One year ago (yesterday?) I was in Guinea on my way back from Kankan headed to my site. Kankan is the regional capital for volunteers, and we’d been there for something (was it the girl’s conference?), perhaps just our monthly visit. It is a 9 hour trip on a good day, and that day was not a good day.
I don’t remember much of that day. Rumors began flying about halfway between Kankan and Kissidougou, which is the biggest city on route. People were rioting, I heard. Or maybe the military was killing some people. The military had arrested all the candidates. No it was just two. Or maybe none. Messages started coming in from other volunteers. We are leaving for sure. No, we are staying, there is no reason to worry. Are we on standby? If we didn’t leave for the coup we aren’t going to evacuate because a few protesters got killed. Wait are we? We are on standby?
I arrived home thinking not much would come of it. The number of killed were getting bigger, but it had been in Conakry and everyone knows that what happens in Conakry stays in Conakry. That is to say, the rest of the country was rather tranquil. I don’t remember if Sajay stayed at my house that night. I think he might have been consolidated there. Or it could have been the next day. We slept and I woke up cursing the little bugs that like to bite me while I dream. For a few days we had not a lot to do. I went to my business club meetings. We ate corn porridge with lime juice. I forget it’s real name now. It’s called coco here, and made with millet. That stuff was so delicious, eaten piping hot at four in the afternoon. I would sweat my shirt through in five minutes.
We ate brochettes and potato salads with boiled eggs. We had a few sodas. We joked around with my friend Cece, who is 15 and a refuge from Cote D’Ivoire. We met this American named Mike who was volunteering with the chimpanzee reserve not far from my site. He was finishing up his time and had been ravaged by various illnesses. He also liked this woman that I had a little crush on myself. We went to visit her and afterward talked about her smile.
A few days into this consolidation (it wasn’t official consolidation, because then I would have been in my regional capital I think) we heard from Mike that the Embassy was evacuating. He had called them to see if he needed to worry about security. They told him to GTFO. He gave them my number as a contact since he didn’t have a phone.
Rumors of evacuation had been building for days as we stayed on alert. When Mike told the embassy to contact him via my number and that I was a Peace Corps volunteer, the guy on the phone said something like, “Oh that won’t work. They won’t be here after tomorrow.” And thus was all the Peace Corps secrecy exposed. This was a Saturday, and of course we couldn’t get confirmation that we were leaving. Sunday afternoon we received the official call. We waited a couple of days as other volunteers came into my town to meet up with us, and on Tuesday we left. We spent that night at a hotel in Guinea and Wednesday crossed into Mali as a big group.
I remember most that I couldn’t find my kids the morning we left. They were 2 and 5 years old and I loved them. One day they woke up and I was gone. I hope they understand why, or at least that I didn’t abandon them. In all honesty I was kind of glad to leave, but I had to hide my tears as we drove away. I had had such a hard time in that site, but I was sad to be so suddenly leaving my friends and my family. What would be next?
The RSO in Mali was an exercise in ridiculousness. What happens when you pay someone to be responsible for the security of all Americans but then encourage him to stay behind the safe bars of the embassy? Yeah, you can guess it. We nicknamed him Captain America and he promptly started hitting on some volunteers. They wouldn’t let us change money because of “security.”
A month later I arrived in Niger and a month after that I moved into a lovely little village that suited me much better. Or maybe I had just learned how to be a better volunteer by then. And that closed the Guinea chapter of my life.
If I sound critical of staff at the Embassy, it should be qualified. I don’t know what those guys go through, what kind of information they have. I don’t know how many threats are real or not real. But I do know that living in a village, living normal life in Guinea or in Niger, the threat is incredibly minimal. To me, real security assessment should involve living closely with the local population, forming real relationships, and getting a feel for the attitude of the population. It doesn’t seem like you can do that very well from behind multiple security measures. This leads to warped perceptions, like the RSO in Niger telling us that we would see herders with AK-47s on a regular basis. I have seen many herders. None with an AK-47. I don’t know any volunteers that have seen one. Maybe their job is just to scare us. Or maybe if you look for shadows too long you start to see them whether they are there or not. From my incredibly uninformed view, there seem to be some lessons in all that with respect to our current struggles.
So adieu, Guinea. Here’s hoping the new group going to Guinea gets to stay.
