Happy Thanksgiving!

Alright, so I'm back in the Kamsar internet cafe for the first time in several weeks. I managed to get a blog post written up in Boke, and hopefully it is now posted and backdated appropriately. Anyway, since then I've had another fine set of adventures:


I spent Thanksgiving in my village with my host family. I had decided to skip out on the Conakry Thanksgiving party because I didn't want to deal with the hassle and expense of travel so soon after getting back from there, especially since I will go there for Christmas. I mentioned in passing to my principal that there was an American holiday that I was going to be in Bintimodia for, and after I explained it a bit he decided he wanted to do it too. He sort of forgot about it until the day before when I brought it up to him again, but luckily I was planning on doing some cooking anyway. I had gotten a whole village squash in Boke, and had brought some raw eggs as well (I don't think you can get eggs in my village, I even had a hard time tracking them down in the Kamsar market just now). I also had some spices from the states, flour, margarine, and sugar - and with this I made a pumpkin pie. I had to roll the dough out on one of my chairs since I don't have furniture really yet, and to bake it, I placed a large heavy pot on a charcoal fire, and used my large pot I use to cook spaghetti as a pie dish by putting it on top of some empty tuna cans inside the larger pot. I added water to keep the heating even and it turned out remarkably well. It took like 2-3 hours to cook fully, but I was amazed by the results. I took this over to the Diallo's and we had it as dessert after the main course of rice with oily fish sauce (again). I was going to make mashed potatotes, but I got kinda lazy and didn't want to bike the 11k to the market just to get 2 kg of potatoes. I enjoyed the opportunity to finally try out the Dutch oven cooking system and the change to cook something "American" for my host family. At one point, I said "Almost everyone in the US is going to eat this same dish today", "Even Bush?" said M. Diallo, "Yeah, and Obama too" - at this he smiled. He also said "Ugh, I ate too much" at the end of the meal, and I had to keep from laughing - I guess it really is Thanksgiving.


I made it back to my village with my kitten with not too many problems. I bought a cardboard box in the market and cut holes into it, put my t-shirt in there and carried the kitten on my lap the whole way. On the taxi ride from Boke to Kamsar he slept and/or was peaceful the whole way, however once we switched cars to go Kamsar to Bintimodia he got a little restless and tried getting out of the box. Now, bush-taxis are a very cozy place where you often find yourself crammed-in awkwardly close to your neightbor. I was sharing the front passanger seat with a middle-aged Guinean man who took up most of the seat. This means I was mostly sitting on the hard plastic divider between the driver and the passanger seats, and having to move my leg over a bit whenever the driver needed to shift gears. I also couldn't really move much, and so keeping the cat contained to the flimsy box was an hour long struggle that got me several scratches and one half-hearted bite. Fortunately the man next to me, who also got his pants sort of clawed at (but not successfully tattered) was pretty good humored about it ("I think he wants to get out", he told me near the end of the ride....gee thanks mister, hadn't figured that one out). Near the end of the ride (last 10 minutes or so, the kitten gave up since it was exhausted, overheated and probably dehydrated and he just lay down on his side and started breathing shallowly - I definitely preferred the rowdy kitten to the on-the-brink-of-death kitten. I had planned on giving him water if the trip got to be too long, so his "bowl" (an empty tuna can) was with him, but my nalgene was in the back of the car with my backpack, so I had no water. We finally made it home and I got him some cool water and he perked right back up in like 2 minutes and began to explore the house (very tentitavely at first).


