The Finale

I can hardly believe it, but I’ve reached the end of this incredible experience. It’s been 2 years since I touched down in my village and became Aysatou Diallo. There will always be a part of my heart left in Guinea, the country I’ve come to love like my own. I am now a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV)!

What’s next?

A 5-week-long cross country trip across West Africa!

The car: a Peugeot 806, renamed the Grey Goose.

 

The itinerary: Conakry, Guinea to Bamako, Mali to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso to Cotonou, Benin to Lome, Togo to Accra, Ghana to Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire

 

Let the adventures begin! Thanks for being loyal readers.

When the end is in sight!

It’s about that time folks! Earlier this month I attended my Close of Service (COS) conference with my fellow stage members, where we were told about all the steps to finishing up here in Guinea and how to transition back to life in America. This is the final 2 months left of service before we say goodbye for now to Guinea, our home for the last 27 months.

We should expect to have re-entry shock, also known as reverse culture shock, once we step back into the United States. For some of us, myself included, we haven’t been back to the US in over 2 years and therefore will be overwhelmed by the hectic pace of life and the abundance of choices. A good example of what will happen on a much larger scale is just surviving a trip to the grocery store…a whole aisle devoted to cereal? I can’t handle that. Without a doubt, it’s going to to overwhelm me. So this is a small disclaimer to my family and friends, be patient with me. 🙂

I’m now in the process of tying up loose ends with my projects at site, completing paperwork necessary for COS, and gearing up to say my goodbyes to my Guinean host family, friends, and work partners as well as other PC volunteers who I may not see for quite some time. It’s a bittersweet ending, as I’ve never been good with goodbyes.

Once I officially end my PC service in January, I’ll be hitting the road (literally) with a group of 5 other volunteer friends. Our plan is to buy a car here in Guinea and then drive it across West Africa: Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. After our 6 weeks or so of cross-country adventures, we’ll fly to Cape Verde to celebrate Mardi Gras before making our way back stateside. So much fun to come!

It’s not all mango jam and rainbows…

Rough patches are simply a part of PC service. Our lives are a continual emotional roller coaster. What comes up must come down and all that.

So not to be depressing, but I’ve lately been dealing with being in one of the many downturns. Much of it has to do with how much fun I had hosting my best friend from home for two weeks. It was such a magical experience to have her here and to share my life and the beauty and quirks of Guinea with her. I had so much fun running a teacher’s training, hiking in the mountains and waterfalls of Doucki and Dalaba, and relaxing together that I definitely felt a void when she left. But I am forever grateful and happy that she took the giant leap across the Atlantic and into Guinea!

Another morale hit for me and my entire stage (the group of 33 I came here with) has been the steady stream of stage members leaving Guinea for medical and other reasons. This started way at the beginning of our service, but has seemingly accelerated in the past few months. With 5 months left here, we can all see the finish line, but it hits extra hard when one of our own surprises us all with a farewell text from the airport. We are now down to 22 left, with 11 gone. What a blow! My G21 stage has been lucky enough to really bond together, so we take every departure to heart. But all we can do is say goodbye for now and look forward to reunions and recrossing paths stateside in a few short months. It ain’t over!

And finally, I’ve hit a complete standstill with all of my work projects for the past 2 and 1/2 months for various reasons beyond my control–lethargy associated with Ramadan, local government bureaucracy, lack of motivation of work partners, etc. It’s always frustrating to be waiting around for work to continue (feeling productive is my characteristically American goal in life), but it had been particularly demoralizing given how little time I actually have left here to get things done and–big gamble–complete projects. Without getting into tedious details, suffice it to say that the only work-related activity I’ve been doing is calling different work partners regularly to ask what the hold up is and when we can get back into action. Ultimately, all I can do is keep trying to push forward, make it clear I’m always motivated to work, and hope for some progress before I leave in February.

When the rains pour down…

Hello out there! Some of you may have thought I had given up and disappeared. But I’m back!

