(In photo: Amy and I made some tres cool visors over Easter weekend)
INSTALLATION
After the fifteen hour drive from Conakry, the Upper Haute gang (which was a group of ten, now nine) spent a few days in Kankan together. Then, day by day, people were slowly taken to their sites. Alison and I were taken to our sites together because they’re only four kilometers apart. On the morning of our send off, all the remaining Haute volunteers helped load our stuff into the car. Ciara left the same day we did, and as her car pulled away from the regional house, she rolled down the window and yelled, half joking, “What the hell am I doing?!” We all smiled because the very same thoughts were going through our heads.
Alison and I hugged the remaining volunteers goodbye and they waved us off. And then it was just the two of us in the back of the car, dressed in our Guinean finest. We were silent for most of the three hour drive, exchanging nervous looks and reassuring smiles (we’d only been acquaintances in stage…she’s now one of my best friends). The car took the pot-holed road at such a speed that we were pretty close to vomiting, although I’m sure our nerves had something to do with it. Indeed, Alison kept her massive watering can close by just in case one of us really did puke. (This
picture is of all our stuff in the car on the way to Mandiana/Faralako...note the blue watering can on the right)
Once in Mandiana, we greeted the local authorities under the direction of Daffy, the Guinean regional coordinator for Haute Guinee. Afterwards, we set off for my hut. However, no one could find my counterpart, nor could we find the keys to the hut. So, we drove further north to Faralako to drop off Alison. Once back in Mandiana, we decided to just hire a locksmith and have him change the locks to my hut, rather than hang out and wait for someone to show up with my keys.
Daffy helped me set up my little table top stove and gave me last pieces of advice, such as “Only let people you trust into your hut,” and, “Be sure to cover up the holes in your door.” It was so surreal to me finally being in my hut, on the verge of being physically separated, for the first time, from P.C. staff, who are fantastic support. Even before I submitted my application to P.C., I’d read PCV’s accounts of watching the PC SUV leaving them at site, with a strong urge to run after it, yelling, “No! Come back! I’m not ready for this yet!” As the car left my hut, I definitely had tears in my eyes, but there was only a flicker of the desire to sprint after it. I’d been prepping myself for that moment for over a year, and there I finally was, standing in my doorway, broom in hand, waving goodbye to Daffy as the car rolled off into the distance.
So, I turned back to my hut and started scrubbing to make it look like something that didn’t resemble a prison cell.
MANDIANA
Mandiana ville is the capital of the state of Mandiana. Everyone insists it’s the poorest state in Guinea, but I’ve learned not to take everything Guineans say seriously. My ville consists of three parallel dirt roads with a few cross streets. Off of the middle road is the outdoor, open-air market, the entrance to it hidden between several shops that sell Columbian lollipops and bread. Also on the middle road is the town’s mosque, which began construction over 20 years ago but is still not finished, thanks to the corrupt men in charge that stole all the money meant to complete it. I’ve asked why the community hasn’t raised the money so that they can have a proper mosque, but all I ever get in response is a shrug.
The department of public health tells me there are 24,000 people in Mandiana. If this is so, then I have no idea where most of them are. No one lives in the center of town- it’s commerce only. There are lots of little stores that sell pretty much the same things, motorcycle repair shops and woodshops. As far as I can tell, you are a carpenter in Mandiana if you own a hammer. Some of the more useful destinations in town are the Telecenters and stores with cold bottles of water. The Telecenters are essentially brightly painted hot dog stands hooked up to generators. For 25 cents you can have your cell phone charged there.
Most of the neighborhoods aren’t even neighborhoods, actually. They just seem to be huts and single story cement houses scattered randomly amongst winding dirt paths. The path that runs by my hut seems to go on and on. I’ve attempted to walk to the end, but I’m usually too hot or too annoyed at the entourage of dirty children following me to reach it. This entourage grows larger each time I pass by a new house, and each child wants to greet me and expects an individual greeting in return. A simple, all-encompassing “Bonjour a tous” doesn’t suffice. They keep saying, “Ca ba?” until I say “Ca va,” back to them. And then they each say “Ca ba bien?”
DAILY LIFE
I begin each day in Mandiana at around 5 A.M., when the morning symphony of the neighborhood’s roosters, chickens, sheep, dogs, donkeys and cows begins. The birds join in their song and the women rise to start pounding grain, and the crescendo is reached at around 5:30 with the Mosques prayer call. This is when I stick in my ear plugs and try to sleep a little longer, which is difficult to do, thanks to the side effects of the malaria prophylaxis we have to take.
