zot in guinea the straight and narrow path of cultural diplomacy

Inshallah, I will be in Conakry tomorrow night for New Year’s eve. The excitement amongst the stagiares is palpable. Some overly industrious soul even took it upon themselves to schedule times for the computers. C’est vrai.

I’m starting to work past and future tenses into my French, but my frustrations with our classes, both language and tech at this point, are mounting. We have essentially taken over our tech sessions, so that we are teaching ourselves the material we should know. This doesn’t really solve the problem, but it removes some of the blame from the formateurs if the sessions are useless. The real problem with tech is that none of it is directly applicable. We all know how to do the different types of analysis, but we have no idea whatsoever how to explain them to people who may have very little education, or who may speak French poorly, not to mention our own mangled efforts at parleying. In truth we need people who have been in the trenches to be working with us on this stuff, but instead we’re getting broad overviews on things that we generally already know.

As for language, sometimes its fine, but lately my formateur hasn’t been prepared and I spend a maddeningly large amount of time waiting for him to figure out what to teach us. But the thing is we don’t need more formal teaching. We need practice. Beaucoup de practique. We need practice comprehending what people are saying and practice working in different tenses and with different pronouns. Instead we spend the days learning how to say we are sick, which we can put together ourselves if we really needed to.

Anyway, sometimes I am not that frustrated, and other times, like today, I get pretty down. I have a long way to go language-wise, and I want to maximize every possible moment, but things are not working out that way. I suspect that, starting after we return from Conakry, we will form a small group of people who are interested in meeting a few times a week solely to practice speaking French with each other. If we’re really on the ball we’ll organize some gin and tonics to loosen our tongues.

Speaking of which, Guineans are fans of palm wine, which they make by basically extracting palm juice and capping the bottle for a few days. It tastes vaguely like fermented urine, but a bottle costs less than a third of what a can of coke costs. I’ve finely figured out that the building outside my family’s compound is a bar, specializing in palm wine and gin. Explains the loud music into the late hours, but doesn’t make me any less grumpy about the noise.

Dear lord, time is going fast.

Life in the Peace Corps is all about small joys. The joys of finally using past tense in a sentence. The contentedness that comes from unexpectedly spending an hour discussing the merits of raising chickens versus ducks, all in French, with a family you had thought yourself sick of. The joy of shaking because Attaya, the local tea you just drank at the cafe, is so concentrated you can feel the caffeine coarsing through your veins as if you had injected it (that wasn’t so much a joy as a funny moment to look back on). Egg sandwichs for lunch, cooked fresh with onions by a man who calls you “mon ami” (everyone is mon ami here). Tea in the mornings during break. Unexpectedly joyous responses to the salues called out to each person you pass. Playing a hand holding game with a tiny kid who, unlike every other child here, doesn’t run at you screaming “Fote!.” Perhaps he is too young.

Sometimes it seems that the best moments in life are the unexpected ones. And those moments only happen if you open yourself to them in difficult times. I could have come home and gone straight to my room, but instead I decided to sit down for a bit and I ended up having the best conversation I have ever had with my host dad. Part of the reason that how I act in difficult situations interests me so much is because it seems like those are the times when true bonds are formed, when true character is revealed, and when friendships move beyond mere convenience. And those moments are always a test, because its easiest to run away from the situation, or to react with hurt or anger or pride. My personal poison is to run away, especially when I don’t know people well. But on those occassions when I have stuck around, either because I decided to or because there was no other option, I’ve generally had surprising and pleasing results.

There are lots of reasons that keep a volunteer in the Peace Corps, fighting to make a tiny difference in a completely different, and significantly less comfortable, world. I think one of those things is the development of small daily sources of joy. Beyond determination, willpower, having nothing to go back to, and the other reasons I’ve heard, I think the small joys, the tiny bits of progress, are what keep us here enjoying our lives and feeling like we are making a difference, even if it is in the eyes of a young girl who gains a bit of confidence in herself, or a man who begins to think of his possibilities in a new light.

We’re doing a mustache contest for the end of stage. I’ll do my best to put up some awesome photos. It seems to be a tradition for Peace Corps Guinea. Mine is still a beard right now, but at some point in the next week I’ll be driven to shave by the combination of heat and itching, and will be left with a nice mustache befitting the modern American male of the 1920’s.

The constant wail of babies threatens to drive me mad. Two one year olds live in the same house I do, and their cries are unending. It seems that people here do not care much for trying to stop them from crying, and often they are left to cry for long periods of time before someone can be troubled to pick them up. In general I find my shell for these kinds of distractions comparably weak. Perhaps growing up with the racket of humanity surrounding you gives you a certain armor, but my own armor is much too thin.

