Tomorrow is the last day of school for the year. We will have a week out of classes before the students come back and do their end of the tri-mestre exams. As soon as the students come back for exams though, I will be leaving for two weeks of liver-pounding fun in Nouakchott and St. Louis. I am inconceivably excited to leave Akjoujt for a while and spend some time with friends I have not seen for three months.

The last month has been fairly action packed, in a Mauritanian sense. I went with the other volunteers from Akjoujt and the volunteers in the Adrar region to Atar for thanksgiving and then on to Chinguetti for a camel trek. I ate a ton of food, including cherry and pumpkin pies (thank you heather), good chicken, mashed potatoes, pesto, and other stuff I can't recall. The camel trek was really enjoyable. Although camels aren't a particularly comfortable animal to ride and it is much to cold in the desert for my now uber thin blooded self. The massive sand dunes around Chinguetti are amazing...just endless nothingness.

On the way to Atar we were accompanied by a goat. This goat was a gift to Kristen (PCV Atar) and what is a camel trek without adequate sustenance. There was no room in the truck for the goat, so we did the Mauritanian thing and strapped him in a burlap sack to the roof of the vehicle. Two hours later we arrived in Chinguetti, Mark (PCV Atar) having been peed on by this goat through an open window, me having no more feeling remaining in my legs, and the goat sufficiently tenderized from regular "bumps" on an unpaved African highway. The key to any good goat meal is in the preparation. The two hours of tenderizing, and the Moroccan who prepared this goat, resulted in the best goat meal I have ever had.

Work in Akjoujt has been pretty normal. My two fifth year classes are enjoyable, because the students listen to what I say. My fourth year class is extremely frustrating, because they talk constantly and then complain about not understanding. Aparently, the students have complained to the school administration that my American accent is incomprehensible and they are used an English accent instead. So I suppose I'll start throwing in some "by joves," "prams," and "lifts" to appease them.

It will be interesting spending a Christmas outside of the U.S. or rather inside a country that doesn't celebrate christmas. I kind of forgot about thanksgiving until it came, and then was kind of bummed out to miss out on football, turkeys, etc. I suppose Christmas will be the same. I'll have a really fun time in Nouakchott and St. Louis with friend, but it would still be nice to see family...and eat ham.

It is good to hear that TU throughly thrashed Houston on their way to a conference championship. Dustin's mentioning of a tailgate ham made me think, why hadn't we thought of that before? I was somewhat dumbfounded to see that Kansas and Missouri are both ranked in the top ten, I guess you leave the country and everything goes to hell.

Last weekend I left Akjoujt for the first time in two months. I and the other volunteers in town (Hayley, Christine and Aaron) all went to visit other volunteers in Atar and have a halloween party. It is the peak tourist season in Atar and it was interesting to see tons of white people walking around. It felt weird to be somewhat anonymous again. We had a fun time in Atar, but mostly it was nice to get out of town for a few days. We will be heading back that way for thanksgiving and then further east to Chinguetti to do a three day camel trek over thanksgiving weekend. Chinguetti is an ancient town and the seventh holiest city in Islam. After that its only three weeks or so until we head to Nouakchott/St. Louis.

Prior to going to Atar for halloween we attended a party at our "club" for our friend Mario who was leaving Akjoujt to go to work in Zambia. Mario does an awesome karaoke version of all of Bon Jovi's greatest tunes. For this party we had a karaoke contest, with the winners recieving some spirited beverages. The karaoke machine gives you a score if you are on pitch and have the correct rhythm. A singles and a duet champion were proclaimed, I am proud to say the team Peace Corps won both prizes. Aaron won the singles and Hayley and I the doubles.

The next night we went to the home of Mario, he lived with a number of other filipino miners, and had a meal. I have never eaten so much good food in my entire life. We had fried chicken, steak, prawns, french fries, some delicious filipino meat bread, doughnuts and about ten thousand cold ones. I almost exploded...and then we did it again the next night. The filipino's have similar hospitality to the mauritanians, which is you should eat until you are considerably uncomfortable. Their food, however, I like.

In work related news, I gave a test this week to my English classes. I had to fail six students because of cheating. Generally, these were students who had not been attending classes and so did not know the material. These students decided though to cheat off of other students who hadn't attended classes. I would hope that if you are going to give the effort to cheat that you should at least be smart about it.

Thats about all thats been going on...I'll try to update again in the next few weeks.

Long time no post...

Well I finally have a bit of internet access after spending the last six weeks without it. Quite a bit has happened since I lasted posted.