I usually fall asleep to the sounds of radios playing crappy West African techno and sometimes the sounds of drums can be heard in the distance. I’m awakened throughout the night by donkey’s brays and cattle’s lows echoing through the air. These animals like to sidle up
to the sides of huts and scrape their flanks against the walls, so when a donkey is braying just a feet away from me at two A.M., it can be downright alarming.
On my fourth night here, someone stood a few feet from my door at three A.M. just coughing and wheezing for over an hour. I was terrified! I asked one of my local friends about it the following day, and, she insisted it was the local sorcerer. Apparently, she goes out at night to search for diamonds and gold, and must have been curious about the new white person in town. Hopefully she didn’t put any curses on me! It’s amusing to think that in America, neighbors would bring food as a welcome. Here, the local sorcerer hexes me! Only in Africa… (In photo: My friend, Mannie the Maneater, who hangs out on a tree by my hut's backdoor all day long.)
My hut is part of a compound consisting of three huts, one cement rectangular house and two smaller huts for chickens and sheep. The family I live with is wonderful. The mother, Fanta (which is short for Fatoumata- she was NOT named after the soft drink) is like Mrs. Claus compared to the cold mother I lived with in Forecariah. She stops by my hut every morning before she leaves to sell fabric and jewelry at the market and always stops by to say goodnight. Not much communication goes on between us just yet, seeing that she only knows “ca va” in French and I only really know the equivalent in Malinke.
Fanta has four children- Mamadi (male), age 12, Laye (male), age eight, Mama (female, shot for “Hawa”) age four and Mohammed, one year. They’re good kids, when they’re not trying to spy on me when I’m taking a bucket bath, or poking holes in my thatch fence to get a better view of me washing dishes in the yard. One day, I was tired of hearing them giggle at me from the other side of the fence, so I looked up how to say ‘go away’ in Malinke. I walked up to my fence, took a deep breath and bellowed “ka I o wah!” as menacingly as I could. Instead of scattering, they all broke into applause, yelling in glee. They were so excited/amused to hear me speak Malinke aside from the obvious scripted salutations. It was not the response I’d expected. (In photo: the kids in my new Guinean family, with a random boy [the checkered one] who I believe now lives with the family as well)
I sit out with the family most evenings. The kids point at objects and give me their names in Malinke, and then ask what they’re called in French and English. The father seems very kind, but keeps his distance from me. He works in the market at the video cassette store and spends his evenings working on a new hut for the family’s chickens, conveniently located a few paces from my front door. Something tells me that the ‘morning symphony’ is going to become something of a morning nuisance.
Two men live in the hut just a few paces from mine. Fanta tells me they’re cousins, but that’s a very Guinean thing to say. In Guinea, it seems that everyone’s family. Another man occupies the midget hut in which I was originally supposed to live, but he’s only there a few times a month (I didn’t need the midget hut because my hut has plenty of room). My hut is feeling more like home each day and no scorpions or snakes have entered it, to my knowledge. Ants, however, have a fabulously easy time crawling through the many little holes in my cement walls. I’ve taken to placing duct tape over these holes, but there are hundreds of holes, so it will be some time before my cas (French for hut) is fully fortified. Speaking of creepy crawlies, my huts ecosystem now includes an unknown animal/giant insect. I hear it scuffling around above the plastic tarp that acts as a canopy above my bed. It has yet to wander down, so I won’t fret about it until it does.
After the fifteen hour drive from Conakry, the Upper Haute gang (which was a group of ten, now nine) spent a few days in Kankan together. Then, day by day, people were slowly taken to their sites. Alison and I were taken to our sites together because they’re only four kilometers apart. On the morning of our send off, all the remaining Haute volunteers helped load our stuff into the car. Ciara left the same day we did, and as her car pulled away from the regional house, she rolled down the window and yelled, half joking, “What the hell am I doing?!” We all smiled because the very same thoughts were going through our heads.
