new pics as promised

new pictures are up... check out swear in ceremony and first week at site

the rains came in

Well I am now officially a volunteer in the United States Peace Corps! We had our swear in ceremony a few weeks ago. The ambassador came to say a few words and we had an elaborate lunch of chicken and vegies! we even had cold fanta! After that we had a celebration and a few of the volunteers made a mexican buffet, which was really good except that the ants thought so too and I literally had ants in my skirt all night biting me. I shook out my skirt the next day and dead ants fell out. Another thing to add to my list of annoying creatures I will get rid of when I meet a genie who grants me one wish. The next day was a day of rest and then everyone packed up all of their belongings and went to their permanent sites. It was sad being a Trarza volunteer because we stayed here in Rosso and watched everyone else sadly depart. I kind of felt abandoned by all these people that have quickly become good friends of mine. I don't know what I will do without Chelsea and Tanya everyday! haha, I am kidding, I love my region mates, I got really lucky with them. I have already said that when I get back to the states I would love to do a road trip and visit all of them.

Megan and I went out to Jider El Moghen finally. We had a ton of stuff to make a home with, a gas burner, pots, matilas to sleep on, a mat, even 2 spoons! Then we got to site and realized that the dream house would take a lot of work and we would have to hall all of the stuff from Rosso. So instead we spent the first few days just talking with families and introducing ourselves and asking if anyone knew of an open house anywhere. We have a few options, the best being the mayor's nephew's house. We basically just asked the nephew if he would move out and let us live there. So we will see how that goes; but as of now I am living with my counterpart who is very nice. She also has the cutest little girl, Fatimatou, that I have ever seen. I want one just like her. Haha, just kidding mom.

Another volunteer, Mike, came out for the day to help us with all of our stuff and to just get out of Rosso for a bit. He left the next day and now everyone in town thinks he is one of our husbands. My family asked me why my husband left me so quickly. Haha, I didn't correct some people because I figured it would be easier just to pretend I was married so that women didn't try to set me up with their sons.

Ramadan also started the day after we got there, which throws an interesting little twist on things. They are not allowed to let anything pass their lips from sunrise to sunset. That is no water, no food, no brushing the teeth (not like they do anyways but you know what I mean). This means that no one cooks for us. We also cannot buy anything in our boutiques in town, every time we ask where we can get something the answer is Senegal. We have decided Senegal is the land of magical things like cheese, bread, jewelry, alcohol, beaches, pants, and palm trees. Our side of the river has no palm trees and the senegal side is lined with them. It is really bizarre. Anyways, it is up to us to be creative with the things our lovely families have sent us in our packages. We made mac and cheese, but did not have butter so we used laughing cow instead and it was delicious. We also made canned ravioli. Then we got really crazy and made a chili with a chili seasoning packet and beans and corn. Sorry I talk about food so much but it is always on my mind here because there is nothing else to do but cook, prepare to cook, go to the market to buy food to cook, eat, and then think about the next time you get to eat. Plus things that would not normally taste good are now great. Like mayonaise on bread, I don't even like mayo, but I do here. So when I try something new I have to think, do I really like this or is it just that I am in Mauritania?

Other than obsessing over food, or lack of food, we have also decided we want to become buff since there is nothing else to do. We went running, which was interesting in this humidity, and we also worked out in Megan's room. People told us for days how they saw us working out and mimicked our arm excercises and laughed at us. I think the women would like a little fitness club though, it is entertaining for them. We also walked about half hour out of town, along the river and tanned in our bathing suits! We tried evening out our legs to match our arms, but instead my arms just got darker. We read and played cards and it was just lovely until we got swarmed by hundreds of bees and ran screaming down the path in our skivies. Everyone within 10 miles of us now know the toubabs have come to town. We also saw a monkey, some giant kuuti lizard guys, cows, and the cutest baby goat ever. I got really excited about the monkey and started clapping and it scared it off.

I learned Hassaniya and Megan learned French so it is funny because we are constantly translating between conversations and there is only one of us at a time that knows what is going on. Also, not everyone speaks Hassaniya, not everyone speaks French, but everyone speaks Wolof (the language of Senegal) which neither Megan or I speak. So that is also fun.

