My House!

So maybe I have just a little too much internet time what with being in a city, but I google mapped my house! Here it is.  I think you can type the coordinates into google maps if you want to look around my neighborhood.  The road next to me (N6) is the one that just got paved.

Don't have much to say this time except I'm heading to Mamou this weekend for in-service training.  It will be great to see everyone again after three months!

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.

***

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!

***

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)

Stuff PCVs Like

For those of you who have internet at work and get bored of wasting time on Facebook all day, you are probably familiar with the blog, turned book, turned multimedia power Stuff White People Like. For those of you who probably aren’t aware of this internet phenomenon (Hi grandma!), SWPL discusses the fads of surburban America (i.e. frozen yogurt, North Face jackets, the Wii) in a humorous, but pretty spot-on, way.  I hope that’s what my version will be like, although probably much more focused on food because, as anyone who knows me is aware, I like to eat.

1. Ice

            Guinea PCVs (not sure about those in colder regions) love ice!  Those of us in Kankan are lucky enough to have an ice vendor right in town, although only for those us who know where she is.  Kenny, the other PCV in Kankan, and I spent about two weeks looking for the ice lady before actually making a purchase.  We were told she was in a house next to the bank, but from there we would be directed back towards the bank (‘over there’ is a legitimate direction in Guinea). 

Eventually, a kind stranger directed me to what looked like a private residence.  Approaching with a bit of caution, I looked around the compound and could find no one selling ice, until someone walking out the front gate told me to try the front door.  I knocked, said “kon-kon”, but no one answered.  The door was unlocked, and I figured that person leaving sort of gave me permission to go in, so I opened it.  To find a little girl eating lunch at a kitchen table.

Being the awkward toubabu (white person) I am, I asked this small child if she had any ice.  She merely stared at me as I stood in the entrance to her home, until her mother walked in.  Half expecting to need to make a very quick exit, I mumbled something about wanting ice.  Thankfully, the woman asked how much I wanted and didn’t come after me with a broom.  Although she was pretty peeved when I hadn’t brought my own plastic bag to put it in.

2. Harmattan Haze

            West Africa is home to climatic phenomenon known as the harmattan.  It is basically a dry air mass that moves North-South throughout the year and is partly responsible for the seasons here, of which there is ‘hot and rainy’ and ‘hotter and dry’.  In movies, the harmattan is portrayed as this giant dust storm raging across the African desert, engulfing century old mosques and cursed Egyptian mummies.  In real life, it is much less dramatic (at least in Guinea) and is only accompanied by a kind of haze that rests in the sky.

            Most Guineans I talk to really don’t like the harmattan haze, the usual argument being that it makes the weather too cold and makes people sick.  It also dims the sun, lending the horizon an “end of the world” kind of feel to it.  This happened my first three days in Kankan, and I was a little worried that the sun was going to disappear behind a mammoth dust cloud that would bury Kankan in sand. I guess I’ve watched The Mummy a few too many times.  What did happen was that the usually stifling 115 F weather became a balmy 95 F, allowing me to drink coffee on my porch in the morning without sweating through my clothes before it even hit 8 AM.  And that is why PCV’s love the harmattan haze.

3. When a New Vegetable/Fruit Comes Into Season

            Living in a country without mass refrigeration and produce imported from far off lands means I am at the whim of the local market when it comes to fresh fruit and veggies.  This certainly has its pros and cons.  For one, the produce I get is fresher than you will find in any American grocery store.  Sometimes I’ve literally just picked it myself at my groupement’s garden.  It also means my food hasn’t amassed an oversized carbon footprint from its red-eye flight in from Brazil.  This makes the blue-blooded environmentalist in me a little proud.

            The disadvantage of the local market however is that it doesn’t offer much in the way of variety.  Usually I go to market and see the same line-up of tomatoes, onions, lettuce, cabbage, okra, eggplant, and chives.  But as the seasons change, I may stumble upon a cucumber or even an avocado.  This is when I tend to make the rookie mistake of getting overly excited about a new food and buy 15 mangoes (which it turns out is possible to eat in one day).  But my own gluttony issues aside, the changing seasons bring some much needed variety into a PCV’s diet, when they’re not helping to eat the ten pounds of Velveeta cheese a neighboring volunteer received in the last run of packages (Thanks Max’s family!).

Aside from enjoying the SPCVL (stuff peace corps volunteers like), I have been continuing my work with Fasso Demen, the gardening groupement, and Green Hand Action, the reforestation NGO, in Kankan.  There is still a little over a month until our in-service training (IST), where I will present all the information I have learned about my community these past few months.  The next month, then, will be spent continuing my community assessment and writing the report that accompanies the presentation.

