Photo #14

This is a photo of John's hangar, which is in front of his house (you can see a corner of the house in the right side of the photo).  His bamboo bed and mosquito net are underneath.  Unlike my hangar, his has oilcloth on top, which helps keep the rain out, and flaps on the side, which you can fold down for shade and to block sandy wind.  We do most of our hanging out underneath the hangar.  The three oil drums in the foreground are where we keep our water for bathing, drinking, cooking, washing, etc.  It costs about $1.50 to have a full barrel delivered, and we need a new one about every week.  Kids ride by on donkey carts with water barrels strapped to the back, so you have to flag one down and then pay him.  And you use a flexible rubber tube to siphon water out of the barrel.  It takes some getting used to, but we've had a lot of practice by now!

Photo #13

And, this is John's house.  It's much newer than mine, and he lives by himself, but we both spend quite a bit of time at each other's place.  He has one door, but the house is split into two rooms.  The windows even have glass, but we keep them open since it's cooler.  There's a little shed between the side of the house and the wall, where we keep our gas stoves for cooking.  And there's an outside outlet, so we can watch movies on our laptops outside.  Talk about luxury!

Photo #12

I took this photo on a backstreet that runs from my house to John's house.  You can see that most of the houses in M'Bout are like mine, made of mud with thatched roofs.  The little boy has his government issued blue backpack on since school recently started.  ALL the kids have the same one; they got them for free from UNICEF, and the bags were filled with notebooks and pencils and school supplies.  Pretty neat.  There's also a fence on the left side of the picture where someone keeps their animals at night.  It's pretty common to pen your animals up at night (my family ties each goat and sheep up by their hooves to logs, buildings, etc.), and then let them roam free during the day.

Photo #11

I took this photo inside my bedroom.  There's a piece of fabric over the door to help keep the flies out without blocking the breeze; I have the same thing over the window.  Currently, the floor is just loose sand, but I'm going to hire someone to put concrete down when I get back to site this month.  After that, I'll put a plastic mat over top to make things more comfortable.  Since it's daytime, my mosquito net is in my room, but I move it outside every night.

Photo #10

This is a photo of the inside of our house (which is made of mud and has a thatched roof!  Every Peace Corps volunteer's dream!).  You can see the three inner doors -- the closest one is my bedroom, the middle one is the salon, and the far one is my family's shared bedroom.  Sometimes when it rains, we all sleep here in the hallway.  Oh yeah, and chickens and goats wander in and out, as you can see here.  

Photo #9

Home sweet home:  this is a photo of my house in M'Bout.  The two openings lead to a veranda, and then there's three inner doors for the three inside rooms.  Every Mauritanian house has some sort of hangar in their yard, which is the thatched roof, open-sided structure that you see in front of the house.  We spend most of our time under the hangar because it's cooler and breezier than inside the house.  At night, I sleep on the right side of the bamboo bed that you see on the right side of the picture, and the rest of my host family sleeps on the left.

I'm baaaaack!

I think it's been a month since my last blog post, but considering that I also haven't checked my email for a month, this doesn't seem quite as long.  Since my last post, we first-year volunteers celebrated our four-month anniversary and more recently, celebrated Halloween.  I left M'Bout trying to explain to my host family and friends there about American Halloween celebrations, and although they were definitely sympathetic, I think they had a hard time picturing it.  Speaking of my family and friends in M'Bout, John and I have decided that we have successfully begun to "integrate" into our community.  Although we have little to show in terms of our girls' mentoring center at this point (we have a promise for a space and a possible community contact/mentor), I can't describe how good it feels to walk around town every day and have people recognize you / know your name and to know where to find things at the market and even to know who to talk to around town in order to get things done.  I don't think I've ever lived in a small town before, but I'm really enjoying the "small town" feel of M'Bout.  And...I took some photos around town before I left, so hopefully, I'll be able to put those online tomorrow.

I wasn't sure where to start writing this post because it's been so long since my last one and so much has happened (and not happened at the same time) and because each day is truly an emotional roller coaster.  So, I decided to give you a quick recap of three random days from my journal:

-- [October 7] John and I made our way back to M'Bout from Kaedi by taxi for the first time.  Previously, we had always been fortunate enough to get a free ride from friends, but because most everyone we knew was out of town, we went down to the garage to find a car.  We arrived at the garage before 8AM and found three cars going to M'Bout.  We each bought a ticket in the front of the car.  (There are different prices for the cab of the pickup truck and the bed.)  We waited under the hangar until 11AM when John asked the driver when exactly he was planning on leaving.  He said we'd probably leave around 4PM!  We were irate!  We had been waiting and having people awkwardly stare at us for hours only to realize that we could have walked back to a fellow volunteer's house and hung out!  We left our stuff in the car, went back to the house for lunch, and then took a cab back to the garage around 3PM.  We FINALLY left Kaedi at 5:30PM!  I call it the ride from Hell because it was bumpy and slow and I was packed in to the backseat with John and two other (rather large) Mauritanians.  Needless to say, I was completely exhausted when we arrived back in M'Bout at 9PM.  Only took over 12 hours to finally return to site.  You can see why we don't come in that often!

-- [October 14]  John and I met a couple of NGO workers in M'Bout, which gave us some promising contacts for our mentoring center.  Eventually, we'd like to use these people as teachers at our center.  Also, my host brothers and sister went to school for the first time today.  I wasn't sure if class had officially started (it hadn't) because they went to work in the fields that morning and didn't go to school until after lunch.  I think they have to pick up their schedules.  I think I've written this in a couple of letters, but the school system here is completely baffling to me.  Also, I was very excited at this point about traveling to Lexeiba (the closest site to M'Bout) to visit two other volunteers and to see Lexeiba's girls' mentoring center.  It's always really nice to see some familiar faces and bounce ideas off the second-year volunteers.

-- [October 24] I went for a run in the morning, then to John's house for some oatmeal, and then to the mayor's office to chat.  Sometimes, this is an infuriating experience because the mayor is a little chauvinistic and tends to ignore me because I'm a woman.  Normally, I choose not to socialize with these sort of men here, but he's our main community contact so I'm forced to tolerate it.  He seems to really like John though.  This experience made me think a lot about my sense of self here in Mauritania.  I wrote in my journal that "I think I need to remind myself from time to time of who I really am / the core of my being.  I'm confident in my sense of self, but sometimes this place shakes me.  All of a sudden, I'm helpless and incompetent in things that I used to take for granted.  I think there are times when all I can do is hope that I will learn from this experience and never feel like this again.  Deep down inside though, I'm confident with myself, and I think life would be a lot scarier if this wasn't so."

Okay, like I said before, each day is really a roller coaster, so don't think that I'm constantly worrying about things or upset or unhappy.  There's a lot of times when I'm laughing at something my host brother did or watching a baby goat (that's cheesy, isn't it?) or greeting people around town.  My journal tends to be a place for me to vent, so I may focus on the negative, but I wanted to give you a sense of my life at site.

Can't wait to hear from you all soon!  Get out and vote tomorrow; we'll be waiting eagerly by our short-wave radios for the results!