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.