I don't really have time to clean this up right now. I figured I'd go ahead and put it up so the text is available and I'll make it pretty later. -Will 18 Feb. 2007
La communauté des Mauritaniens de Washington DC était organisée autour d'un bureau élu par une assemblée générale. Ce bureau a pour vocation de localiser, cibler et gérer les problèmes des Mauritaniens á Washington DC. Mais faute de pouvoir séparer le politique du social, les intérêts personnels des intérêts de la communauté, des problèmes se sont infiltrés et des divisions ont vue le jour.
Cette communauté est pour tant loin d'être parmi les plus grande de Washington DC. Et elle a le plus besoin de s'organiser, vue la psychose qui existe dans ce pays depuis le 11 septembre par rapport á tout les ressortissants des pays musulmans et plus particulièrement certain pays dit sur la liste rouge dont la Mauritanie fait partie. Plusieurs personnes ont vue le FBI débarquer chez eux sans raisons apparentes sauf celles d'être Mauritanien ou d'avoir été á la mosquée pour prier ou d'avoir un nom «bizarre».
Bref on a pas besoin de citer les raisons pour lesquelles la communauté Mauritanienne a besoin de s'organiser, de s'unir, et de se souder comme toute autre communauté. Le besoin est lá, mais malheureusement les divisions sont lá aussi. Des tentatives pour résoudre ces problèmes ont vues le jour et la plus importante fut celle du mois de Février 2005 en Virginia.
En effet les deux groupes antagonistes ont vue la nécessité d'enterré leurs problème et de s'unir autour d'un seul bureau. Des hommes de bonne volonté ont travaillé six mois durant pour établir les textes, les liste et surtout informer et sensibiliser tout les concernés. Une assemblée générale regroupant tous les Mauritaniens vivant en Virginie, Maryland, et Washington DC a eu lieu á la dite date, mais les résultats n'étaient pas satisfaisants pour tous.
Une grande partie des participants ont contestés les résultats des ces élections et leur régularités, et cette tentative s'est vue échouée.
En Janvier 2006 une nouvelle tentative moins définie s'est vue échouée aussi. Mais il faut le dire il y a des hommes de bonnes volonté qui n'arrête pas de travailler dans le sens de l'unification et de l'entente. A ceux lá s'accrochent tout nos espoirs et nous les soutenons de tout nos cœurs.
Dernière nouvelles: le décès très regrettable d'un jeune Mauritanien extrêmement gentil, intelligent, et bien éduqué, du nom de Jideyne ould Hanchi. Le décès est survenu le Vendredi soir 17 Février au environs de 6h 30 alors qu'il descendait de sa voiture tout en parlant au téléphone avec sa femme. Deux individus ont garés une grosse voiture á cote de la sienne et se sont mis a lui parler. La femme, ayant tout vue par la fenêtre de la toilette, pas encore très inquiète, appelle un autre Mauritanien qui vie dans les parages et entreprend de descendre l'escalier, mais trop tard. Les deux lascars lui ont déjá tiré une balle dans le dos qui lui a traversée le cœur en le tuant sur le coup, laissant derrière lui une femme, une fille de moins d'un an, des parents et une communauté d'amis et de frères parmi lesquels il avait une place, un mot á dire et une décision á prendre. Tout de suite après tous les Mauritaniens de Washington, Virginia, et Maryland se sont retrouvés sur les lieux du crime. On a pleuré, on s'est lamenté, on s'est consolé mais on s'est aussi organisé et crée trois commissions pour s'occuper de son corps et l'envoyer en Mauritanie après toute les formalités. Le lendemain on s'est tous retrouvé a la mosquée où se sont joint á nous d'autres Mauritaniens de New York et de Richmond. Nous avons lu le Coran toute la matinée et le travail a continué avec la police, l'hôpital et les services funéraire pour que le corps puis être envoyé le plus tôt possible en Mauritanie. Que Dieu l'accueille dans son paradis et INNA LI LLAHI WE INNA ILEYHI RAJIOUNA.
