On my life, the honeymoon

A free day! Yesterday! At last! And how it was needed. Spent most of the day relaxing and speaking in English, few suprises all pleasant here and there... but here's the cultural note you've all been waiting for.

Last night was a wedding, and to quell your fears or crush your hopes I'll let you know right now that it almost assuredly wasn't mine. It was a cousin of my family, someone I'm not sure if I've met yet. I arrived a little late and was rushed to a group of men, among many groups, all in their best boubous for the occasion and feasting on fresh meat tajines followed by couscous; it was a blessing after this past week of intestines and fish, make no mistake. After the meals, and there were multiple, with multiple bouts of greetings exchanged in the interim, there was some moor music and dancing. This particular music session was mostly centered around a very old woman with a drum and many more women around her who would start up a song and clap along while one or two people would get up and do some traditional dances. After many people had danced and a great number of songs had been sung, it was decided by general consensus that the toubab, me, must dance. I fended off these demands with the plaintive plea that I had left my daraa, my boubou, at home and was dressed in only my toubab clothes, not fit for traditional dances. No these mischeivous old women wouldn't get me up there in front of everybody, no not me. Moments later several other old women gathered a daraa from a teenager and a howli (scarf/head covering) from a man to my left and threw them over me and dragged me to the center. I was a hit, let me tell you. And the rest of the night was filled with not only greetings but people telling one another that the toubab had danced and them looking at me incredulously but gleefully, "You danced?" or with congratulations "You danced well! Zehn hatta!"
Today has been much the same, filled with leftover wedding food (yes!) and congratulations on my dancing.
By the way, my head healed up fine, I'm dressed in traditional clothing, and my local name is Bilal. Gotta run!

On the depressing discovery of a thermometer

Yes, I am online two days in a row more out of a desire to spend a half hour in the semi-air conditioned little room than an actual desire to use the computer again in such a short period of time. Mostly this was prompted by discovering the little thermometer my family has hanging on the house in the shade. It registered a lovely 43 degrees centigrade in the shade which, with the help of my handy dandy phone converter, I discovered is about 109.4 degrees fahrenheit. Damn! And this isn't the hot season or the hot part of the country! Damn!
On a lighter note I'm going to share with you all my little mishap from my first day at my host family about a week ago. I'd been sitting incomprehensibly among my new friends for about an hour and a half when I found myself with a pressing need for the bathroom. They call them Turkish toilets but really they're everywhere in the developing world, squat exercises. Whoo! Anyway, my family, ever helpful, gave me a rather large box of water to take with my to the toilet for the purpose of washing once I'd finished my business, it's all very technical and I don't want to bore you with the details. I neglected, in my care to avoid spilling the water down the front of my clothes, to note the diminutive size of the doorway to the toilet and attempted rather accidentally a karate head-to-concrete move. As it turns out, disappointingly, I do not have inherent martial arts skills and am not a secret ninja in disguise because the concrete won this little headbutting contest and I bled all over the place to the immense concern of everyone within a hundred yards. The PCMOs were called, my language facilitator (Sy Samba, he's amazing) showed up fortuitously moments later with my bags and I was rushed off to the PC center for some more poking and prodding by some folks on the phone with the PCMO in Nouakchott. It was determined that I would probably live and I got quite a lot of bandages and disinfectant and was returned to my family compound wherein the bleeding slowed and eventually stopped several hours later. Long story short, I am my father's son. I briefly contemplated a rematch with the concrete in which I would have the advantage of a running start but some friends remarked that this might not be the brightest idea and maybe I had brain damage after all. I reassured them by telling them it was the kind of idea I would have contemplated before too. Hey, at least i didn't get accidentally converted to Islam... oh yeah, it happened. Emily Nelson showed me up in first day blunders with that little gem.
Alright everyone, I'm off to language class, have a lovely weekend and don't forget to write!

Big suprise, I suck at blogging.

