From Nouakchott to St. Louis to Dieuk and back again

Christmas means snow and stockings, candy canes stolen from decorated plastic pine branches, scarves and hats and candles burning sweet smells into air warmed by fireplaces, outburst and vegetable trays and buckeyes, hugs and family and card tables from the basement and pushing cars out of snow drifts.

Christmas in Nouakchott, then, simply isn’t. The weather is mild, the company is friendly, the soft drinks are hard, and the carols and decorations seem contrived. Not all bad, but not at all Christmas.

New Year’s in St. Louis, Senegal, on the other hand, is stereotypically and perfectly New Year’s. Alienating, anonymous, something from which to recover. The vacation was not all bad: lazy days counting seashells and digging my toes into sand, adopting and naming faithful beach dogs, shivering against crisp winds off the ocean, braised lamb in basil cream sauce, savory Vietnamese tamarind soup, peeling labels off 1000cfa beers, pulsing to reggae beats at the Embuscade, and eating camembert and cherry preserves on fresh baguettes. But the moment when 2006 became 2007 and the hours thereafter were… skippable.

Luckily, detox couldn’t have happened against a more perfect backdrop. This year’s In Service Training (PC-acronymized as IST) for Environmental Education and Agroforestry was in Dieuk, a small Wolof village outside of Rosso. Nearly Peace Corps perfect,¹ Dieuk boasted motivated counterparts, organized cooperatives, tree-lined dirt roads and gardens thick with plump tomatoes, ripe bananas, sweetly decomposing palm fronds and flowering moringa. Before the training sessions, I huddled with volunteers waiting for the early morning sun to soften dawn’s damp chill. In the afternoon, eucalyptus leaves rained down in gentle gusts while I ambled along swampy creeks, disturbing warbling birds and alligator-sized lizards. Evenings were spent under the stars, stealing conversations on the balcony with my counterpart. Monsieur Ba and I slapped at mosquitoes and listened enviously to wind rushing through dense forests that would never take root in Atar. “Let’s stay,” he whispered. “Let’s not leave here.”

But we did leave². There was work to be done, children to teach, expertise to be shared. We returned to Atar saddened but rejuvenated, detached from our desert-born colleagues but bonded in our verdant nostalgia. Back in time for lunch, we shared a bowl of chebugen in silence. Hawa’s restaurant was less magical than a star-lit porch, more practical, more quotidian. Our bowls empty, we gathered our bags and attempted to return to normal life. “See you Monday?”

“Yeah. See you Monday.”

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1: Peace Corps perfect, i.e. sustainable to the point of no longer needing an outsider to help execute community development projects. Peace Corps’ ultimate goal is withdrawal: autonomous communities and unemployed volunteers.

2: Our car left in the morning, with eight people crammed in a Mercedes. Yes, eight people in a compact car that normally holds four adults. Four people in the back, two people in the front passenger seat, one person hanging out the window and sitting on the driver’s lap. Eight. Seatbelts be damned. Eight.

On the six hour drive home, Ba bought us cartons of milk, and I managed to doze off and drool on his shoulder. This was less mortifying that you might expect. Ba tolerated it gracefully and my sitemate KM cackles raucously each time I retell the story.