Sunday, December 28, 2008

December (pre-attempted coup)

December 6th
I can write this in our house again because we (for now) have electricity! Yay! The three weeks without it was fine, but I do enjoy using the laptop as more than a bookend. The getting electricity has been quite an issue though. I’m pretty sure our neighbor arranged to have this all fixed, which I am thankful for, but it ended up being an expense that everyone on our street has to split. When it first broke, I was under the impression that the government was paying for it, but that didn’t happen. After three weeks, I guess people started to get very fed up, BUT now each family has to pay 37,000 francs to have the electricity. For John and me, this is not a big deal, nor is it a big deal for the more well-off families in our neighborhood. HOWEVER, 37,000 francs (or about 8 dollars I think) is a very considerable amount of money for many people. I’m not sure what is going to happen with that, but I really hope that everyone gets to keep their electricity. But now I’m back and able to e-mail all of you and I get to play the super-fun game with the puppy where she thinks its great to chew on the computer cord and I disagree. When I move this just means I want her to find me in my new location with the cord so she can chew on it again. Great time for all!

I need to pause in this blog to send out a big congrats to Amy and Chris! I’m so sorry that I couldn’t be there (and that I never did get that big life-size cardboard cut-out of me made) but I heard from my dad that you looked beautiful at your wedding, so I am excited to see pictures. Jess and Katie, I heard that you guys looked great too. Everyone else, I’m guessing my dad didn’t recognize you or you didn’t really look that special. (Kidding.)

Other news: Thanksgiving was amazing! It was great getting to see everyone and the getting to eat turkey part was alright too! We ended up leaving a day early, but it is always nice to be in the town of pizza, hot showers, and other Peace Corps Volunteers! This past week here we had a seminar put on by a French NGO centered on doing experiments with locally available materials. I think this is a great start and when I told my director about it, he’s all for supporting it as my summer project for next year! Hopefully (fingers crossed) this will all pan out, but I will have updates for you all soon. Basically, this past week, I was with 4 other physics teachers and 3 chemistry teachers and we did some work building circuits, making balances and barometers, and doing smaller scale experiments for the different topics in 7th-10th grades. I think this definitely needs to be extended to high school too, but everyone at the seminar seemed very willing to learn and excited to try. This was very encouraging because this seminar was the only time I’ve ever seen a science demo done in Guinea (besides by those crazy portos that are teaching throughout Guinea) and I really hope that with some work, it will really take off. It’s impossible to believe that kids can really learn chem./physics/bio without some hands on stuff to go along with it. But the potential of this seminar was very promising and I really hope I’ll be able to put together something for next summer. The bad news was I didn’t get to teach all week (really the bad news is that my kids didn’t have class all week because there’s no substitute teacher set-up to accommodate events like this.) But I’m excited to get back to it this coming week!

December 14th
Shockingly, our electricity has run into some problems again in the past week, so I haven’t been able to do much with this. But I hope everyone at home is getting in the Christmas spirit and is having a great time celebrating the holidays! It’s been a little difficult here, without the snow, carols, decorations, or people celebrating Christmas. HOWEVER, I just watched Elf and that has awakened my Christmas spirit a bit. We are also going to Conakry in a week to see everyone (including all of the other amazing G-16ers that I haven’t seen since we swore in at the end of September.)

I’ve got to update you all on what’s going on with us because I’m very excited about it. Our spring is starting to look like its going to be pretty busy. A couple weeks ago I was fortunate to run into a Cameroonian university student. We talked about what he’s studying and what we are doing here and he mentioned he was interested in starting a “science club.” I said we’d love to help. With the idea of starting some sort of club, we went to the first meeting and found out that this student is incredibly motivated and has big goals for this club. From January to the end of May, John and I will be teaching Word, Excel, and Powerpoint AND I’ll be doing a basic statistics class and diving into research methods a bit because this club wants to do RESEARCH! This is the first time I’ve heard anyone say this word here and I’m so glad to help out. Phase I is going to be mainly computer and English classes and next year we are really going to work on starting the research. Right now there are about 40 people in the club and these are just the people our friend hand picked to start it. We are opening it up to the rest of the university in January and I have no idea how many people we will end up with!

We are also starting with drum lessons this coming week. Katy and I are taking lessons together, and after we embarrass ourselves, John will go by himself since he’s already amazing on the drums. He’s already playing with our teacher and learning rhythms, while I’m still in the “So this is a drum” phase of learning. Fortunately, a porto playing drums doesn’t attract any attention, so I won’t have to worry about playing in front of everyone we know. I’ve labeled drum lessons as “public humiliation @ 1 p.m.” on my calendar. But I’m very excited and John’s much more excited than I am, so I think it will be awesome. Now I just have to find a place to get dance lessons and I will be all set. Unfortunately, we live in the most conservative region of Guinea and music and dance are not really practiced much. We were fortunate in that our friend knew this guy that is giving us lessons; otherwise, it would have been much more difficult to start.

Since my last entry, we had the Fete du Tabaski here. I still am not really sure what the fete is about, but I think its mainly a holiday to give thanks. Everyone that has the money to kills a sheep and makes a ton of food. Everyone gets in their finest attire and walks around saying hello to people. Little kids get dressed up and walk around asking for money to buy treats. My goal for the day was simple: walk around and see how many meals I could squeeze into one day. I had four lunches: four delicious lunches at that. I dressed up in one of my two African outfits that I hardly ever wear (I’ve adopted locally made skirts and polo shirts as my usual attire) and John wore his and we walked around saying hello and chatting with people.

School is going about the same. I butt heads with the director of the students on a fairly regular basis. It’s not really my fault and I personally believe that “women” are on the top of his list of dislikes. Everything that I’d like to do ends up being an issue. He actually said no to me having review sessions in a classroom. I had a huge issue with this because he was only hurting the kids in his attempt to be able to say “no” to me. My response: I held my review sessions on the steps of the school. My goal is to have him respect me by the end of our time here. I honestly don’t care if he likes me. My purpose here is not really to impress him, but if I could change his opinion on women even a tiny bit, I would consider that an accomplishment.

The Pulaar is coming along and I impressed myself the other day by carrying on a conversation with a three year old child. She had some pretty tough questions for me, but I nailed them all. I’ve found that I can understand a lot of what people say, but as far as coming up with a response, it usually comes out in awkward phrases, such as, “You hungry, I make food?” I’m trying to learn to insult people in Pulaar too. This sounds mean, BUT it goes like this. There are last names in Guinea that just pick on each other. They are “cousins” and life revolves around jokingly putting the other down. For example, here John and I are Bahs. Our “cousins” are the Diallos. Every day when I walk into school I’m greeted with something to the effect of, “Have you stolen anything yet?” to which I reply, “Did you cast any spells today?” or my personal favorite, “I may steal, but at least I’m not a Diallo, they eat monkeys”. This is so engrained in the culture and sometimes its not taken as a joke. Katy told me that this Chinese company was building here and were hiring Guineans to do the work. A Guinean said, “Don’t hire any Camaras, they steal!” He was of course, completely joking, but the company took him seriously and turned away any Camara who apply. BUT, at least they don’t eat monkeys.