Just Shake it Off

I had a very Guinea day yesterday. I just got back to site from IST and so walking anywhere took forever. I had to stop and say hello at each house, inquire after people’s families and explain that no I had not gone to America and that I promise to tell them before I leave for good but that will not be for a long time. The thing is, I enjoyed joking around and chatting with my neighbors. I missed joking in Susu. I even missed the woman who every morning asks me if I brought her bread, while she is sitting on her step gnawing away at a loaf. I got into work and nobody was there, so I did some work on my own in the morning and then went out to run errands. I went to the tailor to get some fabric altered. I chatted with the man as I tried to describe what I wanted him to make using an old J.Crew catalogue. When I asked him how much it would be, he said free. Last time I was there his wife went off at me saying she did not want a co-epouse (sister wife in American). I ensured her there was nothing to worry about, but now I am not so sure that he is not trying to marry me. I then went out to a new part of the market. I found an area that sold used glass jars with lids. I was so pumped. These are a rarity in Guinea, but crucial for volunteers who want to make jam for food security projects. I could not wait to call my agfo friends. Walking to the carpenter to buy supplies for my paper beads, I found my way blocked by a truck. Men were using shovels to fling trash from a big pile into the truck. I was happy because that trash pile had been growing and rotting since I have been in Kindia, but annoyed because I did not know how to go around it. I could not go around the outside of the trash, there was no way to pass. I could not go between the trash and the truck, so I went around the outside of the truck. Big mistake. An over-eager worker flung trash up, over the truck and onto my head. I rock that was part of the trash whacked me in the tooth. I had trash in my mouth for a split second before it bounced off my tooth and into the road. What did I do? I shook my head like a wet dog, brushed off my shoulders, and went about my day. Of course I bucket bathed as soon as I got home, but in the meantime, it was not worth throwing a fit over. I’ve been in Guinea for over 6 months now, and it is changing me. I think it is changing me in a good way although I should I go about my day with trash in my hair in the US or take people’s babies and as if I can marry them, we might have problems. I am becoming, as we say here, bien integrée.  Guinée ka na n na!

A Little Bit of Paradise

It’s weird to say that I had a perfect day in Guinea. I guess what comprises a perfect day has changed a lot in the last six months. And it wasn’t just a good day, it was good days! I had two days back to back in training when my purpose was clear. I was thrilled to be in Guinea and inspired to work. The day started with meeting Elhadj Diallo, a cement seller. As part of our training, we had to meet with an entrepreneur, asses their needs, and then design a business training for them. I was so impressed with Elhadj. When I asked to see his accounting system, he pulled out a stack of notebooks and showed his handwritten records going back to 2007. During our SWOT (or as it is called here FFOM) analysis, he told me that one of his strengths was welcoming customers with a smile. My jaw dropped. Someone in Guinea knows about customer service?!?! He also sends palm oil to women who resell it in small quantities. He recognized that their success was his success so he set them up in a group to do savings and learn management techniques. He was proud to say that they don’t need him anymore since they can now manage the group themselves. We ended up doing a training on marketing targeted at ONGs and he was thrilled that we left him with visual aids. He could not wait to go teach what we had taught him. A PCV’s dream.

After our meeting, we went over to the CECOJE and with another volunteer, we presented the job interview portion of the Youth Employability Workshop. The group I ended up with for our small group exercise and the girl I had for my one on one interview both bolstered my faith in the future of Guinea. They re the kind of youth you want ot build a better future with. Then for lunch we had riz gras with lime!

We went out dancing that night and then got up early the next morning to drive to Kindia to visit FABIK, a commercial farm. We were all tired and a little car sick from the winding roads of the Fouta, but when we arrived at the end of a dirt road, we were in paradise. We were met with huge platters of banana chips and cold (!) ginger juice. The farm is owned by a dynamic women, who happens to be the founder of AGUIDEP but whom I have never met. She was in Morocco trying to set up exports, so her son took us on a tour of the farm. As he walked us around fields of bananas, palm, and pineapple he told us of his dream to incorporate agrotourism into his business. He pointed at a patch of land and said, we can’t plant anything there, so how can it generate revenue? We can put a guest house. He wants to be the most visited site in Guinea and says that no guest will be able to leave without learning anything. As we ate our delicious lunch, he pointed out where the pool will be and the beach volleyball court. When people flee the heat and crowds of Conakry on the weekends, they come to Kindia. He wants to set up an educational center with a focus on nature and relaxation. He is a visionary businessman and an interesting guy and I know this post is not doing justice to my amazement of finding such a man and such a place in Kindia. Needless to say, all the girls were sad to find out that he is already married. At the end of the two days, there was one word to describe me. Happy. 

A Million Little Projects

If you are familiar with the PC’s way of doing things or avidly read my blog, you already know that our first 3 months at site are for observation followed by a 2 week in-service training. When we get back, then it is time to really launch into our projects. IST was great for taking all I observed in terms of assets and deficits in my community and turning them into project ideas. Here are some of my potential projects. Not all of them will happen this year, or even ever, but I wanted to put them out there in case people have experiences they can share or can connect me to other resources.

My major project will be the educational business films that I have talked about many times in my blog. Next week, I am running a workshop on “Cinema Concu”. It will be a mix of devised theater practices and a basic introduction to making movies. The topic of the first film is TBD, but won’t remain that way for long.

Other projects that fall under the CED framework, but aren’t with my partner organization:

Recycled Paper Beads: I work with a groupement that dyes fabric. They are interested in adding another product to their repertoire. I am going to suggest paper beads. They can be beautiful. We will get kids to help clean up the streets by collecting paper trash, use left over dye from the fabric dying to color the paper and then make the beads. I hope to do a feasibility study with them soon so we can decide if it is a good idea and if we should sell the beads to jewelry makers or make our own jewelry. I experimented with making them yesterday and they turned out really well for a first try. They are all made out of people magazine pages or handouts from IST that I colored with crayon and cut u. 

