aggienaut: (Numbat)

Monday, July 18th, Labe - Arrived in Lafou about half an hour north of the town of Labe. The highway was really shockingly well made here -- no potholes at all. Apparently its part of a new road that goes from Labe to Senegal and will eventually link all the West African countries together.
   We (myself, Mr Damba, our driver Mamadou, the beekeeping association trainer Khalidou) were put up in a guest house on one side of a dirt square across from the tiny little local government hall, which is where the training would take place. There was also electricity this time! The little government building had solar panels and they strung across wires so we had working lights, though we couldn't plug anything in to charge.
   Along the highway and around the square there were these big white light poles with solar panels, to light up the streetlights at night. Apparently this charity project called Akon Light Up Africa put them in. Personally I think they're a nice improvement of safety by the main road and I guess prevent people from tripping at night in the village, but I'm not sure where streetlights fall in the pyramid of needs. Still everyone seems excited about it and everything helps. I did miss my starry nights though.

   As the people filtered into the little hall that first day I noticed a mzungu, or as they call us in Guinea apparently, a porto -- a white person. She was, it turns out, a Peace Corps volunteer. She was working on a beekeeping project so she came to attend the training, which she had heard about the previous years' projects. She was really nice and it gave me someone else to speak with, since Damba usually couldn't be bothered to translate anything conversational for me. Monica, AKA "Umu Bah," wrote a blog entry herself about the training. I'm not going to write too much about the nuts and bolts of the training because that's the same as it always is, so you can read her entry for a fresh look at that (:

   For me, having a Peace Corps volunteer there was itself one of the most interesting things. I have an interesting relationship with Peace Corps, having been thinking about doing it on and off ever since college and at one point had almost gone. And there are lots of informational sessions where you can talk to returned PC volunteers in the states if you are interested, but that's nothing like spending two weeks with one in the field to really see what it's like. I greatly enjoyed discussing various development problems and projects with her.

   In the evenings a local man named Abdul would take Monica and I walking around, in a different direction each day, and I greatly enjoyed this, since I always love to explore the area. While the part of the village where we were staying was more open, other parts of the village were much more like Doumba had been last year, that is, houses and huts connected by veritable tunnels through thick maize, lots of tree cover, generally green and lush.
   One of the days, Abdul led us up a mountain trail, pointing out various herbs along the way and telling us the local beliefs about their medicinal values. Just when I thought we were really far from anywhere, up the mountain, we suddenly came to another little village, where he said his sister lived. Greeted his sister and her family and came back through thick rain.
   We got a fair bit of rain in general, and one whole day was lost because it was raining too hard to do anything, but even when it was raining I was revelling in the fact that it was SO MUCH WARMER than Victoria, Australia, which has been within ten degrees of freezing all winter. As always, many hours were spent sitting on the veranda, reading as it rained.
   Since Mr Damba only really seemed interested in translating for me when it suited his purposes and/or translating what he wanted to communicate, I found myself increasingly using Monica to go around him to communicate directly with the FAPI (beekeeping association) president and FAPI trainer Khalidou. When someone annoys me I tend to tell myself I'm just being grumpy and it's not that bad but after awhile I realized its kind of ridiculous that I was having to go to all this effort to go around my own interpreter (so he wouldn't intervene I'd often be trying to get a chance to talk to Monica without him around about what I wanted to communicate to the other participants!
   Things really came to a head at the end of the week -- I had talked my friend Daniel from Ethiopia into coming to Guinea for the project. He is a honey exporter in Ethiopia, and even if they found another exporter in the United States, no one would have as pertinent experience as Daniel does from exporting from a similarly undeveloped African country to Europe. So Daniel had volunteered to come which I am very grateful for and I paid for his flight from Ethiopia. He was arriving in the nearby town, Labe, on Monday. All week I'd tried to bring up the plans with Damba and he kept brushing me off with "we'll deal with that later." So finally on Friday I sat down with him and said
   "okay we need to go in to Labe on Monday to pick up Daniel," to which he said
   "No we're going to Labe on Wednesday it's in the itinerary"
   "Yes but Daniel is there on Monday and we need to go get him." I said
   To this Damba went into the other room and came back to show me the printed itinerary, saying "no see it's on Wednesday"
   "I don't care if it's in the itinerary!" I exclaimed, "my friend will be there Monday and I'm not going to leave him twiddling his fingers there for three days"
   Damba was completely unmoved, saying we couldn't change the itinerary. Which, I've seen all kinds of wild deviations from the itinerary. We had days off and trips to Labe that weren't in the itinerary already, I really don't know why he was being like this.
   "Okay well I'll email Ibro then and ask about it" I offered, since Ibro, the country director for the Organization, surely had the authority to change the god damn holy text of the itinerary. Ibro called him an hour later and I don't know what he said but Damba seemed a bit better behaved.


Monday, July 27th, Labe - On Monday we headed back in to Labe to pick up Daniel, and Ibro who had actually come up with him. At breakfast that morning in the hotel in Labe there was the Justince Minister, the governor of Labe region, and the mayor of Labe. Place to be apparently!
   Returned to the village of Lafou for one more day of wrapping things up with the participants and "closing ceremonies." Lots of speeches ensued. I gave a boomerang decorated with aboriginal art to Abdul as thanks for taking us walking every day. I'm not sure he knew what it was or what the kangaroo on it was but he seemed very touched.

Wednesday, July 29th, Labe - On Wednesday we had a meeting with the board of FAPI and Daniel presented about how to meet the import requirements for the EU and it was very good and informative and I myself learned a lot. I had really wondered many times if it was worth the stress and cost and effort to bring Daniel here but after this I was satisfied I had done the right thing. His contributions were very valuable and I'm very happy to have fostered pan-African exchange.
   For lunch that day we went to Sanpiring, the little village just outside Labe where I had my first Guinea project in 2014. There I was shocked to learn this young girl of about sixteen I knew (she's the one who was declared my wife after she cried for two weeks after I left the first time) had been married and gone off to live with her husband. You hear about these young marriages but it's truly shocking when it happens to someone you actually knew. She was so young! I was really quite shocked. At least her husband looked young too, not some old creeper.

   And the next day we would return to Conakry! Usually its mostly a straight shot but it actually turned into a rather interesting 14 hour road trip complete with being waylaid by drunk soldiers. But that's definitely another entry! (:


Myself, Ibro, and Daniel

Related
Monica's Blog Post
All entries about Guinea

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Wednesday, August 3rd (today), Moriac, Australia - Well I just got home today from my third project in Guinea. Let me tell you, it was an ordeal getting there as well as getting back! I think I can break this down into just four entries, (1) on getting there; (2) the project itself; (3) on the drive back from the interior to the capitol; and (4) the FIVE DAYS it took to fly back.




Monday, July 11th, Moriac, Australia - I was due to leave on Wednesday, the 13th. As of Monday I was freaking out because I had sent my passport to Washington DC for the Guinean visa stamp and as of Monday it hasn't been released yet. At this point it was no longer physically possible for my passport to arrive on time. In fact I had been stressing out since the week before when I realized it was still in the Embassy in DC. I don't stress out much about things that I can control but thins like this that are entirely out of my hands can really freak me out. I was barely sleeping, constantly feeling stressed.
   I tried to contact the US Consulate on Monday and after initially having some trouble getting through the bureaucracy to actually talk to a human (they only actually answer the phone on Tuesdays and Thursdays or something and the appointment system is automated), but once one of my emails reached a human there they were actually quite helpful -- they called ME and said even though the next day was booked out they would make an emergency appointment for me. They were very careful to say they could by no means guarantee I'd be granted an emergency passport but I figured it was my only chance to save this project.

Tuesday, July 12th, Melbourne, Australia - Arriving at the consulate I began to tell the guy at the window my situation and he was like "oh, yes, you, we've been briefed about you." I had to fill out a bunch of forms, pay a $130 fee I hope will be reimbursed by the organization, and wait an hour, and... voila! they issued me a new flimsy temporary passport! My old one, by now finally in transit with DHL but a week from arriving, was cancelled. I still needed a Guinean visa but I was told the Organization's contacts in Guinea could arrange that on arrival, and I didn't even think of it until I was in transit myself but my yellow fever vaccination document was in my old passport .... could have been a big problem but they didn't ask for it on entry to Guinea -- just re-entry into Australia but that's another story.

Wednesday, July 13th, Geelong, Australia - The first frantic misshap of the actual travel occured on my way to catch the bus to the airport. The airport is about an hour and a half away but there's a direct airport bus from downtown Geelong. My housemate has to go to a train station on the outskirts of Geelong to take a train into Melbourne for work so she gave me a ride there and I was going to catch an Uber from there. I had 40 minutes, plenty of time, ... but my uber app on my phone decided THEN was the time it needed to update! It spent ten minutes updating and then still wouldn't load, as I begin to panic anew! And my prepaid phone had run out of its monthly payment just that morning and I wasn't about to put $20 more on it just for one call!! So I put in my American sim card and called a regular taxi. Succeeded in catching the taxi to the train to the plane.

Thursday, July 14th, in transit - Had a bit of a sore throat by the time I landed in Dubai after a fifteen hour flight, which progressed to stuffed up sinuses during the flight to Ghana (but the sore throat actually went away) ... and I don't know if you've ever gone through elevation/pressure changes with entirely stuffed up sinuses but it's actually agonizingly painful, feels like you're head is going to explode.
   In Ghana we landed, disembarked some passengers, and took off again. As we landed in our next stop, Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire, my seat mate my have wondered why I was leaning forward cradling my head in my hands silently rocking back and forth with tears rolling down my face, I don't know and I don't care, I'm just glad my head did not in fact explode and my eyes did not pop out (I'm really not 100% sure it's not possible for something to catastrophically burst in such conditions). The pain subsided pretty quickly after landing but my right ear remained plugged for most of the project, making me a bit hard of hearing.
   Optimistic that the trip was just one quick hop from being over I sauntered over to the connections desk ... only to find out that the flight to Conakry had been cancelled. On this occasion everyone I interacted with in the airport was extremely friendly and helpful and really made a positive impression of Cote D'Ivoire.
   Since the flight was cancelled they put me up in a hotel, which had a shuttle to take me, so no stress. During the drive there I observed that Abidjan has broad streets without too much traffic or squalor. Apparently it's the second biggest city of West Africa (and here you'be probably never heard of it before). The little hotel they put me up in was cute and the manager, a young man who looked in his mid twenties, was very friendly, though his English wasn't great. When he found out what I do he asked why I wasn't working in Cote D'Ivoire. I said I only go where I'm invited ... the next day he had printed out this really cute "invitation letter" which I promise I will link in here asap. voila:



Friday, July 15th, Conakry - I had bought a massive 250gb "microSD" memory chip for my phone, so I was looking forward to actually being able to take lots of videos even, without constantly running out of room. Well on day 1 it started borking out. Some 85% of the pictures I took resulted in unreadable files until I removed the chip and then things worked fine. It's weird though because I have been using that chip for months without a problem, but the moment I'm out in the field counting on it it completely fails!
   At this point I did succeed in recording and uploading this video, which is mostly just me telling the above story. It cuts out abruptly but all attempts to record the second half resulted in bad files so this is all you get. Anyway I pretty much just spent Friday and Saturday trying to recover from jet lag.

Sunday, July 17th, Labe - The drive from Conakry, a peninsula on the coast, to Labe in the interior, can take 8-10 hours, plus 3-4 hours of traffic in Conakry itself. Fortunately, being Sunday, there was no traffic!
   My driver one of an infinite array of Mamadous, didn't speak much English so we couldn't really talk but he seemed like a capitol fellow. The drive is always beautiful once you get out of the city as well. In Mamou, about 2/3rds of the way up, we picked up Monsieur Morlaye Damba, who had been my interpreter last year. In Labe we stayed in a hotel, and while we were (for some reason?) standing by the front door a well dressed man in a suit came in accompanied by some other guys in suits and some uniformed soldiers. He shook our hands as he went past and I was afterwords informed he is the Guinean Minister of Justice!

Monday, July 18th, Labe - we met up with some people I knew from before from the beekeeping federation, and it was good to see them, and then we greeted the regional governor in his office. And then we were off to the project site about half an hour north of town! But that's another entry!
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   By now not only has nearly a year passed, but my daily notes on the Guinea trip were ALSO on the phone that was lost in Nairobi so they're gone! ): So The last two weeks or so are going to be super condensed! I'm going to assume you don't remember my last Guinea entry, because I certainly don't!



September 2015 - Let's see I don't think I wrote about the making of wax products, which we did the last few days and everyone was very interested in it. I write about it now mainly just to illustrate (or rather literate) the numerous good pictures I got of everyone being very interested in it.



   Anyway, then I returned to Conakry. Did that take one day or two? I don't know any more! But it's a long way.

   Back in the capitol, Conakry, I was once again there at the same time as Dr Sandra, a pesticide expert. The next morning I'm still loafing in my room in my pajamas when I get a call from the lobby saying my driver was there to pick me up. Uh what? So I quickly get dressed and run down there ... and it is then that they (the guys from The Organization) inform me that we have to go to the Ministry of Agriculture to make a presentation. GEE THANKS FOR THE WARNING!!
   THEY had known about this in advance, it's not like it just came up, but somehow didn't think of telling ME about it in advance. Fortunately I have no fear of public speaking so was able to decently wing a presentation to a room full of under-secretaries and heads of branches, two reporters and the local peace corps coordinators -- but I would have really liked to have had a chance to put a power point together, which I could have easily done the night before if I had had warning!
   After that we went to another big presentation room for Sandra to give her presentation on how pesticide safety can be improved in Guinea. I found it quite interesting! I often wish I could sit in on more of other volunteer's projects.



   My dear mother had asked me for some of the cloth they make their beautiful clothes with in Guinea so we went looking for clothe, and once I'd indicated to my local colleagues what I wanted we left without buying it, since the sellers obstinantly would _not_ give a decent price seeing a white guy was the buyer, and instead we had Miss Adama, the Organization's secretary, later go back and buy that same fabric for an actual decent price.

   That evening The Organization guys took Sandra and I to a restaurant out on a pier called "Obamas" that was actually quite nice ... if you ignored the really alarming amount of trash floating in the water.



