inspired!

Monday night
Recovering from a gluttonous meal in town, the volunteers shuffle home in the half-lit streets of Atar. We hear a small voice from the shadows call out: “hello there.” Being a female volunteer in a large, Mauritanian, tourist-ridden city, I am well accustomed to random greetings from the locals at night. I am also well aware that a response is culturally inappropriate if not promiscuous. We ignore the salutation until it registers: that hello was delivered by a woman with a crisp British accent. Our pace slows and we search the darkness, confused but curious.

“Hello?” we call out in our mother tongue (and hopefully hers). Two figures emerge from the shadows, a pretty young blonde and her taller companion, a Latino man with dark, curly hair. We exchange names and greetings, handshakes and hellos, unsure how five PCVs and two – no make that three as their small daughter leaps out into the street – tourists should interact in a dark Mauritanian alley. It is late and we are tired, so we let the superficial greeting suffice and return home.

Tuesday morning
I am celebrating my third day of fasting with a predawn cup of porridge. Kristen sleeps inside while I finish breakfast and clean up around the compound. I am inspired – for no especially good reason – to cut large bricks of recently-bought soap into more manageable pieces. It is unnecessary busy work, but will kill time until K wakes up. I tiptoe in the bedroom, silently retrieve my leatherman and sneak into the courtyard.

Cue disaster, ten minutes later. My right hand is clamped desperately tight to the now-butchered skin between my thumb and forefinger. Blood is draining from my left hand, my face, my brain, my consciousness… I hoist my mangled hand above my head and stagger to the bedroom.

“Kristen?”

She turns in her sleep.

“Um, I think I cut my hand. I think I might need your help. Soonish. Please.”

She leaps up from the matela with surprising speed, going from REM sleep to alert in 3.7 seconds. One look at my blanched face must have convinced her to action. “Sit. Now,” she orders. I remember all of three things: the feeling of sun-warmed concrete under my thighs, Kristen gasping in horror at my wound, and my would-be nurse calmly repeating “… and breathe.”

Not that I would have bled out without her help, but I do appreciate her helping me maintain consciousness. And scrubbing the bejesus out of my wound while I was still in half-numb shock. And not being the least bit queasy about a wound she later described as “fleshy.”

I have not yet seen my wound, but I have anthropomorphized it and given it a personality. At present, wound is clean but angry and wondering whether a vacation to the Nouakchott medical office would be nice this time of year.

Tuesday afternoon
I cannot adequately express the deliciousness of fresh tomato and Vache Qui Rit (Laughing Cow) cheese on baguette with pepper and celery salt. It can only be matched by homemade peanut butter and honey made of dates on baguette. You will have to take my third world word for it.

Tuesday evening
Atar volunteers meet at Tyler’s to have tea with the British couple from the night before. Not three miniature kaas (cups) of over-sugared minty Mauritanian tea but mugs of steeped Lipton, no milk (too bad) but no sugar either (too good).

We meet Karl and Tess and their three-year-old daughter Danani. Karl is from Guam, Tess from London and the three haven’t seen “home” for three months. Over the past few years, home has been a string of organic farms all across the globe. Gallivanting agriculturally was evidently too sedentary, leading them to take a months-long vacation through northwest Africa.

Incredible.

Everything about them is incredible. Karl and Tess are entirely in love but not sickeningly so; their daughter is bilingual and brilliant but not pretentious, perfectly behaved but charmingly curious; and they all passed through Morocco on taxis and trains with a few dinars, patience, rudimentary French and two small rucksacks for luggage. After they tour Mauritania and Senegal, this extraordinary family is destined for Greece to visit relatives, then Guam to settle down.

I feel like I’ve just been told the Earth is flat. This nomadic, worldly, incredible life simply cannot be feasible, yet I see these three travelers making their dreams come true. Providing a blueprint for my own dreams…

How have I never heard about this option in life’s course catalog? How have I never heard of Worldly Workers for Organic Farms, an amorphous online association of individuals who would relocate to a foreign country and work for room and board on organic farms? It is intense cultural assimilation like Peace Corps, but sans bureaucracy. How could I not be aware of a way to enrich your child and yourself while also saving the world? My head is spinning with a multitude of previously unbroken paths now sprawling before me.

I am inspired!

Tuesday late evening
I am seated at Hawa’s restaurant with the volunteers and the British family, engaged in thoughtful conversation about language and developmental aid organizations and bissap wine… my phone sounds in my bag with a number I don’t recognize. To my delight, it is Frances. My god, it’s good to hear her voice, to explode with excitement, finally able to thank her for the packages and letters and cards and pictures. My heart suddenly hurts, realizing how much I have missed her all in one joyous painful moment. We kill a better part of a phone card before I have to reluctantly return to my bean plate, now surely but inconsequentially cold.

When we hang up, I remember she once said, “it’s as if the entire Atlantic Ocean came crashing down between us.” I am both full and empty.

Take home points are as follows:

1. Despite daily, trilingual harassment, don’t be too stubborn to return a friendly hello.
2. Don’t be disappointed about cutting your hand during Ramadan. So you can’t fast while your body heals? Big deal. Be grateful for friends trained in first aid. And the fact that you didn’t hit bone. Or nerves. “It could always be worse” is increasingly relevant.
3. Take joy in simple things without feeling simple. For gourmands like me, this means bruised tomatoes and processed cheese.
4. Seize the opportunity to be inspired. Never write off an idea or lifestyle as too crazy or impossible. But if you do, try to meet someone who can unequivocally prove you wrong.
5. Don’t be afraid to think of people who are gone for fear you might miss them. Because you will. And it will hurt. But it’s that good kind of hurt, like muscles after you run. Always exercise your love.