Hi from Dabola

Hello again, everyone! I didn’t think I’d be lucky enough to be writing again so soon, but we’re in Dabola for the weekend to celebrate Sacha’s birthday, and the generator at US AID is back up and running, so we get to use the internet Ben, Levi, and I made it back to Bissikrima just in time for sunset last Saturday after a painless bush taxi ride (painless for us anyway, not so much for the poor woman behind me with two kids on her lap who was puking into a plastic bag the whole way). Even with the insane heat, I’ve had the best week yet at site.

I love coming back to Bissikrima after an absence because everyone seems so happy to see me, stopping by to welcome me home and ask me about my trip. Since we actually got to take our vacation this time, I came back feeling well-rested and ready to get back into village life. After my chats with Conor in Conakry, I have been dealing with the difficulties of being a female here in a much more positive way. I had a great week at school with my students. I marvel at the progress they’ve made since the beginning of the year — the same students who struggled with basic addition and subtraction and had never before plotted a point in a graph are now solving systems of equations completely on their own. Next Saturday we’re doing a small math competition with my 10th graders in Bissikrima to choose the eight students who will get to participate in a math competition with Hunter’s (one of my neighbor PCVs) 10th graders at the end of May. We just got the go ahead with the funding, so when Hunter gets her later today, we’ll get all of our plans in order. My students and I are very excited!

This has been the most intense week yet in terms of the heat. On Sunday I went out and bought a bamboo bed so I could start sleeping outside because I’ll wake up at 2AM in a pool of my own sweat, and when I glance at the thermometer, it reads 93 degrees. Ninety three degrees at 2AM. Yeeouch. We’ve been ending school around 11:15 or 11:30 because the students can’t pay attention any longer with the heat, which is even worse in the tin-roof schoolhouse. They keep saying the rains are coming, and I just keep on waiting. On the bright side, it’s mango season! They are plentiful, cheap, and delicious, although I have to say I still prefer the oranges.

All kinds of projects have been sprouting up lately, and so I’m no longer worried about being bored to tears this summer without school. In August we have Girls’ Conference, where each PCV brings a girl or two to their regional capital for three days to participate in sessions ranging from education to HIV/AIDS to discussions on what life is like for girls here in Guinea. So Salematou and I are already getting excited for that. Sacha and I just started discussing doing a Girls’ Camp, one in each of our villages. We haven’t started working on funding yet, but we’re throwing ideas around about things to do at the camp while we’re together this weekend. Paul is putting on a race (running) the first Saturday in October, so my girls’ group and I are going to start running together once the heat is over. I’m also helping him plan the big spaghetti dinner for all the participants that will take place the night before the race and setting up one of the water tables. Conor and I are also working on a project modeled after the photography exhibit I saw in Sierra Leone. Whew! And on top of all that, last night at dinner Paul introduced me to an English woman who is working at Concern Universal here in Dabola. Concern Universal works with girls in Guinea. She and I have been living just 23K apart for the last seven months and didn’t meet until last night! Apparently she comes to Bissikrima’s Sunday market to get out of Dabola sometimes. In any case, we were both really excited to meet another English-speaking female who lives nearby.

So that has been my great week. I also read a wonderful book that took my mind off the heat for hours at a time (Prep I highly recommend it). On Saturday, I arrived home to packages and mail from the US (the mailrun came while we were in Sierra Leone), so thank you thank you so much to everyone who sent letters and packages (Laura Martini, Aunt Lori, Grandma, my parents, Van and Diane, my roommates!). You guys make my life here so much easier (and my students love it when I share bonbons from the US with them). I miss you all so much, and it’s so nice to hear from you. To top off my great week, I open my email to find the nicest message from my 10th grade math teacher, Mr. Rumppe, who apparently just met Di Dimond, my mom’s best friend. That put a huge smile on my face

I think I mean it this time when I say I’ll be out of touch via the internet for a while. It’s not so much fun biking to Dabola in this heat, but I never know where the week will take me. It’s hard to believe an entire winter has gone by back home and a new group is already graduating from UM. I hope you’re all making the most of the nice weather (I heard it was 70 in the Twin Cities last weekend). Much love from Guinea!

More tidbits about Guinean life

Since life here is so different from life at home, I thought I’d throw out some more little bits & pieces about Guinea.

