Category Archive

Is anyone else out there getting really annoyed at the vanity sizing? For years, I have noticed that every time I come back to the States (usually every other summer), I’m down a size–without losing weight.

At first, I admit, I thought this was swell–not because I was fooled, but because it is fun to grab smaller sizes. Now, though, I’m just plain annoyed. I have a closet full of clothes that don’t really fit because I never know what size I really am. Yes, I do try things on, but I personally am not fond of staring at myself in mirrors, and I tend to try something on, glance to see that it fits okay, and then move on. So now I’ve got a drawer-full of shirts that make me look frumpy–they are supposed to be fitted but they hang a bit. I bought them, in my size, last summer at Old Navy. They are so loose that I can really only wear them to the gym. But I have a t-shirt, in a larger size, bought the summer before, that fits really nicely, and is basically the only t-shirt I can wear out in public.
And really, do they think we are that stupid? If you need a new shirt, are you more likely to buy it because it’s a size 8 instead of a 10? All it means is that, in any given store, you never know what sizes to take into the changing room.
What prompted this? Our 3 days of warm weather (we are back to cold and grey now. Not that I mind–I’m off to sunnier climes soon enough). I realized how badly I need shirts, but who has time to go shopping? Not me. And given the weird shape-shifting nature of sizing these days, I don’t want to risk online guessing shopping. Guess I’ll be making that one t-shirt really work, all the way to California. How many days in a row do you think I can make it last?

Today my friend Sheri and I went to Starbucks. We decided to go to the farther Starbucks because it has more cushy chairs, and we’re all about sitting in overstuffed chairs with our feet up and talking for hours. We don’t see each other all that often. But I forgot that the further Starbucks is right next to the mall. It’s a small mall, but I don’t go anywhere near anything even remotely retail (coffee is different) on the appropriately named Black Friday. Neither does Sheri. So we drove back to the closer Starbucks, because we are in America, where it seems logical to the Powers That Be to put Starbucks upon Starbucks upon Starbucks, so that you never have to go more than 3 blocks without having access to a double shot of espresso or a froufrou faux-coffee sugary drink. I hate Starbucks marketing but I just can’t hate Starbucks–it smells so good in there, like espresso. You might be getting the idea that I like coffee. I do, a bit. (I don’t mainline it though–that is just rumor)
We had fun driving around this small town in the California desert, mocking the names of various stores. Like Smart & Final! What would this store sell? Presumably, no returns either.
Another one is called Big Lots! I can hear the marketing strategy now…Americans like things big, and they like lots of ‘em! Let’s call it Big Lots! Uh, yeah.
There’s also Fresh & Easy. I’m not even going to start.
I just want to take a moment to whine about America, and I’ll begin by telling you a little story.
When I was in college, I got a job at a Hallmark store in Tacoma Mall. I worked there summers and holidays, including Christmas break.
I hated working in a mall over Christmas. I can imagine no quicker way to squelch whatever joie d’espirit might have existed. I remember two women fighting over a place in line. “Where’s your holiday spirit?“ one shot at the other. “Well, where’s yours?“ the other shot back. I was glad neither was armed–it could have gotten really ugly. Plus, I had to wear an apron that said, “Santa’s Helper.” Once, a woman asked me if I worked there, and I said, “Would I be wearing this apron if I didn’t?” I refused to wear the hat.
The worst of all was December 26th. I begged not to have to work, but didn’t have a choice. On December 26th, all Hallmark Christmas merchandise goes on sale for 50% off. Why? Because Hallmark doesn’t want to have to store all that clutter for a whole entire year. Soulless corporation they may be, but at least they have some sense.
I was never so ashamed to be a woman as I was at 8 a.m. on those Boxing Days. There, lined up in the mall outside the store, would be hundreds of women, all women, no men. (The men were home asleep. Sorry to say it, but the men had some sense) These women would be crowding each other, pushing up against the metal barrier, clutching enormous black garbage bags. I would think, “Go home. Be with your families. Enjoy watching the kids play with their toys, make a big breakfast. Relax.” But no. With crazed eyes roaming back and forth, sizing each other up, they would wait till the metal barrier began to creak up, then they would duck under it and run to the Christmas section, elbows out, pushing the hapless out of the way.
I would hide behind the counter till the manager saw me and made me come out and ring up sales.
It seems to have only gotten worse since those long-ago days. I understand the thinking behind Black Friday. It’s the official opening of the Christmas shopping season. I get it. But what I don’t get is things like Midnight Madness, or the Come at 5 a.m. For Special Deals. It seems really sadistic on the part of the store owners, who presumably are home in bed dreaming of money. The poor workers don’t want to be there. The shoppers don’t really, deep down, want to be there. Why not just have the same sales from, for example, 10 a.m. to noon? Or, catch people off guard, from 1:45 to 2:57?
I was also mystified by all those stores now open on Thanksgiving. Ok, food stores being open for a couple of hours makes sense, but more and more stores are beginning to stay open for the holiday, in order to…you got it…start on the Christmas shopping season. Again, it doesn’t really make sense. Why not just wait a day? Who is going to go Christmas shopping on Thanksgiving Day?
I know you all agree with me, and yet I’m wondering…if we all agree, why does it keep getting worse? How can we stop this madness?
Me, I’m going back to Africa, but what can you do? Tell me if you’ve got any ideas.

This is our living room from the upstairs. Ilsa is reading, as always, and knitting, her latest craft interest. Abel has covered the Moroccan leather poofe with his precious blanket and stuffed animals.

I get so many of these and it seems only fair to share them with you. Some of them make me wonder about the crazy people out there who nonetheless know how to type, and some of them make me wonder about the wisdom of google, because these topics have nothing to do with me and life here on Planet Nomad. An example of both might be the poor lost soul searching for “an event that happened uneventfully.” Get that person a Thesaurus! Besides, here on “red sandstorm planet” (another search, and not only a great description of Mauritania, but a great name for this blog) ALL events happen eventfully!

“Where are camptown ladies?” At the camel races, of course.

“windows were made by soaking cloth in this oil in the colonial days.” Apparently the web thinks Mauritania is still stuck in the 1700s. Hey the web said it, not me!

“idiom of knots in stomach” Um, isn’t this already an idiom?

“explain the idioms said by scout to kill” Ok, I know google considers me the leading expert on idioms. But killing idioms? Isn’t that like a cutting wit—in itself an idiom? Oh my head hurts.

“reasons for reading romeo and juliet.” Oh they are many. But if you have to ask the web, well, perhaps classic literature is not for you.

“antique nomad surfboard” Worked great on sand dunes, presumably.

“browning nomad arm” What I do a little of every day.

“jellyfish sting tan tights” Ok, I get the first 2 words. And the last 2 work together as well. But all 4? Nope. I get nothing.

“obsessed with Mona” As are we all, to some degree or another. I mean, I guess.

“Why do we have to drink camel milk?” This one struck a deep chord with me. I’ve asked myself that same question a few times, although I’ve never asked the web.

“smoked salmon parasites facial rash” Have I ever mentioned any of these things? No. This sounds like a problem for my husband, who recently started his own NGO—Doctors Without Formal Education. That is, assuming the irascible Dr. House is too busy to deign to pay attention to this cry for help.

“where can you buy dolphins milk?” I have no idea. Sounds like traditional medicine here, which states that drinking lion’s urine can cure diabetes. But, how do you know it’s really from a lion, not a donkey? I’d be skeptical of any so-called dolphin’s milk.

“debbie, wife of tabby from neighbours” Sometimes it’s best not to know.

“popular nomad desert tribe.” Maybe we could have a contest to choose. I’m voting for Aicha’s tribe.

And, last but not least: “mauritania everyone birthday december 31” I know about this. Until recently, people didn’t know when their actual birthday was. When they put in place a system of national identity cards, they just automatically put everyone’s birthday on either Dec. 31 or Jan. 1. So it would seem that everyone over about 30 was born on one of those days. If this is confusing to you, ask the web!

The “quick-thinking pilot” in this news story is Aicha’s brother-in-law.

Spring: when young men’s fancy turns to love, and the French go on strike. Yes it’s the season for the greve again. The children are excited, hoping that their teachers belong to the unions with the most demands.

Elliot stayed home from school on Thursday because his teacher was on strike, but the twins (in different classes) had school. This is how it goes. There are many teachers’ unions, and individuals join them rather than schools as a whole. You never know when your child will bring home a note announcing a day off. But since the teachers strike individually, usually only one or two out of three kids will have a striking teacher. Usually, each year one child will have a teacher who strikes noticeably more often than the others. The other children envy this child.

