Mango Softballs in the Sun

I’m sitting on the porch of my house in Kiffa, drinking deep from mother Africa* as I watch my sunflowers sway in the wind and eat the beignets delivered to my door by a sullen veiled girl. A typical day in Mauritania, making it almost impossible to believe that one week ago, I was playing “Living on a Prayer” on an upside-down acoustic guitar at a free beer bonfire overlooking the ocean in Dakar while a retired Marine Corps officer screamed at dozens of Peace Corps volunteers to immediately terminate their topless relay race.

Incoming Mauritania Peace Corps volunteers are told about the annual West African International Softball Tournament, (thrown by the US Embassy in Dakar and known as WAIST) with stories such as streaking at the Marine Corps bash, making Willie Mays catches in centerfield with a bottle of Senegalese whiskey in hand, or overwhelming the local home-stay families with around the clock drunkenness. Meanwhile, teams from other countries (with names like Team Asia, the Baobab Bashers, and the Guinea Fowls) are warned not to get too close to those crazed Americans coming out of the desert. After an almost nine month incubation in Mauritania, the first year volunteers in my group were ready for fun, and the second years were keen to show us how to keep the legacy, and the lunacy, alive.

At its core, WAIST is a softball tournament, and Peace Corps Mauritania fielded two teams, Pirates #1 and Pirates #2. Our better team placed second last year and could have held their own in the competitive draw, but alcohol is not allowed on the field so they opted for the still rather serious social league. I was smartly deemed unworthy of our A team and spent the tournament with Pirates #2 at first base yelling things like “play’s at any base,” and my Little League coach Joe Blinn’s head shaking lament, “walks will kill us.”

After losing two games the first day and staying out downtown through the night and partly into the morning, Pirates #2 trudged unhappily to the field at 8:30 in the morning after a breakfast of instant coffee and ibuprofen. The opponents, a team of 14 and 15 year-old American missionary girls, were already doing infield drills. Our warm-up consisted of a couple of lunges, a pep talk from our captain Mitch, and a round of Senegalese beers.

The game started on a typical Pirates #2 note when a routine ground ball sent our shortstop down to the ground, crawling on all fours looking for the ball. Or a contact lens, it was hard to tell. The ball was well in left-center by that point, heading towards the wall after finding its way through one and then two sets of outfielders’ legs.

One of the several runs that inning was driven in by the opposing pitcher, a 12-year-old boy who looked confused when I smacked him on the rear-end with my glove and said “way to go with the pitch, Mr. Carew.” I winked at their first base coach and said “kid probably doesn’t even know who Rod Carew is.” The coach laughed but failed to find the humor when I asked the next base runner, a pretty little blonde with tight running shorts and several years to go before operating a motor vehicle, what she was doing after the game. He called time and suggested I keep my bottle of beer in foul territory and my language in fair territory. (No one can prove that this actually happened.)

The final score was 16-6, and we were lucky to keep it so close. In the next contest we faced a team of Senegalese who spoke only French and Wolof. A Wolof speaker on our team tried to distract our opponents by yelling “TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS!” but this seemed to make them play better. After several rule disputes, we began to hear whispers that we were cheating. I lost patience when they refused to believe that a ball that starts fair but rolls foul can be ruled out of play, letting out a scream of “WE INVENTED THIS GAME!!!!” We lost by one or two runs, a difficult defeat that we lamented together but celebrated privately as it meant we could focus on cheering for our winning team and sampling the many varieties of local distilled spirits without the demands of hand-eye coordination.

Meanwhile our A team was playing incredible softball, making great catches in the field and clutch hits with runners on base, and I started up our national anthem at the beginning of the championship game, standing just meters away from the previous night’s topless relay race (which maybe I didn’t even see with my own eyes). Team Asia, a group of mostly Japanese and Koreans living in Dakar, was our unlucky opponent, and to a certain degree this was a grudge match. At WAIST 2004, they defeated us in the title bout that may or may not have involved some “minor” racial slurs. Details are fuzzy.

But in 2005, old wounds were healed, Pirates #1 were in fine form, and after our victory the two teams exchanged handshakes and even some jerseys in a spirit of generous cultural exchange. I cringe to think of what would have happened had we lost, however, conjuring up only the image of NATO accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

That about covers the softball. Each WAIST the US Marines who guard the American embassy throw a party, and this year a hundred or so Peace Corps volunteers and others packed the Marines’ beachside residence. Jared and I got our hands stamped at the door, and were immediately coerced by two enlisted Marines into a foosball massacre. At 3-0 down, we realized we were in trouble. At 6-0 we saw our last glimmers of hope dashed by the sarcasm that can only come from a salty sailor on his own turf. “Hey man, I think these guys are hustling us,” one jarhead said to the other. We kept our mouths shut and blindly spun the levers. At 9-0 we finally scored but were mercifully closed out by a phantom give-and-go that made me wonder if the table were somehow rigged. War Corps 10, Peace Corps 1. I kept my mouth shout and thanked them for the game, heading towards the throbbing of music I haven’t heard in a long time.

What I’m about to say is pure speculation. Allegation is too strong of a word, and none of this can ever be proven, even with photos, which are surely fakes if they do exist. Some members of the Mauritania contingent may have possibly, kind of, sort of gotten naked and ran around the house. I wish I could give you a more concrete account, but I’m going to have to leave it at that. Me, I was there, I think, though I’m not convinced that it even happened. And maybe I wasn’t there, after all.

And then at some point in the evening I may or may not have seen the Pirates de-facto leader, an enigmatic, mysterious, almost mystical figure I’ll call Darius, walking around the party wearing only a banana leaf tied around his waist. This may (or may not) be the same fellow who called from a Mauritanian jail to say that he was caught crossing the border illegally after hours on his return trip. It’s hard to say, and again, even harder to prove.

It’s safe to say that Team Mauritania, using it’s own twisted metric system, made a strong showing at WAIST 2005. Other Peace Corps teams seemed to admire us (you guys are so crazy!), and the non-Peace Corps teams dreaded our very existence, resorting to strategies such as trying to intimidate us with logic. However, I’ve learned that criticisms from expatriate soccer moms like “you guys have too many batters in your lineup!” tend to sound a bit off the mark when countered with comments like “take off your pants!”

After a few days on bush taxis I returned to site, self-sentenced to a thousand hours of volunteering in my community until WAIST 2006. English classes and computer lessons are gaining momentum, the beignets are still fresh every morning at 7:30, and my home and garden are slowly coming together. But no matter happens in Kiffa, I’m unlikely to forget what may or may not have happened last week in Dakar.

* Not to be confused with my legitimately bad writing, this is a reference to Susana Herrera’s novel Mango Elephants in the Sun, a re-telling of her two long, boring years in the Peace Corps in Cameroon.