1) I swore in as a Peace Corps volunteer
2) I left my family in Kaedi and moved into my own house in Akjoujt
3) I survived the boredom of Ramadan
4) I started my work as a teacher
5) I was robbed

I swore in as a volunteer on Sept. 6. This involved a number of speeches in languages I do not understand, meeting the deputy ambassador for Mauritania, me swearing to uphold the US Constitution and going to a bitchin' party later that night. Memories of the party are fleeting, but some footage of me dancing and singing jubilantly/impairedly is available in some areas of the country. We had a mexican fiesta for our food at the party, and when we ran out of tortillas for the bean dip I was forced to rely on the obvious backup of grilled chicken.

I left my family earlier in that week. While I was eager to move to Akjoujt and have my own space, my family in Kaedi had about thirty people in the same compound, it was somewhat sad to leave these people who had helped me so much over the past ten weeks.

After our Sept. 6 swear-in party and the day of recuperation that followed, all of the volunteers left Kaedi for our respective sites. This was a tough day. Saying goodbye to good friends that you had seen everyday over the previous ten stressful weeks, but this will make Christmas even more fun this year as we will all return to Nouakchott for a week of rest and relaxation before going to Senegal for new years and more rest and relaxation.

A week after arriving in Akjoujt with my sitemates Hayley, Christine and Aaron, Ramadan began. I did not fast for ramadan. In Sept. the temperature was typically between 45 and 50 celcius during the day. Being unable to drink water during those periods is devotion I was not willing to exhibit, especially since I am not a muslim. Life during Ramadan kind of grinds to a stop. People are too tired to do anything during the day except sleep and get very little sleep during the day as they attempt to eat enough for an entire day while the sun is down. School started in the middle of Ramadan on Oct. 1. Therefore, school did not really start at all.

My teaching schedule is four hours on Monday and Friday mornings. I wish they would have given me more hours, but this is what I was assigned. I have had a number or requests to teach English outside of the school, including a request from Mauritania's first female governor. Hopefully I will be able to find something to keep me busy during the middle of the week, besides going to our club.

I taught my first class with students on Monday Oct. 8 and during that class my home was robbed. The iron bars on my bedroom window were ripped off and the thief entered and removed my Ipod and digital camera. This kind of fucking sucked. I had not uploaded the pictures from my time in Mauritania and the Ipod was my form of western entertainment. Akjoujt's finest are on the case, but I am writing that down as a loss. What angers me the most is that the robbery happened while I was doing a job for the community, which the community had explicitedly requested. That was frustrating.

That is a brief synopsis of the past six weeks. Other things that happened include:

1) I Ate sheep head
2) Watched a number of rugby matches and have concluded that the sport is crap
3) Found out I have lost 50 pounds since arriving in Mauritania
4) Climbed a mountain, which is actually just a big hill in the middle of the desert
5) Consumed quite a few of Danish's finest refreshments
6) Bought a new boubou, a traditional berber robe for the end of ramadan fete

On my agenda for the next couple of weeks is teaching, a meeting with the governor to set up a conversation class for Mauritanian government officials, a goodbye karaoke party for a filipino miner, catholic mass, and a halloween party/road trip to Atar.

My First Teaching Experience

This week the education volunteers began model school. Essentially, model school is a crash course in teaching that each ed. Volunteer participates in before we complete our training. Students from the community recieve three hours of English instruction per day and we get teaching experience.

After observing host country teachers for the first part of the week, I taught for the first time on Friday. I had the most advanced students and I prepared a lesson on transition word between sentences. I began the class by having the students read a text containing the five different varieties of transition words. However, it soon became evident that they had no idea what I was talking about and the lesson was much too advanced. I had to think on my feet and redesign my total lesson plan as I went. At the end of the class a few of the students understood transition words and how to use them, so I suppose it was not a total failure.

I think teaching English classes to non-English speakers is going to help me in a number of ways. My own speech will need to become much more precise and I will often have to think of different ways to convey my thoughts. Furthermore, my ability to make instant changes to my lesson plan and still have a coherent presentation tailored to my audiences understanding will be good practice for whatever field I later go into.

I will be teaching for an hour everyday for the next two weeks and after that two weeks all of the trainees will be returning to Kaedi for the final phase of our training before being sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers. My French classes have been cut in half due to model school in the morning. The class has kind of changed into a strictly conversation class, which I am more than ok with. Yesterday, we discussed our favorite rappers, the importance of mo-town in the civil rights movement, and played a french game called loup-garous. My language teacher, Ali, is a super nice guy and I look forward to visiting him in Nouakchott during the two years of service.

In general, I am really eager to begin the transition into my site community and have a better feel of what my two years of service will be like. It seems like I did not get the entire picture of Akjoujt during my site visit. I look forward to exploring the city and beginning my work.

I Found Out Where I Am Going to be Living

The last few weeks have been extremely busy. Monday through Friday I have had seven hours of French instruction and then on the weekends technical training. Therefore; I have not been able to post on this blog with any regularity.

