You Don't Remember Your Name

Halfway between Kiffa and Nouakchott with Mike Dubrall and his daughter Annika (Kankossa), I brought up that old America song about the desert and the horse and not remembering your name. “I think that song was about drugs,” Mike replied. Was Annika blushing or sunburned? We changed the subject.

That may well be, but I just returned from a camel trek in the north of Mauritania, and without any drugs or alcohol our guides were unable to remember the names of two of the four members of our group. And they have THE SAME NAME! Just a bit eerie, perhaps?

Last summer fellow PCV Keith (Atar) began to develop plans for a camel trek that would live or die in infamy. The trip covered six days and 100 kilometers, starting at the oasis of Tergit and ending up in Chinguetti, Islam’s 7^th holiest city. Jarad (Aioun) and Jared (Kobeni) and I made our way to Atar and met Keith, departing for Tergit with our backpacks and two boxes of military rations (see story in next issue “Foxhole Cooking”).

Our goals for the trip were unspoken, but understood. Have a good time. No whining. Don’t fall off. Try not to kill each other.

So did we succeed? Mostly. But I can’t fairly describe the experience in a chronological account. Instead I offer two equally true interpretations of one day.

-A La Backpacker Magazine-
Day three. We woke with the sun, ate flatbread baked in the sand under hot coals, and left our campsite around eight o’clock. Walking just ahead of the camels, we ascended a gentle grade covered in jagged boulders and slices of sun-varnished slate, where spiny black lizards took cover from the already searing sun. We reached the summit and drank in the view – an ocean of dunes interrupted a few kilometers beyond by a menacing rock face.

Our young but knowledgeable guide Saleck led us down the hill and through the valley of sand. Each successive dune passed like the face of a wave. Lashes of hot wind whipped across the marbled sand, dotted with the tracks of beetles, snakes, and camels.

After nearly three hours we reached a hand-build wooden structure at the foot of the rock face and sought refuge in a woman’s home as the camels were led to a nearby well. She prepared tea and displayed her traditional Moorish crafts for sale – red and green tea pots, beaded necklaces, and carved wooden artifacts. We passed the day with this kind woman, trying to rest with the sun and sand occasionally breaking through the cracks in the canvas walls.

After lunch we ascended the small mountain to get a view of the route covered that day. As our thighs burned from the climb we named it Mt. Misery. At the peak we explored caves dotted with animal droppings, nothing large and hungry we hoped. After descending and collecting our belongings from the woman’s house, we continued our journey until finding a well at sunset and setting up camp for the night. Exhaustion prevailed, but a sense of accomplishment was close behind. We had reached the halfway point.

-From Hunter S. Thompson’s Private Collection-
“They made a G.I. Joe doll out of that guy?” I asked, effortlessly flipping my machete into the air. “It was called The Fridge G.I. Joe,” Keith repeated for the fifth time as Jarad lit military rations aflame, sending plastic fumes into our excrement filled cave on the top of a rocky hill in the hellish Sahara. An image of William “The Refrigerator” Perry celebrating a touchdown surfaced in my brain and was quickly replaced by a Victoria’s Secret model made out of ice cubes. “We’ll call this place Mount Fridge G.I. Joe,” suggested my personal assistant Zanzibar, the three foot tall Malagasy healer we found on day 41 half-buried in sand. The name stuck and we ran down the sandy rear face of Mt. Fridge G.I. Joe as our bare feet melted in molten lava and Jarad screamed “GET TO THE CHOPPER!!!!” Keith thought he actually was Arnold Schwarzenegger from “Commando” and began to cry under a thorny tree. I comforted him by singing “Careless Whisper” and promised that he could ride Jugenjebu our German camel after lunch.

We returned to the home of the overbearing woman who tried to sell us expensive junk, propose marriage to anyone who would listen, and brag about her head lice. And that’s when we realized that Jared had been transformed into a Billy goat and was being chased by Whitaker our British camel. Back on the endless route to wherever we were going, we debated the possibility of time travel in Hassaniya, agreeing that light goes “really really fast.” Jarad brought it all together with a story about his ex-girlfriend in El Paso. “Guilty feet have got no rhythm,” he admitted.

