Nouakchott has been full of surprises. I was partially expecting a desolate, sandy town with nothing modern about it. The guide book made it sound as such; no atms, no restaurants, or supermarkets. The sandy part was certainly true but there seems to have been a lot of money coming into this town. There are now lots of new buildings, supermarkets, restaurants, and the country’s first ATM opened maybe a month before we arrived. We had to stop by the brand new DHL office to pick up the car insurance papers that were supposed to arrive in Dakar but there was some confusion about that and so the documents were forwarded to the Nouakchott office. The office itself was brand new and sparkling, like much of the downtown area. The female employee even took care to spit in a little bucket she kept for just that purpose so she wouldn’t soil the floor.
After leaving the office, we were bombarded again by men in robes looking to change our money; it truly seems to be a national pastime here. The most troubling part of the day happened at the local pharmacy. I was asking to get additional packets of the oral contraceptive that I take, a pretty standard thing. The male employee began to gather the pills and ring up the transaction when another male worker rushed over asking in French, “Why do you want these? Are you married? Where is your doctor?”. “This is my prescription, this is my husband, the doctor is in the car (Peta is a OB/GYN)”. “This is your husband?” “YES!” and I proceeded to take out our passports to show our names, “Kent” pointing to mine, “Kent” pointing to his, “Husband, ma fi haram (Arabic for it is not forbidden)”. He began asking again Bobby if he understood that this is a contraceptive and I had to explain to him that he doesn’t understand him but yes, he knows what this is. Then he began asking me why we don’t want children and I was so flustered I began prattling on something like we have no work or something unintelligible while I was pushing the payment for the pills in front of him and we go out as quickly as we could. I was so shaken by that encounter that I realized that I left a one month pack of pills on the counter despite having paid for it, it only cost about $2 and I wasn’t willing to go back inside to get it back. They did a pretty good job trying to intimidate and embarrass me from getting my birth control pills, which is actually not prohibited in Islam from what I understand but socially, men here certainly do seem opposed to women practicing family planning. I have purchased my pills abroad for the past five years through the Philippines, Honduras, and Mali; this was the first time that anyone asked my husband’s permission or if I was married at all. This would be a pretty effective technique to shaming women out of family planning.
