2005-03-28 - 12:59 p.m.

2ND ENTRY POSTED TODAY:

I’m in Aleg on my way to Boghé, where I will be visiting the local Girls Mentoring Center and a local Kindergarten with my counterpart Limnaye. While there, I will take advantage of the opportunity to visit other volunteers and locals who are posted in Boghé.

The past couple of weeks have been quite inspiring, busy, and filled with interesting visitors, giving me an opportunity to break away from my “six-month slump”!

Just yesterday I was able to spend the whole day and night with the US Ambassador to Mauritania, his wife (who is a Turkey Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) and a few of the USAID desk officers who came to my town to spend the night, meet with the local officials and officially open a seminar on Female Genital Mutilation this morning. Earlier in the day yesterday we were actually in Aleg, where the Ambassador officially opened a seminar on AIDS Prevention, after which we had a real feast catered at the Prefect’s house.

It was a really enjoyable day where Nina, Julian and I were able to have interesting conversations and exchanges with the Ambassador, his wife and staff members, on Human Rights Issues in Mauritania (i.e. slavery, force-feeding, child marriage, freedom of speech and political expression, girls education, etc.), Sustainable Development Issues, Local Politics and Corruption Issues, the local Education System, Embassy Programs, our current and upcoming projects in our sites, Foreign Service Career Paths, Linguistics, etc.

His Excellency Mr. Le Baron and his wife Ellie Le Baron, have spent most of their careers living in Islamic countries such as Turkey, Jordan, Dubai, Bahrein, Lebanon, and Mauritania. I was really pleased to see how, unlike other Foreign Service officers I had met in Senegal, they were actually very keen on making a “connection” to the country there are serving in, learning and practicing the local language, eating the local food, surrounding themselves with local arts and crafts, adopting certain lifestyle changes to better integrate and connect with the host country nationals and officials… my appreciation for US foreign affairs has been partly restored thanks to their positive living example!

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Teaching How to do a Feasibility Study to a group of illiterate women is certainly a rewarding and exciting experience! Wheels are finally starting to turn and my counterpart and I have started meeting with a group of approximately 25-30 women on a weekly basis to talk about Feasibility Studies and finding ways to apply this knowledge to their upcoming new income-generating activity, that will start in the next few months following a ten-day tie-dyeing and business skills workshop I am organizing in my town.

The illiteracy aspect of this initiative has forced Limnaye and I to think about alternative lesson plans that involve a lot of visual association, skits, case stories, and active participation on the part of the women. It’s been really fun and rewarding to see how involved the women are during the sessions and how visibly satisfied they are when they leave our “training tent”!

Limnaye and I will be starting a Feasibility Study series with another group of women who are getting together to open a Kindergarten for pre-school aged children – the first of its kind in Magta Lahjar. I was really happy when this group of women approached me with their request for help in compiling a business plan (of course that is not how they worded it!) as it was a sign that I did something right in communicating my role as a Small Enterpise Development Agent in town and in getting the point across as to what I was going to be able to do with and for the local people!

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Mohammed Ould Bagga, the Education Associate Peace Corps Director (APCD) was visiting my region last week to assess possible future volunteer site placements. While in Magta Lahjar he met with me and the local community leaders to help us finalize the logistics of the upcoming Girls Mentoring Center… that was also a very motivating and re-energizing visit, that helped me get some wheels turning… Al-hamdullillah! Bagga definitely does have a gift for diplomacy and political talk!! It’s always such a pleasure to have Peace Corps missions visiting my site and being able to speak English every once in a while!!!

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Before Bagga’s visit I had been busy with the local FLM branch (Federation Lutherienne Mondiale) traveling to surrounding villages with the Geneva representative who was visiting the Mauritania projects. One of our destinations was a village called Legleibatt where a few months prior a woman had given birth to quadruplets with no medical aid… three of them survived and have since been growing at a healthy rate Alhamdullillah! This family had gotten a lot of media and humanitarian aid agencies attention because of the isolation of the village and the poor living conditions in which this family found itself struggling, suddenly doubled in size and “need”.

I then visited another isolated village called Shlekha, with my counterpart a few days later… and that’s when my previous journal entry was penned away…

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Mauritania is still considered to be the most difficult Peace Corps country to serve in, according the Ambassador’s wife’s information… it definitely is one of the most interesting and fascinating countries to be serving in, still so untouched and often seeming as if “frozen in time”. So rich from the cultural, sociological, political, ethnic and economic development perspectives… definitely on the verge of imminent major transformations at the eve of oil extraction and of the birth of an oil economy. I wonder how the country and society will change…

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I think I managed to blabber quite a lot… time to wrap it up!

A tight hug and lots of love,

Jordy

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