Since then, he's slowly gotten more and more animated and more and more spoiled. At first I was worried that he wouldn't eat, but then he realized that the milk I was giving him (from my powdered supply) was tasty, and he began to eat (and actually now has a belly). I am trying to wean him onto rice and sauce that I bring back from the Diallo's, since that is most likely what he will be eating 90% of the time if I get my way, but he isn't having it. I think I will break him soon though, I caught him sniffing at it yesterday morning when I took away his milk and gave him nothing but water and some fishy rice. He is also starting to act out more, he took to the "litterbox" idea right away, which I guess is cat instinct (all I really had to do was set a box of sand out, and he started using it), but he has started to mark his territory around the house a bit, which I am not sure if I want to get in the way of. One one hand, I don't want my house to smell like cat piss, on the other, if it keeps other animals (mice, snakes, bats, etc) away, all the better. He also has taken to scratching at and attacking random objects. I don't really care when it's my chairs or carboard boxes since he can't really do too much to them yet, but he used my umbrella as a scratching post and completely shredded it - good thing it was already broken or I'd have been more upset. I need to find him some sort of cat toy and I should set up some sort of scratching post on a doorframe with some thick carpet-like fabric.


Also, last night, around midnight, I heard a squeaking and fluttering noise at one of my windows and realized a bat was stuck between the outer shutter and the screen - I poked at it with a broom trying to kill it, then the bat got in the house (I have some pretty lousy screens) and was trapped. I swung at it with my broom for a while, and eventually landed a direct hit that stunned the bat and got him on the ground. I figued he was disabled, and since he was small I thought he'd be a good "practice" bat for Barté to kill. I brought him over, but while he was sniffing, the bat revived and flew around again. I got him with the broom again, this time killing it, and swept him over near the door to get rid of. I wrote a bit in my journal about it, and I heard crunching behind me, I turned around to discover Barté munching on the dead bat. He ate the whole thing in like 3 minutes, bones and all. Good kitty, he got a saucer of milk to wash it down.


Also, in my search for eggs in the Kamsar market today, I finally sumbled across the really good part of the market. I hadn't seen cucumbers, cabages, carrots, or good eggplants in a while anywhere else, but suddently I turned a corner, ducked under a tarp past some kola nut ladies and there in front of me was the biggest variety of vegetables I'd seen in a while. I managed to get some of everything mentioned above except carrots - I'm really excited to fry up some cabbage - wow, never thought I'd hear myself say that.
Alright, that will do for now, until next time.

Rodent Disposal, and Thanksgiving (plus a kitten!)

So, it’s been a while since my last update, I haven’t fallen off the face of Guinea, I’ve just not been to the internet in Kamsar in a while. I am typing this entry up on another Volunteer’s laptop in Boke while I’m here for my monthly visit, which is why I am not in Kamsar this weekend (I will upload it to the internet next week). Last weekend I was in Kamsar but I didn’t bother trying the internet place because I wasn’t really in the mood to fight with computers that day.


Anyway, I’ll start at the beginning: after leaving Conakry, I took a bush taxi back up to Bintimodia, sharing it with two other volunteers for part of the way (their villages were also near the main road between Conakry and Boke). Partway there we stopped to re-arrange passangers, and I thought I dropped my wallet because it had suddenly disappeared from my pocket (we were 4 adults tightly squeezed into the backseat of a small sedan, so I had a hard time reaching that pocket to check if it was there). We stopped and I went back to look for it, and then decided it was just lost. I wasn’t too sad because I knew I only had a little money left in it (most of it was in my backpack), and the only major loss was my bank card (a slip of paper with my account number written on it), and my Peace Corps ID – both of which were easily replaceable. I had already paid the driver and I had some extra money in my backpack, so I decided – ah well, it had to happen sometime.


I got to my carrefour, or crossroad where my village’s road meets the main road, and got off. I couldn’t find any transport to my village except motorcycles which I’m not supposed to ride, so I walked the 11km to my house. Once there I discovered that in my absence, my village had built a fence around my back-yard. I’d been asking around for a while about how I could get one built, but people kept flaking out on me or saying "oh yeah, sure, we’ll get some kids to build one for you one of these days". I guess they decided "one of these days" was while I was in Labe (note: fences here are made from palm fronds with sticks/tree limbs in the ground for structure). Nobody asked me to pay them for this (the materials are free, and the labor was well…students who work for free), and since I didn’t know which kids specifically did it (my principal said he just got some of the 8th graders to do it), I couldn’t track them down to thank them, I wrote a note on my blackboard out front saying thanks.


