Early Termination

Hey, sorry for those of you that I didn't talk to about this personally, but I'm leaving Mauritania. It's called an Early Termination or ET in Peace Corps lingo, and it means I'm quitting and going home. I'd rather not go on and on about the reasons why, but it's a personal decision, because as much as I liked Rosso, I need to be with my "real" family in Virginia right now. I'm currently in the capital again, waiting for my flight home, which is presumably tomorrow. I do want to thank everyone that's been so supportive, and sent me messages, letters, and care packages. It meant more to me than you may realize.

I'll miss the other PCV's, especially my fun and funny regionmates (who put together a mind-blowing Thanksgiving meal, with half a chicken each!). Life in the RIM can be tough, so I wish them all the best. I know they can make it because they're so cool about supporting one another and being there to vent common frustrations with. Vacations and visits to Senegal will help, too!
My host family was also incredible, and I have no doubt that they'll enjoy the company of another cheerier PCV sometime in the future (see, I am quite replaceable...).
The two English classes I had will be reassigned, though hopefully not to Mary, who already does a lot! The Girls' Mentoring Center is in good hands with Michael and his host mom/ star mentor, though I'll miss those girls that I was just beginning to really get to know.

Actually, the one thing I really wanted to share is related to the GMC. I unfortunately missed the first meeting of the "YGMC", for younger sisters/ cousins of the girls that are members. It's going to be a reading club of sorts, and there's definitely a lot of interest. I did have fun replicating a lesson that some other GEE volunteers put together for "Model GMC" during our training, a creative writing/ haiku lesson in French. We wrote this one as a group:

Un beau portable (A pretty cell phone)
Rouge, Avec lequel on joue (Red, with which one plays)
C'est très important (It's very important)
Though I suggested they try for a different final line (and I eventually forbade the use of the word "important" in the poems), so we came up with this:
Mais pas dans le centre! (But not in the GMC!)

This one was nice, too (also a group effort):

C'est mieux pour dormir (It's better for sleeping)
Le matelas est pratique (A matelas is practical/ useful)
Pour se reposer (to rest on)

Then the girls split into groups of 3-4, and wrote some on their own. They had trouble coming up with ideas/ topics, so I was running around suggesting things like trees, sunrise, animals, household items, foods, etc. We ended up with several on the topic of Chebbugen, the rice and fish dish that everyone eats daily or almost daily, and some on the importance of education and the dangers of aids (I suspect this one was inspired by a wall poster).
But a couple of my favorites were:

Coucher du soleil (Sunset)
Me rappelle le Ramadan (Reminds me of Ramadan)
Chaque jour, au soir (Every evening)

and the appropriately universal:
Ma mère est gentille (My mother is sweet)
Elle me conseille tout les jours (She advises me daily)
Je l'adore beaucoup (I love her a lot)

My personal contribution was:
J'adore boire le zrig (I love to drink zrig)
Boisson rafraichissante; (refreshing beverage;)
Lait caillé et sucre (curdled milk and sugar)
(...maybe Mike can come up with one about warm zrig.)

Trust me, these sound better in French than the impression my crappy translations must give. I don't have anything else to add, so I'll sign off with this sweet picture of my host brother and my two little cousins.

Season change, GMC open!

