From Kenya to Guinea: A New Chapter Begins

November 17, 2003

Wow, I didn’t realize how long it’s been since my last update. Time has been flying by and I’ve been frantically trying to wrap everything up and say my goodbyes. The wrap up has been going okay but some things will just have to remain unfinished. I’m okay with that as I don’t have much choice in the matter. My last day with Peace Corps Kenya will be December 3. I’m not totally out of Peace Corps as I’ve made my decision on a transfer extension.

I’ve decided upon Guinea. As of now, I’ll need to be in Guinea around January 8, 2004 for training. I’ll have to go through another complete training of 10 weeks. As most of training is cultural immersion and language lessons, it will serve me well. Besides, I’ll be able to get to know others in my group, even though I’ll only serve for one year vs. two. I’ll serve as a volunteer for 12 months after my 3 months of training.

As for my immediate plans - from December 3 to December 9 I’ll be a fixture on a beach in Lamu, on the Northern Kenyan coast. It’s actually an island just off the coast. No cars exist on the island - only donkey carts. It’s a very typical Swahili culture, very similar to Zanzibar - intricately carved wooden doors, Muslim culture and architecture. I plan to decompress and work on my tan. My legs haven’t seen the sun since my beach excursion to Zanzibar in August of last year! I’m aiming for a shade of brown this time around vs. bright red.

I’ll fly out of Nairobi on the evening of the 9th and arrive in Seattle around noon on the 10th. I’ll basically have only 4 weeks at home before leaving for Guinea. I’m excited at the idea of spending Christmas in Seattle amongst family and friends. I hope it snows. Even while climbing both Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya I didn’t see snow. Lots of glaciers on Kilimanjaro and frost on Kenya, but it’s not the same.

As for saying my goodbyes here, things are so far going smoothly. I’ve already had my farewell party given to me by the women’s group. They all came to my house and we sat outside while they prepared the meal. They slaughtered a chicken in my honor and made a stew of it and served it with potatoes and chapati. True to form, it took them 4-5 hours to prepare and serve the meal. It truly baffles me how long it takes them to cook. I swear I could make the same meal in just over an hour. It’s a social time for them though so they take their time.

I made up a calendar with my available dates for the group as well as JCI. This way they know when they can schedule things with me and when they can’t. It’s also helped to prepare them for my eventual departure. As the date looms large, they try and schedule me for various social and business events. Just this week they are beginning to realize how soon my departure date is coming up. Me too. It’s literally just around the corner.

I’ve mixed feelings about it all. I’ve loved my experiences here in Kenya, and especially my time in Nunguni. I’ve gotten a chance to really get to know some people well and will miss them terribly. But, on the other hand, I’m excited to close this chapter and begin a new one. For me, new experiences and challenges are what I thrive on and count as milestones to a life lived to the fullest. I’ve no idea what I’ll be doing in Guinea ; whether it’ll be similar to my projects here or not.

It’ll be Guinea’s first Small Enterprise Development (a.k.a. SED or Business) training group, which means that the groups or organizations in Guinea have never hosted SED PCVs. I’ve already requested to be placed in a regional capital where I’d be safely guaranteed to be using French vs. a local dialect. My main reason for transferring to West Africa is to get fluent in French. Most likely, being in a town vs. village will mean I’ll have electricity but nothing’s a guarantee. I don’t expect, nor do I want, to be able to get into the capital city very often like I do here in Kenya. I assume the training in Guinea will be similar to the one here in Kenya whereby I’ll get to know my site about halfway through training.

As for my plans while in Seattle, I’ll try and visit with friends for a week or so and then I’m off to Ocean Shores for Christmas with my family. After the New Year I’ll try and do my errands, shopping and packing. I know from my visit home this past May that the time will go by too quickly but I’ll try and make the most of it while trying to not get too stressed out. I must remember to schedule a day at a spa or at least a massage this time around. I feel like I haven’t been really clean and certainly not pampered in ages.

