12. 12. ONG "Arbre", Nouakchott, Mauretania

We were ready at 9 a.m., but it was almost 11 a.m. when we were picked up by Ould Mohamed Lemin, director of „Arbre - Environment Modelling and Management, project of solid waste/Mauretania“. This local NGO was founded about 10 years ago, and they even publish a regular newspaper. At the moment they have a European Union grant. Ould´s English was fine, but he introduced us to a volonteer, who spoke more fluent: Mohamed Mahmoud, a young man who had studied Mathematics and Japanese in Morocco and Japan.

Their project was to coordinate the collecting, separating and recycling of different kinds of waste in Nouakchott, and sell the new products on the market. After the interview, they brought us to 4 of the 6 different collectives involved:

One of them collect plastic and glass bottles, separate them and sell them assorted in high quantities to factories for recycling. They showed us some especially nice bottles, which they kept for themselves: French champaign bottles and other luxuries. We fell in love with a bottle, that had the sentence imprinted: „It is prohibited to re-use this bottle“. We got it as dividend for one of our lucky shareholders – as a present, but they were happy to get a tip of 200 Uuguya (approx. 60 cent).

Next collective melted aluminium out of old cars and produced pots, stoves and different kinds of kitchen tools out of it – something we already had seen in Uganda last year. This time we were happy to be able to buy a pot – in Uganda we depended on public traffic, so we had to travel „light“.

Then we were brought to a cooperative producing water troughs out of old barrels containing chemicals before. Stefan filmed a donkey drinking out of a trough, and Manuel smelled into one of the barrel to feel poisoned for the next hours – it was incredibly sharp.

Next cooperative was at the outskirts of town. There was a huge, on first glance empty place with a few boys sitting there and singing. After approaching we realised, that there was wire everywhere: they decomposed old car wheels and took the wire out of them. The wire then was transformed into fences, which were sold on the adjoining street. In the raining season, they can sell this fences for half the price of new ones.

After this, we met Martial and his German girlfriend Sofia, and they brought us to an exhibition of recycling art at some cultural center: a French artist did a workshop with local artists and artisans, and the results were quite charming.