Well I have successfully made it through almost three weeks at site. I moved into my new house in Kankan February 7th and have been getting to know my women’s group and surrounding community. I’ve started a vegetable nursery in the garden area and go each day to water and greet all the members. I have my own smaller watering can and bucket because my host mom is convinced that a bigger bucket will be too heavy for me to get water out of the well. She might be right, that well is pretty deep. The ladies in the garden are so nice and love greeting me in Malinke, as very few of them speak French.
There is also an NGO here called Green Hand Action, founded by an American English teacher when she was here in 2007. They are an environmental group of university students who are interested especially in reforestation. This year, they will be starting the pilot stage of a cashew plantation project that I will be helping with. In an almost amazing chance of fate, the founder happened to visiting Guinea during my first two weeks in Kankan, so I have been able to meet her and all the members several times and work with them as they plan the first logistical steps of the projects. The members are all super motivated and many speak English, which makes working together much easier for me.
I live only about a ten minute walk from a big market, which means it is easy to get any type of produce or food to prepare over my charcoal stove every day. There is also (as the title of this blog suggests) a relatively wide variety of food available in Kankan. Only about 50 ft. from my house is an intersection where ladies sell bui, a rice porridge, and beans in the mornings, keke (a wonderfully salty couscous type dish) at lunchtime, and rice with at least three choices of sauce at night. This is great for the days when I don’t have the couple hours necessary to cook with charcoal or am just feeling a little lazy.
En ville (in town), there is a lot of great food available since it is the second biggest city in Guinea. A Lebanese man runs a fish and poultry importing business, which means frozen chickens for PCVs! The gas station has cold soda (Coke products and Ironbeer, which is kind of like a mix between root beer and cream soda), Pringles, and real chocolate bars. There are also several other West African restaurants I eat at with other Kankan volunteers several times a week. The Togolese lady makes amazing manioc balls, also called fufu, and the fried rice at the Senegalese restaurant almost tastes like Mexican rice.
Being in Kankan has been great because I am near a lot of other volunteers and we get together a couple times a week for lunch and English conversations. It is the opposite of how isolated I imagined I would be in the Peace Corps, but I am certainly not complaining. Besides the social aspect of having Americans nearby, there will hopefully be a lot of opportunities for collaboration with volunteers from other sectors.
I feel like I should devote some part of this blog post to le vieux, the 18 month old baby in my host family (le vieux means ‘old man’ in French, and he is named after his grandfather). We definitely have a love/hate relationship between us at the moment. Every morning he offers me part of his bread or rice that he is eating (although sometimes the bread is already half chewed) and wishes me good morning with screams of “Ai! Ai”, as he doesn’t really speak yet. However, he also tends to pee on my porch and knock over my charcoal stove or steal my spoons while I’m cooking. As my family likes to say, he is very impolit.
My next couple weeks will be a lot of exploring of Kankan and my neighborhood as I try to get to know the layout and the community. I will also start conducting some community analyses, which is just a fancy way of saying holding some discussions with my women’s group to talk about their needs and what projects they would like to work on. After our first three months at site, all the G21 volunteers will meet back up in Mamou to present our findings from our community analyses and we will write a report to give to our counterpart and communities. It is exciting to be out of training and actually beginning the things I came here to do!
Oh and I uploaded some pictures from the end of PST! None from Kankan yet, the internet just takes forever. But soon, hopefully.
Hope everyone is doing great!
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