   Sandra and I were both to be taken to the airport at the same time the next day. At some point I decided I wanted to stop by the craft market on our way to the airport and talking it over with the Assistant Director he agreed to this and I asked if Sandra was on board with this and he said, I believe, sometihng along the lines of "I assume so"
   Knowing how terrible they are about communicating I asked Miss Adama again just before tehy came to pick us up if Sandra had been told of the chane in plans and she gave me a similar positive sounding yet not 100% positive answer.
   Aaand when they showed up it turns out Sandra had NOT been told we were leaving an hour earlier. It's things like this that I just find shocking -- how can it not occur to you that people involved in plans need to be told of changes of the plans? Especially when someone involved is actively reminding you??

   One last funny thing -- on Tinder, the dating app, there was no one in Conakry but a lot of medical professionals in Freetown, Sierra Leone, 80 miles to the south. I chatted with this one girl a handful of times but then I went into the interior and got busy with stuff.
   Arriving in Atlanta, Georgia, when I got to passport control and told them where I had come from, the officer promptly put on a surgical mask, gave me a surgical mask to put on, and put in a call for another officer to come over after a few minutes, also wearing a mask, to escort me to the quarantine area. There were about half a dozen of us in the waiting area, and then they took us into a little room to take our temp and stuff. All staff wearing protective clothing. And I realized the little room had a thick door with one way window, stainless steel walls, a cot bolted to the floor ... it was totally the room where they beat you with hoses before disappearing you to a plausibly denied secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe!! Fortunately they didn't do that to me.
   But now I mention the girl because when I finally got home to California I had a message from ehr saying "was that you in quarantine with me???" ... so we "met" on tinder while 80 miles apart in Africa, and then two weeks and 3,000 miles later we happened to be quarantined together in Atlanta. Funny!
   The morning after my arrival in California there was a knock on my door, it was a county health inspector there to serve me with a formal notice of quarantine. I was free to leave the house and go about my business but would need to notify them if I left the county, and had to report my temperature to the county health inspector twice a day -- to fail to do this would be a misdemeanor.
   I asked what would have happened if I came back with a fever like I did last time, and he said they'd have had an ambulance waiting for me at hte airport to take me to the back entrance of the hospital where they would put me under intense quarantine. YIKES!!

   Anyway I was officially quarantined for 21 days I believe and on day 22 I was off again to East Africa! And that is another story... which has already been told!



Ismatou, in the blue making a kind of funny face here is getting married around the time I'll be back next month so I'm really hoping I can coordinate it to attned her wedding. Recall I just barely missed a village wedding last year and I was really bummed because it seemed very interesting, so maybe I'll get my chance!


See Also: there's really too many good pictures I'd like to post! See them on flickr! Guinea is such a beautiful place I really want wait to go back!

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Day 10 - Sunday, September 6th - We had to go back to the town of Labe to visit the cybercafe to do some paperwork, so I declared that we should re-visit Sanpiring while we were there (since you'll recall our previous visit had been sadly cut short).
 Arriving in Labe (an hour from the village of Doumba) I was startled to find that my backpack, which I remembered loading up with my laptop and all other valuables to take with me, was not in fact with me. This is a bag full of things I try to have on me at all times for their safety, and now I was imagining it sitting unguarded on my veranda in the village! We tried calling our host in the village but couldn't get through.
   So I didn't have my laptop, and also my phone would not turn on at all. So things weren't going that great. Anyway after what seemed like altogether too long we were finally finished in the cybercafe and proceeded up to Sanpiring (which is just 10-15 min away).
   As we arrived there it began to rain so we took refuge in Abdul's living-room and ate. Now, I was acutely aware that I had an entourage of four: Damba (interpreter), Kamera (the driver), as well as the two training technicians from the national beekeeping federation (Khalidou and Aissa). And on top of this I couldn't talk directly to anyone other than through Damba's interpretation. So we were all sitting in the living-room and I couldn't very well keep a conversation going and the other four were all looking bored, and shortly after we finished eating Damba said hopefully to me "we will leave when it stops raining, yes?"
   And so we did. It was good to see everyone in the village again but the festive excitement of last week was gone and I felt kinda bummed I couldn't just relax and hang out there because I felt like I had four bored people on my back.
   Oh well. Next year! d:

   On the bright side I returned to the village to find my backpack safely inside my locked room. And my phone turned out just to have had a dead battery and to have failed to charge in the car.



Day 11 - Monday, September 7th - The President of Guinea was in Timbi-Madina just five kilometers down the road. Not the beekeeping federation president but the gosh darn president of the country! Also the beekeeping federation president, but he lives there.
   Most of our participants were present, but the president of the village beekeeping co-op came by and said "if anyone asks, no one was here today. Everyone was in Timbi-Madina to see the President. I don't want them to think we're disloyal." (see also in the entire history of Guinea there has only been one free and fair election ... which was the last one, so it remains to be seen if the election this upcoming October is without shenanigans).



   I had brought twenty hive tools (the yellow metal tools you see people holding in the pics) but I had actually dropped one myself by some beehives in a grove of trees in the middle of the village, so on the afternoon of this day I went looking for it accompanied by little Souleyamane (6 or 7?). As little boys do he kept trying to talk to me undeterred by my complete lack of understanding, so I just said "mhm?" "really?" and "is that so??" every now and then. We found the hive tool and then as I was headed back to the house I ran into Ismatou on her way to the Karafou accompanied by two little girls, she invited me to come with her so I turned around and with our now three little childrens paraded back toward the karafou.
   We sat there for awhile, she turned out to speak a little bit more English than I'd thought and we were kind of able to hobble along a conversation. Then we headed back home ... and at just about the same place I'd run into her we ran into Damba and Kamera, themselves headed to the Karafou! I thought about turning around again if for no other reason than it would be funny but didn't.
   Back under the orange tree we were joined by some of Ismatou's cousins and friends and absented herself for a short time and returned with a cucumber salad which we all snacked on as the sunlight faded away.



   That evening I brought up to Damba that it was my intention to leave the 20 hive tools with the participants, but I didn't know what to do since there were more than 20 participants. I'd have liked to give them simply to the 20 participants that had had the best attentance but I don't think we were actually keeping a daily attendance. Damba suggested that there were four villages represented among the participants so we could give give to each village. I wasn't terribly excited about this since there were probably something like 32 people from Doumba and 1 person each from the three other villages and it seemed kind of ridiculous to leave only five among the people here and be sending some people off with five to hopefully distribute to other people who had nothign to do with it. I really sort of intended the hive tools as specifically a present for people taking the class, not as a commodity to be distributed, so this whole distribution scheme smacked of socialistic institutional kleptomania, imo ... but again I couldn't think of any other way to distribute them. And 20 hive tools already weights something like ten pounds so I'm not going to bring 40 next time.

   And THEN Damba later informed me that they had found there to only be 18 hive tools and he wanted to severely chastise the whole group the next morning for allegedly stealing them (every time we went out to hives I handed out hive tools to the people comign along and originally this had been my intended way of distributing them, it was only after a few days of this I realized that the individuals weren't actually keeping them). I was somewhat mortified by this prospect of Damba chastising them and assured him that I didn't want any negativity and it would probably be best just to make no mention of missing hive tools whatsoever. This course took some convincing of him and I almost wanted to just tell him that I just remembered I'd only ever brought 18 just to get him to stop dwelling on the alleged theft.

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Day 5 - Monday, August 31st - On this morning we finally had a projector ready to go and ... my computer stopped working. Specifically, it would no longer log in to my own profile, I could log in to guest but not access any of my materials! I could log in in "safe mode" but it would't talk to the projector or run powerpoint. Finally I logged in on safe mode, hauled all my stuff into the public directories and logged in again as guest. To this day I haven't solved the problem, still having to log in as a guest on my own computer, and I miss all my customized settings and such. I swear whenever I'm in Africa there is just a inexplicable variety of ways my electronics start to fail.



   "They have a handicap in the mountains," Damba, my interpreter, informed me after a member of the beekeeping class had raised his hand and said sometihng, "chimpanzees."
   Later another man told a story about when he was living in Gabon: he had spent some time training a chimpanzee to be domesticated and then gave it to a family up in the mountains. Later he saw them again and asked them how the chimpanzee was, and they said "oh it was very good, we have finished eating it." :O

   In the evenings a bunch of us would usually end up sitting on the veranda or in the meeting room chatting by flashlight-light. They eat really late, dinner wouldn't usually arrive (brought by the women) until around 10pm. Until then we'd just sit around and talk, and afterwords as well. Unfortunately it would be in the local language (Foula), French, or a combination of the two. If French I could usually at least get the gist of what was being said. I'd ask Damba what was being said on occasion but unless it was a particularly good story I'd usually only get a general topic ("oh they're talking about politics"). According to my notes they were talking about marriage and wives this evening. It seems polygamy is pretty accepted here, but it's also pretty easy and normal to divorce. One man was saying he had had two wives and everything was just fine, but then the first one died and after that the second one started to become unbearable so they divorced. He has since remarried and currently has at least one wife.



Day 6 - Tuesday, September 1st - Sitting under the orange tree this afternoon after we were done with the days training, one of the older women in the class was telling Damba about her children, and he translated to me: "she has six children, four of whom are still living. One is a doctor in Canada, one is a lawyer in France, the daughter just graduated university in business and management." It always feels a little surprising to hear things like this from people who live in villages of thatched huts. You imagine they have no upward mobility, and don't get me wrong, life isn't easy there, but people who are able to get to school are able to get to college and get out of the village.


Hanging out under the orange tree was a major afternoon activity

Day 7 - Wednesday, September 2nd - in the late afternoon Damba, Kamera (our driver) and I are sitting by the crossroads (karafou) as one does. Suddenly there's a commotion, some young men are swinging big sticks at the ground just off to the side and people are running over there. It turns out a large green snake was sighted, which is believed to be venomous. The day's excitement!

   In the evening I got to talking to some of the teenage girls from my "neighborhood" of the village. It was funny they'd been hanging around on the periphery of things, then as two walked by one pointed at the other and said "she speaks english" and I said "oh really?" and she said "a little" and came and sat down with me under the orange tree, soon joined by her friends. As the darkness gathered I showed them pictures from home on my phone which they found very interesting.

Salematou, Gerais, Aissatou, Fatamata, & Salematou
it kills me that Damba ruined this picture by walking behind them at the moment I took the picture

Day 8 - Thursday, September 3rd - They had wanted a "beekeeping as a business" lesson. I don't really get nervous or stress about teaching beekeeping because I'm so well versed in it I just kind of show up and open my mouth and out comes a coherent and useful lesson plan. But being as I'm not a business consultant, when they start asking for an entire day's session on running a business I get a little anxious.
   Last year I had let my interpreter, Bara, give them a business lesson since he'd served as the interpreter for many lessons by actual business consultants. But, and maybe it's just because it's what was most easily retained in his memory, from what I could gather listening in as he spoke in French, that sounded to me like more of a lesson on all the business related cliche buzzwords.
   One interesting thing that became apparent was a deeply ingrained socialist mindset, which I remembered from last year as well. It's funny how anathema such a mindset is in America. I was trying to highlight that there are some things that they can best do as individuals, some things that it would be best for them to cooperate at on the village level, and some things it would be best for the regional organization to organize, so I had made a chart with three columns and asked them to list the pros and cons of doing things at each level ... but ALL I could get out of them were recitations of slogans about how it is best to do things together and the individual is weak etc etc etc. Personally I think there are definitely economy of scale advantages to doing things in larger groups but I believe the only real motivator is self interest and they must see an individual reward for their actions. A lot of the hives are communally owned and I think that leads to lax management as no one is individually responsible for them. Also I tried to teach them that while they're waiting for the regional organization to solve their problems, bigger organizations are much much slower to implement things and they should look to solutions on their village level in the meantime (example, waiting for the regional organization to find a way to bottle and sell their honey).
   It also became apparent that there were some serious communication problems between understanding what the regional organization's responsibilities and services were versus what the regional organization thought the villages should be doing for themselves, so I dusted off my old Learnin from when I was a communications minor in college (focusing on organizational communication!) to teach them about how clear and distinct lines of communication with designated responsible people could help them work together. I don't know why so many people act like communications is a useless major.


Damba and Kamera

   That evening Damba, Kamera and I drove into the town of Timbi-Madina five kilometers away, I think just for a change of pace. Two of the girls came along as well primarily I believe because you can get a cell phone signal in Timbi-Madina but only barely in the village of Doumba.
   In addition to the colourful African robes, in Timbi-Madina there are also the occasional women wearing black Islamic body coverings, with so small a slit for their eyes at first glance it looks like they don't have a way of seeing at all. But then you'll have two fourteen-ish year old girls come by on a motorcycle dressed African casual (t-shirt and long skirts). I'm told there's no driver's license system in Guinea. If you can afford a vehicle you can drive it (and/or if your parents can afford a vehicle and let you drive it).
   After asking around at a few little shops Kamera and Damba found what they were evidently looking for, a woman selling grilled meat on skewers from a little shop on a corner. I thought for a second of all the warnings I'd heard about eating grilled meat from roadsides in Africa, but I think that mainly applies to questionable grilled meat that has likely been kept in unhygenic conditions for hours or days -- in this case I could see the fresh meat that looked pretty good and see that it was being grilled right there in front of me. It was really good.
   ...and probably a lot safer than the salad I had later that evening which was after all uncooked and washed in local water. This whole trip I never had any intestinal discomfort other than that caused by my fear and avoidance of the hole-in-the-floor-toilet.



Day 8 - Friday, September 4th - A definite highlight of my day was Abdul, my old host from the village of Sanpiring, visiting us in Doumba. I love this man he has a quiet kind dignity, and an old weathered face that's quick to break into a smile. I learned that after last year's training he was able to significantly increase his honey production, selling several hundred dollars worth of honey (which keep in mind is a fortune there), which allowed him to repaint his house.
   We were also joined by Aissa (Aissatou actually, but not to be confused with one of the several other Aissatous in the village), the female training technician with the beekeeping federation. She had been in the capitol getting a passport so she could travel to nearby Senegal for some sort of training. She had also been present last year so she was another welcome familiar face.



