One Month Down

Here I sit, one month into my official service as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It is impossible for me to express to you the ups and downs of the emotions I’ve felt since moving to my site, but I’m at least going to try to give you an idea of what’s influenced those emotions. Where do I start, though? With the good things? With the bad? I have a cute story, but perhaps I’ll save that for the end, just to make you work for it ;)

So I’m going to start with the bad things. Bad is a harsh word – maybe it’s better to say the things that have made my experience thus far rather difficult. It can be broken down into three groups: living arrangements, professional life, and social life.

As you’ve (hopefully!) already read, my the thatch roof of my hut is replete with holes through which the rains leak incessantly, resulting in muddy puddles throughout my hut and, to my despair, even on my bed. Despite moving the bed all about the hut, there is no longer a place for the bed where it can escape the malice of the leaky roof. Lucky, I’ve made my way into the big city of Faranah (big = 30,000 people), where I bought some plastic to line the roof. Unfortunately, I forgot to buy a hammer! But some day I’ll get that plastic up and the leaky roof will be no more. Secondly, I have the rats to contend with. No big deal though, I’m okay with roommates so long as they don’t eat my food.

Professional life? Well, so far I seem to be the only person in my village to be leading a professional life. Aside from a few appearances by the Director of Studies, during the first two and a half weeks of school, I have been the only teacher to show up to school – even the principal has been MIA for about two weeks. A lack of teachers, though, has not prevented 200 students from showing up every day, which makes 200 students I have to ‘control’ while I try to teach. My classes – 10th grade math from 8-10 and 9th grade math from 10-12 – each have about 50 students, which means, while I’m teaching, there are about 150 other kids running wild with nobody to teach or discipline them. As you can imagine, that gets old quite fast. Students will gather around the windows to my classroom, trying to peak in on the lesson, talk to their friends in the class, or just make jokes in general. To date, the only effective remedy has been… throwing rocks. Yes! I throw rocks at the kids. But don’t worry, it doesn’t seem to hurt them because they always come back about five minutes later. During those five minutes, though, I’m able to teach a little, so it’s worth it :) Oh! and if you have a better idea of how to better control 150 kids not in my class, suggestions are more than welcome.

Regarding my social life en village, there’s not much to tell. Very few people in my village speak French, almost none Susu – instead they speak Yalunka, a language which I am still struggling to grasp. Even among my students, I’d say only about 20% of them speak any kind of recognizable French. How the other 80% could make it to 10th grade in a French school system without speaking the language is beyond me, but they made it. With that in mind, maybe I still have a chance of teaching them math.. So, communication with my village is quite limited. Most other volunteers seem to have found families – people they eat with on a daily basis and with whom they spend most of their free time. Although I walk around my village frequently, and often during meal times, I am yet to eat a meal with a family. Apparently, my village is notorious for not being particularly friendly – oh well! Over the last month, I’ve realized that the cultural barrier between myself and the village is simply too great for me to ever have any true friends here – people with whom I can just relate, hang out, and shoot the breeze, you know?

Also, my village is about 125 kilometers from the nearest Peace Corps Volunteer and a good hour-long trip from a place on a hill which has cell phone reception about half of the time. That, along with what I mentioned before, makes for a lonely situation at site. It’s quite difficult; I’m homesick often and constantly questioning how much longer I can stay. That said, I know I’m here for a reason, that I won’t give up for reasons like this, and that this is just another problem I can overcome.

I could give plenty of specific examples of why the first month has been so difficult for me, but I’d rather not dwell too long on the negatives – I have to live here a long time; I need to focus on the positives!

SO! I am finding lots of time to exercise. After months of inconsistent training, I’m finally back on a structured marathon training program, keeping my upper body fit with the regimen I mentioned a few weeks ago – pushups, bucket curls, tree branch pull-ups. Although I’ve been sick for a good portion of the month at site, I’ve been pushing through to work out, as that’s one of the things upon which I always know I can depend for sound-mindedness.

Although living alone in a mud hut can be lonely, it’s also quite nice to shut the doors at night and write by the light of a few candles. Late at night (as in, say, 8:30 pm), when I go to brush my teeth, the night sky is incredible. Stars like a solid mass of light, the Milky Way so close you want to reach out and touch it. Every time I see it, my breath is taken away.

Teaching right now, as I’ve said, is quite difficult. That, though, is something I think will really help to make me a much stronger person in the future. If I can figure out a way to help these students learn, to help them become able to do the math necessary to pass the Brevet at the end of the – well, hell, if I can do that, anything is possible!

