Saturday, March 21, 2009

Sorry for the delay

December 30th

We came back to our site yesterday after our week in Labe. Now that I’ve calmed down from the excitement/frustration/general ridiculousness of the situation, I want to write about it. Basically, everyone was waiting for the 24 year “presidency” of Lansana Conte’s “democracy” to end. He’s been a dying diabetic chain smoker for the past ten or so years – diabetic and chain smoking for more, but dying for the past 10 that is. The list of positive things he did for Guinea would be pretty short and would definitely be vastly outnumbered by the negative. The attempted military coup gave all you guys an idea of what it would be like to live here. For you, the news changed by the hour, the first couple of days. The military’s got power. The national assembly’s got power. The military’s got power. Oh, it changed again. Basically, no one knew what was going on. Conte was in a coma for days before his death, but no one was aware that there didn’t appear to be anyone running the country. At this point, the head honcho of the national assembly should have stood up and taken charge; however, apparently Conte was completely capable of running a country while unconscious. Although, truth be told, it probably didn’t make a difference one way or another. I probably shouldn’t be saying that on here, but I’m confident that most Guineans would completely agree with me. So I’ll say it.

NOW everyone seems satisfied with the new president Moussa Camara and everyone is most people seem confident that he’s really going to stand for change and help to get Guinea going. All I can say is I hope so. I don’t know why this system is labeled as a “democracy” when the last time I checked, stepping up and claiming to be the new president regardless of the constitution OR support from the people generally went against democratic requirements. Although, at the time, the easy options were either Moussa Camara OR the president of the National Assembly. It was either bad with a chance of good or just bad. I just hope it will not be another 24 years of another Conte. We shall see.

We actually got to see 5 of the people in the rest of our group: Rachel, Conor, Isy, Erich and Valentin came through on their way back to sites last night so we got to have dinner together. It was so nice to see them and I cannot wait for another month until IST when we will actually see everyone else! Since being back, everything is back to normal. We made tea. We saluer-ed all of our friends. We met a woman this morning who just came back from Mecca and now has the name “Haddja” added to her name in recognition. “Elhadj” and “Haddja” are amusing to me. They are supposed to be saved for people returning from Mecca and is a title of distinction and honor. HOWEVER, when kids are named after someone who is an “Elhadj” or “Haddja” he/she gets to add that to their name too. My two year old neighbor is named “Haddja” and I have some real pieces of work in my classes named “Elhadj”. It takes away from the real importance of it just A LITTLE.

I’ve got to give some special shout outs in this entry: we got some of our Christmas packages!

Mom-Thanks for all the candy,movies,clothes, etc. I’m so excited to have a real pair of pajamas!! (I’m really easily impressed).
Jackie/Sue/Steve/Bonnie – Thanks so much for all the food and goodies. I can’t believe that you wrapped every single one, but it made it feel more like Christmas to be able to open everything! We already made the mac and cheese today.
Craig and Bible Study crew – All of the school supplies are much appreciated!! I can’t believe how much stuff fit into that one box! We ended up sharing the Clif Bars with a mouse that lives in the Peace Corps house in Conakry, but he was nice enough to leave two for me and for John. AND he didn’t get into the cashews.

We should be getting the rest in a couple of weeks with the mail run, so I’m sure I’ll have more to put in here. Right now we have the rest of the week to relax, so I’ll be trying to get ahead of lesson plans and grading the 500 homeworks I collected last week. For New Year’s Day we are going to a “beach” near here, so I’m excited for that. At least I’ll get to see something resembling a beach over vacation, although I’m pretty sure it’s a reservoir with sand. BUT, I will take what I can get.

January 3rd
Well, Happy 2009! I’ve got to say, it wasn’t the worst New Year’s ever. New Year’s Eve, we went to a boit – dance club. I was fairly unexcited for this since going to the boit in Forecariah during training makes my list of the top ten most awkward things I’ve ever done. Well, I mean if I had that kind of list, it would have been on it. BUT, it really wasn’t that bad. We helped bring in the new year with a couple of our friends and we actually stayed out until about 1:30, which is the latest I’ve been awake here yet. That counts for something, right? New Year’s Day we rode our bikes out to a “beach” – aka a reservoir that allows swimming. There were so many people that went out there and John and I decided we are going to make going out there a weekend activity. It’s only a five mile bike ride and it was so nice to swim. I’ve got to share with you all the story of our day. Most Guineans can’t swim. It’s not quite like home where there’s a pool every 10 feet, so most people never learn. Everyone went to the “beach” to hang out, listen to music (some people actually brought tvs and generators) and look at the water. So out of nowhere, two portos come in, strip down to bathing suits (and wow are my legs white because they are never showing) and jump in the water; kids did not know what to do with themselves. Within about a minute we had an audience of at least 30 kids lined up at the water’s edge. Some of our students were there and a couple could swim, so they clearly thought it was the coolest thing they’d done in awhile to be swimming with their porto teachers. We are hoping that when we generally go up for a relaxing swim it won’t be quite so crowded. There’s just something about all of your town watching you swim that makes it a little bit less relaxing (I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.)