Alison and I hugged the remaining volunteers goodbye and they waved us off. And then it was just the two of us in the back of the car, dressed in our Guinean finest. We were silent for most of the three hour drive, exchanging nervous looks and reassuring smiles (we’d only been acquaintances in stage…she’s now one of my best friends). The car took the pot-holed road at such a speed that we were pretty close to vomiting, although I’m sure our nerves had something to do with it. Indeed, Alison kept her massive watering can close by just in case one of us really did puke. (This
picture is of all our stuff in the car on the way to Mandiana/Faralako...note the blue watering can on the right)Once in Mandiana, we greeted the local authorities under the direction of Daffy, the Guinean regional coordinator for Haute Guinee. Afterwards, we set off for my hut. However, no one could find my counterpart, nor could we find the keys to the hut. So, we drove further north to Faralako to drop off Alison. Once back in Mandiana, we decided to just hire a locksmith and have him change the locks to my hut, rather than hang out and wait for someone to show up with my keys.
Daffy helped me set up my little table top stove and gave me last pieces of advice, such as “Only let people you trust into your hut,” and, “Be sure to cover up the holes in your door.” It was so surreal to me finally being in my hut, on the verge of being physically separated, for the first time, from P.C. staff, who are fantastic support. Even before I submitted my application to P.C., I’d read PCV’s accounts of watching the PC SUV leaving them at site, with a strong urge to run after it, yelling, “No! Come back! I’m not ready for this yet!” As the car left my hut, I definitely had tears in my eyes, but there was only a flicker of the desire to sprint after it. I’d been prepping myself for that moment for over a year, and there I finally was, standing in my doorway, broom in hand, waving goodbye to Daffy as the car rolled off into the distance.
So, I turned back to my hut and started scrubbing to make it look like something that didn’t resemble a prison cell.
MANDIANA
Mandiana ville is the capital of the state of Mandiana. Everyone insists it’s the poorest state in Guinea, but I’ve learned not to take everything Guineans say seriously. My ville consists of three parallel dirt roads with a few cross streets. Off of the middle road is the outdoor, open-air market, the entrance to it hidden between several shops that sell Columbian lollipops and bread. Also on the middle road is the town’s mosque, which began construction over 20 years ago but is still not finished, thanks to the corrupt men in charge that stole all the money meant to complete it. I’ve asked why the community hasn’t raised the money so that they can have a proper mosque, but all I ever get in response is a shrug.
The department of public health tells me there are 24,000 people in Mandiana. If this is so, then I have no idea where most of them are. No one lives in the center of town- it’s commerce only. There are lots of little stores that sell pretty much the same things, motorcycle repair shops and woodshops. As far as I can tell, you are a carpenter in Mandiana if you own a hammer. Some of the more useful destinations in town are the Telecenters and stores with cold bottles of water. The Telecenters are essentially brightly painted hot dog stands hooked up to generators. For 25 cents you can have your cell phone charged there.
Most of the neighborhoods aren’t even neighborhoods, actually. They just seem to be huts and single story cement houses scattered randomly amongst winding dirt paths. The path that runs by my hut seems to go on and on. I’ve attempted to walk to the end, but I’m usually too hot or too annoyed at the entourage of dirty children following me to reach it. This entourage grows larger each time I pass by a new house, and each child wants to greet me and expects an individual greeting in return. A simple, all-encompassing “Bonjour a tous” doesn’t suffice. They keep saying, “Ca ba?” until I say “Ca va,” back to them. And then they each say “Ca ba bien?”
DAILY LIFE
I begin each day in Mandiana at around 5 A.M., when the morning symphony of the neighborhood’s roosters, chickens, sheep, dogs, donkeys and cows begins. The birds join in their song and the women rise to start pounding grain, and the crescendo is reached at around 5:30 with the Mosques prayer call. This is when I stick in my ear plugs and try to sleep a little longer, which is difficult to do, thanks to the side effects of the malaria prophylaxis we have to take.
I usually fall asleep to the sounds of radios playing crappy West African techno and sometimes the sounds of drums can be heard in the distance. I’m awakened throughout the night by donkey’s brays and cattle’s lows echoing through the air. These animals like to sidle up
to the sides of huts and scrape their flanks against the walls, so when a donkey is braying just a feet away from me at two A.M., it can be downright alarming.On my fourth night here, someone stood a few feet from my door at three A.M. just coughing and wheezing for over an hour. I was terrified! I asked one of my local friends about it the following day, and, she insisted it was the local sorcerer. Apparently, she goes out at night to search for diamonds and gold, and must have been curious about the new white person in town. Hopefully she didn’t put any curses on me! It’s amusing to think that in America, neighbors would bring food as a welcome. Here, the local sorcerer hexes me! Only in Africa… (In photo: My friend, Mannie the Maneater, who hangs out on a tree by my hut's backdoor all day long.)
