'Cause Mariana Said So...

Alright, I was going to slack on the blog writing because it's been a long day and I'm about to spend a good chunk of time uploading pictures to Facebook, but since my sister (and loyal reader) requested an entry, here goes...

Since my last post (which, by the way, was chosen as "Peace Corps Voluneer Blog of the Day" by some Peace Corps Twitter thing, as I've just found out in an e-mail), Tim and I have gotten a good start on the world map project, Jarrad came by and helped us out one day, I finished teaching my classes, and I decided to bring an entirely different girl to Girl's Conference.

The World Map Project is basically painting a mural of the map of the world to whatever size you want (1:2 ratio), we did 2x4 meters on the wall of the outside of the elementary school - facing a map of Africa and a map of Guinea done by previous volunteers (Sam and Michelle, respectively, I think). There is also a smaller map of the world on another wall of the middle school, but it's pretty small, only labelled the continents, and south america fell off when the wall cracked a few years back. Anyway, we measured out exactly the dimensions of our rectangle plus a 4cm border like 5 times, we penciled it out, we painted it white, painstakingly measured our 7 cm grid (28 squares high, 56 wide), and spent a few days penciling in the countries by a square by square grid system. For this process we used some of my students - though after they were done we had to make some minor (and in one kid's case, major) repairs. My two 10th graders did pretty well save for tilting spain at and odd angle and messing up a few international boundaries, but my 9th grader COMPLETELY screwed up Africa. After he left we had to erase it entirely and start from scratch. I was hoping nobody would notice but a bunch of kids who were watching us (there is usually a crowd) were chattering away about how so-and-so did it so bad that we had to re-do it...hope word didn't make it back to him.

Anyway, so we got the penciled countries in and went back to erase all the gridlines, this is where we enlisted the younger elementary school kids (though one of them kept erasing the map and I had to follow behind him redrawing where he had obliterated Hawaii or Equador). Afterwards we used small paintbrushes to do black paint borders of all the countries - something we just finished before leaving for this trip. Luckily we managed to talk Jarrad into coming to my village for a night, and then spend the morning helping us paint before he headed back to Boké. We also made a nice dinner (salad, mac and cheese, a bottle of wine) to celebrate the one-year-before-Jarrad-finishes-with-Peace-Corps mark (he's cutting out a bit earlier than I will next summer).

In other news yesterday was my official last day of teaching for this school year!! Well, sort of...I had planned around stopping this week all along because all around the country school is supposed to end around now, final exams happen, and school should be completely done by early June. As it turns out (and as I found out yesterday) my school is going strong for another couple of weeks because enough of our teachers are behind their syllabus that they're just going to hold out until June 8th to start finals, by the time most other kids will already be on break. I had already planned this trip I'm currently on, and I had finished my syllabus a couple of weeks ago (I've been reviewing since then), so I told my principal as much and called it a school year. When I return I will have to grade my final exams and remaining homework, then turn in grades. But, once that's done, I'm good until next October or so (except for my extra side-projects, etc).

It's weird, even though I haven't quite reached my one year mark (10 months and 2 weeks...and counting), I'm mostly done with roughtly the first chunk of a 2 chunk commitment. Time here is weird because it seems like days take a long time, but the months seem to be flying by. In no time at all Tim is going to be out of here, I'll be in Europe, and then school will have kicked in for a second school year...and then what??

Well, I'm still working on the big "and then what?" questions of post-Peace Corps life - I'll write more about that when I'm more concrete about it (hopefully by September or so....I might need/want to start applying for certain programs as early as then if I'm still seriously considering them (grad schools, JET, TFA, NYCTF, and probably half a dozen others).

Anyway, today was a long day - I woke up around 6 and Tim and I were out of the house by 7, yet we didn't make it to the peace corps compound in Conakry until 4:30pm (and I NEEDED to get there by 5 to get money out of the safe for this trip, so I was kinda stressed). Plus (and this is the thing that really ticks me off) I left my brand-new never-used Barack Obama umbrella in one of the taxis (ARG!). We ended up waiting over an hour at the main-road taxi stop for our car to leave, then the back tire lost its tread (it didn't go flat or blow out...the tread just fell off) so we had to wait under a shady tree for it to get replaced by the completely bald spare tire. Not an hour later the spare did the same thing and this time we didn't have a spare tire. Luckily we were able to duck into someone's porch along the road while the driver and a passanger "fixed" it by cutting off the loose flap with a razor blade. We drove on this disaster-waiting-to-happen for another 10-20km or so until the next big town where we waited another hour or so for a new tired to be put on the car. Of course this meant we got into Conakry right at rush hour and then our taxi made us switch to another car for no reason, on top of the third car we had to get in Madnia towards the Peace Corps office (this, I think, is where I left my umbrella....argh!). In the end we made it in time to get money, and I've since eaten (oh yeah, I had a small piece of fried dough at 8am, then 3 chawarmas at about 7pm, nothing in between...). What a day.