If I have been in higher spirits in the past week, the boredom of today has left me again filled with a restlessness. Five more weeks of training before we are released into the greater world of Guinea. My anticipation grows with each passing hour, though I fully expect a raft of issues to crop up once I am there. My primary frustration with stage is never having time to myself, and I suspect the irony of site is that my frustration will be finding something to do with all the time I am given.

There was a rash of letter writing last night and this morning as I found out that the country director’s daughter would be headed back to the states on December 31st. But when I arrived at the Peace Corps compound this morning the car had already left. Hopefully I can send them with a car tomorrow. In the future I will have to stagger the letters so that I am not writing so many at once. But I keep thinking this will be the last opportunity to get a letter out for a while and want to get them out to both family and friends.

But in the midst of writing letters I managed to distill some of the thoughts that have been floating around in my head. I never wrote a piece on why I was doing the Peace Corps. I wanted to, but it seemed too complicated and, in truth, I don’t think I knew myself sometimes. But one thing I was seeking by joining was a space to consider my adulthood and its ramifications. I am swiftly approaching 29 years old, and it seems to me high time that I stopped thinking of myself as a young person recently out in the world and started to see myself as the grown man that I am.

I don’t mean that in the sense of acting more maturely, and in fact I have not really been able to define what I mean when I say that I need to start seeing myself as the grown man that I am. I think it has at least two major components. The first is the giving up of depending so heavily on what people think of me. In some way I think that my overawareness of other’s thoughts of me reflect a deep-seated self doubt. This self-doubt is something that I associate with being a teenager and it seems distinctly out of place as I approach 30. To some extent I am making strides in that line, becoming more comfortable with my own self assessment, and more confident that when I look back at my life, my actions can generally stand up to the light of judgement. With that recognition, problems that other people might have with me shift from being a personal failure to a truth of human interaction, in which there is no real need for blame. This is something that I have struggled with for the past several years, but I’m beginning to be able to put it into words, and that feels good.

The second component is being less afraid of confrontation and conflict. I tend to shy away from conflict, and so conversations that should happen don’t, or they happen too late. This always leaves me a little ashamed, again a feeling I associate with being a kid. But the funny thing about confrontation is that if you approach it in a direct way, it often turns into something that isn’t confrontation, but instead is a mutual learning and building, or at least a direct resolution or understanding.

Some of this is arising from having thirty people together every day as training progresses, and some from having to live with a family that would, if I let them, quickly step over any personal boundaries without even realizing it. With my fellow volunteers I have reached a point where it doesn’t matter whether some of them like me or not, but that we can still work together and be cordial. And in fact no one really dislikes anyone else, its just a question of how we handle the tiny conflicts of personality that, if blown out of proportion or swept under the rug, erupt into full fledged dislikes. But the group is too good and the size is too small to spend two years seriously disliking anyone. All of which is to say that I am content with being friends with some, and being only acquaintances with others. And this does not mean anything about them or me. I think a few years ago I would have been personally afronted if I wasn’t getting along with someone and it would have to have been someone’s fault, but that idea seems silly to me now.

The short story: I’m fine and things are good. Don’t worry about me or the coup. Also I have a phone, and using skype it costs you $0.20/min to call me (its free for me).

A lot of you must be wondering what is going on here what with the coup and all. Let me first put your fears to rest. At no time was I in any real danger, and I am perfectly fine now. The closest we came to trouble was when the soldiers were celebrating by firing their guns in the air and we went inside on the off chance that an errant bullet found its way down on top of us. Guineans are generally pretty happy with the whole thing. The new president isn’t from any of the three major ethnic groups, which has eased ethnic tensions, and, perhaps most importantly for the general public, the power has been much more consistent since he took over. Most Guineans want change, and figure any kind of change is good.

And there is reason to hope that there will be good change. The new president is by all reports intelligent and truly interested in improving the state of things in Guinea. The sticking point is that he is pushing for elections at the end of 2010, and many people think that two years is too long. But you cannot possibly know how impossible fair elections would be in a country like Guinea. There is no registration of voters to speak of. There is no identification system. If they set up polls, nothing would prevent the wealthier candidate from paying people to vote repeatedly. The infrastructure to handle and election is just nonexistent in this country. And it can take a long time to put together. One of the better U.S. projects in Guinea has been to get people registered and with ID’s, and so that is a start, but the project is far from complete. I’m not saying I think the coup is necessarily a good thing, especially since I don’t know much about the president himself, and it is impossible to know whether the military will actually organize elections. But Guinea has been spiralling downward for some time under not just bad leadership, but a lack of leadership, and hopefully things will be different now.

