The roof doesn't leak anymore - it's dry season!

Three things that scare me: bush taxis, black cobras and angry students.

On my last trip back to the village from Conakry, I was lucky enough to be able to ride all the way to Mamou in a Peace Corps vehicle. Unfortunately, the rest of the ride involved me sharing the front seat of a bush taxi with four other men. As horrifying as the nighttime taxi ride into Conakry was, this may have been even worse: this time we could see the things we barely hit… and the things we hit.

The driver was a maniac. When we’d pass through villages, he’d accelerate; when there were four foot potholes, he’d try to jump them at full speed… and bush taxis can’t jump. There were at least three times when I was certain we were going to kill somebody. We’d be speeding through a village, around a blind bend, when a little boy or girl on their way home from school would try to scoot across the road just in front of the taxi. I can’t express to you how terrified I was the one time the little girl actually had to jump out of the way.

At one point, we came across a bunch of sheep in the road. Animals in the road are fairly common – sheep, goats, cows, monkeys, you name it – and, generally speaking, people slow down, you know, so they don’t hit the animals. But not our driver. For the first time (and sadly, surely not the last), I felt and heard the sickening crunch of bush taxi bumper against sheep ribs. The sheep was down for the count, but not the driver – he just kept going, ready to tackle whatever obstacle got in his way! In spite of his maniacal driving, it still took us about four hours to cover the 135 kilometers between Mamou and my village, thanks to stops about every ten minutes to do who knows what. Needless to say, I made a note of the taxi and driver and will not ride with him again.

The other day, I was over at the Andersons when the two sons came running inside, excited about the snake they had heard in the bottom of the garbage pit. They grabbed their guns and hurried back outside. Yet to see a snake in country, I didn’t want to miss this one, so I hustled after them. As we walked up to the trash pit – a 4ft diameter, 20 ft deep hole in the ground, not unlike a well – there came a ferocious “Hsssssss!” It sounded to me like it was much closer than the bottom of the pit and, upon further inspection, there didn’t seem to be anything slithering around down there; meaning the snake must have been much closer, somewhere in the grass right by our feet… the next day, some of the local boys came over and said they saw the snake – a black cobra. Brrr – the thought of being so close to a snake like that gives me the chills. I’ll think twice the next time I go running after a snake!

Last Monday, I was sitting at my desk around 9am when I heard lots of shouting coming from the road about 150 feet from my hut. The students, angry that no teachers or administration had shown up (I teach Tuesday through Thursday), were marching into town, where they proceeded to pagaille – meaning they blocked traffic for about an hour until somebody was able to disperse them. There must have been about 200 of them when I saw them marching down the road, fists in the air, yelling out their frustrations at an administration who still, more than a month into the school year, is yet to provide them with more than two regular teachers. I didn’t necessarily feel unsafe that day, but it did get me to thinking that someday those students may finally decide they really want somebody to answer them, and that day I may be the only one there. For now I’ll just hope it doesn’t come to that.

So, that may sum up, just a little, how things are going at school so far, haha. Actually, I’ve been teaching for quite a while, holding all my classes, minus a few when all the students got up and left to go to the market (I still haven’t figured that one out!). The first few weeks were incredibly frustrating – these students have been educated for the last ten years on sheer rote memorization, and it hasn’t worked. I’ll ask my tenth graders what one minus one is, and they’ll say zero. Then I’ll ask how much negative one plus one makes, and they say/guess, in this order, minus one, two, minus two, one, one half, zero. A lack of fundamental arithmetic such as this has proved to be the great impediment to my tutelage. Hopefully, little by little, I’ll be able to fix these problems and move onto the actual coursework of equations, Thales’ Property, and autres choses comme ca.

The students, while they aren’t angels, seem to at last have been scared into submission. There have been a few times when I’ve really had to flex my disciplinary muscles – doing things like throwing students’ notebooks into the courtyard and telling them to leave and come back tomorrow, or slamming a cahier down on the floor and making the student sit on the floor until he finally writes what I’m telling him. Okay, that makes me sound pretty extreme, but these students are used to being beaten as punishment, so a little tsk-tsk isn’t going to get the job done. I’m not doing anything to physically harm the students and, since those episodes, I’ve had no problems at all! I guess it’s not really cool to sit on the floor doing a problem while the rest of the students watch from their desks. This is certainly far different from the states, but, then again, so is everything else!

