Sick as a fish

I was pretty sick the past couple of days. In Guinean you develop a “new normal” for what is sick and what is healthy. So while I would have been alarmed and shocked with what was going in the US, in Guinea, I come to expect something like this every once in a while. I even had a friend going through the same thing about 20 hours ahead of me so I could check in and see what the future had in hold for me. My community was very concerned since they thought I had malaria. I would not be shocked if a broken wrist was misdiagnosed as malaria in this country. So I had many visitors. My counterpart (PC assigns you an official work partner) came three times on Friday and was alarmed that I was not eating. I promised him that on Saturday I would eat some bread and to not worry. Well worry he did and he and his wife decided to bring me a meal on Saturday. They came by around 5 with a plate covering another plate dropped it off, said hello, and left. I wondered what could be inside. Bread? Bananas? Plain rice? Maybe bouille (it’s rice or corn or millet pounded into a flour, reformed into balls and then boiled until it has a stew consistency)? I opened the plate and what did I find? A whole fish that looked both terrifying and terrified. Somehow it looked sharp and the mouth was open bearing teeth. The eye socket, a black abyss. It was on the plate with a huge pile of greasy potatoes, onions and spices and topped with a huge dollop of mayonnaise. This is something I would not be able to stomach even if I had not been throwing up. I threw the lid back on, and once I realized that the smell would not make me sick, I had to laugh at the situation. It was incredibly sweet of them to prepare me such a feast, but another case of culture clash. As I was told many times, in Guinea if you don’t keep eating hearty meals while your sick you will never recover and never get your strength back, where as in the US we look at the stomach flu as a reason to eat nothing but broth and saltines. Anyway, I’m much better now and was able to sneak the food to my cat and neighbors without anyone knowing so at least somebody ate like a king.

What Do I Want to Hear?

Other volunteers are probably sick of hearing about how much I love my site and my partner organization. People are motivated. They want better lives for themselves and for the people in their community. They embrace change. They follow through. Even in Kindia, though, you still run into some of the most frustrating aspects of Guinean culture. The number one frustrating cultural practice is telling people what you think they want to hear instead of the truth.

I am trying to start a savings and loans association in my neighborhood. About two months ago, we had an introductory meeting that was well and enthusiastically attended. I gave people a two week deadline to present their groups to me. Two weeks has come and gone at least 4 times. There is one group of young women who say they are prepared to start. The issue is my counterpart (the only French speaking member of the group) has been hard to pin down. Each Sunday that a meeting is scheduled, I go to find her and she is at a wedding, funeral, or baptism. Then she said we needed to wait for Ramadan to end to start up. So this week we had a meeting scheduled for 1pm. I had a good feeling about it. I went over to here house at 9:30 to remind her. I was told,  “Fatime? A bara siga walide, taqui, a fafe”. Fatime is in town working but she’s coming. I went to town to teach my entrepreneurship course and got back around 12. I was told the same thing. I asked her sister to send her to my house as soon as she got back. 1pm came and went at 2, I went back over. “Where is Fatime?”, I asked, “We had a meeting.” Fatime went to Conakry for a sacrifice. I asked when she left. “Horo” or yesterday. When was she coming back? “Tina”. Why did nobody tell me this originally? Instead of lying to me all day, I could have known the truth and not spent my afternoon waiting around for a meeting that was never going to happen. They knew I did not want to hear that she was out of town (again) so they did not tell me. I’m trying again for Wednesday, so keep your fingers crossed for me.

Even more frustrating is my neighbor who is a candidate for Mercy Ships. Mercy Ships is an ONG that gives free surgery on this converted cruise ship. They are in Guinea for 9 months and today was the day that everyone who wanted surgery needed to go to “Palais de Peuple”, a kind of Guinean conference center. My neighbor has a tumor on her face about the size of a football. The kind of tumor you would see on a primetime hospital drama and ask yourself, “How did they let it get this bad.” In Guinea, there is no choice but to let it grow (our hospital does not have electricity most of the time), unless and NGO comes in with their own hospital and offers to help you out for free. We have been talking about her going for four months. I talked to her in Susu, I talked to a family member in French, my host dad talked to everyone at their house multiple times. It was settled. Two days ago I stopped by to remind her the date was coming. She assured me that in two days she would be in Conakry. I went yesterday and said you need to leave today. “Ok”, she said. I went by this morning and she was there. I told her if she did not leave right now, she was going to miss her chance. Did she want to go? She said she was not ready yet. Four months and she was not ready yet. So many people want to help Guineans, but if they don’t want to help themselves it’s not going to work. On one hand, it frustrates the hell out of me, on the other hand, it reaffirms the grass roots development approach. Solutions need to come from the community and development workers need to seize presented opportunities instead of pushing their own agenda. 

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.