In other news, school should be starting up again on Monday. Although, we found out there is another holiday coming up this week, so we won’t have school Thursday (or probably Friday.) I swear, the school seeks out reasons to take off. Our friend was over last night for dinner (followed by a terrible movie at the video club) and he said, quite excitedly, that Thursday is a holiday. I of course asked the ridiculous question, “What holiday is it?” He thought a minute and said he didn’t know the name, but everyone walks door to door singing and asking for money. It sounds like my interaction with children here most days plus singing. But then he said we could go up to this reservoir again Thursday, to which John replied that we had to teach. He said that they in fact cancel school so people can go door to door asking for money. Of course. Why not?

This afternoon I had my 194th glass of ataya (sweet strong tea) since being here (if I were actually counting, it would actually be about that high I think.) Some of our friends make it at least a few times a week. This productive use of an afternoon is generally considered a “man’s” activity – because here, men’s activities do not include cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, getting water, washing clothes, or being generally useful, so instead they make tea. But being white and educated, I’m not really looked at as a “woman”, so I’m free to join. Someone here pointed out that women who are volunteers are kind of like a third gender. We aren’t women, but we definitely aren’t looked at as men either. This is just a general statement though. I do have people who respect me as much as they would a man (I hate that I have to put it that way), but then we know people like our drumming teacher who asked me to get him water AND wash his hands the last time he was here. I kind of glanced at John, who then offered to wash the man’s hands. Needless to say, he did it himself. But bit by bit, I think I am earning the respect of the other teachers at the school AND finally, the director is treating me like everyone else.

This week, our workload is about to double. We are starting review sessions and a computer class for the university. I’m starting English lessons with my kids, and we are finally starting up drum lessons. We are going to be legitimately busy, which will be awesome! I’m also going to throw around the idea of having a girl’s club, so hopefully that will go well and I’ll have some positive things to tell you about that! Also, compliments of Mr. Belokur, we can get some pen-pal exchanges going between his students and mine, which I am VERY excited about!! Now I just have to figure out a way around the postal system being awful at best!

January 20th
As you can see, its been awhile since I’ve blogged. I’ll give you two possible scenarios: 1.) I’ve been so busy that I just haven’t found the time OR 2.) Our electricity crapped out again. Take your pick.

I got to watch the inauguration today and that had so much potential until the French dubbing didn’t quite block out the English. It sounded something like this: “Today is a blglghadfdkjahfkjelkajehkl. This is an important aekranewblkmnjdkljdnekjd.” Andrew was up and of course Katy and the Campbell’s and Brenda (the awesome missionaries here.) I also brought a few of my favorite girls from class and they were excited about it. With these girls, I’ve been talking about starting up a girls’ club, to talk about whatever they want. One of them came up to me the other day with a list of things she wants to change in Guinea, so how could I possibly say no to that. She wants to end excision and arranged marriages singlehandedly and I’ve got to say, she has got the energy to do it. She was telling me that when her friend was 10 she was sent away to be married. When she was 13 she was pregnant and then she died during childbirth. I can’t even begin to imagine what that would feel like. But they want to talk about issues from teachers dating students to men doing not a whole lot (by that I mean nothing) around the house to HIV/AIDS. They also want to start up a basketball league on the weekends. I did a lot of listening to them today and its amazing how quickly they opened up while boys weren’t around. Although since I had our first impromptu meeting at the school, boys kept coming in the classroom. My patience quickly dwindled to comments such as, “This is a girls’ club, are you a girl?” Although I’ve got to say, those comments do the job.

I have to share a frustration with all of you. Craig and friends were amazing enough to put together a box of student supplies for the kids here. We’ve been keeping the box in the school director’s office until we have a lock for our classroom cabinet. WELL this past week I was giving exams so I went to take the supplies. I found out that someone had taken almost all of my compasses and protractors. NOW no student has access to these things so that means that we have teachers that are stealing supplies from the students. For me, that was a new level of angry that I hadn’t quite experienced since being here. I doubt I’ll see them again.

On a more positive note, I found out today that the school is hiring another physics teacher (yay!) This means I’ll only have 400 students instead of 700 and I’ll get to teach the full classtime that I’m supposed to. I told some of the kids today and they were a little less than happy about it. I felt bad because I had to convince them it wasn’t actually because they were being bad in class that I wasn’t going to be teaching them anymore. But I mean they are losing the crazy white woman that brings fun stuff in for them to play with and they are more than likely gaining another teacher that will just write stuff on the board and call it a day. But we will see.

