To sum up the last month -- the first month of my "official" volunteer service -- I would have to say that we have a lot less work than we thought we would. Each day is a struggle to find something to do, something productive no less, and a struggle to resist the temptation to hide inside John's compound (he's just moved out of the abandoned hotel and into a new 2-room house) and watch movies on our laptops. Nevertheless, I've started to establish a routine, which is surprisingly comforting and motivating: sunrise, wake up and go for a run or walk on the gravel road heading out of town, have tea and bread with my host family, bucket bath, go to John's for breakfast #2, go to the mayor's office / market or do laundry, eat lunch with my host family, read / listen to my radio / drink tea / journal, go back to John's to make dinner and hang out until around bedtime. Sounds pretty exciting, right? We're hoping to have more work to do soon, once we get our mentoring center up and running, but everything moves so SLOWLY around here.
So, we arrived in Kaedi last night after a (free) three-hour ride on top of some luggage in the back of a pickup truck. The plan is to stay here through my birthday on Thursday (woohoo!), then head back to M'Bout and start (in earnest) month #2 of service. We've made some good community contacts at this point, but a lot of people have been out of town for Ramadan, so hopefully, we'll meet a lot more now that school's about to get started.
Last week, John moved into his new house, and I decided to stay with my host family. I live with a rather large family (or average my Mauritanian standards) who are absolutely amazing. My host dad Ali speaks really good French since he lived in Toulouse, France for a few months, and the rest of the family speaks Hassaniya, so I'm continuing to practice. There's 7 boys ranging from 20s/30s to a few months old and 4 girls. We live in a three-room mud house (I have one of the rooms) with a bathing room, pit toilet, and outdoor hanger where we all spend most of our time. It's definitely not the nicest house in town, but my family is really kind and friendly and generally awesome, which I think makes up for the lack of electricity and cement walls.
What else? So much has happened during the past month, and I don't think that I could ever put it all down here, but I'll try and give you guys something to work with. I've started running again (I was sick for about a week with giardia), and like I said earlier, I go every morning around sunrise when it's still cool. One morning, I was headed back into town, but was still about a mile out when I crossed a creek and noticed a baby cow standing by itself on the other side. The cow started following me, so I stopped running thinking that it was attracted to my motion. I didn't want to steal it from some herder kid. But it kept following me. So I started running faster, and the calf started running faster. I started walking again. The calf started nudging my elbow. I turned around all of a sudden and yelled at the cow in an attempt to scare it. No luck. The cow followed me at a gallop all the way back to my family's compound at which point it must have gotten scared of the children because it walked away. I have no idea what happened to it after that. And that pretty much sums up my life nowadays, as exotic, weird, sad as that may be.