The weather has been changing lately - it's cool enough to want to wear socks at night, though not enough for a blanket yet. And when you go out in the morning or at night, it's actually a little chilly (high 70's?). Of course daytime highs still reach into the 90's, but it's a nice change. That having been said, the cooler weather comes with incredible dryness (sucks for my skin!), since we won't see rain again 'till May or June. And this also means that on a windy day, ridiculous gusts of wind blow sand and dust over/ into everything. And I'm not sure why there's still so many mosquitoes, considering that there's fewer mud puddles around town for them to breed in. Oh, well.
And the novelty of the school strike has worn off, especially since yesterday there was one at the elementary school. I couldn't really find anyone who could give a logical explanation for these young kids getting up in arms with rocks and running around madly (I witnessed it from the roof of my house this time), other that this - Prices have risen in the market, including for essentials like bread (changing price of wheat), and people are upset. But since many grown-ups don't have strike-able jobs, they pressure their kids to riot to express discontent! I don't know how true this is, but even if it's a little bit true, WTF? At least this time it didn't spread to other schools, thanks in part to a police presence. But here's a nice visual of an empty classroom (actually one of mine) where students are not learning.
Oh, and guess how many hours I'll be teaching in a classroom like this one each week? As of yesterday, it'll be 6 instead of 9hrs! I was just on my way to request the director to lower my class load because it was getting difficult to handle three x 3hrs of classes on top of my GMC work, when I found out that one of my three classes was "dissolved", or basically spread out into other classes. Easily the happiest coincidence I've experienced here, but no, I will not credit it to Allah's will. I think I will be a better teacher with just 120 students (60 in each of the 2 remaining classes) to focus on.

As for the Girls' Mentoring Center, we had a great opening ceremony: I think everyone agreed that the 2 highlights were: short speeches, and good food & drink.
The following day we had our first meeting with all the girls where was had this great but unfortunately fuzzy picture taken of all the members. We now have a fully operational GMC, open 5 days a week, with an emphasis on computer classes (#1 most requested thing). They're good girls, and excited to be members. We're also planning some neat activities, as well as a possible reading club for younger girls (that our members would plan & impliment), and possibly a monthly "open-house" for non-member girls to enjoy a group lesson or activity.

RIM public schools (& my first riot scene!)

So I know at least my parents are interested in more details re: teaching, but I hope others enjoy this too. First, some background on how classes work: students stay together in classes according to which BAC test (IB students know what this is - think of it as required AP tests that the vast majority of students fail) they will take at the end of high school (lycée). Teachers move to whichever class they're teaching in. There's a science/ math track, an Arabic track, and a bilingual track (French/ Arabic). I believe all tracks learn some English, but I might be wrong. The Arabic track students seem to care about English less, and are at a less advanced level.

Now for the fun stuff. To set the mood, let me begin by describing the 4 times I've been unable to teach a scheduled class in the last few weeks, and the increasingly hilarious reasons why not.

#1. I was given an official schedule of which English classes I was to teach a week and a half after classes were supposed to start (this initial delay was due to Ramadan). I didn't really think about the fact that I had 8 instead of 9hrs on the schedule until after I finished my first week of teaching (less than a third of the students showed up in any given class). When I checked with the administration, they confirmed that my schedule was "missing" one hour on Monday afternoons, so if any students had shown up (doubtful - see #2), I missed them. This wouldn't have fazed them, since more than half of their teachers had yet to filter in (Mary was asked to teach an extra hour on her first day, because the administration didn't want to release the students whose Arabic teacher was absent - good reason to always have a backup lesson!).

#2. When I visited my Monday afternoon class for the first time, I found some familiar students milling about, but they insisted that they were not in the class, and that those students had gone home because it's the last hour of the day. I stayed and prepped the lesson anyways, but after 25 minutes of sitting alone in the class (with random students stopping outside the door to gawk/ laugh), I gave up and left. I asked the administration, and they said that this often happens with the last hour of the day - students are tired and go home early. Another teacher advised me to try and get that hour changed, and now, two weeks after I made that request, it has been changed - to the last hour of the day on Wednesday afternoons. Sigh. Although the kids have been showing up after we did an exercise on negation (when I had them on Thursday morning), using the example "I didn't come to class on Monday" ("Do you understand?... Please repeat... Why didn't you come to class on Monday?"...). Apparently shaming students is one of the more effective discipline methods.

#3. Another mistake on my official schedule involved two classes. I thought I had one 3-4 and one 4-5, while it was actually one 4-5 and one 5-6 (the last hour of the day). After I had cleared this up, I went to teach the 4pm, which went fine. Then I found one student in the 5pm class next door, who explained that the students were released because of an absent teacher. The next week, I found those for 5pm at 4pm, and invited them to join the 4pm class rather than sit around until 5 (or go home). Some of them did, but then others who had gone home complained that they were counted absent because they came at 5. In fact, I had seen no students come next door at 5, but the following week I suggested the same thing, but then also taught the few who did want an hour off between classes rather than be able to leave an hour early. Summary - this is ridiculous, and I can't believe their other teacher is still not showing up.