February 8th
Wow, I can’t believe that it’s February already. You guys won’t be reading this until sometime in March because we are getting pretty lazy with going to Labe, so I’m sorry for that. I have got to say I consider it a good thing that I can stay longer in at site without needing to leave! I have quite a bit to update you all on. We’ve gotten the go-ahead on a teachers’ conference that we are planning for October. We are trying to have each volunteer bring at least one teacher and we are going to be putting together science labs for experiments and demos, talking about teaching techniques and addressing a plethora of other issues that we have all deemed necessary to talk about. Soon I’ll probably be harassing you all to make some donations to make that possible, but I’ll update you all on that later! We will be putting together a budget in April.

Other goings on: I’m starting up a girl’s club for some of the girl’s at our school. A few weeks ago, some of my girls came up to me and asked me if I could help them fix all the problems in Guinea….so of course I couldn’t say no to that enthusiasm. We are in the process of putting together a play that they are going to perform for an elementary school to talk out about the importance of education for girls and against arranged marriages. We also started a basketball league on Sundays. Today was our first game and I ended it by spraining my ankle. Most of you may remember that I sprained my ankle a couple summers ago during a treacherous hiking accident in Maine. (By that I mean I was walking back to the car AFTER hiking and I sprained my ankle in two places in the parking lot.) Anyway, my right ankle is always incredibly weak and I fell over today coming down from jumping. All of my girls rushed over to help and one grabbed my ankle to make sure she could still rotate it and after my sharp cries of “NE TOUCHE PAS” I think she realized that is NOT how you check for an injury.

We had our IST training a couple weeks ago in Mamou. It was SO nice to get to see everyone from our group!! The training was okay too, but the highlight was definitely seeing all of the other G-16ers, some of whom we hadn’t seen since the end of September. We also gave our compositions (which are like mid-terms) at school last week. We had a meeting for them beforehand and in true Guinean fashion, the meeting started an hour late and lasted for three hours to cover 10 minutes worth of material. We had to talk about which class would take exams which days – relevant, which teachers would proctor – relevant, and how one teacher had his blue belt to defend himself from students that get physically aggressive during exams – not relevant, and how one teacher had students that disliked him so much that they don’t say hello to him in the market – also not relevant. We discussed at length if the monthly teacher contribution should be 3 mille or 5 mille a month – not relevant.

March 2nd
I kind of awkwardly cut off in the middle of that last entry. I’m sorry for the lack of blog entries that you will be getting this time, but we only have electricity 1-2 times per week and I’ve got really important things to be doing. (Thanks for sending those seasons of The Office on DVD Dad!) I have an amazingly terrible story for you all though. SO, my girls club planned a theatre for this past weekend. They organized the place, the equipment, they wrote the play and I’m pretty much just advising, which is how it should be. Anywho, they get everything set up and music is playing, kids are coming to check it out, it’s perfect. EXCEPT: the microphone jacks do not work. At home, this would not be a problem, right. Just speak more loudly. They look for another thing to plug in a microphone for over an hour, while I man the fort and smile at all the kids checking out the porto. They finally decide they are going to try it without a microphone. They gather all the kids (and there are about 100) and attempt to start. No one will shut up. They are yelling at the kids to be quiet and everyone’s making a ton of noise. Me, being the problem solver that I am, stand on a chair in the middle of the circle and try to get everyone’s attention by clapping my hands. So now I’m just a strange white woman clapping my hands while standing on a chair while everyone talks. They decide to start the play and kids will quiet down. No one heard a word of the play. After they finished, a mass fight broke out with these 100 kids and me the only adult in sight. I yell for neighbors and men come over waving huge sticks trying to break it up. I look over and there’s my neighbor, in the center of the action. Someone has completely ripped off her shirt, but she’s still going at it. My other neighbor has a bloody nose. One of my favorite girls comes up to me and goes, “Madame, in Guinea, it’s like this.” Finally the mob of children took it to the streets and started terrorizing the people down by the market. So in short, I helped cause the Civil War of 2009 here. BUT I talked to the girls afterward about what we need to do differently again next time so no blood is shed over a play for elementary school kids. I’ll keep you all posted.