My hut is part of a compound consisting of three huts, one cement rectangular house and two smaller huts for chickens and sheep. The family I live with is wonderful. The mother, Fanta (which is short for Fatoumata- she was NOT named after the soft drink) is like Mrs. Claus compared to the cold mother I lived with in Forecariah. She stops by my hut every morning before she leaves to sell fabric and jewelry at the market and always stops by to say goodnight. Not much communication goes on between us just yet, seeing that she only knows “ca va” in French and I only really know the equivalent in Malinke.
Fanta has four children- Mamadi (male), age 12, Laye (male), age eight, Mama (female, shot for “Hawa”) age four and Mohammed, one year. They’re good kids, when they’re not trying to spy on me when I’m taking a bucket bath, or poking holes in my thatch fence to get a better view of me washing dishes in the yard. One day, I was tired of hearing them giggle at me from the other side of the fence, so I looked up how to say ‘go away’ in Malinke. I walked up to my fence, took a deep breath and bellowed “ka I o wah!” as menacingly as I could. Instead of scattering, they all broke into applause, yelling in glee. They were so excited/amused to hear me speak Malinke aside from the obvious scripted salutations. It was not the response I’d expected. (In photo: the kids in my new Guinean family, with a random boy [the checkered one] who I believe now lives with the family as well)
I sit out with the family most evenings. The kids point at objects and give me their names in Malinke, and then ask what they’re called in French and English. The father seems very kind, but keeps his distance from me. He works in the market at the video cassette store and spends his evenings working on a new hut for the family’s chickens, conveniently located a few paces from my front door. Something tells me that the ‘morning symphony’ is going to become something of a morning nuisance.
Two men live in the hut just a few paces from mine. Fanta tells me they’re cousins, but that’s a very Guinean thing to say. In Guinea, it seems that everyone’s family. Another man occupies the midget hut in which I was originally supposed to live, but he’s only there a few times a month (I didn’t need the midget hut because my hut has plenty of room). My hut is feeling more like home each day and no scorpions or snakes have entered it, to my knowledge. Ants, however, have a fabulously easy time crawling through the many little holes in my cement walls. I’ve taken to placing duct tape over these holes, but there are hundreds of holes, so it will be some time before my cas (French for hut) is fully fortified. Speaking of creepy crawlies, my huts ecosystem now includes an unknown animal/giant insect. I hear it scuffling around above the plastic tarp that acts as a canopy above my bed. It has yet to wander down, so I won’t fret about it until it does.
My cement floor is really uneven, so I’m constantly mis-stepping, tripping or falling over completely. I’ve had to place wedges under my shelves just so that they stand up straight.
In case I haven’t mentioned it before, Mandiana doesn’t have electricity or running water. I’ve caught myself thinking, “Wow! Electricity and running water are so unnecessary!” And it’s absolutely true. It was a big adjustment in Forecariah, that’s for sure, but you get used to it really quickly. At night, I use three candles, one kerosene lamp and a flashlight to see which species of ant is marching to its death. Or read. Or write.
For water, I use three large, yellow, plastic tanks called bidons. Each is about 50 pounds when filled. I send out petits (little kids) every other day to fill them up at the pump, which is a three minute walk away from my compound. Peace Corps gives each volunteer a big white filter with a spigot, so all I have to do is fill the filter with water, and, voila, running water! While filling the filter with a 50 pound bidon requires quite a bit of muscle grunt, it’s a good workout.
WEEKLY LIFE
Every Thursday at four P.M. I walk to Faralako, which is Alison’s site. It’s about four KM north of Mandiana and a very pretty walk. The crimson orange road is a beautiful contrast against a sky so blue that it resembles the blue of a flame. Unfortunately, it just so happens to be uphill both ways, but I take it at a brisk pace for exercise. Men on bicycles and motorcycles often pass me on my way and they raise their hands and shout “I ni wura!” which means good evening. Most Guineans are shocked that I elect to make the journey on foot, rather than by bike. They always say, “Mais, c’est tres fatigant!” But I think taking a bike up those hills in this heat would be considerably more tiring.