Friends of the Republique Islamique de Mauritanie (FORIM), founded in January, 1996, is celebrating its tenth-year anniversary. And it is very much alive! As always, FORIM's purpose is to serve as a forum (no pun intended) for all who share the common bond of Mauritania. As Mauritania changes, so do we. La Perle is in electronic format, as one improvement. We also have a fluid network of information between Mauritania and the rest of the world, through emails, web sites, and cell phone calls, that we cannot have imagined ten years ago. What remains the same? The tea and the zrig. The need for you to get involved — according to your interests — social, educational, and/or developmental — to support Mauritania. Please contact us to get involved in Mauritania's future — for the next ten years, and beyond.
Mauritania in 1996: access to primary health care 30%, primary school enrollment rates 49%, population 2.6 million.
Mauritania in 2006: access to primary health care 70%, primary school enrollment rates 88%, population 3.0 million.
I wake up and it is already hot, though the sun is just pushing itself out of the eastern dunes, winking at me intimately reminding me of the games we play. I wake up and I'm aware that I haven't stopped dreaming. In fact, I'm swimming.
My face is covered with sand except where my eyes have left a crust of dried tears running from my eyes, to my ears, and all around the back of my head leaving the mattress soaked. I try to wipe the crust away from my eyes but my skin aches from the sand I rub into it. I swim to my hammock which is hanging inside my house from the beams in the roof and decide to stay there until I am absolutely forced to get up. But by the time I get bored and want to get up, I find that I can no longer move.
I am involved in a day that is much like the previous day, and the previous day before that, only each one has been hotter than the last. I stay in my hammock having no choice to do otherwise. I stay there until I feel an eternity of inactivity and still I am unable to move. Many months go by like that with the oddest peculiarity; night never falls, nor rises, nor comes, nor goes. All activities are done by the day and the sun feels compelled to stay in the sky, like me in my hammock.
The days grow so hot that the sun outshines everything it means to highlight. It all just stops existing and there are no people, no houses, no animals. Even the dunes melt away unto the yellow horizon. What remains is the omnipotent presence of the heat. It has a smooth and heavy texture that you can feel as it crawls up your skin, up your nose, through your nostrils, and into your lungs until you exhale the hot dusty air out of your eyes.
This becomes my solitary life of which I long to get out. I experience such longing that I desperately look to hold on to something, but even the ideas in my head are now beyond my reach. There is nothing to accompany me except this insupportable heat and the hope that time continues to happen and that I'm somehow moving forward because of it. But then, I have no way of knowing. There are no watches that tick, no clocks, no roosters, and the sun is always in the sky.
As if God suddenly answered a single desperate hope of mine, my memory comes back to me and I remember of my great adventure to the Sahara and that I have become a teacher. Nevertheless, I have yet to gain the ability to move. In fact some of my students come to visit me and we communicate through telepathy because I can't move my mouth. Then exhausted by the mental effort, they leave me lying in my Mexican hammock that my father sent me from far away. And when it comes time for me to teach, all the students pick up the school and bring it to my house so that I find myself in the middle of a classroom surrounded by a school. For a moment I am touched by their desire to learn and so I proceed to teach all the students through telepathy. But then they get tired of immobility and start to dance on the desks, in the aisles, and through the windows. Brightly colored mulahfas come in and out of a sea of white boubous flying in the air, and all the while I never move except what is the byproduct of a hot breeze rocking my hammock.
It amazes me then that the students take back the school away from me as if all of it were the most natural thing in the world. Some of them even thank me for the class before they leave. I try to smile at them, but my mouth still refuses to move.
As soon as they are gone, the sky begins to granulate. Little by little the air becomes sand until the yellowness of the sun is replaced by the dun color of sand. It becomes so thick that I fail to recognize my skin from the sand. It all blends together like water in milk being neither water nor milk. We call this zriig and drink it with sugar, but unlike zriig, sand and skin are salty.
