Shifting Sands

Mauritania is a special place, a cross-roads for Sahara trade which goes back centuries. For hundreds of years, people have been coming here from all over the world, settling, then moving on again. The result is that if you took a random cross-section of people here, you can bet that you'd find faces resembling every nation on earth.



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In the last couple of days I've been struck down with a fever and a chest infection, so I've been stumbling through my interviews and trying to put out stories, all the while feeling terrible. This afternoon though, perhaps the relief of the elections being over, I felt a little better and went out to the edge of Nouakchott, only a mile or so away, and watched the shifting sand dunes.



Nomads come here for a few months a year, bringing their camels with them, and sell camel milk by the side of the road. So as a Sunday afternoon treat, we stopped by and sat in our old-school Mercedes and drank a warm bowl of milk, fresh from the camel.



It is strangely delicious and I feel better now than I have in days. Although of course the local remedy for a chest infestion (which Mauritanians get a lot, because of the sand in the air,) is warm camel milk.