July 10. Ruminations from Guinea
Hello everyone,
I’m in Guinea! The short story is – we arrived exhausted, but there were no problems. It looks likely that we won’t have email access again until July 28th. The place feels so oddly familiar, like returning to a childhood home. Even though you forgot the color of the house, you remember the curve of the stairs, the hiding place in the eaves, or this vague impression of light in the living room. Guinea feels familiar. It’s certainly not home to all of me, but it is home to an important part of me.
For the longer story, read on…
I spent the first night in New York City seeing my friends Alex and Andy (& his wife Maureen and charming kid Aidan). I met Mom at JFK and we found the Air Maroc check-in desk. This is when the steady transformation began. Even before we left New York, we gradually left western culture.
The Air Maroc desk was at the far end of the airport, a small row of check-in counters hidden by a long line of Africans – women in their colorful robes, men in the little cupcake-shaped hats, young men with slick t-shirts and jeans. The line was permeated with the earthy smell of African body odor (a distinctive smell unlike no other peoples I’ve met), and piled high with immense pieces of luggage and taped boxes. I thought my luggage was huge, but it was dwarfed by those huge suitcases full of gifts and goods from the US. The lady behind the Air Maroc counter was disdainful in that polite way that I’ve encountered several times. I get the sense that they’re thinking that just because I’m white, they figure that I think that I’m better than them, and they’re prepared to take me down a peg. There’s a certain superciliousness in the air. She smiled sweetly at us and, as we found to our dismay a few hours later, gave us some of the worst seats on the plane.
The next step along the transition towards African-ness (and away from Western-ness) was at the gate. We heard no announcement, but about a half-hour after we were supposed to board there was a sudden rush to stand in line. Almost as an afterthought, as we started to board, they announced that boarding was to begin. And on this huge transatlantic liner, 3 times as long and twice as wide as a domestic jet, they just called “all seats, all rows.” Welcome to the madhouse.
On the plane, I heard people greeting in Pulaar, women in elaborate robes brushed by us self-importantly on their way down the aisle, and everyone stood too close to me in line. I never got over the different conceptions of personal space even in the 2 years that I was here.
Take one more step down into Africa. Waiting to go through security in Casablanca, a group of self-important women in colorful robes walked past the entire line, and pushed right in front of me and Mom. The gate at the airport in Casablanca had just one or two working toilets, and one had no pipe connecting the sink drain to the plumbing. So every time that someone used the sink, water flowed directly onto the floor creating a widening puddle the crept down the hall. And again, there was no boarding announcement, just a sudden mass movement for the door, where we stood for a half-hour. Inexplicably, a few people would be let through the door at a time, and then no more. The same self-important women brushed by us in line, pushing us aside to stand directly in front of us. We had the feeling that no matter where we had been standing in line, they would have come and stood in front of us, just to prove something (but what?). We just smiled and stepped aside. We finally began boarding at about the time we were scheduled to depart. When we got to our seat, there was a woman sitting in my seat. This was a different type of Guinean woman than the ones who had pushed us by – this is the educated, French-speaking woman from Conakry (the capital) who also holds some grudge against us because of the color of our skin, or perhaps simply enjoys getting some status hold over anybody. She pretended to think that 19C was the window, not aisle seat, but I prevailed and she moved over one seat to sit between mom and I, where she purposefully spilled over both sides of the seat so that both mom and I were squeezed to the edges of our own seats. Oh well, at least I got the window so that I could see the Sahara below.
We first flew over a series of brown hills, and between the peaks I could see the glint of water and small mud-colored villages clustered around small areas of green. Roads snaked along the ridges of the hills, probably taking a day to travel from one village to the next. Some villages looked as small as 20 houses. Those hills gave away to a brown desert with surprising variety in the land. Knifelike ridges extended for miles, and fractal-like fingers extended like veins from flat swaths of brown that must have once held rivers but were long dead and dry. Odd little dark plateaus stood out, like flat islands in the middle of a sandy sea. And from time to time the variety gave way to an unbroken, blinding beige sea of sand. Here, there is no sign of water, or life. After some time, the variety gave way completely to unbroken sand, like a huge beach. After a half-hour of haze, I fell asleep. When I woke up, there were dark clouds below us, and the lush green of Guinea.