Anyway, we had a wonderful Christmas, surrounded by a coup as it was. We spent Christmas eve at the Peace Corps compound, basically just hanging out with each other. There was a palm tree that we decorated and put secret santa presents under. I received a bottle of gin, which I intend to put to good use .

Christmas itself was a little more difficult. I think that we all missed our families, and we were uncertain of what was going to happen and whether we were going to be evacuated. Fortunately Ousman, who’s official title I forget but he is basically both head of security and head of training, made sure we all got cell phones. So Christmas night was a flurry of stagiares (that’s us) calling home. Ousman has a lot of respect from all of us and I couldn’t for anyone better.

Needless to say our training was rather disrupted, but hopefully next week we’ll get back to it. The SED sessions have improved, though I still think they could be better, but at least now I don’t have a list of objections.

In one week I find out my site location and shortly after that the pace really picks up, with a three day counterpart workshop in a different city and then a four day site visit the next week. After that there will only be two weeks of training left before we head back to Conakry for a few days to purchase supplies and then head out to our sites.

And I’m really excited about site. My French is getting better and, though I still have trouble understanding what people are saying, I can generally figure it out with enough repitition and if they speak slowly. I think I’ve reached the level where I can get by and continue learning on my own. In addition, I’m looking forward to having my own place and being able to settle in to my house that I can make my own.

But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. There was a lot of fear that Peace Corps would evacuate us (not fear of the danger, ironically, but fear that we would be evacuated and lose our spots), and while that danger seems to have passed given the smoothness of the transition to power, it is still a possibility. In Peace Corps it seems essential to take one day at a time. If you have to think about the future, its best to keep it to a few weeks. I think few of us can really handle the thought of spending two years here, which can seem very long. From day to day I am happy and learning a ton (mostly through interacting with people more than training) and actually getting a lot of what I wanted to get out of this whole thing, and that is what seems important at this point.

Another bit of good news is that my body seems to have adjusted to the heat, so that I only feel like I am literally melting sometimes, instead of all the time. It still only gets down to about 80 degrees at night, but now that 80 degrees seems chilly, and I put a sheet on. Today I even had goosebumps when the wind blew. Also, I got my first shirt from my tailor today, and I’m pretty happy with it. It cost me the equivalent of $4. I’m trying to save as much of my spending allowance as possible so that I can buy clothes, as much of what I brought seems useless. Lastly, we are having a mustache competition for the end of stage, so I will be doing my best to grow a mustache for the next five weeks, and then I will be shaving it in preparation for our mustache party at IST (three months after the end of stage).

We’ve reached the part of our SED training where we spend a lot of time meeting with businesses, organizations, groupements (small groups of producers), microfinance institutions, etc… Its pretty interesting and it gives me a good chance to practice my French comprehension, since the people invariablly speak more quickly than our language trainers. Sometimes these sessions leave me feeling like I understood nothing and other times I feel like I am doing pretty well for only a few weeks of studying. We’ve also reached the point at which the staff and trainers have been instructed to speak to us only in French, and we’ve been encouraged to speak to each other in French as much as possible. One of my favorite experiences here was sitting under a tree with some of the language staff and some other volunteers and discussing the idea of love with them. I had a blast. Plus, the language teachers, and perhaps culture here in general, have a sort of exhaggerated interaction, in which gestures and sounds are bigger and almost comical. Its great fun and I definitely want to carry a piece of it back to the states.

Its Sunday night. As of Tuesday, I will have been in stage (with a soft a) for two weeks. I don’t really know how to sum up what has happened during that time. I caught a cold from which I’m mostly better. I killed a chicken and then learned how to prepare it.
My weekdays generally stay true to this pattern: I wake up at 5:00 because the mosque by my house blasts its call to prayer over loudspeakers. I doze till 6:00 or so, when it is 80 degrees and the rooster decides its time for me to get up and it sits underneath my window and crows. Soon after the two one year olds that I live with are crying, and there is no more sleep to be had. Thus my days begin with multiple invasions not typical of my life in the states. I’m happy to report that I have more or less adjusted to them, and that the only thing that really gets to me is the constant crying that accompanies two babies and no efforts to comfort them.
At 7:30 I leave my room and sit by myself in my families living room, where I eat half a loaf of french bread and drink a cup of tea. If I’m lucky I also have peanut butter or a cheese spread. Then I walk with my sister to the Peace Corps office (she goes to her school).

