Hello!

This is my first official newsletter since I've left home.

I'm in Africa!  I made it through 2 months of training in Senegal and one month in Mamou (Guinea).  Training was hard, a lot of work, a lot of information, and a lot of people!  We all went a little crazy.  Throw 50 young people together for several months, add a liberal amount of stress, sprinkle with culture shock and homesickness, stir well and let simmer.  We all kind of reverted to high school, and I ran and hid and spent most of my time with one or two people.

Training itself was like being in school, with class hours, mostly devoted to language.  My French was good enough that they put me directly into the national language (I learned Pulaar, the language of the Fulani).  Other classes were Tech (eg., the actual job - health), Culture, and Medical.  Tech was pretty nebulous, because our job is pretty nebulous.  We learned about needs assessment, working with the community, letting people come up with solutions themselves.  We also spent some time on the actual nuts and bolts, such as vaccinations, nutrition, food preservation.  Cultural training was pretty good (though difficult, since we were mostly in Senegal, not Guinea, and the cultures are different). We were pretty disappointed in the medical training.

In Senegal we lived with host families, which was good and bad.  Some people had a lot of problems with their families, some grew very close to them.  I really enjoyed my host family by the end of my time there, and it gave me a lot of training for sitting around for hours listening to people converse in a language I don't understand.  It's something to get used to.  It was also rather difficult being used to being so independent in the States, and then having to get home before dark.  We all left our host families with somewhat a breath of relief.  Then the health volunteers headed off to Mamou, leaving the Education volunteers behind for a few weeks.

I still remember my first view of Guinea.  It's about a 4 hour drive from Conakry to Mamou, through rolling green hills.  It's beautiful! Senegal was dry and hot and dusty Sahel.  Once we hit Guinea, it looked like all the Tarzan movies - lush tropical jungle, palm trees, towering cliffs with thin waterfalls falling hundreds of feet, and littlethatched huts by the side of the road.  Women in boubous would watch us drive by, carrying baskets of vegetables on their heads.  Little kids ran around rolling tires in front of them.  I felt like I'd walked into a movie.  Even now, after I've been at site a month, I sometimes step back and see the perfect frame for a National Geographic photo.  But then I settle back into the rhythm of life.  That must be the one most important thing that I've learned -- it sounds so odd and different and scary and exotic, but when you dig deeper, live it, and take it on its own terms . . . it's life, not a picture book.

After arriving in Guinea, the health volunteers did one week of Site Visit: visiting a current volunteer at site.  That was our first real taste of the life of a volunteer.  I had a great time:  my hostess had attitude, and really showed us the ropes.  Then we finished up a few more weeks in Mamou, and had our swearing-in ceremony.  We barely had time to recover from that, then we all split up into our regional groups:  Forest volunteers heading to the forest, Haute Guinea volunteers heading for Haute. It was very hard seeing people leave. We'd become quite close, through all the trials and tribulations.  We hope to visit a lot.  I headed off to Conakry, the capital, for a  few days.  I did some shopping, ate some hamburgers and pizza, and got ready to head off to site.

We have a really nice house here in Conakry, with a tv and vcr, washer and dryer, air conditioning . . . I feel lucky to have this so close by.  My site is only 3-1/2 hours from Conakry, which is really really really close.  Most people are about 12-48 hours by bush taxi.Considering that Guinea is about the size of Colorado, pause a moment now to reject upon what that must mean about  the conditions of the roads here . . . the road to my site is pretty good, mostly paved, but there's one stretch that's BAAAD.  It takes an hour to travel about 13 miles.  You get used to it.

So, I've been in my village a month now.  I have my good days and my bad days (my good hours, my bad hours), but mostly I'm very happy.  My situation is relatively comfortable; the people are outgoing and friendly, and I seem to be doing well. It's a very small village, probably about 50-100 compounds (families).  There are several boutiques in town, which sell the basic necessities:  tomato paste, powdered milk, spaghetti, bullion cubes, flashlights, batteries, candles, cigarettes, matches, chewing gum . . . not much else.  The boutique mostly consists of a 5 x 5 room with shelves stacked full of stuff, and a table with a guy (or gal) who will get you what you want.  There are also several tables in town, where people will sell whatever they've bought in bulk in town - chewing gum, soap, matches, candles - or whatever they've grown - mostly onions, eggplant, bananas, guavas, and sometimes tomatoes or papaya or okra.  We have market day once a week, and then you can get more stuff - plastic buckets, cooking utensils, used clothes, fried dough. Sometimes eggs, and I haven't seen meat or chicken since I've been here.  In Fria (an hour away) market day is everyday, and you can get a lot more stuff.  Lots of lovely plastic goods from China.  You know your tastes are changing when you really really want that plastic cup because it has a little sticker of a flower on the side.