The most exciting news in the last month was the announcement of our permanent sites. I have been assigned to the Lycee in Akjoujt. Akjoujt is about three hours northeast of the capitol Nouakchott and two hours southwest of Mauritanias major tourist draw Atar. The area is in the Sahara and surrounded by moutains and dunes.

I traveled with the other future volunteers in the Adrar and Inciri regions; the regions whose capitals are Atar and Akjoujt and spent about a week there. I will live in Akjoujt with three other volunteers doing agroforestry, environmental education and girls empowerment. We are the first ever volunteers in the Inciri region and so have to do quite bit of legwork to establish the Peace Corps in Akjoujt. The town and region officials I met with during this visit were very welcoming and forgave my limited French and nonexistant Arabic.

Akjoujt is somewhat different than other Mauritanian cities, as it happens to have a lot of western expatriates and probably one of my favorite things in the world.

I have about three more weeks of intense French or Arabic languange training and mock classes before I am sworn in as a volunteer and relocate to Akjoujt. I should be extremely busy, which will immediately change when I arrive in Akjoujt and ramadan begins. Due to the inability to eat or drink during the day, in the middle of the sahara, Mauritanians do not do alot of activities during ramadan. I hope it is a nice period of adjustment to my new home.

My First Sandstorm

Things are going well here in Kaedi. I had to switch language instructors; the new language instructor makes the class omelettes so I think I will live.

On Tuesday night I went to sleep outside as I usually do. It is nice sleeping outside. The air is much cooler there than inside and you get to fall asleep looking at the un-light polluted sky. But on Tuesday night I was awaken by some very strong winds and as I opened my eyes and noticed that I could no longer see the beautiful sky, I said to myself you should probably go inside. The house was then pounded by winds and sand the rest of the evening and when I awoke everything I owned had a layer of dust covering it.

I have arrived in Africa. After traveling from Tulsa to Philadelphia to Dakar to Noaukchott to Kaedi, I should be stationary for the next few weeks. The plane ride from Philadelphia to Dakar was as uneventful as a good plane trip can be. On the other hand, our flight from Dakar to Noaukchott landed so hard that the door to the cockpit flew open.

Noaukchott was interesting. Trash is not picked up in Mauritania and instead it is left wherever it happens to fall. The city is very busy, although it was not clear to me what everyone was doing. Life in Mauritania consists of a lot of hanging out, especially during the hot part of the day, and drinking a sugary shot of mint tea three times in repetition with friends or strangers.

After receiving more innoculations and my malaria pills our group of 75 stagaires set off on a bus to Kaedi. We are the largest group of stagaires in the history of the Peace Corps in Mauritania and thus needed large transportation for our 450 km trip to the east. We travelled in an old Spanish bus that had one of those accordion connecters in the middle. The bus trip took nine hours and only a few times did I think I was going to die.

I had my first traditional Mauritania meal that night in Kaedi with a few other stagaires and a Hassaniya instructor. Maurtinian food is eaten out of a communal bowl using only the right hand, the left hand is used for other dirtier tasks. We had sheep and couscous that was pretty tasty, although the dishes here are usually drenched in oils.

The next week were spent at a Lycee in Kaedi where all of the stagaires went through various training seminars and generally getting to know Mauritanian culture and the demands of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. Also we were able to get to know the fellow stagaires we will be working with during the next two years.

After a week at the Lycee we were assigned languages to study and moved to homestay families. I will be studying French and then Hassiniya, the Mauritanian dialect of Arabic, and I am staying with a host family in Kaedi. Other stagaires are in the region, but not necessarily the city of Kaedi. About half of the stagaiers remained in Kaedi, which is good for socializing and that sort.

My host family is led by Omar and also contains five other families. Omar is my host father and renamed me Moktar. Omar is the only real speaker of French, the rest speak some french and alot more Hassiniya. Despite our use of an outdoor toilet and the unclean water, we do have satellite television and I was able to watch the U.S. lose to Colombia on Friday night. About 300 hundred kids are around my house all the time asking me questions about America or anything else that pops into their minds. I had the unfortunate duty of telling my host brother that while I did not personally know the Notorious B.I.G., I did know that he had been dead for quite some time.

I have French class for six hours a day M-F and on Saturdays and Sundays I do absolutely nothing. Thus I am free to spend sometime at the internet cafe here in downtown Kaedi. I had written most of this post yesterday but was thwarted by a city wide electrical outage. Now that I have some stability I will try to post with some regularity.

I Started a Blog

Things today I have accomplished:

1. Went to work
2. Started a blog

Things today I need to accomplish:

1. Buy pants
2. Upload music to new iPod
3. Drink beer
4. So much more it is a bit distressing