Traveler in Tindouf. Dakhla, urban sketches

By Javier de Blas in Tindouf, Algeria

Between February and March 2015 I spent a month living with a Sahrawi family in their “haima” in the refugee camps of Tindouf. Every Tuesday, I’m posting here the notes and sketches I made about daily life in the camps.

If there is any local word you don´t understand, please check in Local terminology post.

18 to 23.03.2015

All the other wilayas are in agreement that Dakhla is the most beautiful. It is like an immense village, or a series of them, which have their dairas, but well formed. Arbitrary paths are not visible neither are they unruly. The haimas are distributed like so, thus giving a sense of peace, which is always perceived in a classical air of the traditional.

I go out for a walk. I see the daira (in this case, the town hall). Another singular building. With its little domes, its yard, its trees. I am even thankful to find trees with some regularity. Then I put pen to paper and draw a pen made of adobe, now being used to those details of corrugated iron and mesh as those of Boujdour. The kids gather round and don’t leave me alone; they are on holiday. I have to tell them to pose for a portrait. And they write their names for me.

The layout of the houses, the haimas, which are grouped to form cores, more or less separate, seem to me to be very cozy and the arrangement of each haima, compact, closed, open to the sky in the inner courtyard. They look quite different from the haimas without walls in Agti my daira in Budjur.

The cemetery is special. It seems that at the beginning it was on the outskirts, but as the wilaya surrounded it, it was necessary to wall it off thus creating enough atmosphere of closure, being as it is, in a throughway zone.

I am also taken back with that maroon domed building, where my colleague Mexican artist Javier Arango, is painting a mural. They call it the club. It’s like a multipurpose room. From conferences to parties.

There is an oasis in my daira which they have turned into a café-terrace, which is only used in the film festival of the Sahara, Fisahara because the people here do not have the habit to go to cafes or restaurants. They are very happy exchanging visits over tea.

From the distance the wilaya has a similar appearance to all the others. Huge villages, mostly one story houses, in the middle of the desert and as elsewhere, people go out for a walk in the desert at sunset (you can see that there are two women on the road on the left of my drawing). Here they tell me that Sahara means countryside for the Saudis.