Finally I learn to float… it's a bit like swimming or flying in a dream. I can do it without moving anything, but the mental effort is excruciating. When it comes time for me to teach again I decide to float to school so that the students don't have to carry it to me again. I float face down as if I were prostrated in levitation. I watch the sand pass by underneath me and its like this that I make my way to school, but when the students see me coming they pick up the school and carry it away from me, laughing at their ingenuity. I try to float faster but I don't know how. I push out my insides in the effort and turn red in the face and the students yell back that I'm constipated.
A small student then says that the whole thing is not polite and so they set the school down where they are, far away from the village, in the midst of a crater of dunes. Before I can get to it, the school sinks down into the sand and the students stare at me blankly. A few apologize for destroying the school but the older kids hit them and say that the school is not destroyed. They promise to dig it out tomorrow and agree that I can still teach them there on top of the dune on top of the school. I have expended so much energy getting there that I don't want it all to be in vain and yet I have little energy left to do much else but sit on the dune. And so the students follow my lead and sit opposite me quietly staring at me, and I sit quietly staring at them. It goes on like this for fifty-five minutes until one of them manages to raise his hand and say in perfect little English that it is hot. I agree with him telepathically and then somewhere below us buried deep in the sand, a bell rings.
The students walk home leaving me by myself sitting quietly on top of the dune. I sit there outlasting the sun in a staring contest. I watch it until it buries its face in the Western dunes giggling like a small child at the game we just played.
The current Mauritanian Foreign Minister Ahmed Ould Sid Ahmed has called Mauritania's ties with the United States "of paramount importance" to the moderate Islamic republic. "We hope to set an example of democracy for our region and for the continent," Mr. Ahmed said. The current administration of Eli Ould Mohamed Vall has taken several steps toward achieving a new democratic order. This includes a decree prohibiting all current military men or civilians in authority from holding office in the projected new government; a proposed constitutional amendment limiting the president to two terms; an electoral commission being set up in the hope that it will assure free and fair elections; and a commission is being created to reorganize the judiciary with the goal of sanctifying the rule of law. Mauritanian Foreign Minister Ahmed Ould Sid Ahmed met with editors and reporters of The Washington Times on Monday as part of his visit to Washington this week for the National Prayer Breakfast.
Mauritania will start oil production on 17 February and oil exports in mid-March. However a dispute between Mauritanian leaders and Australia's Woodside Petroleum means that there is still not agreement over contracts, a fortnight before an oil production deal starts. The dispute concerns amendments to four offshore production-sharing contracts between Woodside and the Government of Mauritania. The initial agreements were brokered greed by ex-President Maaouiya Ould Taya, and the amendments were signed by former oil minister Zeidane Ould Hmeida in February 2004 and March 2005. The amendments are said to cut the state's share in the oil revenue, lower corporate taxes and scrap bank guarantees that were in the initial contract. Ex-Minister Hmeida was arrested and charged in January for "serious crimes against the country's essential economic interests" in connection with the amendments. It is estimated that these amendments could cost Mauritania up to $200m a year. "Woodside is convinced that these amendments are appropriate, valid, and binding upon both parties," the company said in a statement. Chinguetti was discovered in 2001, and has proven and probable reserves of about 120 million barrels of oil. Woodside hopes to start extracting 75,000 barrels of oil a day from Chinguetti, with capacity expanding to 150,000 barrels of oil a day by early next decade.
