My Peace Corps Alphabet Part II

M is for maggi, a bouillon type cube that is used in literally all foods.  It is full of MSG and therefore delicious.

N is for Néré, a local tree with bean-like fruits that we eat twice.  First, the yellow powder surrounding the seeds in the pod that acts as an appetite suppressant.  Then the seeds themselves are prepared to make sumbara powder, basically a local maggi.

O is for Oser Reposer (dare to relax) because you have more free time than you know what to do with as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  Many use this time productively: to reread Harry Potter, learn the harmonica, unsuccessfully brew various wines, build a brick oven, or, in my case, learn to snap (but only with my left hand).

P is for the Peugeot 405, perhaps the most durable automobile ever built.  We use the several decades old station wagons from Europe as nine-person bush taxis. Or ten. Or eleven.

Q is for Quinn, my first cat (RIP), who like to sneak into neighbors’ huts and jump on their faces while they slept.

R is for rice and sauce, the staple, and often only, food in Guinea.  Sauce choices are usually one of the following three: 1) soup sauce, which is like a less hearty beef or fish stew; 2) peanut sauce, which is like a watery peanut butter and 3) leaf sauce, which is reminiscent of creamed spinach.  I will have eaten at least 400 bowls of this by the time I leave Guinea. 

S is for Sarata, the best club in Kankan.  Where the beers are cold and the dance floor is hotter than my tin roof in April.

T is for toubabu, or ‘white person’ in Malinke.  This, along with its variations of toubabumuso (white woman) and toubabumusonin (small white woman), is the ever playing soundtrack to my life.

U is for my own little USA, e.g. all the other volunteers who keep me sane after yet another passenger in a taxi throws up into my hair. (Yes, I realize this one is kind of a stretch, but ‘U’ is a difficult letter.)

V is for my velo (‘bike’ in French) that takes me everywhere.  Kankan-centre is about 6 km across, not counting the extra belt of ‘suburbs’ that surrounds it, and I spend the majority of my day biking from place to place.

W is for waiting, which I spend around 30% of my time doing.  I used to get mad, now I just get a lot of reading done.

X is for XXL, the green apple flavored energy drink that basically takes the place of beer in this Muslim country.  When everyone goes out, it’s this that fuels the hours of sweaty dancing.

Y is for yogurt, which is cultured in buckets in peoples’ houses and sold out of plastic bags or plastic cups.  It is delicious though and if you’re lucky, cold and with tiny millet balls or tapioca mixed in.

Z is for the Zagat’s Guide to Ice Cream in Kankan, a dream project of my site mates and I to rate all the soft serve machines in Kankan.

Planting Trees and Getting Connected

I cannot believe my time here is almost up.  Well, relatively, at least.  The wonderful Lily Schorr is coming to visit, then it is Tabaski and Halloween, then G21’s Close of Service (COS) conference, then my parents visit, Thanksgiving, Christmas/New years, and suddenly it’s January and I leave to embark on an awesome COS trip.  Plus, in between all of that I need to finish up some projects and ensure that others will continue after I’m gone.  It always amazes me how time here is so fluid.  Some days I feel like I have absolutely nothing to do, then I think of the next couple months and feel overwhelmed by work and want to start it all now.  Something Peace Corps has taught me is that, in Guinea at least, you really can’t force things to happen and it’s better to just enjoy your downtime while you have it.  When you over-prepare here, chances are it will change the day of and all your preparations will have been for naught.  It does teach you to think on your toes though.

***

I started the summer with a World Environment Day conference, put on by Green Hand Action.  The morning was a presentation and debate on the biodiversity of a local lake, led by a professor at the university.  We invited all the stakeholders: the ministry of fishing, the prefect, and the local group is charged with the conservation and management of the lake.  It was a rare opportunity for all these groups to get together and have a frank discussion. 