While I was in Conakry, I had purchased some "Atrarat" non-poisonous rat-glue. This is a thick rubber-cement like glue that doesn’t actually harden. You spread it on some cardboard and put food in the middle and mice and rats walk into it and stay there. I had been struggling with the mice in my house for a while and I was desperate. I set up a trap and went to have dinner with the Diallo’s (my principal’s family who I eat with twice a day … whether I want to or not), when I came back there was mouse number 1, stuck to the cardboard. I tried to think of a way to quickly kill it so that it wouldn’t have to starve to death or die of anxiety on that damned piece of cardboard, but nothing came to mind, so I just left it there overnight and went to bed.
Around 7am, I woke up and discovered that the mouse was gone, and the trap was moved over several inches, and there was a glue stain on the floor…uh oh. I checked the path the mouse usually takes to its nest (via my latrine), but it wasn’t there, I checked the other nest hole (in the spare room) but it wasn’t there. Then I checked the kitchen, and there, glued onto a tuna can, was my mouse. See, I don’t have furniture yet, so all my food is either in a trunk, or out on the floor, the canned goods are out on the floor since the actual food is protected in the can. This mouse was coated in "non-poisonous rat glue", and had scurried too close to my stack of tuna cans, and got himself stuck to them. Oh, I was pissed. After much deliberation, I decided the best way to deal with it was to get a plastic bag, put it next to the mouse, and then use my broom to rub the bag on the mouse – thereby sticking the mouse to the bag. I then pulled the bag away, and the mouse came with it. I chucked the bag over my (new) fence in the back where I’d seen an ant hill before – so long mouse number 1.


That night I set out another trap like the first, because I suspected I had more than one mouse. I got up a couple of hours later, and there was mouse number 2, stuck just like his buddy was 24 hours earlier. He was already making his escape, and I didn’t want to have another mouse gluing itself to my canned goods, so I decided spraying the mouse with insecticide right in the face would probably kill it relatively swiftly. I did so, and then realized that the (kerosene based aerosol) insecticide dissolved the (petroleum based) glue and so the mouse managed to get free, run around a bit while I chased it, then huddle in the corner, lie down and die. He soon thereafter joined his (decomposing) friend over the fence. So long mouse number 2.


I saw mouse number 3 later, but it did not fall victim to trap number 3. In fact, I haven’t seen it since. I worry that it was a pregnant female because it looked a bit bigger than mice numbers 1 and 2, and perhaps it disappeared to have a litter of mice somewhere. I’m just hoping it sensed that the other mice had died, and decided to find a nest somewhere else. Inchallah.


Anyway, so that was how I dealt with my crawling rodents, as for my flying rodents (oh yeah, I have bats too), I chose a different tactic. At first I was just ignoring them, because other than their leaving at dusk, they generally don’t bother my in my house. AND THEN, one day, I got into my mosquito net to go to bed, and I hear and feel fluttering next to my head (a bat had been roosting inside my mosquito net during the day!). I screamed for the first time in I don’t know how long and fell to the floor, I then saw the bat crawling around on my sheets in my bed. Remember how I said I was pissed when the mouse glued itself to my tuna cans, this was a whole new level of pissed. I got the broom (which I usually have handy for moments like this – I’ve gotten really good at killing wasps with it) and managed to get the bat off my bed – or so I suspected, but I couldn’t find it. I went around the bed and finally spotted it stuck in the corner of the room next to the bed, hiding. I used my sling shot to get it to get out of that corner – and thus scared it out into the open. I don’t know if it was the broom or the sling shot, but it seemed like it couldn’t fly, so it was crawling along. I got my umbrella (which I also keep handy for this purpose) and beat the bat with it until I was sure it was dead (I broke my umbrella in the process). It was a bloody battle, and I was pretty freaked out after this. I wrote a very curse-heavy journal entry, then disposed of the bat over my fence. I still have at least 2 or 3 bats sleeping somewhere in my house during the day and leaving via the front door at dusk – but other than the once or twice I’ve tried hitting them out of the air with my broom, I mostly leave them alone now. The next morning I asked all my students to find me a kitten though.


