For starters, La Pagaille! RIP
Leaping into the afterlife!
The little Africat up there was my roommate in Kakoni (my village). He was a spunky little thing, rode in bush taxis with the best of ‘em, and used to play with a blue plastic bag (erroneously referred to as a caoutchouc[pronounced, "cow shoe"] here in Guinea. I’m not exactly sure what a cow’s shoe would look like but I wonder every time I hear the French word for rubber.) So Pagaille’s toy, and arch nemesis, was this large blue plastic bag that he’d slide across the floor ripping up at all hours of the day, and when the little duffer met his end in Mamou by eating a little too much rat poison at ENATEF (a forestry school I was staying at in Mamou), the caoutchouc became his funeral shroud.
He had a good run of it.
A market lady returns home over the hill with the mangoes she didn't sell
It’s hard to make out from the picture, but at the bottom of this hill is the village I live in, Kakoni. This picture was taken just around the first rains, when everything is still very brown and red and hot and sweaty and hot and really very hot. By now, we’re well into the rainy season, most folks have finished sowing their rice, and everything is green green green. Still a little hot.
Though they may not be visible, one should be wary of the mangoes in this woman’s bucket. A Guinean will tell you to be especially wary of these early mangoes, as they cause malaria. As it goes: if you eat mangoes prior to the rains, you will get the palu. One must also remain vigilant and stay away from the larger, sweeter and juicier grafted mangoes that appear well into the rainy season. These are also riddled with malaria, or at least that’s how the story goes.
Many volunteers get frustrated by this misleading superstition. Mango season coincides with the beginning of the rains and extends well into the rainy season. At these times, stagnant water appears more frequently, thus more mosquitoes, thus more malaria. Still, even well educated Guineans, who can recite the life cycle of the malaria parasite in surprising detail, will refuse a bite of delicious mango if they feel the rains have not yet come sufficiently, or conversely, if they feel the rains are too heavy. From what I can gather, it’s really up the individual to determine the threat level posed by any given mango.
I’ve also noticed that Guineans will talk about malaria in a very different way. They tend to attribute the symptoms of nearly any illness to malaria (or the palu) in the same haphazard manner that we might call anything a cold. Worse yet, they have little ability to test blood slides in order to verify whether someone does or does not have malaria. Nathallie came to visit a few weeks ago.
Nathallie and her rock-friend
After spending a couple weeks travelling from Conakry to Labe and passing through Doucki (the super-incredible canyon of hiking, waterfalls and sweet rock formations pictured above that Hassan Bah
Hassan chanting 'baby steps baby steps baby steps baby...'
Kissing monkey skulls is optional
is more than happy to show folks), she stayed in Kakoni and helped out around the brand new health center that the African Development Bank donated last year. I had heard from the health center chief that included with the center came a full bloodwork laboratory. What they were missing of course was a lab technician, or in other words someone trained to read bloodslides and determine whether or not there are malarial parasites present. In lieu of this precision, Nathallie saw that there was a certain number of vague symptoms (fever, diarrhea, vomiting, etc.) which may (fever) or may not necessarily (diarrhea) indicate malaria, and if a patient has more than one of these or any single one of them severely enough, they would receive a quinine shot, or whatever malaria drugs available at the time. She was excited because she got to administer them.
Nathallie butters up just the kind of petit she might stick with a shot of quinine, my friend Mouctar's little tea-addicted brother. Notice the bags under his eyes; he's not yet had his post-nap sip of tea.
What’s less exciting is that surely not all of those people who received malaria medicine actually had malaria. Many likely had any multitude of other health issues, giardia or amoebas for instance, that passed regardless of the medicines they took. However, if they got better they would logically thank the shot they received. Hence, people don’t really think they’re getting treatment unless they get a shot of something, anything. For the health center chief (he’s called a doctor, but I’m not too certain of his qualifications), it’s a question of weighing the risks while having extremely incomplete information. He’d rather over-medicate and cure more than if he were more conservative with his distribution of anti-malarial drugs and happened to be wrong on many cases. If I were in his position, I’d probably play it the same way. The problem is that this scenario is repeated over and over across places like Guinea, and malaria, the crafty little bugger it is, quickly builds resistance to the drugs with all that over-exposure. It would be interesting to hear how statisticians at places like the World Health Organization actually get their malaria numbers. They’re not using health center numbers. I hope.