Oh, gotta tell this story - I just had the unthinkable happen to me a couple of nights ago. I was headed out to my choo and took my phone along as I needed to go check messages and I can only get a signal down the hill from the hospital ; out past my choo. My fleece jacket was still wet from being washed earlier that day so I had on my flannel shirt with a breast pocket. That’s where I put the phone. Ok, I never wear this shirt and never put the phone there. As I was bending down to remove the bucket lid I use as a cover for my choo, guess what fell out of my pocket and plunged down the hole?

Yep, took me 30 seconds or so of just staring down to realize what just happened actually did just happen. Luckily my drop isn’t so long, maybe 3-4 ft. The phone also had its cover on and it landed in a relatively clean spot, just up against the wall. I tried in vain to get it with the broom I keep in there but it didn’t work. I then went back to my house and MacGuyvered something up.

I used a plastic cup, a hook, a mop and duct taped them all together. I tramped back to the choo and within 30 seconds had my phone retrieved. I put on plastic gloves and removed the cover and threw it away and then cleaned off the phone itself which wasn’t that dirty, thankfully. Good as new! If I hadn’t promised the phone to my women’s group when I COS, I probably would have left it down there. Makes for a good story though, huh?

Don’t know if I’ll do another update before leaving Kenya or not. If not, I’ll update from Seattle before leaving on my next adventure. In case I don’t get a chance to say it later, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to you and yours.

January 3, 2004

Well, I'm currently in Seattle, freezing my buns off but thoroughly enjoying my visit. My Christmas was great and I'm enjoying spending time with family and friends. I finally have a departure date for Guinea... I leave Seattle on January 10th and arrive in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, on January 11th. I connect through Cincinnati and Paris. There were some problems with my transfer stemming from the fact that PC Kenya processed me incorrectly, but between them, PC Guinea and headquarters in D.C., everything got worked out.

I will not know where I'll be living nor what I'll be doing work-wise until several weeks into training. I've just begun my packing which has been much less stressful this time around as I know more of what I should and shouldn't bother packing. I have one full bag just of foodstuffs :o). I have an address for the HQ in Conakry which is on my Contact Me page. I will update it if need be when I know where I'll be living. I've also put some new links on the Favorite Links page and have new stuff on the Home Page too.

For now I'll leave up the pictures I have for Kenya so you have something to look at until I get some from Guinea on there. Not sure what the email and internet connection situation is like in Guinea so be patient with my updates until I figure things out and get settled. That's it for now. Hope everyone had a great holiday season and I wish you a joyous new year!

January 12, 2004

Look at me...I'm in Guinea. Hey, that rhymes. I arrived last night after 3 long flights in which I didn't really sleep. My connections went great and without a lot of waiting. My arrival in Conakry was...interesting. The airport was rather small but massively crowded. The one luggage conveyor loop was a study in chaos and basic survival tactics.

I was thankfully spotted by the person that was picking me up - she was holding a ping pong paddle with the PC logo on it and waving it up in the air. We waved to each other across the crowded baggage area and she helped me to get a hold of my 2 checked bags. Another volunteer came to greet me too. She is also here for a 3rd year (was a PCV in Gabon for 2 years). She showed me the ropes at the PC house and resource center.

The PC office is in a converted hotel (so each office has it's own bathroom) and the PC house, where volunteers hang out and sleep, is just next door, on the same secured compound. The house has several rooms with 3-4 bunk beds each and is run like a hostel. It has a common kitchen, fridge, stove, etc. It even has a washer and dryer and a tv room with tons of VHS tapes. The really nice thing about it is that you can meet and get to know other volunteers who happen to be in town. In Kenya we had no such thing, at least not in Nairobi. If you happened to run into a PCV at the office, hotel, or at the mall then you'd know there were others around, but if you didn't cross paths, you had no idea if anyone else was in town and available to do stuff with. Some volunteers established their own "house" in Mombassa at one point, but the PC Administration ended up shutting it down. Not sure why it's formalized in some countries and not in others.