Anyway, a couple of days later, my nearest Peace Corps neighbor (about 20km to the south) came to visit. She biked to my village, saw me teach my classes that day, walked around the village with me (everybody asked me if she was my wife – when I said she was just a friend they gave me a sly smile and said "oh ok!"), and came to dinner with my host family. The next morning we took off to Kamsar together (she’d been wanting to do the bike ride, but since it’s 40km each way for her, she wanted to crash at my place the first time). It was really fun having someone visit, but since I’m still struggling with getting all my furniture it was a little awkward at the same time. I’m looking forward to her visiting again in the future (we will be working on a project together for my village which I will talk about later). Also, it was great because having her meant I could take pictures of myself along the road to Kamsar. I now have pictures of us crossing the river on the canoe, crossing the stick bridge halfway there, and also on the bike ride itself. I will post these next time I’m in Conakry (Christmas?).


A few days later I brought up to my Principal that I might be spending Thanksgiving in Conakry with some other volunteers. He said "Thanksgiving….that’s when you eat turkey right?", and so I explained the history of Thanksgiving and the reason we have this feast to give thanks for what we have, etc. He really liked this and told me "That sounds nice, I’m going to have Thanksgiving too, I’ll kill a chicken for it" (can you see why I really like this guy?). I spent another day or two thinking about it, and decided to skip Thanksgiving in Conakry and have it with the Diallos in Bintimodia. I was running low on money anyway, and I would spend way too much money in Conakry, plus my favorite part of Thanksgiving Dinner is mashed potatoes, and I can make that in Bintimodia. I’m thinking I will make 2 kg of potatoes worth of garlic mashed potatoes (enough for everyone to try it), and also attempt a pumpkin pie using village squash and a Guinean "oven" (big metal pot balanced on 3 rocks with a wood fire under it). I just need to get some raw eggs and a squash before I leave Boke. I’m looking forward to it.


Since I wouldn’t be going to Conakry next week, I decided to come up to Boke this week and get some shopping and furniture organizing done so all this stuff can be dropped off on the next mail run (I get my mail once a month when the Boke car picks it up in Conakry and drops it off in my village – along with anything else I leave for myself in Boke or Conakry – such as a table, 2 bookshelves, 2 bamboo mats, 2 small wooden tables, a sack of potatoes, a trunk full of books, etc…I feel a bit bad for Bella, our regional driver, but it sure beats strapping a large wooden bookshelf to my bike). I am a bit sad that I won’t get to see one of my better friends from training who I haven’t seen since training, but I will hopefully see him at Christmas, and I’ve left a note for him here in the Boke house (he’s 80 km away from Boke in the other direction).
Anyway, the best part of this Boke trip happened a few hours ago. I mentioned in conversation to another volunteer that I had been looking for a kitten (partly for company, mostly to kill mice, bats, cockroaches, frogs, etc), and a few hours later when she was visiting a Guinean family nearby she discovered a kitten looking for an owner and brought it to me. Apparently the mom is feral "chat brousse" (bush cat), and this little guy tends to be semi abandoned. He(?) is TINY, and ADORABLE. His eyes are kinda crusty, and I still haven’t gotten him to have any milk, water or tuna (I was having tuna salad for dinner anyway, so I saved a bit of fish for him), but I got him to get comfortable with me. At first when I set him up with a bed, a small dish of water and another of milk in a bathroom, he immediately went behind a shelf and hid there. I removed the shelf and then he hid behind the sink and would hiss at me. Eventually, after some scratching and hissing, I got him to realize that I wasn’t trying to hurt him, and then I just carried him around while I did stuff around the house, letting him get used to me. Now, when I tried getting him to go to sleep by himself, he attaches himself to me and doesn’t let go, so I have him sleeping on my (dirty, and therefore me-smelling) t-shirt in a small box by the keyboard. I’m gonna try to leave the box by itself in the bathroom without waking him. I just hope he starts eating tomorrow so he doesn’t die of thirst or starvation. I’m excited to have a pet at site, I just hope everything works out.

