Fote Can't Cook

Today is Friday and just like in America, people duck out of work early on Friday. Here it is because Friday for Muslims is like Sunday for Christians, but also because nobody likes to work on a Friday night. So even though I typically try to be the last to leave, on Fridays, I go home early. This means I have time to cook dinner. Today I attempted to make a sort of pasta primavera. I had eggplant, cabbage, green beans, hot peppers, onion and pasta. I lit my coals (by myself for the first time!) and boiled some water. Threw the green beans and cabbage into boil and then the pasta. When it was done I drained the water and added the other veggies and- and here I think was my fatal mistake- tomato paste. You cannot get tomato sauce here but I figured, a little tomato paste, a little water, voila! Ragu. I put some in a bowl to bring to my host dad and put the rest in my house. While I cook, I gather an audience of 5-10 neighborhood children. After a while, they get bored and go home (or to eat mangos or to go to the well or to climb a tree). The last thing I do every time I cook is to boil water. I have a sweet thermos that keeps water hot for 3 days and this allows me to have coffee a few mornings without having to take the time for the coals to heat up. After watching me cook for an hour, watching me boil water is usually where the boredom sets in. Today, 2 kids stayed through the water boiling. I said good-bye to them and went into the house to eat and they sat down at my door. I had a dilemma. These kids were clearly hungry. I had too much food and leftovers don’t keep here. The thing is that I am here for two years, so if I feed two kids today, I know I will be feeding at least two kids every time I cook. I don’t have the time, or money, as a volunteer to feed the whole neighborhood. As Peace Corps volunteers, we have to constantly remind ourselves that we are hear to build capacity, not to give food or money to every hungry person that asks. It's the whole “if you give someone a fish they eat for a day, but if you teach them how to fish they eat for a lifetime” concept. In the end I caved. I just couldn’t stand the thought of two hungry kids sitting outside my door while I had more than enough food. Anyway, they had put in their time watching me boil water. I gave them the pot and took a bowl of food. We had our first bites at the same time. The food was terrible. It was too spicy and tasted overwhelmingly of tomato paste. The eggplant was rubbery. The best part was the boiled cabbage and you know you have problems when the highlight of a meal is the boiled cabbage. It was so bad that after a few hesitant bites, the little boy said “N bara luga” – I’m full- a phrase that I use frequently to avoid 10 meals of rice a day, but had yet to hear a Guinean say. The little girl stuck it out for a few more bites and then also said “N bara luga”. In Guinea, they don’t think a meal is good unless it has rice, maggi cube, and fish. Mine had none of these and was poorly made on top of it. So I guess I don’t have to worry about feeding the neighborhood while I am here. I am sure the big story of the night is what a terrible cook the Fote is. I can only imagine what my host dad thinks. 

An Uphill Battle

So too many of you reading this know me well enough that I cannot pretend that I am a neat person. Anyone who came into my apartment last year may be surprised to find that there was indeed a couch in my room, not just a huge pile of clothes. Clutter does not faze me and mess is just a normal part of my life. So if I am saying this, you know it has to be bad. My house here gets so filthy that I feel the need to sweep it everyday. It has not rained here for months so all the roads are loose dirt and at night the wind gets strong enough to blow it through my windows and under my door and I wake up every day to a coating of dirt on everything. Guinea does not have a waste management system. In the town, there are deep gutter to collect trash and water, but out in my quartier we have nothing. An average of 5 plastic bags a night find some way to blow under the ¾ inch gap in my door. Then there is my roof. The underside is thatched. Creatures have taken up residence in between the thatched part and the tin part and when they run around, bits of ceiling rain down upon me. Today I have chased a lizard and a mouse in my house and right now I have a cricket chirping away stuck in my roof. Last, but not least, are the ants. My floor is some sort of clay tiling laid just on top of God's good green (really brown) earth. Ants can burrow up through the earth, through my tile and create ant hills inside my house or these weird dirt tubing things up the side of my wall. I discovered two new huge ant hills today with about a cup of dirt each- one behind my trunk and one under a piece of cardboard I was using as a mat. So whether its coming from above, below, or all around the earth tried to reclaim my home on a daily basis. I just finished a book called “The World Without Us” that examines how quickly the earth would return to its pre-human state if we were all to disappear. I can say, in a week the Guinea zoo will have moved in and within a month it would be filled up with dirt. I give it 6 months until it was like I was never here. In the battle between dirt and Meghan, dirt is definitely winning. 

Work & Education in Guinea

So I am sure this is not the last time I will be writing about this. Over my two years here my understanding will deepen and I am sure my opinions will change or at least become more nuanced. With that as a disclaimer…

The education system here is the French system and after 4 years of high school, students enter “Terminale” before sitting for the Baccalaureate exam, which here they just call “Le Bacc”. If a student passes the Bacc (or pays the right person to say that they passed it), then not only can they go to University, but University is free and comes with a living allowance. Here’s the catch- the Bacc places you in a University and concentration based on your competence in certain areas and not on personal choice. If I was in Guinea, I would not have been able to be a finance major. I am sure the Bacc would have picked out the fact that I am much better at the soft sciences than math and put me in English or History, maybe in Sociology or Communications. I think there are a few problems with this system. I have always been taught that it is important to love your work, but if you are put into a major that you hate, you cannot switch and end up qualified only for a line of work which you already know you will not enjoy. That is if you can find a job. Guinean universities, for the most part, prepare you only for jobs in Guinea. They are not truly competitive on an international scale. Forget about them having a career center. And there just aren’t enough jobs in Guinea. Unemployment here is over 50%. Unemployment figures only account for people actively seeking work. During University, students become accustomed to living off of the Government. Do not get me wrong; I do support affordable higher education. A free college education is really the only way that most Guineans can go to college. But then they graduate, and cannot find work, and expect that the government will continue to pay for them. They (and by they I mean mostly young men) do not seek employment. They expect the government to find it for them. Walk around Kindia at any point in the day and you will see groups of men sitting under trees drinking tea. One of the volunteers here has been working on a three-day workshop for youth in how to conduct a job search with a job fair on the final day. I am lucky enough to be able to help out with it and will let you know how it goes. Its absolutely a step in the right direction- participants will create a detailed action plan for their personal job search, but before any real change can be made the education system here needs to become more flexible, allow more room for creativity and choice, needs to teach people to be proactive, and there needs to be enough jobs for the talented students coming out of the Universities to find work.