Mauritania

When I arrive in Mauritania, I’m taken straight to Aleg, a few hours drive inland from Nouakchott, the capital. Having expected desert, I’m surprised by the colour of the Sahel. It’s as green as the Serengeti, and I keep expecting to see antelope and lions dotted around the flatness that stretches to the horizon in every direction. But the grass is very deceptive: the rains have just finished, and by the end of the year, it will all be reduced again to sand until after next year’s rains. Life here really is hard, and it’s only getting harder. It’s still unspoken, but I get the feeling the people living in the Sahel are caught in a race: will global warming force them out before they can improve their ability to get through the increasingly tough dry seasons (more wells, better ability to capture rains etc)?

My main job here is interviewing rural folk, for writing stories for the website, campaigns material etc (the first one’s up on the Oxfam website: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/where_we_work/mauritania/water_education.htm). It lets me feel a bit like Marla Ruzicka, one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever heard of (I first read about her here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1463729,00.html). But I know my stories are only going to make the smallest bit of difference at best. It’s the reality of working for a big NGO, particularly in a general role like mine: small cog in a big machine grinding against enormous problems.

Along with writing stories, I need photos of the area. But as soon as I get my camera out, I realise how camera shy the villagers are. At first, the only way I can get photos of the people I’m talking to is by persuading them to pose in boring groups – and even then, it’s usually only the men who’re interested in doing that (which isn’t much use for an organisation like Oxfam, where women’s difficulties are supposed to come first). After a while, I hit on the idea of breaking the ice by taking photos of kids, then showing them their pictures on the camera screen. Trouble is, it works too well and within minutes I’m surrounded by every kid in the village, and it becomes impossible for me to get photos of people doing ordinary things without dozens of children jostling to get in the frame. In the end, I leave with hardly any useful pictures, but loads of cute ones of grinning kids.

I’ve often noticed how bad problems are with refuse in developing countries. The sides of the roads within, and just outside, towns are usually littered with plastic bottles, coke cans, and so on. But travelling in Mauritania makes me wonder if the locals generally see it as a problem. As we drove, my colleagues casually wind down windows and throw out empty packets; they go as far as to take my finished bottles from the floor by my feet and throw them out, in the same way as I would put it in a bin. My instinct is to ask him not to, but I assume there’s no rubbish collection in Mauritania - certainly not in the smaller towns - so I’m not sure what I could have expected him to do. I suppose there are more important things for the country to worry about than keeping the desert tidy (though I'm intrigued to wonder how those "don't be a gimp" adverts would go down...).

The hotel I’m put up in Nouakchott is ludicrously plush (I find out later it costs about £40 a night, in a country where average annual income is in the region of £300). It’s the first time I’ve stayed somewhere with separate living room and kitchen. Having a huge tv with several hundred channels (albeit with only five of them are in English) is an exciting novelty after nearly three months without seeing any tv, and I spend the first night glued to its rubbish films. But already by the second day, the luxury gets boring, and once I’ve done the little exploring the city offers and night falls, I’m desperate for time to pass so I can get back to Dakar.

The news with Leo Barasi

Mme Diagne’s on holiday, so my French lessons at the moment are being taken by a friend of hers, M Sarr. By a mile, he’s the best French teacher I’ve ever had, somehow discovering an desire within me to want to learn the language, which none of the teachers I’ve had over the previous 12 years ever managed to uncover. Last lesson with him is tomorrow.


Our lesson on Monday was riveting. Turns out there’s a rigid caste system operating in Senegal, transmitted not by ethnicity, but by surname. Traditionally, surnames were based on occupation: Baker, Cook, Smith, nothing unusual in that. But it’s solidified into the basis of a hierarchy that still exists, entirely regardless of the occupation of the bearer of that surname. The hierarchy is only manifested in marriage: so someone with a high caste surname wouldn’t marry someone with a lower caste surname, even if the lower caste one was prime minister of the republic (as is actually the case). Surprisingly, it’s also true in the opposite direction: people are so suspicious about marrying out of their caste that they generally won’t marry upwards if ever they have the chance. Another facet is that some surnames are ambiguous, so a potential fiancé/e would have to go to the trouble of finding out what their partner’s great grandfather did, in order to decide whether they could get married. (Incidentally, Mme Diagne told me pretty much all of this as well, but I wasn’t sure it was true until I also heard it from the more matter-of-fact M Sarr).