I was too busy eating mangoes to send out an update. May to July is mango season in Guinea, when all the mango trees in villages get weighed down in fruit and you can literally never run out of mangoes. At the height of the season, mangoes in the market are sold for rougly 2 cents each. But a true mango lover doesn’t even need to pay for their mangoes, since everyone has mango trees in their yards. I was given giant bags of mangoes on a weekly basis, sometimes as many as 30. That’s when I had to take it to the next level and start JAMMIN’! Jam in general is super easy to make, and mango jam is the surefire way to decrease the amount of spoiled mangoes around you. I made about 10 jars of mango jam this season on my own, as well as leading a jamming tutorial for the women of my village where we made another 15 jars. The women were all pleasantly surprised by how easy jam is to make (ingredients: mangoes, sugar, lemon juice) and how delicious it is. I am hoping that I made some jam converts who will use this food preservation technique in future mango seasons. That way, in August and September when food stores are running low in the family, people can break into their jam supplies and get some kind of fruit content back into their diet. Et voila, another small step to combat food insecurity!

We are well into the raining season here now, after a slow start in May and June. Where I live, it will generally rain almost every other day. It can either be a slow continuous rain throughout the day or night, or we get a crazy storm that blows in, dumps its torrential fury on us and then blows away. Complete with breathtaking lightning and body-shaking thunder. It makes getting around difficult at times without getting soaked to the bone, but the rains are highly necessary for the major agricultural season in Guinea. It also was much needed in my family’s compound, in order to refill our well! In April our well ran dry, which means we have to walk to the nearby pump for all our water needs. I was very happy once our well refilled and I only had to carry my bucket the 15ft from the well to my house or bathroom area.

As with all Muslims worldwide, Guineans are currently in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan, where they need to fast from sunrise to sunset. No food, water, music and sex essentially. This translates into a slow month for getting any kind of work done, as people tend to sleep and rest all day and are thus “unavailable.” Prepared food is also very hard to find, as Muslims shouldn’t technically be cooking and selling food during the daylight hours. This means that those of us who aren’t fasting need to plan ahead a lot more when preparing meals during the day. We also need to be respectful of those who are fasting around us by eating and drinking in private. You don’t want to be that guy or girl who’s walking around eating a sandwich and getting death stares. Not cool. Many volunteers try to plan their vacations and other travels during Ramadan to make this “slow” month go by a little quicker.

The Attempt to STOMP OUT Malaria!

Malaria is the number one killer in Africa.

For those of you who may be asking themselves, “what exactly is malaria again?” I can help give you a refresher. Malaria is a parasite transmitted through the bite of the infected female mosquito. The parasite is transmitted to the circulatory system, makes its way to the liver and reproduces there. Typical symptoms associated with malaria include a cyclical fever, headache, body aches, chills, nausea and vomiting. If left untreated, severe forms of malaria can cause coma and death. There exist different forms of the malaria parasite, with malaria falciparum being the most severe and deadly. As fate would have it, malaria falciparum is the most common form of malaria in Guinea.

Prevention is the easiest and most effective way to protect all those in danger of contracting and dying from malaria. The female mosquito comes out to bite from roughly 8pm to 6am. As a result, the easiest preventative measure to use against getting bitten is to sleep under a long-lasting insecticide net (LLIN). One of our goals as PC Guinea volunteers working on combating malaria is to teach people that malaria is prevalent year-round in Guinea and that they should therefore be sleeping under nets to protect themselves all throughout the year, every night, with every family member sleeping under a net.

In 2011, Peace Corps Guinea joined together with all of the other Peace Corps Africa countries to finally Stomp Out Malaria in Africa. Currently, malaria is the number one single cause of death in Guinea, and the entire population lives in high-transmission zones. There are over 3000 volunteers across the continent, who just like me are working to bring malaria deaths in Guinea to zero by 2020. You can check out some of the cool projects being done by going to the Stomping Out Malaria website. World Malaria Day, April 25, is quickly approaching. In my village we will be marking the day by having a malaria informational booth set up at the Health Center to target pregnant women and new mothers in educating them about how to protect themselves and their children. What will you do on April 25 to help end malaria?

