Sense of family provides stability abroad
Maite Uranga
Life in Africa
I just got back from my first vacation since I have been in Mauritania. I knew it was going to be great the minute I walked onto the Air France flight. It looked so clean and organized. The seats felt like absolute luxury, the food was great and there was actually the concept of customer service in action. The vacation portion of it involved mountains, trees, waterfalls, islands and ice cream. All of these Mauritania has little to none of — which made it wonderful.
The flight back was one of those high- tech planes with individual television screens and choice of movie options of video games. As my plane left green and water, I played Tetris and suddenly I realized the enormity of what lays ahead of me. I tend to take my life here week by week and sometimes even day by day. For some reason, instead of next week or tomorrow ahead of me, I saw 17 months.
Seventeen months is a long time when you are in your mid-twenties, especially here. Using averages and some guesswork, that involves 673 more trips to the faucet with my bucket, 342 more hours squashed in a bush taxi, 185 more days of waking up already sweating, 1.5 more mysterious illnesses, 1,203 government forms and at least 22 lost letters.
This seems like an enormous amount of stress and in many ways unnecessary. I could be working in a cubicle, sitting in a comfortable chair with the Internet, phones and printers at my fingertips. Food would be within walking distance and possibly even in the same air conditioned building. People would speak my language. My hours would be fairly certain and my job defined. It is a hard choice some days between the chaos of Africa and the order of America.
On top of this I have been in country for almost a year. In this time I have seen a lot of Mauritania, learned French and Pulaar to an extent, read 39 books, made some friends, provided a lot of cross cultural exchange and completed some small work projects. As I played Tetris in the luxury of economy class I concluded that leaving around my one year anniversary did not seem like a bad option.
The plane landed and the flight attendant made me get off the plane. Over the next few days I slowly readjusted myself to Mauritania. Instead of focusing on 17 months I readjusted to thinking about it in a day to day mentality and also on the 11 months I have been here. The day before I planned to leave the capital for my site I stopped by my host family's house in Nouakchott. There were the usual smiles and level of excitement as I entered the house. They asked about my vacation, my family at home and other Peace Corps volunteers here.
Then they told me my host grandmother was there in the back room. Mauritanians never really come out with a direct reason for a situation or a specific answer to a question. All they told me was that she was visiting. I immediately knew something was wrong because she never even goes into the regional capital which is half an hour away. She would never make the six hour trip to Nouakchott just for a visit.
I walked into the room and saw her lying on a mat surrounded by four of her daughters who live in various places in Mauritania and Senegal. She saw me walk in and smiled. We did the standard five minute greeting as if nothing happened. One of her daughters told me she had been asking where I was for about a week and kept talking about me and trying to figure out when I would be back.
My French is OK, but communicating medical terms and situations is not something I can do. All they kept saying to me in Pulaar was, "Our mother is tired." Without even thinking they included me in the "our."
Suddenly the next 17 months did not seem as overwhelming as I realized I had a family. Seventeen months did not seem as dire as I held my grandmother's hand and told her my parents in America said hello.
Maite Uranga graduated from Notre Dame in 2001 as an anthropology and government major. She is currently serving as 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 Tuesday, April 23, 2002