So after a few days we came back into Rosso for Megan's 25th birthday! The hour trip took us 4.5 hours because it had rained the day before and the "dirt road" was washed out. We were in a giant white van in a caravan with 4 other giant white vans. We got stuck at least 10 times and every time we did was an ordeal. Everyone would have to unload from the van and walk in knee deep mud to a drier spot where the van would meet us. Then they tied a rope to the van and would literally drag the van through the mud. Then move on to the next van. Then when all the vans made it we would pack it back up and drive for about 10 minutes and get stuck again. We pretty much pulled the van the entire 35 kilometers. We got to Rosso dripping with sweat, covered in mud, and sunburned regardless of how much spf 70 we put on. We got to the house and everyone laughed at the site of us, and we laughed to right up until the point where I tried to turn the water on and, what do you know, Rosso was out of water again. What an experience, TIA (this is Africa). I can't wait to make the journey back in a few days.

Anyways, for Megan's birthday we made sandwhiches because she is kind of obsessed by them. Rocco went to Senegal and got lunch meat and real cheese and we made proper sandwhiches and home made french fries, it was delicious. I had a birthday candle and we put it in the bread and Megan made a wish. I hope it was that we find a house soon so I can finally unpack my bags that I have been living out of for the past 3 months. A few of the guys got an online Football package so we can have Football Sundays and I can watch along with all the rest of the persistent fans back home as the Bears bomb this year!

I got all of my maladies under control finally and now have a normal bowel movement, etc. I did have bed bugs so I am now covered in little red dots, but at least they don't itch.

I got renamed, I am now Jemilla which is closer to my real name and it means pretty so I like this name better.

I randomly got to skype with mike and carina today. They seem really happy. I am so proud of them. It is so weird they are in Korea and I am in Africa and we were skyping! I love it. There is a camera here in the Rosso bureau and everything so if you want to skype, add me, I am jaime.pollard.

Well this is starting to be unconcentrated. Keep me updated with your lives!!!! I would also love to see some pictures so you should all get online too and do that. At least it doesn't take you 5 hours to upload 20 pictures so none of you have excuses. Anna, I want to see some football game pics or homecoming, etc. or if any of you want to print some pics and send them to me people here love seeing pictures from home!

Anna's Kuuti

Jaime, I thought you would like to see your new sibling.
Does he look familiar?

The girl on the floor is the one who did my hennae.... she was quite an artist. My feet are done too! I kind of like the foot one... maybe it is a future tattoo?!

I got attacked.... with hennae

So I have made it through training! Today, in fact, marks day number 63 here in Mauritania. On day 50 we celebrated and wore American baseball caps (I supported my Cubs of course). Day 100 I might wear pants! Now I am back in Rosso for a final week of admin meetings and then I move to Jider! I think the biggest change that I have undergone so far is learning how to do one thing at a time and living each day as it comes. I have always lived my life so chocked full of errands, work, school, friends, go go go. The other day I was going to sew my skirt while I read my book, and I had a novel idea... why not sew my skirt and then read my book. It was a wonderfully relaxing hour. Then I got bored. But I have definately become more patient and learned how to not think of what I have to do tomorrow, and instead lived in the moment.

Language class is over. We took an entire school year worth of hours in 8 weeks. I can't believe it's over because I don't feel that proficient yet, but in due time. Hassaniya is crazy. There is a verb for "to travel by car in the afternoon" and a separate one for morning and night. And the beauty of it is that each one is conjugated differently. We also asked our teacher to teach us some swear words so we can ward off the annoying kids asking for "un cadeaux." It was funny because most of the swears were not mean at all. The first few meant "you are bad," "get out," and then the last one was "God will kill your father with fire!"

We were talking about how there is not much wildlife in Mauritania and we think it is because nothing survives in the desert. This only means that those that do survive in the desert are persistent little pests. Chelsea, poor girl, had fleas in her room which lasted for about 3 weeks. The fleas would eat her alive at night, and then burrow in her clothes and jump onto the livestock so every goat, donkey, dog, cat, chicken, and cow running freely around boumbry became infected and it became a little epidemic on Chelsea's side of town. So she has been sleeping in my room for the past few weeks. We were too hot to sleep two in a mosquito net, and since mosquitos do not exist in Boumbry, we decided to sleep on the floor to get a breeze. Then we heard a story about another volunteer who slept out of her tent and had a cockroach crawl into her ear. She had to go to Nouakchott and get it flooded out. I have lots of them in my room, especially on nights where there is no moon. And they went crazy the night we had a lunar eclipse. So we had to chose between sweating all night or chancing with cockroaches. We chose the roaches, and developed a pretty solid system. She slept with the flashlight, and me with the weapon of choice, my flip flop (the one not eaten by the sand dune.)