Balancing in the middle

It’s been 16 months since I’ve been in Guinea and 14 months since I’ve been living and working in my village. I’ve had a busy couple of months since hitting the year mark. I had a whirlwind adventure to Senegal where I made a presentation on food security in Guinea at the PC Senegal All Volunteer in Thies and then headed to Dakar for the annual WAIST softball tournament. PC Guinea represented our country well with our team, The Runs. We all wore different shades of brown…I’ll let that one sink in so you can grasp the cleverness. We’re pretty great at double entendres.
The entire Senegal trip was a blast. I got to re-explore Thies and explore Dakar for essentially the first time. Dakar is the cosmopolitan capital of West Africa and we Guinean volunteers were blown away by the amenities and level of development. Driving through the Almadies neighborhood, you think you’re in a resort city in Spain. Unreal. We took full advantage—lots of eating and shopping. I also had the amazingly wonderful chance to reunite with Mbouille and his family in Thies and Babacar and his family in Dakar. It was such a treat to see everyone and to meet the youngest kids in each family who have been born since I was there last in 2007. Mbouille and Babacar were my teachers during my summer program in Senegal but quickly also became my friends and my surrogate Senegalese Dads, looking out for me and opening up their homes to me. I hope to travel back to Senegal to spend more time with them both!
The whirlwind continued as I flew out of Dakar to meet up with my mom in Marrakesh, Morocco. We spent 12 days together exploring Marrakesh and taking side trips to the Atlas Mountains and to Essouira on the coast. I’ve never gone that long without seeing my mom so you can only imagine how over the moon I was for our reunion. We stayed at a beautiful little riad tucked in an alleyway in the medina (Riad Ghemza—look it up, highly recommended) and visited all the major sites of the city including the Souks, where I was repeatedly told I must be berber because I bargained so hard, and the Jemaa El Fna square. Again, I did a LOT of eating—olives, veggies couscous, chicken tajine, goat cheese…Our day trip to the Atlas Mountains included a camel ride through a valley followed by a hike around the villages surrounding Imlil. Our 2 day trip to the artsy coastal town of Essaouira was a welcome change of pace from the hectic Marrakesh, as we walked through the small medina and along the beach. Practically every dinner on our trip included a bottle of red wine and a lot of laughter. Suffice it to say, it was one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.
Since returning to site, I’ve started the tree nursery with the school environmental education club. Now that the grant money has come through, I plan to go to Labe to buy all the materials needed for our activities.
I recently spent a week in Mamou with the rest of my stage (the group I came to country with) for our Reconnect training where we exchanged technical information on what we’ve been doing at site and talked about tackling the second year of service. The training itself was useful, but I most enjoyed simply being all together again for the first time since last May. I’ve come to care for and depend on nearly everyone in my stage like a family—my PC family. We had a great time catching up, swapping stories and even getting some dancing in when we went to the bar down the road from the training center.
Beginning year two is a unique time to look back on what’s happened and prepare for what’s left. I feel accomplished on one hand, having made it this far, yet can’t help but feel daunted and somewhat burnt out when I think of the 10 months I have left to get through. I feel perched in the middle of two mountains. (Sorry if that’s trying to be too poetic.) From what I’ve heard from former volunteers and what I can gather from my project plans, the second year will pass by surprisingly more quickly than the first. However it happens, I’m so happy to have come this far and am ready to charge on, petit a petit.

If you sleep for 12 hours a day, it’s only one year of service instead of two.

Above is an anecdote PC volunteers like to say. It can be comforting at times and depressing at others to know that if you sleep for long enough, you could essentially half the amount of time of conscious PC service. Just food for thought.

I am only a few weeks away from officially hitting the halfway point in my service—1 year spent at site and 1 year left (Si Allah djabi, God willing). It’s a crazy thought that I’ve been here for that long and I’m starting to realize that one more year is not that much time to attempt to accomplish everything that I want to. As I hit my year mark, a new stage of extension (Public Health and Agroforestry) trainees are being sworn in as new volunteers and being dropped off at their sites for the long haul. It gets easier…kind of. 🙂

Before heading to the forest region of Guinea for Christmas, I spent my time at site continuing my training sessions on project design and management for a group of community leaders. We are slowly making our way through the various steps of designing and implementing a community project, including creating goals and objectives, a budget, a monitoring and evaluation plan, etc. The hope is that by the end of our training sessions, the chosen community leaders will be able to plan and undertake community projects on their own with me in the background for support but not in charge. It’s going well so far and I really appreciate their commitment and enthusiasm.

I also wrote and submitted a small grant proposal for the environmental education club at the local middle school. My counterpart and the teacher representative for the club were both big helps in drafting the proposal.

