...and November is almost over already

Happy Thanksgiving from your favorite portos! Tomorrow we will be going up to Labe to celebrate with the rest of the volunteers. The Peace Corps is even sending turkeys to each regional capital, which will probably double my meat consumption in the past couple of months! Yay! I hope that all of you are doing well back at home and are as excited for Thanksgiving as I am. I want to say that November has FLOWN by as compared to October. Being busy (i.e. having a job) actually makes the time fly by! I feel like the first month that I was here, my feelings about being here fluctuated by the day (or hour or minute) but now I’m really starting to feel like I live here and I am happy about it (which is good news!)

Here’s a recap from the month of November:

November 2nd
We have returned from our amazing weekend with all of our amazing other PCVs. Thanks to everyone that e-mailed me back and I will be working on those for all of this month. I decided I had to share this story with everyone. I get back and my yard smells like poop. First I am confused as to why, then I am confused to find a rather large pile of cow manure in my yard. This confuses me because we have a walled-in compound and the last time I checked, cows weren’t very good at using padlocks. I also notice a couple of my plants are totally missing – as in perhaps a cow ate them (I’m noticing that I will have many problems maintaining a garden.) So when my neighbor comes over, I ask casually if a cow was in our yard while we were gone. At first he looks at me confused, then asks me why I think that. I point to the pile of manure. What I want to say is something like this: “Unless one of your kids did this – in which case they need to see a doctor – I know that for some reason a cow was in my yard.” He then replies with, “oh yeah, we had a sacrifice yesterday.” Again, I’m puzzled because they have their own yard, but he continues with, “Do you have anything there?” (Meaning where there’s a giant pile of cow crap suffocating my baby plants.) I just nonchalantly said yes and he took care of the problem. But lesson hopefully learned: if you want to slaughter a cow in your neighbor’s yard without them finding out about it, don’t let the cow crap in their garden. Valuable life advice right there…write that down.

We also picked up our new puppy today. She is adorable. We were supposed to get a boy of the litter, but while we were gone for the weekend, someone stole all the males and left the female. So now we have the luckiest little doggie in the world because we have saved her from being adopted by a family that would throw rocks at her and kick her. When we picked her up she was covered in dirt and bugs. I think that she’s about four weeks old. The first thing she got was a good scrub down, but we’ve got some fleas to take care of yet. Eventually I’ll get to send pictures. Our little neighbors love her and we were teaching them today how to hold a puppy and pet her and be affectionate and not abusive. They watched (perplexed) as we gave her a bath and put her in the hammock with us. When she’s older, I’m going to show them how you can teach dogs tricks and how they are smart animals that shouldn’t be mistreated. Our neighbors are already very nice to the dogs here, but I’m hoping that they can spread the knowledge on to others.

My mom gets a special shout-out mid entry because I’m currently eating the Double Stuf Oreos that she sent and they are DELICIOUS. Thanks Mom!! My little neighbor also helped me make soup tonight. She is about 8 years old and my new hip attachment. Every time I come home she holds my hand, she follows me around the yard/in the house, and wants to do everything that I do. (But who wouldn’t?) In other news, I think I realized today that I’ve gotten more comfortable here so slowly that I didn’t even notice it was happening. It doesn’t even feel awkward any more for me to say hello and exchange greetings in Pulaar at the market or in the street. And the constant staring is something that I don’t even notice (most of the time.) I got a good line from Rachel that I now use in response to “HEY PORTO!” I say, “Ko honto Porto?” – Where’s a porto? At first the kids think I’m thoroughly confused, but then they laugh.

That’s all the news I’ve got for now. You won’t even get it for almost a month…
November 10th
We have officially been in Guinea for 4 months today! I can almost say it doesn’t feel like that long. I CAN say, however, that our over a month at site now has been flying by, seemingly much quicker than training. As another update: John has still not started teaching. The building was supposed to be done today, but the school pushed it back (again) until Wednesday. We did run into our principal today though and he told us that we would both be teaching 16 hours a week instead of 12 because they are having some problems with other teachers. So in the span of a day, my schedule is going from four hours a week to 16 hours a week.

