Teatime in Mauritania
Sahara Desert 2006 … somewhere in Mauritania.
I thought you’d like to see what a nomad’s tent looks like inside. This is a Mauritanian tent and is different from the Moroccan tent I showed you a couple of days ago. The tents used in Mauritania are white cotton, often lined with colorful prints although this one isn’t. I’m sure the prettier ones are too expensive for most Mauritanians. The fabric is woven in narrow strips by the Dogon of Mali. It’s about a foot wide and many yards long, then it is sewn together to make the tent. They are huge, much more spacious than the Moroccan tents. Over in the corner, you see a pile of belongings. This is the ‘cupboard’. And it looks like they’ve made a sort of room using tree trunks. Maybe this is for privacy, for bathing and other activities. The women sit on the sand. Between them is a tray that holds a teapot and glasses. They have prepared tea for us as is their custom. The woman who is facing us has hands that are stained blue from her indigo dyed clothing. Not only do these people and the Touareg tribe consider the blue stain beautiful, but they also thinks it protects their skin from the sun. You might not think that these people try to avoid the sun, but they do. Once I was standing in the sun with no head covering and an old woman yelled at me, “Shams!!!” (the Arabic word for sun) and pointed at the sky. She was telling me to get out of the sun. She didn’t exactly call me stupid, but her tone of voice told me that she didn’t think I was too bright. When we visited these women, I was the only stranger allowed into the tent. The men who accompanied me stayed outside and talked to the women from there. They spoke a dialect of Arabic, called Hasaniyeh. It is similar to the dialect that Moroccans speak.