I was able to start my dry season garden by planting in the communal women’s garden in the Fello neighborhood of my village. I planted potatoes, garlic, onion, carrot, cabbage, kale and beet, and lined my bed with marigold flowers to help deter pests. Everything but the onion and cabbage have sprouted, and those were both pretty old seeds so not unexpected. I still have a lot more seeds I want to plant, including experimenting with lentils, quinoa, broccoli and cauliflower, so I hope to get a hold of more space to plant soon.

I’m still working to help organize the beekeepers who work in the area. Soon I plan to start a series of trainings on different topics: how to build Kenyan top-bar hives, basic bee biology and colony characteristics, and how to make beeswax candles. Should be exciting!

As mentioned earlier, I recently spent the holidays visiting the forest region of Guinea with a group of volunteers. I had an amazing time hiking Mount Nimba (the highest peak in Guinea), seeing traditional mud cloth being made, watching wild chimpanzees in the forest and visiting a vine bridge that crosses crocodile-infested waters. Our ordeal to get the necessary permit to hike Mount Nimba took days and then our first guide turned out to be useless—“oh, by the way, I haven’t climbed here for 10 years so I don’t know where to start the hike…” We finally started the 8 hour trek at noon and as a result practically ran up the mountain to make it back down in time. Our last hour of hiking was in the dark—NOT recommended. But the forest was beautiful on the way up and you can see into Guinea, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire from the top. During one of our rest stops, my friend accidentally was crouching on top of a small viper. One of our guides quickly stepped in and decapitated it with his machete. He kept the body to eat for dinner; I got a picture of him with his prize (on facebook). Mud cloth is a fabric traditionally made in the forest region by dyeing the cloth in a dye made from a certain tree bark. It comes out this deep brown, hence the name. On Christmas Day, I went to visit a family who make the cloth in their backyard and bought some. They lived right next door to the Catholic Mission so I got to hear the beautiful music of singing, djembes and beaded gourds pouring out of the church. Side note: The forest region is the only region in Guinea that is predominantly Christian. One result of this fact is that people drink alcohol more openly then in Muslim areas. In particular, they drink a lot of palm wine that is made locally EVERYWHERE.

In a small town called Bossou not far from Mount Nimba, there are wild chimpanzees that live in the forest and are monitored and studied by researchers through a joint program between the Guinean government and Kyoto University in Japan. I paid US $70 to be able to climb through the forest with 2 guides and watch the chimps go about their business. Of that $70, 50% goes to the community of Bossou, 30% goes to the researchers and 20% goes to the guides. We started hiking to the forest with my guides radioing their co-workers on the walkie talkie to figure out the current location of the chimps. Within 20 minutes, I heard the chimps calling to each other and then a giant male came strolling past within 5 feet of me! He would meander for a bit, then sit down and look up into the trees for fruit, then get up again. We would follow close behind him, and twice I got to see him run up to a tree and pound its giant roots/trunk with his feet. It’s a way of communicating with the other chimps. It was so comical how stereotypical their calls are—OO OO OO then EEH EEH EEH! While we were following him, he met up with his mom and another male before climbing up into this HUGE banian tree, probably 50 feet tall. The whole thing was a magical experience.

Another day we drove to a village about an hour from the regional capital, N’zerekore, to visit a vine bridge. The bridge spans a pretty big river and as you can infer, is made entirely of vines woven together and attached to trees on both banks. The foot path on the bridge was barely wider than my foot and the railings came up high on both sides of me, maybe to my chest, so you felt somewhat secured in while you walked across. Our guide from the nearby village explained that they had to rebuild the bridge every year, which takes 3 weeks. They gather a special kind of vine from the forest which is getting more difficult to find as the human population expands and cuts down more forest each year. When asked how they managed to attach the vines onto the highest branches some 50 feet above, he said that the water demon did that part. Every year the water demon attaches the highest vines and that signals to the villagers that it’s time to start the rebuild of the bridge again.