Day 9 - Saturday, September 5th - by now I'd run through all my organized lessons on beekeeping and somehow filled up the day with questions and answers and miscellaneous topics. I think it's a testament to how interested the participants were that even when there was an awkward silence while waiting for someone to bring up another subject to talk about, everyone sat attentively waiting.
   Two other daily rituals are worth commenting on. (1) One of the participants, Karim, would always be boiling water in a little teapot on a small stove (by which I mean actual hot coals) on the veranda and then, after adding tea leaves, some mint leaves, and probably an alarming amount of sugar, would pour the tea from cup to cup over and over again until it had a thick froth.
   Usually around the time we finished the lesson he would use his last boiled water to boil peanuts (readily available locally) and then serve them to us while we sat under the orange tree. I thought this was a novel new way of having peanuts but then I met an American from the South who said boiled peanuts are a staple down there. Who knew!
   Saturday night found us down at the Carafou (crossroads). There wasn't terribly much going on there (though still a fair number of people hanging out). Kamera played us some music on his phone and we joked about it being a wild Saturday night in Doumba. We were joking but I'm sure I'll fondly remember that relatively quiet Saturday night at the Doumba crossroads long after I've entirely forgotten nearly any Saturday night of partying in a Western city.

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Day 4 - Sunday, August 30th - This morning we got up around the usual time (7:30ish) and, had breakfast and headed in to the town of Labe about an hour up the road. I was greatly looking forward to visiting the village of Sanpiring, near Labe, which is where I had been last year. First we had to stop by a cybercafe in town because Damba wanted to sort out some paperwork. I was getting annoyed, it was taking too long, and for example he wanted me toe mail the head office back in the Capitol asking that certificates be sent to the participants of our program, so I wrote "I'm told that we need certificates" and then he said "no, say that you are asking for them" ...which greatly annoyed me. I wouldn't ask for something without citing a reason anyway and the reason in this case is because I was told they wanted them. So I wrote "the Beekeeping Association would like the certificates mailed..." and THEN I was going to sign it simply "K" as I do short emails abut Damba, who was hovering over my shoulder, insisted I sign the email with my full name.



   From there we finally headed up to Sanpiring. I was just about giddy with excitement as I recognized landmarks along the dirt road leading to the village. At the village gate a crowd of children happened to be playing and they opened the gate and stood on either side cheering for my return. It was quite the entrance.
   As we pulled into the middle of the village and parked I noted that they seemed unusually festive. It turns out a wedding was more or less in progress.
   We got out of the car and I greeted the many people I recognized with huge smiles and hugs. "Here is Mamadou de Boba" someone said, pushing young Mamadou forward, who kind of scuffed the ground shyly. "And here is Mamadou de Yaya" Mamadou's 11ish year old brother was introduced and he smiled in his characteristically serious-for-his-age manner, "and here is your wife..." -- recall I had been informed earlier that I had a wife but I hadn't known who it was.
   My wife, as it happens, turned out to be a teenage girl of the village whom I'm told "cried for two weeks" after I left last year. I'll have you know I didn't get involved in anything scandalous that would obligate me to take a village girl as a wife and the appellation is more or less tongue in cheek (I think my mother was very worried when she heard about this). Since we don't share a language I didn't talk to her last year other than one time I showed her my pictures from home on my phone. Anyway I decided to go with it and refer to her as my wife on occasion much to Damba's amusement.
   It was interesting, I was looking forward to seeing everyone, but especially Mamadou de Boba who I felt had particularly adopted me last year; and I arrived to find I had not one particular adoptee but three -- Mamadou de Yaya also seemed particularly pleased to see me again, and that was entirely before I revealed that I had brought him a present! I had brought a large plastic bee for de Boba and a camera for de Yaya.


Mamadou de Yaya 2015, compare to similar pose last year

   Before I presented these things, almost immediately on our arrival actually, we were told that Abdul, the Mamadou's father, was at the other end of the village with most of the men, so we proceeded over there accompanied by the Mamadous. While we were on our way Damba said to me "I think we have a dilemma -- there is a wedding in progress and doubtless they will invite us to stay, but we already told [the beekeeper association president] we'd have lunch with him." I responded with probing questions like "I don't suppose we could do lunch with him another day?" ... but ultimately I had to depend on Damba's judgement about what was socially acceptable in this situation and he didn't think we should miss our appointment with the president. Further making me reluctant to cancel on him was the funny situation last year of the president and his wife coming to visit us in Sanpiring while Mamadou de Boba and I were out playing in some mud, and then on another day last year his wife had started to make dinner for me but was only informed I strongly dislike fish after it was well underway ... so didn't want to jerk him and his wife around again. Still though, I'd later learn Damba had called Sanpiring the day before and thus presumably knew there was going to be a wedding on before we had agreed to lunch with the association president ... on any case I couldn't help but feel extremely bitter that here we were in my old village where I was loving every minute of seeing everyone again and we were invited to a really interesting cultural event and Damba was in a great hurry to get out of there to go have a simple lunch with someone I'd see numerous times this year.



   Anyway where we got to where all the men were I found all the younger men seated outside on either side of the path and coming up this gauntlet was Abdul, whom I greeted with a huge hug and then was ushered in to the building there, where all the older men were seated on the floor in the big living room. They appeared to be decorating a large calabash (gourd) with fancy knotwork, and the calabash was filled with kola nuts. This was some symbolic part of joining the families for the wedding. I was given a souvenir kola nut which is now on my desk here as I write this.
   After this we returned to the part of the village where the family was, and we were compelled to at least eat a little, though Damba was becoming most frantically in a hurry to get us out of there. There were pictures taken and then I was hurriedly bundled off back into the car, which about broke my little heart because I was absolutely loving seeing everyone and really really would have liked to stick around for the wedding. One thing Abdul said, as Damba translated it: "he says he is extremely happy you are here, there have been many volunteers that passed through here before, but only you have returned."

   And then we were off, driving the hour back to Doumba, and I was doing my best not to feel bitter. I'd been looking forward to seeing everyone in Sanpiring again for a year and what fortune there was a wedding on and ... here we were hurrying away.
   First we stopped again in Labe to visit Khalidou's family. Khalidou you'll recall is the 32 year old training technician with the association, who had been with us this whole time as well. He has a cute family, a precocious daughter just past being a toddler and a slightly older and much shyer son. Later I asked him how he met his wife, wondering if maybe he met her in the course of his duties traveling from village to village teaching beekeeping -- nope, I was told "oh it's the tradition here that the man's mother arranges it. He didn't meet his wife till the wedding day." (!!) Well it seemed to be working out.



   An hour back to Doumba, and the association president lived in the town of Timbi-Madina about five kilometers the other direction from Doumba (ie we could have easily gone over there on any other day.... but I'm not bitter oh no). Timbi-Madina kind of reminded me of what I imagine some frontier town of the Old West would be like, it was bustling with activity, and resounded with the sounds of saws and hammers as people made gates and furniture and things in their shops right on the side of the road. A ten year old boy was busy fixing bikes in front of one shop, no child labor laws here. It was market day so the center of town was really bustling with people in their brightly coloured dresses and gowns, and we had to slowly wade through the crowd in our landcruiser.



   We arrived at the association president's place right on time around two, and lunch was alright, I felt bad that I'd been put out of a mood to really relax and go with the flow. After that we returned to Doumba and we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting under the lemon tree, and I tried not to think about how I was just sitting under a lemon tree while I could probably be at a really cool cultural event in Sanpiring...

I look really awful in this pic but everyone else looks good so I guess I'll take one for the team

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Day 2 - Friday, August 28th - As often the case things were a bit slow getting started. This first day it rained much of the day, though I don't think that effected much. Some of the members of the beekeeping class assembled briefly to sort things out but it was generally understood we would start the next day. Fortunately we did go out and open some beehives to get an idea of what we'd be dealing with, which was nice because last year we didn't get around to actually opening any beehives until several days in.



   A major highlight was that evening, as we're sitting in the flashlight-light after dinner, my phone rang, my phone from home. It was a (530) area code, which is the Davis (Nor Cal) area where I went to school. I sometimes get wrong number calls from that area code since my phone is also still (530). Anyway I almost didn't answer it, thinking it was likely another wrong number and would cost me over a dollar a minute, but decided "who was that" would bother me too much if I didn't pick it up.
   As it turns out it was UC Davis itself. I had applied for a job as the head beekeeper basically, managing the beehives belonging to the honeybee research lab there. They were calling me back for an interview!!!
   "So let's see, you're about seven hours south of here aren't you" she said, referring to where I live in California.
   "hahaha oh no I'm about 6,000 miles away at the present moment -- I'm in the middle of Guinea." Anyway, reception wasn't great, there was a lot of "what was that again?" so it was agreed that a phone interview probably wouldn't work where I was, but she said they could wait until I get back for an interview. I tried to say I'd drove up when I got back but I don't think that got through, reception was really bad.
   Anyway, this development made me really excited.



Day 3 - Saturday, August 29th - I never set an alarm clock the whole time I was there, relying on roosters crowing and voices outside reaching a certain level. Typically around 4am the rain would pour down with a roar (see also: aluminum roof), around 5am the first call to prayer would warble out through the darkness. I always love to hear the meuzzen, though I wouldn't savor the idea of having to get out of bed and pray every morning at 5. Sometime between 7:00 and 7:30 I'd get out of bed and have breakfast of a piece of fresh baguette. They tried to ply me with butter, mayonaise, or honey but I liked to just tear off as much of the baguette as I wanted and sit on the veranda eating it with no further adieu. At first I tried to drink the accompanying nescafe but after a few days I realized I was barely drinking any of it and switched to tea. At some point Kamera (the driver) would turn on the land cruiser to warm up the engine and I'd jump up to go plug my phone in to the car charger, like a chicken seeing chicken feed being tossed out. If the car was at all dirty Kamera would also start cleaning it at this time, truly he takes his charge of the vehicle seriously.
   Finally at, I really don't know what time, about an hour and a half later maybe, we would begin every day when a critical mass of people had arrived, the African way of doing things. (:
   A portable generator had been acquired and positioned just outside out building and it would be turned on at this time, and as always people would flock to the power plugs like pigeons on bread crumbs to charge their phones.



   That evening there was an important soccer match being televised between two European teams, which Kamera in particular wanted to watch, so in the evening Damba, Kamera & I went to the karafou (crossroads), where for a few thousand francs a person (ie less than a dollar) we were admitted into a little room that I guess would be the Doumba cinema -- it had benches set up so we could all watch this small TV that was affixed to the wall and had the game on (powered by a generator just outside). There were at least a dozen men in there to watch the game. I wasn't so into the game, even soccer (the One True Team Sport) I can't really get into unless it's the world cup (and national honor is therefore at stake), but it was an interesting cultural experience watching it in this rudimentary fashion.

This picture is kind of out of place in the text but had to evenly distribute the pictures -- this is some of the beehives we looked at earlier

Much Later - Sept 14th - Despite the initial assurance they'd wait to interview me for the bee lab job, which I confirmed later in the week by email, and had then emailed them again a few days before my return to my states expressing my eagerness to come up there to interview ... upon my arrival in the states I received an email saying they had filled the position. Broke my little heart, as the job would have been absolutely perfect. ):

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Day 1 - Thursday, August 27th -Shortly after I got up and had breakfast (8:00?) the Winrock driver, Kamera, arrived to pick me up. He was actually significantly early, unusual in Africa, and caught me still eating. The drive out to the field took about eight hours, of which at least an hour of it was just getting out of the capitol. The capitol, Conakry, is on a long peninsula, and even the inland part of it is a long skinny strip along the road, it is a very oblong city.
   After about an hour the buildings start to finally thin out and one finds oneself on the road winding through green canyons. Since Kamera does not speak English we didn't speak much, but it's interesting how you can get along with someone without being able to talk directly, and I think Kamera is fantastic. He's also a great driver, I've had a lot of wild rides in Africa but never felt unsafe with him behind the wheel. The road winds through the occasional village or roadside market, and I had noticed there were always little tables with liter bottles of some red juice. Last year I had noticed them and another volunteer and I had wondered aloud what this very popular beverage sold universally by the roadside was. Well this time I later asked someone and was told they are bottles of petrol! Of course! There's very few normal gas stations, so the ubiquitous motorbikes buy their gas in one liter repurposed water bottles by the road side!!
   Drove through the town of Kindia with it's bustling marketplace and moldy looking old colonial buildings (this is the last place I'd see an abundance of multi story buildings, as well as women wearing pants (as opposed to skirts or dresses)), and then after another few hours arrived at the town of Mamou where we picked up my interpreter, Morlaye Damba:



   He was an interesting fellow. As he got in the car and I asked him how he was he said "oh just trying to make ends meet," which I thought was a slightly weird first thing to say to someone. Then he was particularly insistent that he'd show me his resume as soon as we had a computer up. He's fluent in English, French, and three local languages, and was working in a radio station in Liberia during the civil war there. "the things I've seen [shakes head] you wouldn't believe."
   Shortly outside Mamou we crossed a large river which I would later learn was the River Bafing, which is one of the major headwaters of the River Senegal, one of Africa's major rivers. Before all this I didn't even know there was a "Senegal River," but there is and it apparently was a semi-mythical "river of gold" in the European imagination for centuries before they finally were able to explore it. continued through the hilly terrian up into Dalaba ("the Switzerland of Africa"). Short pit stop at the family home of the Winrock country director where I saw his nephew, who had been part of my training last year. Shortly after the town of Pita we turned off the paved road, picked up Khalidou at the villagelet there, and drove for about forty minutes down a dirt road. Then we turned off THAT road and drove through grassy pastures on just two worn wheel-paths for about five minutes, occasionally having to stop for goats to get out of the way. Then we came to the low wall around the village of Doumba, Khalidou got out and opened the gate for us and we drove in.



