Newsletter #2 - February 18, 1998
I have been in my village for 4 1/2 months now. At the time of my last letter, I had been here for only a month. A lot has changed. At about the second month, culture shock hit me very hard. The villagers have little concept of how different my home is from theirs. Their world is very limited in scope. They know little beyond what they hear on the radio and read in the (limited) textbooks. Few people travel.
It is rare to talk about feelings. People talk about events, who's going where, who died, who was born... but not how they felt about those events. The two words we use most for describing feelings are "happy" and "tired". Anything beyond that, such as "sad" or "angry" or "fulfilled" just isn't in their daily vocabulary. Especially "sad". I think it made people very uncomfortable when I expressed sadness.
I took a few days off and came to Conakry at Halloween, and had a much-needed perspective break. I spoke lots of English. I felt that I had emerged from some very long dream...not quite a nightmare, but definitely another world - an all-encompassing world, that makes you forget that there is something else beyond, so there is a sense of surprise and relief when you wake up.
After I got back from Conakry, I started working on alleviating one of the first problems I had at site. The most persistent problem that health volunteers have is role-definition, because our job is not very structured. We are not teachers, we do not teach school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.. We do not have an office or a boss. In a way, we are really free-lance volunteers. You know all those nice, useful things that you always wished you could do for your community, but didn't have time for because you have a full-time job? Well, that's sort of what my job is -- Volunteer At Large - and the U.S. Government even pays me to do it!
Since our job is so nebulous and unstructured, often our Health Center staff tries to make use of us in the way that helps them out the most. In my case, as in many cases, they told me to do the Prenatal Consultations. Pregnant women come in on market day and we do the basic pre-natal check-up - measuring the stomach, taking blood pressure, asking a few basic questions and giving some iron pills and anti-malarial medication. From my second day at site, they put me in this office on market day (Sunday) and said that that was my job. Peace Corps Volunteers are not supposed to take a post in the health center, because that is not sustainable. If we train somebody else to do the work, then that will last after we leave. So, after coming back from Halloween, I felt a little more certain of myself, and had spoken with my PC supervisor and he agreed with me. We spoke with the Health Center staff several times, and the point was finally made that I'm not to be charged with a specific post. I still help out once in a while when it's very busy. And just last month, we finally managed to hold a formal training on the pre-natal consultation for two people in the health center. It took 3 months of asking, but it finally happened.
My work has continued to be quite varied. I still observe at the health center from time to time, and make suggestions as to how things could be run better. The next push I want to make is to get them to chart the babies' weight on the growth chart, so we can track malnourishment. The health center facilities are very minimal. We have four walls, some basic medicines (aspirin, antibiotic, iron and vitamin pills, anti-malarial pills, saline IV drips), plus iodine solution and gauze bandages for wounds. The "doctor" actually only has a nurse's training. He diagnoses a standard array of illnesses -- e.g.., malaria, respiratory infections, parasites -- and gives medicine, without explaining to the patient what they have, how to prevent it, or what the treatment is going to do. Even if he did, they probably wouldn't understand, or even believe him. I'm not even sure he's diagnosing the right disease half the time. One thing to realize about the medical structure here, however, is that it is designed to be "medicine for the masses". They prefer to reach a lot of people regarding basic general health needs, rather than only reach a few people with highly specialized health care. As such, I'm sure that 95% of the time the "doctor" correctly diagnoses malaria (or whatever malady), and as such we're helping the vast majority of patients.
I've also visited a lot of Non-Governmental Organizations and talked with various officials and visited the local hospital facilities. Making contacts is one of the more useful and time- consuming things that I do. I've also been involved with a women's gardening co-operative, which is only just now really starting to take off. I'm more of an observer than anything - I did not start the project. I'm curious about agriculture here because there is not a wide variety of foods available, which has obvious implications for nutrition. The women plan to sell the vegetables in the market, and any sort of income-generation is very useful. Whenever I think of something that people can do to improve their lives, it seems that it's not possible without outside financial assistance. They hardly even use soap, it's too expensive.
One of the major projects I worked on in the last few months was planning activities for World AIDS Day. We had a football game and AIDS talk, an AIDS-themed dance party, and a AIDS talk at the health center. This took quite a bit of energy to pull together, and there were some problems, but overall it went very well and I was very heartened by the way that the community pulled together to make it work. That bodes well for future projects. People still don't really understand the threat of AIDS here.