• Guineans love rice and sauce. There are a few different sauces they make; the three main ones are peanut, leaf, and soup, which is really just palm oil. They could (and often do) eat rice and sauce for every meal. Eating here is done for sustenance not for appreciation of the taste. It is rare to see a family sit down and eat all together. For example, in Salematou’s family, the father eats on his own as does Saidou, and then the two kids and their mom eat together.
• Classes in the middle and high schools (where we PCVs teach) are two hours long. I’m constantly being interrupted by parents or other villagers just wandering on in and saying hi to all of my students while I’m in the middle of explaining something at the board. Interrupting is not impolite. Other teachers will often pop on into my classroom while I’m in the midst of teaching. The interruption itself is frustrating, but what makes it even more annoying is that they’re usually smoking a cigarette. Most teachers at my school smoke and teach at the same time. Other Haute PCVs complain about the same thing.
• Since my latrine is outdoors, I strip down to go to the bathroom when it’s raining so I don’t get soaked. I’m not really sure what Guineans do…
• One thing I love about Guineans is that they accompany their departing guests at least partway home. Whenever I am leaving someone’s compound, they will stand up and walk quite a ways with me before turning around and heading back to their place. I think it’s a really nice gesture.
• Guineans are obsessed with Obama as were the people in Sierra Leone. When you go to the markets, you can find all kinds of Obama gear, from shirts, to sandals, to notebooks, to jerseys (yup, a jersey with a picture of the first family on the front). What Guineans love most are these little ID cards they can clip onto their shirts that have a picture of Obama on them. They wear them everywhere. The driver for Haute calls himself Obama now and refers to his Land Cruiser as Air Force 1.
• Speaking of markets, those are the only thing that exist au village. There are no stores and no set prices. You have to bargain for everything, which is loses its fun when it’s something you need and you can’t get the vendor to give you the right price.
• The water pumps are often stolen because they can be sold on the black market for a large sum. The pump at my school was stolen at the end of January, and the one really good pump just outside of town is also nowhere to be found. The pump I use has dried up, so we’re having somewhat of a water crisis in Bissikrima right now. People are drinking well water, which is really bad for their health.
• Sometimes you’ll be standing around talking to someone, and they’ll just stick their finger up their nose and start digging around. Completely acceptable. Guineans also use keys to clean the wax out of their ears.
• Because we lost our electricity over a month ago, it’s been very dark at night. You really start to pay attention to the moon cycle when it’s your only nightlight.
• I get called “toubabo” (white person) multiple times a day by little children. It’s not done with bad intentions, but it does get incredibly annoying. I still think it’s ridiculous when some little kid who can barely talk yet and is running around with no pants on calls me little white person (toubabo-ni).
• In the rainy season the animals are kept tied up out in the fields where they can feed without ruining the crops. During the dry season, they just wander around the village looking for food. Cows have plowed through my fence, just broken right on through it, three times now in the middle of the night. The goats have completely eaten my basil and spinach plants (I think I got a total of four leaves before they finished them off). It’s a constant war between me and the animals, and unfortunately, I’m losing badly.
• I usually spend less than $1/day on food. Stuff here is so cheap, even compared to Sierra Leone.
• When I’m with a Guinean, one of their favorite activities is to call up all their friends and put me, the white lady, on the phone with them. It brings much joy and laughter to all Guineans involved. The person on the other end of the line will often pass the phone around to all their friends as well so everyone can talk to me. More of my celebrity status I guess!
• Guineans essentially live outside. Their dwellings are usually fairly small, certainly by our standards anyway. They cook, bathe, socialize, nap, and hang out outside. In the hot season, they even sleep outside.
• Radios are the way to get news here, and you always see men walking around with a radio in their hands and the antennae sticking straight up in front of them.

So tomorrow I will be heading back to site. Ibrahima Sory, the driver we ride with, called me yesterday to set everything up – he insisted on coming to the house to pick us up in the morning and won’t take payment for doing so. Yet another example of Guinean kindness. My plans for the next couple months are still up in the air. I’m not sure when I’ll be heading to Kankan, and since the internet in Dabola has been down a lot, it may be awhile before I can update again. The next time I come to Conakry will be in July to pick up my mom and Paige! I’m still not sure when school will be ending. May? June? Who knows. In any case, I’ll be spending plenty of time in Bissikrima these next two months and therefore lots of time thinking of you all. Much love!

