Back from en Brousse!

Finally I am somewhere with Internet, so I can update this again. I am in Kiffa for a couple of days after having spent about 5 weeks in Kankossa. Ramadan ended about a week ago, which meant that life in Mauritania has started up again. My first month here has been up and down, but it is definitely getting easier. School and the cold season are about to begin also, so I will have a little more to do. Here are some random glimpses of life in Kankossa:

A lot of Mauritanians here are interested in the U.S presidential election, and specifically Barack Obama. They always ask me if I am for McCain or Obama and discuss how Obama’s dad is from Kenya. Mauritania is very stratified along ethnic lines and has actually never had a black African president (they have all been white Moors of Arab origin), so the prospect of an African American president is really exciting for people here.

If there was a Mauritanian food pyramid, the five food groups would be: milk, bread, rice/cous cous, sugar, and meat. These things can be combined to make a surprising number of things, such as:

Rice+milk: ish

Small cous cous+milk: bossi

Large cous cous+milk+sugar: gossi

Milk+sugar: zrig

Bread+meat: taajin

The list goes on. Part of the reason for the limited diet is there is not a large variety of food available, but it is also cultural. Many Mauritanians, and particularly Moors, prefer a desert diet-basically just food you could find and survive on in the desert. It is considered more “pure.” We eat vegetables sometimes, but they are always very cooked; uncooked produce is for animals, not humans!

One day one of my site-mates and I were having tea at the Forest Bureau. We were laughing and talking with one of the three men who works there, who was explaining the Hassaniyan names for some of the native trees. He then asked me how to count to 5 in English, and I happily obliged, since lots of people here are interested in learning English and I always jump at the chance to prove that I know at least one language fluently. After asking me 1-5, he asked how to say “10,” so I told him, and then he asked how to say “20.” I said “twenty,” remembering about two seconds too late that the word “twenty” in Hassaniya is a derogatory term for a woman’s vagina. It was a blatant set-up. This 60 year old man proceeded to laugh in my face and told me how I should never say that in Mauritania.

That’s all for now-I will updating this again for sure at Thanksgiving, and possibly earlier in November as well. There is a travel ban on Peace Corps volunteers for the first three months of service, meaning that we cannot leave our region and should stay mostly at our sites. This ends in December, however, and after that I will be doing more traveling for training, social stuff, etc, so as a result I should be able to update this more!