Because we can

My sister trying to do crowd control. See the huge speaker?

What happens if you take a camera out

As I said in my last post, I have been très occupé. I have been in the office or around town for meetings from 8-5:30 which is a long work day when life is also so time consuming and you walk 30 minutes each way to work and daylight ends at 7:30 and you have no electricity. Today I got home around 6 and was planning to skip dinner, get into bed and watch a movie on my laptop. As I approached my house, I heard loud music. A wedding in the neighborhood? Now that Ramadan is over, weddings will start up again. Nope. My host dad owns giant speakers, like professional DJ speakers, that he let people borrow for weddings, baptisms, ect. For no reason other than Ramadan’s over so we can listen to music, so boys rented a generator and borrowed the speakers to have a dance party. I can home to 50+ children dancing to LOUD Guinean music and chanting my name. So instead of a nap, I had to dance solo for the crowd for 15 minutes to Guinean music while they shouted Salématou! Salématou! At least I can’t complain that my life is boring.

Busy as Abeille

So it’s been awhile and I am happy to say that I have not been blogging because I have been busy. If you know me, you know that busy is the way I like to be, so I ended up in a great placement in Guinea. I have been out to a farm / prospective ecotourism site to do a minor strategic plan / business plan and got them up on WWOOF. We have our first WWOOFer coming in November (check us out, we are the only site listed in Guinea wwoofindependents.org)! After months of pulling teeth trying to use a participative method for script writing, we have the outline of a script for “The Adventures of Nga Bountou & Kadi”. The title is still in progress but it follows a women who successfully starts a business transforming manioc into atteike and a women who does not business plan so fails in her fabric dying project. The moral of the story is that a business plan minimizes risk and to be truly successful you need to innovate. Hopefully it will go up on youtube but it will be in local language so most people will not be able to understand. I traveled again to Mamou for a volunteer advisory committee meeting and got to meet the new stage (training class) of education volunteers. They are a great bunch and it is always exciting to get new blood. Ramadan is over. I got my family a live chicken and carried it by its feet for two miles to get it back from the market. We almost killed it for the fete, but it laid an egg so it was spared, but not for long. I saw my brother eating chicken this morning and have not seen my feathered friend pecking around anywhere. In biggest news, I am working with another volunteer to start BiblioTech. BiblioTech is a Kindle library. We had an Open Space conference on entrepreneurship in Kindia and one of the out comes was the vocalization of a need for a library. BiblioTech’s most obvious goal is to provide books. Kindia has 300,000 people and 0 libraries. We are going to stock the Kindle with classics, popular novels, and business, management and entrepreneurship books. On a deeper level, the goal is to provide a concrete example in Kindia on how to leverage technology to create a profitable social enterprise. Membership to the library is going to cost a small amount of money and this will support the buying of new books and the general activities of my partner organization. Another volunteer is starting a BiblioTech in her community, Dalaba, based on a slightly different model (it is not going to generate revenue and will be supported by a library instead of business NGO) and from our success (fingers crossed) we hope that the model can be copied across Guinea. As I have talked about in other posts, Guinea, if it ever wants to catch up with the West needs to leapfrog development steps, so it makes no sense to build a physical library full of paper books because that technology is becoming obsolete. If you are another volunteer or development agent and want to see the full proposal comment with your e-mail and I’ll send it along. All exciting things, so I am thrilled to be so busy.

'Happy' Ramadan

Lately Guineans have been driving me a bit up the wall crazy. It’s Ramadan. Everyone is Muslim, so everyone is fasting. Everyone. There is no prepared food to buy; most restaurants are closed. Instead of music, you only hear the Koran being read. I’m not Muslim, so I’m not fasting. To me, that’s simple. I do not light candles because it is Chanukah, I do not go to the mosque five times a day. I sometimes eat meat. I do not practice integral parts of religions other than Catholicism. Even that I see as flexible; I take what I like about it and leave the rest. Growing up in America, religious freedom is seen as a basic right. It doesn’t matter to me that other people are not Catholic, and I am not going around telling people they should convert or that they should give up something for Lent. To be completely honest, I believe people should make their own life choices and it’s not up to me to tell them otherwise. If you want to drink, drink! If you want to eat lamb, go ahead! Even if I am in one of my vegetarian stages, I am not going to suggest you instead order the tofu. Maybe that is why it’s driving me absolutely crazy that 100 times a day, I am asked if I am fasting. I don’t look Muslim. I have blue eyes and am just as pale as I was 8 months ago when I left for Guinea. Although Guineans do not often meet people from outside the country, they know that there are Christians (neighboring Sierra Leone is full of them) and that most white people they meet are not Muslim. My go-to response is, “Am I Muslim?” and when they respond with no, I then ask, “Then should I be fasting?’ The answer is usually yes. I try to explain that I should not be fasting. The fast is part of the religion and while I am trying my hardest to integrate into Guinean culture, I am not trying to convert to Islam. For most Guineans, they cannot separate Guinean culture from Muslim culture. After about a week of this I caved and decided to fast on Fridays, the holy day for Muslims. Ramadan is a part of Guinean culture, so I thought I should give it a go. Fasting was hard. I got up at 4:30 in the morning to eat some hardboiled egg and bread, then went back to bed. I woke up thirsty, but was not allowed to drink water. I was not terribly hungry, but I was so thirsty. It is what I focused on. I stopped working hard in the afternoon. I just wanted to sleep away the last hours of my fast. I realized that my work was more important to me than the fast. I reaffirmed my commitment to nonparticipation. I’m going to do it again tomorrow (since it will be again Friday), but nobody can convince me to do everyday. So today, when someone asked me if I was fasting, I went through my typical spiel. I told him I respected his culture, so I am fasting on Fridays as a show of solidarity. His response. “That’s bad!” If a Muslim only fasts on Fridays, he is a bad Muslim. "Il faut faire le gen". Il faut is a strong sentence structure, a command. You must fast everyday. And so we returned to the beginning of, “Moi, est-ce que je suis Musalman?”. He agreed that no I am not, but I still needed to be fasting. I kind of lost it. I told him that religion was a choice and that it is mean and disrespectful to try to force his religion on me. That I did not appreciate it in the least and that I found him intolerant. That it was not at all obligatory for me to be fasting and that if I choose to fast once a week to show my support for his culture that is one more day a week of fasting than is necessary. I got up and walked away. He was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but really Guinea, please open your mind to new ideas, other ways of living. I am looking forward to spending this weekend on a farm and then a few days in Conakry away from my community where I have to deal with the constant questioning. Soon after that, Ramadan will be over and if so many people around the world are living each day without food or drink, I can do a month of extreme annoyance.