25.11.04 - 14:51

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have often heard the holiday referred to as Turkey Day, but that doesn't apply to me here. I am currently in Selibabe with a hoard of Peace Corps buddies, planning to celebrate tomorrow (thus allowing those teachers among us time for travel.) I will be attempting a pecan pie, in deference to the host of pecan pies always available at Joy and Doug's. (I do miss you guys! The whole crowd out yonder!) However, the closest we will come to turkey is duck and the possibility of guinea fowl. Still, the whole affair will be imbued with a sense of thankfulness never fully realized in the States.

I'd like to speak to you of the locusts. Again. Because they are here. Again. Just today a swarm sprayed through Selibabe like bullets from a machine gun.

In Kankossa, my father is beginning to plant for the third time this year; the locusts have eaten all the sprouts that came up the last two times he attempted. His garden looks like a wasteland, begging the words of T.S. Eliot: "After the torchlight red on sweaty faces/ After the frosty silence in the gardens/After the agony in stony places/The shouting and the crying... If there were the sound of water only/ Not the cicada/ And dry grass singing/ But sound of water over a rock...What is that sound high in the air/ Murmur of maternal lamentation/ Who are those hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth/ Ringed by the flat horizon only" (This from "The Wasteland" part V. One of my favorites.)

There is almost nothing in the market. There are but a few scraggly carrots and soft tomatoes. I've learned to consider an onion to be a vegetable. The worst is, this ought to be the beginning of the "season of plenty." There ought to be cabbage, okra, eggplant, squash in abundance. There should be enough to tide us over for the rest of the year, when little can be grown. Vegetables do exist, but they are of poor quality and very expensive. I am one of the supremely lucky ones: I have vitamin pills and can afford the occasional kilo of imported fruit while in Kiffa.

I heard a BBC program postulate that there will be another exodus from the rural Brousse to the cities (well, Nouakchott in particular.) People with no crops and nothing to feed their animals will have no other economic choice. I asked some colleagues if they thought this was true. "Oh, yes," one responded calmly and conversationally, perhaps even a hint of a smile stretching her lips. Typical Mauritanian. The people recognize the huge problem that faces them, but act unaffected.

Surely, there will be foreign aid. I hope it will be enough. I hope there will not be a repeat of the drought fiasco, the most recent event that led Mauitanians to be increasingly dependent on foreign aid.

I also hope that M will develop interest in the nurtition center, finally.

But, there's only so much one can do. So I'll close by saying that I also wish that there will be fudge to eat tonight. And that, at least, is something over which I have control.

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