Notice the wire and rubber holding the brake shoe in place
Transport in general is not one of Guinea’s strong suits. The condition of the roads beats up pretty hard on the taxis, and the taxis are generally repaired in quite inventive, often successful ways. On one of my more laborious travels I was commissioned by the chauffeur to change the tire while he caught a motorcycle to the next town to look for a spare tire. (It had been our second flat.) It’s especially the getting back to Kakoni that gets frustrating.
A nice looking Peugeot ready to depart sun blasted Conakry to go upcountry, as they say.
During my return trip from dropping Nathallie off at the airport in Conakry, I made the mistake to continuing on to Santou, a small village where my closest volunteer neighbor lives (approximately 36 km from my site), and passing up Telimele, a larger town with lots of transport activity about 70 km south of me. Unable to get transport from Santou north, I was stuck for a day and a half until I finally borrowed a bike, strapped my bags on the rack, and zipped home in the rain.
A petit in my village rides through the flood waters after a night of raining.
During my sejour in Santou, I sat down with a 20 cent school notebook featuring a poorly photoshopped European football star on the cover (Rio Ferdinand – Defender, Manchester United) and jotted down all the incredible ways that Guineans reuse stuff, things, items and choses.
In the dry season you can ride up top, no worries
Come rainy season, they batton down the hatches
If you ever wonder what happens to all those promotional billboards in America that seems to spring up one week and disappear the next, well, someone found a market here for them. The transport trucks, which are generally large fixed-body Renaults often have nothing but the skeleton frame of a roof over their truck-beds. Guineans, and I would assume people in many countries, take those use thick rubber billboards and use them as tarps to shield their cargo against the rain. Even the NGO Land Rovers all have strips of rolled up billboards stowed away somewhere in case they need to throw something on top while it’s raining.
Exhaust tenderizes intestine
A lot of the Peace Corps drivers were taxi or truck drivers previously, so they know these sorts of tricks. Take Balde for example; he knows that 3 kilos of meat will only stink up the van. Tie it to the front mirror, hit the road, and call it a day. I don’t want to get too sidetracked, but butchered meat is not the only kind of meat that can be strapped to a vehicle.
Wait 'til you see a cow up there
There’s also live meat.
Another trick that I must believe is pretty common across West Africa at least is the melting down of aluminum cans. Guinea is, by many measures, the largest exporter of bauxite in the world. It’s also just between Afghanistan and Pakistan as number nine on the failed state index, primarily because it doesn’t see the profits from that export – but that’s another matter. That bauxite goes off to another country and comes back often in the form of soda cans, which are then melted down and transformed into pots, lids, spoons, and other assorted cutlery.
Ben cooks a little pineapple jam in the aluminum pot on the mudstove back in Forecariah
The blackened pot above was once many different soda cans. People also like it when you give them emptied coke cans, as they can be used to repair cracking pots. Little boys with also cut them up and bang them out in to flat sheets from which they make toy cars and trucks that they pull along on strings. Since the clever boys who knows who to manufacture operating wheels is rare, most often these tiny roadway contraptions tumble and crash while the kids run about. Like their much larger counterparts, these model cars also require frequent maintenance.
There are a couple rancid liquors produced in Guinea, most prominantly Gin Captain’s – the grammar mistake is theirs, not mine. And it most be more prominant than any Guinean will let on because the old bottle are used to repackage procts into for sale.
El-Hadj Abdoul has a Porto for sale
Honey, peanuts, cashews, palm wine (which is like the cultural equivalent of hard cider), peanut oil, palm oil, even gas and transmission fluid. Above, I’m sitting in a little stand that might house liquor bottles of fuel and assorted car fluids. Dadis tried to do away with these sorts of roadside stands, but I don’t think he offered a better solution other than clogging the few gas stations with motorcycles. They’ve mostly returned by now.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it by now, but I should have: cow shoe is everthing in Guinea. Without caoutchouc, there would be no take-out containers. If you get rice and sauce to go, or better yet, chicken athieke (sounds like: etchekay) grated and steamed cassava often with an incredible sauce, they lady with hand over your food in a fragile looking black plastic back, whose bulging seams you will gingerly support all the way home. One of my favorites is the roadside shot of attaya in a tiny cowshoe.
Sorry about all that art getting in the way there, but that's how we all experienced the attaya session
Check out Abdoulaye's pouring skills. He's a champ.