Roach duty wasn't too bad since we didn't sleep much anyways because we also were both lucky enough to get Giardia, which is quite possibly the most unattractive and unpleasant little bacterial disease you can get. We got it because people do not wash their hands before eating because they don't want to wash off their hennae. You can look it up if you want but I will just leave it at we were running to the bathroom all night and  all day for about a week; along with putting up with abdominal pains so bad I can only equate them to what I would think labor pains would feel like. The worst of it happened the day that there was no water in Boumbry. My pot of water that was in the bathroom that we use to wash our hands was empty, our water filters were empty and we both had to go really bad. I asked my family where the water was and they shrugged it off and said "it doesn't exist today, maybe tomorrow, inshallah" We had to use neutragena facial scrubs and I ate a packet of gatorade powder hoping that it would at least keep in some of the water I already had in my body. Peace Corps finally brought us water at like 5pm and we were getting a little delerious. Its amazing how important water is.... so besides the starving kids in Africa, everyone finish every last drop of that glass of water because there are thirsty volunteers!

The next day I went to wash my face and noticed that the acne soap I had bought in town was actually face whitening soap! It is a huge trend here for Moor woman to use face whitening cream, and cover their hands and feet with mittens and socks on 100+ days to try to stay fair. The guy in the store kind of laughed at me but I thought it was my Hassaniya, maybe my Hassaniya was actually perfect and he just thought I was a Mauritanian whose face whitening was working well! The cream is actually a problem that the government wants us to teach women about because it destroys the melanin of skin pigment and lets the free radicals get to deeper layers of tissue; and thus the prevelance of skin cancer is on the rise here. It is hard to talk to women about it because, just like in America, they will likely shrug off health issues in favor of beauty. Just like if you tell a women who works in a tanning bed in America, they will likely respond "that's nice can we talk in 20 minutes." Never the less I will try to work on it, if not for anything else but that the white faces and dark eye and lip makeup freaks me out.

I ate lunch with a man who introduced me to his wife, then a few weeks later I had lunch with that family again and he introduced me to another wife. Polygamy is still common for some Moors. He also joked about the 10 year old girl serving us tea being his next wife. I laughed uncomfortably realizing he could be serious. 

I can appreciate most cultural differences, but I draw the line with the animal cruelty that goes on here. Kids are relentless. They have nothing better to do with their days but run around and jump off dunes, drop kicking dogs. I also watched a baby cow get killed the other day and I all thought about was poor cute little Noooormaaaan (right Anna). We really went off when we saw a group of girls swinging a string with a dead kitten attached to the bottom. They were just playing with it like a yoyo or something. We did not know how to express our anger in Hassaniya so we screamed at them in English and when they were really confused they held it out like they would give it to us so we could have a turn. We just said in broken Hassaniya "descend the cat child" because that is all we could muster, and didn't know how to say put down the cat. They think it is so weird when we call the dog over and pet it. Speaking of pets, Anna the Hassaniya word for the giant 3 foot lizard that we have here is "kuuti" but is pronounced kutchie. So you should name your new pet that.

Kevin- I showed some girls my pics from home and they all think you are zeyn hatta (very cute) and want to know when you are coming. So for anyone keeping track I think I may have pimped out both of my siblings now; I plead the fifth and blame the language  barrier. But in seriousness I want to know when you are coming too.

Our last night in Boumbry we had a dance party in the moonlight to music one of the girls had on her cell phone. Some of it was Hassaniya rap music, which wasn't too bad, and I have never seen such large women get down. We showed them some of our silly little American classics, like the cabbage patch, running man, shopping cart, macarena, etc. The women were making fun of us for doing "faire du sport" every day, and they asked us to race them. So we did. We raced Mauritanian women in the dark on the sand. They even took their mulaafas off and ran in tank tops!!! They were falling all over the place and so out of breath but they were having a blast. Then my sister stole all their mulaafas and through them behind a dune. It was really funny. I think I want to try to do a fitness club for women in my town and do small walks or dance parties to get them moving. 