There was also, as you may or may not know, a coup d’etat in Mali, which lies directly to Guinea’s east.  From what I can gather from French radio and limited news sources, the military took over the government because they weren’t receiving the funds and resources for their campaigns in the north of the country against Toureg and Libyan rebels.  This came as a surprise to all of us here because, until last week, Mali was considered to have the most stable democracy in all of West Africa.  Fortunately, the political situation next door hasn’t affected us in Kankan much at all.  There was a midnight curfew imposed in the city last weekend and the borders between Guinea and Mali are currently closed to those who don’t have a military order to cross and/or a bribe.  We are all hoping, of course, that a compromise can be made and the country can be returned to order quickly and without any conflict, setting a much needed example for any future power disputes in West Africa.

I hope everyone is enjoying their spring break vacations and for those of you who worked so hard on their tan at the beach, I recommend the savannah of Guinea as a great place to work on that golden brown hue.

Give a man a fish...

After reading that title, you probably think this is going to be some diatribe about sustainable development and building local community capacity instead of simply throwing money at projects.  And while I do agree with that, this blog post is simply about fishing, specifically the Fete du Mar.

Fete du Mar (Festival of the Lake) is celebrated all over Haute Guinea, the region I’m in.  The specific date of the festival changes depending on which lake it is at.  Our nearby lake in Bordo just had their fete on March 14^th, but Balandou, a neighboring village, had theirs in February.  The date also changes from year to year, so how anyone plans it is beyond me.  I, in fact, wasn’t even aware that our lake took part in Fete du Mar until about an hour before it actually started (hence why I showed up in the unfortunate clothing choice of white pants).

So what is the Fete du Mar? In these lakes, fishing is only allowed on one day a year, and that is the Fete du Mar date.  People seriously come out of the woodwork to come fish in the lake.  Sitting at the lake before it started, I watched a steady stream of people approaching for at least an hour, carrying all types of fishing devices, though mostly nets.  Everyone gathers around the edge of the lakes, in some places in crowds 15-20 people deep, waiting for the signal to enter.

Then a village elder (ours was 90 years old) lifts his net in the air and brings it down and everyone runs into the lake.  I like to compare it to what must happen when the crazed preteen mobs at Justin Beiber concerts rush the stage. What follows is a whole lot of fishing.  Because fishing is banned the rest of year, the lake is extremely well stocked, and with everyone crammed into it, the fish have nowhere to go but into one of the 800 nets.

The best part is when an especially excited participant gets their first fish of the fete and comes running out of the lake with it, proudly displaying it to the hordes of kids watching from the bank.  One talented fisherwoman had caught so many huge catfish that she tied them to her back like they do their babies here, because the sac was too heavy to carry.  Most others simply float a large bowl beside them, attached around their waist like a belt, and put their catch in that.

Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera because I didn’t know I would be going until I was basically there, but Kenny, another volunteer in Kankan, posted a video of the whole thing, for those of you have the motivation and free time to find his blog (I will try and post a link later).  My counterpart has also promised to take to me to the festival in Barro in April, which is the biggest Fete du Mar in all of Haute Guinea, with people coming from other West African countries to attend.  It is also the president’s hometown, so the government puts on a pretty legit festival, with music and dancing and all.

I do however have pictures of my house in Kankan!

The sticks in front are a fence my counterpart and I threw together to protect the flower beds he planted there from the roaming sheep and goats.  And that’s le vieux sitting on my front porch eating a Starburst!

Until next time!

Frozen chickens, Ironbeer and Manioc Balls

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!

It's official!

I am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer! This past Friday, February 3^rd, was our swear-in ceremony.  The American ambassador to Guinea came as well as several Guinean ministers.  It was a lot of speech and circumstance, with one given by the volunteers in French and each of the three local languages.  Lane, another volunteer, and I did the one in Malinke.  Credit should be given to Clara (or Makale, as she is known here) for writing it.  There were speeches by Julie (our country director), the ambassador, Ousmane (our training manager), and the representative of the Guinean government.  Probably the best tidbit from those two hours of speeches was given by the government man (who also lamented all the Chinese food and movies we will miss over the next two years), “Today, people can find the price of anything, yet we know the value of nothing.” 

After the speeches we all stood up and pledged our allegiance to America and our service, and then it was official! Afterwards we had a delicious meal of rice and chicken and scavenged all the Pringles left over in the VIP tent that the ambassador didn’t eat.  Friday night, Julie invited us over to her house for a pool party and desserts.  Overall, a great day to become a volunteer.



All the AGFO volunteers in our matching tree fabric.

To back track a bit, before swear-in in Conakry, we had a farewell ceremony with our host families in Dubreka.  I was very sad to leave the people who had welcomed me into their family and they were equally sad to see me go.  At one point, a petite (young child) just ran off crying and an older boy had to chase after him to bring him back.  Probably most sad was my namesake, Mahawa, who I will miss so much.  She has already called me on the phone at least 8 times since I left, so I am sure we will stay in touch.



My host dad Derem, brother Moussa, sister Mahawa, and me



Now I am shopping for home supplies in Conakry, like a propane stove and cooking utensils, and Sunday I will head to Kankan to be installed at my site.  I am glad to be done with training (it was starting to be a bit of a drag) and so excited to start my work here in Guinea.