One day while our group was in N’zerekore, three of us decided to find the cyber café in town. While we were walking there, we passed a construction supplies shop with two Lebanese guys in front of it. Lebanese men are a pretty familiar site in major Guinean cities, so I didn’t think much of it. As we were passing by, one of them signaled us over and introduced himself. Ali was probably in his 40s, with thinning hair and a big belly. He was so eager to talk to us and sent one of his employees to buy us cold cokes. It only took him a few minutes to invite us to his house for dinner. We thanked him but politely declined, explaining that we were part of a group of 11 people. He paused for a moment and then said, “No problem, I’ll order a whole carton of chicken. Everyone’s invited!” We went to the cyber café to use the internet and then Ali showed up when he was done with work to give us a ride to his house in his BMW X5. We go tearing through the city in his car with Lebanese music blaring through the speakers. We make a stop at a house and Ali calls someone on his phone and tells them he’s outside, bring the package. Now I’m thinking, am I such a broke starved volunteer that I accepted an invitation for a free chicken dinner from a Lebanese mob boss? A guy approaches the car, Ali rolls down my window and the guy hands off a plastic bag full of cash. You know, totally normal. My face instantly betrays me, because the guy starts laughing and asks if I’m scared. Oh no, I assure him, not at all. We take off and head to Ali’s house, where we sit on his patio drinking tea and smoking hookah for hours while an amazing feast is prepared for us: barbecued chicken, salad, French fries, pita bread, baguettes and cold cokes. Ali and his brother laugh at how ravenous we all are and keep throwing more chicken and fries on our plates. “Oh no, I couldn’t!…Well, if you insist.” We stuffed ourselves silly. Ali and his younger brother found us very entertaining. They could not believe it when we told them we only make around 1 million Guinean Francs per month (about $150). They were stupefied. Ali’s younger brother, who was in his mid 20s, looked uncannily like a former response volunteer in Guinea so we started calling him Lebanese Danny. We were half convinced it was Danny playing a prank on us and he would reveal himself at any moment. Ali told us that the reason he flagged us down in front of his shop in the first place was because Lebanese Danny had seen me walking by and wanted a reason to talk to me. He was sitting on his motorcycle with 2 million Francs (don’t ask, mob bosses…) and supposedly chucked the money into the bed of their work truck and shouted to Ali “She’s looking for a taxi! I can be a taxi moto!” Not to make too fine a point, team, but I’d like the record to show that I was instrumental in securing us a fabulous Lebanese chicken dinner. Ali had on this ridiculous lime-green, fitted shirt on that read “Nobody’s perfect except for the captain.” The collar had been cut lower and his chest hair popped out the top. Winning. Two guys in our group were eyeing the shirt and then one of them asked if he could have it. Outraged that he beat him to the punch, the other guy protested. We all decided they should arm wrestle for it. We cleared the table for them and as they started, half of us chanted “ME-XI-CO”, encouraged by Ali, for our Mexican-American friend while the other half chanted “FRANCE” for our half-French friend. It was hysterical. It was unclear who won, so we all had to vote for the winner. France was the victor. But then Ali felt bad for Mexico so he went into the house and got him a different shirt. He was feeling so generous, even I got a shirt and a hat out of the deal. Then to further prove how starved for Western food we are, we all went crazy when Lebanese Danny said he could find us pizza in N’zerekore. We were all stuffed from dinner, but still found the enthusiasm to chant for pizza. It went a little something like this… Lebanese Danny: “You guys want pizza?” Us: “YE-AH!!” Lebanese Danny: “Who wants pizza?” Us: “WE DO!!!” We’re all such fat kids at heart. That night was so hilarious and surreal, I still can’t quite believe it all happened.

Introduction to students

Hello!

My name is Brittany Williams and I am an agroforestry volunteer serving with the Peace Corps in Guinea. I am 23 years old and am originally from Northern California. I am currently 10 months in to my 24 months of service.

I joined the Peace Corps shortly after graduating from UC Berkeley because I was interested in working in the field of international development. I am particularly interested in environmental policy and management, so I work in a sector that combines agriculture and forestry. Before joining the Peace Corps, I spoke French and Spanish. Due to my academic and language background, I was placed in Guinea.

Guinea is a small country in West Africa roughly the size of the state of Oregon. It is formerly a French colony, so the official language is French. However, most Guineans have not received enough schooling to be able to speak much French. There are several regional local languages spoken here. The 3 major local languages are Pular, Susu and Malinke. The majority of Guineans are Muslim, while a minority are Christian. For a variety of historical and political reasons, Guinea ranks very low in terms of economic and infrastructural development. Many neighboring countries in the region have better roads and basic services as well as more developed economies. Guinea is a beautiful place–in terms of landscapes and of culture–and has immense potential to advance in bettering the lives of its citizens.

