by Charlie Hummel, junior studying political science and economics at Northwestern University
Spring quarter of my sophomore year I got the chance to work abroad in Uganda at a small solar company through Chicago Field Studies. I had a phenomenal experience living with a local host family in Jinja, a city located on the northern shore of Lake Victoria. Upon my arrival home, I quickly began exploring other avenues to spend more time abroad while at NU. I knew I wanted to experience another part of Africa and I had begun studying Arabic my freshman year, so I decided Morocco would be a great choice.
Eager to escape a Chicago winter, I enrolled at the Arabic Language Institute in Fez and spent a fantastic couple of months learning the language and travelling around the country on its amazing and super affordable train system. When my program ended, I still had a few weeks left before NU started and I was eager to make the most of it. I had had my eye on the majestic deserts of Mauritania and the remote beaches of Western Sahara since I arrived, so when the last class of my program ended, I headed south.
By this time, the coronavirus was raging across Europe. My hometown friend studying abroad in Madrid had just returned from a trip to Venice only hours before the city went into lockdown and his program began discouraging travel. He had planned to join me in Africa, but this meant he could no longer meet me, but without a single COVID case in either Morocco or Mauritania, there didn’t seem any reason to alter my plans, so I pushed on alone.
My journey south from Fez was a mishmash of just about every transport means: a train from Fez to Casablanca, a 2-hour flight from Casablanca to Dakhla in the Western Sahara, a bus down to the Mauritanian border, and a minibus from the border zone into Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s second largest city. Once there, I spent the next couple of weeks exploring some of the country’s best-known sights and activities. I rode the country’s famous iron ore train inland from the coast, visited the ancient holy city of Chinguetti, experienced several of the breathtaking desert oases, and ate near the bustling fish market in the country’s capital, Nouakchott.
However, in all the excitement and lacking any means of connectivity, I didn’t fully realize that the world around me was quickly and messily shutting down. I was on a crowded minibus from Atar to the capital, Nouakchott, when I heard the news from a frantic, older French passenger: the airports had just shut down. Without much else to go on and no one quite sure about the extent of the lockdown, I hurried back up to the Western Sahara land border, only to find it had closed just hours before my arrival. After contacting the US embassy and exploring other options to return home, I quickly came to the realization I was stranded.
I spent the next couple of weeks in the capital: walking the city, meeting locals, and getting to know other stranded foreigners from all over the world—Russia, Germany, France, and Finland, to name a few. Unfortunately, by this time, Northwestern classes were ramping back up and I was without a laptop or reliable internet connection and growing more anxious by the day about the prospect of being stuck long-term and missing a whole quarter of classes. To make matters worse, the markets, restaurants, and all non-food shops had closed and the major cable bringing internet to the country had just been damaged.
Feeling similar worries and wanting to get me set up ASAP my mom reached out to a NU professor she coincidentally found online—Professor Zekeria Salem—a Mauritanian scholar who had taught for nearly two decades at the University of Nouakchott. Immediately upon hearing of my situation, he put me in touch with one of his friends, a local English teacher named Baba, who offered to help get me set up for classes if I remained stranded in Nouakchott. Fortunately, it never came to that. About a week into spring quarter, great news arrived. The repatriation flight that the State Department had been trying to schedule for US citizens finally came through!
In one 
sense the trip home was exciting and an enormous relief, but in another, quite eerie and a bit nerve wracking as we picked up little groups of similarly stranded people scattered across small countries throughout Africa. There was only one more stop in Lomé, Togo after I was picked up in Nouakchott. The plane was full of Americans who had just left Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and Sao Tome. When we finally landed at Dulles International, it quickly became apparent the US was a very different country than what we had left behind. What was once one of the busiest airports in the country was almost entirely abandoned, now only sparsely populated by the sporadic planeloads of stragglers the State Department was repatriating from other far-flung locales. After riding a small, near-empty plane meant for shuttling pilots between airports, I arrived home in Saint Louis to an international airport that appeared as if I was its only traveler.
While the once-in-a-lifetime circumstances certainly added extra stress to my Mauritanian experience, it will certainly be a country I never forget. The hospitality and welcoming nature of all the Mauritanians I met were unlike anything I had ever encountered and the landscapes throughout the country were unbelievably humbling. In a final coincidence to top off an already amazing trip, it turned out that Professor Salem was the professor for my African Politics class upon my arrival home.
This article originally ran in the PAS Newsletter, Fall 2020, Volume 31, Number 1