Green Hand Action members at World Environment Day

Once the discussion was opened, claims started flying around that NGOs only work to get projects so they can graft the money.  This in turn prompted the NGOs to shoot back that the government does the same thing and, what’s more, doesn’t even support those civil societies who are actually working to improve their communities.  These accusations from both sides are, at times, true, but I have also worked with NGOs and government officials who are doing genuinely good work.  I hope that this conference has encouraged these positive deviants to work together and not get discouraged by those just in it for the kickbacks.

* * *

Condé and I have been leading a weekly SRI course at the agricultural school that we started in July.  We’ve had over 50 participants and have been able to create and introduce a new appropriate technology, a hand-pushed weeder/aerator.

Condé pushing our sarcleuse

The only problem is some mysterious animal or pest that is eating our rice stalks down to the ground.  Our demonstration plot is right next to the student dorms and one student recently told me he saw the animal eating the rice when he came back from the dance club late one Saturday night.  We think it is some sort of wild rodent and have set up a trap nearby, so hopefully I will be eating bush rat stew sometime soon and our rice will be growing tall. 

* * *

Mid-July through Mid-August was Ramadan.  I decided not to fast this year and it was a completely different experience than last year.  For one, I didn’t sleep 18 hours a day.  Even though I’m not Muslim and therefore not required to fast, I felt guilty every time I ate and tried to do it in secret.  There was still unprepared food in the market, but all the street meat, snacks, and rice bars were gone from the sides of the roads.  Luckily, there is a Christian Togolese lady who runs a restaurant that become the lunchtime haven of Forestières (of whom the majority are Christian) and expats (ie PCVs and other West Africans).  Some days, I fasted accidentally simply because I was too lazy to search out food.  Other days, I did so purposefully because I was tired of feeling excluded.  My family still let me eat the break fast meal with them regardless, but that rice porridge tasted so much better when I knew that I had earned it.  Because I didn’t spend most of my days in a hunger nap this year, I was able to see just how much people secretly cheat.  If only I had known that last year.

* * *

The timing of Ramadan forced us to push Green Hand Action’s annual cashew reforestation project back to late August, the very end of the ideal planting time for trees in this region.  It is hard enough to get people to work when they’re eating, so I can only imagine the struggle we would have faced had we done the project during Ramadan.  Our group was smaller than last year and therefore easier to manage and, since this was their second year of the project, I was able to take more of a back seat and just be another volunteer.  This was easier said than done.  Watching four people do a job that could have been more easily by one, it was difficult to not take the reins. 

In the end, we planted 6 hectares (about 15 acres) of cashew trees in less than a week with a minimal amount of intra-team bickering.  I did have to take a quick session on the best way to give constructive criticism (some tips: don’t call the receiver stupid and yell in their face) and offer friendly reminders to keep good notes, always get receipts, and maybe not buy several pounds of candy because it would make everyone happy.  At times, it felt like I was chaperoning a high school service trip, which, in effect, I was, since most of the members of Green Hand Action are high school students.  Fortunately, we were greatly helped this year by Mr. Sanoh, my Pioneer Farmer partner and the owner of the land on which we were planting.  He is a cashew expert and did the work of five of my high school students, even during a torrential downpour.

I’m really proud of all the members for managing the project themselves this year and I think that they are too.  It gives me confidence that the NGO will continue to function after I leave in February, which is really the goal of all my projects: forward progress that can and will be continued.

* * *

The biggest thing going on in Guinea right now are the legislative elections.  BBC has a kind of “everything you need to know” site  and this article by a fellow American inConakry gives a more detailed backdrop for the current situation.  Basically, after the election of the President in 2010, legislative elections were meant to be held, but for various reasons (mostly logistics and the innate inability of political parties to agree) they kept getting pushed back.  They were most recently scheduled for September 24^th, now the 28^th (which incidentally is the anniversary of the stadium massacre in Conakry).

This is the closest we’ve come to the elections actually happening since I’ve been in country, which is exciting because it means the official campaign has started.  According to campaign rules, candidates can only campaign starting from 30 days before the election.  In Kankan, at least, the campaign is pretty fun and mostly chaotic.  Everyone wears their party colors and ties bandanas on their motos/cars/bikes/babies.  Posters are plastered on cars, shops, and cars.  One party even has a 6-foot wide beach ball with a picture of the candidate’s face on it.  Then every day, outside each parties’ headquarters, there are actual parties, with speakers, DJs, and dancing.

