Happy Valentine’s Day!

Hi guys! I’m writing to you from Dabola, the town 23K from me. Hunter and Ben came to Bissikrima yesterday afternoon, and we spent the evening drinking cold drinks, eating delicious care package food, and catching up on the past couple weeks. This morning Hunter and I left for Dabola around 7:30 (Ben didn’t come because he’s feeling under the weather) to visit the new volunteer Paul. After a loooong ride here and much wandering around asking for the “toubabo” (white man), we finally found him, and now here we are at USAID using the internet! When we’re done here, we’re planning on going out to lunch for chicken, fries, and cold drinks. Afterwards we’re going back to Bissikrima to make breakfast for dinner (and oreos for dessert!). What a great day

Things have been going well at site, although ever since returning from our week of training in January, the days have been getting hotter and hotter. In the mornings it’s a chilly 65 degrees, but by the time I get home from school between 12:30 and 1:30, it’s well into the 90s. The hottest it’s gotten so far is 100.8 (and that’s in the shade under my straw roof — quite a bit cooler than in the sun away from my hut). It’s around 90 inside when I crawl under my mosquito net to go to bed around 8:30. And it’s only going to get hotter. Yikes! Luckily it’s incredibly dry, so the heat at this point is completely bearable. Check back with me on that in April. I’ve been drinking copious amounts of water — a minimum of 5L a day, which means more trips to the pump. You should see the biceps on this girl!

So for the next month and a half, I’ll be at site teaching, hanging out with my Guinean family, and  hiding out in my hut to avoid the heat (it’s a good 10-15 degrees cooler in my hut). I have a trip to Kankan planned in March to celebrate St. Patty’s, and then a big trip to Conakry and Sierra Leone try #2 at the beginning of April. My family is planning on visiting in July, so those are the big things on my radar (besides the mailrun of course) for now.

Teaching is going well. This week I tried to start vectors with my 10th graders only to find that my students had never worked with the coordinate system and could not even place a point much less comprehend a vector. These kids have been failed every step of the way. I’m starting my girls group again now that I know which girls are working hard in school and will be allowed to participate (and I got some great ideas on what to do and how to do it during our week of training last month). Hunter and I are working on setting up a math competition between our middle schools as preparation for the Brevet in June. I’m also looking into working with TOSTAN, an NGO that works against excision/female genital mutilation (96% of Guinean females have been excised to some degree) and early marriage, which causes them to drop out of school and start reproducing. My 8th grader who got married over the holidays, the star girl in the class, is no longer in school. So I’m looking forward to these projects as well.

I hope you are all in good health at home. I’m constantly writing letters home, but unfortunately they won’t be mailed until April 5th or 6th, so watch your mailboxes the week before Easter! Next time I’ll be online is the weekend of March 20th, so until then, take care. Much love from Guinea!

The Bush Taxi Experience

As PCVs in Guinea, you have few options for transportation. If you’re lucky, you manage to snag a ride in an air-conditioned PC car usually with your own seat belt and everything. A little less lucky and you find a “patron-ride” which can be anything from a ride with an NGO or just a nice, private car. Aaand those who are not so lucky get to take a bush taxi (or some combination of biking and bush taxi-ing for the unluckiest of all). Now it is possible to have a good trip in a bush taxi. In fact, in the handful of trips Ben and I have taken in bush taxis so far, we’ve had few if any problems (aside from the whole being kicked out of the car and forced to wade through a completely washed-out road during site visit).

To take a bush taxi, you generally have to arrive at the taxi station (and by station I mean piece of dirt land ear-marked for taxis that exist every decently-sized town) very early in the morning, preferably before sunrise. You pay for your ticket ($7 for the 234K from Bissikrima to Kankan), choose your seat, and begin waiting, which is likely what you will spend the rest of the day, and maybe some of the night, doing.

First, let me describe to you a bush taxi. A Puegot – have you ever seen one of those station wagons? They’re French, and that’s what constitutes a “taxi” in Guinea. You put two people in the passenger seat and often a third straddling the stick shift (one leg actually in the driver’s well…), four in the middle seat, and of course there’s the third “bench” that’s been added in the back that fits three. Babies and small children ride on laps, and the apprentice, who rides along to help fix the car every time it breaks down, rides in the tiniest bit of trunk space that still exists given the third seat or, more simply, on top. There may or may not be other riders on top as well. So in any given bush taxi, you have at least nine passengers but oftentimes many more. (I actually stop and stare now at cars with less passengers than there are seats it’s such a rare sight.) “Wait. So you can’t bring a bag with you since there’s no trunk?” you may be asking. Oh, you can bring a bag. As many as you like actually. Chickens? Goats? Sure, dead or alive. Bikes? Motorcycles? Why not! It all gets thrown on top to the point where the top may be heavier than the interior and at every turn in the road your heart pounds as you feel your car start to tip.

So, you’re sitting there in the station, you’ve picked out your seats, and now you’re playing the waiting game. Waiting for the car to fill up, waiting for the roof to be loaded, waiting for the driver to fill up the gas tank. Most taxis look like they should have been in the junkyard at least 20 years ago – literally falling apart. When you go over a bigger bump in the road, you actually feel the pavement against the bottom of your feet. When you want to roll down your window, you have to ask around for the one handle that still exists and have it passed along. So you’re waiting, staring at the car thinking there’s no possible way it’s going to make it to your destination or even out of the station for that matter. Eventually, after what could be six or more hours, everyone starts piling in. All the sudden the driver, who you realize you haven’t seen up until this point (so the guy you paid for your baggage… who was he?), jumps in and off you go. Well, sort of. Usually you need some kind of push start from all the available young men at the station. Then there you are, on the road in your bush taxi.

I should take a moment to describe the roads. They’re the worst roads I’ve seen in my life entire life. Potholes, gigantic potholes that could fit the entire car, everywhere. In South Africa the speed limit was 120K, and that’s at least you fast you went. I’ve never seen even a PC car go more than 110, and that’s on the best stretch of road in Guinea. Most of the time you are going around 60K/hour because the roads are horrendous. Which is why carsickness is frequent. When a fellow passenger got sick half an hour into our trip to Conakry in December, the driver stopped to let him puke, but not before yelling at him and allowing all the passengers to make fun of him. When he got back in they gave him a plastic bag, and the rest of the 8.5 hours had the lovely background noise of him retching and puking into that bag. Luckily the windows were down so there was no stench. The passengers build a sort of camaraderie with each other, perhaps because you’re all sitting on each others’ laps and dug into each others’ armpits. If you have food, you share it. You chit-chat to pass the time. It is actually really nice. You look out for each other. As unenjoyable as it is to ride in a bush taxi, making friends with Guineans is a great way to pass the time.

So you’re driving down the road, you may have lost a wheel by this point (not uncommon), broken down at least once or twice (but Guineans are so resourceful they can fix anything), raced other cars (which caused you to break down again), stopped to let a passenger get out and try to shoot a monkey, and you’ve dodged livestock crossing, walking down, or even sleeping in the middle of the road. Drivers will slam on their brakes for cows and goats –those are assets, so you don’t mess around. Children on the other hand are treated like targets. Do the priorities seem a little messed up here?

Finally, after hours and hours, you arrive at your destination covered in dirt (I complimented my friends on their amazing tans when they arrived in Mamou for IST not realizing they were actually just incredibly dirty from their trip), tired, and ready to have your personal space bubble back but with some new, very kind Guinean friends. It could be worse, but I’ll never again be able to complain about air travel in the US.

Much love from Guinea!