zot in Niger bush camels

I woke up a couple of hours ago to the funniest dream. My friend Davey had sent me his entire entertainment system, complete with the furniture for it. I’m pretty sure there was a Nintendo Wii in there. All the ladies in my village were watching me when I came home and saw it sitting in the lawn (already set up, and what lawn?) and trying not to laugh. I was really excited, and apparently I wasn’t considering things like how I was possibly going to use any of it with no cable and no internet, not to mention the lack of electricity.

I haven’t really missed those kinds of amenities, or even the lack of running water. Its a little annoying when I’m trying to cook by lamplight and pouring water from bidons, but really there’s nothing to be done about it, its just the way it is, so I don’t think about it much. Its a little strange to me that, even among volunteers, we put such emphasis on running water and electricity. If someone got a with electricity, we consider them lucky. But really electricity is only a small part of things, and I’d much rather have a good organization to work with, a motivated counterpart, and a friendly family and community. I think I’ve lucked out and gotten those things, in addition to infrequent electricity, so my site is really a boon. But the lack of running water and electricity has been by far the least of my struggles to adapt.

Guineans know how to party. Yesterday was my counterpart’s fiancee’s birthday, and we didn’t even get start until about 23:00. They rented out a club, so we danced until about 1:00, and then ate food (at 1:00?!?). I finally left at 2:30, and they seemed to have every intention of staying there until the sun came up. I didn’t really get to sleep until about 4:00, and then was up at 6:00. But today was pretty relaxed. After studying French for a couple of hours I convinced myself to go in to the hospital to talk to the doctor there about health facilities and just to get to know him. After that I came back and tried more or less unsuccessfully to nap for about four hours. It was super hot.

Anyway, not much to say today one way or the other. The weekend should be calm, I’ll go to the river again on Sunday, and I will watch Cece’s football game tomorrow, but other than that I have no plans. I mostly just wanted to relate the funny dream.

I think Guineans get away with not sleeping for two reasons. The first is that they take reposes in the afternoon. But also, there is a different cultural take on life. There is relatively little of the frenzied worry about getting things done. It makes it a little easier to get by with only a few hours of sleep. Perhaps thats also why not a lot tends to get done, so I suppose its a trade off, but its interesting and kind of liberating to see people approaching life from the other side of the coin.

Oh yeah, I also have a pretty bad heat rash in my armpits. I used to even get it in the states sometimes, but here as you can imagine its rather worse. My health handbook says to stop using soap, so we’ll see what happens with that.

Another bout of diarrhea kept me inside all day, this time accompanied by stomach cramps. I read Hemmingway’s The Garden of Eden, and remembered why I loved Hemmingway so much in high school. A book may move you to abandon your path or encourage you to stay on it, but the great thing about the gret ones is that they encourage you to think and feel a little differently about things. Hemmingway’s unique combination of machoism and sensitivity leaves me wondering about him as a person. His characters are the kind of characters I always want to be.

It is interesting how making such a drastic shift to a new place and culture can end up being more self-reflective than anything else. What parts of myself are carried from my old life, what new parts develop here, and what parts have always been there? I can only look at myself through the lens of a life for so long before I stop seeing things. The fresh perspective is both refreshing and disturbing. Its like rediscovering an old treasure and remembering there were some things in it you don’t really like.

Sometimes I think I can too easily see different sides of a thing. Introspection from another angle is narcissism, and it seems nearly all good actions can be interpreted as selfish. This sort of double view makes it rather hard to believe in my own character, and though I know that we are all some mixture of altruism and selfishness, I want to walk in this world unheeded by the worry that I am acting selfishly or that what I have done and my reasons for doing it is less than honorable. There is some great conundrum here that I have been stuck on for years, but I am tired of it and the limitations of second guessing myself, and I’d like to move beyond it, wherever that may be. It seems to me that it should not be impossible to rid oneself of hypersensitivity to what other people might be thinking of you, just to give an example.