Above, some of my petits are preparing the super strong green tea that they call attaya. Basically they fill a tiny tea pot up with green tea and almost a cup of sugar, bring to a boil, and cool it by pouring it between two cups for a while. Once it gets really frothy, they pour it out into these tiny cups and you throw it back in a sip or two. If one is lucky, the chef has added mint as well. By the way, don’t worry about the size of that tiny cup. It’s enough caffeine to wake a dead horse. Culturally, it’s quite important as well. There are lots of rules and lingo about making attaya. But mostly, it’s a great way to pass the time. I suppose it’s for this reason that I’ve found the to-go shot of attaya a bit odd. When the bush-taxi rolls up to a check point or the driver stops to buy a sack of charcoal for his wife, among the many things hocked through the window of the taxi – an activity not without its share of yells, grimaces, reachings and exasperated HRUMPHs – are tiny, individualized sacks containing a single shot of attaya. Separating the beverage from the hour-plus process of cooking, chatting, sitting and staring is a bit jarring. I tend to decline.
Adema, please smile!
You also get smaller quantities of cooking oils, like palm and peanut, in the small thin cow shoes, such as those my friend Adema sells. As with most Guineans, she takes the idea of getting her picture taken very seriously and went from joking about to this stern, almost sad expression in an instant. I consider it a skill.
That's right, I garden in white.
I first met my friend Dioulde when he offered to help me build a fence behind my house for a garden. You can see a part of it above. I’m using a hoe to make a quick bed for an open-root mango nursery. The soil all around my house is atrociously clay-ridden. You can see the redness of the soil. I blame the somewhat recent construction of the huge house to which my house is linked. Not only did they bring the deeper soils up to the surface in the process of construction, but there are all these piles of unused mudbricks throughout the property. Over the past couple years, they’ve disintegrated and leached into the ground. Rather than double digging here, because the layer of decent soil is so thin, I’m doing what most Guineans do for the rainy season. You pull all the vegetation onto the bed and then cover it with the newly exposed dirt on each side of the bed. With all the rain, the vegetation decomposes inside the bed fairly quickly. Anyway, I’ve digressed. We (Dioulde and I) used tree bark to lash the bamboo to the posts, most of which are from species that will regenerate by cuttings over the course of the rainy season. Anyway, one day a girl came by and asked me why I used tree bark for my fence. Apparently, it’s the old method. She advised that I go down to the mechanics and have them burn a truck tire for me. Once all the rubber is melted away I could extract the steel cabling within and use that to tie up my fence posts. “Ca c’est la garantie, quoi.” I’ve since found out that they use the same steel cabling to make the woven metal charcoal burners for cooking attaya as well as for tying down their aluminum roofing to the ceiling beams on their “American houses” as they call them. You can see one in the background up there.
Keeping with tires, in order to have something strong and flexible to strap items on the roofs of taxis and SUVs, Guineans will slice up tires into long strips, perhaps one inch by one inch and 15 feet long. With small patches of tires, they also make the soles for sandals or even the hinges to at gate so that it remains closed. Only when imported sandals have actually broken are they used as hinges.
Just having a shade break.
I’m sure it’s obscured, but one of these men has secured something or other to the seat of his moto with a different kind of cow shoe. The cow shoe from bicycle tubes. That cow shoe is more useful than duct tape. I connected two water pipes using the top of a water bottle and a long piece of bike tube cow shoe.
A dry-season rainbow
It’s not often that one sees a Guinean car in such a disintegrated state. More often they are completely stripped of any remaining metal. The steel undercarriage is especially valued.
Ploughing requires much more precision control than I had thought
Everything from this man’s plough,
Guess who cut all the brush for that fence
to this old man’s machete,
My hardest working petites
to the daba, or hoe, these girls are fooling around with came from cars and truck under-carriages. What is even more impressive is that from those large 50-gallon barrels, people make fanciful sheet metal doors and windows.
Rice sacks are also a big source of material. People use clumps of frayed rice sacks to wash dishes. Sometimes they get fancy and intentionally unravel them to make tassly dusters or fly swatters. A little re-bar and a sturdy rice sack also can result in a very comfortable lounge chair.
Their heads are always dangling so far back
Women tend to carry their small children around no matter where they go or what they are doing, gardening, cooking, cutting firewood, etc. They do so by wrapping a bath towel around the baby’s butt and up over their breasts. Getting the little duffer up their is always entertaining. Momma bends down, grabs her baby by one arm and plops him on her back, then catches his butt with the towel before he slides off. Usually a little hop and a shake gets the baby secured in there, and momma is ready to head off to the market 5-6 km away with 20 kilos of mangoes on her head and a couple more kids in tow.
