PAST AND FUTURE: AN OLD MAN BEGGING IN NKTT STREETS

This early morning while going to work my attention was disrupted by a scene which seemed to me unprecedented in Mauritania, a country which has been known for its social and economical mutuality…..

In my mind sprung the question: why such scenes have become common and disseminated wherever we head, despite the fact that we are few people living on a huge and immance surface? How some people cannot afford a shelter where they can sleep in peace and tranquility? Is it a strategic policy in our society nowadays that the stronger strips the weaker out of his dignity….?

It was really a painful scene: an old man roaming around the streets and digging up a hole where to bury (or seem to do so) himself alive on the edge of one of the biggest street of Nouakchott . I felt a strong desire to ask the old man a question “How did you become less than a beggar?”

Then the answer came silently that it is because beggars have homes and friends and many of them are young, they can find or change their minds when they grow up and see more opportunities opening up before their eyes or looming in the faraway distant world since they are lost at home. …..

But how can an old man who was born a man could get marginalized to the extent of becoming an outcast old man in the violent see of life? How can this old man accept to lay dying in a complete silence in a society which pretend to help but it kills and humiliates….

For me, to see an old man forgotten between his past and the enigmatic future is to feel how the whole country is collapsing and dwindling to reach the unknown with unsteady steps. For to be on aboard of floating boat in the mid of the ocean is to be nowhere between safety and loss, or despair and hope……

These kind of everyday scenes has been growing up dramatically in the narrow, dirty, and psychologically suffocating streets of Nouakchott; many people have been forced to go out to streets and beg from beggars because or the unprecedented upheveal changes that are taking places deeply within the social, political, and economical tissues of our injured society. When I saw the old man trying to comfort himself within nowhere and all kinds of sorrow and pain have left their scars on his face for a long time shrinking and falling apart under the unpleasant and heavy weight of being alive and dead at the same time…..

I know very well that homeless people are not only in Mauritania, but rather they are different here. They reflect something which doesn’t exist and never existed but in this land……

This man seemed to me if he is no longer chasing hope in the future and he is also escaping his ruins of memory in past….