The Changing of the Seasons

As the dry season enters its peak, we are certainly feeling it here in Kankan.  It is getting hotter by the day, although we have been lucky enough to have a lot of cloudy windy days to relieve us of some heat, but lots of wells are running dry.  My host family is connected to city water by a faucet, so we should have water year round, but I have noticed that more and more neighbors come to get water from us as their own wells dry up.  At the garden, many women have left for the season, as there are only one or two of the over 50 wells that still have water, and not much water at that.

The slowing down of garden work means that the focus of my work is beginning to switch from the groupement to the wider community of Kankan.  I have started a women’s student group with the female English students at the university and we meet twice a week.  It is a self-help group to encourage the students to plan for their future after university and hopefully gain some valuable life skills (e.g. how to write a CV, word processing skills, personal finance, etc.).  It also offers a chance for the women to work in cooperation together, and learn how to organize themselves effectively.

This past weekend was a PCV run Girls Conference for Haute Guinea.  Each education volunteer brought two girls, ages 12-17, from their village to Kankan for a four day conference.  We covered a lot of topics with seminars and activities: conservation and sustainable agriculture, nutrition, women’s health, HIV/AIDS, women in the workforce, and education.  Volunteers also led activities to that teach important skills such as decision making and conflict resolution.  Most importantly, the girls got to hang out with only other girls all weekend and just have some fun.  We danced, went to the market, planted moringa trees and then the girls would stay up until midnight talking.  It was just like teenage girls at camp in America.

By the time they all left Monday, I could see a difference in all of them.  They were more confident and each had written an action plan of what they will do to share the information they have learned when they return to their villages.  One of the university girls I work with now attended a PC Girls Conference when she was younger and said it was one of the things that encourage her to go to university, so I hope this has made a similar difference for all the girls that attended ours.  It will definitely be something that I always remember.

The rest of my time has been spent meeting more NGOs in Kankan.  When my APCD visited a couple weeks ago, he put me in touch with some environmental advocacy and reforestation NGOs in Kankan, who I have been meeting with to see if there is any opportunity for collaboration.  I also met a lot of people during the girls conference who are interested in working with a PCV.  The difficult part is trying to choose who to work with and seeing where I can fit in with their organization.  Most don’t really understand the role of a PCV and are just hoping I will somehow give them money (or marry them), so it takes a lot of explaining, at the end of which I am usually still given a request for financial aid.  For those that do end up understanding though, it will hopefully be a great opportunity for both of us.

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I am officially a city slicker!  Since I moved here in February, they have been working on the road next to my house for what seems like forever.  They would grate it, then roll it, then wet it down, then leave it for a week so everyone drives over their work and then start all over again.  It turns out there was some method to the madness because now it is paved.  This means that I can get to most all of my work places (the garden, the university, the PC office) on paved roads.  I’m probably more excited than I should be about this, but come on, pavement!

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And now some more Stuff PCVs Like, to help describe some of the more random parts of my life in Guinea.

100 FG Notes

Like most developing countries trying to compete in the world market, Guinea struggles with inflation.  This year, in an effort to combat inflation, the government began to print bills that are worth 100 franc Guinean.  Previously, the smallest available note was 500 FG.  The current exchange rate of dollars to FG is about $1: 6800 FG, so these new notes are worth about $0.07.  I can’t speak to whether these smaller bills will fight inflation (I always ended up dropping microeconomics before the semester started), but there is one advantage to them.  Because the bills are so small and new, most people don’t really consider them real money yet, so the main people I’ve seen holding them have been kids.  The kids aren’t using them to buy things though; they use them to “make it rain”.  For those of you not well-versed in hip-hop lingo, making it rain is when someone presumably absurdly wealthy throws money in the air over other people, making it rain thousands of dollars.  Ever since these new bills have come out, some kid will get their hands on 20 or so of them and stand in the street and throw it in all in the air.  This generally tends to draw a crowd of other kids, who proceed to go crazy trying to pick them all up, just so they can throw them in the air again.

Edit: It turns out making it rain is not only limited to kids.  I recently attended a wedding where women were making it rain in the dancing circle.  Traditionally at weddings, there are female griots, basically singers or entertainers, who come to the ceremony before the real band to sing songs about all the people in attendance.  When a song is sung about you, you are supposed to pay the griots.  Since the appearance of 100 FG notes, more and more women are simply throwing their money onto the dance floor.

Donald Ducks

Probably one of the greatest mysteries of the Disney franchise is Donald Duck’s wardrobe choice.  He is usually wearing that same old blue shirt, with no pants, but when he emerges from the shower, he has a towel wrapped around his bottom half.  If he walks around town naked from the waist down, why does he need a towel to cover himself in the privacy of his own home? 

The majority of children below the age of 2 in Guinea seem to heartily agree with the fashion sense of Donald.  More often than not toddlers are running around wearing a shirt, or even a winter jacket, but no pants.  The other day I even saw a boy wearing a suit jacket, and nothing else.  It seems to me that “Donald Ducks”, as the PCVs in Haute Guinea have coined them, are the mullet of Guinea.  Business on top, party on the bottom.

Thank you everyone so much for the packages and mail!! The problem at the post office was sorted so I have been eating lots of candy and delicious snacks and reading my fill of celebrity gossip this past week. 

J’arrive (“I’m coming” in French; Guineans always say this when they leave as a kind of goodbye, I guess to mean they are always coming back and its not really goodbye. Or maybe its just bad Guinean French and I’m reading too much into it. Either way, it’s the end of this blog post)