Saharan Adventures: Nearing the end

I've spent the last couple of days visiting different projects and meeting community members and sponsored children. It has been a whirlwind trip with a lot of driving. There is a good road between Nouakchott and Kiffa, but once you get off that road to get to the communities where we work, the trips get interesting. All of a sudden the road just sort of stops and you find yourself following well worn tracks in the sand. In some places even those disappear and you're just driving through fields and sand dunes. In some places it is what I imagine the Paris-Dakar Rally to be like. I have spent a lot of the past couple of days being thrown around the back seat of a Land Cruiser and I have the bruises to prove it. Eventually we reach our destinations, small towns in the middle of nowhere built where there is water at least part of the year. These towns don't make any sense right now at the end of the dry season, but I am told that ones the rains come the landscape changes completely, from dry and dusty to lush green grasslands and rivers cutting off communities from each other. From the towns where we have our project offices we go out into the surrounding communities, tiny villages seperated by kilometers of sand and dried out river beds. I was priviledged to be able to meet some of the community members and to celebrate with them the completion of a water system that provides clean water to 5 villages and the school they share. A beautiful old woman, back bent and skin wrinkled grasped my hand with surprising strength as she told me about the difference these water taps made to the health of their children. I was humbled to be invited into the home of one of the families, served sweetened milk and tea and told that this was my home, that I should feel free to visit it anytime. I sat with a shy girl sponsored through our project and when I asked why she was so quiet, found out that I was the first white person that she, or even her mother, had ever seen in real life.

This country is at once beautiful, desperate, magnetic and repulsive. The landscape is varied, from rolling sand dunes dotted with Nime trees and thorny bushes, to flat expanses of rocky nothingness. There is a string of mountains that crosses Mauritania reminding me of pictures I've seen of the grand canyon. These mountains hide valleys full of date palms and sand dunes, an oasis pitcuresque and exotic. The towns are teaming with people, selling and buying, donkey carts loaded with people and products, the streets bustling and full of garbage. The outlying areas seem sparsely populated with tents and small houses in little clusters in the middle of nowhere, seemingly deserted. Small herds of cows, camels, sheep and goats dot the landscape, crossing the roads and causing some heart stopping moments in the Land Cruiser. There are empty burned out car frames along the side of the roads, stripped of anything that could possibly be of value and left to rot, looking every bit like a decaying carcass in the hot desert sun. When the wind picks up it carries sand through the air like a cloud, getting in your eyes and nose. When I get to wherever I am staying at the end of the day I am always surprised by the amount of sand in my ears.

I only have two more days here. Part of me is sad that this adventure is almost over. The heat doesn't seem quite so oppressive, and the people are warm and welcoming. I am learning a lot and the work is going well. I have spent the past week speaking only French and I am pleased with how effortless that has been most of the time. However, a bigger part of me is really looking forward to heading back to Canada and to being out of the sweltering sun, back in the more reasonable temperatures of a Canadian summer.