zot in Niger bush camels

The enthusiasm of my last post has subsided a bit, but I am still feeling pretty good. Today is Wednesday, and since Sunday there have been three rains. This morning the rain came in suddenly and was extremely heavy. It was fun to just lay in bed and listen to it. Now the rain has stopped and people have started to go out again, and I am debating going to APIC. I studied Maninka this morning, paying special attention to insults so that I have something to yell at petites when they get extra annoying. Maninka is a fun language, though a bit overwhelming in the beginning. I have to remember I have two years to learn it, so though it seems like a lot to learn, its really not so bad. Of course, I am aiming to leave Guinea having gained proficiency in three languages, so maybe that is a lot. On va voir.

My French is not bad, but I’ve stopped trying to use anything other than passe compose, present, and future proche, which is okay for conveying meaning, but isn’t really fluency in any sense. I need to force myself to use the more complicated tenses, but it is difficult because many people here don’t use them and may not understand them. University students are my best source of language help, and a couple of people at APIC would like to do a language exchange, which would be good.

And I bought a razor. Its a cheap thing that cost less than $1.00, but was the best I could find. You can switch out real razor blades just like with Sajay’s razor, only whereas his feels like the caress of velvet cloth, mine feels like a dull fish knife. Hopefully its the blade itself and the other blades I bought will be better. Blades themselves are $0.02 a piece. How is it possible that they are manufactured and transported here for less than that? The major difference is that my razor can’t be adjusted to vary the closeness of the shave, so I am stuck with the default.

Did I mention that before I left for IST my family cut down a bunch of branches from their mango tree, and in the process knocked down my power line? So I am without power, not that anyone has power right now, but when it comes back I am going to have to get a power line installed, and I wonder if that means I am going to have to pay for my electricity now. I don’t really care if I do, but I would like to get it installed as soon as possible, and if I know things here I am going to be sitting around for two months waiting.

Short post today. I’m just a little bored. Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” is pretty interesting though.

So I got back to site Sunday evening, after spending Saturday in Mamou doing nothing. It was a good detox after IST. My house was dusty and a mess, so I spent some of the night and a lot of today cleaning it and organizing, and that brings us to now, in which I have mango salsa and guacamole prepared and am only waiting on the beans to finish before I eat dinner. One thing I love about Guinea is how happy people are to see you after you have been gone. My welcome back made me feel pretty good, and it was subdued by Guinean standards. You should see the welcome that soldiers get when they return home. People dance around and sing.

My phone got stolen while I was at IST, so if you try to call me but can’t, that is why. Don’t get worried. I won’t have the money to buy a new one for a couple of weeks, so you will have to wait till then. I will let everyone know when I have it back (and my new number, again). Some of us were playing cards and we went inside to eat dinner, leaving two phones outside on the table, and when we came back they were gone. Sajay’s phone was stolen with mine, which is a real bummer because he just bought it and it was pretty nice. There were so many people there that night it is impossible to tell whether it was a homologue, someone from an NGO, one of the staff, or one of hte other random people that were around (probably the latter).

But that hasn’t got me down. I am in a fantastic mood right now. I might feel the best I’ve ever felt in Guinea. IST was a good break, but most importantly it left me glad to come back to Faranah and full of plans for my projects. Being able to contrast my life at site with the other volunteer’s lives, and realizing how nice it is to have my own house and not be cooped up with a bunch of other Americans, has made me happy to be here. The sense of home is growing, and with it the sense of being out of place is diminishing. I doubt I will ever feel completely at home and integrated, but the sense of being different is definitely getting smaller. But maybe what helped most is that I worked with a person from my NGO to set up a schedule and figure out what my work was going to be like, both with APIC and my own projects. We finished IST with a 3 month plan of work, and that was probably the most useful thing I got out of it.

Not to mention there was a terrific rain last night, and again later in the night and into the morning. I love the rain. I woke up, did some yoga, skipped my first run on account of the rain, and instead cleaned my house.

Today I bought some mangos, which are now so plentiful you can get 6 for 500 FG, which is like $0.10. I also bought a giant mango which was incredible, and I took a picture of it next to a normal mango and a pen, but even so it doesn’t accurately convey the sense of giganticness. I also bought two lamps and some batteries, my first forey into battery powered lighting (I have been using candles and kerosene lamps). I have tried to stay away from them to some extent, mostly because I don’t like the light, but also because the batteries are supposed to be really bad. But other volunteers have had good experiences with them, and with my phone gone I wanted an easy source of light. It sucks to stumble around in the dark looking for matches.

Oh yeah, and my razor was also stolen, which led to me borrowing Sajay’s razor, which is freaking amazing! He has one of those razors that you actually put a razor blade in, and you can adjust how close of a shave you want. I really liked it, but while looking for a razor today I was only able to find the non-adjustable type. I will probably have to give in a get one anyway, but I am worried they will cut me to ribbons. Maybe when I go to Conakry next time I can find a good one.

