The title is not a typo.  I have been wondering about popcorn for a while now, especially since my mom sent me some nutritional yeast.  Occassionally you see guys on the street selling popcorn from little popcorn machines that must be left over from the 50′s, so I know it exists.  On impulse I bought a little bag of corn kernels, thinking, since it was a food stand, that it could only be popcorn because how else can you eat dried corn kernels (okay okay, I know you could grind it into powder to make any number of things, but you can also just buy meal).  After I bought them they told me, by means of pantomime since they didn’t speak French, that it was for planting.  Hmmm.  But I took it home and tried it anyway, throwing the kernels with wild abandon into way too much hot peanut oil and then cackling with glee when I heard the sweet sound of popcorn popping.

My excitement was tempered only slightly when, upon opening the lid after a few minutes, I found that less than a quarter of the kernels had popped and the rest had just turned a sort of dark brown and black color.  My dreams of white salty yeasty popcorn were dashed, but, my stomach growling with anticipation, I dumped the contents of the pan into one of my new plastic bowls, which as you might expect is not the least bit heat resistant, and promptly started to melt.

In the end I managed to get the popcorn kernels, and a few grains of actual popped corn, into a glass bowl, where I proceeded to indiscriminately pour yeast over the remains of my experiment and ate everything with abandon.  It was the best popcorn ever, though I did tire of the charcoal taste near the end.

So with that unnecessarily long story by way of introduction, maybe I can move into my real post, of which the contents are that it rains crazily here, that some animal already broke through my fence and knocked down my new moringa tree, and that only a few days remain until Mary arrives, which is rather fiercely interfering with my ability to concentrate on anything else.  I also bought some kind of lemony-minty herb that people told me I am supposed to make tea with, and add sugar, and it is good for the stomach.  It is quite delicious and a nice change from the liptonesque tea I’ve been having every day.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that I’ve now been in Guinea for over six months, and that I have only a year and a half left, which seems like a long time in the sense that it is a year and a half, but considering how fast the first six months flew by in retrospect, it is frighteningly short.

And what the heck am I going to do afterward?

But more immediately concerning is how am I going to get anything of significance accomplished?  Granted I’m only supposed to have been working for one of those six months, and in that one month I have had so many meetings its crazy, but I have yet to do any actual transfering of knowledge (unless you count the very simple budgeting request that I gave to a business I am trying to work with).  I am hoping that shortly all these meetings will turn into actual real events, but so far that is not the case.  To be fair though, my calendar is so filled with planned trainings and sessions that I am scared I will be overwhelmed.

If I end of doing a funded project, it seems clear that it might be some sort of computer lab, since numerous people have talked to me about it.  But there are a million problems with the idea, not the least that it would almost certainly be turned into someone’s rather lucrative business after I leave.  I’d want it to be run by a group of youth, who were responsible for holding classes on how to use it, for charging small fees to cover operating costs and internet, and for making sure that some patron didn’t move in and take it over.  But these are difficult demands to make, and as of right now there exists no such group of youth.

Oh yeah, I got some new clothes today to.  It was a little surreal, as I sat waiting for the tailor to finish sewing the buttons on my shirt (I will have to post pictures), behind me a man hacked a a leg of a cow with an axe, and bits of bone and gristle were flying everywhere.  I drank some ataya tea and spoke a bit of malinke, much to everyone’s delight, and, most surreally, we were listening to Britney Spear’s “Oops I did it Again” on someone’s cell phone.  Now, I like pop music as much as the next Peace Corps volunteer, but this was six or eight men, all my age or older, listening to Britney as if it was the coolest song in the world.  The guy with the phone asked me if it was a sweet song, and was very happy when I replied in the affirmative.

I can feel my posts shifting topics into a list of things that happened rather than of what I am feeling and thinking.  I can’t help but think that this is less interesting, but my mind does not seem inclined to write a lot about the pondering, and anyway the amount of pondering has greatly decreased since my return from IST and subsequent greatly improved feeling toward being here.  Maybe now that is all I have to offer.

I had an excellent three hour meeting today.  I bet I never in my life get to say that again about a three hour meeting.  With my counterpart and the Secretary Comtable, we revisited the three month plan and fit everything together for what I will be doing and how that will proceed.  I will be making an excel sheet and will put it here once I do.  Hopefully it will give everyone an idea of what I am doing, which right now is mostly just having a lot of meetings, but in a couple of weeks will be having a session or two every day.

One of APIC’s initiatives (APIC is my partner ONG), is to have a serious of sessions on how to start and run a business, for which they would like my help.  I was happy that, after looking at what they wanted to teach, I felt competent to help teach on several of the topics.  I also made a suggestion that is probably my first real attempt to change something they are doing, and they liked it a lot.  What they were going to do is somehow do a study of different types of businesses to see what was feasible.  Sort of a large scale feasibility study so that they could tell people in these business trainings what business they could go into.  Feasibility studies are good, but I thought it might be better if the people in the trainings did their own feasibility studies, and in the process learned about how to evaluate a potential business.  That way they could also make their own choices about what kind of business they want to start, which is better for them, and APIC doesn’t have to do some giant amorphous study of the feasibility of a million different tiny businesses.  Also, it helps to weed out the people who are just there because they think they will get something without having to work.  Anyway, point being that it went over pretty well and I felt like I actually contributed something good.

Which brings me to the ridiculousness, which isn’t so much an event as the fact that a small thing like that can put in such a good mood that you bike back to your house, not noticing the heat and barely hearing the petites yelling Toubabu at you, thinking that this is the best damn mood you have ever been in in your life, and if you were a little more of a sissie, you’d be balling your eyes out in happiness.

Instead I unrolled my plastic mat on my cement floor and took a nap until this afternoon, when I sat through another meeting, this one two hours long and in the local language of which I understand barely any.  I managed to stand up to be acknowledged at the appropriate time, and also met a French guy who works in the nearby national park, and therefor consider it a success.

PS – My posts have been filled with humourous tendencies lately, so take what I say with a grain of salt.