Life as a woman in West Africa

So I’ve mentioned a few times that I’ve been struggling to deal with life as female here in West Africa. There are two aspects to this; one is the way I’m treated as a white American woman, which is without a doubt better than the way Guinean women are treated but still not like life at home. Men are constantly making inappropriate comments and harrassing me. It’s one thing to receive a comments like, “Go home and cook me a big meal” or “Do you want to have sex with me?” occassionly, but here it is every single day, multiple times per day. Just yesterday I was talking to a couple guards at the PC house, and they started telling me how I need to marry a Guinean. I told them I was too young to get married, and they said, “No, you’re not. You can marry this guard here.” It’s in my face everywhere, even in places where I should be able to get away from it. If I got these comments once in a while, it wouldn’t be a huge deal, but it’s exhausting because it’s all the time. Everytime I see a Guinean man walking towards me, I brace myself. Ben and Hunter have both told me I’m mean to Guineans, but I’ve noticed it is only towards the men. If I’m the slightest bit friendly, they’ll do things like follow me home from Paul’s house and harrass me in the middle of a rural road (like his educated co-worker recently did). My personal favorite was when Ben and I were walking around his market one day, and this guy asked Ben if we were married. Ben started to explain that we were friends, but as soon as he had said the word no, the guy said, “Il faut me donner” which translates roughly to “You must give it to me”, it refering to me of course as if I’m some piece of property to be traded. But that’s really what women are here, property.

Aside from the harrassment, the other difficult aspect is the gender inequality. It is extreme and something to which I’m completely unaccustomed. This country would not function if it weren’t for the women. They do everything and are working from before sun-up until sundown. And despite all that they do for their husbands and families, they are still treated like crap. They’re beaten for no reason. The mayor in my friend Lisa’s town has been spending a lot of time in Conakry lately (apparently he’s getting a second wife), and he refuses to give his first wife money. She has nothing with which to feed her family, and the community and Lisa have been giving her money so that they can eat. Unfortunately, this is not at all uncommon. I recently watched a man ask Salematou for a cup of water, and he refused to take it from her until she presented it to him on her knees. A class that is 20% female has a high proportion of girls. It’s so frustrating to see. My female students have tons of chores to do before they can start studying and doing their homework everyday.

The exhibit at the Sierra Leone National Museum was so amazing because it did a great job of capturing females’ lives here. My friend Conor, another education PCV, got to Conakry Wednesday night, and he was so struck by what I told him about the exhibit, that we decided to look for funding to do something similar here in Guinea for our upcoming Girls Conference.

So I realize this post is somewhat of a downer, but I thought it was important to share…

Sierra Leone

Yesterday we arrived in Conakry after a lovely eight days in Sierra Leone. We left Conakry April 5th around 5:30AM and arrived in Freetown around 6:30PM after the taxi ride from hell, by far the worst I’ve experienced so far, but hey, it was with good company, so I really shouldn’t complain. The countryside in Sierra Leone was breathtaking, and it’s the end of the dry season. I can only imagine how much more green and lush it is during the rainy season.

We rolled into Freetown wide-eyed and jaws dropped. We were shocked by how much more developed it is than Conakry. We marveled at things like trash collection, sidewalks, paved roads, cold drinks that were actually cold, functioning government buildings, and real restaurants (and plenty of them). We ate at an ocean-side restaurant the first night that had draught beer and real booze (Captain Morgan and Coke Light – I was in absolute heaven). Despite our fatigue from staying up all night before the trip, we were positively giddy.

Monday we walked around Freetown seeing the sights and buying delicious treats we can’t find in Guinea (muffins, hotdogs, etc). Aside from the food, the Sierra Leone National Museum was my personal favorite. They had an amazing exhibit where they had given village women cameras and asked them to photograph women’s lives. We saw pictures of women getting beaten by their husbands who were smiling (the woman had taken goods from her husband to sell to make money to feed her family since her husband wouldn’t give her money), of a stillborn baby (a woman had been beaten that harshly while pregnant), of women cooking (similar to what I put on my blog), of a man bringing a new wife into his home unannounced, of hairdressing (one of the few ways women here spend time on themselves), of teenagers impregnated by adult men who deny they slept with the teen (and of course the girl is then forced to drop out of school), of girls doing the ridiculous amount of chores they have to do after school when they could be studying (another of a girl who’s given no food if she doesn’t complete her chores for her brothers). We also saw more empowering pictures of girls in their school uniforms at all girls’ schools and women who had found the means to get sewing machines, which enabled them to become financially independent from their husbands. This was the coolest thing I have seen since coming here. I wish the exhibit could be turned into a photo album and distributed widely because it is astounding what women in West Africa go through.