I am excited to start a correspondence with you all. I’m happy to answer any and all questions you have about Guinea, the Peace Corps, my life here, Africa, etc. I look forward to hearing from  you.

To Cameroon and Back

I recently spent 10 days on vacation in Cameroon with 2 other volunteers. What an amazing trip! I had a wonderful time relaxing, eating, traveling, hiking, swimming and being welcomed by my newly adopted Cameroonian family (thanks to Clara). I was struck by how noticeably more developed Cameroon is as compared to Guinea. Better roads, nicer public transport (air conditioned buses), more widespread electricity and running water, toilet paper as the norm, more developed tourism… I also found the food to be more varied and tastier: whole grilled fish, fried, boiled and grilled plantains, kebabs, tri-tip and whole rotisserie chickens sold roadside to name a few. I got to explore Yaounde, the capital, Buea, the base town of Mount Cameroon (highest peak in West  Africa), Limbe, a major coastal fishing town, Douala, the economic capital and Kribi, a beach resort town. Based on my time there, I could definitely picture myself working and living there at some point in the future. If you’re curious to see pictures of the trip, check my Facebook.

Upon returning to Guinea, I was still on the move away from site until recently. I spent a couple of days in Labe celebrating Oktoberfest and Halloween with other volunteers. Many of us came up with Guinea-inspired costumes: sweet potato leaf sauce, Moringa superheroes, a “petit” (child) covered in dirt and dragging around a box on a string. Then I spent close to a week in Conakry for our quarterly food security task force meeting. We’re particularly focused on getting food security training material ready for the new extension (Agfo and Public Health) stage arriving at the end of the month.

Now back at site, I’m trying to gear back up for advancing my main projects–organizational and technical support to the beekeeping union, permaculture training for women gardeners, project design and management training for community leaders, relaunching the environmental education club at the college, creating a tree plantation with a local motivated youth. It always takesa while to get momentum going again when I leave and come back, so I don’t have much to report on yet.

A few days ago, I went to yet another wedding in a rural neighborhood in Popodara, my market town. I took my bike because I has to leave early while my host mom went on foot. The plan was for me to leave the house 30 minutes after her to her a head’s start and we would meet at the main crossroads in Popodara and continue together. I ended up leaving the house 45 minutes later than I should have and didn’t see her when I arrived at the crossroads, so I figured she had continued on to the wedding. I asked around for directions to the neighborhood in question and made my way over there. [Side note: People are well-informed! Multiple people I asked for directions who found out that I was American mentioned Obama’s re-election. “Obama est bon!”] When I arrived at the wedding, I greeted a bunch of people (strangers) and then asked about my host mom. They said she hadn’t arrived yet and had me take a seat in the shade. After almost an hour of waiting for her, it started to dawn on me that I might be at the wrong wedding. There are a LOT of weddings in this country. I was then convinced that I was crashing a Guinean wedding but knew I couldn’t leave because that would be seen as rude. The wedding videographer then came over and stuck the camcorder in my face as he proceeded to interview me about where I’m from and why I’m here and Obama and if I like couscous and sour milk (a traditional Peul celebration dish). I answered his questions partly embarrassed that I was a wedding crasher caught on tape. But, thankfully, my host mom finally arrived and vindicated my presence there.

I was just at a baptism where I saw and held the baby in question…that’s a first! My friend who’s an intern at the local health center, Binta, just had her first child: a girl, Jeynabou. Unfortunately, the week-old infant was sporting the local fashion of penciled-in eyebrows. What’s so wrong with letting the real ones grow?! Jeynabou was also decked out in a thick quilted onesie with matching hat and blanket. Here I am sweating in my shirt and skirt while Guinean moms overbundle their babies as if they’re expecting snow or something. Those kids must be boiling! But I guess once mom lets up a little on the layers of clothes, the kid thinks the ambient temperature is refreshingly cold. But Guinean moms don’t fuss over their babies and children like American moms do–they don’t have the time! They hand off their babies to whoever’s nearby if needed and there’s no tutorial on how to hold a baby first. Because everyone in this culture has grown up taking care of younger siblings, cousins or neighbors to the point where handling babies is second nature!

