Moments in a weekend

Saturday early afternoon

We sit in the bug-free zone of Kristen’s screened in porch. And by screened in porch, I mean a concrete overhang decorated with duct tape, nails, bungee cords, and cut up mosquito nets. She is mixing a concoction of delights: chocolate bars with an incredible melting point of at least 120 degrees, peanut butter that is little more than ground nuts in a plastic bag, honey made of dates but called whole fruit spread, and crushed graham-cracker-like cookies. I am sitting on the matela next to her, leafing through a special environmental edition of Vanity Fair from May 2006. Nearby, a radio plays a scratchy tape of NPR’s This American Life. Date unknown but the stories are timeless and hilarious.

“Here, try this one,” she says and offers me a bite of chocolate peanut butter cookie stuff.

I taste, nod, approve. “That’s pretty good.”

She looks at me, probing me for a more detailed evaluation. I admit, “It could use more cookie.”

Kristen keeps stirring, I keep flipping, the radio plays on.

A few minutes pass. “Ok, try this.”

I giggle and confess again, “Yep, more cookie.”

Stir, flip, listen.

Eventually, she hands me a star-shaped molded cookie thing. I pick it up carefully and nibble one of the slender star rays. “Yeah,” I say in between decadent bites.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. That’s the best yet. Holy crap, that’s good.”

Mauritanian butterfinger: delicious, comforting, worth its weight in ouguiyes. Or calories, as it were.

She stirs, I skim, we laugh.


Saturday afternoon

Almost five. I quicken my pace hoping to beat the clock. Nouha knows me well enough to know I’ll be a few minutes late for tea, but I make a labored effort through the sand anyway. Footsteps following me, no, chasing me, running after me. Fighting panic, I hold my pace and calmly turn to find a winded teenage boy next to me.

“Tissu, j’étais tissu,” he pants.

Cloth? He was cloth?

I tell him in French I don’t understand. Now walking beside me, he repeats himself, this time it sounds like “acheté tissue” – bought cloth, still gibberish to me. I tell him in Hassaniye I don’t understand.

“Howli?” he says, his voice agitated, increasing in volume. I understand this Arabic word – a headscarf men wear – but I can’t guess the context.

What do you want, I ask in French and then in Hassaniye. While he seems bent on confusing me, I am doubly intent on being understood.

“Tu comprends rien,” he spits and gestures rudely, too close to my face for comfort.

True, I think, I don’t understand anything. I don’t understand why you ran after me to speak nonsense in two languages. I don’t understand why you think it is ok for a man to speak to a single woman on the street of an Islamic country. I don’t understand why your subpar language skills require rude gestures and raised voices. I don’t understand.

I shake my head, continue walking, and stare straight ahead, the universal symbol for “thanks I’ll be on my way now, it was nice not communicating with you.” Oblivious to my attempted departure, he follows me and hurls a venomous mix of bilingual curses. I spin on him and demand, “why would you speak to a woman this way?” I explain that I am a woman and it’s rude to speak to me so crudely.

He counters, “you are a Frenchwoman.”

I am not French, I explain, ironically in French. I am American and who cares? Aane mra. Je suis une femme. I am a woman. You have to respect me because I am a woman.

“You aren’t muslim. Are you? Are you? If you are” he now switches to Hassaniye, screaming at me in the street, “then say Allah is great. SAY IT. SAY IT! ALLAH IS GREAT!”

I am dumbfounded, silent, disappointed. He continues his conversion efforts, and I continue walking. Eventually, he gestures toward me, peppers me with a few incomprehensible insults, and storms off. I survey the marketplace before I turn the corner to Nouha’s house. Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty faces fixed on me, devoid of pity, of empathy, of shame. Just detached interest, as if “harassing the nasraniye” was a game they bothered to catch on tv before dinner. Or a commercial interrupting their favorite show. Hardly worth watching intently, not bothersome enough to change the channel. After all, I’m not Muslim, am I?


Saturday afternoon, later

I arrive at Nouha’s for tea, shaken from earlier harassment en route. She runs through the Hassaniye greetings: how are you, is there goodness, how is work, what is new, is there health, how are you? I offer culturally appropriate responses: I’m fine, there is nothing but goodness, thank God, nothing new, I’m good.

She asks again, but more intently, “how are you?” The angle of her head and the depth of her gaze indicate that this question is not merely a cordial salutation.

I spill.

She listens, not with the half-interested gaze and incomprehension that I expect. Instead, she nods eagerly in agreement, validates my frustrations with stories of her own, and offers the sentiment that “men are…” worth a roll of her eyes. We laugh in solidarity, not as an American and a Mauritanian, but as two women who have been subjected to harassment. Who have been disappointed by inappropriate pick-up lines, indecent propositions, threats to our safety, and challenges to our modesty.