Spring is the season though—beginning now through about May, in France, airlines and trains and busses, teachers and nurses, will go on strike. Effects will trickle down here to this former French colony, where travelers will get stuck in Paris en route to Nouakchott, or the school’s nurse won’t be there the day your kid throws up in the corner of the sandy courtyard during recess. I don’t know why the longer days and burgeoning bulbs bring out these tendencies. The only thing I can come up with is that it’s an excuse to get a day off work to enjoy the season.

We lived in the French Alps for a year—an incredibly lovely year. We didn’t have a car so we walked about 6 miles a day, enjoying the changing seasons and the light on the mountains that surrounded our town. Walking so much freed us to enjoy all that France has to offer in the way of good food and drink without gaining too much weight. We found the French welcoming and generous, patient with our accents and limited vocabulary.

Elliot was 8 that year and the twins were 6, learning how to read and acquiring beautiful French accents, the better to mock our sorry attempts at the French ‘r’. For 2 weeks each that winter, their classes had swimming lessons during morning school. Elliot’s class had them first, in early December. We packed his swim trunks and a bonnet (warm cap) for afterwards, when he walked out into freezing air with wet hair. This was following school instructions: the French don’t trust you to come up with this on your own.

He looked forward to swim class for weeks and went off that morning in great excitement, but there was a huge difference in his comportment when we picked him up at noon for lunch. You could see the rain cloud, a la Eeyore, literally hanging over his head. He was depressed and, unusual for him, quiet about it over lunch.

We kept questioning him—“How was it? Did you have fun? What did you do?” He kept not answering, and this from a kid who usually won’t stop talking.

He was so depressed that we, loving and concerned parents, began to get really worried. Finally, in desperation, we asked that question that every parent dreads having to ask—did anyone touch you? Still, he shook his head.

Eventually we got it out of him. Oh the shame, the horror. In France, it transpired, it is the law that males wear Speedo-style swimwear in public schools. As West-Coast Americans, the males in our family all owned baggy swim trunks, or even in the case of the surfing father, board shorts. It had never in our wildest dreams occurred to us that any “free” country would pass an actual law about this—especially a country so relaxed in general on the concept of swimwear or not.

So they did make you wear your underwear? we asked Elliot. “No, they had an extra swimsuit for me,” he muttered, head still down. Did the other kids make fun of you? “No, they were all wearing the same kind of swimsuits.” All this drama for…what exactly? It took us hours to get our heart-rates back to normal, and days to recover from the morbid imaginings we’d come up with.

We had to buy him a new swimsuit and, since it was December, they were only available at the sporting goods store. 22 euros for Speedo brand—ouch. We were able to find fitted shorts, which eased his trauma. When it was Abel’s turn 2 weeks later, they told us Elliot’s were too big on him so we bought him the underwear-style. He didn’t mind—in fact he liked them. He’s a little exhibitionist at heart.

I asked every single French person that I knew the reason for this law. “It’s hygiene,” they told me. According to them, before this law was passed, French men would wear their swim trunks as shorts. They would eat meals, and wipe their hands on their pants, and then go into the pool where bits of lunch would float off into the water. So why not pass laws about manners? Don’t be silly. I asked why that was less hygienic than wearing Speedos as underwear, under your shorts-cum-napkin, but I never did get a good answer.

We have friends who are living in the same lovely Alpine town this year, studying French at the same school we went to. They recently sent us an email—they had tried to go swimming, and the man was turned away because he had swim trunks instead of Speedo-style. The answer for him? He bought a new swimsuit at a vending machine provided at the pool for just this kind of emergency. Hmmm… Are you thinking the real reason for this law is the same as I’m thinking?

Africa is, sadly, where the rest of the world dumps its garbage. Here is where all the unwanted things end up—those puffy neon-pink parachute jackets from the 80s, car batteries with only a year left out of the original 10, the sweepings off the floor of the tea factories, repackaged and sold cheaply. Did you ever wonder where the rest of the chickens go, as you stare at the supermarket rows of boneless, skinless breasts? You can buy them here in Africa, sold as cuisse (french for thigh), arriving frozen from Europe in 10 kilo boxes. They are skin-on and bone-in, almost half a chicken with a drumstick and wing still attached.

Here, you can buy cheap plastic toys. You can pay a lot for these at the fancy import stores, or buy them cheaply at the local market, but it makes no difference—the toy will be broken literally within half an hour of coming out of its package.

In one of the poorest nations on earth, where everything is stained with dust, the desert lies deep within. Garbage lies in piles along the streets. Driving along, people toss empty pop cans and juice cartons out of their windows. The wind helps move things along. Plastic bags whirl with a weird grace, twirl high in the air, land in your yard to add clutter and ugliness.

I am thinking about this as my husband collects garbage to photograph. He has always done this; his genius is to see the potential beauty in the most mundane or unlovely of objects. When asked, he will say that “it has as much form and texture as anything else, but you don’t look at it because it’s ‘trash.’” But the trash here is so…dirty, so used, so much more, well, trashy. I don’t want it in the house.

Photography is not well understood in Mauritania. People are suspicious. If you ask them why, you will hear one of several answers.

1. Old people don’t like it because Islam prohibits images, which is why Islamic art is calligraphic and geometrical. (But, one replies, why does everyone have satellite TV then?)
2. About 10 years ago some journalists came through and took pictures of what they called a slave market although it actually wasn’t, and tried to make it look like we still had slaves, when slavery was officially outlawed in the 1980s and no longer exists here.
3. Journalists take pictures and make us look poor. They exploit us.

Amina and I discuss this over coffee. I argue that until Mauritanians get more comfortable with being photographed, tourism (which they desperately want) will never develop. Tourists take pictures; they want memories, souvenirs, I say. I tell of being with a visitor who wanted to take pictures of the herds of camels gathered for feeding; it was dusk and the sky was the palest of pinks, and the nomads and their tents were in the background, and we were driving along the Rue de Nouadhibou, which goes from Morocco to Senegal and is one of the main roads in the entire country. He simply wanted to capture this picturesque moment, unique in the annals of the modern world. But the people protested and wouldn’t allow even an innocent picture of some animals. She nods. Some people are like that, she comments.

I point out that Marche Capitale, the city’s main market, is colourful and interesting, with its swirling kaleidoscope of people shouting prices and brandishing goods in your face, young men in long white robes going “Psh! Psh!” to get your attention, piles of muluffas in lime, pink, midnight blue, yellow and orange tie-dye, all lying on the ground in loose folds of cloth, mounds of shoes, heaps of plastic barrettes and pony-tail holders, plastic bags of unmarked spices, etc. The market is right downtown and the streets that border it are filthy with refuse—piles of wet tea leaves, wandering goats, cardboard and plastic trash, perhaps the bones and offal from a recently-slaughtered animal.
Amina agrees that yes, the market is fine to photograph. “But I saw tourists at the market, and they took pictures of the trash,” she protests. “Naturally people were upset.”
I take a deep breath and point out that rather than get upset at the tourists, people might think of cleaning up the trash. Amina purses her lips in thought, then agrees. “But,” she says sadly, “they don’t think of that.”

They don’t; it’s true. We excuse Mauritanians and their trash by saying that of course, as nomads there was no recycling they had to just toss things, but everything was biodegradable. It doesn’t quite work anymore though. On the other hand, it’s not like Americans don’t ever litter. Until laws and fines were enacted, our highways were receptacles of junk, and I belong to one of those families who always comments in disgust at finding other people’s pop and beer cans in an otherwise pristine picnic spot.

This post is not going the direction I intended. I wanted to discuss concepts of found beauty, how we can look at the passage of time etched by sand and sun and rejoice not in youth and freshness but in age, how, as Adam Gropnik put it when discussing the mosaic mermaids at the bottom of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, “the line between art and kitsch is largely measured in ruin.” Or, to put it another way, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” But thinking of garbage led my thoughts in another direction.

Here is the picture Donn took of 2 tin cans and one ancient Coke can—although given the aging properties of a desert, the word ancient here means “outside for about a month.”

And if sun and sand can do this to metal, imagine what they’re doing to my face!!

I can really relate to Noah.

Recently I posted about the locust plague of 2004 and how I was apprehensive that more plagues would come. Now I’m scanning the skies worriedly for signs of ominous rain clouds.

It all started when Mona, who is Not Our Cat although you wouldn’t know that just by looking, had 3 kittens under the flamboyant tree on New Year’s Eve. Mona is a pretty black-and-white stray who lives in our yard and lets us hold her and comes in the house every opportunity she gets. Mona is our beautiful compromise—we don’t have to feed her or spend money on her, but those of us who like cats get to enjoy her, and those of us who don’t get to enjoy the official status of Not Owning a Cat.

Mona hid the kittens under a bush round the side of the house, safe from children who wanted to hold them, until their eyes opened last week. Then she moved them to the corner of the porch right next to the door, where they are sheltered from the wind and can infiltrate the house at every opportunity. The cat-lovers among us are thrilled of course; the kittens are adorable! Two are black and one is tabby-striped.

