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.