   Before us were the two pictured beautiful large huts. I thought we had arrived, but in fact we drove between them, around a few more other small buildings and large huts before finally arriving at our destination:



   Now, when one says "village," I would picture a close cluster of huts or houses surrounded by fields. As it happens, both Doumba and the other Guinean villages I've visited actually have their agricultural fields within the outer fence of the village, between the houses. As such, the interior of the village is a green leafy place with internal trails upon which one finds oneself surrounded by lush greenery. The entire thing is surrounded by a fence / wall outside of which the goats, sheep and cows graze all day. Inside it is divided into family units a few acres in size in which several immediate families lived who are all brothers/sisters/cousins, though I'm sure their neighbors in the next section are only marginally less closely related, as evidenced by the fact that each village seems to have a mish-mash of only a very few last names. I was housed in a new "modern house," that had just been built, they had hurried to complete it for our arrival in fact and it still smelled of fresh paint. The neighboring structures consisted of a smallish kitchen hut (no chimney, the smoke just filters out the roof thatch), and a large beautiful hut of the typical local design, with a roof that comes down to enclose a walkway around the outside. In this hut lived the grandmother of my host family with several of her grandchildren. I'm told her son offered to make her a "modern house" but she declined, saying "this is the hut I lived all my life in, this is where I lived with my husband, this is where I'll live the rest of my life."

   As for a toilet I only had a hole in the floor (which appeared to lead to a tube leading out at an angle so not just splashing right down and the accompanying stink), which scared me into using it as infrequently as I could stand, but I survived and "it builds character" right?

Doumba had a really nice mosque for a village its size

   About once a day in the early evening, typically after Damba and Kamera had returned from the mosque, we would walk to the karafou (crossroads), which took about five minutes winding through the village. At the crossroads the main (dirt) road to the town of Timba-Madina intersected with a much smaller road leading to toward the interior of the village on one side and out to another satellite village on the other. Here there were two tiny kiosks made of corrugated aluminum sheets, which sold various sundry things (but not, for example, anything so exotic as a coca cola), a small generator puttered away to one side for purposes I never learned, and there was a "restaurant," in which a young woman with a stove and a pot might make someone something, but mostly I think she chatted with her friends -- the older girls liked to sit on the bench there by the "restaurant," while mostly men sat by the kiosk across the road, and the young boys seemed like prefer to sit near the generator. As many people would pass this way either to visit the kiosks or catch a ride to town, it was a natural place to hang out and see what was going on.

   In the evening we returned to our veranda, where Damba, Kamera, Khalidou and I were joined by a number of other men from the neighborhood who would also be in the class. We ate from communal platters at around 10pm. Most of the conversation was in French or Foula and when I'd inquire what it was about Damba would usually only give me a general topic ("we're talking about politics,") which was a little disappointing.

   Khalidou was another individual who would feature prominently in the proceedings. He had been present last year but had kind of taken a back seat, sitting with the participants, this time he had more of a leadership role. With a bachelor degree in agriculture from a local university, he is the beekeeping federation trainer, and I am quite impressed with his level of beekeeping knowledge and ability to teach. At 32 he is just a year younger than me and being as he's employed in kind of the same thing as me I feel like he's sort of my Guinean doppleganger. On this first evening he alarmed me a bit by saying we'd probably meet my wife later -- I was afraid it was going to be this female trainee from last year who had slipped me a note saying she loved me but fortunately it turned out not to be her...

   And so we set the scene for the next ten days (:


The classic "chase a tire around" game pictured in depictions of the 1920s is still alive and well in the African village.

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Sunday, August 23rd - The day before the trip I found myself particularly stressed, not so much about packing so much as a number of things that needed to be sorted out before I left. Among other things, I bought my tickets for the October trip to East Africa. The group in Tanzania I've been planning to work with, the main contact has been extremely difficult to get ahold of and when I finally had a friend in Nairobi call him (he always asks me to call him in the afternoon, which is the middle the night for me) he apparently said "call in September" to find out if everything is ready for the project ... which as you can imagine increased my frustration with trying to plan it. But then I got a nice email from the Beekeeping cooperative of Pemba Island, the northernmost of the Zanzibar islands. I had contacted them as a backup plan to Tanzania but they seem so much easier to work with...

   I'm thinking of trying to fit both in though.

   I took most of the evening off though because my dear friend Asli was passing through LAX with a seven hour layover, on her way to Fiji to take up a position as a third mate on a ship there. It's funny because last time I was her was a little less than a year ago when I myself had a ten hour layover in Istanbul.
   It was interesting to note that for her to legally immigrate or even visit the states would be a huge process, but, without even dealing with the US embassy or consulate she was able to get a transit visa on a ticket from Istanbul to Fiji, get stamped for a "transit visa" on arrival and walk right out of the terminal to disappear into Los Angeles.
   As it happens of course she has no intention to illegally immigrate and to do so would throw away her huge investment in time and money in her merchant marine licensing (US authorities who are reading this please take note and keep it in mind when granting her a tourist visa eventually!)

   We had just time to drive down to the Santa Monica Pier and stroll about there for a bit before rushing back to the airport. Unfortunately didn't have time for In-N-Out as we'd hoped -- the line was around the building. I feel well satisfied though that we made the most of the time, the pier and surroundings were suitably emblematic of the LA area.



Monday, August 24th - Got up at 5:30 for my 8:45am flight. And then began packing ;D
   Last time I was really freaked out because I didn't seem to have forgotten anything, which just seemed wrong. Well I don't have that worry this time. Despite distinctly remembering unplugging my phone charger and picking up the solar phone charger that would have been so useful on this trip, I can't find them in my luggage. Very irritating, I guess I must have set them down somewhere between retrieval and putting them in the luggage. ):
   And before anyway says "you wouldn't have forgotten anything if you had packed the day before! I'll point out that I needed my phone to be charging that night so the one tihng I forgot I couldn't have packed earlier anyway.
   As it happens I have another charger that's for the in-country phone I've been provided with, but it doesn't seem to charge my phone very fast, charging overnight last night (in country now) didn't even get it about 80%.
   Also it means I can't transfer pictures from my phone to my computer. :-/

In Flight Movie Review Intermission!
The Hobbit III: Battle of Five Armies - D+ I loved the Hobbit book, though granted I was in elementary school when I read it, but I'm going to wildly guess there was just a chapter or two dedicated to this battle, and there's a reason for that. While an important event if you dedicate an entire novel / feature-length-film to one battle, we've really gotta care about it and/or it needs to be done extremely well. You could make a movie about Gettysberg or Waterloo or such, but I think almost any entirely fictional battle is just going to be a lot of pointless killing in movie form. And that's what this was, CGI orcs and dwarves and elves throwing eachother around for 2+ hours. On top of this the orc commander suddenly appears on top of another mountain that wasn't there before, and though it's snowy on top everyone seems easily able to teleport there from the battleground and/or see what's going on there? Or how about when characters trekked to some other fortress presumably hundreds of miles away and returned, also during the battle? I'm not talking about the wizards going to renamed Dol Guldor in the south, but that made up place in the West. Anyway, I thought it was pretty terrible, probably the only reason I didn't give it an F was out of my tremendous respect for JRR Tolkien's original story.
The Water Diviner - A and I don't give many As! Russell Crowe as an Australian farmer and water diviner sets off to look for three sons, all of whom failed to return from the Battle of Gallipoli four years prior. Also his wife commmits suicide, which I guess really bummed him out, but obviously opening it up for him to fall in love with a Turkish woman, which I'm not even calling a spoiler because who wouldnt' see that a mile away. Anyway for some reason, despite not having had any relatives involved to my knowledge, the Battle of Gallipoli always seems particularly poignant to me, maybe it's because I lived in Australia, have been to Gallipoli, and fell in love with a Turkish woman myself (and whom I'd seen just the day before). Anyway I think the movie was well done, and did a good job of portraying the Turks of the era as a rich and dignified culture torn between a disintegrating empire and Turkish nationalism.
Gunman - B- A solid running-around-shooting-pepole of the "trying to find out why they're trying to kill me" variety. Noteworthy aspect to comment on, in the beginning the protagonist and his compatriots are working as private security for aid agencies in Congo, and then most of the action occurs eight years later, where we find him digging water wells in the Congo (an interesting random parallel to the Water Diviner, which involves some well digging), and all of his compatriots are now filthy rich running their own aid agencies. I had no idea aid work was the path to the swanky life! ;D


Tuesday, August 25th -Other than those movies, nothing much to remark on about the flights. Orange County -> Minneapolis -> Paris CDG (where they still don't know how to queue for security check, but I got randomly waved into the flight crew line, where I think security was much more laid back and friendly) -> Sierra Leone (didn't de-plane) to Conakry. Arrived in Conakry at 17:30, which if I'm doing the math right is 25.75 hours after my plane had taken off in California. It took another hour and a half to wind through the narrow crowded streets of Conakry to my hotel at the end of the peninsula.


Wednesday, August 26th - For my own reference, this is the Golden Plaza Hotel that they've put me in this time. It has a nice restaurant in it, the food is downright good, and the internet works better than it does at home (that being said, it's been down this last hour, but hey). Generator kicks right on when the power goes out, AC works ... but my room is a cell with no window. There's a window, on the side wall of an adjoining utility closet which I have a curtained window that looks into. So the level of outdoor light and fresh air in here is dungeon status. And the bed takes up most of the space in the room so it's very dungeonesque. I'd ask to be put in the hotel I was in last time, which is right around the corner ... but internet is lifeblood and it mostly works here. When I get back into the city I'm definitely requesting a room with an actual window though. I don't care if it gets street noise, that's preferable to being in the Bastille here.

   Speaking of when I return, usually there's a day or two of lollygagging about upon my return to the capitol, which is generally not very fun because, like today, I end up with nothing to do but sit in my cell. But I google image searched the islands off the coast here and ... wow! And then looked at the tripadvisor comments on them and they're totally doable in a day trip! I'm so doing that when I get back!

   But back to the present, today I spent way too many hours cooped up in this cell. Oh I went out and walked around a bit, but this town isn't entirely safe even in broad daylight (last time I was year one of the other volunteers got picked up by some soldiers allegedly for photographing buildings he wasn't supposed to photograph, and they took him back to their barracks to pressure him into bribing them. Though ultimately they let him go not terribly worse for the wear, I'm still particularly leery of soldiers in this town. I did find my favorite Turkish place from last time I was hear and had lunch there.

   Also exchanged money for 8300 Guinean Franks to the dollar, thus making me once again a millionaire (1.8 million franks to my name at the moment). I always find it novel that the official exchange rate (7300:1) is just an average and you can actually beat it. In industrialized European countries I don't know how one can do that, usually everywhere that'll exchange money will only do so at a rate significantly advantageous to the broker in comparison to the exchange rate, but dealing with individual money exchangers in Africa I've frequently been able to significantly beat the rate (and by me, I mean the savvy Winrock staffmember assisting me).



   It is presently Wednesday evening. Tomorrow morning I head up country to the project site in the field. Immediately prior to beginning one of these projects it always feels a bit like walking to the front of a big lecture hall with no idea what you're about to say. Getting to the podium, turning around and seeing all eyes on you ... and you just start talking. By which I mean, it's impossible to plan what I'm going to say/teach/do, every situation is different and I won't know until I get there. But thousands of dollars have been spent to get me here so there's certainly pressure. And I don't feeeeel like I have anything that valuable locked away in my head to share. I think I would have been more terrified before my first project if I'd known what I was getting into. I think I would have been more terrified on my second project, except I knew by some miracle I had made it through the first one ... seemingly with flying colors. It still marvels me that it works.

aggienaut: (Numbat)

   To break from the narrative again, presently I'm taking a creative writing class at the local community college. Or at least trying to. So far I haven't been able to actually sign up for it officially, because WR 11 "Writing Short Fiction," has a prerequisite, and unlike real college where you could ignore prereqs at will, the system won't let me register without taking WR 201 "Intro to College Writing." And what's more, I can't sign up for THAT either, because THAT hasa prereq: WR 301 "Intro to Writing." And furthermore, THAT has a prereq: RD 370 "Reading for Success," which has a corequisite, RD 371 "Reading Lab." ... are you freaking kidding me?? That sounds like a kindergarten class! I sent an email to admissions politely asking if since I have a bachelor of arts degree I can be excused from "intro to college writing" and everything prerequisite to that. I'd think at most they'd maybe want confirmation that I have the degree, nope, they want me to have my transcript sent to them with the classes that meet the requisite requirements highlighted. But even if I didn't have that to go on, are you kidding me they want people to successfully pass four dumb classes before they'll be allowed to try writing short fiction?

   But that's not the rant I meant to write right now. Actually I wanted to share something I'd written for class. The teacher has obligingly allowed me to fully participate while we try to figure out if I can be excused from fingerpainting "reading for success."



   The following is for an assignment where we were to describe a character by their actions rather than extensive physical description. It's not actually fiction but shhhhh. Takes place during the Guinea project six months ago:


There’s an App For That
   We’re sitting on the porch in the dark, just watching the rain and the constant lightning that flashes silently over the corrugated metal roofs of the other cottages in the village, when an idea strikes me. I take a little notepad out of my pocket and write the word “stolid” in it. Within 24 hours my only pen would be lost, and this would be the only word in the notepad two weeks later. It was the appropriate word to describe Baro.
   The long warbling call to prayer suddenly breaks out, from Baro’s phone.
   “Come, let’s break fast.” He says to me with a smile on his stolid face. Other people are already coming by, someone hands us umbrellas, and we step onto the volcanic gravel of the village paths, while the rain pours down around us in big fat cold drops. Baro hobbles along with a pronounced limp in his left leg, we make a little informal procession under the umbrellas, around some cottages, between tall stalks of corn, past some round thatched huts.

Tea By Moonlight
   Most days, if it wasn’t too wet, Baro would spend the hours after the breaking of the fast tending a teakettle over a little fire of coals, squatting just off the porch for hours. He made it from loose leaf tea, repeatedly pouring it from the kettle into a tin cup and back into the kettle. He’d spend an hour or two at this, like a long slow ritual, as the moon slowly rose overhead. With no electricity, you become acutely aware of the phase of the moon, especially since Ramadan and fasting wouldn’t be over until the moon finished its cycle.
   With nothing but the light from the moon and the stars, and the orange glow of the coals under the kettle, I would think about how very much like his nomadic ancestors Baro looked at this moment.

