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.
brittyinguinea 