TIREZ-MOI PHOTO!
These kids are holding up a deck of cards that Nathallie sent me. They kids love the cards. So much so that I bought some chalk and can now get petits to do math problems on my door as payment for being able to use the deck of cards. DIGRESSION: I originally got the idea from this early piece of brilliant graffiti on my door:
Boy Cent 05. Brilliant!
I’ve heard people say that one’s after-life exists only so long as those who still live think of you. In Guinea, 50 Cent will live well after he dies tryin’, but in sort of a misspelled, francophone kind of way. “Ousmane Bah, tu connais cinqante cent?” Like a museum archivist, I did what I could to preserve this little corner of 50 Cent’s existence, but alas the forces of nature hath smote him. Anyway, back to the matter at hand: playing cards.
So these kids love to play cards. Me, not really knowing too many games, asked them to teach me one of their games. Huge mistake. There was card trading involved, like Go Fish, but there was also ordered competition like War. And it was very clear that the black and red divide was important. I tried admirably to learn but had to bow out. The more I watched the kids play, the more they seemed to be confused, too. Eventually, I noticed that once confusion set in the eldest, or largest, would claim advantage and the game would continue.
Some time later, I walked in on a game of cards the kids were playing with their homemade decks. They make them from old cigarette packs. What’s curious is that they don’t draw on the suits or card names, and they use multiple brands. At that point I realized what’s up. Their games didn’t work because their used to a deck whose variables are limited to the number of cigarette brands sold in Kakoni, so their games have been created with those restrictions in mind.
He's doing something right.
I hate to cut things short here, but wise Peuhls, such as my friend Alpha, above, say ‘if you wake up with a beating, you must have done something bad before you went to sleep.’ My friends, I must sleep and catch a taxi for back home in 4 hours. I do not wise to receive the proverbial beating from my taxi ride tomorrow for having stayed up too late tonight.
Trained. Wrecked.
February 7, 2009
Among his many talents, I do believe Jason was once the Michigan State back-up punter. A coveted spot, no doubt.
For the past many weeks, since December 8th, myself and the rest of the trainees here have lived in a smaller city not far from Conakry called Forecariah. There, we underwent the first phase of training, which mostly entailed language instruction, cultural competancy, and technical sessions related to our sectors. So now, by the end of training, I can safely say that in Guinea I can perform the most basic tasks essential to survival, such as speaking French, haggling, finding rice and sauce, using a bush taxi, and crapping in a latrine without falling over. These are no meagre accomplishments. As far as agroforestry is concerned, the more we learned the more I realized I don’t know. That wasn’t so much a surprise as a validation.
While in Forecariah, everyone lived with a host family. I lived with the Toures.
Mariama (my maman in Forecariah) and Mama Aissata preparing diner
Technically Mariama was my host mom, but the in the family there were two moms, eight children and an untold number of cousins. (A modest sized family by Guinean standards.) While Forecariah sits firmly in the Susu dominated coastal region of Guinea, and both of the mothers in my family are Susu, my papa in Forecariah, Mikhail Toure, is Malinke. He has lived his whole life in Forecariah, but the Toure family comes from Haute Guinee, the large Northeast region of the country that borders Mali and is more culturally and geographically similar to the latter than other parts of Guinea. The point I was trying to get at was that even though everyone in my family speaks French, the language in the house is Susu (with a little Malinke tossed in there to spice things up).
Oh, and you were wondering about the whole “Mikhail” thing. Well, in 1958 Guinea declared its independence, and unlike every other remanant of French West Africa, Guinea leapt right into independence by snubbing any French efforts to ease the decolonization process. The relationship soured and Guinee, led by Sekou Toure (no relation that I know of), became closely aligned with the Soviet bloc. You can still feel the close relationships in many ways. Two of the language trainers working for Peace Corps Guinea speak Russian.
But the affairs of history didn’t feel very close as I sat in my light-less room:
Misquito net, LED lamp, water filter, and BBC on the short-wave; or every other night in Forecariah
One night, I heard over the BBC a story about inconsistent electricity in Nepal. Sometimes they lack electricity for 10 to 14 hours per day. In that dry, unconciously condescending tone that BBC reporters use, I learned that the Nepalese children who huddle around candlelight to do their homework get it twice as often as the schoolkids in my house.
