Well, folks, we just arrived back in Conakry after 2 weeks "en brousse" (in the bush) and I'm exhausted. It was a day of bad choices & bad luck. The wrong taxi, missed phone connections, the wrong choice of eating establishments, wrong choice not to bring an umbrella, trying email a half-hour too late. But it's ended well, and I just washed my hair for the first time in 10 days and am sitting groggily typing this note. The next two days will be a whirlwind so, tired though I am, I might as well take a moment to write a little.
We spent a week in my village, left for 4 days, and came back for 4 days. It was just the right amount of time "au village" - it was enough time to relax into the rhythm, to cultivate that vacant stare as you sit in the heat next to your friends, watching the chickens and chatting to pass the time. Relatively little actual information passes in these conversations, even after 5 years. I asked what grade their kids were in, whether they'd had any more kids, and that was about the sum total of the news. I got a few more tidbits of news, but that took some time to tease out. After that, it was hanging out, chatting, drinking tea with my young men friends at the bakery (a thatched open air hut with a mud brick oven inside and a few sweating hunks pounding flour into submission), throwing a few words of Pulaar around the market to delighted shrieks from the people there, translating the goings-on to my mom, and suckering a few kids into carrying 20 gallon jugs of water on their heads for me in exchange for a few matchbox cars. We grooved into a daily routine - wake to the roosters at 6:00, go back to sleep until 8:00 when the screaming kids woke us for good. Throw some water on our faces & dress in the half-light of closed windows. When we felt ready to face the world, we'd open the door and windows to let in light, and shout some greetings to the neighbors. Breakfast was baguettes of bread or rice porridge or mashed manioc with onion and oil and eggs, plus some precious Earl Grey tea we brought along. One day we went on an excursion to the local river, with fishing poles made of fishing line tied to branches, with corks for bobbers and some sad little worms the kids dug out of the river banks. Another day we brought some cloth to the tailors in town and explained how we wanted our dresses, handkerchiefs, and pillow covers done. Another day I sat still for 2 1/2 hours and a local lady braided my hair until her hands and my back ached. It was so comfortable to have the tiny braids sitting right against my scalp, very cool and low maintenance. We visited people at their homes, sat, and spent a lot of time at the aforementioned bakery with the aforementioned bakers. I enjoyed hanging out with them - it was relaxed and we'd joke around. They were my "guards-corps" (bodyguards) and wouldn't let anybody touch me. We got fresh bread and good strong tea, and I gave them little gifts. One was my close friend when I was here before, and it was good to be around him again. In the evenings, someone would usually send us some rice and sauce in two little enamel bowls - a generous offering of food, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed eating rice and sauce again. I got tired of it by a week into our stay, though, and it's certainly no Atkins' diet. Dancers be warned - I won't be wearing any tight dresses anytime soon!
I was surprised by how much it has developed. The road is now paved all the way to Fria (the last hour was graded dirt before, and I used to arrive in Conakry with a fine layer of red dust coating my skin and nasal passages), and the road to Wawaya is greatly improved. I have no idea how they got out all those horrible rocks. It now takes 40 minutes instead of an hour. They've also improved much of the road all the way to Telemele - a town in the middle of Guinea that used to be virtually unreachable from where I was. There were several new buildings in my village and the previous volunteer built a middle school, so there are now more kids in the village and more teachers, which improves the intellectual air a lot. They also got a grant to build an improved market structure, which is amazing, and they finished a youth center in town. The officials who were there when I was there are mostly gone, and the new ones seem motivated (at least the Sous-Prefet, or mayor, was), and get along well with the traditional leaders. What a difference!
We visited the town where I built the health post and that was nice. It was a smaller village than Wawaya, and the huts were pretty and well-kept. The elders made some nice speeches, and I met the first girl to be born in the hospital. They called her Kadiatou Stephanie Diallo. I gave her a necklace. We walked around the village, and took some pictures of huts, of women pounding rice in a pestle, of the imam teaching the Koran to some young boys at the mosque.
After that first week we left to go to Boke, a city about 3-4 hours from my village. The market there was quite a bit more extensive than in my village or Fria (the closest big city) and we bought far too much fabric. Some woodworkers were carving touristy items out of wood in a open air hut next to the only museum I've ever seen in Guinea, and we special ordered a few items from them. We stayed in the "maison de passage" (Peace Corps hostel) there, which had exciting things like electricity and a TV and VCR. We watched Sweet Home Alabama, Sense & Sensibility, and Benny & Joon. Hooray. We needed to vegetate a bit after all that "on" time in the village - always talking, always the center of attention, trying to pay attention to every little thing to soak up the details for later. While we were in Boke we got a taxi to take us to Bel Aire - a fancy ex-pat hotel and beach. It was a weekday so we were the only people in this fabulous establishment. I haven't seen the likes of it before in Guinea - 3 stories high, with a nice pool and lots of shiny glass and tile. We spent almost as much on our meal there ($25) as on the taxi ride there. We've generally been eating rice and sauce for about 20 cents a plate. It rained most of the day at Bel Aire unfortunately, but the sun came out for a bit and we swam and it was wonderful. It's been raining a LOT while we've been here - it's the start of the rainy season in earnest, and it rains almost every day. When it doesn't rain, you wish it would because the air becomes pregnant and hot and moist. I got a cold while I was in Boke, so the third day (which was torrential downpours anyway) we stayed in while I dealt with my sniffles. I also got a blister beetle burn - a blister beetle lets out some sort of liquid that burns the skin, and you get a raw patch of skin that looks like someone splashed you with some mildly strong acid. It's still healing, and doesn't look too pretty, but never really hurt or anything. So far, that's the most serious illness we've faced. We were pretty worried about getting very sick but so far (knock on wood) it's been fine.
We came back to Wawaya for those last 4 days and hung out. I'm not even sure what all we did. We found the metalworker and watched him heat metal red-hot using coals in a small depression in the ground (fired hot with a bellows), and then pound it into shapes on an anvil embedded in the ground. We bought some rough-hewn hoes for about 50 cents. It continually amazed me how little everything was worth after the currency conversion. It cost about a dollar to have a tailor spend most of the day making a dress. The bakers earned $2-3 a day for 8 hours of backbreaking labor - chopping wood, feeding the oven, kneading the flour in a huge basin, shaping the loaves, taking them off hot pieces of corrugated iron.
I really love Guinea, and it was wonderful to be back in that part of myself that fits here. It was difficult to leave again. Mom found a quote in a book to the effect of "It's difficult to leave a place because you will never again be the person you are now, in this place, with these people." It's true. In Wawaya, I am Aicha Diallo -- popular, relaxed, joking, and a self-consciuos. The village brings out certain core elements of myself -- that I worry about what others think about me and so I worry about whether I'm doing the right thing all the time. It brings out my sense of humor and that I like to play jokes. I'm more comfortable, somehow, joking and teasing in the village. In Wawaya, I'm the popular girl -- I talk much more than I do at home, where I fade away (verbally) into a crowd.
We're excited for Morocco, where we go next, to spend a week in Marrakech. It was beautiful when I visited Fez, like something out of the Arabian Nights. The streets twisted through a maze of markets, and the public baths had stone floors heated from below, with vats of steaming water in every corner. There were loaves of nugat larger than my head. Here's to Morocco!
Love to all,
Stephanie