Ramadan

(Oops, ok so I just found this and the matella story that I wrote back in October, so ha, I guess I’ll finally post it now. Explanations for my tardiness coming right up.)

So finally October. The first day of fall was about a week ago, and guess what the temperature was that day. 126 degrees Fahrenheit. Soon the weather will be getting mild here again, but until then, my days will consist of laying around in the shade dumping water on my head. Trust me, this is the true key to happiness. Also, did I mention it’s Ramadan again? Yep, the month of not indulging and basically existing in hell during daylight hours. It’s a little hard on the new volunteers I think because it’s impossible to make friends during this time or get any work done. No one is in a good mood and work? Please. This is normally the last thing on their minds, so add starving during the day and see how much gets done. So it started a couple of weeks ago and Ellen and I actually decided to do it. It involves fasting for a month during the daylight hours, so about 6am til 7pm. For Mauritanians, this means they can’t drink anything, smoke cigarettes, swallow their own saliva, or even brush their teeth. But Ellen and I just did the no eating thing—being in the Sahara, we decided not drinking water maybe wasn’t the safest idea. So I did it for about 2 weeks, and then yesterday I decided to stop. Reasoning: Other than the obvious fact that it just sucks, the GRE is coming up at the end of October, and every time I tried to study I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Seeing as how I don’t believe in Islam, I couldn’t rationalize sacrificing a score that could affect, you know, my future and whatnot. Also, eating a lot of food at night makes my stomach throw tantrums and I’d gotten sick at least 6 times since the start of Ramadan. With the reasons piling up, I scrapped the whole thing. The only problem is that now all of my friends in town still think I’m fasting, and since they’re so proud of me for doing it, I can’t just tell them I quit, so for the next week or so, anything I eat during the day has to be done inside and in secret. This won’t be too hard. The challenging part will be not walking out of my house with some bit of lunch stuck in my teeth. Wish me luck!

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The Matella

Here in Mauritania, most people sleep, eat, hang out, read, or whatever, on their matellas. It’s basically a foam mat about 6 feet long and 2-3 feet wide covered in fabric that is always in some state of falling apart—yes, even the brand new ones. In addition, these matellas are often dragged onto roofs where many people sleep, since it’s too hot to sleep inside or on the ground. You can usually get some sort of a breeze on the roof and it’s a great place to go when you feel like being gawked at by your neighbors.

Well the other day, I laid my 4 matellas on the roof; it’s good for discouraging critters from setting up house in your bed. Then at 4pm I left to run some errands, eat, and finally got back home at 11pm, only to find 3 matellas where 4 were left. Scandal! Where did it go?! Well, the first and most obvious possibility is that the wind carried it away and someone grabbed it. However, if that had happened, it would have landed in either of the houses directly behind or beside mine, or in the empty lot of the other side, which I’ve had happen twice before. However, it was nowhere in site and both of my neighbors and I noted that there had been a noticeable absence of wind that night. Also, if by some total impossibility a small tornado came through and it had somehow been blown over the houses behind me and into the next road, some of the neighbors would have seen it lying in the road. This was also not the case with the neighbors we asked. Next option, and the one that I suspect most: little bastard street urchins. There are quite a few of them, and with no school at the time and Ramadan in full swing, there is nothing to occupy these kids except bother the hell out of, well, whoever is in sight. Not to mention I am a prime target for any crime and attention, being white. Little kids love to bother us specifically, so stealing the white girl’s anything-at-all would easily make you a neighborhood hero. So I’m guessing they grabbed it off of my roof and carried it away, a definite possibility and not unheard of. But who knows.

One way or the other, the PC Security Officer Macire told me to file a police report. Going over to the police station, they got out a big book of reports, wrote what I told them in the book, then gave me a copy of the report. By copy, I mean a torn-out piece of notebook paper 3x3 inches with some Arabic scribble. I have included a picture of this official Mauritanian documentation.

So, this timeline is as follows: my matella was gone Saturday evening, I filed the declaration on Monday. Then, I’m walking down a street near my house the next Friday, and a Mauritanian woman walks up to me saying a bunch of stuff in Hassaniya (the local language here), of which I understand only enough to get along in the market, so to me it’s 2 minutes of blabbity blah blah blah, then at the end of all of this I finally hear the magic word: “matella”. “Matella red?” I ask excitedly in Hassaniya, to which she affirms, so I say “Matella where?!” She takes me to a house a full three streets over from mine, where another woman pulls out the missing matella—at this point stained and traumatized— from her house and hands it over. Praise be to Allah! Regardless of the condition, I’m very happy to have it back, and very anxious to pour boiling bleach water over the entire thing, because god knows what it’s been through in the last week at the hands of cruel Mauritanian children. Seeing as how it was found in an empty house three streets from mine, I’m going to go ahead and assume the wind had little to do with it. But who knows.

When I withdrew the claim at the police station, the officer was surprised that I didn’t want to pursue the matter and called my reaction “trop petit” (too small). But really what am I gonna do? It’d be unlikely to find out who did it, and there is that minute chance that it was actually the wind. And I’m glad to have it back because those things are expensive. Okay well $20 doesn’t seem like a lot now working out the math, but when it’s about 10% of your monthly salary, it adds up. Anyway, so that’s the story of the missing matella. Hopefully, this won’t turn into a series.


Anther (quick) matella story:
I have an upstairs room in my house and since the doors don’t really lock, I only kept a single crappy old matella up there to hang out and read on sometimes. Well during the summer of last year, I would often leave the doors open to cool off the room. One day a local kitty came and left me a present on the matella. The present? Guts. I’m pretty sure they were those of a goat. I promptly threw it over the wall into the empty lot next door. I think I made the right decision. Because really, if I tried to wash it (disgusting as that would be since we do laundry by hand), I would still be unable to use it later without thinking, “There were so many guts on this matella right where I’m sitting.” If other people came over, they would ask, “Hey, isn’t this the guts matella?” and then refuse to sit on it. So over the wall it went. I’ve included a picture. Sorry it’s kind of gross. Have fun seeing if you can spot the ear, jaw, and shoulder blade! :)