And now…

 10 Things We Learned in Pre-Service Training

1. Street food is delicious

2. Toilet paper is a rarity, stock up when you can

3. When all else fails, throw in some local language. Or dance.

4. Nothing starts on time in Guinea

5. “Je suis excite” means ‘I am excited’, but not in a good way

6. The fancier the occasion, the brighter and more garish your outfit should be

7. No meal is complete without rice and fish sauce

8. Knees are too sexy to keep uncovered

9. Speed limits are for squares

10. NEVER look down the pit latrine



Abdoul (our APCD), and all the AGFO guys with their swearing-in mustaches.  Guinea has no idea what is about to hit it.

Oh, and people were asking about mail. It still goes to the same address. The only place that really receives mail in Guinea is Conakry and then it is spread throughout the country in a sort of West African Pony Express kind of system (at least that is how I picture it).
Much Love to All

Yes we Kankan!

I have been waiting to make that joke for quite a while.  I haven’t had internet much recently and, to be honest, the idea of writing up all I have been doing was a little overwhelming.  I’ll try to summarize what I’ve done without droning on too long, for my sake and yours.

New Years Day, myself and the other AGFO and public health volunteers climbed a nearby mountain, ‘Le Chien qui Fume’.  It was an interesting hike, since the path was very narrow and didn’t actually go all the way to the top.  At one point we had to machete through a wall of brush and make a tunnel that we then crouched/ crawled through.  The view from the top was great though, and we all felt very accomplished upon reaching the top.  Because it is currently the dry season, it was too hazy to see all the way to the ocean as I’ve heard you can do, but it was cool nonetheless.

On the 4^th, we all headed to Mamou to do a workshop with our Guinean counterparts.  This was mainly to go over what the PC is and what is expected of both volunteers and counterparts.  It was also a chance to get to know our counterparts before we all went our sepearte ways for site visits.  The workshop was held at an agroforestry school, which was especially fortunate for us AGFO volunteers, because we got to see a wide variety of tree species we hadn’t seen before and had a session on tree identification and uses.

We all left with our counterparts that Saturday to head to our sites.  Several of us shared a bush taxi to Kankan, with 10 people in it (one counterpart in the trunk!).  It was about a twelve hour trip over very bumpy roads.  Fortunately, my site in Kankan was right along the route of the bush taxi, so I did not have to go very far once we arrived.  Others still had another two hour trip north after arriving in Kankan.

Kankan is very much a ville (city).  The roads are crowded with motorcycles and bicycles, although there are very few cars.  The president of Guinea has recently pushed for increasing the accessibility of electricity in Kankan, so power lines are going up all over.  This is great for me because it means I have almost constant access to soft serve ice cream and cold Coke.  It is also a very spread out city and takes at least an hour and half to walk from one end to the other. 

The quartier I am living in is called Dar Es Salaam.  It is about a twenty minute walk from Bordo, which is where my groupement’s garden is located.  A groupement is basically just an organization of people.  I am working with one called Fasso Demain, which is primarily a women’s group who practices market gardening.  My counterpart, Conde (pronounced con-day), is the president of the groupement’s son.  The groupement is very very enthusiastic.  When I met them, they all danced in joy for my arrival.  Then when they heard my Guinean name (Mahawa Conde), they all danced again!

There are two research centers located in Bordo as well.  One is an agricultural research center that I will be working with.  One scientist there is a consulter for Fasso Demain and I have been promised an office there.  They have a wealth of research that simply hasn’t been shared with the average Guinean, so I am hoping, as a PCV, to bridge that gap.  The other center works with bushrats (e.g. agouti).  One way people hunt for agouti is by setting bush fires to scare the animals into traps.  Unfortunately, this can lead to uncontrolled bush fires, a major cause of deforestation in Guinea.  This research center is working on learning how to raise agouti domestically, to lower the incidence of bush fires.  I’m not sure what exactly I will be doing with them, but they have offered to bring me along on several workshops to observe and help when I can.

I am staying in a new house in Kankan next to my counterpart’s house.  It is one big room with a queen size bed and inside latrine.  The front porch is ringed by a little garden that my counterpart has begun planting, although it looks pretty sad right now because the goats and sheep keep snacking on it.  I am hoping to plant some herbs and flowers when I move-in in February.

Now I’m in Dubreka for the final two weeks of training.  We are learning our local languages (Malinka for me) and some final technical skills.  Yesterday we made papaya jam and are in the process of making sun-dried tomatoes.  I will definitely be doing a lot of that at site!  Everyone is very excited because the African Cup starts this weekend and Guinea is in it! I imagine we will be watching a lot of soccer over the coming week. 

For those of you who don’t know, the official swear-in date for my stage (G21) is February 3^rd.  The ceremony is supposed to be televised (only in Guinea, sorry) and we are all getting matching outfits for it.  Shortly after that, I will be heading out to Kankan to officially start my Peace Corps service.

Anbe kofe, huh? (See you later in Malinka)