This coming month we will be working on painting a big world map on our school building (its right next to the water pump that a ton of people use, so we are hoping they will at least look at it while they are there.) We are hoping to dispel the myth that there are 52 states – 53 if you count Canada, and five continents. They actually learn that in school here – sorry all you Canadians out there. This is one of the things I wanted to do while here though, so I’m looking forward to it. I’ve been learning to make a lot of Guinean food lately, so you should all be excited to eat rice and sauce when I get home. We will be serving it at the wedding – don’t even think I’m kidding. I’m going to make you all fish meat balls full of bones so you can appreciate what we’ve been eating. I bet your mouths are watering just thinking about it. I can now make peanut sauce and leaf sauce and soon I’ll be rounding out the main sauce category with soup sauce. I can do corn rice with spoiled milk (which is actually pretty good) and this weekend I’ll be making fonio. That sounds good for a wedding menu, right? Fish meatballs and spoiled milk? Mmmm….

I guess that’s about all I’ve got for now. We’ve taken some interesting bike trips lately, teaching’s been good, I started up a basketball team, we are teaching a club at the university, and if you call me on Skype, I’ll tell you about it first hand!

March 18th
Hey all! We will be going to Labe now in 2 days, so you’ll all get to read our (few and far between) updates. We still don’t have electricity on our side of town so its been hard to keep up with this blog. I have to write about a very strange couple of weeks that we have had. Almost two weeks ago now, two girls started screaming and muscle spasming and passed out in the middle of class. Only one other teacher and myself actually stopped class to see what was going on. I had no idea what it was, so I’m doing what I consider reasonable: checking vitals and making sure people are supporting the girls’ heads so they don’t hit the concrete. I look over at the other teacher and he is blessing their hands and face – a different approach, I thought. Eventually kids carried these two girls into our director’s office and I called our Peace Corps doctor to see what he thought. He said it might be a case of meningitis, so to keep a heads up. SO about an hour after this (teaching continued as normal) the same thing happened to another 8 girls – 10 girls in total – screaming, convulsing, passing out – and at this point, I don’t know what to think. It ended up being a HUGE cultural lesson. Our principal, fellow teachers, the prefet, the mayor – some of the most educated people I’ve met here – explained to me that it was caused by evil spirits and the devil because the school did not have the required sacrifice upon the completion of the buildings this year. I, being one to look for a scientific explanation above all else, finds this to be a hard pill to swallow. My theory was (is) that there was something actually wrong with the first two girls, however you want to label that “something”. Personally, I believe in the devil, but all this was a little much. I think the rest of the girls so strongly believe in all this that they convinced themselves that the same thing was wrong with them. I think the rest was mass hysteria. Anyway, the next day it happened to 20 girls, another 10 after that and after almost a week of this, the school had a sacrifice to ward off evil spirits. We killed a cow and a sheep and sat in a classroom-turned-mosque while all the elders/important people here (myself and John included in case that wasn’t obviously included under “important people”) read from the Koran and recited incantations. HOWEVER, after all this was said and done, the “crise” as they call it, which just means attack in French, continues at school.

I also have been thinking about things that have become normal in Guinea that I can never do at home (but probably will). For your reading pleasure:

Habits I Have to (Should) Leave in Guinea
1.)Grabbing random children on the streets – Whether it be for a high five, a hug, or just to hold the portos hand, I don’t think parents at home will share the same appreciation for their children getting so attached (literally) to a complete stranger.
2.)Shouting “Black Person” when someone shouts “White Person” at me – Although shouting Baleejo as a response to Porto works here, I have a feeling it won’t make me friends back in the US
3.)Calling strangers that happen to be elderly “Mom” and “Dad” – “Neene” and “Baaba” are encouraged here and the market ladies always respond by calling me their daughter or girl or sometimes baby, but I don’t think I’ll try the same thing with older women and men at home.
4.)Inviting the person next to me at a restaurant to eat out of my bowl – “Invitations” is something you always say to the person next to you and they (almost) never take you up on it. It’s looked at as polite to offer. Maybe I’ll try that one out the next time I’m at Red Lobster.
5.)Picking nose in public – I don’t think I need to elaborate
6.)Spitting out food – when you find a bone, rock, piece of dirt, etc. in your food here, people just spit it out. I have become so used to doing this that I am completely confident I will embarrass myself at home by spitting out food in a restaurant or at someone’s house.
7.)Going to the bathroom on the side of the road – again, no need to elaborate.
8.)Assuming people will be late for a meeting – I’ve started leaving so I will arrive at school 10 minutes late. I also tell my students that the review class is earlier than I actually intend to start, so that by the time I’m ready, they are there. BUT I don’t think I can show up at job interviews when I get back with that same lax attitude about what “on time” means.
9.) Swearing audibly at my cell phone in English when my service cuts out – although I have come up with some good names to call our cell phone.

I'm going to end my list there. I'll add as I go! OH also, I think we will be coming home the first couple of weeks in August, so I'll keep you all posted on that! Love and miss you all!