Then, last Saturday night, we came home from the beach and our guard, Abdellahi, walked up to Ilsa and said, “Do you like puppies?” (only in Hassiniya-Arabic, which my keyboard can’t do, not to mention my brain) and plopped a wriggly squirmy bundle into her arms.

It was all over from that moment.

“Aww! Isn’t it the cutest thing?” “Can we keep it?” “I love it!” “Can we keep it?” Donn made the mistake of saying he’d think about it overnight. By morning, it was firmly installed as a member of the family.

I’m not a dog expert, but this guy seemed too little to be away from his mother. His eyes were open, which I believe is the local standard on age to wean, but he couldn’t feed himself initially, and slept most of the time. I spent the first few days feeding him with a syringe, and even did night feedings. I still can’t believe I got up in the middle of the night to feed a dog. Ilsa wanted him in her room—after all, Abdellahi gave him to her—so I agreed that first night. About 4 a.m., I was awakened by howls and yelps and very sad whines. I staggered out of bed and fed the thing to get him to shut up. Everyone else in the family slept right through it. Oh the joys of motherhood.

Once he figured out how to drink from a bowl, I figured he was big enough to make it through the night and things went more smoothly. In the meantime, we seemed to be doing something right—he was fat and roly-poly when he came to us, and every day he’s a bit bigger, into something new, and still roly-poly.

Thursday morning, we got a call from another family. They were going out of town; could we dog-sit their fully-grown German Shepherd? Since we’d already agreed to this before the arrival of the kittens and the puppy (named Weston after a famous photographer), we merely arranged a time for drop-off and wondered how it would go.

It’s going ok. Mario, the German Shepherd, is a really nice dog who likes children and digging. In an effort to save our garden (which is looking fabulous these days), we chained him in one corner of the yard. Mona the cat was not happy about the situation, and stared him down all afternoon from her corner of the porch. Finally to assert her mastery, she went over and gave him a sharp swipe across the nose. Then she reverted into Halloween Cat mode, arching and hissing for several hours, basically telling him not to even think of her kittens as a delicious mouthful. Now there’s sort of an uneasy truce between them, coupled by a weird sort of sibling rivalry which has currents going all over the yard; wherein all the animals are jealous of the attention the others are getting, and all obviously feel the yard belongs only to them. I refuse to get out my parenting books though.

Plus we still have the rabbit, which we had to move out of Mario’s line of sight. And, presumably the turtle is still there although I haven’t seen it since spring. His kind live long and prosper, though, and in a big green yard like ours, I’m sure he’s munching away contently under some leaves somewhere.

I took Mario for a walk this morning and my hands still hurt. Africa is basically a Dog’s Paradise of nasty things to smell and pee on. Other dogs aren’t chained, and there are many interesting goats and chickens, and he’s a big dog with a lot of pulling power.

It’s very strange. We are not really animal people, and suddenly we find ourselves basically running a zoo for domesticated and semi-domesticated animals. Which is why I find myself relating to Noah, and worrying about floods. We had a sort of fog this morning. Do you think it means anything?

Aicha wants to talk to me. She’s pregnant again but doesn’t want Donn to know—that is too embarrassing. Although Mauritanian culture expects wives to get pregnant soon and often, at the same time pregnancy is something that must be hidden; it’s intimate, and has a whiff of shame about it. Someone (male) catching a glimpse of a pregnant woman might inadvertently think about what causes it. Aicha tells me that once she is obviously pregnant even beyond the loose swaths of her mulaffa (head-to-toe veil), she won’t leave the house. What if one of her older male relatives saw her and realized, with a shock, that she wasn’t a little girl anymore? I tell her, “That would be his problem, not yours!” Aicha has been married 7 years now, and is in her mid-to-late 20s. But I can’t convince her.

I love my friend Aicha for many reasons. We have that soul connection that makes friendship possible across the boundaries of culture, language, political and religious views, and even diverse topics like race, or what constitutes beauty. Why are we good friends? We just like each other, in that mystical way that happens when you find a real friend. We like being together; we like talking about things. We may disagree, but we listen to each other.

One of the many things I appreciate about her is the way she has, more than any other single person, introduced me to Mauritanian culture. She has opened the door to me. Aicha comes from a very conservative tribe but she is university-educated. Her traditional background makes her a great source of information. The culture was always somewhat diverse, made up of various tribes each with their own oddities and special areas of expertise–the scholarly tribe; the warrior tribe; the tribe of griots, or singers. Different tribes have embraced modernity to varying degrees. Aicha’s tribe is well-connected and educated in general, but they have also fiercely held on to their traditions. Talking to her, I get a glimpse into another world.

Aicha’s tribe practices an ancient local custom called sawaHah, and I have to say that only people obsessed with not thinking about sex could have come up with this one. SawaHah originally dealt with relationships from generation to generation; it’s about showing respect to elders and not broaching certain topics in front of them, and it combines concepts of respect and embarrassment. But here, it also deals with the relations between in-laws and spouses and with keeping one’s parents from ever having to face the realization that one has, well, grown up. Accordingly, Aicha’s husband has never even met his father-in-law. “He saw him once from across the room in a public building,” Aicha tells me when she is explaining this to me. Since there is no marriage ceremony, only an agreement between 2 families followed by a lot of sheep meat and women ululating, it is possible to never confront your parents with the reality of an in-the-flesh, real live spouse.

But this is also a culture where married couples often live with their parents. Aicha’s sister and husband lived for a while with Aicha’s parents. The son-in-law never sat in the same room with his wife’s father; never greeted him. If he had to walk by an open door to a room where his in-laws were seated, he would pull his robe up to cover his face and scuttle out of sight as quickly as he could. He is in the military, and one night a thief broke in and came into the parents’ room, demanding cash, threatening violence. Because of sawaHah, the soldier son-in-law was helpless to interfere. He couldn’t shame his parents-in-law by seeing them in their nightclothes, much less by what was implied that he was actually in the same house as they were! The thief got away with the family’s cash that night.

Just like it is shameful for a bride to show happiness, lest she be thought eager, brazen, in the same way when Aicha is living with her in-laws, she must be the last at night to go up to the bedroom she shares with her husband. If she is tired and goes to bed before the rest of the family, everyone will wink and nod knowingly, and she will face their sneers the next day.

She doesn’t tell her mother-in-law that she’s pregnant, and is worried that the older woman knows. “She told me not to carry in the tray of drinks, that it was too heavy,” she sighs. She enjoys the freedom of discussing pregnancy with Michelle and I, who as friends AND outsiders are doubly safe. When she was pregnant with her first child, I loaned her an old copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. In it, she found a frankness of information that astonished and delighted her. She was also thankful for the openness with which I talked to her about my own pregnancies and childbirth experiences. It’s surprising to me that she doesn’t feel comfortable discussing these topics with her own mother; although she can tell her mother that she’s pregnant, they won’t talk about it at all. She would never tell her father and is embarrassed that he will eventually realize that he’s expecting another grandchild. Aicha would never shame him by being in the same room as he and her son; she is a dutiful daughter who adores her father. “I couldn’t believe my sister!” she tells me one day in shocked tones. “My father is traveling and asked her what gifts she wanted, and she said shoes for her child!” I don’t get why this is shocking, so she explains. “It is not right that she discuss her child with my father like that.”

SawaHah is frustrating to the outsider. “How can a society function like this?” we wonder aloud. It’s still a mystery, and part of what makes living here a bit like visiting outer space. Even other Arabs wonder about it; as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, Mauritania is the only place that practices it in quite this manner.

In the meantime, Aicha pops prenatal vitamins that Michelle was able to get her from a visiting doctor and worries about how she’ll balance her full-time job (with an international company) and another baby. She wants my advice, wants to enjoy the freedom to discuss anything and everything that we enjoy together. I tell her stories from my own culture, of my own relationship with my in-laws, and we agree that we come from opposites sides of the globe.

Hey, it’s campaign time here on Planet Nomad. I was just nominated for “Best Writing” at the Share the Love Blog Awards. Check it out at One Woman’s World or click on that lovely new banner in my sidebar. It’s fun! It’s free! Share the Love, people.

Her brother was young, very young, and immature, only about 21 or maybe 22. In this culture, men can take forever to grow up, whereas women can be married and mothers at 13 or 14. He was young, he was immature, he was with friends; they were playing cards. One friend began to taunt and tease. “Promise me you will do the same thing I am going to do on Friday.”

“No, how can we?” he, they, protested. “How can we promise something when we don’t know what we are promising?” But the friend teased and taunted. “Be a man! A real man would do it!”

