2005-03-28 - 12:56 p.m.

Journal entry excerpt dated March 25th, 2005:

The desolation starts seeping into your skin even before you get there, the moment your car leaves the paved road and doesn’t meet anything but dry, dusty, monotone land, when you start realizing that whomever is so unfortunate to live so far away, really does live in the middle of nowhere: in a landscape so unforgiving to human kind, which provides no natural solace or shelter, and bears no fruit or water.

You start seeing tents and animals; chickens, goats and children alike running away… scared of the unlikely visitors.

Your heart can’t help but feel suffocated and tightened at the sight of the extreme living conditions in which these families lead their daily lives. Where do they get their water? Where do they get medical care? How can they be healthy without any vegetable intake? Don’t they get sick from lack of hygiene?

You look at their thick, cracked, soiled skin and see the effects of hard work and harsh conditions of life “en brousse”.

And then the last stone is thrown at your face. When they bring you their children and ask you to help them, that’s when it’s hard to keep the tears back, that’s the moment when an avalanche of thoughts about your impotence and the abundance you left “back home” race to your mind.

How can all this be real? How can people back home understand what it feels like to be holding one of these children? They really do exist: these tiny creatures who should be healthy chubby kids running around playing and being loud… and yet they lay motionless and expressionless in your lap, head tilted back as it takes too much strength to keep it up, skin sagging revealing tiny sharp bones, no trace of fat or even muscles.

You can’t let your tears streak your cheeks, not yet, not there… you can just sit there feeling helpless and wait until you are back in your safe haven. But even then your mind does not give you peace: it’s been marked, most likely indelibly, by the touch of misery and injustice.

It’s in my backyard, the Aftout region, renown as the poorest and most desolated in Mauritania.

One cannot understand until one sees, touches, and sits under a tent in this desolated area with these families, who are ready to give you everything they can to provide their guest with the proper reception. One cannot understand the tightness you feel in your heart when the starving child is laying in your own lap and you realize how helpless and impotent you are in that very moment, while you’d be more than willing to “trade places” but of course can’t.

And the thoughts just don’t leave your mind, those images; those feelings have become your haunting companion.

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