From Kamsar, again

Alright, so I’ve been out of communication for some time now, I didn’t come to Kamsar last week and so it’s been about 2 weeks since I’ve checked e-mail, and about 6 days since my cell phone battery died (I was planning on charging it at the village nightclub last Saturday (they run off a generator), but they didn’t open for some reason…I found myself running around after dark to random houses that I thought had a generator going, but nobody seemed to be running them this past week (no important soccer matches on TV, and so no need to gather half the village and run a generator for the TV)). I’ve certainly been out of communication for longer (I spent almost 3 months with no internet in Forecariah – and the cell phone reception there wasn’t very reliable), but it was still a bit annoying.

Village-wise, not much has happened. My Country Director came for a visit a little over a week ago, he showed up after my classes had ended so I was able to show him around for the whole 2 hours he spent in my village – we took a few pictures in front of a large baobab tree stump (the tree had been cut down to build a canoe) and chatted with my sous-prefet and principal. We also started brainstorming a potential “Tour de Basse Côte” for us to do at some point – he’s big into biking and has already done a trip with volunteers between Kissidougou and Kankan out in Haute Guinea. I’d like to have it involve going the 80k to Jarrad’s site from Boké – since I plan on doing that at some point anyway, but we’ll see how it goes.

There was also a “Community Development Meeting” last Saturday in my village (we’re the sous-prefeture, sort of like the county seat, so people from all the neighboring villages came to our meeting room for this event). I showed up at 9 because nobody ever told me what time the meeting was supposed to be at, and I figured I’d go and ask, then go home and come back when I was actually needed. I was welcomed and told the meeting would start “tout de suite” (real soon) and so I busied myself looking over the village computer – which I’d promised to set up (The village got a new-ish PC, printer and copy machine from the gov’t, but nobody but me seems to know what to do with them so I’m going to set it up for them, teach them basic word processing, and set them up with template letters for the kinds of stuff they’re probably going to want typed up from now on (the current system involves hand-written letters and carbon-copy paper)). After I evaluated that they had almost everything they needed to get the machine going (they need to buy a current regulator so the fluxuating generator power doesn’t fry the system) and I think tomorrow we will finally turn it on and see what it contains (I hope it has the necessary software, otherwise it’s going to be (even more) useless). Anyway, after I’d checked all the cables and thought about what they needed to get, I went into the room where the meeting was set to begin, and sat down amongst the other people, many of whom had already arrived. I had just started writing a letter to help pass the time when I was ushered to one of the seats at the front of the room, facing the “audience”. I kept writing, finished the letter, waited around and finally around 11 or so they took attendace by calling out all the necessary villages and seeing how many people from those places had shown up by a show of hands. I was counted under “Bintimodia-centre”. Then there was some brief (10 minute) speech given in Susu that I didn’t understand a word of. Then, apparently, someone important showed up and so the meeting stopped and we waited again while something (I still don’t know what) kept the main people busy. I waited around some more, started a second letter, and watched people move chairs back and forth trying to decide the best way to arrange people. Finally at 12:30 I decided I didn’t feel like waiting any longer to hear a meeting in a language I wasn’t going to understand anyway, and I went home. The next day I got the 5 minute version (in French) from “Bob”, the guy in charge of youth development in the village.

So that’s pretty much it, other than that I’ve been teaching as usual (we started conjugating the verb “to be” in English class this week – a step up from memorizing random phrases like “how are you?”) and reading as usual (on book number 85 currently, I would say that I’m going to be very well read when I’m done here, but I do spend a lot of my time on trashy fantasy and detective novels so I don’t know (I loved “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “Oliver Twist” though, neither of those really felt hard (or impossible) to read the way “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” did (I gave up on that one half-way through)). Anyway, upcoming highlights include going to Conakry in a few days to pick Tim up from the airport and then maybe staying there about 8 days waiting for a committee meeting I’m supposed to be at (though I may skip it since it was pushed back 4 days - making it sort of inconvenient with the plans I made around the original date). Anyway, so I will write again in a few days from Conakry, and hopefully post some newer pictures of my house now that it’s pretty much set-up.

Until then.