Global Nomad

You know, there are three main goals of the Peace Corps: technical help (in my case teaching), sharing American culture with Guineans, and upon returning to the U.S. sharing Guinean culture with Americans to help foster understanding between the countries. I guess it is the first goal that all volunteers focus on most because it’s something that is, in a way, quantitative. I can say, “Hey look, I’ve helped teach 400 kids English!” or, “Wow! I’ve organized my health center!”. Stuff like that. But the other two goals are just as important to the mission of Peace Corps, we just tend to forget about them because they are harder to quantify, and it is more difficult to measure our impact.

Now, it’s not like my students don’t ask me questions about America, they do, especially my 12SE/SM students but they’re always questions about traveling to America or living in America or about how great and amazing and powerful America is. They’ve got too many ideas in their heads already that sometimes it’s difficult to explain things or make them see the connections and similarities between my country and theirs, between Americans and Guineans. I don’t think my students will ever believe me that homelessness, poverty, hunger, and unemployment are all very real and serious issues in America. So facing these challenges with my students, I guess I never thought that it would be the children who would make the most effortless connections.

I recently received a care package from my family (the first of the last three sent that actually made it to me!) and in it was a People magazine with the best and worst of the year 2012. It also had a story about, and kind of tribute to, the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting that occurred in December. Now, the kids that come over to my house love looking at my magazines, I mean everything is glamourous and new and exciting to them. There are literally ads for things that these kids (and even most adults) here can’t fathom and I certainly can’t explain.

“This is for a bike, right?”
“Um…well…there’s a lady on a bike but this is an advertisement for life insurance. Where you pay to…where your family gets money if you die.”
“Why is she riding a bike?”

See? Stuff like that is difficult to explain to 12 year olds anywhere, let alone Africa. But something really amazing happened when Bofanta, also known as Bimko, turned to the story of the Sandy Hook shooting. I thought she would just skim through the pictures as usual pointing out things she found interesting, but instead when she saw the photos of some of the mourners holding candles and crying she said to me without lifting her eyes from the page, “Someone died, right?”

At first I was surprised that she could figure that out from the photo but then I guess it was pretty obvious even if you didn’t know what happened.

“Yes, you’re right,” I said, flipping to the cover of the magazine where there were photos of all the victims, “All of these children were killed at school.”

Now, you probably think that was a really distasteful and blunt way to put that, but I honestly didn’t know how else to explain what happened.

“All of them?” she asked.
“Yes, someone shot them.”
“But that’s me.” she said, matter of factly pointing to a photo of a smiling little blond girl. “They’re all me.”

And it was incredible to see this 12 year-old understand the magnitude of what happened halfway across the world in some country she’d never been to and to be able to relate to the children, to understand that they were kids just like her. She didn’t ask if they were rich or think about differences that existed between their lives and hers. She was simply able to see that they were all children who had a lot of life ahead of them. And for the first time I realized what Peace Corps is all about. It’s not only about building new health centers and libraries and doing sensibilizations—though that is certainly a very important part of what we do—it’s also about making those connections between two groups of people who at first glance couldn’t appear more different. Sometimes when I’m especially frustrated with teaching or with people in my community always asking for things, it seems like they’ll never understand me and I’ll never understand them. But it took my 12 year-old neighbor for me to realize that I should be thinking in terms of “us” and “we” and not “them” versus “me”.

So, long time, no post. Well, my friends that is because I have been very busy at site. Plus, I only have Internet (not to mention electricity) once a month when I take my monthly visit to my regional capital, Kankan. I’ve been so busy that I’ve managed to read twenty or so books in the past three months. Okay, so it’s true, I’ve got a lot of downtime. But it’s much appreciated and isn’t really all that relaxing when you have unwanted visitors dropping by for private English lessons and a gaggle of kids screaming “Tante Aisha! Bonsoir!” at the top of their lungs at your windows.

But other than that, things at site are going…well, they’re going. I currently teach fourteen hours at the lycee (high school) to 11 Science Sociale, 11 Science Experimentale/Mathematique, 12 Science Sociale, and 12 Science Experimentale/Mathematique. I also teach a class once a week at one of the colleges (middle schools) and give a weekly English course to adults and other community members. And I’ve got to tell you, teaching is hard work. The lesson planning, the grading, and then actually giving the lesson, it’s no walk in the park. Especially in a place where the critical thinking level is nowhere near what is should be. Most of the time I spend twenty minutes explaining a simple excercise that should take three minutes to do and most of my students still do it wrong anyways or not at all. Take a simple matching excercise for example. Match the English word on the left with the French equivalent on the right. Literally next to impossible for the students to do. Impossible because they simply haven’t been taught to think in school. Their lessons are dictated and lectured to them, written up on the board sentence by sentence for them to copy down word for word in their notebooks. For this reason some teachers don’t even come to school, but merely hand their notebook off to the chef de classe (the head student) who writes it on the board for him. So, while I may be here to teach Enlglish, I’m really teaching critical thinking skills as well.