I bribed a customs official $5 to bring us through customs, so that there was no chance of items being stolen from our bag, and paid a guy $3 to wheel me and my bags to a waiting taxi, where I bargained for 5 minutes for a $4 ride to the Conakry Peace Corps house. I changed money while I was there, too, and was amazed at the exchange rate. The official exchange is 1800 Guinean Francs to the dollar. He offered me 2700 GF to the dollar. I hear that you can get up to 2900 GF to the dollar. When I first arrived in Guinea 7 years ago, the rate was one-third of that: 1000 GF to the dollar. The currency fluctuation, and inflation, has been killing the local economy. The price of rice is rising, and the government is printing tons of new money to make up the difference. One Peace Corps volunteer told of the complaints of one of her villagers, who waved Guinean bills in her face and said “this is worthless! This is paper! What you have is real money.” He didn’t, of course, throw that 'worthless paper' on the ground!
We went out for our first tastes of Guinean food this afternoon. We left the Peace Corps compound and dodged puddles on the narrow road filled with potholes. We leaped into the mud on the side to avoid the taxis careening wildly around the corners, stuffed full of people. We passed old men with the little muslim hats, young girls carrying plates of bananas on their heads, little storefronts selling tomato paste and small plastic bags of sugar, and kids running around. I only heard "Fote na ra" a few times -- "there's a white person" -- because the Peace Corps house is so close by, they're sort of used to us. We went to a Senegalese rice bar and got some riz gras (salty rice with tid-bits of meat, sour spinach-type stuff, and funny little squashes) and yassa poulet (chicken with onion sauce) -- yum! The two plates together cost us $1. We are *so* not going to need all the money we brought with us.
We had the good fortune to see my friends Brad and Estel Willits, two missionaries who lived in Fria (the next town over) when I was in Wawaya. They were very good to me while I was here, and we spent an hour chatting and catching up. They tell me that the road is now paved all the way to Fria, and that the road to Wawaya has been graded. I'm excited to see it. We also met the new Peace Corps director, Lisa Ellis, who was charming and very helpful. We talked about the situation of Peace Corps over the years, and how much easier Peace Corps service is for current volunteers than for either her (she served in the Gambia in the 80s) or for me. There is now a mail run that leaves every month, driving directly to each PCV's village! We used to get mail about once every 3 months, when someone happened to be coming through, or if we went to the regional house. I saw Mohammed Fofana, the APCD for Education. It's amazing to me how he remembered my face, my name, the village where I served, even with all the volunteers who have passed through the country in the 5 years since I left.
The Peace Corps house has been moved since I was here and it is in a beautiful house and a good location, just down the street from the Marine House and from a fancy restaurant (the Riviera). However, the more things change, the more they stay the same – the sink fills with dirty dishes, PCVs gather around the TV, the bunk beds seem to be the same as the ones that were there when I was a volunteer (rickety but solid), and the place has a familiar musty smell of damp Conakry. The PCVs are the same, too – the people change, but there is something similar. I recognize some of the people I served with in their mannerisms, their reactions to Guinea (casually happy, bitter and jaded, MacGyver party boy, responsible and quiet). A couple just returned from their first 3 months at site and one of the first things he asked me was, “why did you come back?” I said it was to find the part of myself that fit here.
And there is a part of myself that fits here. Going down the road to the boutique, I see the familiar products – the Nescafe, little packets of soap, bottled water, powdered milk – and I feel happy. “Bonjour, tanti” (hello Auntie) I say to the woman behind the counter. Her old husband looks respectfully at the floor as he greets us. And then down the dirt road to the brick oven to buy a warm baguette. It all feels so familiar in its strangeness. I hear snatches of Pulaar and Sousou as I walk down the road, and the rhythms feel soothing. My Pulaar is coming back, and I feel comfortable speaking it. I am so very, very glad to be here.