Blogs from Mauritania, Africa - page 4

We took a mercedes grand-taxi from Nouakchott to Nema, 1000km away near the Malian border. The trip took 25 hours through rain storms, lightning storms, sunshine and darkness. At one stage we were crawling through a flood in the very middle of a thunder and lightning storm, with water around our feet from the flood around us and coming through the roof from the rain. For a while we lost the road but eventually found it again. Our taxi driver was an absolute legend - in those 25 hours he drove for 23 and slept for 2 - and he kept the car ticking over, bending the radiheater pump upwards when we were driving through deep floods to create a sort of snorkle for the engine. At times floods were too deep and we had to ... read more

so today Im in nouackchott, theres not much here and Im just resting before I head for saint louis (senegal) through rosso. thus, Ive decided to talk about lariam. honestly, I was quite curious about the effects this antipaludic might have on me, or on anybody else for that matter (as I manifested by asking about it to any single person that had taken it). these effects, besides prevcenting mmalaria with about a 90% of effectiveness are mainly psicological and range from VIVID dremas to mild hallucinations, passing by the always sweet road of paranoia. I had heard people having some crazy ing dreams, not nightmares, just dreams so intense that wouldnt let them rest. heard of others having strong paranoia, which might be quite fun when youre the only skinny weak white piece of around. ... read more

there are no words nor images nor smells to describe the train trip. but Ill try... so heres the thing, the train comes to nouadibou from somewhere in the middle of the dessert full of minerals, is emptied in the port, and then goes back. this happens two or three times a day (insh alah!), and of course the train is only cleaned before its loaded with minerazls, which means that by the tilme it gets to nouadibou it has a pretty thick layer of toxic silverish . and so the train leaves from nouadibou port, and sometimes (god onbly knows the algorithm determining when) it stops and lets people get in (get in is some of an undertstatement, as Ill explain later). I was lucky enough to only have to wait 6 hours for the ... read more

The Moroccan side of the border took us just over 3 hours to get through, lot of bureaucracy we got stopped no less than 3 times within the frontier, police stop, army stop etc. Then after we are through comes 3 km of no mans land full of garbage and abandoned cars, we stopped a moment to help a stranded car in the sands little did we know we will get stuck as well, out the tire mats and we worked hard to dig betsy out and by the time we got to the Mauritanian frontier it was quarter to 3, the border closed from 1pm to 3pm for lunch, but we hadnt had lunch yet so we set up our kitchen right at the border and have to catch up with the truck as it ... read more

Hey Everyone, I think it’s being about a month or so since I updated my blog. Don’t know if anyone even reads these but I thought that I would still write on the chance that people are. Things have being very hectic the last few weeks. I have being at site for about five weeks, which is to long for me. After about week four, I’m feeling the need to talk to my parents or use the computer. School has being slightly chaotic. My school director left to go to another town and he was not replaced for about two weeks or so. Then a new director came but he did not plan on staying in aoujeft and was only their for a week and a half and then left and now we have a new ... read more