In case I haven’t mentioned it before, Mandiana doesn’t have electricity or running water. I’ve caught myself thinking, “Wow! Electricity and running water are so unnecessary!” And it’s absolutely true. It was a big adjustment in Forecariah, that’s for sure, but you get used to it really quickly. At night, I use three candles, one kerosene lamp and a flashlight to see which species of ant is marching to its death. Or read. Or write.
For water, I use three large, yellow, plastic tanks called bidons. Each is about 50 pounds when filled. I send out petits (little kids) every other day to fill them up at the pump, which is a three minute walk away from my compound. Peace Corps gives each volunteer a big white filter with a spigot, so all I have to do is fill the filter with water, and, voila, running water! While filling the filter with a 50 pound bidon requires quite a bit of muscle grunt, it’s a good workout.
WEEKLY LIFE
Every Thursday at four P.M. I walk to Faralako, which is Alison’s site. It’s about four KM north of Mandiana and a very pretty walk. The crimson orange road is a beautiful contrast against a sky so blue that it resembles the blue of a flame. Unfortunately, it just so happens to be uphill both ways, but I take it at a brisk pace for exercise. Men on bicycles and motorcycles often pass me on my way and they raise their hands and shout “I ni wura!” which means good evening. Most Guineans are shocked that I elect to make the journey on foot, rather than by bike. They always say, “Mais, c’est tres fatigant!” But I think taking a bike up those hills in this heat would be considerably more tiring.
(In photo: me, every thursday and friday from 4:15 to 5:00 PM. Seriou
sly...I even wear the same outfit each time. Guineans LOVE to laugh at my spandex underarmour.)
I look forward to my weekly visit to Faralako. Alison is wonderful company and she too is an educated feminist, so I can talk freely with her and not worry about being judged as militant. She also has a lot to do with my newfound cooking abilities. Alison often has an American dinner ready to eat when I arrive—we have a deal going that whenever one of us comes to visit, it’s the others responsibility to do all the food preparation and clean up. It’s a nice break for both of us because we each prepare all of our own meals, everyday. We usually just talk after dinner, read or listen to BBC Africa on the radio. That is, until Alison’s host mom comes over for her nightly visit.
Hawa is a woman probably somewhere in her fifties and is absolutely wonderful. A few weeks ago, Alison had been searching high and low for a kitten to combat her huts insanely brazen mouse population. For the past two weeks, Alison had been waging a war on these mice that chewed through not only her American food (heresy!!!), but through her bottles of bug spray, tubes of toothpaste and even through her candles. Just as Alison and I had broken into singing “I Hate Guinea” to the tune of “I Love Paris,” Hawa came through the door with the most emaciated kitten I’d ever seen. Alison was over the moon, and while her mice are still living in her thatch roof, they no longer venture down below.
Back to Hawa. Not only is she wonderful, but she is also a riot. She speaks only two words in French- “bebe” and “bon,” and ever since she gave Alison the cat, she’s always pretending to kill it. But Hawa is very realistic about it. For example, she’ll stick Moose-Moose (that’s the cat’s name) in her shawl and swing the shawl around her head, rotating it like a helicopter, and then makes to sling the cat onto the floor, but she always stops right before Moose-Moose would hit the ground. It’s sick, but hilarious. Hawa also enjoys telling Alison that cats are bad, but babies are good, and that Alison should go to Kankan to sleep with her son and have his baby. This is all communicated through broken Malinke and a lot of hilarious hand motions. This is exactly what happens every night I spent in Faralako, and it never gets old.
Then, on Friday morning, I work at the health center in Faralako, which mainly consists of hanging out with the Agent PEV, because Faralako is tiny and few people come in to get treatment. I’m working with the center to try to begin weighing babies so that they can tell the mother if they need to feed the baby more. Malnutrition is a HUGE problem in Guinea. At least half of the kids have the bloated bellies to prove it.
WEATHER
February marked the beginning of hot season here in Guinea. Mandiana is classified as “savannah” and has thus far reached a maximum of 110° in the middle of the day. It’s not unbearable, but everyone plans their days here so that they’re not outside doing strenuous labor between the hours of 11 and three P.M. Come noon, the air outside my hut quivers in the heat over puddles of reflected light. The sun beats down on the dusty earth, as round and hot as only an African sun can be. Mandiana’s air can get so suffocating that it feels like my whole body as been zipped up into a sleeping bag, head included. All I want to do is rip the sleeping bag off, but all I can do is disrobe, soak my clothes with water and then put them back on. Even throughout the night I find myself tearing open the mosquito net and running to my water filter to douse my shirt and a bandana. It’s not comfortable falling asleep in sopping wet clothes, but at least it’s ‘cool’. The best word to describe the air in Mandiana right now is ‘airless’.