She explains how she received a late-night call just last week, a male friend inviting her to tea. “Tea.” She politely declined: it is late, you are married. He pressed; her tone remained demure but her resolve firm. He hung up on her. Impressively, he had the gall to call the next day. When he asked where she was, she lied. When he asked when she’d be in town next, she said next month. But then she was moving. When he asked her if she was ever going to come back, ever going to see him again, she shrugged a disinterested no. I interrupt her story with incredulous giggles, “And that worked?”

“Hag.” Of course it worked.

I think on this and attempt a summary of her lesson. “So that is what you have to do? Lie?”

“No,” she says, “you have to protect yourself.”

Hag. Of course I do.


Sunday early morning

I walk up the stairs to the bathroom. Over the wall, even without my glasses, I spot a small Mauritanian girl. Her face blossoms in recognition; I cannot see it but I hear it in the shrill rise of her voice, “nasraniye!!!!!” she screams as she sprints toward my compound. Her small feet pound into the dirt road as I duck behind the wall. “Donne-moi cadeau!!!!! Nasraniye-ha!!!!” She jumps up and down at the base of the wall, demanding my attention, my gifts. I just wanted to use the bathroom.


Sunday morning

What am I doing here?

I’m in Africa, in a Muslim country, in a conservative city, in a Catholic church.

Sunlight refracts through stained glass in slender frames that run from floor to ceiling. Father Mark leads the meager congregation – six people including me – in a chant that echoes off the domed ceiling and reverberates into the courtyard. I rake the depths of my memory to remember the call and response in French, “et avec votre esprit.”

Over four years ago, I said these same words in Paris, at Notre Dame and at Saint Severin. I felt no less out of place amidst the throngs of faithful Parisians and disrespectful tourists than I do now sitting with two Mauritanian men, two French nuns, one Spanish nun and Père Mark. But I feel decidedly less harassed in here than out there. Out there, in the street, in the open, exposed in Atar. Less targeted as a source of money, cadeaux, Bic pens, handshakes, tea dates, English lessons, and entertainment.

I am not Catholic, or institutionally religious for that matter, but Father Mark’s voice is gentle, his sermon welcoming. His bare feet peek out from his robe and grip the dusty tiles. He helps me find the correct page in the French hymn book. He offers to deliver the sermon in English, “non, merci, je comprends bien.” He asks me to come back next week.

Before my arrival in Mauritania, I was so dedicated to cultural integration that I refused any contacts associated with missionaries or Christian churches. This was less a commentary on global evangelism and more a realistic approach to living in an entirely Muslim country. How would I integrate with the locals if I embraced something so “other?”

In retrospect, the question seems silly. Embrace something so “other?” I am other. In a veil, speaking Hassaniye, eating with my hands, drinking tea, averting my eyes in the street, haggling for a kilo of onions, I will always be other.

Sunday afternoon

It peaceful, lunchtime so the streets are mostly empty. As I open the metal gate to the Girls Mentoring Center, a car approaches, slows to a crawl and eventually stops. Its driver leans out the window and peers at me through a howli that wraps his entire face. I enter the gate, and close it behind me. The driver stares. I lower my eyes and lock the gate. The driver stares. I realize the gate can be opened all too easily from the outside and I wonder why I even bother to lock it. The driver stares. I walk deliberately to the office and wonder why its front door only locks from the outside. The driver stares. I hope Kristen arrives soon so I am not alone for very long.

The driver stares.


Sunday evening

Hawa’s restaurant serves dinner just after sunset. Usually, the volunteers meet here to avoid cooking and usually, the female volunteers take an escort home. As in the male Peace Corps volunteer kind to avoid the male Mauritanian tour guide kind. Inevitably, one or the other will follow us home in the dark and we prefer goofy PCV antics to other approaches.

One of the male volunteers mentions that he hasn’t walked me home recently. “I should really remember to do that.”

I politely decline his perpetual service; I feel guilty taking him fifteen minutes out of his way every night and anyway, “I will have to learn to fend for myself eventually, right?”

He is doubtful and explains why. Apparently, walking past the gas station outside the Girls Mentoring Center office Friday, I won the audience of the attendants. I was oblivious to their catcalls, but the aforementioned volunteer heard and saw their chivalrous wooing attempts. “They were mimicking you, saying something about the way you were walking.”

“Wait,” I interrupted, “I was wearing a melifa Friday. I was covered head to toe in a veil. There was nothing to see.”

He shrugged, adding, “It was pretty crude.” I expected as much. What I didn’t expect was his next comment. I wanted him to say, I yelled at them, I defended your honor, I gave them a dirty look, I wanted to punch them, something gallant.

“They did a pretty good imitation of you,” he said and laughed.