In about a week, I’ll be cooking up a Thanksgiving meal for a small group of volunteers in Labe. We have to improvise some things obviously, but our anticipated menu is roast chickens, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, green beans, spinach, cranberries, pumpkin pie, squash pie and carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. Gravy, cranberries and pumpkin are all courtesy of care packages from the US. I will be sure to share how it all turns out!

Oh hey there, baby cobra

You might have heard on the international news that the IMF recently forgave Guinea of around $2 billion of its debt. Finally this country catches a break. BBC News was discussing the bleak outlook of growth of the international economy, but presented West Africa as an area that would hopefully see the highest growth in the year to come. Within West Africa, Guinea stands among the poorest of all the countries in the region by a whole variety of economic and development measures and indicators. And yet it is among the richest in terms of agricultural and mineral wealth not to mention the incredible level of ecotourism potential. The cruel irony! I may be partial, but I know a lot of PC volunteers from neighboring countries who would agree with me that Guinea has some of the most beautiful landscapes in all of West Africa. Hikes through stunning forests and mountains, visits to countless breathtaking waterfalls, opportunities to see chimps and other wildlife… Any of you with an adventurous spirit should definitely come visit. Guinea also boasts some very fertile lands and a good long rainy season, which translates into a huge agricultural output, part of which is exported to other countries. We’re talking bananas, coconut, pineapple, papaya, oranges, mandarins, mangoes, avocadoes, watermelon, squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, taro, onions, carrots, tomatoes, eggplant, okra, hot peppers, beans, coffee, cacao…the list goes on. This goes to show that Guinea has enormous potential and all of us working here hope to see it reach that potential.

My work is steadily chugging along. After returning from hosting the 3 day food security training in Labe, some of my colleagues and I decided to redo some of the practical sessions on gardening, permaculture, food transformation and nutrition with my village’s women’s cooperative/groupement. I’m excited that they requested these skills—it makes me feel both relevant and helpful! We held the first session on permaculture gardening techniques, as we did a demonstration on double digging garden bed preparation in their communal field. The women took turns getting their hands dirty and dug a demo bed. We briefly discussed how to grow more vegetables by companion planting in such a way as to maximize the space available. To thank me for the session, the women broke into song at the end, clapping and swaying and singing “The hoe is an important tool, Aysatou!” In future sessions, we’ll address composting, integrated pest management, intercropping and crop rotation before moving on to nutrition and food transformation, specifically solar drying. The women have expressed particular interest in drying sweet potato leaves and selling them in the market.

Lumo is doing well and growing up. October 16 marks her 6 month birthday. She can be quite a handful as I try to train her to be a good canine citizen. She doesn’t make it easy, but “petit a petit” as they say. A couple of weeks ago, we came across another dog on our walk that imprinted to me like a baby duckling and followed us all the way home. Lumo was not happy to have another dog vying for my love and attention and made that very clear. Rude, Lumo. But the dog hung around my house for several days crying and trying to follow me everywhere. I decided I needed to find her a home. So I called one of my Guinean friends in Labe and it turned out his Lebanese friend wanted to adopt her. I biked with her alongside me into Labe and dropped her off at my friend’s house, who will take care of her until his friend returns from a business trip in Conakry in a couple of months. I anticipate stopping by from time to time to see how she’s doing. Yay for happy endings!

Not to end on a scary note, but the other day I was standing on my porch when I saw a small snake slithering on the rocks along the side of my house straight towards Lumo and I. And this wasn’t just any snake…it was a baby cobra!! Which I’m told has more venom than the adults. Oh great. It was brown with rust-colored markings (pretty if it wasn’t so terrifying) and had its little pharaoh heas up off the ground as it moved. I mumbled “Oh, sh*t” and kind of froze but managed to alert my host mom by yelling “serpent!” and pointing. She doesn’t speak any French, but caught my drift and came over throwing rocks at it. It slithered off in the direction it came from towards our fence and bushes. That was honestly the only moment here where I really felt like I absolutely had to board the next plane and get the hell out of here. Mice and spiders and cockroaches are unfortunate in their own way, but the downright danger of a cobra made me think twice about living the rustic Guinean life. I’m told that now that the rainy season is coming to an end, snaked tend to be out and about more. I’m on high alert. I’m honestly more afraid for Lumo than myself, because I could imagine one biting her while she lies on my porch. My host mom seemed to sense my panic and has since cut back all the tall grasses and bushes along the fence near both our houses. Steer clear, snakes!