I made some mango jam before I left for IST, and now I am wishing I had made mango salsa instead, because I am way more likely to eat an entire jar of salsa before it goes bad than I am to eat an entire jar of jam. Especially since I am getting sick of all the carb food and wanting some serious variety. At IST they gave us meat and potatoes each night (or pasta), rice and sauce for lunch, and bread and jam for breakfast. All of us gained about 10 pounds, which probably puts us back at a good healthy weight.

I also took some pictures of outside my house today, since I’ve been hearing some requests for them. I figured I might as well break out my camera and stop worrying that someone will see it and steal it, cause otherwise I will never use it. I will post them in the next post.

We had our volunteer reporting form (VRF) session today.  The VRF is a piece of Excel software that is meant to track what projects volunteers have worked on.  We complete it on a quarterly basis, and at the end we get a nice report with lots of numbers to reference.  It is a pain, mostly because, of course, it can only be used with Excel.  Interoperability is not a hallmark of our government.  As a result more than half the volunteers who brought laptops cannot use them to complete the reports.  Instead we will have to travel to regional capitals and/or to Conakry, or pay for computer time at a cybercafe.

And its cumbersome software.  Its complicated.  It is ugly.  It reminds me of the essence of bureaucracy.  But for all of that, I am actually pretty excited about using it.  I like the idea of having a reference at the end of my service that will let me look at the types of projects and number of people I have worked with.  This is good not just as a continual reference throughout my service, but also to remember and emphasize what I did after my service is finished.  Volunteers do a lot of their work in small groups that sometimes happen accidentally, and so if it isn’t recorded then you forget about it.

Soon after I arrived at site I bought a pocket calendar and began to record what I did each day, with the objective of keeping track of what I did, but also how I feel and what my health issues were.  So far it has worked great, and if I feel like I am not doing anything I can look back and see that I actually have been doing something each day.

Anyway, IST is almost at an end, and all of us are glad for it.  I want to write a little about the good and bad aspects of the Peace Corps training method, but that will be another post.

So I’ve been talking about how I would write about all my projects, and finally I’ve done it.  At least I hope so.  I have a feeling the real post will wait until after IST is done, simply because I don’t get much time alone right now.

The big thing is a peer educators group.  This will be a group of kids in the last few years of school who are motivated and interested in learning a variety of different things, with the goal being to have them work as educators in the larger community, teaching others what they learn.  Probably it will take the form of a couple of meetings each week, perhaps one where they learn what I want them to learn and one where they learn what they want to learn (probably English).  It would be a good forum to work on some gender issues as well.

Then there is an entrepreneurs group, which might be university students and others as well, but people who are looking to start their own businesses or at least learn some business skills.  We would probably meet once a week and have various hands on projects throughout, and might be centered around the school year.

Also in the working with kids theme, I’d like to get a math tutoring group together for women, or maybe a general one with a focus on helping the women.  Ideally this will lead up to having a big national girl’s math competition in a year or so.

Then there are a couple of groupements (a group of people who work together to produce something, usually agricultural) that I am going to meet with and potentially work with, who I am being introduced to by Credit Rurale, a small loan bank.

There is also a guy who runs a foundry/fabrication shop, and who doesn’t speak a lot of French, but is looking to remodel and extend his business and buy some equipment.  I will probably do some work to get him set up with some accounting and eventually to help him apply for credit to do that stuff with, provided his profits are actually high enough.

And there is a kid who wants to start an NGO.  I’ve met with him a few times now, and will probably continue to work with him, though I kind of suspect that he will drop it when he realizes that it isn’t the easy path to money he thinks it is.

Another big project is setting up village savings and loan associations, which are just groups of people who get together in the smaller villages that don’t have access to credit, and pool their money to allow small loans to their members.  They are a good way of helping people to save and giving them access to credit.  I will probably start in the village that has a volunteer that is close to me, and we will work together getting it going.  If it is successful, I (we if he is interested) will get to work setting some up in other villages.  I feel like VSLA’s might be one of the more effective things that I can do, so I am pretty excited about that.

I also am working to get a garden set up, a solar dryer built, and other stuff that will let me demonstrate things to people who are interested.

Of course, there also remains all the stuff that I will theoretically be doing with my partner organization, though I don’t know what that really means.

And lastly, I have a couple of things that are less directly related to my work.  One is setting up a wiki for Peace Corps Guinea volunteers, and linking with other wikis of that nature in western Africa.  Another is setting up something like a magazine of fiction, poetry, and other writing by volunteers.

All of that seems like a ton of stuff, so I don’t really expect that I will have a lot of extra time, but the trick will be actually getting all of those things to happen, and not putting off what is necessary too get them started.  Also, Ramadan is coming up in August, so if I want anything to happen before September, I need to get it going soon, or it will peter out during that month.

I hope that gives you a sense of some of what I am doing.  All of those things require any number of meetings, many of which may be postponed or forgotten, as well as almost certain missteps on my part as I get used to the whole process.  The specifics will be in other day to day posts, but I wanted this post to serve as a reference for the many projects I am planning.