Watching Your Language

== 17, 18, 19, ummm, let’s skip to 30 ===
Hassaniya can be a bit of a tight rope walk. One tiny slip and you’ve said something drastically different from what you intended. “I’m going to tickle you” can easily come out as “I’m going to take a, um…well… a you know what on you.” And I learned why kids here laugh when you teach them English numbers. The word “twenty” means “my little female reproductive organ” in Hassaniya, except not so delicately worded. So when I went to the bank the other day and said “Will you accept this 20?” maybe that’s why they escorted me outside?

=== Molasses. Glaciers. Sloths. Internet access. ===
Some things were just designed to be slow, and the internet access in Kaedi is no exception. During a presentation to the Peace Corps business trainees, the new general manager of the Association of Mauritanian Internet Providers spoke about the challenges of providing service in this country. I don’t envy him. There’s a government monopoly on the supply side, basically meaning that an internet café pays $300 or so USD a month for about 64 kilobits per secord or roughly enough for one dial up connection. Split amongst 15-20 computers it’s not hard to see why sometimes it takes 20 minutes to send one email. And when the line goes down, you still pay... Sounds a little like the heyday of AT&T, but worse…

He quoted the investment in the internet café in Selibaby as being $100,000 US. It’s hard to imagine how you could spend that much here on an air-conditioned room with 15 generic PCs, but I guess anything is possible… maybe it is expensive to make the required 12 color copies of the President who stares at you from every corner of the room? And is it just me or does he look like Vicente Fox’s long lost twin?

Back to the financial situation, some back of the envelope math led me to believe that at 200 ougiyas (less than a dollar) an hour you’d need five or more years to make your money back, assuming a pretty healthy profit margin an, ahem, that all computers are occupied 24 hours a day. In other words, government (or foreign aid) subsidies will be floating my ability to send emails for the foreseeable future.