Venn Diagrams
   Later, when we’d gotten a generator that growled away under a nearby tree, Baro gave a presentation on business planning, standing in front of the room in slacks and a collared shirt, pointing with a pointer at diagrams he’d drawn on a giant flip-pad of paper as he explained them in French to the attentive audience. Flow charts, cluster-diagrams, key words, it would have fit in just fine in any board-room.
   As he hobbled out of the building his eye caught an herb he recognized in a thicket by the path. He slowly bent down and plucked a sprig, holding up, with a broad smile on his rounded face,
   “This is very good for blood pressure!”
   “This is very good for digestion!” he’d say later about a different herb.
   “This is very good for achy joints” he’d say still later, proudly holding another sprig of foliage. And then he acquired some aloe vera, somewhere, and attributed all of the above and more to it. Thereafter every day after the breaking of the fast he’d carefully, lovingly, ritualistically, slice off a sliver of his tapered aloe vera blade and eat it like it was the sacred wafer.

Connections
   One of his proudest possessions was a book sized solar panel, with which he could charge his phone. He’d prop it up on the ground when the sun was shining and collect enough energy to make a phone call. Once a day he called his family, back in Mali. Born in Timbuktu, he’d recently migrated to Guinea to avoid the instability back home. I wondered how long it had been since he’d seen them. I also wondered if we’d be able to get out of Guinea ourselves, with the burgeoning ebola outbreak in the capitol, Mali could become our only way out. He offered me some aloe vera, but I still got sick, and ended my stay lying in bed in the capitol, coughing, listening to the rain and the long warbling call to prayer.


Oops I guess he wasn't wearing western business attire at the time. Ah well, there's your fiction.

aggienaut: (Numbat)

July 11th, Friday - After ten days in the field it was finally time to return to "civilization." And by civilization I mean spend most of a week in the crowded, dirty capitol of Canakry, ground zero for the burgeoning "worst ebola outbreak in history." But at least I'd be able to shower again!!

   The Organization's landcruiser came up from Mamou, where the other volunteer (Edie) has been working, and after many rounds of photographs catching every combination of us, Bara and I were off!
   The several-hour journey to Mamou was mostly uneventful, as we wound around Guinea's lush green hills. The rain was only a sporadic sprinkle so I could see mountainous landscape of "the Switzerland of Guinea" much better than I'd been able to on the way up (when it had been pouring).



   Arrived at the hotel in Mamou at the same time Edie and Ibrim (the Organization's country director) were pulling in from whereever they had been. After hellos, Edie retired to her room and wasn't seen again that evening. Ibrim, Bara and I reconvened about half an hour later (19:30) to break fast for the day. In many ways it was similar to breaking fast in the village, after they all the men got together and prayed, large bowls that looked just like the bowls used in the village were brought out and everyone sat either on the ground or small stools to eat it with their hands. The food was very similar to that in the village (millet soup, for example), but had a different flavor, which I found an exciting change.

   After breaking the fast, Bara and I continued our tradition of sitting on the porch idly watching the moon for about half an hour. It was a nice pleasant clear evening, with swallows swooping about in the day's last light to catch insects.
   Shortly, it was dinner time. Bara, Ibrim and the driver and I got in the landcruiser and drove through town (we were just on the end of the town). I don't like to unnecessarily perpetuate stereotypes, but most African towns aren't very pretty. We slogged through a traffic jam of beat up vehicles while around us throngs went about their business trying to sell things to one another on the dirty medians. It was dark by the time we arrived at our destination, the house of the president of an agricultural cooperative. We parked and headed down a not-very-impressive alley. Entered the side of a compound, and as I stepped over the rough hewn stones I thought to myself how very much this setting probably resembled a medieval village. I was startled to notice a red glow coming out of one door, and as we passed it I looked in and saw it was coming from a large oven -- several young men were vigorously engaged in baking loaves of bread in there. We entered the house and proceeded down a nondescript hallway, but true to form, at the end of it we turned a door and entered a room that was like a little nest of civilization -- cozy, clean and well lit, with a big screen tv on one side. Edie would later report that when she'd been there for dinner the tv had started smoking.
   We were greeted by the coop president and someone (his brother?) else who was there with him. His wife brought us plates of food, which had some meat of surprisingly decent quality on them.

   Back at the hotel I was very excited, veritably giddy, with the prospect that I could finally take a shower. I'd been told after 7pm they turn on the generator and thus there's water pressure and hot water. What I hadn't been told was that then there's ONLY scalding hot water!! My excitement quickly turned to alarm when I realized it was too hot to shower under and no amount of twiddling the cold water handle would have any effect!!! I had to make do with little more than some desultory attempts at splashing myself with scalding water.




July 12th, Saturday - Continued the journey to the capitol. Once again several hours of driving through beautiful countryside. It was raining off and on and some huts we passed were steaming in the morning sun. I desperately wanted to get a picture of this beautiful occurrence but alas I only succeeded in getting a lot of bad blurry shots out the car window. We made a very short detour to visit a pretty epic waterfall along the way:


(Pictures don't do it justice, see this video I made there!)

   At "Kilometer 36" outside Conakry we stopped in at Ibrim's house. His family hadn't seen him for two weeks and in a few days he's off on another project so they were all very excited to see him. I don't know how long its been since Bara saw his family, who are still in Mali. There I was fed lunch (Edie was still fasting during the day), and leaving Ibrim and Bara there to rest and recouperate in this much nicer setting than the city, Edie and I continued with the driver into the city.

   Shortly after checking in to the hotel someone knocked on Edie's door, he was there to finish grouting her shower. I was very excited to finally have a decent shower, though they had failed to secure the showerhead and so it shot out at me. Third World Problems.
   Its these easily fixable problems that are the most baffling. Why couldn't they properly secure the showerhead? I think its a sort of work ethic thing. Back home, if you do a shitty job at work, such as not properly installing a fixture, you're probably getting fired, but out here, "good enough" is good enough, and "good enough" is all very relative.


July 14th, Monday - Went into the Organization's office this morning, because USAID was supposed to show up at 11:00. Edie kept saying "they won't come, they never come" but around 10:50 they said tehy were running a little late but were on their way. They updated us again at 11:15 saying there was bad traffic ... and finally after 11:30 it was announced they weren't coming at all. Were they ever coming??? One of life's great mysteries.

   Another volunteer had just arrived from the states. Apparently he had first arrived in March but they sent him back home after only a day because of the Ebola outbreak... but now the outbreak is literally a hundred times worse and his project is NOW going forward.

   Edie wanted to go the craft markets so we went over there just prior to lunch. I've avoided such souvinir shopping in the past since I hate shopping, buy let me tell you I made off with some sweet loot. I have a thing for decorated (cow) horns. I really want a nice drinking horn but in my travels I've so far been flummoxed on this. Did find some really nice "musical" horns. The noise they make is kind of a "flooomp" so they're more suited for hanging on the wall then putting on concerts with, but they're very nice looking. Also got a large wooden spork ( / backscratcher??) as a wedding present for my friend whose wedding in France I would soon be attending. The Organization's accountant was with us as translator and negotiator and managed to get the prices cut by at least half from the original offer on all items bought. I think one item ended up getting knocked down by 2/3rds of its price.
   After this shopping Edie wanted to eat at the nearby Palm Hotel -- "the only nice hotel in Conakry." I ordered a $20 hamburger, which I asked for no tomato on and even though it wasn't an option, I figured for a burger that cost more than a local might make in a month they could god damn find a way to put a slice of god damn pineapple on it .... no luck, I got a shitty looking burger with a tomatoe on it, and no pineapple. The very nice seating area was overlooking some tide pools that were actually not covered in trash so I really wanted to go poke around down there and see what exciting things I might find in the tide pools, but the hotel wouldn't allow us down there.

My sweet loot, as seen hanging from my bunk on the ship in Sweden later in the trip

   Edie left this day.

   I had been kind of uncomfortable all day, but it wasn't until that evening that I suddenly realized I had had a sore back all day, exactly the way my back hurts when I'm getting sick. I didn't feel sick yet but I realized bad times were ahead.

   At ten thirty that evening there was a knocking on my door. It was some guy holding a cell phone, which he proferred to me and on the other end of the line the Organization's accountant told me he was going to pick me up at 8:00 the next morning, not the previously mentioned 9:00. I thought it a bit odd that rather than find the phone number for the phone they'd given me they actually sent a messenger with a phone. Odd.

Big organized soccer games regularly took over city streets

July 15th, Tuesday - Lay in bed in the morning feeling awful -- sore throat, sore back, runny nose, general feeling of fatigue. Interesting fact, what are the initial symptoms of ebola before you die by bleeding out your eyes? Sore throat, sore back, runny nose, general feeling of fatigue.
   But at least it was raining out so I lay in bed at 5am listening to the rain and the call to prayer that seemed to go on for an hour. Went to breakfast at 7 and commenced to sit in the lobby at 8 as instructed. 8:30, 9:00, 9:30 rolled around... Every half hour or so I'd text the organization's staff and they'd tell me they were on their way. Just like the USAID staff, I wonder if its a thing here to say you're on your way when you haven't even left yet. I really really would have liked to lie in bed longer but instead I was stuck sitting in a lobby possibly dying of ebola for three hours until they finally showed up at 11:00.
   And then I was very surprised to suddenly meet another American who had been staying in the same hotel as me since yesterday that they organization hadn't thought to tell me about. He'd just come from another project and had apparently spent most of the day before in the custody of some soldiers who had accosted him in town and been very disappointed to find he only had $50 on him for them to take.

   Also learned the other newly arrived volunteer had been unable to make it to the interior due to some striking workers blocking the roads out of town, so he'd been stranded for the day at Kilometer 36.


   At around 5 the driver took me to the airport on the outskirts of town, for my 9pm flight. A guard at the entrance to the terminal tried to jokingly tell me I had to pay him to take my luggage in, but when I laughed and tried to walk passed him he stopped me and insisted. I turned on my heel and grabbed my driver, whom I returned with. While the driver berated the guard I walked through into the terminal.
   Now, realistically speaking, I considered it unlikely I had ebola, though not entirely implausible. But what did seem overwhelmingly plausible to me was that they wouldn't want to let anyone with ebola-like symptoms to fly out into the international air travel network. So I was filled with a fair amount of trepidation was I walked past the watchful eyes of some people in white lab coats by the entrance. Did everything I could not to have a coughing fit while near them, and made it safely past them into the terminal before breaking out in a highly suspicious fit of coughing.

   I'd once crossed the border from Jordan into Egypt where they took everyone's temperature as they crossed the border. I was kind of expecting something thorough like that but other than the guys in labcoats at the entrance there didn't appear to be any attempt at quarantine. I was greatly relieved to be able to leave without that hassle but it also seemed wildly unsafe to me that they weren't being more vigilant about the "worst ebola outbreak in history."

   I also found, as I miserably made my sick way through the air over the next 24 hours that the possibility I might have ebola worried me even more once I wasn't in Guinea. If I had ebola in Guinea, well then, the consequences aren't significant, I'm just death number 867, end of story. But as I traveled through the Paris airport and tried not to cough on people in Frankfurt the idea that I might possibly have ebola and could be spreading it all over the world started to really gnaw on me.

aggienaut: (Numbat)

July 7th, Monday - Day Six: We finally had a new generator, so even though we were going out into the field I left my computer and phones plugged in and left the generator running, to be turned off by others when everything was charged. Once we'd gotten that sorted out we accompanied the president of the national beekeeping federation an hour south to his home village. There the beehives were kept in a veritable jungle, which was fun. I've always had an affinity for jungles, possibly because the very earliest thing in life I can remember is being in the jungles of Brazil.



   I noticed something along the way. One of the beekeepers in San Pirii has a green "SMHS CHEER" jacket. Another had a shirt ostensibly advertising a 5k in Scantron, Pennsylvania, but being as it also had among the list of causes "celebrity rabies" I suspect it may have something to do with the show The Office. This fellow at a shop along the way had a shirt emblazoned with "Alabama State Youth Beef EXPO 2009" ... another had a shirt for some American church, and odds are the guy was Muslim. Clearly the Salvation Army or someone is exporting thrift store shirts here, which is all well and good, fantastic really, but it results in people in Africa randomly looking like hipsters!

   I also got my first inkling this day that the country's previous dalliance with socialism may have left lasting impressions. People were talking about the beekeeping federation itself as the entrepreneurial unit. "Strengthening the co-ops" to solve all their problems. That's all well and good, but the individual beekeepers are the ones trying to earn a profit here, they're the only self-motivated unit. The Federation and cooperatives must be able to support them, and the Federation should buy and sell honey to that end, but I think its a backwards idea to think the whole thing will maintain momentum from the top down.
   I showed them pictures of the very good honey processing plant in Ethiopia, saying, "this is in Ethiopia, Ethiopia is not rich, there's no reason you can't do that here" and the President responded that "well they have very organized coops there!"


   Returning home I found that because I had left my computer on, it had charged up to 100% and then charged down all the way to 0%. So I had lost what charge I'd started the day with.

   This should have been in last week's update perhaps because it applies to every day, but here it is: they had put me in a house with a "western style toilet" -- but without running water it won't self-refill. You really learn to appreciate how much water it takes to flush a toilet when you have to fill the bowl by hand each time.



July 8th, Tuesday - Day Seven: When they told me there was another village they wanted to visit that was 3 kilometers away by forest path or 30 km around by road, I eagerly noted that I'd like to walk there. A parade of us beekeepers trooped in single file through the beautiful forest, among tall ferns and past cute huts. Most of the beekeepers carried some kind of load atop their head, from bee suits to boots and gloves. Two motorcycles took the roundabout way to meet up with us, and Bara was on one of those. I felt bad for the beekeepers doing all this walking and apparently not even allowed to drink water during the day during ramadan.
   Arrived in the village of Sala. Of course by then it was time to pray. Then we headed out to the beehives. Here many were placed directly on the ground, which is undesirable (bees don't like it and its easier for pests to get in). We split into two groups and also made more of an effort than usual to make sure than new people were actually going through the hives, not the same people over and over again (its hard for me to monitor this because (a) at first I'm overhwlemed by all the new faces and mostly (b) everyone looks the same in a bee suit!). When the groups reconvened some women from the other group who had been kind of the the periphery on previous days proudly announced they had worked the bees without gloves. Excellent.