The fragile ego of a young man is a thing familiar to us all, no matter our culture or background, so they all promised.

The friend announced, “I am getting married on Friday.”

A storm of protest broke out—We are young! We don’t have the money to get married!
Her brother said, “I can get the money, but my parents will not allow it. I am young.” The friend said accusingly, “You promised.”

Her brother went home. The eldest son, firstborn male, pride of his parents, raised that the world was his for the asking, said to his mother, “I want to get married this Friday. Choose one of our relatives for me—I don’t care which one.”

His mother protested. His father put his foot down. No, this was ridiculous. His son was young, so young, so immature, plus had no money of his own.

The son took this crossing of his will in stride, as firstborn sons, favored of their mothers, will do. He said to his mother, “I will get married this Friday, and you will find me a wife, or you will never see me again. I may kill myself, I may not, but you will never see me again.” And he left the house.

Three days later, his desperate mother came up with a plan. She went to her relatives and told them the truth. They will refuse, she reasoned, and I will tell him I have done what he wanted, and he will return home, and all will be well, and all will be well. So she said to them, “He is young, so young, and immature. He has no money. His wife will have to live with us if he marries now. The wedding would be Friday, this Friday, in two days.” Relieved, she sat back and waited for their refusal.

But the relatives liked this family, and this family’s money and connections. “We agree,” they announced, and his mother gasped. And on that Friday, they married their 14-year-old daughter to the brother of Leila.

She moved into his room in his father’s house and quit attending her junior high school classes. Perhaps her friends envied her—so beautiful and desirable to marry so young!— perhaps they didn’t.

For he was young, so young, and immature, only 22 or maybe 23. And soon he began coming home at 1 a.m., then at 2 a.m., then at 3 a.m. or not at all. She, poor child, often slept with her husband’s little sister Leila, who was a year older than she, rather than sleep alone. “He is your husband,” urged her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, “Speak to him!” But she shook her head and bit her lip. “I don’t want him to be angry with me.”

Finally his mother spoke to him, but he didn’t listen. His young relative was boring; he would rather be with his friends.

She, in the meantime, did all she could to ensure a pregnancy, and soon was able to announce that a baby was on the way. They fussed over her, her husband’s family, and every day the mother of her husband gave her a gift. She would pack a small bag and spend the day with her family. Maybe her friends came to see her, maybe she even put on airs—a married woman, and to be married young connotes great beauty, and already pregnant, so fertile. And maybe (please God!) it would be a son, to bring joy to her heart, pride to her eyes, prove her worth to her husband. She might return home to her husband’s family in the evening or she might not, and it didn’t matter, because her husband was often traveling now, or out with his friends, meeting other girls.

Her young body was not even beginning to swell and round when she miscarried. Her husband was traveling with friends in another part of the country; it didn’t concern him, and he didn’t return to the city.

He had been gone well over a month when he sent a letter to his mother. “Tell Fatima I divorce her,” it said.

Her mother handed the letter to Leila, but she refused to be the bearer of such bad tidings. Another sister also refused. So they phoned another relative and asked her to come over and take the letter to the young wife’s room.

“And she cried—can you believe it?” Leila tells me. “I never thought I would see a divorced woman cry. I was so embarrassed.”

I explain carefully that the girl’s tears do not seem strange to me.

“But it is a great shame for a divorced woman to cry,” Leila argues.

“Why?”

”That means she loves someone who does not love her, and that is a great shame.” And it seems that with her tears, little Fatima lost any sympathy she had in the eyes of her sister-in-law.

Or perhaps it is just that the passage of time has proved blood, especially the blood of the immediate family, to be thicker. Because the young man is no longer so young and immature. He grew up and remarried, but this time, says Leila, he really loves her, and he is now father of 3. She beams with pride.

Fatima? Oh she hasn’t remarried and lives still with her parents. She is dismissed with a wave of the hand. She lost.

Donn and I recently watched the movie “The Constant Gardener.” We borrowed it from friends, which is basically the only way to get movies around here—at least, if you want original instead of pirated versions, and also if you want versions that actually play the movie.

The plot, for those of you who missed it, concerns a drug company who tests its products on so-called “disposable people”—i.e. poor Africans who would “probably die anyway.” It’s immoral and cash-producing and the Evil Masterminds who do it and control the universe basically win at the end, although the movie ending is a little happier than the book version (and for once I didn’t mind).

My point is to say that sometimes, things start in Africa. They try things here that they couldn’t get away with elsewhere. And so, I want to warn you that the Pod People are taking over.

This weekend, Elliot and Abel came up with the wild idea of cleaning their room. Unprompted. On top of that, they actually cleaned it, instead of their usual push-things-to-the-side-and-come-for-approval method. They were running up and down the stairs with bag loads of trash. They got rid of things voluntarily. They emptied off shelves and put things back neatly. I didn’t even know they knew how. And that’s when I realized. These were not my children. They were clever imitations. They looked right, sounded right, smelled right—but the actions were not right.

Many mothers joke about how their kids never clean, how they can’t see the floor in their children’s rooms. Here, it is the sad truth, no exaggeration. But something like this has never happened before in the Nomad household. Ever. Obviously, Donn and I have done a stellar job, both genetically and by example, of passing on our own “organizational skills” to our children.

Ilsa, who was unaffected by the Pod People, announced that her room didn’t need cleaning. Afraid, I went to check, and discovered that not only could I not see the floor except in spots, but that the tide of “artwork” (i.e. paper junk) had risen as high as the bed, so that she could theoretically slide to the floor if she wanted.

I knew Elliot was back when he came up to me and gave me a big hug. “Wait till you see our room!” he announced. “It’s going to be one of the happiest days of your life! (pause) …except for maybe the day you got married or had kids.” He’s never quite grasped the idea of having perspective.

This is part 3 of an irregular series in which I present for your reading pleasure events that happened here on Planet Nomad before we got internet at our house and discovered the joys of blogging. It’s so long that I will just briefly say THANKS for all your comments (I made my goal of 20 comments on a post—best ever!) and now I’m tempted to fish for compliments more often

In November 2002, Debbie and I decided to attend a conference being held in Dakar, Senegal. Neither of us wanted to drive, because when driving cross-country in Africa it’s handy to have some men around; to deal with police checks (police relate better to men), to change flat tires or deal with engine trouble, to scrape locusts off the grill in the event of an invasion, to deal with the myriad problems that can arise. Flying is expensive. So we decided to take bush taxis.

Our husbands drove us to the southern edge of the city to the taxi stand. The stand is a dusty lot filled with taxis; old Mercedes sedans, made to sit 5 comfortably, were parked in vague rows, between which strolled merchants selling tiny packets of cardboard-like biscuits, bottles of juice, long-life milk packets, and other things useful on car trips. We emerged cautiously and were instantly mobbed. Taxis wait until they are full to depart, but Debbie and I had already decided to splurge and buy an extra seat. We traveled the first stage of our journey with a Liberian couple that we knew; between the 4 of us, we bought 6 seats and so could set off at once. Sure it was a pinch to spend the extra $8 or so, but we thought it was worth it to sit with a mere 3 adults in the back, instead of risking being squished in with a traditionally-built African woman, or a man in a voluminous robe who might be subtly friendly.
Soon we were whizzing our way south. The weather wasn’t unbearably hot, and the open windows provided a pleasant enough breeze. The first stage of our journey, Nouakchott to Rosso, passed uneventfully. The taxi dropped us off near the ferry.

The Senegal River serves as the border between Mauritania to the north and Senegal to the south. The town of Rosso is split by the sluggish brown water; there is Rosso, Mauritania, and Rosso, Senegal. In between, a simple ferry runs several times a day, although it doesn’t keep to a strict schedule. For example, the 10:30 ferry may leave at noon.

Since we had only ourselves and our bags, we didn’t need to wait for the ferry, a process usually rendered obnoxious by heat and curious children. Instead, we opted to take one of the many wooden pirogues bobbing about near the shore. A pirogue is sort of like a dug-out canoe in shape. We boarded quite quickly and wobbled our way to an empty spot along the edge.

The crossing was brief—it’s not a very big river. We hit the other shore with a bump, and everyone arose and began pushing their way off the boat. Debbie and I were cautiously balancing our way forward, when a wave from the ferry smacked our little pirogue. I sat back down again with a bump, but Debbie overbalanced and ended up on her back, skirt fallen round her hips, feet up in air over the bench. And this in a place where ankles are considered a little racy! I helped her up quickly and then we had to sit back down again because we were laughing so hard. (Aside: Debbie is a great person to travel with)

We made it out of the pirogue and began the steep climb up the slippery rocks to the road. I lost my footing and came within two inches of taking out a large Pulaar woman, dressed for travel in a royal blue satin robe with gold trim. She shot me a look that would have scared me to death if I believed in the Evil Eye.

