I found out the other day that I have internet, so this is my first post that I am writing on my laptop to post from the internet cafe. Its not really a cafe, being more like a tiny building with two computers on a desk. For 5.000 FG an hour, I can use the internet. Hopefully it is fast. I will try to get on once a week or so to post some stuff.

Anyway, I had a visit from some volunteers and from the Country Director the other day, and we met with my organization and he gave me some Kudos bars, which I promptly devoured (I tried to save one for a rainy day but ate it within five minutes of the other one).

I’m in the middle of my second week at sight now, and it feels like each day is only getting harder. If the whole of my service was like this I would never make it the whole two years. I put my hope in that everyone says it gets better after the first three months. During these first three months I am supposed to do an Etude de Mileu, which is like a community study. Today I started thinking about how I wanted to present the information, and its not unlike the work I used to do for BBER. It always helps to consider how you want to present what you learn before you start, because then you can fine tune your questions and how you go about it. It sucks to reach the end of a project and wish you had asked another question that would have been really interesting.

My basic idea is that I want to present my results as a sort of probability continuom. This will be interesting for a few different reasons, namely that getting good information is hard in Guinea. For example, Guineans like to say yes to things you say, especially if they don’t know the answer. You can imagine how this might skew any surveys. Also, there is no real verifiable numerical data for a lot of things, so I expect a wide range of answers to demographic questions and other data that can be condensed to numerical form. I think it will be fun to present the population, age distribution, and ethnic distributions as probabilities rather than numbers. Then there is the more physical stuff, which I’m going to map out as best I can, and have other people map out for me. For the economy, I want to approach it from two ways. The first is the production chain for some common items, such as oranges and peanuts. If possible I’d like to get prices at each stage, which should show som measure of profit margins. My suspicion is that the ladies who peel oranges and sell them aren’t exactly making much. The second is from the viewpoint of a regional economic model, looking at what money comes in and what money goes out, and why, and how the production of different items are related. Lastly, I want to look at NGOs in Faranah. From what I can tell so far, they are a big source of money in the city, and I’d love to have some kind of geneology chart that shows the funding relationship between different organizations. In my short time here I’m aware of more than eight organizations alone, and I know there are many more.

When I can be focused on that kind of thing, my time here seems easier. Indeed, nothing in particular is bad, and I’ve lucked out in several ways at my site. I am contending with both a leaking roof and a rat, and ants that will stop at nothing, but those are not unusual issues in life. Indeed from what I can tell, the real trouble is that I simply do not yet feel comfortable here, and that is something that will only change with time and determined effort. I will continue to make two liters of tea every two days, and use my awesome thermos to keep it warm, and drink it with powdered milk and honey. It is the tiny picture and the grand picture that keeps me going, while everything in between is more difficult than I imagined.