   After this someone announced there was a traditional hive nearby ready to harvest and would I like to see them harvest it? Which I of course said I would so we tromped a few hundred yards to where it was. This was the wicker basket style hive, located low in a small tree. They smoked the bajeezes out of it and then started tearing it open. It clearly had been going for awhile, had old brood and old hatched out swarm cells. They tossed the brood into the bushes, collected the honey, and then put a topbar hive in its place in hopes all the displaced bees would occupy it.

   Then we returned to the village and it was time to pray again. And someone had made me a big salad for lunch (which mostly consists of things visitors such as myself aren't supposed to eat, since all the fruits and vegetables are washed in local water), and placed it for me, along with a big cup of water from their bore hole, in a bare dark room in a house.

   Then it was time to return. Bara insisted I ride the moto on the way back and I went along with it to see a different set of scenery. It consisted of kind of quiet sleepy backroads with more villages and open space.

   We'd been vaguely following the World Cup in the afternoons via radio, and this day there was the much anticipated Brazil - Germany game. Bara announced that someone in our village had a tv and would be hooking up a generator tonight to watch the game, and of course everyone was invited. So after evening prayers we ventured down to the house in question, where just about every young person in the village was crowded on the floors and couches. They made room for us on one of the couches and little Mamadou de Boba soon found me and occupied the arm of my couch, though by the end of the game he was asleep there.
   We were apparently getting the game via some Congolese station and during the breaks when they went to their "news room" it looked super campy -- bad lighting, announcer clearly reading off of index cards in his hand, no visual effects whatsoever.
   The game itself was somewhat painful to watch as a Brazilian.. Brazil got utterly trounced, Germany made it look easy. I guess some of Brazil's key players were out with injuries?



July 9th, Wednesday - Day Eight: Suddenly its almost over! How did the end sneak up on me? Training was interrupted this day by rain so heavy that inside the building we couldn't hear eachother speak and had to wait for it to die down a little.
   We finally had a dependable generator (on day eight!). This is what happens in Africa when you run a generator:



   But I was finally able to do some slideshow-assisted presentations.

   In the afternoon I went out around the village with Mamadou de Boba and another lad who appeared around 9 or 10 maybe. We set out excavating a termite mound again, this time having an easier time since the dirt was soft from the rain ... but a local woman came and appeared to be harshly criticizing our activities in the local language so we beat a retreat.
   The older boy led us to a place by the river where there was a bare muddy slope and of course you could take a bucket of water and pour it at the top and watch as it flows down in various channels -- what young boy isn't amused by that?? And very interestingly when you pour water in the right place at the top there seem to be small underground tunnels from which the water spouts out lower down the slope. Neat!
   So this was fun and we did this for awhile, I tried not to get too muddy but at once point I slipped on the muddy slope and fell down. Upon returning to the house I was staying in I was slightly mortified to find the beekeeping federation president and his wife, apparently on a sort of formal visit, sitting inside with Bara, all dressed nice and here I am coming in all muddy. So I don't think I quite got off on the right foot with the presidents wife. She almost got in the car without shaking my hand and say goodbye, but then again they frequently neglect to introduce their wives or daughters here so it could have just been that she didn't anticipate being accorded a goodbye. Things were compounded further when she made a dinner for me/us that night but the memo that I don't eat fish didn't get to her until this fish was well under production.

   That night we once again all got together at the house with the TV to watch the Netherlands-Argentina game. I don't remember the score but most of the room seemed to be rooting for Argentina. I was rooting for Netherlands since Argentina is a big rival to Brazil, so once again my team lost.

   Later that night while Bara and I stood looking at the moon and commenting on whether or not it was full tonight or tomorrow, I realized that I'd been a lot more aware of the phase of the moon lately. Ask me on any given day in California what phase the moon is at and I probably couldn't tell you, but without electricity and sitting outside late every evening, one is very acutely aware of its progress.
   Additionally of course Bara would often remark on it as an indicator of how far along Ramadan was, since it goes from one moonless night to another and the full moon marked the middle.



July 10th, Thursday - Day Nine: Second-to-last day on site. We made candles, which, we were very successful with using both a papaya stalk and a piece of metal pipe as a mold (I didn't think the latter would work, I still don't know how they got the formed candle out), though unfortunately the string they selected for wick was plasticky and would just melt away immediately without holding a flame. (Interesting fact: solid wax doesn't burn. Only vaporized wax does. The way a candle works is that the heat from the wick is constantly vaporizing wax which then gets sucked up the wick to burn.)
   I don't really have business development presentation prepared but Bara remembered all the buzzwords from previous business development volunteers so he gave them a business presentation. From what I was overhearing though I was a bit concerned he was telling the small beekeepers to due market assements and business plans, which is all well and good for a big enterprise but the villager with three hives just isn't going to do it. It gave me some good ideas about how to do some business development stuff on future projects perhaps, though it wasn't until the last five minutes of this project that I really grasped the problem..



July 11th, Friday - Day Ten: Last day on site. We were going to make an aloe lotion this day, and I had explained everything involved to Bara and wasn't expecting any shenanigans... but next thing I know he has them well in the process of making soap. I knew he was enamored of this soap making idea, he'd brought it up a number of times on the previous two days, and I had always said yes but it involves many ingrediants and most importantly has to compete against easily available cheap soap, so I really don't think they'd be able to sell it. I guess this is where the market assessment does come in, and next time I think I'll have my group of beekeepers add up the costs of making soap and decide for themselves if it would be a viable product as an exercise. Meanwhile even though people had brought aloe vera leaves and Bara had been extolling at length their medicinal value, we never got around to making this simple three ingrediant product which would probably sell.

   As I mentioned, it was only in literally the last five minutes that the depths of their business planning problems became apparent. We were going over my recommendations, and one of the major ones as mentioned was that FAPI, the federation, should buy up honey from the individual beekeepers and sell it on the bulk market for the higher international prices. To this the president aid "no we need to strengthen the coops," to which I was like "wait what? what does that even mean??" and he said that they can't do it because all the beekeepers currently sell their honey individually. So I very very quickly went through how they should contact food packaging and processing companies and see how much honey they'd buy and at what rate, and with these numbers write a business plan, and with this get a loan from a bank to buy the honey from the beekeepers and possibly improve their facilities for processing it, and then they'll be able to buy honey from the beekeepers at a higher rate then they're currently selling it so of course they'll sell it to the Federation. "Strengthening the coops" is all well and good but has pretty much nothing to do with this. It seemed to me "strengthening the coops" was being used like some magical metaphysical cure-all which would somehow solve all the problems and once they were sufficiently strong the honey would all just start moving of its own volition. But this was like a five minute crash course so next time I'm definitely going to make sure to walk them through this process at a pace more likely to be absorbed.

   Anyway after we hurried through the things we needed to do his day, there were some vigorous rounds of photo taking and then after they prayed and I ate lunch, we were off! The Winrock landcruiser had come up that morning, so Bara and I piled in and were off. The End!



   The two day journey back to Conakry and my subsequent adventures in the land of the plague ebola will have to wait for another entry Hint: I get sick! O:

aggienaut: (Numbat)

   As mentioned, I arrived in the village of Sampiring (pronounced like "San Parii") on Tuesday June 1st. One more funny thing I didn't mentioned in the previous entry -- during the drive Edie tried to teach Ibrim and Baro how to say my name. I generally let anything recognizable slide, though Ibrim's habit of enthusiastically greeting me with "Freak!!" (ie "Fricke" without pronouncing the E as one should and drawing out the i in the middle) was a bit unsettling. It was amusing to watch them try to say "Kris" and come up with everything from "KrisT" to "Krish" to "Kwis" before getting it right. Its funny how much trouble an unfamiliar name can be. And I for my part am still not sure if I should be calling him Bara or Baro.

July 2nd, Wednesday - Woke up to pouring rain, the wife of Abdul brought me an omelette, as she would every morning (except the last morning, whereupon I ate the chicken). I regret not retaining her name but again, these unfamiliar names just don't stick in the head. She was very nice though, and always seemed to have kind of a mischievious smirk about her. After eating I sat on the porch with Baro, sipping my tea, as the rain gradually petered out. Once the rain stopped the beekeepers started filtering in one by one into the little square in front of the house. We set up chairs and did introductions and planning for the upcoming two weeks. I think about 70% of the beekeepers in the group are named Mamadou. Seriously. And another 60% have Diallo as either a last, middle, or first name. For example, just taking the two business cards I have on me at the moment, the FAPI (national beekeeping association) president is named Mamadou Yaya Diallo, while the owner of the house I was staying in is (Elhajji) Diallo Mamadou Cellou (Elhajji being a title, denoting having made the pilgrimage to Mecca).
   I learned that they'd previously been visited by a Peace Corps volunteer "named Dave," who had come to teach them about beekeeping years ago --probably the reason there are kenyan style hives here now-- "but then he died."
   We dispersed around 1 so they could pray and I could eat lunch. Over the next two weeks I'd spend the afternoons either sitting on the porch with Baro (till I finished reading my book), or wandering the surrounding countryside (if it wasn't raining).

   At first the children of the village were very fond of greeting me with "bonjour!" from afar. Then after a day or two many grew brave and would run up to shake hands with me. Shortly, one of them in particular, a five or six year old boy named Mamadou de Boba (brother of Mamadou de Ajeilla or something) pretty much adopted me. He would spend afternoons climbing the porch rail near me and talking to me in the local language, to which I'd sometimes respond at random with "oh really?" "no kidding!" and "are you sure about that?" It was cute and amusing, though I certainly got a feel for what a burden it can be trying to keep a five year old occupied! I also learned that while he was mostly pretty well behaved, if he saw my phone, and god forbid saw me playing the 2048 game on it, he would immediately become a grabby demon. Possible proof that electronic games really are the downfall of youth today.



   Whenever I was walking across the village with the smoker he would run up and get it and carry it for me, he seemed to adopt this as his sacred duty... and right. Woe unto other children who might try to take it! He also of course tremendously enjoyed puffing it when it was lit, though he quickly learned his older brother did not appreciate having smoke puffed at him.

   Around 7:30 every evening we would start heading up to the elder's house for prayer. Baro, I found, seemed to be very enthusiastically religious. Not the kind of enthusiasm that makes one boorishly talk about it a lot and evangalize to people, but in that he seemed to genuinely relish prayer time and the whole rigamarole of ramadan. I was glad they made me feel very welcome, inviting me to come along with them every evening. I would help set up the mats and then set up my little stool off to the side. Random observation: while they're praying one sees a row of the bottoms of people's feet, and all but one of them had pale bottoms-of-feet. One of the villagers had feet that were the same color all around, I wonder if its a genetic trait from another tribe or something.

   Then we'd troop back to the house. Most of the other villagers would head off to the mosque, one kilometer away, but Baro, with his pronounced limp, was unable to make the journey. Every evening one of the Mamadou brothers would bring a small brazier of hot coals and Baro would spend most of the evening tending his tea kettle over these coals. I somewhat suspect half the reason for the tea was for the sake of doing something. Watching him tend his tea I'd often think about how very much like his ancestors for countless generations he must look just then, tending his little tea pot on into the evening. A man who can run the national branch of an organization, make business planning presentations fit for any boardroom, and sit in the dark carefully tending his tea pot like a nomad.
   The first two evenings, when Elhajji Mamadou returned from the mosque several other men from the village came back to the house with him and they spent the evening discussing politics. During dinner they would run wires out to the car and power the lights with its battery. On the morning of the third, however, he departed to drive to Dakar, Senegal, some 900km away.
   After that our evenings were a lot quieter, but Mamadou de Boba would come and try to talk with me until sent to bed by his mother, and then his father Abdul and another fellow would come over and maybe take a cup of tea with us before dinner. Dinner every night came around 10:30 to 11:00, brought by Abdul's wife. It was generally a rice dish with sauce and some meat, or the sauce and meat with homemade french fries which I think was more a concession to me than a tradition. Unlike the extremely extremely chewy meat in Nigeria the meat was pretty good, though I always find it unsettling trying to eat by flashlight light meat with lots of bones to pick out.

a hut in the village

July 3rd, Thursday - Day Two: Intermittent rain, but had a good first day of lecture. After lunch I enthusiastically got my bee suit and equipment ready because we were going to visit the beehives! But they looked at me in alarm when I came out with my equipment and informed me "there's been a misunderstanding, we're not going to OPEN the hives right now, we're just going to look at them"
   "Well... I've got the equipment, let's open them!" I say.
   "But no one else brought their suits" they say. ::sigh:: okay. So we'll go look at beehives. Note to self, future projects make sure its known beforehand that I don't see much benefit at just looking at the outside of beehives.

   On the plus side I was overjoyed to discover I had finally forgotten something, so all was right in the world -- I'd left my flip-flops in the hotel in Canakry. Additionally I only brought one pen and it almost immediately disappeared. By this point the batteries on all my electronic devices (two phones and a laptop) were running down pretty low, and without them or a pen I wouldn't have any way to note things down!

July 4th, Friday - Day Three: "Still no bees. Batteries all dead. Rained most of the day." I felt lucky because it was "the day off" and they still scheduled a field visit, to a group of beekeepers in a town about an hour away near the town of Pita. There is currently a Peace Corps volunteer working on beekeeping with them, who also doesn't have any previous experience at it. I talked to her one the phone the day before but she wasn't present when I visited (ironically, she was in Labe at the time, the town near where I was based). I was a bit disappointed, I'd have liked to meet a Peace Corps volunteer in the field, would have felt a little like things had come full circle since the PC dropped me in 2011... and as she doesn't have prior beekeeping experience I'd imagine I could have given her some good advice. But I suppose she'll have to get it from the locals I talked to.
   Though the weather was fine in the morning, after we did some question and answers in the morning they broke for prayer and we were going to visit beehives after, but it was pouring rain by the time prayer was done. Was getting very frustrated that we hadn't opened any hives yet.