The last day we were invited to Chelsea's tent for tea, where the women cornered us and attacked us with Hennae, like the picture of my sister. No Ian, you don't go to a tatoo parlor.. haha.. Hennae is die made from crushed up leaves of a plant and mixed with water. They took a few hours to apply the finely detailed mixture to our hands and feet. Then when it dries a little they put tea on it, wrap it in tissue, and then wrap it in plastic bags to sweat in the die. then they scrub it off and it leaves an orange design on your skin. Tanya has some good pics I will post later. I actually like it, but you have to sit still with bags on your hands and feet for 4 hours! I had drank an entire liter of water before going over and this was  a difficult feat to sit for that long in the heat of the day. It is extra hot now because it is "rainy season." Which means it has rained 2 times at night and the rest of the time there is just heavy humidity in the air. They also put it on your nails, but I already had pink on my toenails so now my feet look like disco barbie meets Mauritania. We also got bedazzled in gaudy rings and bracelets, one women even gave me the shoes off her feet. I got mulaafaed one more time and then we jumped in the peace corps car and left Boumbry for good with a loud cheer! It was really just hard to be trapped there, not able to leave when you have issues like flees, sickness, lack of water, spider bites, etc. Kudos to Tanya and Chelsea, and thanks for keeping me strong too!

We returned to Rosso and got strange looks for being dressed in Mulaafa and having hennae and I said it would be the equivalent of seeing Buddhist Monks walking down the streets of the ghetto in Chicago wearing Fubu jeans; it just doesn't match. I took a shower and used my new loofa from my first package (thanks mom) to scub at least 5 layers of Boumbry off of me. The loofa looks like I've been using it for a year. Hot right? I am so ready to move to Jider. One of the past volunteers built my town a school! So I have some big shoes to fill. There are not many latrines in town and people use the river to defecate; which is a problem because the snails pick it up and then when people go in the water they get schistomeiosis from the snails. Schizto basically calcifies your bodies organs, and it is painful and deadly. I am thinking of making latrines one of my projects too, but that would be far in the future. Until then, if anyone is thinking of being charitable this year, look into Peace Corps Partnership. It is based off of donations and when a volunteer wants to do any project that requires funding, that is where they get the funding. We can make this a group effort! haha. 

Tanya is going to Cancosa, which is pretty far to the East in a more conservative Mulaafa land. She has a bigger site, and apparantly a great market and a big house. Chelsea is going to Wudon, in the North. She has huge mountains of sand dunes to go sand boarding on. So I already have a few weekend trips to go visit them. I was talking to one of the guys in my region and we were sad to not have a ski season this year, so we are going to try to go up to Atar and go sand boarding instead. I have a feeling climbing up the giant hot sand dune with a board may be a lot of work, they should look into chair lifts.

I have to give a shout out to Mike and Carina who are going to South Korea tomorrow to teach English for a year. I am so proud of you and am so excited you get to do this journey together. Mike has a blog and Carina may make one too. I am so glad I got to talk to you guys (and Julisan) the other day! I miss you so much it hurts! Julie too is going to Germany for 2 years to work on her masters in German... I have such interesting friends! 

For those who keep asking what to send me:

I do have a ton of time on my hands, and who would have thought but I kind of like down time to read! I have already finished 3 books and am starting my third so books are always appreciated if you want to send me anything. I would like to read "White Maasai," "Walk Across America,"and Obama's book, and anything else that you love and think I should read. I also would like some body wash (maybe mint hemp... it is really good), games of any sort that I can play outside, a football, plain solid color tees (I have too many long sleeve ones), treats.

News links.

Here is another link I pulled off of the RIM parent's shared email. Just a little more information about the US's response to the coup, and the Americans living in Mauritania. It is brief.

US Calls for Reversal of Mauritania Coup http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-08-06-voa62.cfm

Coup d'tate today in Mauritania.

In case anyone heard on the news about the President of Mauritania being seized this morning and might be worried, I am posting a link to a news story. Apparently there is some political unrest there. I did talk to Jaime this morning. She said everyone is fine. The Peace Coprs is "business as usual" right now. The volunteers are all together in Rosso. The main trouble is in Nouakchott.
I asked her to blog today, but since so many people are in Rosso now she said she cannot promise because the computer lines get so very slow.

So here is the link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7544834.stm