I faintly remember someone from the State Department telling us how the electicity system works in Guinea. It was a wild tale and I only remember sparse details. One that sticks out well though was that much of the electicity for major towns, especially in the dry season when the electric dams decrease in output, comes from enormous petrol powered generators. And not a large number of these. For some reason 14 sticks out in my mind. Regardless, if the BBC was trying to get me to feel sorry for people who get twice as much electricity as I did, they sent their signal to the wrong short-wave.
When we do get electricity, my family tends to build a makeshift theatre out of the front courtyard where the father and perhaps another deserving gentleman from the neighborhood will sit in plastic chairs front and center before a small TV as the rest of the family and neighborhood children (petits) form a semi-circle behind them. Usually, my family watches West African hiphop/dance videos or these very odd comedies that seem to have been made with a handicams and no plots to weigh down the hijinks.
In the days after the Christmas Coup 2008, as it has been dubbed, there was an incredible spike in the number of hours of electricity per day in Forecariah, up from just 6 to nearly around the clock for a couple days. I couldn’t help but think that some brilliant Guinean realized that if you left the electricity on in a complete political power vacuum, most Guineans will take the opportunity to have a movie marathon rather than take to the streets.
The Obama/Conte sign on Barack Obama Boulevard in Forecariah, Guinea
Well, I suppose I’ve mentioned it so I might as well keep going on about it — it being the coup d’etat. Everyone, included us trainees, knew that Lansana Conte, the man who has been president of Guinea since 1984, has been very ill for the past several years. By the time his death was announced, there had appatently begun rumors that he had been dead for weeks. All I know is that on the morning his passing was announced, my family told me rather sombrely that the presient had died, and then they went along with their day somewhat apprehensively but as though nothing had changed. The floor still needed to be mopped. The rice needed cooking. The water fetched, etc. In general, this is how Guineans have reacted to the change. They are apprehensive about the possibility of violence and simultaneously too preoccupied with their own affairs to be more than spectators to the extra-constitutional governmental transition.
I, and all the other volunteers, freaked:
Worrying that Santa has been hit by celebratory gunfire
Conte had consolidated so much of the state that it was entirely invested in his person. He also kept from deciding on a successor, possibly for fear that the successor might try to jump the gun on him. As soon as Kadija, the 17 year old sister in my host family, told me Conte was dead I knew I was living in a country that had no government. The scenes on the street in Forecariah were made much more surreal as it was the first day of school vacation and the usual ocean of uniformed school children had disappeared from the streets, replaced by men walked intermittently and holding radios to their ears for the latest updates. Anyone who has been in Guinea long enough will tell you that nothing happens quickly here, nothing except cell tower construction and now – apparently – coups des etats.
By Christmas Eve a group of military officers led by Moussa Camara began saying that the constitution was no longer valid and that their junta had appointed M. Camara to be head of state. Over the course of the next few days (my timeline isn’t very good) there was essentially a game of capture the flag between the President of the national assembly (who was interim head-of-state according to the constitution) and Camara whereby the Presidency could be had by the man best able to maintain possession of the presidential palace. Camara won. For us trainees, this meant that our Chistmas trip to Conakry was cancelled. We spent the evening together at the training center in Forecariah, huddling beneath solid cover when occasional bursts of celebratory gunfire errupted, wondering if and when we might get evacuated over the border to Sierra Leone, and just generally having a grand ol’ time looking like this:
Are you here to take me to Sierra Leone?
During this whole escapade, Ousmane Diallo, the training manager/heart/soul of Peace Corps Guinea sat chuckling with us through the night. So adept are his skills that from his chair in Forecariah, crutches at his side, during the most tense period of the coup he orchestrated the purchase and shipment past roadside checkpoints of our cell phones (an errand we trainees were to have done in Conakry over Christmas) from Conakry to Forecariah just so we could call home on Christmas Day. A Pere Noel if ever there was one.
After a few days, the new president seemed to be accepted, everyone was happy that no one was hurt in the process, and life resumed to normal.
The fact that power changed hands so peacefully here makes complete sense when you consider how incredibly open and friendly Guineans are. A normal meeting on the street will last several exchanges as they ask how you, your family, and your health are fairing in a slew of various ways. On one of my first bush taxi rides, a 4 hour trip from Kindia to Telimele (a distance of 130 km), the taxi driver stopped without exception at every occasion he could to saluate another bush taxi driver. I had just learned enough Pulaar by this time to be able to navigate my way through a couple cycles of salutations and it was clear that no specific information was being transfered during these roadside interactions.