Another challenge of teaching here in Guinea is the size of my classes. All of my classes are 80 or more students. One in particular, 12SS, has around 140 students; not that they’re ever all there at once, but that’s still a lot of kids! A lot of unruly kids and a lot of homework and grading. Though I have to say, I’ve had fun tying to come up with creative punishments for talking during a lesson and cheating on tests. Sometimes I take the offender’s notebook and throw it out the window telling them that if they don’t want to work they can leave. Once I gave a student a choice of either standing in front of the class with his arms outstretched for the remainder of the period (an hour) or leaving. He chose the latter. Now, my methods may seem a bit harsh but they are far from it in a country where teachers beating their students or making them do manual labor for punishment is not unusual or even frowned upon.

Anyways, I look forward to posting more frequently in the future now that I’ve adjusted (more or less) to my site.

For now I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I will be celebrating with some friends in the Forest Region of Guinea, the only region where we have no volunteers and that is predominantly Christian. We’ll be hitting up the regional capital, N’Zerekore, and Lola where we will hike Mt. Nimba, a nature preserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Updates to come!

Saying farewell to life as a mere stagaire in Dubreka and hello to life as a volontaire in Kouroussa!

In Guinea, locks and I aren’t friends. So far in the three months that I’ve been in country I’ve had the lock on my door break no less than six times. Five of those happened here with my host family and once during site visit in Kouroussa. But I swear, it’s not me. Sometimes my lock breaks so I can’t lock it and sometimes it breaks so I can’t unlock it and get inside my room/house. This happened in Kouroussa and resulted in me standing outside my door with about ten women and thirty children all standing around taking turns trying to open my door.

You may be thinking that having a lock break is not that bad, and it’s really not. It’s what can happen to you when your lock breaks that is more troublesome. The third time my lock broke I didn’t bother telling my host family right away because it was night time and I was tired. Aaaannnnd it was the third time my lock broke. So I decided it could wait until morning and closed my door and went to bed. Well, that very night someone waltzed into my room and stole my phone, iPod, and one of my suitcases which was filled with supplies (basically everything I brought to survive from the U.S.). So long story short, get your locks fixed because filing a police report is a lot more annoying than telling someone your lock is broken.

So now everyone in my family thinks that I’m some moron who doesn’t know how to open a door, made worse by the fact that one of my friends joked that I am “too strong” with my host brother. So now that’s never going to end. When they came to replace my lock this last time they demonstrated how to lock and unlock th door and told me to remove the key “doucement” meaning slowly. Yeah, thanks. I think I’ve got it. Everyone here is also under the impression that in the U.S. we never lock our doors so of course I don’t know how to lock one without it breaking. I’ve tried to dispell that myth to no avail. And as long as I keep breaking locks no one’s going to believe me anyways.

This weekend was unusually productive and exciting for me. A couple of others and I went on a shopping spree at the big market here near Dubreka. Kilometre Cinq, so named because it’s five k’s from Dubreka, is a large market that has everything that you could pretty much ever need. The shopping isn’t as good as what you can get in Conakry, but it’s a nice place to get lots of things. This Saturday I bought so much exciting stuff! A new bucket, two new gobelets, and an orange bowl with lid—Tupperware type of thing from the plastics vendor for 24,000 GNF; some powdered milk and Ovaltine for 3,000 GNF; and three paignes of fabric for 95,000 total. I’m getting a skirt made right now and will be taking my other two paignes back for what they call a taille princess, basically a matching skirt and top. The best part of our K-5 trip was the gas station. Seriously, it’s amazing how everything fits into context. I would never look forward to shopping at a gas station in the States, but here it’s THE place to buy imported and cold foods. The first gas station we walked to was closed, but the second one was open and had air conditioning! It took us half an hour to walk there from K-5 and another half hour for the walk back but it was worth every step. This gas station apparently didn’t have as much as the Shell Station which was even farther away, but I didn’t care. I bought two packs of cookies, one lemon and one chocolate, so I was pretty happy. On our trek to the gas station we met a little boy whose father happened to run the shop. He walked us there and then back to the market. He then accompanied us around for a little bit. We were debating whether we should pay him or something or if he was just bored and wanted something to do. I guess it was the former because when we were looking at fabrics he grabbed something from the vendor’s table and ran off with it. Well, at least that what’s they told us and we never saw him again so…

