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A Sunday afternoon in the inner suburbs of Tunis. The light is just beginning to dim over the skyline of white apartment buildings and lonely half-built skyscrapers. Across the street the weathered lettering on the shopping complex advertises its two tenants, a furniture store called "Campus" and an all-male cafe named "Rodeo," in angular French and Arabic. 


As on most Tunisian streets, the men severely outnumber the women — or maybe it just seems that way, since they tend to hang about longer. The causes of this lingering are chronic unemployment and a staggeringly young population. Those factors fuelled an explosion of frustration that culminated in the Tunisian revolution, which has left the country in a state of limbo since the beginning of this year.


Along the wall of our building a group of "mecs" (dudes) are camped out, smoking, talking and watching the world go by. Amelia, Yasmin and I observe from the safety of my host family's second story window. They are 11 and 13 respectively, half Tunisian and half Algerian by birth, both decidedly in love with Western culture and America.


Outside, a man in a wheelchair is being pushed down the street toward his peers. His leg is bandaged in white gauze and splinted to form a perfect 90 degree angle with his waist. Protruding from the middle of his thigh and slightly below his shin are pieces of steel that seem to be facilitating a long and painful healing process. 


"He's a Libyan fighter," says one of the girls. "They all come to the clinic down the street. There are tons of them. A lot of their injuries are gross." A face is a made, a hand gesture implying vomiting and some dramatic gagging follows. Almost immediately their attention wanes. "Do you like to play Wii?" 


I reply that I have never played, but there is no time like the present. Soon we are playing a dancing game. I somewhat successfully imitate the supposed dance moves of Avril Lavigne and then Kris Kross. There are three of us and only two remotes so we must take turns.


Down on the street, two men have arrived with similar apparatuses on their arms. They sit smoking next to a slightly overweight man with a Libyan scarf tied around his head. For all intents and purposes, their war is over, and if they are lucky they will soon enter the period of stagnant indecision and confusion that has permeated so many corners of this country over the last nine months.


This is what I came to see, I think to myself; these are the moments I came to experience. I am here to watch them sit on this wall, to press my face to the glass, to see political unrest and struggle in the flesh. 


Suddenly I am transported back to the moment when I made the choice to travel to North Africa. I woke up one dark night in March and knew that somewhere deep inside my head the decision had already been made. It was not the most orthodox of decision-making methods. But I find justification in the notion that you are only this young and immortal for a limited time.


"OK, now we are going to play Mario Party Olympic Winter Games, is that all right?" one of the girls asks in French. Her voice pulls me back into the room. "Yeah, that'd be cool, I love Mario games." 


I choose Peach as my character and pull off a mean figure-skating routine, only to fail miserably at bobsledding. Meanwhile, the sun sets over the Maghreb, and when I return to the window a couple of hours later the Libyan fighters have slipped back into their corners of the neighborhood. There they will bide their time, care for their wounds and continue to wait.


Sarah Kerr is a St. Paul native and a senior at McGill University in Montreal, where she is pursuing a degree in political science and international development studies. This semester she is studying in Tunis and working for the Carter Center as it prepares to monitor Tunisia's first elections since the Arab Spring.

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A college student from St. Paul follows her urge to see political unrest up close.

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