The town had its first rain in months in late March. As soon as I heard the first drip drops onto the leaves above my hut, I dashed outside. Most of the kids in the neighborhood did the same, running around with arms spread, faces up towards the sky, yelling “san ji!” (rain) in absolute happiness. The rain hit the ground with such force that clouds of dust were sent up with each drop, giving the earth the appearance of being draped in a fine mist.
The rain means one thing to most of the kids- mango season!!! According to my host mom, the mangoes need three rains to be ready to eat. Already, they are weighing heavily on the trees like oversized Christmas ornaments. A common sight now is kids whacking ripe mangoes with sticks ranging from 20 to 60 feet in height. It’s crazy! And then there are always two kids holding out a towel, running towards the huge falling mango to avoid it smooshing on the ground. In fact, the mangoes have gotten so large that their weight snapped a large branch hanging over my
pit latrine. I was eating lunch on my front step with the kids in my family and I heard a really loud splintered CRACK and then a crash. The branch was so massive that it filled the entire fenced-in area in my pit latrine. It was far too heavy to move, even with petits help, so I had to use a latrine across the street for the rest of the day. I’m really happy I wasn’t actually using the pit when the branch fell—I could’ve been seriously hurt. (This picture is of Laye, Mamadi and Mama with the massive branch peeking out of my pit latrine area.)
WORK
The first month of work was difficult. I ended up leaving the second, third and fourth days of work so frustrated with the Agent PEV and Guinea in general. This is because of a little clash with the Agent PEV. I tried to organize the babies vaccination files because they were in no order- one needed to search through the entire stack of files to locate the correct file. It was totally inefficient and I explained to the Agent PEV that it would be better to alphabetize them. He insisted that we should organize them by neighborhood, which makes no sense because there are only five in Mandiana, whereas there are 26 letters in the alphabet, and with more groupings it would be easier to retrieve a baby’s file. I ended up ignoring his wishes (yes, I know…bad call) and organized the babies files by alphabet and left.
The next work day was market day, so there were a lot of people there waiting to be seen (there’s no order for who gets to be seen first- it only depends on how pushy you are). I was looking up the babies files a million times faster with this new organization and one of the nurses congratulated me, saying that that was how Kankan’s hospital organized their files. The Agent PEV was obviously disgruntled by my victory and so ordered the nurse to reorganize the files according to month the baby needed to come in for its next vaccination. I wanted to smack him over the head with something heavy! In theory, this might work if mothers actually had calendars or could read in the first place, but, they don’t! Mothers bring in their babies whenever they feel like it, so organizing by month is sheer idiocy (107 babies missed their appointments in February). I tried explaining this to the Agent PEV, but he wouldn’t listen.
I just expected everyone to be open to change, because, that’s why Mandiana requested a volunteer. But, no, you have to convince them they need to change first, which is going to take awhile because, in general, Guineans are a very complacent people.
I only worked a total of three weeks with the Agent PEV and then moved on to work more directly with the DPS. They seem to think that I’m a computer specialist, because all they’ve been asking me to do is fix their computer problems. I’m no Luddite, but I am certainly not a specialist. Sure, I know you need a special program to read PDF files, but I can’t fix a computer that won’t turn on!
Alright, this entry has reached six pages on my word document so I’m going to paraphrase the rest, for my sake and yours.
Easter—Alison, Amy (the Kankan volunteer) and I organized an Easter egg hunt for the kids in Faralako. They looked a bit confused as to why we were hiding eggs and lollipops in trees, but they were absolutely thrilled to be getting free food. We turned it into a mini sensibilization about the health benefits of eggs. (In photo: it's the easiest game of Where's Waldo you'll ever play. These are just a quarter of the kids that showed up for the hunt)
Soccer—as a welcome to the neighborhood, Mandiana put together a little soccer game in my honor. There is a women’s team in Mandiana and they played against another women’s team from a nearby town. It was fun to watch and they had me shake all the players hands before the game. A lot of people showed up and there were chairs set around the field as well as a loud speaker playing Guinean music. And then, after the game, the two teams ended up brawling. It was funny.
