Is this all there is?
Sahara Desert 2005: Somewhere in Mauritania
We stopped to camp near some scrubby palm trees around four in the afternoon on that day. One of the cars had a problem with the transmission and our mechanic needed a few daylight hours to do the repairs. We pitched our tents on the softly rounded dunes and scanned the horizon. Nothing but blue cloudless sky and featureless sand as far as the eye could see.
We kept the screens to our tents zipped due to the fear of malaria and the zippers were always getting stuck. I had just finished arranging our tent home and was trying to get out but the zipper wouldn’t work. Suddenly a young women, robed in indigo, grabbed the zipper tab from the outside and easily pulled it free. Who was the primitive one here was the question that crossed my mind as I crawled out of my tent.
I salaamed her and asked her how she was, thereby using up a goodly portion of my Arabic language skills. But I didn’t need them. She was good at mime. First she grasped my hand and drew me down to sit on the sand beside her. She looked into my eyes and said the Arabic word for friend. I knew that one, too. We were getting along fine, sitting close together with her hand still entwined with mine.
She was young, maybe early twenties. And she was pretty even with the blue dye from her robes discoloring her golden complexion. Her dark eyes stared into mine and she gestured to her head. I got that one, too. Headache. She wanted aspirin. It’s a common request from nomads. They always ask for aspirin for mal d’tete. If they don’t have a headache that day, they know that soon they will and with no aspirin to hand all they can do is tie a cloth tightly around their head. Which might help, but evidently aspirin is superior.
I had a supply of aspirin just for nomads and so I gave her some and I gave her some candy for her children. (We’d already covered that ground.) That made her smile for the first time. The smile faded though as a man at least twice as old as she was strode into camp. She stood to thank me and went to him…her husband.
Marriages are arranged in Mauritania as they are in much of the Maghreb. The parents (usually it’s the mother) look around for someone suitable for their son and the women of the girl’s family are not shy about touting the girl’s attributes. Often the bridal couple meet for the first time on their wedding day. Talk about dreams dashed! This poor girl must have looked at her middle-aged husband with despair. Because the girls dream, as all girls dream, of Prince Charming.
I think her husband must have had his hands full with keeping track of her because the next morning she appeared at our camp early and alone. We were ready to leave… in the cars with the engines running. She came to our car and stood by the driver’s door. She gestured that she wanted to drive.
Alberto was driving that car and he laughed and opened the door for her. She started to sit in his lap, but he quickly slid over knowing that familiarity with another man’s wife would not be tolerated by the nomads. She grasped the steering wheel and we took off. Her husband who had just arrived at camp, stood helplessly and looked on with a dumbfounded expression as his wife drove away.
Please don’t get the idea that her husband was not a good man. He seemed to be. He was looking out for her. He had come rushing into camp that morning not so much to get her and take her home, but to be there in case she needed him. He knew he was older…he told me through gesture that his eyes were not sharp any longer. I pointed to his binoculars and yes, he could see well using them. Oh. He needed glasses. It can’t be easy to be a nomad and need glasses. Even if you could buy them, how would it look to other nomads?