* In 2002, I wrote my name in chalk on the wall outside my dorm room door at the Université Gaston Berger. In 2007, I confirmed that it’s still there.
* Saint-Louis is basically the same as I remember it. There are some minor changes, as in walls where they didn’t used to be. The gas station where we used to buy cheap Spanish wine-in-a-box is now totally gone, as are many of the fruit sellers on the mainland side of the Pont Faidherbe. I didn’t find my favorite Mauritanian-run shwarma place, but it’s possible that it was just closed, as it was Sunday.
* I met this year’s crop of American students at UGB. They seem pretty cool, and are enjoying something like the fifth or sixth week of student strikes. They don’t seem to have much to do there, which is something I remember all too well.
* UGB has a gym building now, which for the time being is being used as a space for the martial arts clubs.
* They moved the gare routière further outside of town in Saint-Louis — this happened right around the time when I left in May 2003, but I didn’t know that they’d moved the local garage as well. It’s now a bit out of town as well.
* It’s about two hours east from Saint-Louis to the border at Rosso. Upon getting out from the sept-places, a policeman took my passport and told me to get into another car which would drive me two minutes down the road to the police station down the road for 100 CFA ($0.20). I was a little bit paranoid that all of a sudden my passport was snatched away from me, but sure enough, it was returned to me, with an exit stamp in it once I got to the police station.
Upon exiting the police station, I was immediately surrounded with hustlers and moneychangers, who mainly wanted to know if I was going on to the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, and if I wanted to trade my euros, dollars or CFA for Mauritanian ougiya. One even decided that he would follow me onto the river ferry and kept asking if I wanted to change money, and told me that in Mauritania, they don’t take CFA, they take ougiya. (Dude, I know. But I have it on good authority that in Rosso you can get away with CFA. Plus, I’d only be there barely 20 hours, and I didn’t end up spending a dime anyway.)
Once on the other side of the border/river, I met Daniel Zhu, a guy I met online, who is currently in his 18th month (of 24), of doing Peace Corps in Rosso. How’d I know what he looks like? He’s the only Asian within a couple hundred miles. (Although he did tell me later that he’s buddies with the Chinese family that runs a restaurant and karaoke place in Nouakchott, and gets to eat there for free because he helped them translate their menu into more correct English.) Daniel is also buddies with some of the border guard guys, including Adama, a black Mauritanian, who helped me get an “unofficial” 24 hour Mauritanian visa for the “price” of 5,000 CFA ($10), payable to the border post chief, a hefty Mauritanian Arab guy who rolled in 20 minutes after we arrived at the border post, wearing a fancy embroidered boubou (loose traditional robe), sunglasses, and closely cropped facial hair. He apparently kept saying that they didn’t do 24 hour visas, but after Adama dropped the 5,000 CFA bill on his desk (even though he said he would refuse), it seemed to work. For this to work I also had to leave my passport at the office (I was assured they would keep it in a safe). Apparently the logic to this is that once you leave Rosso northward toward Nouakchott, there are several police checkpoints — and given that I was just staying in Rosso, I wouldn’t need it, and this was the border patrol’s way of making sure that I stayed put. (On the way out, it would cost me an extra 2,000 CFA ($4) to get the Mauritanians to give me an exit stamp my passport.)
