Oh! Jazz Fest: a festival of jazz if you will: jazz, being that melodious rag of a thing that wanders into some smoke-filled room {the smoke: gray swirls wafting higher and higher into the darkness), settles onto a wooden crate, and slowly lulls you into an unpunctuated dream of easiness smudged with the grittiness of shattered hopes.
Oh! Jazz Fest! The experience had is nearly perfect: good people, an amazing venue, a lively nightlife, and the lack of actual jazz. The last, by the way, is what makes the event nearly perfect and not entirely so.
St. Louis is, in my opinion, a piece of paradise here on earth. The air is cool, the beach is warm, the streets are lively with the hubbub of daily activities, and people are smiling and singing. Sounds like paradise, no? Indeed.
During the festival, the RIM volunteers stay at two different hotels. One, located in the center of town, provides easy access to the seemingly never-ending nightlife, which by no means are restricted solely to nighttime hours. The other hotel, where I stay, is a 45-minute walk from the town center and only minutes from the beach. My few and precious days are spent relaxing on the hotel’s rooftop veranda, relaxing at the beach, relaxing at the RIM booth (where we “sell” Mauritanian produced odds and ends) and just plain relaxing.
There’s nothing more I can say about the trip, as the rest is better told in person…{A quick note though - a warning, if you will, bore out of my individual experiences: it is highly ill-advised to get smashed the night before one has to travel many a miles in cramped and most definitely uncomfortable conditions, as such a personal circumstance invites nothing but additional misery.}
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After St. Louis, I head north to Nouadhibou to help at the local Girls Mentoring Center – a Peace Corps run venture focusing on the education and mentorship of young Mauritanian girls. Nouadhibou is nice, but a little too nice. It is so nice in fact that I forget I’m in Mauritania. The weather is damp and cool, almost like the Northwest. The beaches are breezy and empty: Mauritanians don’t like going to the beach. Scattered on the shorelines are countless shipping boats, some – beached and rusted – look ghostly. At nighttime, we go to the Chinese restaurant, openly famous for it’s booze and prostitutes. The food is good, too.
I enjoy my time there, for the most part, but by the end of the trip I’m ready to leave and return to Kiffa. I think, dare I say, that I’m homesick…but I can’t. I come back to Nouakchott for a weeklong AIDS workshop organized by my boss. Kiffa, sadly, will have to wait.
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“Everyone has AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!”
The AIDS workshop is held in Nouakchott and consists of a handful of volunteers and our counterparts. The workshop is run by two very enthusiastic Gambians and a Peace Corps staff from Washington D.C. The information presented is already familiar to most of the volunteers, but this matters not, as the aim of the gathering is to better equip the counterparts in educating the populations of their respective towns and villages on HIV/AIDS.
I notice early on that the room is oddly black and white: most of the counterparts are Africans and not Moors, the more conservative of the two groups. I, having no great like for the Moors, let out a slight smile at the observation.
The workshop is long and tiring. The counterparts are bossy, making group work difficult. In addition, the counterparts are too comfortable sharing various parts of their sex lives that I, frankly, find neither relevant nor appropriate for the workshop and venue. {I don’t want to know that you practice polygamy because you love sex, or that during the middle of foreplay you open a condom with your teeth, or that you married you underage cousin who later cheated on you, or…and it goes on.}
In the end, however, I feel that the workshop has been useful and educative to the counterparts. We spend the last day making plans for what we will do with the information that we have learned once we return to our respective sites. I hope that everyone will follow through, or at least make an attempt in doing so.
That’s all folks! Come back soon for another whirl around the Mary-go-Round! Wheeeee!
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