The good news is tomorrow (bright and early), we're going to Dalaba in the Fouta, hanging out with a couple of my friends for a few days, then going on a 3 day hike through the mountains in the middle of the country (Doucki), THEN going to Labé to show Tim around there before heading back to Conakry for a VAC meeting and back to my village. I'm excited to be away from my village for a while, not have to be responsible for work (though...I guess I'm going to be working on budgeting for a teacher's conference, but at least that's different).

Anyway, if you made it this far, I'm glad you're this interested in my life, I don't feel like editing this right at the moment, but i'm guessing it's one of my least-cohesive entries yet...I hope to write a better one from Labé or when I'm back in Conakry.

Blog Post from a Hard to Find Internet Cafe

Ok, this entry will be brief, hopefully explanatory, and probably not very well written. Sorry. The reason I've been so long in posting to this blog is because the internet cafe that I frequent in Kamsar has had technical difficulties for over a month now (getting close to two months actually...). In addition to this whenever internet has been available (Boke house, mostly), I've ceeded my right to the limited conenctivity time to Tim so he could catch up on all the stuff he needs to catch up on (he's nowhere near as used to being cut off from internet as I am now, and I suppose rightfully so since he actually has farm reservations to make for his WWOOLF plans after Guinea). The culmination of this was this special trip we've made to Boke so he could get access to internet here - last night the stars all aligned (Boke had electricity, our internet provider was functioning, there were no other volunteers who wanted to use the itnernet, etc) and Tim got to use the dial up connection from about 8pm until about 6am or so (got photos uploaded, farms researched, etc). I checked my e-mail and then typed up a blog post (not this one) on his laptop to uplaod to the internet eventually.

Since the internet stopped working this morning (our router battery died), we decided to venture out to the new iternet cafe that just opened in the past week or two that all the Boke voluinteers were raving about. We were told it was a satellite connection, with a generator backup, and that it was in Boke at the University. Only 2 of these 3 things are true - the cafe IS at the university, but what I didn't know was that the university was way the f**k out in the boonies of Boke, like 3 or 4 "suburb" villages away. I didn't know this when I started walking towards it this afternoon. Whenever I asked for directions I was told "you've got to take a moto-taxi, it's far" but since Tim is opposed to moto taxi's and Peace Corps policy forbids me from riding them we walked it. Turns out the university is 7km outside of Boke. We were on the verge of turning back and giving up (we'd been walking for about an hour and a bit in the hottest time of the day) when we got here. The things I do....christ.

Well, I'm here now, Tim is getting the last of his internet business figured out and I'm finally putting up a long awaited blog post (apologies to my regular readers, my mom's already told me that my sister was complaining about my lack of updates). Unfortunately my long post that I wrote last night is on Tim's laptop, this cafe doesn't allow USB drives, and the guys running the cafe couldn't figure out how to set up Tim's computer on their network (they're not used to windows Vista, and they're not used to computers being in English) so I will hopefully put that post up in a few weeks when I go to Conakry (or if the Kamsar internet gets fixed....this next weekend).

The quick and dirty summary is this: Tim and I have been hanging around in my village, I've been teaching and I only have a week or two of teaching to go before final exams - my school hasn't decided on the schedule yet. Our plan is to do "The World Map Project" on the elementary school wall in the time that Tim is here - painting a 2x4 meter map of the world using a draw-by-grid system. I picked my girl's conference participants (more on this in a later post) by doing an essay contest with all my 9th and 10th grade girls.

Girls Conference is basically a 4 day workshop where each volutneer brings a girl from his/her village and they are sensibilized about women's rights, female circumcision, HIV/AIDS, public speaking, etc etc all together in Boke. Their food, lodging and transport is covered by Peace Corps. For this essay contest I told my girls to write a page about "The biggest problem girls/women in Guinea face, and a possible solution". Of about 70 girls I got 6 essays back. Of the 6 only 3 actually addressed the topic (one of the other three actually wrote about how married women need to listen to their husbands because their place is in the house cooking the rice...). I narrowed it down to two girls - my principal's daughter Fatim, and the former Peace Corps host family daughter Merie - after consultation with the volunteer organizing the conference I decided to take both of them since there's room in the budget for more girls.

Other exciting news is that Tim and I made a trip out to Mankountan to see Teale in her village, we saw a girls soccer match that she had organized and spent the night in her hut. Pictures from this can be found on Facebook if you look up "Tim Baker" within my friends - his photo albums should be public. Also, his blog can be found at http://timjbaker.wordpress.org - he's written more than I have about what we've done during his time here.

Anyway, my itnernet time is running low - plans currently involve going to see the Fouta and go hiking with my friends John and Marg from Dalaba at the end of the month when I'm done teaching. Hopefully I can write a more complete blog post about the past 2 months and I wil be able to upload it when I pass through Conakry for this trip.

Now I've gotta figure out a way to get back to Boke, then back to my village before it gets too late....wish me luck!