Men—The men in Mandiana are incredibly persistent. I wear a little ring on my ring finger and tell everyone I’m married to a big, burly American, but they think nothing of it. One guy who keeps coming by my house brought me five large potatoes and a Fanta. Is this Guinea’s version of flowers? Thanks, dude… Men I’ve never seen before come up to me and say “Kadiatou, je t’aime!” Kadiatou is my new Guinean name. No Star Wars name for me.
There is so much more to my last two months, but, those were the highlights. I hope everyone is healthy and happy.
sly...I even wear the same outfit each time. Guineans LOVE to laugh at my spandex underarmour.)I look forward to my weekly visit to Faralako. Alison is wonderful company and she too is an educated feminist, so I can talk freely with her and not worry about being judged as militant. She also has a lot to do with my newfound cooking abilities. Alison often has an American dinner ready to eat when I arrive—we have a deal going that whenever one of us comes to visit, it’s the others responsibility to do all the food preparation and clean up. It’s a nice break for both of us because we each prepare all of our own meals, everyday. We usually just talk after dinner, read or listen to BBC Africa on the radio. That is, until Alison’s host mom comes over for her nightly visit.
Hawa is a woman probably somewhere in her fifties and is absolutely wonderful. A few weeks ago, Alison had been searching high and low for a kitten to combat her huts insanely brazen mouse population. For the past two weeks, Alison had been waging a war on these mice that chewed through not only her American food (heresy!!!), but through her bottles of bug spray, tubes of toothpaste and even through her candles. Just as Alison and I had broken into singing “I Hate Guinea” to the tune of “I Love Paris,” Hawa came through the door with the most emaciated kitten I’d ever seen. Alison was over the moon, and while her mice are still living in her thatch roof, they no longer venture down below.
Back to Hawa. Not only is she wonderful, but she is also a riot. She speaks only two words in French- “bebe” and “bon,” and ever since she gave Alison the cat, she’s always pretending to kill it. But Hawa is very realistic about it. For example, she’ll stick Moose-Moose (that’s the cat’s name) in her shawl and swing the shawl around her head, rotating it like a helicopter, and then makes to sling the cat onto the floor, but she always stops right before Moose-Moose would hit the ground. It’s sick, but hilarious. Hawa also enjoys telling Alison that cats are bad, but babies are good, and that Alison should go to Kankan to sleep with her son and have his baby. This is all communicated through broken Malinke and a lot of hilarious hand motions. This is exactly what happens every night I spent in Faralako, and it never gets old.
Then, on Friday morning, I work at the health center in Faralako, which mainly consists of hanging out with the Agent PEV, because Faralako is tiny and few people come in to get treatment. I’m working with the center to try to begin weighing babies so that they can tell the mother if they need to feed the baby more. Malnutrition is a HUGE problem in Guinea. At least half of the kids have the bloated bellies to prove it.
WEATHER
February marked the beginning of hot season here in Guinea. Mandiana is classified as “savannah” and has thus far reached a maximum of 110° in the middle of the day. It’s not unbearable, but everyone plans their days here so that they’re not outside doing strenuous labor between the hours of 11 and three P.M. Come noon, the air outside my hut quivers in the heat over puddles of reflected light. The sun beats down on the dusty earth, as round and hot as only an African sun can be. Mandiana’s air can get so suffocating that it feels like my whole body as been zipped up into a sleeping bag, head included. All I want to do is rip the sleeping bag off, but all I can do is disrobe, soak my clothes with water and then put them back on. Even throughout the night I find myself tearing open the mosquito net and running to my water filter to douse my shirt and a bandana. It’s not comfortable falling asleep in sopping wet clothes, but at least it’s ‘cool’. The best word to describe the air in Mandiana right now is ‘airless’.
The town had its first rain in months in late March. As soon as I heard the first drip drops onto the leaves above my hut, I dashed outside. Most of the kids in the neighborhood did the same, running around with arms spread, faces up towards the sky, yelling “san ji!” (rain) in absolute happiness. The rain hit the ground with such force that clouds of dust were sent up with each drop, giving the earth the appearance of being draped in a fine mist.