The border crossing was no worse than normal. We eventually sorted everything out, and walked several blocks to the Senegalese version of the taxi stand to find a taxi to Dakar. Again we bought extra seats, and again I sat by an open window as my hair and nose filled with dust.

The conference went well. It was held in the same hotel that Mike and Robert stay at in “Endless Summer,” for all you surf-freaks out there. When it was time to return home, we went again to the taxi stand in Dakar. This taxi stand is bigger than the one in Nouakchott, choked with dust and trash and people selling items and people buying items and people haggling over prices—sort of a combination mini-market/taxi stand.

We found places in a sort of station wagon. We bought an extra seat and wedged ourselves into the very back, knees near our chins, contemplating how it would have been possible to fit 3 adults in that little space, thankful we were rich enough not to have to find out.

The ride from Dakar to Rosso takes about 8 hours. We left about 6 a.m. The taxi whizzed along, stopping occasionally in tiny roadside villages for cold drinks and snacks. By about 11 a.m. we were in dire straits. The taxi had stopped in a really remote village, and Debbie and I crawled out to stretch our cramped limbs. We were desperate for a spot of privacy, so in great determination we crossed the road, heading for a field with some lovely big tall weeds. We soon discovered, however, an obstacle; a deep ditch full of fetid water, too large to leap, extending as far as we could see alongside the highway. What to do? We glanced back at the taxi and saw that it was ready to depart, waiting just for us, a taxi full of men glancing our way. Some of the villagers were also out for a glimpse of the white women squished in the back of a taxi. We looked at each other in despair. There was no way we could get back in that taxi and wait any longer to relieve ourselves.

I can’t speak for the whole continent, but in my experience Africans have no trouble relieving themselves in public. Round here, it’s a common sight. The world is their toilet. Their wide robes sweep to the ground, providing them some modestly, provided they are wearing robes. But for Debbie and I, it was a whole new experience. We were wearing long skirts, but they weren’t as wide as a muluffa. Hopelessly Westernized as we are, we were also wearing underwear, which complicated things. Also, again as complete newcomers to this sort of thing, we were more concerned about drips and drops on ourselves than we should have been. We were as behind a tree as we could be, but we were definitely not private. No, we basically were in full view of the men in the waiting taxi, the fascinated villagers, and any passing cars.

In spite of that, we felt better as we regained our cramped quarters in the back of the taxi.

You just never know what skills you’re going to need in life, do you?

Our second pirogue crossing wasn’t as exciting as the first—perhaps Debbie felt she had already shown enough of herself to the world, and the Mauritanian side isn’t as steep so I had no opportunity to nearly knock anyone into the river. We were directed to a fringed cart drawn by a horse (our lives are so picturesque!), which we rode for about 3 blocks to another taxi stand. By now we were getting tired. It was early evening and we’d been traveling all day. We paid for an extra seat and shared the back seat with only one other man, who was very polite and squished as close as he could to the window; a pointless gesture since the seat had no springs left. We all 3 kept sliding, inch by inch, closer and closer to each other with each little bump on the road, until we’d all end up squished together in the middle and have to pull ourselves apart again.

Debbie and I split up once we made it to the outskirts of Nouakchott; she took a city taxi to her house and I to mine. After a joyful reunion with my family, I shook the dust from my hair and went off to shower and contemplate the joys of locked bathroom doors.

Jeana wrote the other week about left-handed compliments, although I must say that I have received some awfully nice compliments from left-handed people. My mother calls those with that talent for the devastating comment “diplomats in reverse.” It’s a talent that at least 2 of my children excel in—I don’t mean to boast, but they are really good. Here’s Elliot’s latest example.

We got given this DVD of U2’s latest concert tour for Christmas. Donn and I have been U2 fans for years, but we were unprepared for Elliot’s enthusiasm. He loves it. He watches it every day.

He came up to me in the kitchen the other night. “Do you think I’ll still like U2 when I’m a grown-up?”
“Probably,” I said. “I still do. Of course, I’ve liked them since I was a teenager.”
(gasp) “They were teenagers when they became a rock band?”

“Well, I think so. I’m not sure how old they were when they first put out an album, but I was in high school when I first heard of them.” (pause) “You do realize they are a little older than we are, right?”

“Yeah,” he hesitated. “But they’re more active.”

In other news, it’s national de-lurking week and/or month. What, you say, is a lurker? In blog-ese, it’s someone who reads a blog but never comments, never, not even once. To me, the expression ‘lurker’ always sounds a little shady, like someone hiding round a corner in a dark alley with malicious intent, ready to pounce. As for de-lurking, it sounds downright shocking! I don’t know who comes up with these expressions.

I really don’t care if you lurk—I’m just happy to have readers. On the other hand, I am insanely curious. So, if you want, just click on the word “comments” and write a little something in the box below.

Not sure what to write? Here’s a sample; just cut and paste.

“Wow, you are the best writer I have ever read in my life!! Better than Margaret Atwood, Lemony Snicket and T.S. Eliot combined! I read you religiously and never miss a post. Ever. Keep writing. Oh, and here is a big wad of cash/amazon gift certificate, just for fun.”

I read a very thoughtful post-and-comments on the subject of the beauty we mothers see in our children last night, and it got me thinking. I have a nine year old daughter who is bright and talented and talkative and loves math and reading and who is also already convinced that she is a little too fat.

She lives in an Arab environment and goes to an international French school and has American friends, so her influences are mixed. Arab and French women tend to be more feminine than American women, for whatever reasons. It’s rare for girls to go out for sports; they tend to take dance or theater or music. For many years, she has been the only girl in her class without pierced ears. I don’t know at what age the French pierce ears, but Mauritanians pierce their daughters’ ears at 3 days. In a language where there is no word for child, only for son/daughter, boy/girl, you have to have a way to know at a glance the sex of the child. Families who can’t afford earrings for their tiny ones tie bits of brightly-coloured twine through the holes to keep them open. Let’s not think about how they are pierced in the villages and shantytowns. It’s best not to.

Although she of course compares her looks unfavorably to her friends’, in some ways I don’t worry about her self-esteem. My daughter is exotic in her environment. She has fair skin; she is American; to some, her passport is as precious as pure gold. She received her first marriage proposal when she was 4, and this turned out to be the first of several proposals, mostly from men in their 20s or 30s.

Ilsa is small for her age, and at 4 she still looked like a toddler. I was out with Ilsa and my friend Z, and it had gotten late. Ilsa lay down on the carpet and went to sleep, and Z’s cousin, about 17, covered her with his robe. Then he told me, “I’ll wait for her; I’m going to marry her.”
I took a deep breath and carefully explained that in our culture we do it differently, that she’s the one he’ll have to convince, not me, and that not until she’s about 22 and finished with university. I thought I was very polite, especially considering that my initial emotions curled my hands into fists, but Z was appalled at my manners. “It’s a great compliment,” she hissed at me. “What’s wrong with you? It means he thinks she’s really beautiful.”

I was skeptical, though, as this same young man had earlier been exploring with me the possibility of me getting him a visa to America. I suspect that my daughter’s golden hair had less to do with it than her golden passport.

When she was smaller, everywhere we went people would mutter, “Zweina, zweina, masha’allah” (beautiful, beautiful, thank God—the “prayer” is meant to avert the Evil Eye) while reaching out to pat her cheek, feel her hair. They still do it, although to a lesser extent now that she’s older.

Ilsa takes it all in stride. “Why would he want to marry a little girl?” she asks me when, at the age of 8, she receives a proposal from someone who is about 25. “I bet he’ll be dead by the time I’m old enough!” She laughs. “We can only hope,” her father adds dryly.

On the cusp on the teenage years, she moves through her days with confidence, braids swinging down her back. Of course she’s beautiful, but what I want to show her is how the whole package works; how what is inside of her will come out and shape her features to show grace and kindness, or sourness and cruelty.

When she was little, someone gave her a book of Disney’s version of Beauty and the Beast. I’m not a big Disney fan but I don’t mind their version of this story because it’s more full of morals than the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. Gaston is beautiful on the outside but not on the inside; the beast learns to be beautiful on the inside before he can become beautiful on the outside; only Belle is beautiful in both places.

Inner Beauty. I don’t mean to be mystical here; it’s something that we all recognize on some level or another—how when we love someone, we see the whole package. Ilsa sparkles. She’s more than just a set of features that I think resembles her grandmother’s—it’s what she does with those features: how she pouts and blinks her eyes when she wants something but can’t hold the expression and we both start giggling; how she gives me this cheesy grin when she thinks she’s about to hear a “yes”; how she glows when she’s excited about something and dances around the room; how angelic she looks when those features are at rest in sleep (yes I know it’s a cliché. There’s a reason things become clichés, you know). It’s her ability to turn a neat room into an absolute pigsty but to her, it makes sense—the towels are carpets and the pile of clothes is a throne, don’t you see, Mom? It’s how she walks through rooms with her nose in her book, holding a plate of scraps for the rabbit, and calls for someone to open the door for her because it doesn’t occur to her to set down her book, feed the rabbit, and then pick it up again.