So, after all was said and done, I probably spent around 140,000 GNF or $18.00. Big spender. Seriously though, we were all freaking out about how much money we spent because we normally just buy food for lunch or phone cards. Really went wild this weekend, need to put a check on my wallet. I can’t spend money like that all the time!

I figured some of you may be interested in hearing about the critters around here, it’s probably a bit more interesting than my day to day routine which is basically nine hours of school every day. Anyways, the only pest I’ve actually had a “problem” with has been spiders. It’s not so much that they’ve been a problem, it’s just that they’ve been there. In my room. Several times. I believe the spiders that I’ve been seeing are called African Cave Spiders. They are big and flat and do not move around too much (though when they do, they’re fast!). They pretty much just sit there on my wall not moving. Fortunately this makes them easy to kill. I myself have not worked up the courage to kill one of these giant spiders, but I am able to exterminate the smaller ones. The spiders that have webs (and there are many) I leave in my room, because quite frankly the mosquitos are my biggest threat and hopefully the small spiders will gobble up some of the ones that sneak into my room. But yes, the big spiders, I don’t play around with that. Because by big I really mean huge, like literally the size of my hand. There’s no way I can just ignore that. So every time I come into my room and see one of those suckers I promptly turn around and march right back out to the family and ask someone, anyone to please come kill it. They find this hilarious. One of my host brothers, Ismail (who is sixteen), taught me how to say “There is a spider in my room,” in Sousou and told me to use that instead of French. So a few days ago I left the porch (I use that term lightly) area after dinner to head back to my room and lo and behold what did I see when I opened the door and slapped on my headlamp? A giant freaking spider on my wall. And you know what’s really creepy? Spiders’ eyes reflect the light from flashlights and such back at you like other animals’ eyes (I recently discovered this). The stuff of nightmares. So I saw this giant spider on my wall and did what I always do, go find someone else to kill it for me, only this time I took my notebook with me.

I walked up to my family on the porch and cleared my throat.

“J’ai quelque chose a dire,” I have something to say.

“Ma ban xi saye lai na na?”

Blank stares. “Quoi?”

“Uh…ma ban xi saye lai na na?”

My family broke into hysterics. My older host brother, Abaka who is 23, found this to be particularly hilarious. Ismail came and killed the spider though so i’ts all good. And they got a good story out of it, once which I’ve already heard them tell once.

As far as the roaches and mice go, I am fortunate enought to not have had any run ins with those guys. Well, at least not to the extent that I’ve have with spiders. I found a dead roach beetle thing in my room. Or, I thought it was dead because it was on its back, but when I moved it with my shoe its legs began moving. So then I tried to squish it with my bidon which somehow ended up helping the roach to flip itself back over and crawl away.

The only other time I’ve seen roaches is inside the actual house. They come out at night, so if I’m sitting in the living room after dinner or something I always see a giant roach crawling around on the walls, floor, or dishes. Once one flew across the room and landed on my arm, I didn’t even have time to react before my host mother just brushed it aside. I really hate sitting inside the house at night. I told Abaka to kill one of the roaches once and he stepped on it but it just scurried out from under his shoe—those things are invincible. I’m quiet fortunate have an indoor latrine because many people don’t and roaches are many at night in those areas.

I also don’t appear to have mice, though I tought I did for a while because I could hear something moving around in my room at night. I still don’t know what that was. To deal with it I would just put my headphones in so I didn’t have to hear it. Some people have been having real mice problems—finding droppings everywhere and stuff chewed through. Even so I keep what little food I do have in my room in ziplock bag inside tupperware containers so as not to make my room any more attractive than it already is. There’s no such thing as a house without mice in Guinea, even the bureau where we have our classes has them, but I would just like to keep them out of my room if at all possible.