   Another thing happened that was becoming apparent -- they seemed to think it was more desirable to eat indoors, always. This means frequently when there was a perfectly good open air porch I was happily sitting on, or chairs under the shade of trees, when tehy brought food they'd beckon me indoors and set me up in some dark room that if it had a window at all it was small and barely sufficient. I didn't argue much because I kind of assumed maybe since they were fasting they didn't want to see me eating, but in the end I think it was just how they thought I'd want to eat for some reason. In this case I was happily sitting on the porch and they set me up to eat in a room where I could barely see the food at all. As it was a grilled chicken full of bones to pick around I found this rather tedious.
   Jumping ahead a bit, on my very last day I was due to leave just after lunch, all the beekeepers were hanging out in the village square, and when my lunch came they of course put it in an ill lit room in the house away from the square. I brought it out and sat in the square with it and no less than three people immediately urged me to go sit in the house, but I was not about to go sit in a dungeon during my last hour with the group.

The Pita group.


July 5th, Saturday - Day Four: We finally got a generator hooked up, but it was insufficient to power both my laptop and the projector, nor even my laptop alone very well, and by the time we were done in "the classroom" my computer only had about 20 minutes of battery life stored up. We were finally able to go into some hives this day though. The first several hives we visited obviously hadn't been visited in a long time and were completely full. We didn't have a bucket to harvest honey into so after opening several hives we resolved to postpone opening any more hives until the next day when we'd be prepared to harvest honey.
   In the afternoon little Mamadou de Boba and I went exploring around the area surrounding the village. I'm pretty sure most American parents wouldn't want their five year old disappearing for hours with some stranger they've only known for a few days but no one seemed the least bit concerned. I tried to instill in Mamadou an interest in insects, but lacking a common language when I pointed out a small insect on the ground he often interpreted it as an invitation to smash it. Similarly I embarked on an attempt to excavate a hole into the middle of a termite mound because I've heard they're hollow inside, and wanted to find out, and he was enthusiastic in helping with this, but probably just saw it as an opportunity to hack up the termite nest for fun.
   That evening Baro had got his hands on an avocado, which it turns out he absolutely loves. Just about every day after this he'd have one avocado after the breaking of the fast, which he would very methodically peel, almost as if it were a ritual. Then he would hold the pit up admiringly and remark upon it and where he would plant it, and finally he would reverently eat the avocado flesh, clearly savoring every bite. He also has a strong tendency to find wild plants and gather their leaves while noting their medicinal properties. I think he sometimes integrated them into his tea.



July 6th, Sunday - Day Five: "Visited hives. No rain! Exploration. Presentation of roosters." In the afternoon while Baro and I were sitting on the porch a delegation three men from the village approached us and I could tell immediately there was something strangely stilted and formal in their manner. Uhoh, was I in trouble for something. Baro seemed to know what was up because he was smiling before they even spoke. After they spoke he translated for me:
   "The people of the village want to honor you with a gift of two roosters ... what do you want to do with them?"
   "Uh.... I guess I'll eat them?"
   [some interchange in local language] "okay they will cook the first one for dinner tonight."

   We went through very many hives today, it was a very good day. Most of the hives did not in fact have surplus honey to harvest, I think they had all been harvested in May but a few did have more surplus honey already. No hives were bad tempered and so I was able to work without gloves or a veil on most of them and this encouraged many of the local beekeepers to try it without gloves as well, which is a really good sign of comfort with the bees. If they're not comfortable/confident with their bees they're not going to take good care of them.
   In the afternoon I went exploring the surrounds further afield by myself this time.


   And that brings us halfway through the time in the field, and this has gotten fairly long already so I'll save the latter half for another entry. Still to come: more rain! will I ever find electricity? And do I ever meet the cute girl from the village who's always smiling at me from across the square??

aggienaut: (Numbat)
2014-07-02 20:23, village outside Labe, Guinea -- This is going to have to be quick because we don't have power here, and lord knows when, if ever, during the next two weeks I'll have a chance to recharge anything! At the present moment the darkness around me is lit only by the stars, the firelight coming out of a nearby window, flashes of lightning on the horizon... and the green glow of my laptop keyboard. When I went inside to get the laptop I had to step over someone who was actually ironing a shirt using an iron made of iron with hot coals inside. My green glowing computer presently appears to be gathering a curious crowd of children. But lets start in the beginning...


Yesterday -- Tuesday, June 1st
   At around 8am, Edie (the other volunteer) and I loaded our stuff into the winrock landcruiser and left the hotel in Canakry. I sure was glad to be done with my three days penned up there.
   Looking at the escalating graph of ebola deaths in Canakry gave me a certain sense of escaping a plague. Ebola isn't present where I am now, but I'm slightly concerned if it continues unabated i might not be able to return through ebola. After all, Doctors Without Borders had described it as "uncontrollable."
   Previously I think we'd all declined to make a move for the front seat out of politeness, resulting in one of the winrock staff getting it by mere virtue of being the last in. With an all-day journey ahead I wasn't going to dance around the issue, and nabbed the coveted from seat. At first it was just Edie and I and Winrock's new driver -- their previous driver died on Saturday.


   Roads out of Canakry were surprisingly well maintained. Smoothly surfaced and smoothly flowing. And this despite ongoing construction to widen the road for a great length of the road out of Canakry.
   Once we left the city behind, the road wound through lush green hills. There were sporatic spats of drizzle -- I'm told Guinea is "the water tank of Africa." They say the Senegal and Niger rivers both begin not far from where I am now. I didn't know there was a river Senegal but Niger is quite noteworthy, being as it gives both the countries of Niger and Nigeria their name!
   After about an hour Edie and I were beginning to seriously wonder where the other two supposed passengers on this drive were. We'd been told we were picking them up at Ibrim (the Organization's Guinea Country Director)'s house just outside the city. We finally arrived there at a place called "Kilometre 36." His house was a lovely little walled in compound abounding with trees and his in-laws. Here Ibrim, Baro and their luggage joined us, filling the car pretty much to capacity.
   Ibrim would be accompanying Edie on her project, which is on the way to mine, and Baro would accompany me. Baro is actually the Country Director for Mali, but he is presently displaced to Guinea, so helping out over here. He is an easy-going fellow one might describe has having a stolid stature, except he has a pronounced limp*. Interesting fact, he was actually born in Timbuktu.

   Crowded into the vehicle, we resumed our winding journey through the beautiful Guinean countryside. Presently we came to a town where they'd planned to stop so I could get lunch, but all the restaurants were closed for ramadan. Similarly, it is only I who was after lunch because the Organization's staff are also observing Ramadan and so is Edie, in solidarity with the people she'll be working with. Personally, I'm all for cultural experiences but I don't think I could adequately do they job I was sent here to do if I was starving the whole time.
   On any account, other than my non-regulation 7am breakfast I pretty much ended up observing it.

   Dropped Edie off at a pretty decent looking hotel in the town of Mamou. While it looked nice on the outside she did quickly acertain that the running water didn't appear to be working, among other things. And then the rest of us continued. The driver would be returning that way with Ibrim so he'd rejoin her on the return trip.

   Around 2pm we stopped by Ibrim's home village, near a particularly hilly area I'm told is called "The Switzerland of Guinea." I'd have tried to take a picture but rain was thundering down on us at the time. Ibrim brought some bags of rice to his aunts and uncles (parents no longer with us. There seems to be an alarming lack of old people about), and we left him there.

   Drove through the town of Labe and turned off the paved highway onto a dirt road. I was a bit confused because I'd been lead to believe I was staying in a hotel in town. We pulled into a quaint little village. Apparently they'd found room in one of the houses of this village, which also contains many beekeepers! It is an absolutely lovely quaint little place. The very picture of an idyllic village. None of the plastic trash carpeting the ground like autumn leaves I'd seen in so many villages in Nigeria.

   There was just enough light left for our host Abdul to give me a tour of the surroundings. Abdul himself appears to be old, though his small stature makes him more reminiscent of a particularly mellow twenty year-old if you ignore his lined face and bad teeth*. The village consists of some small square houses with painted walls, and a few huts with thatched roofs. The whole habitation is surrounded by a low fence to keep the local herd of children from wandering too far afield, and keep the goats out until they can be herded into pens every evening. Thick stands of corn and cassava occupy the open spaces around the village. Just outside the village there's some fairly thick forest, though I'm not sure I quite dare to call it jungle. The tree tops aren't nearly high enough anyway I suppose. But there are numerous staghorn ferns to be seen growing off thick branches overhead, which is fun. There appear to be hundreds of beehives (kenyan topbar, for those who are keeping track) stashed away in the immediate surroundings. They appear to be pretty well made, though I've seen enough to comment on that I don't think I'll feel useless..

   Later on we were sitting under the porch watching the pouring rain when the call to prayer sounded on Baro's phone. "Come, it is time to break fast," he said to me.
   So I followed him and the troop of other men from the village as we tromped under umbrellas through the dark and the rain, around a few houses to the village elder's house. There I stood on the balcony while they did their prayers and then they invited me in to join them. They distributed large bowls full of millet soup, everyone sitting on the floor or small stools, and ladles were passed out. We used our ladles to consume from the communal bowls. It was an interesting mix of savory and sweet. Having not eaten since breakfast that morning myself I certainly had an appetite.
   There were also bowls with ??? some kind of something in it possibly describable as the consistency of couscous. This we ate with our hands, mixing in some spice we'd take pinches of from another bowl, and some gooey stuff that was in the middle of the big bowl (I didn't discover this until I put my hand in it -- remember the only light here is from a few flashlights). It was good but I think next time I might take the spoon they proferred me -- the stuff was genuinely good, but the growing gooeyness of my hand was fairly unsettling me.

   Walked back to the house I'm staying in. Several other local men joined us in sitting on our porch and talking, though unfortunately it was almost entirely in either French or the local language and I couldn't follow. This one fellow, Mamadou, who also might be the owner of the house, seems to love to discuss the politics of Guinea and I dearly wish I could understand what he was saying, he seems intelligent. Thursday morning he's leaving to drive to Dakar, Senegal, which, if he leaves at 5am he might be able to get there by 9pm, he says.

   This just hanging around chatting though, this is a thing I think we really miss out on in our electrified distraction filled world.

   I had kind of assumed that was it as far as dinner was concerned, but to my surprise several big dishes showed up around 10pm. In Nigeria I had come to expect pretty rudimentry food, even in the electrified towns. But here I was in an un-electrified village and some very appetizing dishes were being trotted out! There were two kinds of rice with a sauce "made of leaves" (?), a lettuce/egg/tomato salad with balsamic dressing, fried plantains (which I simply love), and some sort of beef soup which I didn't actually get around to trying. We probably had about a dozen men with us in our little livingroom for the meal, and a car battery had been hooked up to light the house. As we finished the meal we listened to the US-Belgium worldcup match on a handheld radio. I kept insisting "we can still win!" as the last seconds ticked away but to no avail.

   Fell asleep to the sound of pounding rain, woke up to the sound of pounding rain. Lay there wondering how this training, which would start later that (this) day, would go if it rained the whole time. But my battery is nearly out. So amid the sound of another prayer behind me in the house, and crickets chirping in the darkness in front of me, I'm going to end this for the day. Hopefully I can find a charger soon!




* I'm trying to work on my descriptions of people. Of the two described people, this is Baro (I'll link a better picture when I get one up), and this is Abdul. Feedback on the quality of my character descriptions would be in order (:
aggienaut: (Numbat)
Leg 1

   I felt the aircraft gently jolt into motion, the motion mainly transmitting from the seat in front of me through my knees which were jammed against it. I peered out the window as the gate pulled away, and wondered why I couldn't shake this strong feeling I'd forgotten something. I had packed for a year in Australia the morning-of, but for some reason for this, a month in the West African country of Guinea, I'd had this anxiety for the past week that I'd forget something important. Usually it hit around the time I pulled onto the freeway. Sometimes it took until we were pulling in to the airport. But this time it was far overdue and it was freaking me out.
   The crinkling noise of the guy in orange bermuda shorts next to me unfolding a newspaper drew my attention from the window. Wall Street Journal. Headline: "Bomb Blast in Abuja." Big picture front and center of carnage. I peered at the picture trying to see if I recognized any buildings in it. That's where I'd normally be headed!! I thought to myself, easily picturing the hot chaotic atmosphere of Abuja. This seemed very ominous.

   As the flight accelerated down the runway I pondered why I felt so anxious. It's not like I could be unprepared, I've done many of these projects already and pretty well have it down. I moved on to pondering if that was the guy next to me's body odor I was smelling, and leaned closer to the window. Tiny houses went by far down below, and cars like toys. We soared up over Saddleback Mountain and left Orange County behind. If you're not from Southern California, you might not realize this, but just over our small little mountain from Orange County lies the planet of Tatooine. As I hungrily devoured the tiny bag of little pretzels that pass for a meal now (because lord knows there's no meal that falls between 8am and 3pm) I gazed out at the barren landscape below and tried to make out Jabba's Palace or perhaps a tuskan raider village, but all I saw was a windfarm. I tried punching some buttons on the screen in the seat in front of me and found it would cost at least $6 to watch anything, and I'd have to pay for headphones too. I read my book about insects.

Leg II
   In Atlanta I got some surprisingly decent tacos at the food court, and happily took note that in contrast to California liquor laws, I could leave the eating establishment with an alcoholic drink. Narrowed my eyes at those posh bastards in first class as I passed, margarita in hand, and proceeded halfway down the plane to a middle seat in the middle row. No aisle for extra legroom nor at least a window -- frown. But then as the airplane began to back away from the gate, lo, I heard angels singing, and a mysterious light shon down from above as churebs proudly indicated to me that neither seat on either side of me had been occupied! I hastily turned off the overhead lights and flight attendants sternly told the cherubs the seatbelt light was on, but I had ample space! Later when I got up to use the lavatory, and didn't have to climb over anyone to do so, to my amazement nearly every seat in the plane was taken except for these two.
   And so I hurtled through the night much more comfortably now that I wasn't on a US airline. A little complimentary bottle of mediocre wine came by, and there was food, and free headphones and free movies. I was still strangely anxious. Still hadn't thought of anything I'd forgotten. As I watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is about travel and being adventurous, I started to ponder more existential hypotheses -- what if I just felt guilty because I needed this project as much as the people being trained? What if I feel anxious about taking so much time off work during the busy season? ...but then again, my boss hadn't even asked when I'd return. "When I was your age," he'd regaled us at work the other day, "I was chasing bees all over the world."