Which brings me to the classes that I am not teaching today;
#4. Student strike/ riot! Good grief.
This is connected to teacher absenteeism, and I think the root of the problem is undoubtedly teacher dissatisfaction. Teachers at the public schools have little choice as to what city they teach in. They're "affectated" or assigned to a school in a specific town or village, often having to leave their families behind for the duration of the school year. The reason for this, as far as I can understand, is two-fold: because there aren't enough teachers willing to teach in rural or otherwise "undesirable" sites, and as a forced cultural exchange of sorts. The result is that they're sometimes very reluctant to leave their homes to come teach, especially if it's a black Mauritanian forced into a predominantly white moor area, or vice versa*. They're also paid on a monthly basis, and the pay is the same no matter how many hours they teach (so many are overloaded on hours), and I'm not sure how carefully teacher absences are monitored. And the pay is inadequate enough that public school teachers will skip out to teach at the private schools, where they're handed cash after each lesson taught.

So, back to the strike. This morning I was headed to the school around 9:45 for my 10am lesson. As I sidestep a puddle and scare a muddy duck, a kid rounds the corner and says excitedly in French "don't go there, there's a strike!". Naturally, this aroused my curiosity, and I kept walking. As I rounded that same corner, the sounds many kids screaming suddenly made much more sense: hundreds of students were wandering aimlessly or running madly in the last block before the schools. The middle school and high school are next to each other, and a few students were still running out of the middle school to join the others in the street. Most of these kids are pumped full of adrenaline, and this is clearly the most exciting thing that's happened at the school since it opened. It felt like a spontaneous "senior skip day" across two whole schools, with a bit of a pep rally gone wrong thrown in.
Despite being the only teacher in the street, I didn't feel unsafe, and several students filled me in on details. Evidently some middle school kids were getting angry because they still don't have a physics teacher (~correction: the bilingue students are mad because new reforms mean that math and science are now only taught in Arabic, not French, so technically they're mad because they don't have any math/ science teachers), and the administration wasn't able to calm them down or get them out before they started throwing rocks! This spread across the middle school first, and my host brother at the lycée said his class there was interrupted by a rock smashing through their window. As I get more information, I finally get close enough to see the entrance to the lycée where I'm supposed to teach, with a line of police blocking the entrance. At this point my conversation with a student was interrupted by the sound of rocks ricocheting off the tin roof of the house next to us, and a renewed frenzy of students in the street throwing rocks in the general direction of the school and the police. I confirm that the reason they're out in the street is because all school is canceled, at least for the rest of the morning, and if not for the day, and then start to head home.
Several kids (including a couple rock-throwers!) were being protective and seemed anxious for me to leave the scene, but I didn't feel very threatened (in part due to my obvious cluelessness) and walked away calmly. One young kid excitedly claimed that "someone was killed!" to get my attention, but some older teens I met on the way home said that "it's just the kids having fun". I got home fine and talked about it with my mom and host bro, and we could hear the kids screaming in waves (sort of like how you can hear a stadium from miles away when a touchdown is scored). When I left to go to the bureau and record this for all of you who like to read too much, my bro jokingly suggested that he could come along as my bodyguard. Good times had for all, and a day off for me!

I don't know how to transition this random thought in, but I've been thinking about it a lot: You know who must always be thrilled at the start of the school year? The goats. In the US, on the last day of school, you often find old notes scattered to the wind, right? Well apparently the tradition here is for students to do that every single day after school. Spend 5 hours taking careful notes, then tear out the pages and disperse them across the landscape for hungry goats to discover and excitedly devour. "The goat ate my homework" is never a joke. Someone even told me how this can be a problem in municipal offices - she came looking for the file with her original birth certificate, and was told in complete seriousness, that the file was unfortunately eaten by a goat.

