Understanding a different life
Maite Uranga
Life in Africa
Last week I looked in a mirror larger than 3 inches by 3 inches for the first time in about four and a half months. It scared me. I did not recognize myself. I looked older. My hair is bleached out and in some indescribable way it simply looked like I had lived in Africa for awhile. This triggered multiple reactions, the major one being a realization that I now use very different characteristics to describe myself.
Much of how I saw myself in the United States is gone. I wear ankle length dresses everyday with my hair in a ponytail. My last name is now Ba. When people ask about my family, I immediately describe my Mauritanian family. I am rich as a result of the approximately $100 a month I make, my United States citizenship and my skin color. No one cares what my major was in college or that I even graduated from college. I left almost all of my personal possessions at home.
I speak French on a middle school level and Pulaar on a very elementary level so there are few intellectually stimulating conversations. I think two story buildings are skyscrapers. I see pavement as an American luxury. I live in a culture that considers 23-year-old men and women children, polygamy, although uncommon, is acceptable and women are supposed to stay close to home and not go gallivanting around the globe to live in strange and foreign places.
More important than the change in my material possessions is the change in all of my personal relationships. I talk to my parents for about half an hour every two weeks. I have only talked to my best friend from college twice on the phone. Some of my relationships at home have actually gotten stronger because of the honesty that letter writing tends to bring out in people. Other friends can not seem to reconnect with the lost art of letter writing so I hear from them every three months over e-mail.
No matter how much I write or talk to my family and friends they really have no understanding of my life. I can tell them how I heroically killed a scorpion with a flip flop, but they cannot truly comprehend how scary that is. They cannot understand how difficult it is to function in a place where I hear four or five languages on a daily basis without a strong grasp of any of them.
I have similar problems with my family here. I cannot talk to them very much about my life at home. I give them little bits and pieces of American life, but they cannot even imagine what a five-story building looks like. The concept of eating at a table with a fork and knife is completely foreign to them. Then there is the small problem that the average Notre Dame experience and 23-year-old single American lifestyle does not tend to be acceptable in a dry Muslim country.
The person I am in the United States and the person that I am in Mauritania seem to be so different on the surface. I laugh at things I do here that I never did in America and vice versa. Here I have become obsessively clean in some sort of attempt to have at least one thing in my life under control. Here I go to bed at 9:30 p.m. and wake up at 7 a.m. There I socialized with people around my age group. My best friends here are my 80-year-old grandmother, my 16-year-old sister and my 4-year-old little brother.
Here I have become proud to say that I am American. There I sat in front of a computer 8 hours a day in a cubicle. Here I am completely aware of the cycles of the moon and can tell time by the movements of the constellations.
All of these differences in the day-to-day existence of my life and the relationships that I have with people seem so glaring. It has forced me to look at myself differently and for purposes of mental health to search to find similarities between who I was and who I am.
After contemplating this for some days on my mat I have started to find more similarities than differences. I like to laugh. I like to be continually challenged. Friendship and family come before everything else. I like freedom. Most importantly I like waking up everyday and being happy with where I am despite the drastic changes in my life. I find joy and challenge at looking in a mirror and not recognizing the person looking back.
Maite Uranga graduated from Notre Dame in 2000 as an anthropology and government major. She is currently a Peace Corps volunteer in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Friday, February 22, 2002
