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. 

I like washing the TV very much

I teach English on Saturday mornings to about 25 students ages 16 to 54. It's a very diverse group, but they are all excited to be learning English. Their homework this week was to write a paragraph describing themselves. Here are some of my favorites:

My name is Barry. I have 19 years old and teint black. I am a short boy. I am also fat boy, a big head and small eyes et black hair. I have a small mouth. 

Sounds like such an attractive young man. 

I like washing the TV very much

Hopefully he unplugs it first or doesn't use water.

Firsty, I'm a present...

???

I'm black boy. I like the childs.

In the US this would send up so many red flags.

I've got black hair and white eyes

Not sure why this was the most common descriptive phrase used.

I'm not married so my best friend come to divorced with her wife because she is always hungry...I's sunny and in my bedroom, I'm hot. I hope you haven't forgotten me?...I'm not so greedy after all. I just like food....I dream to fly in America.

Not sure what I can even say about this.

My name is Camara Mohamed Aissata II. I'm a young man, I'm a single. I'm a nice man, a smart man. I'm a pretty boy, I'm a jealous man. 

At least one student can write positive things about himself. I hope this wasn't a come-on.

I am a little ugly. I have a small mouth and short eyes.

Again, what is with Guinean self deprecation / honesty. 

I want to travel in America to so sea in Salematou a house. NB: I like my mistress Salematou beaucoup. She is taught very good the lecons in English. 

NB stands for Notez Bien. I think she is sucking up so that I invite her to America to "sea" my house. 

Going Commando

We are told that as Peace Corps volunteers we will have to give up a lot. Christmases, Birthdays, air conditioning, good food, movies, parties, toilet paper (ok, I have not given this one up, but TP is one of my most expensive purchases of the month). I’ve been ok with giving these things up. So, I did not get to watch the fireworks on the Fourth, but I did sis in the view of a mountain and eat homemade guacamole. And as for sushi, I just have vivid dreams about eating it thanks to my malaria prophylaxis. The one thing I never thought I would have to give up is underwear, but that is just what happened. I realized while I was packing for Mamou that I really did not have any clean clothes. I had two choices, wash them here, wait for them to dry and then go or bring dirty clothes and wash them with the running water at Mamou. I was among the first to arrive, headed straight to the big sink out back and did my wash. I even took off the ones I was wearing so that I would have a stock of clean underwear. I finished up in record time and hung it all out to dry. I went back a few hours later and it was still damp, so I left it. The other volunteers arrived and we prepped for our conference. Just as it was about to start getting dark, I went to take my clothes in (look up Tooba Flies) and found that while all of my clothes were where I left them, all of my underwear was gone. Trying to see the best in everyone, I went to ask the manager if someone moved it so it would not blow away or something like that. He told me he did not take it and confirmed that it did not blow away or fall on the ground. Thanks for the help buddy, but I checked the ground under the line first thing. I was getting frustrated and left at which point the man explained to the other volunteers that he didn’t like me accusing him of anything and that my laundry is not his responsibility. Can’t forget about that language barrier. I got Yama, a PC staff member to talk to him so we would avoid any confusion. Her basic take away is that the man was angry I did my own laundry instead of paying him to do it. She said that they may have taken it to teach me a lesson or maybe some kids stole it, but if they took it, it would be back by the end of the week. In the mean time, I had NO underwear. Not a single pair. And I was spending the week presenting in front of 72 youth. I started laughing/crying. I don’t know where the tears came from, but for the first time in Peace Corps I basically cried for no reason. I’m proud I made it almost 7 months. I was lamenting to one of the volunteers about trying to teach about assets and deficits maps all the while knowing I was going commando. She reminded me of the age-old adage of picturing the audience in their underwear to deal with nerves. She told me I could picture them in my underwear since that was probably what they were wearing anyway. And I made it. Besides the occasional oddly placed smile sneaking in when I remembered the ridiculousness of my situation, the conference went really well. My mom sent me more in the mail and I guess on the bright side, it was high time for some replacements anyway. 

A Post that’s not about Guinea?!?!

Thinking back to early last summer when my response to, “What are you doing next year?” was still, “I hope to be leaving sometime in the future for some country in Africa”, I got an email from Peace Corps. It reminded me of the budget cuts and that some nominated volunteers would never be invited and to stay competitive. I figured my summer plans of lying on the couch watching “Toddlers and Tiaras” OnDemand did not count as “staying competitive”. I hurriedly searched idealist.org searching for volunteer experience that could enhance my resume and get me in a plane and on to the next part of my life just a little faster. I found Novi. They were a perfect fit. Their mission “recognizes the need to support and encourage the sustainable development of, simultaneously, education, entrepreneurship, and the environment so that economically distressed communities might become self-sustaining entities while preserving the traditional customs that hold them together.” Over the summer I fundraised for their SEEK Camp which brought together 60 youth for 2 weeks of learning how to innovate to be positive agents of change in their community. Thanks again to everyone who bought raffle tickets, came to that ungodly hot beach workout, and sent in donations. It was a huge success. Although, my work in Guinea is so life consuming that I am no longer on the Novi team, I believe in their work and so try to stay in touch with the founder. Novi has expanded rapidly in the last year and works with 8 cooperatives in 3 countries 6 of whom have started to sell in the US. They even started doing wholesale and Anthropologie and Whole Foods are interested in becoming buyers. The model of poverty alleviation that Novi has developed works! Unfortunately, on the US front, funding for the NGO is not going so well. There is not money for SEEK this year and if they do not raise money soon, the organization will have to close taking away the technical support for 200 artisan families and the possibility of expanding this model to the rest of West Africa (i.e. Guinea which is losing it’s CED program). So if you feel like you maybe have an extra $20 or $200 lying around I urge you to donate. Go to noviafrica.org. Although the website is under construction, you can still donate. Or go to novifairtrade.com and buy their quality shea butter soaps before they triple in price at Wholefoods and get ahead of Anthro’s trends with a cool handbag. Providing technical assistance and access to markets is the most proven and most sustainable route to poverty reduction in Africa.