When you are away from someone you love and think of them, you don’t think of their face. You think of them—their essence, who they really are. It is an emotion deeper than words or pictures, one that really doesn’t need them. It’s why we can forget faces but remember people. This essence goes by other names, character or soul. Teenagers can’t understand that a pimple on the end of their noses is of much less importance to how their face ultimately looks than how they treat the unpopular girl on the bus, but one of my goals* in raising my daughter is to teach her this. She already instinctively chooses her friends for their characters; her best friend is the girl who likes reading and climbing trees, not the one who prefers trying on her mother’s make-up to acting out the latest stories they’ve invented. But I remember how enticing those other girls can be. They’re the ones who tend to be popular in high school. I want to give her enough of an anchor for her soul that she stays true to who she really is, and that in truth she is someone who makes wise choices.

To be honest, Donn and I are not among the “Beautiful People.” We weren’t popular in high school; we weren’t swamped with dates in college. (Although, like beetles, we are beautiful to each other ) I will be very surprised if Ilsa ends up with model-good looks. But that’s not what I’m worried about. I don’t care if someone sees her walking down the street and is struck by her beauty, although if we stay in the Arab world, it may happen. But I care that she impress people she meets with the qualities that make her uniquely Ilsa, my beautiful daughter.

*I’m including this word in a blatant attempt to qualify this post for Scribbet’s writing contest.

You Are an Espresso

At your best, you are: straight shooting, ambitious, and energeticAt your worst, you are: anxious and high strung You drink coffee when: anytime you’re not sleeping Your caffeine addiction level: high

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

Saturday, we went to the beach because EVERY Saturday we go to the beach. My husband is stubborn dedicated like that.

Lots of people normally join us, but because we’re the faithful ones, we provide the tent so people have shade, or a shelter from wind and blowing sand, or a landmark to view when the current pulls you to the south, so you can easily see how far you’ll have to walk to get back to your friends.

It’s our own tent, bought a few months after our arrival. Donn went down to the tent market where he sat with the tent ladies in the shadow of the Moroccan mosque, drinking tea and haggling over prices. Mauritanian tents are typically 2 or 3 layers thick; the outside is thick white canvas and the inside is patterned with bright scraps of fabric. I think they use rags, which would explain why part of our tent has red dinosaurs—technically not traditional, but colourful nonetheless.

Local tents have a large central wooden pole with a pointed end, and a little hawli, or hood, that you stick it into to prevent it from tearing through the fabric. Each corner has a rope which is tied to a stake, and then wooden cleft sticks are driven in at the corners, giving some height to the interior. These are the small tents, of course—the ones that people live in are much larger, big as houses, and require much larger poles.

Our tent has gone to the beach pretty much every Saturday for 5 ½ years, gradually getting more and more tattered and stained, until it ripped a couple of weeks ago. I told people we’d had a skylight put in, but they weren’t as appreciative as you’d think. (Note to those who want visuals: I do have a pic of Donn poking his head through this handy new feature, but he won’t let me post it because he doesn’t like it.)

We took this tent with us on Saturday, along with 3 extra kids, and headed out. According to Donn’s sources, the waves were supposed to be good. But it was Day 8 of the sandstorm. As we drove north of town, it got dustier and dustier. Blowing sand shrunk the horizon to just beyond the car. Why were we going?
Did I mention we’re stubborn dedicated? We decided that since we’d already made it this far, past the police check and the customs check, we’d at least go SEE what the beach was like.

We did. It was horrible. The wind was howling off the desert, whipping the sand up in swirls and whirls, stinging lashes of pain and irritation. We ate our gritty sandwiches in the lee of the car, then left. We spent the afternoon in the house with all the windows closed, watching a movie and spilling popcorn on the floor.

Sunday, the sky was clear and blue, for a change. We took down all the Christmas decorations, dusting them off before packing them. You would not believe how much dust gets into my house during a sandstorm, in spite of sealed windows and closed doors. Even the cat was dusty.

It’s official—the sandstorm is over. We can see the sun (and it’s hot). My friend was laughing at some tourists she saw today outside a hotel, sunglasses on and soaking up the rays. But even with afternoon temps in the 80s, the shade is cool and the nights need blankets. The moon soars amongst the stars, casting shadows in the garden. It’s perfect weather.

Life is still very quiet here on Planet Nomad. There’s no sign of the sandstorm letting up just yet. One year at this time, the sandstorm lasted 32 days, so we may be here a while. We’re keeping the windows closed, and the house is staying downright cool! We’re wearing slippers and long-sleeved t-shirts and enjoying some extra coffee (like we ever need an excuse to do that). Today is the last official day of vacation, and next Monday it’s back to work and school.

In lieu of any current excitement, today’s post is about the locust plague of 2004.

We’d just come back from living in France for a year. We’d descended, rather like a plague ourselves, on our previously-good friends Tim and Debbie and their one son, turning their quiet and well-organized home into something more like, well, our home.

It was early September, the hot/humid season. We’d heard reports over the summer of a locust visitation, and were suitably horrified, and secretly a little disappointed that we’d missed the excitement. We needn’t have been.

I don’t remember exactly when the locusts first came back, but it was probably about 2 weeks after we’d swarmed in and settled ourselves into Johnson’s house, eating up their food but drawing the line at their hibiscus plants. One sweltering afternoon, we walked outside and saw the sky full of tiny winged bodies.

The first wave of locusts were pink with brown wings—kinda stylish, if you could overcome your loathing. They took out Johnson’s hedge in about an hour. The sky was full of whirring, chomping noises, as millions of tiny insect jaws set to work, masticating every green thing in sight. It was a somewhat awe-inspiring, if nauseating sight.

By sunset, all that remained of a once-proud hedge, a once brilliant spot of green in this dry and dusty land, was a meager collection of twigs. The hibiscus plants were just as bad. Tim and Debbie had rushed out with old sheets to cover up the flamboyant tree, but the locusts had eaten through the fabric in several places. The locusts were swarming, looking for a place to settle that night. A few got in the house. One got in Debbie’s hair; another landed on Donn’s shirt and ate a small hole in the linen.

I don’t remember all the invasions, but I do remember that, like labour pains, they gradually got closer and closer together. After that first wave, we assumed everything was dead. But a tiny green fuzz was appearing on the brown twigs, bringing joy to our hearts when, one blistering afternoon, we heard again the dreaded buzz of millions of wings and the chewing of thousands of tiny mouths.

The adults were overcome with dismay, but Abel (then 7) went out in the storm to fight. Armed with a cape, a light-saber, and a whip made of a bit of rope he’d found, he pulled on his flip-flops and yelled a mighty KI-YAH! He leaped out of the door and began whipping and hitting and kicking. It was truly inspirational, and we blinked back tears (of laughter pride) as we watched his heroics.

Walking out into a locust hoard is like walking out into a rain storm, only instead of tiny drops of water, you are bombarded with insect bodies. They land in your hair, they land on your shoulders, they cover the ground. We were the lucky ones who only had to make it to our cars; the Africans, many of whom walk miles to work each day, had it much worse.

Each consecutive wave ate more. First, the pink ones ate all the green. A few weeks later, another wave of darker pink ones ate the new green. Then came yellow ones, who ate all the bark, and finally dull brown ones who ate everything that grew. All plants were mere stubs, a twig of a few centimetres poking forlornly out of the sand. The trees were stricken, and we didn’t expect them to survive.

They always came on the hottest days, adding insult to injury. I remember emerging from class one afternoon to find the sky full of a few dozens. My heart sank, knowing what was coming. Sure enough; next morning was a full-fledged invasion.

Locusts were everywhere. You’d slice open a baguette and find half a locust baked in. They got caught in the screens and died, and for months afterward we were finding bodies when we opened our windows. Every night, some would get into the house; every morning, there were bodies to be swept up. Weirdly enough, locusts would eat their dead kin. After some weeks, we were hearing rumours from our Mauritanian friends that in the interior, people were disappearing, eaten by locusts! Their dismay fed rumours that grew more and more implausible.

Invasions would typically last 2 or 3 days, until an east wind from the desert would drive them into the ocean, where they’d drown. We’d go to the beach and find piles of bodies washed up on the sand; one week we couldn’t swim because of all the carcasses in the water.