I spend my mornings at the health center watching the few people who come in to get treated. Our busiest days are market days when people come in from the outlying districts to buy things, and then it's hectic.  The rest of the week is pretty low key.  I'm trying to breakaway from the health center a bit, because they have things pretty well under control . . . right now I'm supposed to be conducting "community analysis", so I want to go out and talk to as many people as possible, go see the fields (they're starting to cut the rice now - see some of the outlying districts.  The afternoons I mostly veg out, write down what happened during the day, make some sense of it all.  Maybe do some reading.  Teach a little English to the vaccinator.  Hang out in the market and practice my Pulaar.  Sit on the front porch and chat.  It's really hot in the afternoons (usually about 95 degrees and humid - so I don't have much energy to do stuff.  I really want to start running in the mornings or evenings.   It's just hard to get up the drive.  I get into the village drone and just sit. Sometimes, when you want to relax and don't feel like dealing with people, everyone will stare and laugh. You just have to laugh back and not get mad.  A lot of things are like that - just more difficult, so you don't feel like dealing with it.  For instance, I want to borrow some scissors from a tailor to make a quick cut in a piece of cloth.  But then one of the tailors has a crush on me and I don't want borrowing his scissors to be a sign to him or something . . . and if I borrow someone else's scissors he'll be crushed. . . . And they'll probably ask me why I need to cut cloth, what I'm making,and they'll take it from me and quickly sew it themselves as a gift to me, and I don't quite feel like dealing with that, especially since the one has a crush on me . . .

Do you see what I mean?  Everything becomes difficult, because of two things:  (1): I don't know what is going on half the time and I'm playing the cultural guessing game, and (2)  I stick out like a sore thumb, so anything I ever do is going to be subject to conversation later.  I can't even have a sore on my arm without half the village asking me what it is.  So this is how Peace Corps is hard.  It's not hard like back breaking hard - I'm not carrying large pieces of lumber across raging rivers. It's energy hard. It's draining. Yet at the same time I get these wonderful energy bursts.  For instance, this is a big gift economy.  Money is still very central, but with little gifts you form alliances.  The tailor who has a crush on me brought me 4 pieces of chewing gum one evening. The little brother of a guy I work with brings me guavas sometimes.  Often I'll get bananas. The midwives of the health center are always sending me food in theevenings.  One family took me into their compound and picked about 20 limes to give me because I'd been looking for limes all day.   And I participate in this gift economy.  I took the limes and made a key lime pie, and shared it with my neighbors.  When the kids carry my water for me, I'll give them a piece of candy.  It's such a nice way to be, rather karmic. You give because you know it will come back to you.  And it does.  It's always bothered me how stingy Americans are, and so I loved this aspect of the culture.  Especially considering how little everybody here has for themselves, It's really a warm glow when a little boy with a shy smile comes up and presents you with a bag of peanuts . . .

My house is really nice, two rooms about 20 x20.  It's a concrete house with a corrugated iron roof.  It's a triplex, and my neighbors are really nice, except he plays the radio all the time).  It's nice having people right there, makes me feel safer.  In general, I feel very safe in the village.  It's very small, people watch out for me.  I feel like I have a lot of stuff - I have dishes and a gas stove and a propane lantern and lot of books and more clothes than I really need.  Since our clothes are washed by hand on the rocks by the river, we tend to wear them at least 2-4 days before washing.  Otherwise they'll wear out in notime.

Running out of things to say, so thanks for your time, and feel free to drop me a note. I love mail, but it doesn't always make it here.  Send me questions so I have something to write about.

Take care!          Stephanie