Chicago, Illinois.
I was posted in Maal...click here for a map of Mauritania and more details.
The final farewell: Dec
Nov Sep
Aug Jul Jun
Liz's Quick Links:
Where am I now?
How to send something to me
Why am I doing this?
Mauritania Quick Links:
CIA World Factbook - Mauritania
Current Mauritania News
Current Mauritania Time
Current Mauritania Weather
Peace Corps Quick Links:
What is the Peace Corps?
What do volunteers do?
Volunteers in Mauritania
Info for family and friends
I'm not quite sure yet. The first few months at site, I'll just be working on my language skills and getting to know the community. We had a current PC volunteer with us on site visit so she was able to ask questions of the people we met. It sounds like there is a lot of health work to be done in Maal. Some of the issues people brought up were malaria, prenatal health care, feeding centers for malnourished kids, and the lack of medication and trained medical staff. I also have concerns about the water system, general nutrition, and respiratory illness (which is a major problem and can easily be deadly here). So once I get a better handle on the language, I'm going to have plenty to keep me busy.
Weather
Haami (�hot,� the first word my host family taught me in Hassaniya). Maal is about as hot as Kaedi and, though people don�t use thermometers here, it�s probably safe to say it�s around 100 degrees each day. And the humidity during the rainy season can be rather stifling. It�s starting to cool down to a sleep-able temperature at night (outside, of course), but the nighttime deluges force me inside a couple times a week.
Pictures
Don�t ask. Uploading pics at the internet caf� here is next to impossible. And my digital camera has already succumbed to the sand, though I�m hoping only temporarily.
Food
Lots of rice, lots of oil. The typical lunch in my family is rice and fish and a few vegetables (carrots, eggplant, cabbage, turnips, potatoes, squash). Dinner is usually couscous or pasta with meat. There are a lot of animal parts I�m still not comfortable eating, so I often forgo the meat, but that may change at some point. Mauritanians don�t seem to think that veggies go with anything but fish, so if we have a dish with meat, we don�t have vegetables. Sadly, fish is getting harder to find in the market here, so my vegetable intake is quickly diminishing.
Language
Um� I�ve figured out that these 10 weeks of language training are only meant to prepare us to be able to function at a very basic level when we get to our new homes. As in, buy things at the market, greet properly, and tell people our names. I�m learning Hassaniya, a dialect of Arabic. It�s not an easy language, but I�m getting the hang of it.
of the US government or the Peace Corps.