Other exciting news: this past weekend John and I ventured into the library to check it out. There was a room full of covered up, turned off, collecting dust COMPUTERS! We asked if they worked and were told no one really knew. So today, John and I tried them all out and we’ve got three perfectly fine computers and another 3 or 4 that we need to play around with. There’s potential to have 7 working computers at our library and we can start having technology classes for all of the students! There’s the possibility for internet, but its outrageously expensive to get it set up and then a little less than outrageously expensive per month, so it would be difficult to get that started up AND now we will be able to focus on getting people familiar with the computer in general and using different programs. The librarian is VERY excited about this potential endeavor. (As am I, in case you can’t tell.)

In other positive news: another volunteer in G-15, Liz, and her dad were in our town yesterday, so we walked around with them and Katy. THEN, we tried out the best restaurant in all of Guinea as far as I am concerned. It’s owned by a Guinean woman and her French husband and I got to eat steak and herb-seasoned potatoes with a cold Heineken and crème caramel for dessert. It was by far the best food I’ve had since being in Guinea. Unfortunately it’s far out of our Peace Corps budget for eating there often, but I had almost forgotten how much I enjoy incredibly delicious food. And thanks so much to Dave for dinner!!

Our puppy is doing well after a couple of mishaps this week. First we went to find flea meds for her and she had a not-so-positive reaction. As in she was crying in pain for the entire night with burning skin after having two baths with a scrub brush. When we told the vet who doubles as a math teacher about this he seemed less than concerned and after three days it was better. We took her for a walk yesterday and she walked up to an adult goat just checking him out. In response, he gave her a head butt and she went tumbling across the road crying and crying. Before that we looked ridiculous taking her for a walk. No one does that here. I’m really worried about when she is older and will get out of the compound when we aren’t here because people will kick her and throw rocks at her. She will learn pretty quickly who she can and can’t trust. She already freaks people out because she’s not afraid of them yet because John and I don’t really make a habit out of hitting her.

The math class that I’m teaching is going well and soon I should be able to get started on my English classes for the 50+ students that I’ve got interested in learning English. A lot of people seem to be a bit misguided in believing that learning English is their ticket to a good job and being able to get themselves out of Guinea. I want to open by emphasizing that this is not entirely true, but I do admire the enthusiasm. Basically it appears that I will go from having practically nothing to do to lots to do. But that is why I am here and I am very excited for the potential change.

In really exciting news, we got to watch the election last week! Katy’s neighbors have a satellite dish that gets CNN so Andrew came up and two of the missionaries here and it was an exciting porto party! I do have to say that after four months sans lots of technology, the magic map and the touch screen exit polls were a little overwhelming to take in. But EVERYONE here is very excited that Obama won and I’ve seen people walking around with Obama pins and writing “Obama’s family” on their gates. I believe and sincerely hope that his win will be a turning point for us and will change how we are viewed throughout the world. It’s about time.

A special thanks goes out this month to Mom (white shirts were great!), Dad, Uncle Bill and Aunt Gail and Gillian and Mike (Thai noodles with peanut sauce was amazing and we are having taco night soon!) for the care packages and Jen and Tom McGarrity for the letters! Much appreciated!!

November 18th
Hello all! John finally started teaching today (hold your applause because 7th grade has still not started.) We had to call our director of education to let him know we were going for an overnight bike trip – more on that later – and he asked how the teaching was going. I casually mentioned that I was teaching some and John had not yet started. He was furious and told us that he was calling our principal as soon as we were off the phone. So he did. Coincidentally, school started the next day.