“So we’ll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.” 
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benediction

Found out my site placement today! I’ll be serving as a English teacher at the Lycee (high school) level in Kouroussa in Haute Guinea. I’m pretty “close” to several other volunteers in my training group and compared to the other sites, Kouroussa is a big city. I will occasionally have electricity. When I had my site placement interview I told them I had no preference because I just kind of like things to take their course. I’m really happy with my placement, and BONUS!: I will apparently be living on the best road in Guinea. The only downside, the few Soussou phrases I’ve learned are for naught since they speak Malinke in Haute Guinea. So better get on that.

Well, it sure has been a while since my last update, hasn’t it?  I don’t even know where to begin.

PST is going great.  I’ve reached the Intermediate High level French proficiency that is needed for me to be able to swear in as an official volunteer in September.  While this is a huge weight lifted from my shoulders, it doesn’t actually mean that I’m capable of communicating well around here.  ”Around here” being Dubreka.  My host family never misses an opportunity to tell me how horribly I comprehend Francais or how hopeless I am at learning Susu.  Yeah, thanks.  Makes me feel real great about myself.  Especially when I hear them talking in Susu and can distinctly make out the word fote, which is “white person” in the local lingo.  Yeah, all of us stagaires are quite the celebrities around town.  By which I mean that we are continually mobbed by hoards of children who want to give us “big-ups” (fist bumps) or hi-fives.  Or just yell fote at us until we wave, and even then most continue to yell.

While everyone calls me fote, my host family uses my real name but pronounces it Morghane, with quite the emphasis on the second syllable.  However, they have also given me my Guinean name, Aisha Guirassy, which I believe is the name of my grandmother.  The woman whom I call my mother here has a five year-old son named Siddiki who is absolutely adorable and at times incredibly annoying.  Kids don’t really have toys around here so everything is amusing for this kid.  Children literally play with garbage so whatever I have on me always ends up in his hands.  My keys, my phone, my flashlight.  He really loves my flashlight.  He likes to stick it right up to his eye and stare into it, at which point I yell, “Siddiki, c’est pas bon!  Ne fais pas ca!”

My family tries to make me eat a lot here.  It’s gotten a bit better now that it’s Ramadan because I eat with the family after prayer now instead of getting fed right when I come home and then attempted to be fed again at night.  Now it’s just one dinner.  We eat lots of rice.  Every meal I’ve eaten at home has been steamed rice with some kind of sauce, mostly leaf, meat, or nut sauce.  They use a lot of manioc, potato, and a spice called pumin here.  I’ve taken to eating my rice plain now because the sauces aren’t my favorite and they really heap that stuff on.  Recently we’ve been eating something called Bouille.  It tastes pretty good but it’s just kind of strange.  It’s basically these little white balls made of maize that they put in hot tea and eat like a soup.  The first time I saw it I thought it was some kind of beans so I was taken aback when it ended up being sweet.  My favorite thing to eat here is bread.  I love bread and you can buy huge baguettes are the market here for 3000 GNF (about 50 cents).  I always get a half loaf in the morning for 1500 GNF.

Electricity here is not continual.  It’s supposed to come on every day at midnight and every other day in the after noon (I think).  The electricity is hydropowered, so since we’re in the rainy season electricity is actually more frequent than it is the rest of the year.  It’s kind of funny because there is one bare lightbulb in the living room of the main house (my room is in a separate house that never gets electricity) but there’s a huge flat screen tv on the wall that everyone watches when the electricity comes on.  Super happy that I brought a headlamp because I am reliant on it every night to see anything in my room.  We also do not have running water, but I’m actually pretty lucky because I have a private “bathroom” attached to my room.  My bathroom has a toilet without a toilet seat and a hole in the ground for a shower.  The toilet must be flushed with a bucket of water.  I also shower with a bucket of water and a plastic mug, what they call a gobelet here.  Bucket baths aren’t so bad, I just always dread the cold water in the morning.  For bathing, I get my water from the well when I come home from training around 6:00pm.  For drinking water we have big yellow plastic containers called bidons which are extremely heavy when filled with water.  Well water is not to be used to fill bidons, we must use city water from a pump because it is cleaner.  We also have to filter the water and add bleach before we consume it.  The only problem with using city water is that it’s hardly ever on.  The whole time I’ve been here I’ve only been able to fill my bidon once.  I hasn’t been a problem though, because I still have water left in it.

Slowly but surely I’m settling into my new routine in Dubreka.

Just a quick update from Dubreka! Life is going well. Learning the local lingo (sort of) and trying to communicate with my host family and failing most of the time. So much to tell, but not enough internet time to tell it. Hopefully I’ll have a more in depth update later!