That was the agreement yesterday. But I guess my family talked to the Imam last night and he said that if I want to take part in Ramadan I had to convert to Islam. Now I’m not exactly religious, but I like cultural rites, and I was excited to be a part of that with my family, but it looks like I won’t be doing it afterall. That’s okay, its their decision, but I am a little disappointed.
My own frustrations with the difficulty of accessing information have got me thinking about the difficulties of getting information for Guineans. The internet is dreadfully slow and rather expensive to use, and so nearly all communication is via cell phones, which are everywhere here. Books are not easily available either, and so it is hard to find information on anything that you might want to learn about something outside of Guinea, or at least outside of West Africa. For example, a few university students have expressed interest in trying to go to college in the United States, but they have no idea what is necessary and how to go about it. I drew up a plan with one kid, listing all the steps required, but the hard part for him is just getting information. There are a ton of schools, and he doesn’t have the money to pay for internet to research them all. Though applying to one is more or less the same as applying to another, how can he find out which ones he has a reasonable chance of getting in to if he can’t look at their entering classes? And even assuming he did find some data on that, how would he go about comparing his own grades to American grades? Dealing with cultural and educational differences is difficult enough, but the lack of information makes it almost insurmountable.
Along the same lines, I had hoped to do some computer skills trainings while here. It seems like it would be useful to some people, especially university students who are going to most likely be living in Conakry when they finish their studies. But the lack of electricity and the dearth of computers makes the cost of doing trainings prohibitive. I had a grand vision of using open source software to be able to examine code and even learn some programming and web site development, but that probably won’t really be feasable (-able versus -ible is going to really screw with me after learning French).
And all of that has me thinking about open source and its relation to undeveloped countries. Did the movement arise because we had an educated group of people with extra time on their hands, and they enjoyed building software? If so it seems like there should be corollaries in the non-software world. What do Guineans do with their extra time?
I don’t see a lot of independent projects to try new things (maybe I am just missing them). Instead I see a lot of educated people spending time trying to start NGOs and searching for funding. Has the giving of aid to local NGOs only served to draw the educated workforce out of productive business and into the world of aid? Given my feelings about the general ineffectiveness of that aid, is that a waste?
But maybe part of what led to the open source movement was the ease of creating new things that reaching a certain level of technology has given us. Software, once you have a computer, is relatively costless to produce, requiring essentially only time. But physical things require money to buy parts and supplies, and if things don’t work out it isn’t as easy as just rewriting lines of code. Still, there was a lot of tinkering back in the days before computers as well, and surely if you can afford a cell phone with lots of bling you have enough money to expirement a little. So is it a cultural thing? If so, why? Is aid part of the problem? I guess this sort of goes back to the old question about why the industrial revolution occurred in the first place.
Part of why I am also thinking about this stuff is that I just finished “Against Intellectual Monopoly,” which essentially argues that innovation is actually highest when there aren’t restrictive patents and copyrights, and that such measures simply enforce the status quo. I tend to like the idea that we are naturally curious and creative, and so their thesis sits well with me, but in Guinea I see little of that creative drive. Is the innovation factor something that is learned then instead of innate? Certainly education here focuses much more on memorization than on critical thinking or creativity.
I don’t really have anywhere I am going with this, just a lot of questions.
. And du courage.