On to the bike ride. We thought it would be fun to ride out and visit with Bryan and Emily for the weekend. It was 45 km of hills each way, which wasn’t so bad until the very final stretch of the way back. But we picked a great day to visit his village. We went to a sacrifice, where we were fed excellent riz gras (this was after Bryan’s host family had fed us rice and sauce) and then the maison de jeunesse put on a little Pulaar theater. It was like a middle school/high school drama club production. But oh you should have seen the excitement that 4 white people can cause. We walked in and they wouldn’t let us pay and then they kicked people out of chairs so we could sit down – in the front row. When we went to leave, they brought us drinks and cookies for coming and not paying. I swear Guineans are the friendliest group of people that I have ever met.

November seems to be flying by as compared to October, which I would say is good. Soon, I’ll have 600 homeworks to correct each week, which will keep me busy for a few hours a day I’d say. I’m really going to make an effort to give the kids as much attention as they’d get in a small village school, but its going to be a challenge. I’ve given up the idea of learning names without making nametags, so that will be going into effect next week. This year is going to be a challenge because (especially with the 8th grade) we’ve both got much less time to get through the same amount of material.

I also finally have some good news on our garden. One brave cucumber plant, two peas and a few greenbeans have survived the chicken/cow/puppy attacks and have beaten the odds. I’m sure none of you care about this, but after all the bad news I wanted to put in a happy update on the garden. The puppy is also doing well. HOPEFULLY (I seem to say this all the time) I’ll be able to attach pictures. Don’t count on it though.

So far teaching has been pretty interesting. It’s been about as big of a challenge as I anticipated keeping 80 kids in line at a time. I think my tolerance for crap is a little bit lower than a lot of the other teachers here and kids think it’s outrageous that I’d kick them out of class for minor things like answering their cell phone in class or going over to the window to shout at their friends. I know, I’m just so mean. Now I have a rule that I subtract 5 points from their grade if I have to kick them out of class, so that’s cut down on the stupidity by a pretty good amount. Little by little, its coming along.

November 24th
I’m sorry to everyone I wasn’t able to e-mail back this month! We’ve been out electricity for about a week and a half and I’m using our friend’s house with electricity to do this. Instead, I’ll get letters or e-mails out to you all in December! The past week has been getting busier. I’ve started doing review sessions which are going well and after the first exam, I’m going to start English classes. Today, our principal called me into his office (so I’m thinking, crap what’d I do?) and he said he had a question for me. Now I’m really thinking crap, what’d I do? But word has gotten around that I’m going to have English classes, and he wants his kids to come to them.

I was supposed to be a part of a seminar this week run by a French NGO. We got there, waited over an hour and then were told that we could return the following week because there were too many people at the seminar. Besides that, the people running the seminar were over an hour late to begin. I actually felt like they didn’t really care very much about this, which made me very sad because seminars like this have the potential to be very beneficial. I’ll let you know how that goes next week.

In other news, I’ve decided that there must be a point in every Peace Corps Volunteers service when he/she realizes that he/she is but a shadow of a former self. Mine happened last week. For a couple of nights, I went into our bathroom and saw a single cockroach. Rather than doing what I would have done without hesitation a couple months ago (squishing it), I named him Fred. It gets worse. I went into the bathroom the other night and he wasn’t there. I actually went inside and said to John, “Did you kill that cockroach that was in the bathroom?” He looked at me with a confused expression on his face and said no. He of course wanted to know why I’d ask and I told him that I had named him Fred and he was less of a nuisance and more of a pet to me. All I really got was a blank stare from John and looking back, I can’t really say that I blame him!

The Pulaar is starting to come along too. I’ve found that I can understand a lot more now, but as far as RESPONDING in Pulaar, that still doesn’t really happen in more than in a few-words-put-together-that-sometimes-make-sense kind of way. But I’m hoping that by the time we leave we will have it down. We are also thinking of coming home next September-ish so mark your calendars now (for September-ish, that’s right) because all I will want to do is eat for two solid weeks, so I’ll be needing people to do that with. A lot of G-15 are going home for Christmas and its making me miss you all more than I do already. And of course, you can all come visit us!

This is all for November. But enjoy December and I’ll talk to you all again next month!

Love and miss you all!
Marg