Why hello there friends and family, let me tell you a little bit about my Mauritanian experience. The most common question people ask me when I blow on tea that just came off a fire, or I sweat in the middle of the day, or I pull burned fingers away from steaming food is: "hami?" "It's hot?"
My family consists of lots of people whos relationships to one another is unclear and they seem to come and go for days at a time... with the exception of some of the children who are there all the time making trouble for the goats who tend to chew on my notebooks which are filled with notes from four days of Hassaniya training. Today is the fourth of july, happy independence America! The bulk of the PCTs (that's Peace Corps Trainees to you lay people, otherwise known as future PCVs, Peace Corps Villains) are gathering at the center for some good old fashioned American burgers... which may or may not turn out to be camel.
On a scale of most irritating insects I've ever encountered I'm moving Flies up to the top of the list, closely followed by Mosquitoes (which are much less annoying thanks to my lovely mosquito net tent) and scorpions and biting ants at distant third and fourth respectively.
People are constantly coming to greet me in my home, which is often hopping with visitors until one or two in the morning, and upon discovering that I have learned the greetings they then attempt to hold a conversation with me in Hassaniya until my blank stares and pleas in French convince them that I really am relatively ignorant. After that they sometimes attempt to hold conversations with me in French to varying degrees of success or they look at the others present who shrug and say "Bilal, mange!" (my Mauritanian name is Bilal, he was a slave that the prophet freed who became the first muzzein, the guy who calls people to pray. It's a big name around here. Mange is my poorly spelled rendition of the French command "eat") after which I try to explain that I normally don't eat two lunches and three dinners per day and that I really am full (ana shabaat is the first phrase I learned in Hassaniya, I'm stuffed). I think I might be the only American guy in this country actually gaining weight. Ridiculous!
Last night was my first duststorm, kicked up by a rainstorm that was rolling in hard and fast. It was beautiful, if only you could have seen it. This fantastic ominous cloud of swirling sand and dust rolling over the city like a steamroller, followed closely by a whopper thunderstorm.
Anyway, we're in Rosso for a few months of wicked six-seven hours language training days 6-days per week with the exception of a week around July 21-28 which are our visits to permanant sites.
Okay, last things last. A few explanations:
PCT- Peace Corps Trainee
PCV- Peace Corps Volunteer
CBT- Community-Based Training
CD- Country director, Obie Shaw
PCMO- Doctor
GEE- Girls Education and Empowerment
GMC- Girls Mentoring Center
AGFO- Agroforestry volunteers
EE- Environmental Education Volunteers
Ed- English Education Volunteers


I hope everyone is having a great fourth, I'm gonna go have some amazing camel burgers.

It's like Arabic but not..

So, tomorrow is off to host families with for CBT. I'm staying in Rosso in a little neighborhood not too far a walk from here. I'll be studying Hassaniya which is sortof a dialect of Arabic mixed with berber dialects and some of the southern languages. I tested high enough on my French to not study it any more (suprised?) and I'll just kindof pick it up as I go along... which should make anyone who knows Parisian French give me really weird looks. Anyway, been really busy and I'm sorry I can't e-mail so much. There are cyber-cafe's in Rosso though so I'll probably stop into one every week or so. We're gonna be back at the center for tech training in a few weeks too. Alright friends and family, be good and be safe now out there. It's a dangerous world after all ;)

P.S. Mom, the bomb? Maybe if you didn't give my car nasty nicknames it would be nicer to you :P. Ready to be a grandma?

P.P.S. Tracy, how's it feel to have an ankle-biter on the way? Has it sunk in yet?

P.P.P.S. Dad, you're gonna be a grandpa! I know you're playing it cool but really, you must be freaking out.

I'm a ho, it's my job

Practice your Soninke greetings at home!
1. Salaamu alaykum?
2. Malaykum asalaam.
3. amaho?
4. Majam.


Get it?
We went through all four sets of greetings for all four languages and once they all become a giant cluster in your head you'd be amazed what kinds of sounds-like phrases help you keep them straight.
Flew in yesterday morning, of course, arrived in Rosso late afternoon, and then a long long day since both Friday and Saturday ran into one another and became the longest summer solstice ever imagined. Slept outside on a mat in my amazingly brilliant free-standing mosquito net and I swear I have never slept so well in my life, particularly in Africa.
Other news: My sister is pregnant! Sorry, Tracy, for failing to really react when you told me thursday, I'm pretty sure I didn't even realize what you said until Friday afternoon. On a more serious note, I feel the child should be named after me. I'm thinking "John the lesser" for a boy and "Johnina" for a girl (shortened to Jo, naturally)
Alright friends and family, sit tight, and I'll be on again at least once between now and Friday. We've got wireless (!!!) in the compound here.

I fly tomorrow

And tonight was crazy. Karaoke, a dozen "last drink(s) before Mauritania!", a lot of new people (I'm getting a lot of names right on the third or fourth try), a lot of intimidating speeches about how tough Mauritania is as compared to other countries and how we'll be tried and tested etc., and lastly a lot of new friends. Goodbyes are behind me, now it's time for goals and work and gregariousness. Mostly work. Lots of work.
Goodbye America! Be back soon!

Last Minute Packing

Yes, I did leave a million things to the absolute last minute. Yes one of those things is packing... but packing has always taken me a week before and I end up with way more stuff than I need or use so this time I'm going for the last-minute-freak-out-strategy. Along with saying goodbye to everyone else, and forgetting to say goodbye to a lot of people who are important to me. It's a lot bigger this time.. but I remember being nervous about Morocco, about Ghana, about Uganda, hell even about UI. Life works out. We're an adaptable species when we want to be. Realizing that everything will probably be fine, however, is not the same thing as feeling it. It's like my whole body is clenching up, my lungs are getting tired of it.
I will miss my family. I miss them already. It's a lot easier to focus on the excitement later, on the plane... today all I feel is the losses without being able to acknowledge the gains.