The rain means one thing to most of the kids- mango season!!! According to my host mom, the mangoes need three rains to be ready to eat. Already, they are weighing heavily on the trees like oversized Christmas ornaments. A common sight now is kids whacking ripe mangoes with sticks ranging from 20 to 60 feet in height. It’s crazy! And then there are always two kids holding out a towel, running towards the huge falling mango to avoid it smooshing on the ground. In fact, the mangoes have gotten so large that their weight snapped a large branch hanging over my
pit latrine. I was eating lunch on my front step with the kids in my family and I heard a really loud splintered CRACK and then a crash. The branch was so massive that it filled the entire fenced-in area in my pit latrine. It was far too heavy to move, even with petits help, so I had to use a latrine across the street for the rest of the day. I’m really happy I wasn’t actually using the pit when the branch fell—I could’ve been seriously hurt. (This picture is of Laye, Mamadi and Mama with the massive branch peeking out of my pit latrine area.)WORK
The first month of work was difficult. I ended up leaving the second, third and fourth days of work so frustrated with the Agent PEV and Guinea in general. This is because of a little clash with the Agent PEV. I tried to organize the babies vaccination files because they were in no order- one needed to search through the entire stack of files to locate the correct file. It was totally inefficient and I explained to the Agent PEV that it would be better to alphabetize them. He insisted that we should organize them by neighborhood, which makes no sense because there are only five in Mandiana, whereas there are 26 letters in the alphabet, and with more groupings it would be easier to retrieve a baby’s file. I ended up ignoring his wishes (yes, I know…bad call) and organized the babies files by alphabet and left.
The next work day was market day, so there were a lot of people there waiting to be seen (there’s no order for who gets to be seen first- it only depends on how pushy you are). I was looking up the babies files a million times faster with this new organization and one of the nurses congratulated me, saying that that was how Kankan’s hospital organized their files. The Agent PEV was obviously disgruntled by my victory and so ordered the nurse to reorganize the files according to month the baby needed to come in for its next vaccination. I wanted to smack him over the head with something heavy! In theory, this might work if mothers actually had calendars or could read in the first place, but, they don’t! Mothers bring in their babies whenever they feel like it, so organizing by month is sheer idiocy (107 babies missed their appointments in February). I tried explaining this to the Agent PEV, but he wouldn’t listen.
I just expected everyone to be open to change, because, that’s why Mandiana requested a volunteer. But, no, you have to convince them they need to change first, which is going to take awhile because, in general, Guineans are a very complacent people.
I only worked a total of three weeks with the Agent PEV and then moved on to work more directly with the DPS. They seem to think that I’m a computer specialist, because all they’ve been asking me to do is fix their computer problems. I’m no Luddite, but I am certainly not a specialist. Sure, I know you need a special program to read PDF files, but I can’t fix a computer that won’t turn on!
Alright, this entry has reached six pages on my word document so I’m going to paraphrase the rest, for my sake and yours.
Easter—Alison, Amy (the Kankan volunteer) and I organized an Easter egg hunt for the kids in Faralako. They looked a bit confused as to why we were hiding eggs and lollipops in trees, but they were absolutely thrilled to be getting free food. We turned it into a mini sensibilization about the health benefits of eggs. (In photo: it's the easiest game of Where's Waldo you'll ever play. These are just a quarter of the kids that showed up for the hunt)
Soccer—as a welcome to the neighborhood, Mandiana put together a little soccer game in my honor. There is a women’s team in Mandiana and they played against another women’s team from a nearby town. It was fun to watch and they had me shake all the players hands before the game. A lot of people showed up and there were chairs set around the field as well as a loud speaker playing Guinean music. And then, after the game, the two teams ended up brawling. It was funny.
Men—The men in Mandiana are incredibly persistent. I wear a little ring on my ring finger and tell everyone I’m married to a big, burly American, but they think nothing of it. One guy who keeps coming by my house brought me five large potatoes and a Fanta. Is this Guinea’s version of flowers? Thanks, dude… Men I’ve never seen before come up to me and say “Kadiatou, je t’aime!” Kadiatou is my new Guinean name. No Star Wars name for me.
There is so much more to my last two months, but, those were the highlights. I hope everyone is healthy and happy.
2 comments:
I was just re-watching Blood Diamond a week ago, and in the scene where Jennifer Connelly, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Djimon Hounsou go to the refugee camp, I realized that the subtitle said Forecariah! It was cool to see that Guinea connection, but it's also crazy to think that less than 10 years ago the country must have been flooded with hordes of refugees from Sierra Leone. Do people ever talk about that at all?
Oh, also, I'm medically cleared and in placement now! I should know where I'm going really soon.
I'm making this comment from Pie in the Sky in Woods Hole. Isn't that cool?
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