Leg III
   I awoke from first semblance of sleep in nearly 24 hours on a bench by my gate in Paris, which fortuitously hadn't had the usual rails between seating positions.
   "Hi, you must be Kris." said an older woman whose hair still had a tinge or red was sitting near me.
   She was Edie, another volunteer with the same organization. We'd been informed we'd be on the same flight, though we'll be in different parts of the country. She does business and organizational communications training.

   By and by, and after a few delays, it came time to board, and I joined the throng of colourfully robed Africans jostling to board the plane. The line was by no means "single file" and people didn't seem to have any compunction about wriggling ahead in the line. I tried to more-or-less maintain my position relative to some other people and wound through the zig-zagging queue until I reached the ticket check. They scanned my ticket and the machine flashed a red light and growled. The attendant frowned at the ticket and punched the number into her computer. It made a short R2-D2 noise and popped out another ticket for me -- I'd been upgraded to first class!
   While the mere mortals shuffled past on their way to airplane purgatory in coach class, I settled into the fully reclining armchair seat and a waiter with a towel over his arm poured us champagne. Once we were in the air, the waiter / flight attendant quickly began plying us with wine (several options from full sized bottles of what was no doubt high quality wine) and food. Lunch came in a blur of three or four courses, involving such fancinesses as foie gras (which I disliked), scallops, a choice of three different kinds of balsamic viniagrette, and creme brulee. Stuffed full of delicious food and fully reclined, I couldn't even muster the energy to peer out the window at the Spanish coast below, and dozed away like a happy otter.


Guinea near Canakry from the air

   Below me Guinea materialized as a landscape seemingly devoid of human development, a maze of curving rivers and damp looking foliage. And this just outside the capitol.
   There were no buildings in sight until just seconds before landing. The capitol, Canakry, is build on a peninsula, and, being built from the tip (an island off the tip actually) first, the airport was probably at the "base" of the peninsula, and I was seeing the wild interior as I came in.
   As we got in the aisles to finagle for our luggage from the overhead racks, Edie introduced me to the attractive young lady who had been sitting next to her. She had also just come from Atlanta, probably on the same ATL-CDG flight as me. She was with the World Health Organization, here in Guinea to fight the ongoing ebola outbreak. My project had earlier been postponed due to it, but she informed us it's actually still getting worse. Doctors Without Borders has described it as "completely out of control," and we had just landed in the very midst of "the worst ebola outbreak in history."

IV Canakry
   In the dingy baggage carousel room, I fished my first duffelbag off the conveyor relatively quickly, but the thing went round and round without my second bag appearing. As I stood in the jostling crowd I took heart that it appeared hardly anyone else had found their bags yet either ... but then I realized it appeared that 90% of the passengers had had bags of about the same shape and size, thoroughly wrapped in pink cellophane, so they were just having immense trouble sorting out which bag was theirs. I was about ready to despair when finally my second bag came along, a duffel bag stuffed like a giant sausage looming down the carousel like a juggernaut. My boss had stuffed it with ten bee suits -- in addition to providing me with a smoker (clean and new, I found its great for putting small things that would otherwise get lost in my luggage in), and letting me borrow his go-pro camera.

   Outside the terminal it was hot and humid, and there were the usual throngs of pushy porters trying to help us (for a fee) and taxi drivers insistent on taking us whereever we needed to go, but Edie and I had both been through this before and plowed through the crowd to the two staffmembers from The Organization (identifiable by their hats), a young man and young woman, and loaded our things into the Organization's landrover.
   Canakry seems more like a large village or expansive town than a city. Previous African capitols I've been in (Abuja, Addis Ababa) are at least characterized by paved streets and big buildings, but across the street from the airport there were houses with corrugated metal roofs, and dirt roads with streams of filthy water running through them. Not quite shantytown, more "functional squalor." The Lonely Planet guidebook had described Conakry as "smelling nausious" in general but the misty rain must have been dampening that effect. We wound our way around throngs of children playing soccer. World Cup fever seems to be in full swing, unless they're always obsessed with soccer.

   Total travel time: 28 hours. Hotel is decent -- the AC works, the power hardly ever goes out, and the internet usually works, what more can one ask for? The room doesn't have a safe, not that I was expecting one, but that causes some anxiety when carrying a fortune by local standards. I noticed something peculiar though -- the refridgerator in my room has a lock on it with a key. So I've squirreled away my 2.8 million guinean francs in the fridge. I unplugged it so I can store my laptop in there as well -- with the very high humidity I think condensation could be a serious concern when using a chilled laptop.
   Unfortunately the largest guinean franc note is the 10,000, which is worth approximately $1.42, so I have bricks of the ragged bills. It really isn't very conducive to carrying much money around.
   Edie, the other volunteer, got an even bigger suite on the top floor, but several things were broken or have broken on her, including the shower door which apparently fell and mauled her while she was taking a shower. Africa, it's a dangerous place.




V Cooped up in Canakry
   This morning (Monday) I slept through my alarm for an hour because I couldn't hear it over the rain. Fortunately I still had half an hour before breakfast, and our ride is running an hour plus late. Welcome to Africa.
   I need to make a mental note to request not to arrive on any future assignments at the beginning of a weekend. Not knowing anyone here yet, arriving to spend two days cooped up in a third world hotel is not very fun. On the bright side the internet has been working so I finally beat the game 2048.
   Most of the local restaurants recommended by the hotel staff have turned out to be closed but there's a Turkish restaurant down the street, complete with a coterie of Turkish men smoking on the porch, and a surprisingly nice Chinese restaurant (our waitress appeared to be part of the other dining party in the place, also seemed enthusiastic about a chance to practice her English, which was very good) in the other direction.
   On Sunday Edie and I went to church, which was in French and local languages so I didn't understand a thing, but it was a good break from the enforced idleness. The singing was wonderful.


traditional boats being built on the shores of Canakry

   Tomorrow morning we begin the long journey into the interior, I can't wait to get out of this hotel.

aggienaut: (Numbat)

   It was strange, really. To go to Australia for a year I packed the morning of my flight. This is only a month, and its not like I haven't done it before, and packed the morning of, but for some reason I developed a deep paranoia I was going to forget something important. I think I was stressing about it for a least a week prior to departure. Even did a large amount of my packing two days before departure.
   And then as I pulled away from the house, and we got on the freeway, when I didn't suddenly remember one more thing. It kind of freaked me out. Got to the airport thinking "this just feels wrong. I must have forgotten something. What is it???" ... the longer it took to realize, the more important I feared it would be.

   I board my flight from "John Wayne," the Orange County airport, to Atlanta. The guy sitting beside me takes out the Wall Street Journal as we taxi away, and on the front cover is a picture of a bomb blast site in Abuja, the capitol of Nigeria -- where I'm usually headed. Guess there was another bomb blast there yesterday. I found that a bit ominous.

   Had some surprisingly good tacos at the food court in the ATL airport, and an overpriced margarita in a plastic cup, which, in wild contrast to California liquor laws, I was freely able to leave the restaurant area holding. Boarded my Air France jet with margarita in hand and settled down to watch the Desolation of Smaug. My seat was in the middle of the middle row.

   As they closed the gates I realized that in an aircraft that looked otherwise almost entirely full, for some reason the seats on either side of me were unoccupied. I could hear angels singing, as a mysterious light from above shone down upon these two empty seats.

Film Review Intermission
Desolation of Smaug - I thought a lot more of it than I'd quite like was cartoonishly cheesy -- the ease with which the protagonists sometimes completely accidentally kill fearsome attacking orcs. That which wasn't cheesy was usually wholly invented parts of the story. So in conclusion it was pretty and what they were trying to do was no doubt well executed but I ultimately felt it didn't do the story real justice. Really the large amount of cheesiness I felt really hurt the story. C+

Lone Survivor - Wow this is a true story right? I haven't bothered to look up how accurate it is, but if so, man, that guy went through some gnarly stuff. There were a few cheesy moments where people took time to say something sappy to eachother at a time when I'm pretty sure they would have been too busy fighting for their lives, but overall I felt it had a high degree of realism, which I noted really helped one get into the story. If you like movies with lots of action and shooting, this is a movie for you. B

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - This movie was cute and entertaining, and not too cheesy (which you may have gathered is something I loathe and despise in movies). Some scenes shot in some interesting locations such as Iceland and Greenland too. A

End of Film Review Intermission
   Couldn't sleep on the flight. For some reason wasn't even that sleepy. And hadn't had any caffiene since the morning I left.

   Had to go through security in the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, and let me tell you, they don't know how to do security nearly as efficiently as we've sadly learned to do in the States. People putting their bags on the loading end of hte conveyor and then taking forever to get it all sorted out before tehy're ready to move on, no single file line going through the metal detector. Security check personnel not super professional (or rather, more like ours used to be before the whole tihng got reorganized after 9/11), people shouting at eachother in three different languages. On my third try I made it through the metal detector and got about 15 feet away before it went off and they called me back. WTF.

   Still can't think of what I forgot. Still freaking me out.

   Arrival in Paris CDG was around 8:15, with a scheduled departure around 10:30. Departing flight kept getting delayed until noon. Slept for awhile on some seats that didn't have rails between then, one hand in a death grip on the zipper of my backpack. Woke up and met the other Winrock volunteer, an older woman who's been to Guinea before (circa 2001?), will be working in a different area but we'd be flying in together. I asked her if the food in Guinea was any good and she just started laughing.

   On boarding my flight from Paris to Guinea I was informed I'd been upgraded to first class. Seat 7A turned out to be fully reclining with a big cavity under the seat in front of me for me to extend my legs. They brought us a choice of champagne or banana juice while we waited for all those mere mortals in cattle class to board -- I naturally chose the banana juice.
   Lunch was three or four courses, it was hard to keep track, they kept bringing exciting things over. For a beverage I asked for the red wine and the waiter/flight attendant (with a confidential smile and of course a strong French accente) showed me two different bottles of red wine (full sized bottles, not the small single servings of questionable stuff you get in coach (that is if you're anywhere other than the US, where you can forget about it entirely)). When I shamefully admitted I had no opinion between the two he said with a wink he'd give me both so I could decide. So I had two glasses of wine, not that one wouldn't have magically refilled itself. For what its worth I found I preferred the one from cote d'ore.
   The first course of lunch involved, among other things, little balls of something that tasted vaguely fishy and a little grey-ish pink slab that tasted of liver, and a choice of three different kinds of balsamic viniagrette for the salad (!?). Turns out it was scallops and foie gras, the latter of which I didn't eat more than a nibble. Second course was beef with some tasty sauce. For dessert a creme brulee showed up. I probably haven't had such a fancy meal since, I don't know, high school prom.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - Full of good food and wine I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe it was the wine but I thought it was just SO good. Reminiscent of other Wes Anderson movies such as Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, that one about a train, but whereas the others had started to seem they had too much in common this felt like a fresh look at the Wes Anderson genre (yes he's made his own genre I do believe), and I thought it was just the right combination of cute, interesting, intriguing, silly, and all around amusing. A+

   Then, feeling fat and content and snug on my back like a happy sea otter I dozed away, barely able to even summon the interest in peering out the window at the coast of Spain down below.


Guinea near Canakry from the air

   My first impression of Guinea was the view pictured above. A landscape seemingly devoid of human development, a maze of curving rivers and damp looking foliage. And this just outside the capitol.
   Didn't start seeing buildings until just before landing. The capitol, Canakry, is build on a peninsula, and, I believe, built from the tip (an island off the tip actually) first, so the airport was probably at the "base" of the peninsula. "why don't you google that before you write an entry about it" you might ask. Except my connection is super spotty. "Let me google that for you" is a First World Problem.
   Met a girl who had been sitting the row in front of me. She had come from Phoenix, probably on the same ATL-CDG flight as me as well, she was with the World Health Organization, here in Guinea to fight the ongoing ebola outbreak. Got through customs went super fast, getting my baggage took longer but by and by it all came down the ramp, and we were out the door, met two winrock staffers who drove us across town to our hotel. Total travel time, around 28 hours I believe (its hard to keep track of time while traveling but I think I left OC at UTC 1600, Thursday, and arrived at my hotel in Guinea at UTC 1800 Friday)
   As opposed to other African capitols I've been to, Conakry feels much more like just a really big village. Within a block of the airport there were houses with corrugated metal roofs and alleys that smelled of sewage. The Lonely Planet guidebook had described Conakry as "smelling nausious" in general but the misty rain must have been dampening that effect. My general first impression of Guinea, in a word, would be "damp."

traditional boats being built on the shores of Canakry

Hotel is decent. Electricity hasn't gone out once yet. Has internet which sometimes works (cue that pyramid of necessities that has wifi on it -- ironically I'd link it here but, yeah, internet), AC works in one of my rooms (I have a suite that by space allocations at least would certainly compare favorable to Motel 6), albeit while making an irritating humming noise that necessitated my turning it off to fall asleep. Shower seems to work just fine (no little bottle of shampoo provided though).
   Edie, the other volunteer, got an even bigger suite on the top floor, but several things were broken or have broken on her, including the shower door which apparently fell and mauled her while she was taking a shower. Africa, its a dangerous place.

   We went walking around looking for a place to eat yesterday evening. Area around the hotel consists of muddy potholed streets, kids playing soccer, "functional squalor." None of the restaurants the hotel staff had told us about seemed to be open so we ended the evening hungry.
   This morning Edie and I had breakfast at the hotel restaurant next door (omelettes, really good croissants). We were going to go to church next but it turns out Edie thought it was Sunday and while I thought it slightly odd, I wasn't certain church wasn't a thing that might be happening on Saturday. I don't go to church in the States but in Africa I do, both so I don't get stoned as some sort of unbeliever, and because its an interesting cultural experience that gets you into the middle of the community. The catholic church has English and local language services, and we're going to try to get to the latter.

   Never did figure out what I forgot. I find this very unnerving. I'd say feels like it must be bad luck not to forget something, but I had remarkably good luck with my flights, seatingwise. Still though, I'm left waiting for the other shoe to drop.

   Okay now I just need a window of internet access to post this.

LJ Idolists don't be alarmed when I reuse this narrative for LJI this week. Maybe I'll even submit this one as a placeholder if I don't have a chance to rework it.

July 2025

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