zot in Niger bush camels

Sometimes life here is so surreal. For example, right now I am at my site’s lone internet cafe, which is a bit misleading, since it is dialup speed and does more business selling phone cards than using the computer. But that said, what is surreal is that I am listening to Christina Augilera’s “Dirrty” and have been left in charge while the proprietor left with some people to go pick up a new motor. I just finished serving as a translator for some Sierra Leonians who wanted Guinean music, for which they will pay $0.10 for each song. Now it is just me and for some reason people keep coming by and thinking I actually own the place or at least that I can sell them phone cards.

Today is Tuesday, and I will be heading to my ONG’s office soon, and after that heading by a foundry owner’s to talk to him about how he can get what he wants. What he wants is money, so I am going to tell him that if he does several different things, I will help him apply for a loan from a microcredit place. But first he has to keep some books for a while so we can figure out his profits, and then we are going to do a feasibility study to see if it is actually worth it for him to take out this loan and expand his building and buy equipment. But my job is not to find donors for people, though everyone seems to think that of any white person (with good reason, since most are here to give money away).

Sunday I played some football with a few friends, and then that night went to another Saba, which is a dance that is held before a wedding, as a sort of souvenir for the bride (the first one I went to I wrote about a while back). It was a lot of fun, but you have to give the musicians money every time you dance, and so while there were a lot of people there hanging out, there weren’t a lot of people dancing. Seems sort of backwards to me, but I think that is probably how the musicians make their money, so who knows. It was a lot of fun none the less, and I got huge cheers for dancing.

Then two volunteers showed up late Sunday night, their cab ride having taken nine hours (actually a short amount of time from Conakry). They got here past midnight, but of course me and Sajay stayed up till about 4:00 am talking about all sorts of things. I borrowed Sajay’s phone so that I could talk to Mary, and so I was up at 7:00 am the next morning. Result is I got no sleep, and yesterday I was a zombie.

I did meet again with the guy I am helping to form his ONG. It was a good meeting, and fairly productive, and I had to apologize for getting angry when he had come by my house the other day. He basically came by and then said “Okay, lets go to my house,” which pissed me off because I was busy and its not like you can just show up at someone’s house and tell them to come with you to do some work. But of course it was a misunderstanding, and apparently sometimes people here will say that as a sort of invitation if they haven’t seen someone for a long time, sort of like “Hey I haven’t seen you for a while, lets hang out and catch up.” Only that isn’t what is actually said. There is some disagreement from others as to whether people actually say that much, so I wasn’t way off base in being annoyed. Anyway, it all finished on a good note, except that he is taking his ONG in the same way as every other ONG in the country, and maybe in all of Africa, which is to hold little teaching seminars. Having been to several of these teaching seminars and knowing how much information gets transmitted and then how likely it is that any participant actually changes what they do as a result, I don’t have a lot of faith in their effectiveness. I urged him to do something more involved and hands on in peoples lives, and said that donors might be happy to receive an application for funding that was different from the usual teach-in approach, but he wasn’t willing to try it out.

I have a great example. One of the things he wants to do is work to reduce the selling of land to multiple people, which unscrupulous government officials will do (and then bouf all the argent). But he wanted to do that by giving teach ins to these officials about how they shouldn’t do that. Practical outcome? Nothing. When I brought that up he switched to teaching people that before they buy land they should make sure that someone else hasn’t bought it. Better, but given the huge number of people you would have to reach, not likely to make a difference. Now I am not saying that I have a perfect way to address the problem. In fact, the things I could think of involved increasing transparency and the accuracy of record keeping, but are probably infeasible here because of a lack of technological infrastructure, and whats to prevent the same people from doctoring records to enable them to continue to sell land multiple times?

If you can’t tell, I am pretty down on a lot of the aid work that goes on here. A lot of projects roll in with what seems like a lot of money and then spend it to accomplish very little. I think we should pour it all into education, but I don’t know everything. At the very least, I think aid workers need to be more heavily involved in the lives of the people they are ostensibly working to improve, because otherwise they don’t understand why people are doing what they do.

Another great example is the handing out of mosquito nets, which invariably end up on the local market and remade into all manner of things, from dresses to curtains to fishing nets. There is a disconnect there that needs to be addressed, and that would be more effective than dumping a bunch of nets (not that giving nets is a bad idea, malaria is one of the most economically debilitating diseases around, but it should be more wholistic in general).

I will get off my soap box now. I know its a lot easier to criticize than to create, so I’m not really condemning aid efforts, but its frustrating to see them be so ineffectual.

I have to go to Kankan this weekend for warden training, which is frustrating because it will take 5 days but only one day will be training, and I’m willing to bet I won’t be getting a lot out of it. It takes two days each way to get from Faranah to Kankan because the taxis don’t line up. I am feeling like I have been away from site too much and want to stay here, but won’t really get the chance to do that for a period of more than a couple of weeks until later this year.

Each region (prefecture maybe?) of Guinea has two wardens, which are volunteers that are responsable for making sure other volunteers in their region are informed of any security issues, and primarily for helping to make consolidation go smoothly if Peace Corps decides that things are dangerous. It is a little silly in some cases though. I am the 1st warden because I am in the big city and have access to reseau at all times. Sajay is 2nd warden, but he only has reseau on a hilltop, so if they can’t get in touch with me they are going to have difficulty getting in touch with him. And then there is only one other volunteer in our region.

I wouldn’t mind the training but for the near certainty that all of the information that we will get could be given to us in 30 minutes instead of a whole day.

Wow, I sound really critical in this post, but I am doing really well and am happy with being here aand what I am doing for the first time. In fact it is pretty awesome. I hope it lasts. I think after six months at site is supposed to be a peak, then bottoming out again after about a year at site, which means around December or January I will probably be feeling like I am wasting time again, but right now I feel like a lot is happening and I am having a great time.