After getting settled into the house last night I was taken to dinner with Yamilee, my boss at PC and the other 3rd year volunteer, Victoria. We went to a nice restaurant called Casa Bella. It had Mexican, Lebanese and Italian food. What a combo. The taco salad I had was great! I hear the most common Guinean food here though is rice with some kind of sauce, either peanut, fish, or tomato based. Good thing I like rice. I only managed to stay up for one movie last night before heading to bed at midnight. Only woke up a couple times in the early morning hours to go to the toilet (damn malaria medication) but mostly had a nice refreshing sound sleep. The house and office have air con so it was fairly comfortable. It is hot outside though. I'd say in the low 90s - and I hear this is the cool season! Better get used to sweating. The office and house are just about a block from the beach. Conakry is a peninsula jutting out into the ocean so it's beautiful and there is a bit of a breeze. The sunset last night was great.

Alright, it's time I head off to a meeting with Yamilee. I will hang around Conakry for a few more days and then meet up with all the others in my training group - who are arriving from the U.S. on Wednesday - and then we'll go to our training area, about 40 minutes away. There are 44 of us in the training or stage as it's called in French. 15 of us in the business sector, or SED as it's called in PC. The others are health and environmental education.

Looking forward to meeting everyone else and getting started. I've been getting a lot of sympathy and pity from other PCVs who hear I have to do training again. Oh well, c'est la vie!

January 31, 2004

Here I am, almost 3 weeks in Guinea and just beginning my 3rd week of training - we started on week 0. Luckily this past week flew by so I have high hopes that the rest of training will also speed along. Having the language every day is helpful but most of the other stuff we do all day is review for me. The technical training for my sector, Small Enterprise Development (SED), is actually very good. Much, much better than what I had in Kenya. The working environment sounds very similar between Guinea and Kenya. In fact, I’d say that there are more similarities between the two countries than there are differences. The glaring difference I see is in the availability of clean water, or any water for that matter. It was a struggle for many rural communities in Kenya but here most every household has either a well, a pump or a spigot with city water in their compound - if not in each compound, than certainly within the village.

Training consists of waking up at 7a.m. and getting dressed and ready for the day. I get a half a baguette for breakfast from my host family. Class goes from 8:00-10:00 and then again from 10:30-12:30. Lunch is from 12:30-2:00 and is either eaten together as a sector or the entire training group (3 sectors). Lunch is usually rice with sauce. Sometimes there’s fish with the sauce and sometimes it’s chicken or beef or a peanut sauce (like really runny peanut butter with oil). There’s also salad, which consists of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions, and bread. We then have class again from 2:00-3:30 and from 3:45-5:00. Many days we all meet up for one or two classes at one of the villages where the trainees live.

There are 3 sectors within my training group and all 3 live in different villages about 5km apart. We meet up in the middle one. We all have new Trek mountain bikes so I bike the 10km roundtrip and get nice and extra sweaty even though I sweat all day long. Dinner is eaten at your homestay family’s house. I either have a salad (with lettuce!) or rice and peanut sauce. My family’s father is the Chief of the area I’m in. I live in a separate house from the rest of the family. I can tell that it was just barely finished in time for my arrival. Actually, it’s not finished. They were putting in a toilet within my room but stopped work when I arrived - they were behind schedule so it will be completed after I leave. Rats, almost had a toilet in my room.

As it is I use the pit latrine outside. I have electricity in my room and the family has a TV that they watch constantly and at top volume. It’s usually placed out on the porch and everyone sits around on chairs out in the compound as it’s much cooler outside than inside. It’s still 78 degrees but it’s cooler than the 93 degrees it was during the afternoon. Everything is in French of course which is good reinforcement but annoying when you really want to know what’s being said. My French is coming along but the French you get on TV is still way too fast for me to understand all what’s being said. While I studying French for years in high school and college, then even lived in France for about 6 months, it's become rusty with lack of use.