Mauritania is staking its financial future on oil, copper, and gold reserves. Historically, mineral products continue to account for over half of total export earnings, with iron ore exports contributing 16% of GDP in 2002. The state-owned Société nationale industrielle et minière (SNIM) is the country's largest mining company. In addition, a Canadian company, First Quantum, has committed investment in the Guelb Moghrein copper and gold mine near Akjoujt. The mine is expected to begin production by the end of 2005 and to have the capacity to produce about 30,000 tons of copper and 50,000 troy ounces of gold a year over ten years. Probable crude oil reserves at present are estimated at around 600 million barrels and the sector is bound to become the major player in the economy…
Read the entire article at: http://www.eitransparency.org/countryupdates/mauritaniacountryupdate.htm
The email addresses have been stripped to protect the privacy of the membership.
The Peace Corps Partnership Program (PCPP) is a great way to stay involved in Mauritania, and continue to support development projects. Through the PCPP, current PCVs advertise projects that are in need of funding. Potential donors (thats us!) are able to review projects and donate whatever fits our budget. Currently there are no projects posted for Mauritania, but postings change quickly, so be sure to check back at:
Mauritania has held two nomadic music festivals in the past two years, one each in (February 8-12) 2004 and (April 4-8) 2005.
The first international festival of nomad music in Mauritania saw thousands packing a stadium in the capital for a concert by Malouma, the desert country's best known performer. That festival brought together 50 artists from a dozen countries with 200 local musicians, coming from several African nations as well as Europe and India.
The director of the festival, Lemrabott Mohamed Elhacen, said that 5,000 people were in the audience for the final concerts of the 2004 festival, which he said "ended in a party atmosphere and on a note of total success".
"The unexpectedly high audience figures, with 5,000 in the small Ksar stadium, has convinced us that we were right and means we can now envisage holding a festival every year," he added.
The final two concerts in 2004 included the Mauritanian diva Malouma and a group comprising musicians from France, Senegal, Guinea and Mali.
Up until 2003, Malouma had been virtually banned from performing in her own country for a decade, with her espousal of women's rights bothering traditional leaders. Her music melds western styles to the Moorish music of the Sahara.
The first group of Peace Corps volunteers (PCV) to serve in the then peaceful, newly-minted if mostly empty Islamic Republic of Mauritania arrived in the wind-blown capitol of Nouakchott on a bright day, in early December 1966. There were twelve of us, who from the beginning of training had been dubbed the Dirty Dozen. Nearly everything about the Mauritania 1 project had been extraordinary. We trained for three months at Western New Mexico University in the old mining town of Silver city, hiked and camped in the Gila Wilderness, and even spent a week on the Zuni reservation learning how to build with stone. We had subsequently been shipped to a staging area in Dakar Senegal, and there awaited the pleasure of the Mauritanian Government for nearly one more month.
Dakar had provided a glimpse of how pleasant African living could be, but Nouakchott was nothing like it. Built in a hurry by the French in the late 1950s, in preparation for independence that was granted in 1961, Nouakchott was an artificial urban conglomerate of ugly block and concrete buildings lacking any pretension to architectural merit, which even the Mauritanians disdained. Nouakchott was really a small village. There was a single, nonworking traffic light and perhaps a mile of paved road. Apart from some government ministry structures and a few substantial foreign embassy buildings, there was precious little in the way of a "city." The "city" may have had only about 5,000 inhabitants in early 1967. As in all former French colonial towns, there was, of course, a bakery to produce the daily baguette for the civilian and military French cooperants who had been unlucky enough to be posted to Nouakchott. There was a pleasant little hotel on the main street, the Al Amein, operated by an occasionally friendly French couple, along with a restaurant that offered the only palatable food in the city. Otherwise, commerce was in the hands of Mauritanians for very small stuff, and the Lebanese for all else. There was a single movie theater in the town, which, co-incident with our arrival, screened the then-recently released "Lawrence of Arabia;" to which the Mauritanians responded with much laughter.