When I moved to Albuquerque I think I channeled the loneliness I felt into running. It took a lot of conviction to make it up every morning to run, and I can feel that kind of conviction returning. But that itself raises questions as to how capable I am of doing things that are uncomfortable after I have a measure of comfort. It seems like my desire to be physically fit should be rather independent of whether I am happy.

But maybe when I come back I’ll be a baller, cause I’m going to get my rear handed to me in basketball tomorrow. Its embarassing, but they don’t really care that I suck, they just like schooling me.

Its Sunday night, and another week starts tomorrow. As of Tuesday night I will have been here for three weeks, which is kind of amazing. It brings my monthly trip to Kankan rather close, and I’m torn between waiting another two weeks for the mail run or going in some time next week or so. People from Haute are getting together for a St Patrick’s day party, but I’m not really that excited about it, except that its the first time everyone from my region will be back together since being to site. On the other hand, I could probably take the mail run into Kankan and avoid having to travel by taxi, which is a big plus.

Today I burned myself to a crisp at the Niger, forgetting until it was too late that my mefloquine induced translucency does not prevent sunburn. The Guineans were tripped out by the fact that my skin could turn red, and that when you press it it turned white for a moment. I had fun though, and spent a while trying to explain to some petites that in America is pretty looked down on to marry before both people were eighteen, and in fact in some states (or all?) it was illegal. This was prompted by a nine year old girl that asked me if I was married and then proceed to tell me she would find me a wife, who turned out to be her twelve year old friend sitting next to her. After I explained the age issue (its a rather convenient excuse that doesn’t involve rejection) she told me she was actually eighteen. But now she thinks I am looking for a wife who is eighteen, so I can tell that future conversations are going to be in order. People do not understand how I can be 29 and not married.

So much here is subject to misinterpretation. For example, I get pretty annoyed at the way that I don’t really get asked if I want to go somewhere. Instead I get told I am going. Or similarly, someone will just say “Come here!” to me, or “Sit down!”, all in an imperative tone. They don’t mean it rudely, but they are used to people not interpreting it as a command, or at least having no problem rejecting their command if they want or need to do something else. I’m struggling to explain it to myself, so its even harder to write it down, but in general there is lots of arguing and contesting of wills that, in the states, would be cause for hurt feelings, but here is considered normal and no one is really offended afterward.

On a different note, I made tortillas and beans the other night, and whipped up some salsa, and even tried to make some cheese from some fresh cows milk. It was delightful. I think the cheese is probably not worth the effort, but I may try and some mornings substitute fresh milk for the powdered milk I generally put in my tea. Its tasty, but it requires boiling to be sure its safe to drink. And its a little chunky. The beans though were amazing, and the tortillas, though a little bit of work, were also really good. Course now ants are maurading my dried beans, so I will have to create yet another way of subverting the ants. I really might break down and just poison the heck out of them.

I’m trying to work more consciously on my French. I’ve reached a point where I can generally get my meaning across, but if I want to be able to sound good when I talk I will have to consciously practice the more difficult tenses and work to expand my vocabulary. I’m trying to learn five new words a day, one new verb, and a new idiomatic phrase, and then I will spend Saturday reviewing and take a break Sunday. We’ll see how it works out.

Lets see…more generally. Things continue to improve each day, with only a few missteps. I am thinking I am going to have a housewarming party at some point, though I haven’t really worked out the details. I don’t know how I would provide food, and I feel like I would need to invite a whole bunch of people. Each day I feel more comfortable, and that is the important thing that was really contributing to my unhappiness. As the sense of uncomfortableness fades my feeling grows that I will not only be able to last two years, but that I will actually enjoy parts of it.

On the 16th or thereabouts I’ll get my mailrun, and I’m pretty excited about it. I know I have seveal things on the way, so I’m hoping its actually getting through. I’ll be pretty disappointed if it turns out I don’t have much because it all got boffed.

I need to sleep. Its late and I want to get up and go running in the morning.