* Activities in Rosso included: getting a tour of the main market area; being asked no less than half a dozen times by random dudes in big robes and occasionally turbans poking their heads out of dusty Mercedes the following question: “Nouakchott?”; meeting Dan’s Guinean barber, meeting loads of Wolof-speaking black Mauritanians, meeting Dan’s host family and the goats and rabbits that the host father is raising on the roof; Dan pointing out the huge wall around the local national police school that was funded by the EU and other foreign entities; stumbling upon a local high-school age soccer match at the Rosso soccer “stadium” (think minor-league NASCAR in Watsonville, CA in terms of atmosphere and level of dust and size); hitting up the local CD shop/electronics repair shop (also now a local recording studio thanks to Daniel); meeting a local Mauritanian rapper named “Joe” where Dan and he discussed the feasability of having a local rap contest in Rosso; going over to Dan’s friend’s Oumou’s house to watch a Senegalese wrestling match on TV followed by dinner; watching an episode of “24” on Senegalese TV and an Ivorian sitcom; watching the American film “Phone Booth” dubbed in French; heading back to Dan’s place; watching some breakdancing competitions on CDs that he had on his laptop; sleeping; walking through the market; finding his Guinean friend who ran a coffee and omlette stand; chatting with some Mauritanian guys who sat next to us; walking through the market some more; watching Dan buy a Nigerian soccer jersey for $4 (he’s collecting as many jerseys of African players as he can find); popping into a jewelery makers’ shop; showing me a Peace Corps project to turn empty oil barrels into metal cooking stoves and the guy who makes/sells them; more “Nouakchott?”; seeing the Peace Corps office inside the Rosso City Hall (it’s got tons of discarded/donated English-language novels and guidebooks); visiting a hardware store where Dan knows the owner; seeing cloth vendors in the market; eating camel liver in the market (it’s light, somewhat gamey, breaks apart really easily); meandering back down toward the border; retrieving my passport; waiting for the ferry; saying goodbye to Dan; disembarking; waiting for the Senegalese border police to carry my passport to the border post; getting my passport stamped; negotiating with a kid and an older man with a horse cart for passage to the gare routière (opening bid: 500 CFA ($1), closing bid: 100 CFA ($0.20)).
Things I learned about Mauritania from Dan:
Schools are split almost exclusively along racial lines, with the blacks going to French schools and the Arabs going to Arabic schools.
At the head of every government organization (like the local border patrol), is an Arab.
Rosso’s cybercafés recently got bumped up to a 256kps connection. Most Senegalese cybercafés are 1.24Mbps or greater. If Dan wants to use the Internet for an extended period of time, he’ll cross the border to Richard Toll, the nearest good-sized town to Rosso, Senegal. He helped one of the cybercafés install a MAME (1980s-era) video game emulator so that when kids come to the cyber, they don’t take up bandwidth playing games online — instead, they just play “Street Fighter II” locally.
Because alcohol is forbidden (“haram”) in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Dan and others often make alcohol runs to Senegal, which is 95 percent Muslim, but not an “Islamic Republic.”
Dan says it’s a good idea two get to know two types of folks in Rosso, those who run the border, and the hustlers/moneychangers. He often does favors (like putting new ringtones on their cellphones) for the hustlers, mainly to keep them at bay.
Dan, who played soccer while a student at UW-Madison, trains with the local soccer team, which competes against other teams in the country, mainly Nouakchott. Except Rosso cheats a little bit and recruits from the other side of the river.
There’s a big softball tournament amongst Peace Corps volunteers every year at the baseball field owned by the US Embassy, overlooking the Atlantic, in Dakar. Peace Corps Mauritania has won the last two years in a row, despite the fact that many of its players were less than sober at the time and that the female players have been known to flash the other team (or at least do Rockettes-style leg kicks while wearing no pants). They plan on continuing this winning strategy in 2007.
Not only can you get Senegalese TV in Rosso, you can also use Senegalese cell phone networks. Dan just discovered that via the Senegalese cell network Orange, he was able to text his Dad back in the States.
* Getting back to Dakar, seated in the last row of a sept-places in a car that had no upholstery to speak of, I frequently banged my head against raw, rusted, skanky metal, until I was able to rearrange my backpack behind me to serve as a crude pillow. The journey back included a 20 minute stop in Saint-Louis for lunch (plate of ceebujen: 400 CFA ($0.80)), getting a flat tire somewhere near Louga, stopping for a new tire about 30 min later, and the driver deciding that he wasn’t going all the way into town, meaning I had to catch a cab back and the three women that were left were none to happy about not being taken all the way into town.
And finally: 72 hours from now I’ll be on a plane to Casablanca and then onto Paris. I’ll be home two weeks from today.