The last of the locust plague left a still, almost shell-shocked city. The locusts came to all of West Africa, but Mauritania sustained the most damage, and many people in the villages faced a terrible famine that year. Here in the city, where most of our potatoes, onions and carrots are shipped down from Europe anyway, it wasn’t so bad, but in the interior of the country, subsistence farmers were in dire straits, and many died in spite of great efforts by World Vision and other international aid organizations.

The city felt strange. It felt like a hellish autumn, as for once all the trees were bare. But the amazing thing was that life remained in those barren sticks poking out of the dry ground. In time, hedges, trees and bushes recovered, grew back, in the wildest “spring” I could ever have imagined.

That December also brought an unusual amount of flies. At the beach, I would crack open the cooler, plunge in my hand and pull out a sandwich, and in that time find my arm black with them.
It was more than a little spooky. I explained to someone at the time, “First locusts, now flies. If the water turns red, a lot of frogs appear, or anyone gets boils—I’m outta here!”

Ilsa, age 9: “You know, it doesn’t feel like 2007. It still feels like 2006.”

2006 was a relatively uneventful year for us, although frankly 2005 was such a roller-coaster that anything less than a nuclear bomb under the bed might have seemed uneventful. Life here in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania has been calm and quiet. The sand whips around your ankles, dust fills the air, it’s days since we’ve seen the sun and at night the moon has an eerie halo, but it’s a pleasant temperature, and sandstorms are certainly not out of the ordinary. The elections in the fall went well, with everyone reporting that these were the best, most honest elections this country has ever seen. The university students are still on strike and rioting, and riot police recently hammered on the door where my colleague had locked herself in the library, leaking tear gas under the door, reshaping the door with their boots and clubs and scaring her to death, but I wasn’t there so it didn’t affect me.

But it hasn’t always been this uneventful.

For example, one night in June 2002, I awoke about 1:30 a.m. to the heavy rumble of tank fire. “Donn, wake up!” I whispered. “What do you think is going on?” “Nothing,” he muttered. “Go back to sleep.” A huge explosion shook the walls of the house, followed a few minutes later by a second explosion. (He told me later that he thought, “I hate it when she’s right.”) We looked out our window towards the presidential palace, located about 2 or 3 miles across town, and we could see an airplane buzzing in circles overhead and red tracers lighting up the sky.

Donn called our friend Tim. “Tim, is this normal?” he asked. We’d been here just over a year at that point, long enough to know that we were still often surprised at how things happen here on Planet Nomad. For all we knew, it was Independence Day or something.

Tim assured us it wasn’t normal. We decided it must be a coup. Every time the walls would shake, I’d toddle off to the kids’ rooms to reassure them that we were all fine, but they slept on unawares through the whole night. Donn and I tried to sleep too, but kept startling awake to crashes and rumbles of anti-aircraft fire, tanks going down the street, etc. The fighting wasn’t too close and we were in no danger, but it was loud enough to murder sleep.

The next day, we kept the kids home from school. We knew by then it was a coup attempt, but our TV wasn’t working and we had no way of knowing what was actually going on. Ironically, Donn’s dad calling from California, where he was watching BBC news, had the most updated information. We went out on our roof to see if we could see any tanks (we’re all 13 at heart) and shared the news from California with our neighbours, also on their roof.

Later in the day, we needed food. I sent Donn out for bread. He will never let me live this down, but he wasn’t in any danger. No really. (This is actually the crux of the argument) It’s true that the embassy was saying “Stay in” and I sent him out for bread, but you have to realize that the embassy is always saying “Stay in”–they are worse than your grandmother on a cold winter’s day.

I made a pie (comfort food) and invited our next-door neighbour, another American, over. I packed a box of food staples, including extra coffee which is always needed in an emergency, or non-emergency, or is basically just always needed. Donn put together all our vital information (passports, his negatives, etc) and I went through my bookshelves to decide what to read; something that would be involving enough to distract me in the event of an evacuation without being either too intellectually challenging or too simple. I can’t remember now what it was, but I remember that I chose 2 or 3 options. I also packed my journal. We were ready to evacuate if necessary. In the meantime, we watched movies with the kids, who were only too ready to stay home from school another day.

Two days later it was over. Reuters had actually already announced that the coup was successful, but troops loyal to the president drove through the night and managed to keep power in the president’s hands, so Reuters had to add in the word “almost”. Many people were arrested, some people had died, and for weeks we’d see tanks stationed around town. After Ould Taya (then president) returned in triumph, everyone in town quickly plastered posters of his face all over their cars and drove around honking to celebrate, hanging out of their cars or sitting on top, as if he’d just won an international soccer match. Everyone was sooo happy that he was still in power, even those who earlier might not have felt that way.

Elliot, then 6, didn’t clearly understand the situation, but he was happy. He’s an orderly child, the sort who would disapprove of military coups on principle. “I’d like to buy the president a chicken sandwich,” he told me that night.

Unless my so-called-exotic-life gets more interesting, over the next few days I’ll post some other highlights of our time here.

Happy 2007! We started this year as we have started almost all years that Donn and I have been together—listening to U2’s song “New Year’s Day.” This year, we got to watch it—for Christmas, friends back home sent us the DVD of their latest tour.
New Year’s Eve was uneventful. It was the Eid al-Adha—Feast of Sacrifice, known locally as the Eid al-Hahm (literally Feast of Meat, kind of like when Americans refer to Thanksgiving as Turkey Day) or Tabaski, which is the Wolof term. (Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, but it’s had a fair influence here even on the Arabic dialect) The Eid al-Adha is one of the 3 main Muslim holidays. This one celebrates the story of Abraham’s offering of his son; in the Muslim version of the story, the son was Ishmael. If you can (and of course if you are muslim), you must kill a sheep. If you can’t, you should try to share one between several families. If you are rich, you should share your sheep with the poor.

When you walk out of your front door on a major feast day, you see several sheep, throats slit, lying on the ground. We went to bed Saturday night to the bawling of the neighbour’s feast-day sheep, penned in the yard and very unhappy about it.

Usually, feast days include lots of invitations to celebrate with friends. Even if you are not specifically invited, it’s good to stop by your friends’ houses, spend some time with them. Once again, everyone has new clothes.

But I was tired. Outside the sky was red with dust and the air was full of it; in the space of a couple of hours, our yard went from green to sand coloured. It wasn’t a very nice day to go visiting, and no one had specifically invited us. So I stayed home with the windows shut and pretended it was just New Year’s Eve. A stray cat who has adopted us (named Mona after one of Ilsa’s friends) had 3 tiny kittens under our flamboyant tree—2 black and 1 tabby-striped, tiny and wriggly and adorable. The kids are still nose-in-books from Christmas, when all 3 got riches practically without measure in the form of an entire BOX of Scholastic books (split among the 3) from a friend who’s a school-teacher. I’m still stunned by her generosity. The children surface for meals and showers, but other than that we’ve hardly seen them all week.

In the evening, 2 families joined us for a mellow, low-key celebration. One family brought their video projector, and we all watched a movie and ate popcorn. At midnight, we played U2. We realized that Donn and I have done this every year (we think) that we’ve been together, which is a really long time as we dated several years before we got married.

We slept in this morning, then spent the afternoon with friends at a big party. Happy New Year.

Resolutions? Naaw. Life’s too unpredictable.

I’ve been collecting some of the strange ways people have found my blog for a couple of months now. Here are some of my favorites.

fast thanksgiving desert (why spelling is impotent)

slurpee sand spike groundwater (yummm—EE)

idioms using decapitate (cuz you never know when you’ll need one)

women formal ready made evening dresses (Mauritania is all about formal)

ducks in the wind idioms (all we are is ducks in the wind)

describe what elizabeth 1st looked like (like a nomad, of course)

dryer buzzer won’t stop (???This has to do with my desert life how? I don’t even OWN a dryer.)

styrofoam eaten by my dog (My styrofoam was eaten by goats. And it was actually cardboard.)

redo africa song bad (Not to mention grammar bad)

how do I pronouce the work Ibuprofen (“thuh werk I-boo-pro-fen”)

how dolphins came from another planet (I can see how the web would be the place to find this information…)

“is just a handshake” (I feel sorry for whoever’s been getting this pick-up line)

When you live overseas, especially overseas as in Africa, celebrating major holidays can be a little unusual. That is, we do all the same things, but they might look a little different.
I was thinking about this as we went to buy the meat for Christmas dinner. It was Christmas Eve, a hot sunny afternoon. We stopped by Fawaz to see if they had petit pois surgelés, but they didn’t. Nobody this year had frozen peas, or broccoli, or any of the veggies I wanted that can sometimes be found here at Christmas-time. That’s ok—we had glazed carrots and fresh green beans instead, and it was good.