By 10:00 it is 90, and it will reach 95 or so quickly, and stay that way for the rest of the day. I’ve stopped sweating copious amounts, and my body is actually cold lying on the bed when at 3:00 it reaches 78. I have four classes each day, at least two language classes, and another two classes split between technical (SED skills), cross-cultural, health, and language tech classes. The language classes are simply awesome. My French is improving astronomically, though I still fear I won’t be competent when I finish stage, but I’ll have to work with that. I’m basically at the bottom of the class with respect to language, which is demoralizing, but I usually don’t really think about it.

The rest of it is kind of a wash. Cross culture classes are fun but inefficient in that they transfer only a small amount of information during their two hours. The language tech classes have the potential to be great if they were like business-specific language classes, but instead they tend to be a question asking tutoring session, which is only marginally helpful. The health classes tell us a bunch of stuff almost everyone must know, but they also have some crucial information about how to minimize risk of different illnesses, and the sessions on taking our own blood samples have been pretty interesting (just wait till the stool sample class).

The technical classes, on the other hand, have some serious issues. Even allowing for the general banality of business classes, my fellow SED volunteers and I have been less than happy with what we are learning. The classes tend to focus on technics for analyzing a business (for example, SWOT analysis, needs assessment, etc…). These are useful tools, but they don’t really prepare us for the reality of being a SED volunteer. As of now we still don’t really know what to expect. But they’ve recognized a need to shake things up so I’m hoping it will improve.

On any day except Thursday, I buy my own lunch from a ‘cafebar’ that is near the Peace Corps office.The owner is really friendly and he makes an egg sandwich with cheese spread and onions that is 9×10^100 times better than everything else. He also has cold cocas and fantas, so life is good. Occassionally I switch it up with a bean sandwich, taking care to avoid the fish spaghetti. On Thursdays the Peace Corps provides lunch, a tasty smorgesboard of Guinean (or maybe Senegalese) food.

Dinner is a struggle. I’ve lost a lot of weight, and expect to lose more. This happens to every volunteer, but for me it is exacerbated by a skipping of dinner, which usually consists of a whole fish in a sauce over rice. I was able to eat it the first night but since then the prevalence of fish in all foods here and the monotonous dinner has made my body reject it wholeheartedly. I figure once I get truly hungry my body will decide it is okay to eat. One night I had chicken and I literally went to heaven.

Speaking of heaven, a volunteer’s parent sent a box of candy bars. There was a moment of wonder as a trainee reached into the box, and then the loudest 30 person cheer I have ever heard as she pulled out a snickers bar. Now I like Snickers, but I didn’t think I could like a Snickers this much. My disappointment was only slightly lessened when there were only Milky Ways left by the time the box reached me.

My nights are filled with homework and efforts to speak French, followed by an hour to two taking a bucket bath (the luke warm water is awesomely cold) and then laying in bed reading (except that now I’ve finished my book, I’ll get another when we go to Conakry for Christmas).

My family is Catholic, and consists of mon pere, ma mere, 5 freres et 2 soeurs, plus the son of one sister and the occassional guest. Mon pere is really nice and does his best to speak French with me every night. He has tons of patience. Jean, who is 16, and Jacqueline, who is 12, are also both pretty neat. Jacqueline has taught me how to wash clothes and fetch water from the well (though I’m dubious of her assertion that a lack of suds means a lack of soap).

Today my grandpere asked if I wanted to marry her. Complete shock. I don’t even know what to say about that. It weirds me out big time to be honest.

About the chicken killing. It was really interesting. I expected to have significant levels of guilt and sadness, but it wasn’t actually that bad. I might have checked out after I cut its head off and was standing on its wings and feet while it tried to run around. After that the process of preparing the chicken was really interesting. We are probably going to do several for the Christmas potluck.

In some ways my volunteer work is already beginning. I’m teaching Roger, my brother, to type on my little computer, and I’m trading English for French classes with my sister Angeline (if we can get the times to stick). Mon pere wants to plan out a pig breeding business (even though this is muslim country), so hopefully we’ll sit down in the next couple of weeks and start hashing that out. The language barrier makes it difficult but that is getting easier every day.

With the days so hectic I am taking increasing solace in my room just to get a break from it all. I suspect my fellow volunteers think I am antisocial, but hopefully they don’t think I am unfriendly. I just need a break from people and my room is the closest I can get (and still, there is the yelling of my family the hopeful knocks on my door to ride my bike or use my camera, and the disco/cinema that blares music across the street (and by street I mean four foot wide dirt path).

Aside from the cold I have yet to get sick, and my spirits are pretty high (except for a few significant lows). The whole process is a rollercoaster ride, but I am content with it.