Interview for the advocacy job is by videoconference, which is far less scary than I’d expected. In fact, it makes things easier, as all my tension is defused in the 25 minutes I spend trying to connect the call before we can get started. It also allows for a little moment of surrealism, as one of the interviewers (whom I already know fairly well) pauses after one of my first answers to say how weird it is seeing me on tv: “and now, the ten o’clock news, with Leo Barasi”. Probably wasn’t helped by the way I set up the room so my head and shoulders filled up most of the screen


With Chris back in Britain, my being back in Oxford is seeming that bit more imminent. Since I didn’t get the advocacy job, and there’s now pretty much no chance that my communications job is going to be extended here, I assume I’ll be back to my old job in just three weeks. I’m looking forward to getting back to the life I was living before I came here: among the best few months of my life. And with George as a likely new housemate, and a few new AC people in Oxford as well, it should be better still. But while it all seems another world, I’ve not yet managed to reach the point of quite imagining that it’s going to happen or begun to work out the practicalities.


Going to Mauritania tomorrow, for what feels like the last hurrah of this job before I get into wrapping up and handing over. I’m sure I’ve never felt under such pressure to enjoy and learn from a bit of work. Probably having just worked a 60 hour week (which seems ludicrously long to me – how does anyone manage 80+ as their norm?), as well as not really having had a day off since the weekend before last (and next one will probably be the Saturday after next) has meant that work’s been pretty much the only thing in my life lately.

Senegalese culture, Islamic prayers

After two months of grammar lessons, I manage to get Mme Diagne to agree to spend an hour on conversation practice, and we start talking about social issues in Senegal. We get straight onto polygamy – which is legal and common here, as I already knew. The article we begin with claims that a lot of women are very keen on it, and our conversation turns to women’s place in society here. Whatever I’ve thought about the liberal culture it looks like the differences between appearance and reality are even bigger than I’d guessed. I don’t think there’s anything I can add to the ‘fact’ (according to Mme Diagne, anyway – who isn’t a Muslim and maybe exaggerates) that the Wolof word for an unmarried woman above a certain age is the same as the word for prostitute.


To add to that, I’ve been wondering for a while whether Muslim women pray in the same way Muslim men do. It should be a ridiculous question, because I’ve always assumed they do: it’s such an integral part of the religion that to leave out women would seem extraordinarily divisive. But although I see men praying nearly every day here, sometimes in their dozens, I’ve not seen a single woman praying. At least I hadn’t until this week when a young woman from the office came out to the quiet back area where I was having a meeting and prayed next to us. So now I know that women here definitely do pray, I’m trying to understand why I never see them do so in public, even though women don’t seem to have any problem being in public spaces, and Islamic prayers are generally a very public thing here (yesterday, I watched a man praying on his roof, silhouetted against the setting sun and spent the time wishing I’d brought my camera). Again, the liberalism of this place seems not to be all it’s cracked up to be.


Barely two months here, and already I’m back into spending so much of my time job hunting. It’s possible it may all get sorted out quickly, as I’ve got an interview this week for a job based in Oxford, but if not, I’ll be back to looking at everything and trying to work out what I should do. It takes so much energy, and one of the most likely outcomes is another round of short term placements, which would mean yet more job hunting in another couple of months. I suppose at least as time goes on and I get more experience, it will take a bit less work to find each new position. Maybe.


