Worth reading?

Well, looks like another two months have passed and I've been a horrible blogger. I guess I was waiting for a good story. If you can get by the first few paragraphs of updates there is a pretty funny story at the end.

I've now been in the Peace Corps for 8 months, going on one whole year. Christmas and New Years were fun but not as great as WAIST, West African Invitational Softball Tournament. The holidays weren't as hard as I expected them to be, being away from home and all. I was surrounded by 100 other RIM PCVs. We partied hard in NKT and St. Louis, Senegal. St. Louis is probably the most beautiful city I have ever seen. It holds true to the flavor of West Africa with local music, arts, fishing ports, and brightly colored colonial style architechture, yet it is developped enough to accomodate a bit of tourism with a fews comfortable hostile and a few nice restaurants and bars. The beach is breath taking- white sand and clear, deep blue water... *sigh*

I was, however, after two weeks of partying hard, ready to come back to the RIM and pass time until WAIST. During the six weeks in between vacations, I spent my time enjoying the painfully fleeting but ever-so-delicious could season of 70-80's during the day. I slept inside, slept in late, took naps, soaking up every minute of it as ten months out of the year those things are not possible. My friend Rachel and I began two projects. The first, I'm proud to say, got off to a good start. We created a tree nursery at my house and have about 60-70 Neem seedlings. In June, Inshallah, we will be planting them around the Gorgol and Braknah regions, hopefully adding a few more trees from some other nursuries, while conducting sensibilizations on the environmental benefits and mosquito-repellant properties of the Neem Tree. Our second project will take place on March 15 (another Inshallah). We are hosting an all day "Nutrition Camp" with adolescent girls from three different villages. It doesn't sound like much but those projects take a lot of arduous planning! I'm still teaching once a week at the GMC and going to the dispensaire regularly, helping out with vaccinations when I can. And since Jan/Feb were slow months, I got to spend some time in my friends' villages "en brousse," realizing, again, how lucky I am to be placed here in Kaedi.

So this brings me to WAIST in Dakar, Sengal. After an inspiring talk from the Doctor of 9 West African Peace Corps countries about being from the RIM, "the toughest post in the Peace Corps" and being, "foot soldiers in the Peace Army on the front line," we traveled by two huge buses for 16 hours from Nouakchott to Dakar. The RIM Pirates played softball for three days straight. I played on the "social" aka non-competitive, drunken, pantless team and got a few good plays in. We lost three games and tied one but our competitive team really rocked, coming in second place. We didn't bring home the trophy this year like the past several years but we played really well and had a ton of fun. (If you want to see pictures, you will have to email me because the are not entirely blog-appropriate.)

We left Dakar the day after the tournament to spend two relaxing nights back in beautiful St. Louis, completeing our one week drinking binge. I left Thursday morning in a group of 7, waking up a 6:15am after 4 hours of sleep, to get the garage by 8am, when it all went downhill. The goal was to travel through Senegal and make it to the Senegal River across from Kaedi by sunset. Since we were low on cash, we opted for the cheaper of the two evils, the prison vs. the expensive station wagon. The driver of the van said it would take 5 hours and that we would leave "joni," which in Pulaar means anywhere from now to soon to somewhere in the near future. We realized we had probably made a huge mistake by the time we finally got moving at 10:30AM, going 40 KM per hour with 300K to go. After stopping every thirty minutes to let someone off or pick someone up, at 5:30 pm we were still hours away from Kaedi and had give nup hope of making it before dark. Deciding not to risk having to sleep on the side of the river, we chose to get off the bus early to cross the river near our friend Laurie's village. We made it there by 6:30pm, tired, hungry, and going through some serious alcohol withdrawal. The nasty villagers, pointing out the color of our skin, practically raped us for the price of the horse cart going the 2k to the river.

Stressed and just hoping to make it across, we took the cart. But when we got to the river and they tried to overcharge us again, we just about lost it on them. We were almost out of money and the sun was setting, but we settled on a price only 5 times more expensive than normal. The nasty villagers followed us across the river and tried to scam again for the next 7k ride to the second part of the river, and last part of our travels for the day. They continued to harass us for more money, bringing a few of us almost to tears. There wasn't even another cart there waiting so we decided to try to walk. It was dark by that time, we had no flashlight, no food, no water, and no idea where we were going on this island rumored to be the home of wild boars. But we had the light of the full moon and 7 uncrushable PC RIM spirits. Mercifully, not too long into the seemingly fateful hike, we stumbled upon a little village that offered us a place to rest, some fresh murky river water to drink, and two horse carts to get us the rest of the way. As if I wasn't in need of some comic relief, I got behind the horse with some really bad gas and we joked in the local language about the horse eating beans (a popular joke here, one I can actually say in Pulaar). If that wasn't enough, when we arrived at the river, we found the little canoe we were about to take with the owner bailing buckets of water. We climbed in the second unsteady canoe for the evening, balanced ourselves on the edges, and bailed water out as we safely crossed to finally step foot on Mauritanian soil. We got some food, washed our hands for the first time all day, and passed out on the concrete floor of Laurie's house, just thankful that she had enough mosquito nets for us to share. I finally made it home the next morning around 10AM, having to wash myself twice before the water wasn't running black anymore.

Back in Mauritania the heat is on again and it is time to get our of the game of softball and back into the spirit of volunteerism...