zot in Niger bush camels

I made vrai spaghetti for my family ce soir. I don’t think they liked it, though I thought it was fantastic. They ate it out of politeness, but they had rice ready to mange when we were done. We’re in the end game now, having finished our last presentation this morning and having only the language test on Monday before all necessary assignments are finished.

There is a decided mix of fear and excitement in the air as we prepare to leave for site. And where as a week ago we seemed fed up with each other, there is a marked friendliness between nearly everyone as we realize that we won’t really see much of each other after next week. This is especially true for those fellow volunteers in separate regions.

Things are wrapping up, and not a moment too soon. We finished our small business presentatinos yesterday, and tomorrow we have our groupement presentations, and then we are basically done, except for the language test on Monday.

I’ve been thinking a little the past few days about what I want to do when my two years here is up. There are a couple of people here who are interested in hiking the Appalachain Trail, which I think might be pretty cool, and since I will be done in February but (if I go to law school) starting anything till August or so, it fits perfectly in that time.

But I’ve also been thinking about extending my service for 6 months to continue working here until school would start. Ou bien, if I don’t go to law school right away there are a few other options, like working for USAID or the state department. I think under President Obama I could (maybe) feel like I was doing some good work. Lately I’ve also been wondering about the possibility of going to France for a while, either for six months before I go to law school, or for a longer period if there is something like a UN job there. There are various confluences going on here. Cornell and Columbia law schools both have a tiny and hence tres selective program where you take two years of courses in the U.S. and then go to France and spend two years there studying law. When you are done you are eligible to practice law in both countries. But it would be necessary for me to learn to at least comprehend vrai French, which sounds somewhat different than the French of West Africa. Here its almost like they took French and spanishified it. They roll their r’s like in Spanish. So anyway, six months in France would help a lot with my understanding and speaking of vrai French. And I haven’t really looked into it, but if there are some interesting opportunities in France, perhaps I could stay longer and work there for a little while.

Yet all of this is being thought of within the context of feeling a little like I need to settle down a little, find a place to live to establish roots and live for the foreseeable future. I can’t tell yet whether this is something I feel like I’m supposed to do, or something I want to do. I haven’t really felt settled in a spot, and I think I would like that feeling of knowing I was in a place to stay.

Thirty-one, which I will be when I finish with the Peace Corps, isn’t young, but it isn’t really old either, and so I feel like I have a lot of flexibility in what I want to do. Its just a matter of sorting out the conflicting desires to live in different places and experience different cultures and do really interesting things, like living in France, whether for six months or longer, or whether I want to go to law school and settle down in a city, like Seattle or Boston, and establish some roots. I’ve really been missing living close to my friends, and there are also some pretty cool things about staying in a spot for a while, like buying a house and developing serious expertise in a field, and maybe even, gasp, starting a family.

Anyway, not to get ahead of myself too badly here, at some point after I’ve settled in a bit I need to take advantage of the internet in bigger cities to do some research on the various options. How do I go about getting a visa to live in France for six months or longer? How do I find a job there? That sort of planning is fun.

Of course, I also have to consider that if I don’t go to law school directly my LSAT scores will expire and I’ll have to take it again. And if my English continues to deteriorate as quickly as it is, that won’t be a good proposition. Its amazing how much learning French and French sentence structures and vocabulary has screwed with my ability to say things intelligently in English.

Also, you only need one song in Guinea, and that is Akon’s Don’t Matter. They listen to it 24-7.

It’s been more than a week since I last wrote something to post. Probably because not a lot has happened. Or more like, a lot has happened, but since we are all just attending for stage to be over, much of it seems unimportant. The biggest thing is we did our income generating activities on Monday. Basically this means we pair up and run a small (very small) business for a day. Some volunteers sold peanut butter and banana sandwiches, or chocolate peanut squares, or pineapples. We created a music cd, and managed to sell 3 of them, which just covered our costs, and gave us a 5,000 FG profit ($1). It was pretty fun, we had our ipod and speakers set up to play music, which drew a great crowd. The highlight was when I taped a sign on my back, attached the speakers to my hips, and rode my bike through the throng of students as they made their way to the lycee in the morning. We won the most creative marketing award for that (there was an award for everyone). One Snickers bar, to split. It was delicious.

Tomorrow we will do a presentation to our business partners to discuss some possible improvements, or impart some skills. We have been working with a telecentre, which sells phones, recharge cards for phones (all phones are prepaid here), accessories, and will also charge your phone for a fee. The guy who owns the place already does accounting, and his biggest problems seem centered around the costs involved in his going to Conakry every now and then to purchase supplies. So we will probably talk to him about some ways to pool with other telecentre venders so that they can reduce transportation costs, and maybe a few other things. We don’t have a lot of information to give him, but the exercise is supposed to give us an introduction to working with small businesses and giving them ‘sensibilizations.’ A sensibilization is like a seminar on a simple topic, such as the usefulness of washing your hands, or how to do some very basic accounting.