*I'm going on far too many random tangents, but I had to mention an interesting exchange I had with my host mom about race, a very touchy subject in the RIM. I sometimes complain about kids bothering me in the street (I love the "mosquito" analogy, Mom - thanks!), and one time she had my host brother round them up for a 5-minute scolding/ shaming. But ultimately she recommended the same thing as my real mom - ignore them, they're not worth stressing about. So that's what I do, but the most interesting thing was my mom telling me that she had a similar experience when her husband was assigned (he worked in the military) to the all-moor city of Nema, far to the East and smack in the Sahara. Evidently when she walked around town or went to the market kids would yell "Pulaar! Pulaar!" at her. Crazy, huh?

Working!

Sorry I haven't posted for a while, but take it as a good sign - that I'm finally feeling busy! I now have a regular weekly schedule, even though my "real" work at the Girls' mentoring center is really just starting. Actually, all last week I was trying (along with my GEE sitemate) to get permission to administer a test which will help us admit new girls. Even though we were warned of it during training, I was pretty shocked at the inefficiency of the schools' infrastructure. Part of it was due to misunderstandings/ miscommunication, but I never expected quite so much red tape over such a simple matter. Well, we were able to announce the test today, and we're administering it tomorrow (inshallah!) so that we can select girls and send out invitations for our "grand opening" soon!

I've also begun teaching English as a secondary project. This is my third week doing it - I have three classes of high schoolers (equivalent to sophomores), each for one 1-hr and one 2-hr class each week - 9hrs per week total. It's definitely a challenge, but I like it pretty well so far, and one of my sitemates is a teacher trainer who also teaches the same age students, so I have someone to go to for help and advice. The only materials I have in class are chalk and a blackboard (I'll never think of Edison's smartboards quite the same way!). The students don't have textbooks, so any new lessons or information need to be written on the board for them to copy into notebooks. It can be especially difficult to maintain control with such big classes, and when I asked a Mauritanian for advice, she said that I should treat the classroom as a dictatorship, unlike a "democratic classroom", because that's what the students expect.
I don't have much to add (except, as always, thank you for your letters! Pictures or postcards are always a blast, too), and as a follow up to my food entry, here's another delicious dish I had a couple weeks ago. Moroccan couscous, a special treat (the photo doesn't do it justice)
Oh, and I recently had the amazing luck to meet Dr. Sato in the one good restaurant in the entire city of Rosso. This guy is working on such a great project, and is such an interesting character. It was an awesome coincidence, since we PCV's only visit this restaurant once a month or so... And on that note I'll leave you with three pictures of beautiful local birds (maybe Erinia can identify them?):

Food post (finally)

I promised it a while ago, and here it is. I'm lucky that my host sister is a spectacular cook, and I'll do my best to describe the tasty things I get to eat (with more pictures, since they make you all so happy!).
First, the beverages. Alcohol may be prohibited, but drinks are a huge part of the culture, and all of them so far contain indescribable amounts of sugar. There's the ubiquitous tea, served in three rounds in shot glasses - chinese green tea, fresh mint, and sugar. Then there's café au lait, which I enjoy despite never having liked coffee, since it's more like hot sugared milk with a bit of nescafé; delicious. This is often for breakfast (or lipton tea with milk and sugar again), but during Ramadan it's also what everyone breaks fast with at sunset, along with buttered bread and dates. The other two special drinks are zrig, a traditional moor drink of cold sweet milk (there are many variations of it), and bissap juice. Bissap is a Wolof word, and the drink is the national drink of Senegal. It's made with dried hibiscus flowers, and plenty of sugar. Wish me luck protecting my teeth from the tasty onslaught.