Assuming that I will be leaving in less than four weeks – it’s not exactly fixed – it’s occurred to me that I’ve still seen so little of the country, let alone the region. But I don’t think I’ve been particularly bad at taking opportunities to see places: I would certainly have had to take time off work to do any exploring. It makes me realise that just having a job that takes you places isn’t enough to guarantee seeing the world. To add to it, Michel spends Friday night regaling us with anecdotes of his 18 months backpacking around Asia, then finishes by saying that he didn’t really feel like he got to know the places he went to. So if that’s not enough, what can an outside ever do to become an insider?


Yet another taxi ride adds to my conviction that I don’t want to drive a car here. It’s not because the other vehicles are badly driven – although they are – and I’d be scared for my own safety, but because of the fear of hitting someone else. Every time I’m in a taxi following a public minibus, I’m worried that one of the young guys holding onto the back - one foot on the platform, the other in the air, one hand on the inside of the open back door, the other free – will lose his grip and fall onto the road in front of us. Equally, the pedestrians – black skin, dark clothes – are often inches away from us, stumbling on the rough ground and crossing in narrow gaps between cars. At night, I can barely look out of the front of the taxi with driving so nerve-racking.

Higher urinals

I feel a desperate – and, really, unjustified – desire to namedrop one Tom Skitt, after he’s mentioned in George Alagiah’s autobiography. In fact, Alagiah describes him as ‘an old friend from our college days in Durham... He is the kind of white man who never gets rich in Africa but leaves Africa all the richer for his passage through it’. Truth be told, I’ve never met, spoken to, or even exchanged emails with Mr Skitt, but a couple of weeks ago, I used an article he wrote (for my predecessor) in the latest West Africa News. Which is hardly a claim to fame. But the whole thing reminds me once again how small the NGO world is. And with the number of new friends and contacts I’m making out here, it’s an unavoidable realisation that who you know can go a long way towards making up for what you don’t know.


I’m intrigued by the question of what the locals make of me and Amir. He doesn’t speak a word of French, so whenever the two of us are out (which is several times a week), I do all the talking. Occasionally, the taxi driver, shop keeper etc, will say something to Amir in Wolof, and it becomes obvious that he’s foreign. But usually, they carry on speaking to me in French, leaving Amir out of the conversation. So at least sometimes, people must assume that this Senegalese bloke has got a white guy (who can’t really speak French) to do his business for him, while he stands back, aloof.


Dinner with Odette on Saturday night – as well as giving me my first Senegalese food poisoning – prompts me to wonder again about Western non-Muslim perceptions of Islam. I think it’s pretty much the only time I’ve had an extended conversation with a Muslim woman, but it’s so utterly unlike how three months ago I would have imagined an ‘extended conversation with a Muslim woman’. The only time her religion comes up is when I ask her about it directly, and I find it almost impossible to spot any attitude of hers that seems exotic to me, and which I can identify as specifically Islamic. She doesn’t seem any less Islamic than most of the rest of the people in this city, but when we (non-Muslims) in the West try to visualise Islam, I doubt many of us think of Odette. I’m sure there are several reasons for this – particularly the success of Arab Muslims in capturing media attention and interest – but we’re missing out on so much understanding of Islam by ignoring Senegal. It would be like we thought only of Bush or Pat Robertson as the typical Christian, and ignored Rowan Williams.


Two months in, and I start having something like the work-based social life I’d expected before I came here. Dinner, a couple of bottles of wine and Batman Begins at Matt’s beautiful house; a farewell party for one of the bosses, ending with a crowd at a nearby nightclub.


The nightclub seems familiar on the surface, but there are small differences. It’s English-language music (though I do leave at 3am, before the night really gets going), and sitting down, with the music too loud to talk seems just as popular as back home. But it’s disconcerting being in a club where few people have had a drop to drink (how can you dance like a fool if you know people are going to remember in the morning? It makes me realise how far most social interaction in Britain is based on alcohol), and shocking to see the women leaving their bags and drinks at their tables without a second thought while they dance (shocking because I think few people would contemplate doing that at home, and we’ve accepted that: fear of crime has become normalised). My favourite little difference, though, was in the bathroom: I know I’m in a place where people are that bit taller when the urinals are six inches higher than any back home.