Like I’ve said, loneliness has made my time here very difficult. Thank God I found some angels in the form of the Andersons, a family of missionaries only about 45 minutes from my village by bike. They arrived at my door one day, freshly-baked cookies in hand, inviting me to their house any time I wanted. Believe me when I say I’ve taken them up on their offer! Dawn, the mother, is an incredible cook, and over the last few weeks I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy pizza, cinnamon rolls, and cherry cheesecake, among other things. They’ve been a great help to me, my visits to their village at the end of the week looming like the carrot suspended before the donkey, except each Saturday I finally get to eat that carrot! They’re very kind people who take an interest in what I’m doing and what I have to say, and that’s quite refreshing after six days of having no idea what it is everybody is yelling at me in Yalunka, haha.

So here’s a funny story about school the other day:

When the Director of Studies arrived at the school around 8am, he noticed the Guinean flag had not yet been raised, so he found the smallest seventh grader he could and told him to raise the flag. Why did he pick the smallest seventh grader? Well, obviously he didn’t want the biggest kid climbing the pole to hang the flag – the pole could break! So, flag line in hand, the little boy (and by little, I mean maybe four feet tall, 65 pounds max, seriously) started climbing. At the top, his first attempt in threading the line through the hook at the top of the pole failed – he dropped the line all the way to the ground. As some other students attempted to wrap the line around a rock to toss it back up, the boy just waited, chilling out at the top like it was no big deal. Man! I wish I had my camera. There he was, about 25 feet in the air, with the entire school of about 200 students standing in a circle, ready to salute their colors, but instead they were saluting him!

It all worked out in the end, of course. The trick with the rock worked and the flag was up just a few moments later, but those magical few moments while the child sat atop the flagpole, flag missing, students all around – it was one of the moments that reminds me I’m glad to be here.

Unrest in Conakry:

Check out this article on what’s been going on around here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/05/africa/guinea.php

While there’s been some unrest within the city, I’ve been perfectly safe behind the walls of the Peace Corps compound. Don’t worry – if we were ever in danger, we’d be yanked out of here faster than a seventh grader could climb a flag pole, and, believe me, that’s fast! The other day, though, we finally got permission to leave the compound to go to the market. For the most part, it was uneventful. At one point, though, I felt like the scene in front of me was straight from a book or movie. While I haggled over the price of eggs, a pickup truck full of police officers rolled by. There must’ve been about 20 of them standing in the back, singing Guinean military tunes and hoisting their AK-47s to the sky. I’ll admit, I was a little terrified. Fortunately, they just passed on by. A few minutes later, while buying some eggs, we heard a rapid burst of gunfire, but no response. Honestly, it didn’t really seem like a big deal, but looking back I guess it is a little scary. Things seem to be cleared up now.

As scary as that trip to the market was, it was not nearly as awful as my taxi ride from Mamou to Conakry last Thursday night. We’re not supposed to be on the road at night, and now I know why. Although I’d originally planned to pass the night in Mamou, all the hotels were full, so I was forced to grab a taxi at 4pm, meaning I’d be riding blind for at least 2, maybe 3 hours. Naturally, I picked the taxi with the most complete headlights and the least amount of damage to the windows and mirrors. Given that I’m writing this right now, it’s obvious I made it in one piece. Half-way through the ride though, I’d probably already given up on surviving the trip about ten times over. There is nothing to compare to the terror one feels when passing a truck at 60 miles an hour around a blind bend, in the dark, and finding another trucker coming directly at you, only tens of meters away. I have no idea how that driver avoided making paste of us, but I’m glad he didn’t ;-) Needless to say, it’s going to be a long time before I travel at night again!

Ok, unfortunately, that’s all for now – I have to be up early tomorrow and have a lot more to get done. I hope everybody is doing well back home--tune back in a few weeks from now for some more of my ramblings!

Holla holla
Hunter

For my next post (around Thanksgiving), I plan to shoot more photos of my village and write a bit more about my experiences as a teacher. There will be plenty more bush taxi rides between now and then, and so you never know when we might have to stop to pick up a dinosaur to squeeze into the middle seat, so get excited!

Oh!!! But I almost forgot a few more pictures:

I bought some rope, hung it from a tree, and occasionally use it to do some very difficult pull-ups. If you squint, you can also see my clothesline:

My lovely bathroom (the thing in the center lifts out):

My bathroom and the view I have while showering/bucket bathing:

My bathroom from a little further away. This is also where I put trash before I burn it:

Can you see the branch in the very middle that's almost parallel to the ground? I use it for pull-ups:

Some kids in my village while I waited for a taxi:

The cafe in my village. This is where I come for tea:

The man in the center repaired my shoes, cleaned, and polished them for 1000 francs, or about 20 cents, while I waited for the taxi:

This is the boy who climbed the flagpole, out of uniform. Please notice the pattern of his complet - green background with purses all over.