Afterwards Donn swings over to the meat market. We turn into a narrow, winding alley, choked with trash, live goats and sheep wandering round, lined with wooden tables piled high with slabs of meat. Flies buzz determinedly. From hooks above the tables hang sheep legs with the tail attached. (Note: this is nothing. Someday I’ll tell you about the camel market, where you can buy legs with the hoof attached) The dusty air is filled with the stench of blood.

Donn steps out and is instantly swarmed by young men brandishing hunks of sheep. They push it into his face, all talking at once about how theirs is the best, the freshest, the meatiest, the tenderest. I sit in the car, windows rolled up against the smell and the flies, and wish I had a camera with me.

He buys lots of meat. We have invited two Mauritanian men to eat dinner with us, and Mauritanians love meat and eat lots of it. This will be a new experience for them, as I will roast it with a crusty herb topping and serve it on china with gravy and mint sauce and roast potatoes, instead of boiling it without salt and serving it on a large platter. I am also passing on the intestines and organs too; even after 5 years in the desert, I just can’t stomach them, and we are inviting them to experience a Western-style Christmas.

We are still Christmas shopping. We stop by one last store, trying to find something to give Elliot. They have a French version of Pictionary for $80. We can’t do it—we decide to let him order something online. He might get it in April. But he’s got plenty of other things to open on Christmas morning. This year we got TWO parcels of gifts from friends!!

Christmas morning we spend as a family. We have baked French toast and bacon and Starbucks coffee that came in one of the parcels. We open presents, read the story. Another American family joins us for dinner, plus the 2 Mauritanian men. One brings another American friend whom we don’t know. The poor man feels very awkward, crashing a Christmas dinner, and follows me into the kitchen to apologize. But we don’t mind–after all, it is very Mauritanian to bring along extra people unannounced. We just get out another plate and there’s plenty of food.

Afterwards I make coffee and one of the men makes Mauritanian tea, very strong and minty, 3 rounds drunk in little glasses. We have pumpkin pie and fudge and mince pies and chocolate covered ginger, which I made myself this year. Some guests linger; I make more coffee, we talk with friends while carols play in the background. Some things are the same around the world.

Edited to Add: Donn wanted to make sure we were getting sheep meat instead of goat. Everytime he said, “Kebsh?” the vendors would thrust the sheep tail into his face! That’s the point of leaving the tail–to show what kind of meat it is.

I also forgot to mention that we opened presents to the thumps and bumps of construction work which is going on next door, where our neighbours are adding a couple of rooms to their house. No one around us was celebrating, but that was ok–we were.

We had our Oasis Christmas Party on Thursday night. Debbie invited all the students, teachers, and teachers’ spouses over to her house. The staff brought goodies, and about 50 or 60 people with varying levels of English crowded into one small room and chatted away.

It’s not unusual for students to give gifts to their teachers. I’ve been given a Mauritanian drum, a bright yellow purse shaped sort of like a banana but with metallic accents, white shoes with 4-inch heels, and a framed olive-tree-like piece of art. Sometimes, students buy gifts for my children.

Tom, who’s about 50, taught a beginner’s class this term. As one of his students was leaving, she handed him a wrapped parcel. “Part of it is for you and part of it is for your wife,” she explained. The student had never met or even seen Tom’s wife, but it was nice of her to think of both of them.

He opened it after all the students had gone. It contained a satchel for him and, for his wife, a pink lacy bra-and-panties set!

“Do you like jazz?” Amina asks me one day during women’s hours at the gym. I know Amina because she’s in my Advanced Conversation class at Oasis. She is kind and easy to talk to; once when our car was in the shop she gave me a ride home after class. Her car was one of the nicest I’d ever been in.

I do like jazz, I tell her. “There’s a jazz concert tonight at the CCF,” she tells me. “Would you like to go? I can pick you up at a little before 9.”

The Centre Culturel Français—the French Cultural Center—is located on the grounds of the French Embassy. Here your children can take ballet or karate classes, watch French movies, borrow French books. There are concerts and theater shows, and a small art gallery.

We go to the concert and we both enjoy it. The jazz quartet is lively and obviously enjoy themselves. It’s the drummer’s first concert in Africa, the saxophonist tells the audience. Amina has brought a camera, and afterwards has her picture taken with 2 of the band members, for a good memory. “Quelle gloire!” jokes one. (What glory!)

Afterwards, we sit in the small garden café and sip cokes and talk. I find out that she was married at 18 to her cousin, a man she did not know beforehand. “It is forbidden in our religion—a girl is supposed to be able to say no,” she says. “But in our culture they say, ‘What does she know?’ We do not marry for love.” She blinks, hard. “We have many problems, my husband and me,” she tells me. She is hungry to hear of how Donn and I met, how we fell in love.

She and her husband have a small daughter. They live in a desert town once considered part of Western Sahara but now considered part of Morocco. “I have no friends there,” she tells me. “My…how do you say it? Husband’s sister?…is jealous of me. If I go to the dentist she tells everyone I am pregnant. Why would she do that?” Surrounded by petty gossip and jealousies, unable to really talk to a husband who is often traveling, she sits in the cool garden and mourns her fate. “I was only a teenager, so young, I knew nothing before we were married.” She has enjoyed her 3 months with her family in Nouakchott but her days are numbered—she must return just after Christmas. “Please, could you come visit me there?” she begs. The words spill out of her. I imagine that it is not easy to talk of her problems to her family; she is desperate for a confidante. Throughout the conversation, she blinks back tears.

It is nearly midnight; we leave our bottles on the table and walk back out to her beautiful new car. We drive home; she drops me off.

I return to my family; to my husband of 16 years whom I did marry for love and who still loves me, even more now than he did back in 1990 when we promised each other to be together forever. I return to my 3 sleeping children; Elliot with his wild curls and mischievous brown eyes, his love of medieval times and his sense of humour; Ilsa with long golden brown hair, artistic and creative, always with her nose in a book and a funny turn of phrase; Abel with his strawberry-blonde surfer’s shaggy hair, his tender deep blue eyes, his sweetness that always seeks to build others up, his bizarre sense of humour that keeps him acting out Looney Tunes and Calvin and Hobbes.

I feel so rich that I am almost embarrassed with it. Tears sting my eyes.

It’s easy at this time of year to feel discontent. I’ve been struggling with that myself; looking at pictures online of Christmas decorations in beautiful modern houses, snow outside. This year instead of our normal tiny sort-of-pine charlie-brown-style tree, I want a big one—not even fresh, just a big artificial one so we can hang all our ornaments. But that night I see clearly; trees and tinsel, snow and trimmings are so infinitesimal as to not even be worthy to be called the frosting on the cake.

I am so rich that all the world should envy me.

Hight School

Sweat Girl

Preety Girl (in sparkles)

Given that there’s not much to do here, there are actually quite a few things for kids to get involved in that will eat up their parents’ time and money. There are tennis and karate lessons, football clubs (in the whole world, only the US calls it soccer), ballet, piano lessons offered in her home by the Russian wife of a Mauritanian man. The French School offers some after-school activities; there is the French Cultural Center where they can join a library or learn karate or ballet; there are a few private clubs.

We usually allow each child to do 2 activities, subject to parental approval on price and amount of driving involved, since both Donn and I are congenitally allergic to playing chauffeur. (You know, I bet there’s no legal driving age limit here. Hmmmm. If only they were taller…) Most activities begin in the fall, and this year we had some spirited exchanges on what, how often, when, etc.

The boys announced there’s a new club, “Football Brasilian,” where the coach actually trains and teaches the boys. This is opposed to other local private clubs, where you pay for the privilege of letting your kid just play a game with some other kids and the coach yells at them when they do something wrong—sort of a negative reinforcement method of training. Both boys are part of the “Football Brasilian” and are really enjoying it. Friends who live near play too, so there’s opportunity for car pools. Ilsa is in the school choir again, in spite of a painful experience at last year’s school concert (but at least people remember her!).

A year or two ago, a group of Americans here started a Boy Scout troop. The first year, we were the ONLY English-speaking family not involved. This was painful for our children. But who knew? Even the English and Portuguese kids were in. ONLY our children, of those in the right age group, were left behind. So last year, we knew we had to, even though I was initially informed that the Webelos group (for boys 9-11) was the short form of “We Be Loyal Scouts.” Although I had serious issues with allowing my children to join anything with such extreme grammatical problems, I did look into it and found out it is actually “We’ll be loyal scouts.” Still stupid, but at least not wrong.

This year, Elliot is a Boy Scout, Abel is a Webelos, and Ilsa is a Jr. Girl Scout. There are 4 girls in the troop, all 9, and I have to admit they are darn cute in their little green skirts. So far no cookies though, except the ones I make myself for snack. I mean, aren’t cookies the point?

I am not the ideal Scout mother. I lack energy and team spirit. I think the pseudo-military emphasis on the placement of belt buckles and shoulde