I just posted 5 other posts.  I’ve adjusted their timestamps to the approximate time at which I wrote them, so just remember that the “posted on …” date is not the date posted, but the date written.

We rang in the new year with style, sipping gin on the top of the Peace Corps compound volunteer house.  But it seemed destined as a night for contemplation over revelry.  I was struggling with the sense of being so far away from my old life and all my friends and family, and with the sense of having two more new years to ring in still in Guinea.  So it was odd when, at 4 am, I found myself still awake with a man fast becoming a good friend of mine, dreading the idea of going to sleep and the return to Forecariah that would occur on the next day (today).

But this morning I am doing okay.  I have to remember that if I stay within a relatively short time frame I am happy and loving being here, but that when I go outside those few weeks, in either direction, it becomes more sad.

Anyway, enjoy the posts.  There is fighting tooth and nail for computers.

Inshallah, I will be in Conakry tomorrow night for New Year’s eve. The excitement amongst the stagiares is palpable. Some overly industrious soul even took it upon themselves to schedule times for the computers. C’est vrai.

I’m starting to work past and future tenses into my French, but my frustrations with our classes, both language and tech at this point, are mounting. We have essentially taken over our tech sessions, so that we are teaching ourselves the material we should know. This doesn’t really solve the problem, but it removes some of the blame from the formateurs if the sessions are useless. The real problem with tech is that none of it is directly applicable. We all know how to do the different types of analysis, but we have no idea whatsoever how to explain them to people who may have very little education, or who may speak French poorly, not to mention our own mangled efforts at parleying. In truth we need people who have been in the trenches to be working with us on this stuff, but instead we’re getting broad overviews on things that we generally already know.

As for language, sometimes its fine, but lately my formateur hasn’t been prepared and I spend a maddeningly large amount of time waiting for him to figure out what to teach us. But the thing is we don’t need more formal teaching. We need practice. Beaucoup de practique. We need practice comprehending what people are saying and practice working in different tenses and with different pronouns. Instead we spend the days learning how to say we are sick, which we can put together ourselves if we really needed to.

Anyway, sometimes I am not that frustrated, and other times, like today, I get pretty down. I have a long way to go language-wise, and I want to maximize every possible moment, but things are not working out that way. I suspect that, starting after we return from Conakry, we will form a small group of people who are interested in meeting a few times a week solely to practice speaking French with each other. If we’re really on the ball we’ll organize some gin and tonics to loosen our tongues.

Speaking of which, Guineans are fans of palm wine, which they make by basically extracting palm juice and capping the bottle for a few days. It tastes vaguely like fermented urine, but a bottle costs less than a third of what a can of coke costs. I’ve finely figured out that the building outside my family’s compound is a bar, specializing in palm wine and gin. Explains the loud music into the late hours, but doesn’t make me any less grumpy about the noise.

Dear lord, time is going fast.

Life in the Peace Corps is all about small joys. The joys of finally using past tense in a sentence. The contentedness that comes from unexpectedly spending an hour discussing the merits of raising chickens versus ducks, all in French, with a family you had thought yourself sick of. The joy of shaking because Attaya, the local tea you just drank at the cafe, is so concentrated you can feel the caffeine coarsing through your veins as if you had injected it (that wasn’t so much a joy as a funny moment to look back on). Egg sandwichs for lunch, cooked fresh with onions by a man who calls you “mon ami” (everyone is mon ami here). Tea in the mornings during break. Unexpectedly joyous responses to the salues called out to each person you pass. Playing a hand holding game with a tiny kid who, unlike every other child here, doesn’t run at you screaming “Fote!.” Perhaps he is too young.

Sometimes it seems that the best moments in life are the unexpected ones. And those moments only happen if you open yourself to them in difficult times. I could have come home and gone straight to my room, but instead I decided to sit down for a bit and I ended up having the best conversation I have ever had with my host dad. Part of the reason that how I act in difficult situations interests me so much is because it seems like those are the times when true bonds are formed, when true character is revealed, and when friendships move beyond mere convenience. And those moments are always a test, because its easiest to run away from the situation, or to react with hurt or anger or pride. My personal poison is to run away, especially when I don’t know people well. But on those occassions when I have stuck around, either because I decided to or because there was no other option, I’ve generally had surprising and pleasing results.

