolers-so I really want the center to work. At the moment I am in the capital not just to be scrubbed but for a GMC conference. There are 12 GMCs in Mauritania; a volunteer from each center invited two women from the community with the idea of convincing them to be more involved with the centers. It’s a concept with a lot of potential, but the process itself is a little painful. It’s like when my eighth-grade class took that bus trip to Houston and we took all the rolls from the hotel in the morning so we could save our $10 daily eating allowance. I actually ushered a woman out of a reception room as she dumped peanuts into her purse. But these are the role models of our centers, and if they want free food, who can blame them? I want free food too. On that note I’m going to eat lunch.
So yeah, I’ve broken my silence of over a month to tell you THAT.
January was a slow month in Selibaby. Through some unfortunate scheduling, there were only two weeks between the official “Christmas” vacation and Tabaski, the year’s major religious fete. As no one came back the week following vacation-it’s basically protocol-of course they didn’t come back the week before the fete. I taught a few small classes but mostly just played Scrabble in French. In fact, in a seven-hour stretch of Scrabble during the third day of the fete, I more than doubled the score of my Mauritanian-ex-pat-practically-French friend. So bring it.
Equally important, the Girls Mentoring Center of Selibaby officially opened its (one) door in the month of January to an underwhelming seven girls. This was mostly due to the problem mentione above about nobody being around. It was sort of discouraging, but as the girls who came had been involved in the center last year it gave us a chance to chat about things that worked and didn’t work… and to agree to wait until after the fete. When we officially reopened our door on the 31st of the month closer to 20 showed up.
This aspect of my peace corps responsibilities (which I will at some point discuss further) is by far more rewarding than teaching middle schoolers-so I really want the center to work. At the moment I am in the capital not just to be scrubbed but for a GMC conference. There are 12 GMCs in Mauritania; a volunteer from each center invited two women from the community with the idea of convincing them to be more involved with the centers. It’s a concept with a lot of potential, but the process itself is a little painful. It’s like when my eighth-grade class took that bus trip to Houston and we took all the rolls from the hotel in the morning so we could save our $10 daily eating allowance. I actually ushered a woman out of a reception room as she dumped peanuts into her purse. But these are the role models of our centers, and if they want free food, who can blame them? I want free food too. On that note I’m going to eat lunch.