Take a Peugeot station wagon, jack up the rear suspension with springs made of melted down scrap metal and you can take any amount of cargo on any type of road.
A Jarrama. Hey. A Jarrama. Hey. Tana Alaa? Is there evil? Jam Tun. Peace only. No Marsude? How’s it going? Seeda-Seeda. Little-little. Tana alaa ton? Is there evil there? Jam tun. Peace only. En Ontuma. Later. En Ontuma. Later.
Mix and match these phrases (and the ten thousand additional Pulaar greetings) until an actual conversation begins or one person walks away, and then you have started to become Guinean.
Bush taxis themselves, like pit latrines and eating rice and sauce with your hands, fall into that realm of things here in Guinea that totally astound you when you first come into contact with them but after a couple weeks are fairly passe. As you can see, the taxis here are mostly old european-style station wagons. One like the taxi pictured above would not leave the taxi-gare until it has at least 8 of its 9 inside seats paid for (that doesn’t include the driver). Inevitably, people pay the driver to be able to ride on the roof with the luggage too.
The people who ride on the roof are not amateurs. They know what’s up. On a hot day, when the chauffeur assumes the radiator has run dry (he must assume because the guages generally don’t work), he pulls up to a roadside stream. Someone from up top leaps off and grabs a spare motor oil bottle, dips it in the stream, tops off the radiator, and if he’s feeling especially parched he might top himself off too then offer the rest of the taxi an invitation.
When you see that for the first time, it blows you away, like why would someone knowingly (and of course they know the risk) put themself at such risk by drinking surface water. If you consider that to get clean water requires going to a pump, using expensive bleach to clean it, and then on a trip having something to carry it in, the cost of availability for most people becomes too much to outweigh the risks of a stomach parasite that they might get from other vectors anyway.
Bush taxis are also incredibly fun. On real rough roads like the 3 hour, 60 kilometer ride from to my site from the nearest large city, a bush taxi feels more like a slow, bumpy rollercoaster. A rollercoaster that has support bars ramming into your butt and a sweaty, coughing man smushing you into the door.
One of the first excursions we took during train was to a diamond mine outside Forecariah. First off, we looked for diamonds for ourselves:
Jason looks for diamonds
The diamond mines were once a somewhat major operation, run by an international organization. But for the last several years, since the mining company has left, the mines have been frequented by people who are essentially freelancers.
Sifting for diamonds and letting the soil wash away
Most are Guinean but many spill over the border from Sierra Leone as well to dig 8 to 10 foot holes into once arable land in order to find tiny nuggets that they can sell back in town for usually 50,000 Guinean Francs (or, about $10 USD) depending on the quality of the rock.
Diamond miners breaking their backs for 10 bucks a month and disturbing soil levels for years
The economic cycle of these kind of diamond miners seems to follow that goldrush path where they get a find and live large on the cash until it runs out and they return to the diamond mines for the next find. Not only does the process to mining for diamonds in this manner degrade the soil by baking it, removing the organic matter and mixing topsoil levels with all other soil levels, but the land would be much more profitable if it were repaired to its arable state and farmed.
Such a proposition suns up against two major problems in Guinea. Firstly, Guineans often see the land as a gift from Allah that is either living or dead rather than a system that can be maintained and even restored. And secondly, no one thinks longterm. There is so much uncertainty in West African life that longterm plans are often unfeasible. Planning much past a growing season or two is often too far ahead. So, attempting to convince people first that it’s possible to restore degraded lands to agricultural production is one thing, then getting them to actually follow through on the process is even harder – especially when that 50,000 GNF comes in every once in a while.
Back in Forecariah, by chance, I had the opportunity to talk to one of the midlemen that buys diamonds from the freelancers. He wanted me to sell his diamonds in America and tried convincing me that he was a very well-connected dealer by mentioning all these Canadians, Brits, and Australians he works with by their first names. He was a very insistant fellow, but from what I could gather the certainty of his occupation was just about as stable as that of the diamond miners who supply him.
Cooking smoke
One project that takes little pre-planning, few material costs, and almost no risk happens to be mudstoves. At the top of the post you can see how most Guineans cook. They place 3 rocks together and build a fire between them. Often in the rainy season this occurs in an enclosed cooking hut. As you can see they put out a lot of smoke, but they also loose a lot of heat and thus waste time and fuel. In fact, the drastic increase in fuelwood due to population increases is the driving factor behind a lor deforestation in Guinea. By using a mud compound made from clay and cow poo, one can easily make a far more efficient model.