Aside from school, I have been quite healthy and have been able to exercise a lot at site. I’m back to running five times a week and doing all of my other exercises as well, the result of which is a very happy Hunter. It got cold for a few days, during which I wrote a little essay called “Fall”, which I’ll post below, but since then it’s really heated back up – it got up to 119 the other day! The heat isn’t helped much by the addition of brush fires, which the neighbors have recently started. I’ve started teaching English to the doctor at the clinic behind my hut, and am helping out at the clinic some, too. Hopefully in January I’ll be able to get rolling on some nice secondary projects within the village, and maybe then I’ll be able to recruit the help of some of you readers in getting some things done – I know everybody wants to get involved! ;)

Okay, I think that’s all for today – but I’ll be back tomorrow to post a little on Thanksgiving. Here’s the “Fall” piece, and I’ll “Fall”ow it up with some new photos.

It’s November and fall is in the air. The leaves are changing; smoke wafts lazily about as it drifts from the neighbor’s fire; and there is no mistaking the chill of the crisp, autumn breeze. Okay, so only about half of that statement is true, but let’s be fair – I’m in Africa, and half is good enough for me. Today, for the first time since arriving here in July, I found myself actually feeling a shift in the season, as if summer had snuck out in the middle of the night without even saying goodbye.

The leaves haven’t changed color, but something else has: having not tasted the sweetness of rain in a good two weeks, the grass has evolved from its former verdant self into the most beautiful shade of deepest violet. Riding my bike through the fields outside the village, I’m spellbound as this transformation brings to life the landscape about me, the grass swaying in whichever direction the wind decides to push it.

There is smoke in the air, but it’s not coming from the fireplace of a cozy den. Rather, it’s the product of controlled brushfires, started by farmers as a preemptive measure before the brush becomes too dry and a single lightning strike could ignite a fire capable of devastating the entire village. The smoke lends to the already present haze of the dry season and brings with it an acrid aroma, lingering long after the fires have licked their last flame. While the smoke saddens me in the sense that the dancing fields I love to watch will soon be no more, I welcome it as a precursor to a time when the humidity will be all but gone and I’ll once again be able to breathe easy.

The crisp, cool air is by no means the stuff of a chilly Saturday in October, awakening hats and jackets from their hibernation in the hall closet, but, to an American living in Africa, the fresh air blown in by the Harmattan winds from the Sahel is a welcome change to the normally stifling heat. 95 degree nights are now a thing of the past as the thermometer dips into the 70’s, forcing me under the covers wondering where one buys a blanket around here! I’m happy the cold air has finally come, and it can stay as long as it likes, but I’ll tell you this much – bucket baths just got a lot colder!

Of course, the ‘fall’ I’ve conjured up here could just be the product of my active imagination and my homesickness for a day back home where I could zip up my fleece and hear the crunch of leaves under my feet; perhaps the pure want of a cool night has simply made it so. After all, the Guineans only have two seasons in their culture – the wet one and the dry one. At the end of my fall, there will be no snowy night to which I can look forward. In January and February, there will surely be a ‘light dusting’ on the ground, but it will be exactly that – dust. I suppose for now I’ll just have to take this feeling of autumn I’ve conjured up and run with it while I can, and… who knows? Maybe a few months from now I’ll be writing about the sharp bite of winter in the air, how the African dirt can actually be rolled into balls and stacked up Frosty-style, but I’ll be darned if I can find a top hat and scarf around here!

The following thirteen pictures are all taken from the inside of the hut. The bookshelves are the newest addition - I made them just the other week with the generous help of the Andersons.

Some volunteers have students or petites come hang out on the porch. I have sheep:

The most amazing hut dinner ever - the Andersons brought over a chicken pot pie, cookies, and COLD sweet tea. They are angels.

The next two photos are the starts of brush fires. The fires are yet to become terribly intense, but they sure are loud.




This is the village where I go to get cell phone, reception - Krimbisinde. The hill I have to climb is behind me.
Peace Corps rules make it such that volunteers cannot drive cars or motos. Luckily, there's a loophole involving large construction machinery, and now we each have giant CATs outside our huts to drive around at our leisure...

This is the sunset as seen from my shower. The hills in the background are in Sierra Leone, as is the antenna.





The sunrise, as seen from my bathroom on Monday.