Sometimes This Place Rocks

I was up till 01:00 last night.  It was raining and I was having fun putting music I liked but didn’t know onto my ipod and then listening to it.  But I had a big day ahead of me, and so I finally (when I couldn’t keep my eyes open) gave up and went to sleep like a good little volunteer.  I woke up at 06:00 and lay in bed wishing I was sleeping in before hearing a knock on my door.  It was time to get started.  I pulled on some shorts and a shirt, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and went outside.

Today Cece, Henry, and I were going to do a grand promenade through some of the small villages surrounding Faranah.  Its in these villages that I might have the most appreciable impact, and also it will be good for me to get out of the city a little bit.  Faranah can be claustrophobic.

But since I am leaving for Kankan tomorrow I had to wash my clothes first, so I made some tea and sat outside washing clothes.  I also had to buy water (having poked holes in the lid of my one water bottle so I could squirt water at petites) and kola nuts, which are little very bitter things given to people as a gesture of respect here, and for other reasons like marriages.

So we didn’t actually leave Faranah till 9:30 or so.  The first village was about 5 kilometers away, and I was quickly sweating through my shirt and thinking that the whole thing was a bad idea.  But we managed to find some mangos along the way, and also some little fruits that are very sour but kind of good, much like sour worms.  And once we settled into the groove, it wasn’t too bad.  I only had to stop every half hour or so (I very much dislike being so weak here).

The chief of the first village (he really is a chief, or chef in French) was out in his field working so we went out there and met with him.  He has a big plot of land where he cultivates several varieties of mango and some bamboo.  He was really nice and said he had heard about me over the radio, which I guess means they did make an annoucement at some point.  During much of this we are walking through his land which seemed much more like dense jungle to me, but probably seemed like a cornfield to him.  I made the mistake of standing in a place full of hard working ants that promptly decided to repay my kindness, but we all left happy and with the intention of coming back in a couple of weeks to have a grand meeting with the village.

The second village was further, perhaps 6 or 7 kilometers, and now it was after noon, so it was really getting hot.  But the bush trails are much cooler than Faranah city is, and in general I was having a pretty good time.  I was finally doing some work.  We got lost a little, ran into several people cultivating their land, and generally had a good time tromping around.  By the time we got there Cece was about to faint from lack of food and I had drank all my water, but fortunately they had a pump (hope I don’t get sick!).  There wasn’t any food to buy though, so Cece had to make to with more mangos.  At this point he had eaten nothing but mangos since at least noon the day before.

Then we got lost again before finding the last village on our program, which is next to a protestant school were all classes are taught in English and there are usually a bunch of Americans, only it was vacation time so no one was there.  The campus was very pretty, and we got more water at another pump.  The chef de village was not at this third village either, but we met with his wife and gave her the kola and talked some about why I was there.  It seemed to go quite well.

On the way back to Faranah, rain came in rather quickly and drenched us, and is still going now as I write this.  Everything was soaked, but fortunately my family took my clothes off the line before the rain started.  We walked for a while, ran for a while, and I had to give Cece 500 FG because I had bet that it wouldn’t rain today (Henry was with me, and he lost also.  He’s Guinean, so its not just because I don’t know the weather here).

Accomplishments: talked with one chef de village and one wife of the chef de village.

So as you can see, there are plainly some days that are just bad ass.  Did I mention that it was incredibly beautiful, that we got to chase some cows and help a family defend their cooking fire against the flooding rainwater, and that we walked somewhere around 12 miles?  Awesome.

Surrealness

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.

Reflections on Projects

Guided by the soft hymns of Ben Harper, the last few days have been ones of increasing clarity for me. I hope I mentioned back somewhere that one of the main thrusts of my work was going to be forming village savings and loan associations, which are just a group of people who get together to form their own mini bank. This can give people access to the very small amounts of capital that are needed to increase productivity while also teaching about accounting, the benefits of saving and the process of taking out credit.

But I’ve been thinking more about the other thrust of what I want to do, which is working to encourage girl’s education. Mostly I plan on doing that in my own way by having a math tutoring session for girls, culminating in a spelling-bee like math tournament. Anyway, the reason I am writing a post this late at night is that I have almost finished Three Cups of Tea, which is about Greg Mortenson’s work to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is a very inspiring book and really well written (Unlike Beauty School Kabul, which made me shudder, but I nonetheless finished). As I learn more about what holds development back in Guinea, I become more and more convinced of the importance of girl’s education as a society-changing process. The result is that it is eleven-thirty at night and I am fired up about a project that won’t even really get started until the next school year, which starts in September or October. As such I heartily recommend it. It is not like those human interest books that leave you bored and feeling like they are just tooting their own horn.

Some volunteers do a larger funded project while at site, and it is possible that in line with the goal of education I will work with a village that is close by to get a school built, but that depends on them being willing to donate the labor and oversite for building it.

And as with everything I read these days, I can’t help but reflect on what it means for what I want my life to be like. It strikes me that a volunteer is rather vulnerable to brainwashing, being as hungry for ideas and stimulation as we get while waiting for things to get rolling (it is possible there are volunteers that don’t do any waiting, but it isn’t about being proactive, its about a culture of not being hurried). I feel like every time I read something I find myself thinking that the author has several good points and how does my own life look in relation to what they have to say? So if some nefarious agent of evil (or good, I suppose) wanted to reach a number of unusually receptive minds, he could do worse than send convincing literature our way.

As for Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea, he seems to have done a lot at great personal sacrifice, and I find myself intimidated by that, but also inspired, because he did nearly all of it after the age of 30. I, quickly approaching 30 myself, sometimes find myself wondering if I haven’t missed my chance to do something really interesting. Fortunately I am doing something pretty interesting right now, but I have to find a way to keep that going when my time in Peace Corps is over, and how best to do that occupies a rather large portion of my thoughts.

Pictures of Home

I have had a few requests for pictures of my house and the surrounding area. I hope you enjoy. Starting with my house, it basically goes clockwise from there.

Chez Moi
My House. Isn’t it “charming?”

One to the right One frame to the right.

Two to the right
Two frames to the right.

Three to the right
Three frames to the right.

Four to the right
Four frames to the right.

Five to the right
Five frames to the right.

Left of My House
One frame to the left.

My Cat Thumper
My cat thumper.

Moringa trees I planted
Moringa trees I planted behind my house.

Giant Mango
Giant mango threatens to take over the world.

View from Mamou
View from Mamou. Some volunteers have all the luck.

Anyway, there you go. I hope you enjoyed my little slideshow.

My Phone was Volered

My phone was stolen while I was in Mamou, so if anyone is trying to call me and not getting through, that would be why. Hopefully I will be getting a new phone at some point, but probably not for at least a couple of weeks. What I may do is buy a new piece, and that way I can have a number and will only have to borrow someone’s phone before I can use it.

Things are going really well right now. I will hopefully post more soon.

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bush camels

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