...Both versions are more or less true, you see? The lesson is that a drug and alcohol free excursion in the desert can be even more dangerous than America and Hunter S. Thompson combined. So let’s all say it together: “NEVER AGAIN!”

Sitting Under The Plastic Tree

A popular West Africa travel guide describes the dark side of its industry: “Tourists create tremendous amounts of rubbish, particularly non-biodegradable packaging such as plastic bags and water bottles.” This, it continues, is a serious problem in areas where traditionally all trash decomposed naturally.

While there’s truth in this observation, it ignores several realities that make the environmental picture in West Africa much more complicated.

Let’s travel through Mauritania from city to town to village and see what the realities are, using my province, the Assaba, as an example. In Kiffa, a city of 50,000 with close to zero tourism, nearly every product purchased and consumed is made of or packaged in non-biodegradable materials. Combine this with desert winds and a lack of trash collection and you’ll understand why I commented in my first week that, “it seems the plastic bag tree grows very well in this country.”

From Kiffa travel 85 kilometers south through dirt and sand to Kankossa, a town of around 5,000 people. The local economy is still heavily influenced by plastic, because even without an improved road, 50-75% of the goods available in Kiffa make their way here, albeit at higher prices. Head seven kilometers southwest and you’ll reach Agmamine, a village with a population of around 1000. Because there is almost no commerce, you see few water bottles strewn about, and almost no plastic bag trees. But villagers still need buckets to bathe and wash clothes and haul water out of the well and to their door, and surprise surprise, these are the same plastic products sold in Kankossa. In this sense, Africa’s “traditional villages” are growing scarce indeed, but not thanks to tourism.

It’s a fact that globalization, or more specifically the opening up of Africa’s markets to imported products, means an increasing amount of plastic. But while westerners can identify the problem, they can’t solve it, and while they can propose solutions, they can’t fight market forces. There’s no doubt about it, plastic is just incredibly useful.

Think about it: lightweight, strong, rot and rust proof, easy to clean, and cheap. That’s why developing country businesses and consumers, with low levels of investment and income, love plastic. It scores high in a cost-benefit analysis, unlike many western-pushed development efforts, which tend to score low and thus fail no matter how hard the push.

I turn my head 180 degrees on my porch and spot the plastic items that nearly all other Mauritanian families have: buckets, bags and baggies of all sizes, floor mats, bottles, cups, shoes. And here’s a factoid that makes the already tired Globalization Kills argument even more trite: most plastic products sold in Mauritania are made in Senegal. Those evil Americans, I mean Europeans, I mean foreigners, I mean…West Africans? They must get foreign investment, the conspiracy theorist might comfortably imagine.

On a recent trip to Dakar I saw a ray of hope for the very real problem of plastic bag trees when I visited a nascent recycling business founded with the assistance of EnterpriseWorks/VITA, a US-based NGO (also my former employer). This company collects plastic waste like bags and sandals, chops it up using everything from machines to an old man with a machete, and sells it back to Dakar’s plastic manufacturers as pellets. With good management, good marketing, and good luck, this will become a profitable business, and plastic producers will as a matter of course churn out new products with a percentage of recycled material. Not because they’re environmentalists, but because it’s good business.

So here’s my two cents on the global energy and sanitation situation. Extracting petroleum from rock or ocean governed by myopic thugs will never foster political stability, civil society or economic development for all. Let’s take all the bright minds we can spare and make alternative energy more economical. Let’s work on market-based recycling. Let’s fight corruption and push for governments that collect more trash and buy fewer cars. And let’s encourage tourists to leave a small footprint.

But don’t cry out that plastic is destroying Africa. The alternatives – making everyday products out of wood or metal or not having them at all – could be just as bad or even more destructive.