Out on the Town

Not much to say, but while I have internet, I'll say it.

The situation here has cooled down a lot (some say Obama's victory had a part in this), so we were allowed to go downtown to do what we needed to do there (I got money out of the bank, got Chinese food from the one Chinese place in Guinea (run my Chinese ex-pats for Chinese ex-pats - best Chinese food I've ever had, though I may have been eating rice and sauce in my village too long to be a good judge), got a couple of things at the American/European goods store (shampoo to keep in Conakry, more cheese, some powdered lemonade mix, and a cup of yogurt). I also got some pictures developed from the one photo place here that actually has a few of those Kodak do-it-yourself kiosks to print digital pictures. I printed some pictures that I plan on sending out in holiday letters, and also bought some Obama pictures (photoshopped so he was in the middle of an American flag, standing next to the Guinean president, etc) that were being sold on the street for 2,500 GNF in the form of name-tags. I got about 10 (at 1,000 GNF from the people who were making the name tags) to send out to people I think will most appreciate them. I'm definitely keeping one for myself too. I'm actually regretting not getting more of them, they're really great.

I'm actually surprised at the level of excitement his victory has caused in Guineans. I expected them to be happy (heck, they've been reminding me about the Nov. 4th date pretty much since I got in country), but this is a whole new level. On the street most people saw me and said "Obama! Vive Obama!". One guy asked if I'd voted, and then shook my hand and thanked me when I said I had. People were dancing in the streets at 4:30 am when BBC officially called it for him over shortwave radio broadcasts. There are tons of products out on the streets with his face all over them (wallets, watches, umbrellas, name tags, t-shirts, .... several of my students' notebooks are have him on the cover (my grade book has him giving a speech on the cover)). We were tempted to start an "Obama! Obama!" chant at the bank to have people let us cut to the front (we waited in line about an hour), but we decided not to.

It's really great to see people here be inspired by his success. The best part is that I don't think they are excited because they expect him to make vast changes to Africa (which he probably can't and/or won't) as some people are saying, but simply because it's a symbol that African-Americans in the States aren't being limited by a glass ceiling anymore. It seems like a similar admiration that they have for wealthy musicians (Akon, 50 cent, etc), simply because they made it in the states despite the color of their skin - showing that maybe that factor is beginning to matter less and less in modern America. ...or maybe I'm just projecting my thoughts onto them, who knows? In any case, Guinea is very happy with the news, I can't wait to talk to people in my village about it (I'm actually a little sad I could be there when the results came in, I would have loved to have danced in the dirt road in front of my house with fellow Bintimodians - I'll just have to organize an inauguration fête for January 20th).

Anyway, I will (most likely) be headed back to my site tomorrow morning, until the next time I post from Kamsar...

Yay Obama!

Ok, so what I forgot to mention in my previous post was that I was going to watch the election results on "Armed Forces Network" TV at my Country Director's house. This is about 10 or 11 channels that apparently the military gets along with foreign service officers, embassies, and apparently - Peace Corps staff. The "news channel" kept changing from ABC to NBC, FOX, CNN, etc every half hour or so, but the general coverage was of the election (though we did have a half hour of "around the military" news right as the first set of polls closed at 11pm Guinean time). We watched there until about 1am, which was around when we found out that PA went to Obama. After this we went back to the volunteer house to let our Director and his wife get some sleep. I listened with some other volutneers to the hissing SW radio to try to get more results, but around 2am, I decided to go to bed.


I woke up this morning to the news that he is our new President-Elect. Exciting stuff. I will leave you with a quote from his speech at the DNC....