After the museum we stumbled upon an amazing artisan market – this kind of thing just doesn’t exist in Guinea because there just isn’t the demand. We all ended up changing money to buy some of the fabulous items we found. We also saw the first college in West Africa (Fournah Bay College), and one of the security guards took us around the top of the mountain upon which it sits, showing us a natural spring that people from miles around come to for drinking water. I barely made it down the mountain carrying nothing but my purse; I don’t know how they do it with 20L of water…

Tuesday, we hit the beach. We arrived around 3PM, and from that time until 11AM Monday morning, we did nothing but swim, sleep, drink, and eat. The beach was stunningly gorgeous as you can see from the photos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/37048709@N05/). It is almost completely untouched, and for the first few days, we were the only ones there. The mountains lead right down to the ocean, and there’s a river that flows into the ocean (hence the name, River No. 2). When the tide was low, we would float down the river and let the current carry us out to sea. A natural lazy river if you will. We ate fresh seafood (shrimp, barracuda, lobster, crab) every night for dinner. Okay, that’s a lie. Everyone else ate fresh seafood every night while I ate mounds French fries because I’m 22 years old and I still refuse to eat fish, but those fries were delicious, and I was very content.

So that was our week at the beach: lovely and relaxing. Monday we got back to Freetown in time for one last delicious dinner (mozzarella sticks and hamburgers, which you can’t really get here in Guinea. At least not without bones) and the big Easter Monday celebration. I swear Easter is the biggest holiday in West Africa, which is a little bizarre since West Africa is mostly Muslim, but hey, who doesn’t love a good party? The streets were bumping until we pulled out of town at 5:30 Tuesday morning. All in all, it was an amazing vacation.

There are many things I will no longer take for granted after living here for two years, but the main thing is freedom: the freedom I have being a woman in the US (which I’ll try to explain perhaps tomorrow) and to do anything and be anywhere without question so long as I’m doing nothing wrong. In both Guinea and Sierra Leone there are checkpoints every so often along the main roads (or every five minutes in the case of Sierra Leone). In Sierra Leone, the police would ask us what we were doing, ask us when Peace Corps was coming back to Sierra Leone, and send us merrily along our way. In Guinea, you just brace yourself every time you come to a checkpoint – how much hassling and harassment will it take to get past this time? The Sierra Leone border patrol helped us through with no problem, but we knew we were back in Guinea when we came out of Guinean immigration to find our bags wide open and being searched without us present. Every checkpoint on the Guinean side required bribes from our driver and screaming matches between him and the militaires manning the checkpoints. It is a point of much frustration, but all you can (and must) do is smile and be sweet to the officials, even if you think the whole thing is ridiculous because all you’re doing is trying to get home! In any case, that by no means spoiled the vacation; it was just something I thought I’d throw out there. Just one more thing I, as an American, am grateful for after living here.

Right now I’m planning on heading back to site on Saturday, so I’m hoping to post at least once more before then. I hope everyone enjoyed their Spring break. Missing you all, and I’m quite possibly coming home for Christmas… If I do, I can’t wait to see as many of you as possible!

Pictures

So my pictures were not posting to my blog for some reason, so I created a flickr account to show you my hut and the rest of the photos from cooking with Salematou. They are in a random order, but I just couldn’t deal with the slow internet and power outtages forcing me to start over again anymore. So here you have it! Click below to see the pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37048709@N05/

We’re leaving in five hours (hopefully less) for our trip to Sierra Leone. I’ll be back in Conakry the 14th and will post more pictures, etc before I go back to site on the 18th.

Cooking with Salematou

In previous posts I’ve mentioned my neighbor Salematou who’s about 14 years old and in 7th grade. I absolutely adore her and her younger brother Alhissaine whose in 5th grade. Recently their “mother” left to go visit family in the Basse Cote, so Salematou has been doing absolutely all of the family chores. This means immediately after school she goes to the market to buy the ingredients for the sauce that day and starts preparing the food around 12:30. Since she’s got all kinds of chores to do, I asked her if I could help out with the cooking one Sunday. I actually probably ended up slowing her down, but she didn’t seem to mind. In Guinea, a family (meaning the women of the family) prepare the food once per day, and then they’ll eat 2-3 meals from the food they’ve prepared. Cooking is done over an open wood fire and total prep time is between two and three hours. Here are some photos of the eventful afternoon: