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.