"...Because the future of our nation depends on the soldier at Fort Carson, but it also depends on the teacher in East LA, the nurse in Appalachia, the after-school worker in New Orleans, the Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, and the Foreign Service officer in Indonesia....and double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 to renew our diplomacy...."

Too bad I'll be done with Peace Corps by 2011, though if I do a 3rd year extension....hmmm.....

Labé Summary and Conakry Situation

Alright, well since my last post I have: attended an awesome halloween party in Labé with other volunteers, attended the VAC meeting, ended up staying in Labé a couple of extra days due to travel complications (more on that soon), and then came to Conakry on a Peace Corps car via the scenic route (5 hours longer on a much rougher road than the way I came). I am now in the Peace Corps office in Conakry until the situation here gets resolved. But first...

So, there was a large gathering of Volunteers in Labé to celebrate Halloween, we made mexican food (tortillas, beans, salsa, guacamole and tortilla chips - all from scratch since there's no canned beans or pre-made tortillas ehre) and had punch. Everyone made costumes from stuff found in the market, I found a track suit from the 80's in the market along with some sunglasses, and was a mobster from the 80's, pictures will be on Facebook in the next day or two. Some highlights include a Sarah Palin costume that was very well done, I think it was the hair and glasses that really did it, a cracked out and pregnant Britney Spears (I've heard rumors she's getting famous again for legitimate reasons...good for her?), and Guinean-Spice Girls (Maggi, Fish, Palm Oil, Piment, and MSG...I think the Maggi costume was probably the best one of the whole party) among others. It was really great to see everyone again (all of the Fouta people from my training group, 10 of them I think, were there, along with lots of people from the previous training group who I hadn't met yet).

The VAC meeting was also a great experience. I mostly listened at it, though I did have a couple of suggestions to throw in here and there.

Now, the beginning of the drama. On Saturday I decided I didn't have enough time to get to Conakry if I left after the VAC meeting, so I waited until Sunday. However, on Sunday I discovered that no taxis were moving because there was no gasoline being sold anywhere. It turns out that when the price of oil dropped 50%, the price of gasoline here only dropped like 20 or 30%, so gas stations refused to buy the gas, and so nobody could gas up their cars. The only gasoline available is via the black market (aka, anyone who had some before the gas stations closed, who are now selling it by the liter for the equivalent of about $20 per gallon). Because of this, I decided to wait one more day and get a Peace Corps car ride down to Conakry, since a car was going to be going down the following day.

The next day we left, and I was in the car that was taking a back road that cuts sort of diagonally from Labé to Kindia, and then rejoins the main road. This means I was travelling a shorter distance than I did when I drove up in the first place, but it took over 5 hours longer (about 12-13 hours). This was partly because we stopped at the village of a Volunteer who had switched villages to get her stuff (the reason for the detour), but mostly because the road was very very rough and so we could only go so fast (and believe me, we were going FAST for the quality of the road, my back is still sore from the ride). We heard over the SW radio that there were issues in Conakry and we may have a hard time getting in, but we weren't entirely sure what all was happening.

We got to Conakry last night and unloaded, soon after our arrival we got a phone call from our security officer who had been told we had arrived safely. We were told not to leave the compound without his permission and we were informed that there had been demonstrations and at least one death that day in Conakry. This morning we were told we could wander a bit if we needed to go to the market for food, etc - but we couldn't go anywhere in a car. So I will be in Conakry until this blows over. I don't want to personally explain the situation via this blog to avoid any miscommunication or misinterpretation, so I will instead direct you to these news stories that explain what has been happening recently.

http://www.afrol.com/articles/31551

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gqtIf8t8waZ_euDFPqjH7q8IV8Yw

...more on Google News (search Guinea and/or Conakry)

Rest assured, I am absolutely safe here since I am in a guarded and fenced in compound that is relatively distant from the main trouble spots. All other Volunteers that are out up-country in their villages are also safe, since the violence has been centered around Conakry.