There are lots of reasons that keep a volunteer in the Peace Corps, fighting to make a tiny difference in a completely different, and significantly less comfortable, world. I think one of those things is the development of small daily sources of joy. Beyond determination, willpower, having nothing to go back to, and the other reasons I’ve heard, I think the small joys, the tiny bits of progress, are what keep us here enjoying our lives and feeling like we are making a difference, even if it is in the eyes of a young girl who gains a bit of confidence in herself, or a man who begins to think of his possibilities in a new light.

We’re doing a mustache contest for the end of stage. I’ll do my best to put up some awesome photos. It seems to be a tradition for Peace Corps Guinea. Mine is still a beard right now, but at some point in the next week I’ll be driven to shave by the combination of heat and itching, and will be left with a nice mustache befitting the modern American male of the 1920′s.

The constant wail of babies threatens to drive me mad. Two one year olds live in the same house I do, and their cries are unending. It seems that people here do not care much for trying to stop them from crying, and often they are left to cry for long periods of time before someone can be troubled to pick them up. In general I find my shell for these kinds of distractions comparably weak. Perhaps growing up with the racket of humanity surrounding you gives you a certain armor, but my own armor is much too thin.

If I have been in higher spirits in the past week, the boredom of today has left me again filled with a restlessness. Five more weeks of training before we are released into the greater world of Guinea. My anticipation grows with each passing hour, though I fully expect a raft of issues to crop up once I am there. My primary frustration with stage is never having time to myself, and I suspect the irony of site is that my frustration will be finding something to do with all the time I am given.

There was a rash of letter writing last night and this morning as I found out that the country director’s daughter would be headed back to the states on December 31st. But when I arrived at the Peace Corps compound this morning the car had already left. Hopefully I can send them with a car tomorrow. In the future I will have to stagger the letters so that I am not writing so many at once. But I keep thinking this will be the last opportunity to get a letter out for a while and want to get them out to both family and friends.

But in the midst of writing letters I managed to distill some of the thoughts that have been floating around in my head. I never wrote a piece on why I was doing the Peace Corps. I wanted to, but it seemed too complicated and, in truth, I don’t think I knew myself sometimes. But one thing I was seeking by joining was a space to consider my adulthood and its ramifications. I am swiftly approaching 29 years old, and it seems to me high time that I stopped thinking of myself as a young person recently out in the world and started to see myself as the grown man that I am.

I don’t mean that in the sense of acting more maturely, and in fact I have not really been able to define what I mean when I say that I need to start seeing myself as the grown man that I am. I think it has at least two major components. The first is the giving up of depending so heavily on what people think of me. In some way I think that my overawareness of other’s thoughts of me reflect a deep-seated self doubt. This self-doubt is something that I associate with being a teenager and it seems distinctly out of place as I approach 30. To some extent I am making strides in that line, becoming more comfortable with my own self assessment, and more confident that when I look back at my life, my actions can generally stand up to the light of judgement. With that recognition, problems that other people might have with me shift from being a personal failure to a truth of human interaction, in which there is no real need for blame. This is something that I have struggled with for the past several years, but I’m beginning to be able to put it into words, and that feels good.

The second component is being less afraid of confrontation and conflict. I tend to shy away from conflict, and so conversations that should happen don’t, or they happen too late. This always leaves me a little ashamed, again a feeling I associate with being a kid. But the funny thing about confrontation is that if you approach it in a direct way, it often turns into something that isn’t confrontation, but instead is a mutual learning and building, or at least a direct resolution or understanding.

Some of this is arising from having thirty people together every day as training progresses, and some from having to live with a family that would, if I let them, quickly step over any personal boundaries without even realizing it. With my fellow volunteers I have reached a point where it doesn’t matter whether some of them like me or not, but that we can still work together and be cordial. And in fact no one really dislikes anyone else, its just a question of how we handle the tiny conflicts of personality that, if blown out of proportion or swept under the rug, erupt into full fledged dislikes. But the group is too good and the size is too small to spend two years seriously disliking anyone. All of which is to say that I am content with being friends with some, and being only acquaintances with others. And this does not mean anything about them or me. I think a few years ago I would have been personally afronted if I wasn’t getting along with someone and it would have to have been someone’s fault, but that idea seems silly to me now.