We’ve all been watching the African Cup soccer tournament that is being played in Tunisia. Guinea is doing well. We won the first game in our group and tied the second. When we won the first game everyone and I mean EVERYONE in the village/town rushed out into the streets and celebrated. After the tied game it was much more somber. Can’t imagine what it’ll be like if Guinea takes the cup. We actually convinced our SED trainers to cancel our class last week to watch one of the games.

Later on in the training I’m going to give a session on solar cooking to the entire group. No one does much with solar here. We were just trained on solar food drying, but not cooking, by the Peace Corps trainers (actually volunteers who are helping out during training). Deforestation is a big problem here as it was in Kenya. The Sahara desert is encroaching upon Guinea and will be here within a couple decades if the deforestation and over-grazing doesn’t stop now.

Well, as far as what I’ll be doing for a project and where I’ll be living - I won’t know until the week of Feb. 16. The following week I’ll then travel there with my Guinean counterpart (the person that I’ll be working closely with on my project) to check out my house and the project. Training will be completed and everyone will swear-in as a volunteer (not sure if I do again as I’ve already got the status of volunteer vs. trainee) on April 1 in Conakry. There will be a party afterwards hosted by the U.S. Ambassador who was himself a volunteer at one point in his life. After a few days in Conakry spent buying supplies, we’ll be off to our sites and on our own.

It sounds as if here in Guinea the Peace Corps tries to pair you up with another volunteer, not within your same village, but at least fairly close by. It certainly wasn’t that way in Kenya. I shouldn’t say that. Those out in western Kenya were very close to one another. My region just didn’t have many volunteers so we were spread out. Guinea has about 100 PCVs vs. Kenya which had about 140.

The volunteers here and in other West African countries have a saying for the tour of service in English-speaking Peace Corps countries, like Kenya. They say it’s Peace Corps for Beginners. In a way I think they’re right. Even on your worst day in Kenya you could at least find someone who spoke and understood English, many in fact. Here, no matter where you’re at you still have to get your point across in French. If you’re really sick you still need to have enough brain power to speak and understand French. I don’t know of any volunteer in Kenya that HAD to conduct all his/her project-related stuff in Kiswahili or a local language. Here you HAVE to do it all in French or a local language or else no one will understand you. Another of the biggest differences I’ve seen between West and East Africa has been the level of communications. No one really has a cell phone outside of the capital city as there’s no service. Land lines are few and very unreliable. You’re even charged to receive a phone call on a land line. Internet exists but mostly in the capital and maybe in the regional capitals up country. There are only a few internet cafes in Conakry vs. one every 20 ft. in Nairobi.

So, that’s a round-about way of saying I won’t be doing a lot of emailing or making web updates, certainly not during training. I think I can get online once more before I finish training and again when I’m in Conakry for swearing-in. Not sure how close my site will be to a regional capital and whether or not that regional capital will have good internet access. In other words, I’d really like to get snail mail. My address for my entire stay in Guinea is posted on the Contact Me page so please check it out and send me a letter. If you write to me I promise to write back. Number your letters and make a photocopy as I hear many letters never make it here. Never send photos in a letter as it will cause the entire thing to disappear. Same thing with postcards - I’ll never get them.

If anyone feels so inclined to send a package, I’ve heard you should write the address in red ink, write the words "Religious Materials" all over the outside of the package and only declare a customs value of $1. Also might try putting tempting looking stuff into a tampon box to disguise it. Any food items including candy should go into a Rubbermaid container so the rats and mice don’t feast on it at the Guinean post office where the package will most likely sit for days to weeks. If the mice don’t eat the good stuff, the postal workers probably will. Many volunteers never have a problem so it’s the luck of the draw.

Ok, I think I’ve covered just about everything. I typed this update out on my laptop a few days prior to coming to the internet café so I could capitalize on the time spent online. I tend to ramble when I’m not crunched for time so you’re stuck reading a really long update. Till next time! Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying cold weather. You really don’t know how much you appreciate the cold when you can’t ever have it.