The most chaotic parts (and frightening, if you happen to bike through them accidentally) are the huge motorcades.  Hundreds of party supporters hop on their motorcycles, usually with another 2-3 people on the back and race through town at 50 mph, sounding horns, popping wheelies, swerving madly from side-to-side, and generally disrupting traffic.  The scariest I’ve seen was a van doing unbelievably tight donuts with fifteen people on the roof.  At one point, two wheels were off the ground and I nearly had a heart attack thinking I was about to witness a gruesome accident.  Besides the need to bike more cautiously, the upcoming elections haven’t affected life in Kankan too much, which makes me hopeful there will be no need for Peace Corps to disrupt its program due to political instability or violence.

* * *

Starting this summer, Orange, one of Guinea’s main cell phone carriers, lowered the costs of its data plan and started promoting mobile connections, whether with a phone or an internet USB stick.  This has been great for me because I can receive e-mail everyday for less than $3 a month.  The network does go out for hours or days at a time, but I don’t even have reliable electricity, so that is the least of my problems. 

Simultaneously, there has been a big push in smart phones from Chinese manufacturers.  I would estimate that in urban areas at least 1 out of every 5 new phones purchased is internet capable.  This has opened internet access up to a whole new group of Guineans, especially the youth.  Kids who have never used a computer are now posting pictures on Facebook from their phone.  The lady who runs the rice bar I go to was updating her status while spooning out bowls of rice and sauce.  I’ve been opening e-mail and Facebook accounts for people almost daily and it is amazing to see how fast it has spread.  While a lot of new users are just posing selfies everyday (picture MySpace circa 2005), others are using the internet to become more informed about world and national news.  For a country with an isolationist history, this is a big change and I personally am excited to see how this IT revolution can help Guinea in the future.  Okay, we may not be at the revolution stage just yet, but for the moment at least everyone can watch this Nicolas Cage/Miley Cyrus parody:

And isn’t that what free information and open access is all about?

My Peace Corps Alphabet Part I

When people talk about Peace Corps, they always talk about the big "experience" of it all, but there's also a lot of little things that I think characterize my two years here.  Following is a collection of a few of them, according to the alphabet:

A is for Allah Akbar, otherwise known as my 4 AM alarm.  This is the start of the call to pray that crackles over the mosque’s loudspeakers five times a day.

B is for bucket baths, which I take usually daily.  Apparently there is a hotel in the south of France that actually charges extra for this ‘luxury’, although they call it a tropical shower.

C is for “Chop My Money”, the number one hit by Nigerian duo P-Squared that is constantly playing in clubs, cars, radios, phones, etc. 

D is for disease, the number one plague of Peace Corps Volunteers.  Unfortunately, living in a place where everyone east with their hands and toilet paper, or even soap is at that gas station 100 km away, means you are often sticken by something else that starts with the letter ‘d’.

E is for “Eh, Allah”, the exclamation meaning anything from “Oh my gosh” to “I don’t believe it” to “Say what now?!?”

F is for Faso Démén, the gardening group I work with and a never-tiring bunch of women who keep me stocked with fresh veggies. 

G is for Guiluxe, the national beer of Guinea.  It’s not too horrible if it’s cold, as unlikely as that is.

H is for handholding, which everyone does all the time and is an important sign of frienship here.  I especially like when 2 burly gendarmes stroll down the street hand-in-hand, old Soviet AK’s strapped to their backs.

I is for “Ifo, huh?”, quite possibly my favorite Malinke phrase. It means ‘sorry’, but changes depending on the tone.  You can say it after a kid trips and falls or if someone loses a family member, but also if you buy the last cold Fanta, as in “sorry I’m not sorry”.

J is for jaro, a type of bitter eggplant native to Guinea that is something of an acquired taste.  I eat it raw now, though, so I guess it only takes a year to acquire.