My host father showing off his dandy new mudstove
Mudstoves not only use less wood, cook faster, and look awesomer, they free up a lot of time for women who would otherwise be attending cooking related tasks.
As far as the Peace Corps is concerned, volunteers are facilitators. It is not our job to come here and just give and make, but rather to teach by giving, making, facilitating, and delegating until our hosts are independent of our guidance and passing on their knowledge. Or something like that. Well, take a gander at this:
Mikhail and his newest mudstove
On a Monday I taught my family how to make a mudstove, and on Tuesday, while I was away, they used the excess material to make a second on their own. DONE. Difference Made. Plane ticket back to America, PLEASE.
Another pretty nasty cause of deforestation in West Africa are brush fires. Sometimes unintentional, but usually field burnings that get out of control, brush fires wreak havoc not only on the air and forest size, but since the burned fields are not left to fallow for long enough due to increase production demands they provide very little benefit to offset their destruction.
Just a lazy Sunday afternoon
But again, this is a hard practice to counteract as burning fields is not only less work intensive than other methods of clearing fields, but it also enjoys the luxury of legacy.
I suppose I must conclude at somepoint, so I might as well wrap up this post with a word on Guinean children, or petits, as they are called. In the social hierarchy where father is at the top, petits form the base of child labor upon which father stands. Petits are enlisted to all sorts of tasks, from cleaning to food prep, selling items in the market, and finally their schoolwork. But even with their full docket of work they still summon the energy to freak out whenever a white person is around. In Susu, they yell, “Fote!,” (white person or rich man) with a sing-song rythm that lingers on the “o” sound for a beat and a half before droping that “te” on the last half beat. Even if you are only in eyesight, they will scream out to you for you to respond. And if petits are lucky enough to have a Fote near them, the petit will sprint to the fote with the kind of intent reserved for on the the most urgent of messages. Then he or she, or more likely, the group of 4 to 8 petits will fall dead silent and wide eyed. They’ll reach out their right hand to touch the fote and ask as though they don’t know entirely the meaning of the words coming from their mouths, “Fote. Comment tu t’appelle?”
Barbara (second from left) and Bouba (Right) playing me the Fote song
The above photograph is pretty representative of petits. As a parting gift, here are some some sound clips from the event:
hmm. I seem to be having technical difficulties getting the audio up so I’ll get back to that later on. Here are some pictures to tide you over:
Dorian making her way through the Telimele market
My new house at site
Inside my house
Inside my house looking th other way
All of these bathroom elements work as they are supposed to because I have gravity fed pump water plumbing
See, I'm already helping Africa
From within the Kennedy Compound
December 8, 2008
Possessions.
Too many events and too little sleep have transpired since Philadelphia for me to remember much of it. There was a restive red-eye from JFK to Dakar, where 29 confused people got of the plane and into the first bus with open doors in eyesight before considering where they needed to go.
Can't we just walk it?
These airfield buses seem to be the thing here in West Africa. They have no signs indicating their destination and only carry you 30 or 40 yards, but the man in the blue camouflage and with the rifle strongly suggests you take it. There was also the inception of Mefloquine Wednesdays, when most of us take our weekly malaria meds. As Mike, a fellow trainee said, a couple days a week of heightened anxiety, sleeplessness, and terrifyingly lucid nightmares are much preferred to a foreshortened life of exploding blood vessels.
And it’s the anxiety that really took hold of me on the first day in-country. On the plane ride, people from the different projects in our staging group, Small Business Development, Public Health and Agroforestry (mine), were quizzing one another on their job descriptions and quickly finding that no one really knew anything about what they were going to be doing. Sure, people are qualified and could say things like, “Oh, I’ll be working with NGOs to facilitate more sound business practices” or “I’ll be trying to increase the nutrient productivity of crops among rural farmers and starting Moringa plantations,” but clearly these were responses we had all repeated for weeks or months to people asking us why we were going to West Africa.
Want vitamins? Eat, drink, or just lick this Moringa tree.
We were (and definitely still are) completely ignorant of how Guinea operates and what working toward those ends entails. So, when we finally unloaded from the quick flight from Dakar to Conakry and deposited ourselves and our vital possessions into the Peace Corps vans for a ride through our new country’s capital, the vagueness of my oft-repeated explanations was suddenly dwarfed by the chaotic streets of midday Conakry.
