You can take the nomad out of the desert

Nouakchott

Mauritania: my final destination for twelve hours of airline travel from Tunis to Rome to Casablanca to home. I love this country. So dearly, in fact, that I have officially decided to extend my service for another calendar year. But today, I understand why it retains its third world status. Today, I understand why, despite countless resources and infrastructure potential, it remains in the developmental dark ages.

In the past two weeks, I have been through five airports. And in each one, I endured metal detectors, passport checkpoints, embarking cards, and other such security procedures. Of course, these measures ate into a shrinking day; traveling west shaved hours from my life (no matter what I gained traveling east two weeks prior). But at least they were part of a process designed with safety and order in mind. In Mauritania, not so much.

Once off the plane, passengers pushed their way through a narrow door to meet their bureaucratic fate. No yellow lines behind which arrivals should stand and wait. No rows of impatiently tapping feet and quietly shuffling passports. No vibrantly painted booths with sour-faced customs officials. Just one dirty, underventilated, overheated window around which hostile passengers elbowed each other and thrust dirty passports. One, overworked, underpaid, and (understandably) discourteous security officer whose most pressing question was, “what is your address?” Since when did Mauritania have addresses? Or street names, for that matter? Even a spoiled, capital-dweller should know better.

The baggage claim was, in effect, worse. Aggressive porters demanded I accept their “help.” Otherwise civilized people scrambled over conveyor belts, threw luggage on the ground, and politely requested more space to maneuver their suitcase by lodging it in my shin. And when my bags turned up missing, one, incompetent man with no superiors and no last name promised he would find them, inshallah. That was over 36 hours ago.

Why not form lines? Why not paint a yellow marker on the floor? Why accept that people should conduct themselves like animals? Why not have a fixed line for an international airport? Or a proper office to file a lost baggage claim? Why reduce a decently equipped facility to utter bedlam? Why abandon civility? Are these questions too much to ask?

It’s as if Mauritania shifts our mentality. We become desperate and vulgar. We forget how the rest of the world conducts itself in public places. We prefer force to order, and in an effort to speed our processing, we block the airport’s arteries like self-absorbed, uncivilized plaque. When the process inevitably goes wrong, there is no legal recourse because there is no legal anything. Everything is haphazard and jerry-rigged. And this is status quo at the airport, taxi stands, crowded city intersections, local markets, elementary schools… How, with this systematic, conceited, unprofessional disorder, can a country expect to advance? “Divided we fall” becomes more relevant than cliché, and I witness an entire nation scurrying to shoot itself in the foot.

Like I said – and will continue to repeat silently until I convince myself – I love this country. But I need more transition time for re-entry. And maybe a yellow line or two.