K is for Kankan, my site and second biggest city in Guinea.  It’s got all the city amenitites, cold drinks, an internet café, Pringles, but still has enough of a village feel that you know everyone.

L is for latrines, which you learn to love. Or at least tolerate.

Happy Ramadan!

So for the end of Ramadan, everyone goes to mosque for a big service/prayer but since our mosque isn't big enough, we have an outside prayer at the intersection near my house. I would say almost a thousand people come to line their prayer mats up on the soccer field and road.

Please note the awesome rainbow umbrella to block the sun.

My Pantry

... And by pantry I mean tabletop next to where the cockroaches live

(not shown: the million packages of bacon I already ate)

P. S. I am posting this from my phone so sorry if the formatting is a little crazy

Photos from World Environment Day

This past Saturday, June 22nd, I hosted World Environment Day with an NGO I work with, Green Hand Action.  We held a science conference in the morning about the diversity of fish in a nearby lake and then in the afternoon had some public skits performed by a theater group and a gang of neighborhood kids who helped us plant trees in 2012.  It was a really big success with over 100 people attending the conference.  People were talking about it all around town the next day and the young volunteers in the NGO were so happy and proud of themselves.

Here's some photos of it on my Google+ account:


https://plus.google.com/photos/109284563137945907097/albums/5894919859266836273?authkey=CKDKnJmcgbLeDg

My Dream Sensibilisations

One of the activities almost all PCVs do during their service is lead sensibilisations.  As many times as I’ve asked, no one knows what this really translates to in English, but it is basically when volunteers go out into the community and spread some sort of knowledge.  For example, going door to door with a picture book and explaining the causes and preventions of malaria.  Or leading a short skit about responsible life choices and condom use.  Basically, the goal of a sensibilisation is to give community members the knowledge necessary to make informed choices and incite behavior change.

Usually sensibilisations are similar to what I mentioned before, dealing with nutrition, malaria, environmental protection or conservation, or girls’ education (to name a few), but sometimes I really wish I could give a sensibilisation that would help improve my own life here.  Some of the ones I’ve dreamed up:

• how to make a pizza: Pizza making is really most limited by the lack of ingredients, but it never hurts to be prepared for when cheese finally makes its way to Kankan.
•  proper street crossing behavior: This would generally center around what I consider a golden rule: look both ways before crossing the street.  I would bet at least 65% of traffic accidents are caused by someone literally stepping into a moving motorcycle.
• arriving on time: One of the first things we were told in PST was how nothing ever starts on time in Guinea and to expect it and bring a book, but after hours of reading my kindle in waiting, it would be nice if people were a little more prompt.
• the joy of puns (plus a side sensibilisation on sarcasm): People aren’t much into wordplay here, which means I am approximately 50% less funny than in America.  Also no one ever laughs at the following joke:

An English and French cat, both named 1-2-3, have a race to cross 

the English Channel. The English cat won because un deux 

trois quatre cinq (that’s 1-2-3-4-5 in French, for you Anglophones, 

pronounced ‘un deux trois cat sank’).

• customer service: A favorite joke among volunteers is how hard it is to get people to sell you something.  You walk into their restaurant and no one is there, then search around and when you finally find the madame she looks really offended that you’ve asked to buy a bowl of her rice.  There has been many an occasion where I haven’t bought what I sought out to just because it was so difficult (and I am lazy).
•  line forming: In general, occasions that would normally call for lines in America (the bank, buying something at the corner boutique, mosquito net distributions), are dealt with in a somewhat orderly crowd.  Usually, at the bank, everyone puts their ID cards in a perfectly straight line in front of the teller and then stands in a jostling crowd just behind, straining to hear their name called.  The crowd thing tends to work because people get exasperated and demand service in about the same order in which they arrived, but sometimes I just don’t feel like pushing my way towards the front to shove my money into the rice lady’s hand.  Luckily, there is always a kind-hearted Guinean crowded next to me who is more than happy to do so for me.
• girl scouts: While the girls empowerment and training part of this would no doubt be great, I’m really just in it for the cookies.