Paper Cooking Briquettes: This is more down the line, but I hope that the bead project will help show the women the value of recycling and then we can move on to the more involved paper cooking briquettes. Using recycled paper and peanut shells, you can create these dense logs that can be used for cooking. This alternative fuel source will clean up the streets, but also help slow down deforestation. It also burns cleaner than the plastic bags people use to get their wood or “coal” fires started.

Teaching English: I’ll be teaching it at my organization, but also hope to give a class to students in my neighborhood. I go back and forth on how I feel about teaching English. I think I have landed on the pro side for 2 main reasons. Rio Tinto is starting a big mining project in the area and will only hire people who can speak English so I will be helping people get jobs and helping the Rio Tinto jobs remain in the community. I also will have a group of young men and women who I can sensibilize on making positive life choices.

Teaching Youth Entrepreneurship: Right on the back of IST, we had a training on a new Youth Entrepreneurship Program we are rolling out in Guinea. One of our response volunteers was here to develop it and he trained 17 volunteers and more than 17 Guineans on how to teach the program. I am going to start teaching it at our youth center with the director if the youth center this summer. I hope to start teaching it as a university

course at the agricultural university come fall. With unemployment at around 70% for recent college grads, it is crucially important to give business skills to these students who will be forced to become entrepreneurs out of necessity.

Did you know this is how cashews grow? Me neither. 

Youth Professional Development / Income Generating Activity for CECOJE:

In Guinea, there is a structure called CECOJE (Centre d’Ecoute et Conseil de La Jeunesse). It’s found in every major town and is a kind of youth center run by volunteers. Their main goal is to use peer education to prevent AIDS and promote family planning. This is the organization we partnered with in Kindia to do the Youth Employability Workshop. I hope to transform this 3 day extravaganza into a semester of classes. Peer educators from the CECOJE will hopefully be able to teach it after some training, and participants will pay for the class generating some income for the CECOJE.

Numeracy Murals: Women and girls spend hours and hours at the pump in Kindia. I hope to paint teaching murals focused on teaching numeracy on the cement walls that surround each pump so that the women can learn while they sit waiting for water. Got to take advantage of that captive audience.

Promoting Tourism: I am also going to work with a volunteer in the Fouta (mountain region of which I am on the border of) whose partner organization is the national office of tourism. Since you have to pass through Kindia to get to the Fouta, the goal is to have people stop here for a few days and visit the waterfalls and FABIK (see later post). Anyway, we will be writing a Peace Corps Guide to Guinea. I also will be working with FABIK to get their tourism operations up and running.

Kenede Savings and Loans Association: On the request of my host dad, I will be starting a VSLA in my neighborhood. VSLA’s are informal banks that take deposits and give out loans to members. It’s great because it was designed for illiterate groups and all the rules are designed by the members, including interest rate and repayment cycle. It is micro-finance for people who fall below the target group for MFI’s. Women who save with the group will actually make quite a bit off of the interest, since at the end of the cycle all money is shared out to the group and then you start again.

Outside of my framework, I will be visiting some of the public health volunteers to run workshops for their theater groups to help them up the quality of their health sensilibization skits. I did a brief 10 minute workshop with all the volunteers at IST and at least some of them weren’t weirded out by making a living sculpture depicting power…

That’s all for now. I am spending the next 10 days before leaving for Morocco to sow the seeds and hopefully by the time I get back, the ideas will have taken root.

How Long's it Been?

It’s been over 2 weeks since I’ve had internet access. Congrats to my 2012 Hoyas!! Welcome to the real world. I was in Mamou, a town about 3 hours away for 2 ½ weeks of In-Service Training (IST). Breakfast was at 7, even though we all rolled in around 7:45, and classes ended at 5:30. We had no days off and at night we did what you would expect a group of 30 friends who had not seen each other in months would do. I got very little sleep, but learned a ton and am ready to launch a million projects in my town. Well, not a million. As my APCD reminded us, we need to take everything petit à petit. Sustainability of projects is much more important than quantity. I’m going to break up the post about IST into a few little posts, so you can read what you are interested in and skip what you are not. Enjoy!

Let's Plant Some Trees!

Today, I had an unusual assignment. One of the volunteers in the Kindia region is a agroforestry volunteer. His village has suffered from rampant deforestation and one of his projects is to plant trees at all of the surrounding schools. The trees will filter the air, provide much needed shade, and will help educate the students about environmental sustainability. In other words, it is a great project. One of the trees that he wants to plant is the flamboyant tree. It is beautiful and full of red flowers. We have a few of them in Kindia, so he asked me to go collect seeds for him. Of course I was not going to climb up into a tree and pick the seed pods off, so I did it the African way. I got some petits to do it for me. I felt like such a creep, waiting under a tree for a boy who looked big enough to climb, but small enough to not break the branches to walk by. A perfect one passed me and I called him over. “Would you please climb this tree and fill my bag with seeds? I’ll give you some money”. Of course he would. Petits here are constant errand boys. He would have done it for nothing. He scaled the tree quickly and easily and within 10 minutes had pulled enough pods down to fill my bag. I paid him and started walking back towards town thinking about how happy he would be to buy some bonbons or some other treat. I heard him call out “Salematou, Salematou. Attend!” I waited for him to catch up. He asked me if it was enough for him to buy a notebook. He had nothing to take his notes in at school. I told him that it was and he ran off happily. Whenever I get frustrated about this country (see last post), I have to remember that for every youth who is going to grow up and keep the cycle of graft going, there are many more like this boy who have the foresight to spend his money on preparing for the future.