Dust & Locusts: Two Potential Exports

=== Dust Storm Coming ===I’ve just started my (camping!) shower one Saturday afternoon when I look up into the sky and notice some clouds. Why does it always seem to rain the day before we go to or from the training center, I wondered, feeling bad for the trainees who come in from further away on bad roads. Then, a moment later I look up again and see a fast moving cloud, and brown as the sun was hot moments before. Uh oh, a dust storm, and here I am half wet, in the buff, and my laundry is hanging on the clothes line. I figured I had about two minutes to get inside. Throwing my clothes back on and leaving my shower hanging from the wall, I dashed out of the bathroom and saw Bayeh (host sister) already taking my laundry off the line, one of a dozen acts of kindness you receive here daily. I got inside my room without eating too much sand and tied some twine to my door and anchored it to my backpack to keep it from blowing open… and here I am… typing the latest AIM dispatch in my clay bread oven slash bedroom.

=== Babow, Locust Fighter ===

There’s a new addition to the practically defunct Kaedi airport – a plane! And with that, a pilot, Ahmed Babow of the Mauritanian Air Force, I guess you would call it (no jets, as of yet). I met Babow at Sydu’s, the epicierie (basically The Peach Pit for you 90210 fans) which sits next to an air conditioned hotel of sorts… Our first interaction went like this:

Me: Isellam aleykum (Peace be upon you).

Babow: Are you a Muslim?

Me: No.

Babow: Then why are you speaking Arabic?

Me: I dunno… Are you English?

Babow: No.

Me: Then why are you speaking English?

Turned out he was kidding, and the conversation did continue. When he said he spent two years in Florida learning to fly, I couldn’t resist. “Oh, you graduated from Al-Qaeda’s flight school?” I asked. He laughed, and held out his hand for a semi-high-five-slap-hand-shake, a sign here that your joke was appreciated. In fact, when he left the Sates after graduation (he attended a civilian flight school in Ft. Pierce, Florida, with the sponsorship of the Mauritanian military), his American girlfriend advised “now don’t you go flying into any buildings, you hear?”

Babow is one of the lucky ones, and by that I mean Arab looking folks who want to learn to fly planes. He graduated just weeks after 9-11. Within a few days of the events, he said in so many words that the FBI knew his favorite flavor of ice cream and whether he cries during sad movies.

The other day, Babow asked me if I wanted to see his plane up close, and I agreed with the ecitement of a small child, partly my boredom talking, partly my life long interest in aviation. We walked out onto the tarmac past some other stagiares (sorry, ladies, I asked if you could join us but he said even one was probably too many) up to a boxy and tired looking Defender (an old British twin engine turboprop, from World War One, Babow joked). She holds up to nine passengers and goes slow but plays an important role right now in Mauritania. Tucked under each wing are tanks, holding not fluel but insecticide. Babow’s job is to fly straight into the locust swarms you might have heard about on CNN (one visited Kaedi last week) and score a few points for Mauritanian farmers and herders. “How many have you killed, Babow?” I ask him in front of a few other trainees who don’t know the back story. “Millions,” he replies, coldly, holding his smile just long enough to make the others uncomfortable. The plane was a veritable crime scene, with locust guts splattered all over the engines and windshield and front side of the wings. His first request to the maintenance crews? Windshield wipers.

Babow has all the swagger of Val Kilmer’s Iceman and claimed that his boubou cost $100 US. I’m not saying he’s lying, but I’ve asked him to take me boubou shopping to see if they really do get that expensive. I’m still not convinced that you stay cool in one of those things, especially with the poofy pirate pantaloons underneath, but they do look really nice and I should get some local threads while I’m in Kaedi, which is apparently known in West Africa for its fabrics and tye-dying. When I finally do get you some photos, I hope there’s at least one of me looking like a white guy trying to look like a Mauritanian guy.

=== Daily Thought ===

In our health handbook there’s a recipe for Home Made Roach Bait, which includes such mundane ingredients as flour, water, a chopped up onion, and then voila, boric acid! That’s probably how some would describe my tuna casserole. Bad dum bum. But then it goes on to say, “be careful, boric acid can be irritating to the skin.” CAN be irritating, they say. Are there people out there who LIKE boric acid on their skin? Is this a new trend in cosmetics? Ok, this bit is going nowhere, hope you are all well!!!

-- Luke