Merry Christmas

Alright, things have remained very calm here and so far today's Christmas is turning out to be very nice. I stayed up late last night uploading pictures to facebook, and then chatting with a couple of people until like 2 or 3 am. I slept until 6 (I don't know why I never sleep when I'm in Conakry, I think I stock up on sleep in Bintimodia and then can manage fine without here). I got up and saw that people had already started on Christmas breakfast (ended up being ready at 11, so it was Christmas brunch). I opened my care package under the tree and shared some of the goodies (someone is going to use my "dried fruit mix" in place of rasins to attempt Irish soda bread, etc) then peeled like 100 cloves of garlic. After this we got authorization for 4 of us to go to the market with a specific list of things we need to Christmas dinner, so I went with 3 others. My friend Conor and I teamed up with the "produce" list.

The market was very busy, it's been closed the past couple of days so I think everyone was re-stocking up. Everybody seemed calm and there was no sense of danger at all (or we would have gone straight back to the house). Conor and I bought: 12 cucumbers, 6 kilos of tomatoes, 6 kilos of onions, 2 kilos of green bell peppers (you can get more vegetables in Conakry than anywhere else, expensive as hell though), 7 kilos of carrots, 1 kilo of green beans, 16 avocadoes, 10 eggplants, a bag of garlic (about 15 heads), 10 limes, 4 kilos of cabbage, ....and some other stuff. Obvously we did this in a few different trip and then walked the stuff back to the waiting Peace Corps car. A Liberian kid (spoke decent-ish english) kept following us for a while trying to interpret english to susu for us, but when he saw that I could argue with the market lady in susu about how she was overcharging for tomatoes he gave up, asked for money then walked away confused. The highlight of this was near the end when Conor (who speaks Pulaar, not susu) and I were both bargaining in our respective local language with the same lady (who, being Pule herself mostly ignored me) and most of the market around us stopped and stared at the white people who speak the local native dialects. Later I got payback when a Susu lady ignored Conor, and told me in Susu "he's a Pule and a Diallo, watch out for him" (Guieans have a lot of joke (kinda) family feuds, I'm a Bah, she was a Balde (same thing, sorta), and we all think Diallos (and Camaras (also the same thing?) are thieves, they in turn thing we're sorcerors, obviously this is just a country wide local joke, but it's awesome that calling someone a goat thief will usually get you a better price for whatever you're trying to buy). I think market ladies are my favorite people, possibly in the whole world.

Anyway, we got back to the house unloaded all our stuff (the other couple of people got roughly the same volume of other foodstuffs) and then I sat down with a bunch of people to watch "Home Alone" while brunch got finished. As the thieves were being driven away in a police car (in the movie), brunch was announced. Scrambled eggs with basil, garlic, onions and green peppers, fried potatoes and onions with good spices, fruit (pineapple, coconut, bananas), fresh squeezed orange juice and toast. Real coffee too (usually you can only get instant coffee here). So good. We had all-around "Merry Christmas" hugs and dug in. Now everyone is working on cooking for dinner at our Coutnry Director's house later this afternoon, potluck style.

For a Christmas spent during the middle of a military coup in a (temporarily) constitutionless country, we did pretty well for ourselves. Now, I'm gonna go help one of my best friends (who incidentally I hadn't seen since September) make some fried rice for tonight.

Merry Christmas.