The local joke is that the letters SIDA actually stand for Syndrome Imaginaire pour Descourager les Amoureux -- Imaginary Syndrome for Discouraging Lovers. Condoms are not yet widely available, and rarely used. Guinea has not yet been as hard hit by HIV as most African countries, because the borders were closed up until the death of the dictator Sekou Toure, in 1987. But the numbers are rising rapidly, since Guinea is a polygamous society where extramarital affairs are the norm. I feel like the two most important messages I can convey are AIDS/STD's and family planning. I'm also planning on getting involved in the schools. I have a program set up to do health education classes for 4th - 6th grades. So far, I've taught a few classes, and once they got used to my funny accent, it's gone well. I taught a song "Wash your hands" to several classes, and now every time a little kid sees me on the street, he treats me to a little serenade... I also plan to go into the larger town to do family planning and AIDS classes for the middle and high schools, which will take a lot of time.
So, as you can see, work has started to get rolling for me. It's only in the last two months that things really started to click, because I've become comfortable with the languages (not conversational, but comfortable) and life here, and I know how to communicate African-style a little more. I've made some friends, and know who I like spending time with. Things have definitely gotten better since the first terrifying month.
Probably one of the things I love the most here are the taxis. Any other volunteer would probably think I'm crazy. Taxis here are the bane of our existence. They are slow, they are crowded, they break, and they never leave when you want them to. But they are so quintessentially Guinea, life is so real and inescapable in a bush taxi, that I really do enjoy them. This is not to say, of course, that I haven't engaged in my fair share of screaming matches with taxi drivers, or angry glares with policemen at barricades. Enjoyment is not the same as fun.
It gives me a perverse joy when the taxi driver has to push a foot off the windshield so he can see the road. We careen between the rocks and gullies, peering through the dust, listening to the squawking of the chicken in the trunk. Some friends of mine were in a taxi once that had a goat tied to the roof. Unfortunately, the goat wasn't well attached. When it fell off, the driver kept going for a few minutes, dragging the poor creature along. Another group of friends had the amusement of watching a group of men trying to stuff a cow (live) in the trunk of a Peugeot. Apparently, they succeeded, and drove off down the road...
There is a main National Road that runs down the center of the country. It is paved, and there are a couple short capillary roads running off of it which are also paved. This national road is about the size of a small state highway, and winds through hills and small villages. It takes about 20 hours to drive the length of it, which is the equivalent of driving across Colorado. I did the entire trip for Christmas, when I went down to Nzerekore, the forest. We gathered eight volunteers from various places around the country, and 'desplaced' -- paid for all the seats in -- a 9-seater car. This made it much more comfortable, and meant that we didn't have to wait for any Guinean passengers to stop and see their uncle or aunt or girlfriend on the way. It also meant we got a lot of attention at the barricades -- a car full of white people.
Christmas was great. It was so good to see everyone. On Christmas Eve Day, we wondered what we should do to celebrate. We elected Jeremy as Fowl Boy; he came back a half-hour later with 3 ducks and 2 roosters dangling, bad-tempered, from his fists. The Guinean guard helped us kill and clean them, and we had wonderful grilled duck with sweet and sour sauce. Pasta salad, lettuce salad, and chocolate cake were the accompaniments to this feast. For 25 people. Created with only a small camp stove and a small charcoal pit.
The next day, I visited a vine bridge. Fowl Boy took me and a few others to a small village that has an amazing vine contraption swinging out over a large river. The villagers sold us a little bit of rice, and a lot of palm wine (a naturally fermented vinegary-sweet wine that is tapped directly from a certain palm tree).
Right now I'm in Conakry (obviously, since I have no computer in my village). We just finished our mid-service training, which was held on a small tropical island with a view of the beach. We sunbathed and swam during coffee breaks. I tell you, this Peace Corps thing is hard... ;)
I really enjoy the company of Guineans. They laugh at my jokes. Or maybe they're laughing at me. Whichever, we have a good time. One thing that does disconcert me, however, is to realize that I do have the luxury of enjoying this place. I can expound on the joys of African life - because I can afford to. Because, quite frankly, I can leave. I made the choice to come, and I can make the choice to stay, which is unlike the situation of my Guinean friends and colleagues. I get very frustrated with the constant questions regarding U.S. Visas, but I also understand. It's not that it's so horrible here -- it is hard, but not horrible. But because it is so very difficult to leave, everybody wants to. By fortune of birth, I have this U.S. Passport, which gives me more freedom than we often care to think about.