Mind the gap.
A more representative image.
What am I doing here again? After being stared at and waved to for a half hour, the bus pulled us into a concrete walled compound that said Peace Corps on the gate.
Peace Barracks.
Amy on the roof.
Sadiqi, a current Peace Corps Volunteer assisting with our pre-service training, keeps wondering aloud whether Conakry is the only national capital without regular electricity. It may well be, but electricity is not its only problem. The water system is unclean and only operates periodically and waste seems to get dumped directly into the ocean.
Do not swim here.
But the people are absolutely incredible, and I doubt it’s just because we’ve been around mainly Peace Corps foreign national workers. Last Friday night, I missed dinner because I was typing an email. Ibrahim, the dishwasher and general kitchen master, found me some spaghetti and has since called out my name when I come in to eat, as though marking me off the absent list. We’ve had many a small chat over the weekend (which actually feels like it has lasted weeks), and today he even invited me and some other trainees to his Tabaski (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_ul-Adha) meal tomorrow. Here, it’s kind of like inviting someone to your Easter and Thanksgiving meals all wrapped into one. It was hugely nice of him to do so, and I knew that saying no would be, if not an insult, at least a bit let down, but the prospect of navigating this city unguided on an enormous holiday was way too much for me. I had to say no thanks. I’m pretty sure he understood why, well, I hope.
On Tuesday, we go off to our training site and begin living with our host families. In preparation, we had a Homestay Orientation this afternoon, the highlight of which was a detailed explanation of latrine use. Now, of course, there is a toilet paper method that seems to be preferred by most PCVs, but there is also a second method that is preferred by the Guineens. This is the “Water Method,” and it involves a bare left hand, a kettle of water in the right hand, well trimmed fingernails and results in an intimate knowledge of one’s stool characteristics. They say it’s far more comfortable than paper during those inevitable bouts of diarhea and sooner or later you’ll run out of toilet paper. As Siara, another PVC assisting with our PST, declared, “You don’t choose the ‘Water Method’. The ‘Water Method’ chooses you.”
Am I already chosen???
In the last couple days here, I’ve realized that my jeans and unbreathable shirts are meant for a totally different place. (I’m still ridiculously scared of malaria and have been wearing long pants and sleeves as much as I can. As well, I’ve made a point of attacking any mosquito in eyesight – even at the risk of disrupting a speaker. The enemy shall receive no reprieve.) Once I get to our training site this week, I’ll be getting a couple outfits tailored. The material is really inexpensive and apparently the tailors are incredible. I saw a picture of a dude with a wild tailor made suit that couldn’t have cost much more than the equivalent of $20 USD. Local threads all the way.
Ian.
OK- The begging list:
2 oz. bottles of hand sanitizer
sugary water additives, like crystal light or even better gatorade powder
multi-vitamins
pro-biotic chewables (lactobacillus)
Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese
A fixed 60-gig iPod (that’ll be a miracle)
hard candy
powered spices (I’ll be eating rice and sauce for a very long time)
Also: Big up to Ben for a couple of those shots.
Mailing Info and Philly
December 3, 2008
Hey Fellers.
This, here, is my blog. I know, even the word itself is disgusting but get over it. I did.
Today was a bit of a long one. At 12:01 AM, I was far from packed. There were shirts drying on a rack in front of the fire, mismatched socks on the dining room table and a suitcase that seemed to have vomited my posessions all over the floor. From 1:30 to 2:30 AM I would periodically fall asleep and wake up with a start, obsessed over some completely irrelevant item or another. Ties. Thick socks. A Billie Holiday Songbook. Make or break items to be sure.
As an aside, if you feel so kind as to send me correspondance or some fantastic item (I found the Billie Holiday Songbook but no ties) I can be reached at the following address:
Ian Hartman, PCT (PCV as of Feb. 6, 2009)
Corps de la Paix Americain
B.P. 1927, Conakry
Guinée (West Africa)
To find out exactly how to send anything and everything to Guinea see this ridiculously exhaustive post by Dorian: http://dorianinafrica.blogspot.com/2008/11/epic-mailing-guidelines-post.html. Really a stand up job the lady has done there.
The 7 AM flight to Philly included the most serene above-cloud ceiling sunrise ever, but for the rest of the day I’ve felt like a zombie. So, I’m going to end this short post because sleep calls. And so does Africa, in 29 hours.