Then Saturday we will give a presentation to a groupement, which is a group of people who get together for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, perhaps pluspart de temps, it is just to get money from aid organizations, but they have to register with the government, pay a small fee, and submit a plan of action and an organizational structure. Often a groupement is centered around producing a crop, making soap or cloth, carpentry, or some other business. By banding together, they pool resources and split profits, and also distribute risk. There are also groupements for non-business things like providing kids with a daycare. So we met with a groupement and we’ll be doing a sensibilization for them, and that will conclude our activities of real substance for stage. Then Wednesday we’ll head back to Conakry, buy supplies, and ship out shortly after that.

I also finally bought some candles, eight for 4,000 FG ($0.80). Its great to be able to right and read by candle light. It has a certain romance to it. Speaking of which, I also spent all my money on clothes, so now I have to live carefully for the next week until we get our next chunk of money. I have about 8,000 FG ($1.60) left for each day. It sounds small, but that is enough for lunch and tea, oranges, or even a coke to boot. Since my family gives me breakfast and dinner, it shouldn’t be a problem. So what did I get for the approximately 250,000 FG ($50)I spent on clothes? I will have 2 pairs of tailored pants, a tailored suit, and a gooba, which is this awesome robe-like thing with accompanying pants, with huge sleeves that are basically slits in the side of the fabric, and that you can fold up onto your shoulders. The sleeves are wide enough that you have to wear clothes underneath, to give you an idea. I should have a picture to somewhere. Oh yeah, and a little hat. With those clothes, the two shirts I’ve already had made, and my awesome shoes (also in the picture), I am pretty psyched about my outfits. I still have a couple of other purchases to make, but I will have to wait until I’ve saved up some more money. By the way, this isn’t my money that I brought tthat I’m spending, but money I’ve saved from my per diem while in stage. I am kind of frugal, but the big saver is that I don’t buy much beer (at $1+ a piece, they are expensive!).

I’m pretty sure I’m paying way to much for the clothes, but I failed to correctly discute the price when I first went to this tailor, and so now its hard to get him down to a non-fote price. I’ll have to be more vigilant when I get to site.

What else…I’m pretty emotionally crazy right now. I think we all are a bit. With stage being almost over and site coming up quickly, I’m stuck between feeling like I am learning and doing nothing, and being overwhelmed by what seems like a quickly arriving isolation. Once I get to site it will be different. I’ll be talking and making friends with people there, and setting up my house (for which I have grand designs), but right now it feels more like fellow volunteers will be dispersed and I’ll be in a big city with nothing changing for two years. Its a scary proposition, but it won’t really be like that.

So yeah, the last few days are the first time that I’ve also thought in any real way about coming home. Not that I will, but I hadn’t really entertained the idea until recently. I just don’t want to waste my time here, and right now it feels like I am wasting my time. If that is the case I’d rather be in the states making the next stage of my life happen. Of course it won’t be the case, since how much I do and learn at site will depend largely on me, and I like to do and learn some pretty cool stuff. But with the unknown it seems like it could turn out that way. Many of us feel that way je pense.

D’accord, I should go eat my rice and leaf sauce (I can’t wait till I can cook my own food). I have to study my Francais. Monday is my final language test and I defintely have some improvements to make.

The last couple of weeks have been very full. First we left for our counterpart workshop, where we meet our counterparts and have two days of sessions with them. It is a good way to introduce us to each other and learn how to work with each other in the comfort of other peole. Many of the sessions focus on exploring the cultural differences and the expectations of volunteers and of counterparts. It seems very well put together. After those two days, we took a bush taxi ensemble to our site, me with my counterpart, another volunteer and his counterpart, and a volunteer from an earlier group. Its a good introduction to riding in bush taxis.

My house is a single room with a large bed, and a tiny bathroom attached. It was pretty dirty, and is slowly falling down a hill, so its was pretty disheartening to see when I first got there. But I moved some stuff around and lay in my bed thinking about how to arrange it and I think I can make it pretty homey. But if I get the chance I will try to move. There were also several giant spiders of a type common in Guinea (I don’t think they’re poisonous) in the bathroom. I have current occassionally, which is nice for charging my phone and my other electronics.

Faranah itself is very pretty, being on the edge of the savanah and along the Niger River, it has great landscape not too far out. It is also the city of Guinea’s first president, and he pumped a ton of money into it, so it has a lot of amenities (this does not mean running water). My marche has actual lettuce and carrots, and a million other things as well. The market is very close to my house, which will make shopping pretty easy.