Most of us did not know what to make of the place. Along with Peace Corps Director Collins Reynolds and PC Doctor Berkowitz, we awaited some sign from the appropriate ministry officials that (a) they still wanted us to be there, and (b) they would assign to us useful work somewhere in the vast desert that extended forever to the East of the capitol city. The French cooperants who were advising the various ministries viewed PCVs, as they had initially in all other former French colonies of West Africa--naïve, troublesome interlopers who were going to produce little of value to the government and people of Mauritania. The cooperants we dealt with were all engineers of one kind or another, and assumed that as generalists, the PCVs could not be trusted with substantive projects. Eventually, we did manage to convince the most senior of these cooperants in the Ministry of Rural Development, to at least withhold judgment about our capabilities and get us to our postings.
We spent Christmas Day at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador, treated to a good dinner and even some small presents. The entire Embassy staff participated, and most members of the staff, with the notable exception of the Deputy Chief of Mission, were happy to have us in the country. Ambassador Geoffrey Lewis made us welcome, in his awkward manner, not quite knowing whether the PCVs would enhance or mar the image of the United States in what was then one of the backwaters of American diplomacy. He did present us formally to President Moctar Ould Daddah, who received us in his very modest Presidential Palace and welcomed us warmly. We were restless though – some, seeking a more immediate integration in the local culture, took to wearing Mauritanian garb. We still knew little about the country, and certainly not very much about the racial tensions that seethed just below the surface between the desert Moors and the riverine blacks.
Eventually, the order came in January to post us to our various regional capitals. Two of us went north to Atar. The others headed South and East to take up residence, in many cases as the first Europeans perhaps in decades in such places as Kaedi, Kiffa and Tidjikja.
We were a great curiosity in some places, less so in others, but the government had done little or nothing to define the work that we were to do. From the regional cities, the central government (where all key decisions were made) looked far distant and unreachable. Some of the twelve did eventually find useful work and a good connection to their local communities, but most struggled for a constructive role within a society that was culturally difficult to penetrate, and which in any case had little regard for the very idea that young Americans could in any way improve their lot.
The Mauritania-1 experience lasted less than eight months. In June, the Arab-Israeli war broke out in the Middle East. Mauritania, like most other Arab countries, responded by breaking diplomatic relations with the United States. Most of the PCVs left the country by their own means and under difficult circumstances, with not much help from the Embassy. I found myself unable to leave Tidjikja because a local official somehow convinced himself that I would constitute a security risk if permitted to drive out alone into the desert! He held me under house arrest for a week until a Mauritanian "air force" plane was sent by the Swiss Embassy, which took responsibility for U.S. interests in Mauritania, to get me out.
The small, single engine plane of the "air force" was piloted by two Frenchmen who arrived in Tidjikja late in the day and therefore unable to make the return trip in the absence of daylight. I hosted them at my home, using the last of my canned food supplies. They supplied the beer and, after dinner, a little cognac and cigarettes. It was a pleasant enough evening. Early the nest day, the entire village turned out to say good-by, in part curious about the "war plane" that had unexpectedly landed in their unlikely place. There was no third seat on the plane, so I sat on top of a cooler that was lodged between the two pilots' seats. We flew south towards the Senegal River, but without much instrumentation. The plane was slow and noisy. Eventually we arrived, probably accidentally, somewhere near Rosso. Upon landing, the local head of the gendarmes met us, and I was escorted to the pirogue that would take me across the river and on to freedom.
Mauritania is perhaps a state of mind that remains in the unconscious long after its physical presence has been abandoned. It certainly remained with me, for I returned in 1973 to assist with the devastation of the great drought that hit the entire Sahel region in that decade. In due course, as a Peace Corps Washington official, I negotiated the re-entry of the Peace Corps in Mauritania, with Patrick Dumont as the Director to lead it, in the late 1970s. I negotiated the re-entry with the man who had been the Governor of the Tagant region, Dah Ould Sidi Ahiba, my only true Mauritanian friend. He had become Speaker of the Mauritanian Assembly, when there was still such a thing, and he welcomed me and the Peace Corps back with the hospitality of the true desert nomad.