Notes From Sahel

Okay, this is for real the last post. I am going to keep this blog up indefinitely but I am closing off the comments because of spam.

Also, I forgot to say, thank you so much to everyone who called us or sent us packages or sent us letters. Your support meant a lot to us.

In the last several months that I spent in Mauritania I spent a considerable amount of time working up ideas for a final essay in my head. In the end, though, I found that I had very little to say about the past two years. Not that it was an insignificant period in my life but that it was just a two-year chunk out of my life, not really so very different than anyone else’s life, and just what can you say about that? Also, we saw that Peace Corps sign when we walked into JFK and it was so serendipitous that it seemed like more than enough to close this blog with. Then, two days after we returned to Portland, there was a coup in Mauritania.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to say whether this is really that significant an event for Mauritania and, God knows, Mauritanians are rather used to this sort of thing by now. But the excitement of last year’s elections and the growing international support for the government had given me optimism for the country’s future. So much optimism that I found, to my complete surprise, tears welling up in my eyes as I sat in the neighborhood coffee shop and read the news.

As I said, I do not know the significance of this event for Mauritania. But there does seem to be something a bit tragic about it all. Western governments had grown increasingly supportive of Mauritania in the year since the elections and now all that goodwill is flushed away. The elections enjoyed impressive turnouts and now those people who were excited to finally have a voice have learned that their voices didn’t matter after all. Granted, many people, particularly in the South, knew that they were going to be disenfranchised no matter who won. But Abdellhai was a progressive and, as the Israeli ambassador points out, we just witnessed the death of the world’s youngest democracy. The US is pulling its aid.

One thing that jumps out at you when you start to spend time in Mauritania is the perennial frustration. Someone new to the country might wonder why people don’t just clean up that pile of stinking trash, why they don’t work more instead of sitting around and drinking tea all day. You gradually begin to understand that people don’t work harder in Mauritania because, in Mauritania, nothing works. Everything breaks, relatives suck away the earnings of their more successful kin, the government is utterly corrupt and worse than useless. And then, of course, there is the climate. Doing anything productive in 120 degree heat is no joke. Mauritanians are neither lazy nor stupid. The ones that do manage to better their lives are the ones who move to France or the United States.

I can think of no grand, sweeping statements. No way to convey what the last two years have meant to me. Maybe I will understand the significance ten or twenty years from now. It was something amazing, though. And I am so happy to be back and yet getting this American life restarted feels so strange. Things seem more trivial here, somehow. The sense of community is lacking. In my last few days in Mauritania, a Moor was telling me about the Saudi Arabians and how, for them, roots are everything. The original tribal community considers anyone who came in the last four-hundred years to be a wandering outsider, insignificant because they have no roots.

So, here in America, I wonder about my roots.