Now for the food. The most common dish here (which fortunately, I adore), is chebugen.
The base is rice, and you can see the fish and vegetables in the middle. I avoid the hot peppers, but love squeezing the lemon and lime over my "section" (even though it's a communal plate/ bowl, you stick to the space in front of you for the base). The veggies are variable, but generally include cabbage, carrots, potatoes, turnips, and squash. It's the typical lunch dish in most families, but also appears as dinner, and has fairly consistently been the "second dinner" during Ramadan, though alternating with mafé. I don't have a picture of mafé, but it's also not as pretty to look at. Still, it's delicious - a base of white rice, with meat cooked in a flavorful brown peanut sauce. Two other things not pictured are 1) the different dishes prepared with pasta as a base, usually with meat (sometimes chicken!), and 2) hakko sauce over rice (prepared with bean leaves, meat or fish, and peanuts). A typical Moor dish is couscous with meat, and I like the rice & meat dishes. It's great to get to enjoy such a variety of foods (the Wolof dishes are the best, in my opinion), and Rosso's market has a lot to offer. My other favorite Wolof dish is banafa, because it's essentially one of my preferred American comfort foods: meat & potato stew. Anything with a more soupy consistency is eaten with bread. Like the appetizer of fish sauce in the picture below.
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"Lighter" dishes like that are the ones served first during Ramadan, most often fish (fried whole, or ground into spicy fish meatballs) served with french fries and onions. The next meal pictured was a special treat - chicken and fries! And the one beside it is my attempt at cultural exchange - this charming boy (my cousin) is helpfully cleaning up leftover pudding provided by yours truly.
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And last but not least, my absolute favorite picture of my family (and two PCVs) enjoying some watermelon. Everyone's so happy!

"Wildlife" of Rosso

This should not come as a surprise to those who know me - I've taken a number of photos of the animals I've seen around town. It's also easier than taking pictures of people, because of the attention that a camera attracts. (all these photos, and some others, are on Picasa)

There are many beautiful wild bird varieties that I've been unable to catch "on film" (it is a digital camera after all). But of course much more common are dirty chickens, and even a few domesticated ducks that muck about in (and eat! eww) the filthy mud. Here's a great cross of the two - wild birds feeding in sewage!

Next up is the herd of cows that we ran into on our way to school, followed by some free-range goats. Everyone's goats (the sheep live more restricted lives) pretty much roam around town at their leisure, sifting through trash and eating their favorite treat, cardboard. The most impressive thing is that all the goats seem to return to their respective homes every evening, often with little prompting. I really feel bad for the donkeys (and horses) here, because as cart-pullers, they are very roughly treated. And any livestock is likely to experience the natural state of being strapped to the roof of a vehicle at some point in it's life. The other photo is of the feral dogs that live behind our offices.

The dogs are very fearful of humans, with good reason. Only a few people keep guard dogs, but dogs are generally disliked in this culture. There are also a lot of scraggly feral cats, but people seem to tolerate cats better (though apparently they share the black cat crossing your path superstition). Part of this stems comes from the Prophet's preference, since there's a story of him cutting off his sleeve to let a cat continue to nap on it. Of course both cats and dogs have huge overpopulation problems, and a spay/ neuter program is inconceivable. Periodically the town makes a collective effort and lays out plates of poisoned milk to bring the number of feral animals back down.

The last two photos I have to share are of the gecko that lives on my ceiling, and one of the baby frogs that lives by the family tap. I wish them well, since they both enjoy eating the mosquitoes that make my life hell. Still, the sheer number of tiny frogs is a little distressing... the nightly frog chorus sounds nice, but I hate (almost) stepping on them in the dark.
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That's all I've got for now - I'd love to hear what you think!

Oh, and one thing I should mention, since I just got some more lovely letters and packages - if there's one thing I don't need more of right now, it's stamps. I'm so grateful for all the stamps everyone sent me (including some 90-cent ones to send letters to France - Thanks!), and I realized yesterday that I now have over 100 stamps (even after giving some away to other PCVs). So I would have to write at least one letter per week for the remaining 90 weeks of my service, but keep in mind that I plan on going home for vacation in about 38 weeks (but who's counting?), in which case I would need to write about three letters per week to use them all up before I visit the US. And on top of all this is the fact that I've written no letters since I've been in Rosso (though this will soon be corrected). Love you all!

Interesting article

This is a huge part of cell phone culture here in Mauritania, where it's referred to as bepage, or the (french) verb beeper.