So I spent the first night watching a football game between Faranah and Conakry. The director of the department for the promotion of youth met me and gave me his chair right on the sidelines. It was pretty awesome. The next two days I walked around with my counterpart and met people at the organization I will be primarily working with, as well as a number of local authorities, some of which were happier to see me than others. Much of those two days was spent alone in my house dozing and thinking. It was a great break from being with other volunteers all the time.

Then on Wednesday I took a bush taxi to another volunteer’s village. It was a station wagon with a third seat, and there were at least 14 people in the car, and another 2 on top of it, plus all our bbaggage. It was a little intense when we drove through a herd of cattle that miraculously had an opening the width of a car in it. Anyway, we spent the afternoon hiking through hills near his site, and ran into a couple of snakes that left quite hurriedly. Then we camped on a hilltop. But by 2 am we gave up because there were a couple of cows that kept circling back to check us out, and so every 10 minutes we were turning on our lights to make sure the cows weren’t going to step on us. So we walked back in the moonlight, which was actually rather nice. We finally got to sleep at around 4 am.

Thursday we took a taxi back to Faranah (it had a plastic oil container rigged as a gas tank) and that evening we went, with two other volunteers, to my counterpart’s fiance’s family’s house. There we made garlic bread, and they made spaghetti with beef that was fantastically awesome, and gave us as much soda as we wanted. It was a little crazy, because they must have dropped a ton of money on my birthday party, and I don’t even really know them very well. We also danced a lot, and it was a ton of fun all together. They were incredibly nice, and I like her family a lot.

Other events transpired that evening, during which I learned that I definitely do not want a puppy in my life, and that volunteers who can’t handle a puppy shouldn’t get one, and that I have not yet perfected the buddhism of perfect patience. Who knew?

Then Friday the three of us in my group headed to Mamou, where we stayed the night with several volunteers before heading back to Forecariah on Saturday.

I also shaved a mustache, and after arriving in Forecariah, shaved my head completely. It is way cooler, but you can imagine how I look with a mustache and no hair (actually, maybe you can’t). We have two more weeks of stage before we prep to head to site. I’m so excited I can hardly sit through my classes. I can’t wait to start my life there.

A bit about the organization I’ll be working for. They concentrate on helping women and youth start small enterprises and form groupements and associations. I’ll be doing some trainings on how to start businesses, how to write plans of action, and probably some classes on English. The organization is primarily funded through Faisson Ensemble, an initiative of USAID. It seems I might also be working with several groups to facilitate cooperation between NGO’s, so I might be travelling to different cities a lot, which is pretty exciting.

With only a couple of exceptions, everyone had a great site visit and we’re all ready to be done with stage and living at our sites. Just two more weeks. I have to say that the Peace Corps has done a great job of easing us in to life in Guinea with baby steps. Petite a petite, as they say.

We seem to have passed a threshold in the training, and suddenly things are exploding. On Monday we had language interviews, and I placed into intermediate-low, which means I only have two more levels to go (I have to reach intermediate-high). I started at Novice-low, so I’ve gone up three levels since starting, and I’m feeling pretty good about being able to reach the place I need to be. Of course, I wish I was farther, so that I could start learning a local language. We learned of our sites during the next session. It was done in a really fun way, with the APCD describing what the volunteer had asked for and us trying to guess who it was, and then them announcing the location. They had drawn a giant map on the floor and we stood where our sites were. I was the very first person to find out their site, and I was super excited. We aren’t supposed to advertise to the world where our site is so I’ll just say that it is in Haute-Guinea (eastern region), and next to the Niger river. Apparently I may have electricity sometimes and I will most likely have good cell phone service. In all it seems like the APCDs did an excellent job of placing people in sites that they would like, though I suspect most of us would have liked whatever we ended up with.

Anyway, we spent the rest of Monday working on presentations we are going to make to our organization. The presentations are tomorrow, and it seemed like it was going to be a disaster but I think we’ve saved it. The other group was lucky because their organization asked them to specifically teach them some accounting stuff, so they have stuff to work with, but our organization did a needs assessment with us and we were left with no clear goals, and insufficient understanding to come back with suggestions on how to address their needs. None of us wanted to walk into a situation we didn’t really comprehend and make suggestions. So instead we’re going to try and turn it into a discussion revolving around their needs, what they’ve tried to do in order to address them, and, if possible, bring up some ideas for discussion. Its not a great solution, but it will work, and hopefully it will be useful.

So anyway, we have that, and tomorrow we have a session on survival language for our local language (mine is Malinke), and then our presentations, and then preparation for our counterpart workshop, where we will meet and work with our counterparts. That lasts for two days, and after that we’ll head to our sites with our counterparts for four or five days. We are all psyched, and nervous, for that.

I think we get paid tomorrow also. I have a shirt at the tailor’s that I want to pick up, and I may buy a pair of white pointed dress shoes (more like clogs really). Then I’ll have my clothes for meeting with officials completely set.