News from Lisa - Back in Guinea!

Recently, we received this email from Lisa:

"Greetings from Kankan, Today I've officially been in Guinea for one month again, but it feels more like a week. I'm doing well, I'm healthy and all my friends and especially Cherif & his family were really happy to see me back again. I thought it'd be a readjustment to go from the hectic Bamako life with traffic pouring down every street and multi-level apartments back to the quiet village with no paved roads at the end of a 80 dirt road, but really, it's going fine. I guess I needed a break from going non-stop, so I've been taking it easy my first month just settling into my new house and looking for little projects to do here and there. Since the political problems Peace Corps made a new rule that no volunteer should live next door to a government official (which definitely included me since I was in a Prefet apartment if you remember) So I
was out of a place to live, but thankfully [the Cameras have worked with Peace Corps to help with my lodging needs.] It's yet another graduation in housing for me, by far the best as of yet. I started in my two room one bath apartment in Dinguiraye, in Bamako I had my 2 bedroom, kitchen and modern bathroom apartment on the 2nd floor, and now I have my own huge 3-bedroom house, a giant salon, 2 bathrooms and a terrace, all tiled floors and electricity (when it comes, for about 12 hours every other day). It seriously makes my crappy college apartments in Greeley look even more terrible. And I live in Africa.

So like I said, I've been taking it easy, there's not a lot of work I could launch into right away, my big projects before I left were the marketing of the solar cooker (which now it is a rainy season like Guinea has never seen before- I'll get to that later), trying to raise funds for a well for a poor village (also delayed because of the rain) and the letter exchange program called "Peace Pals" for the kids, and it's their summer vacation right now. So I've been doing little translation work for Africare, the NGO based in Dinguiraye, and I've been teaching Cherif how to type and use the computer, he's a pretty quick learner. One of my reasons for coming to Kankan was to buy paint because I want to do the traditional Peace Corps project of painting a world map mural on the side of the middle school, which ties in with my peace pals program too. Also I'm developing simple business lessons in French which will be translated into Pular for the local Radio station that gives Dinguiraye updates every evening. With the start of the school year I may start teaching English at the high school, and will hopefully start a youth business club. But around September 13 Ramadon comes once again (I can't believe it's been a year) and everything will come to a standstill for a month while everyone fasts from dawn til dusk, which I plan on participating in again until I go down to Conakry to catch the flight for Michelle's wedding. So I don't know how much work I'll get done during that month either.

Of the 106 volunteers that were once Peace Corps Guinea, we are now 8. Only 3 in all of Haute Guinea (my region) which makes for a pretty ghostly volunteer house. But if everything goes well, we'll get a few more returners over the next two months for a total of around 17 volunteers, and we'll try to get Peace Corps Guinea set up for the new group slated to come in December, so I'll probably be in Conakry in January/February for training. That doesn't leave much time until April, which is the end of my contract, but I'm already thinking about at least extending to the end of the school year which ends in June, especially if I'm teaching English, but nothing's been decided yet.

The rainy season has come, and to make up for a lack-luster effort last year, it's dumping buckets every where this year. This is good for some of the mountaineous farmers, but unfortunately disasterous for valley farmers (rice patties completely flooded and ruined) and for the roads like mine up to Dinguiraye. To make up for all the exhilerating un-necessarily long voyages I'm sure I missed during the 6 months I was in Bamako, I was definitely re-hazed by this last trip to Kankan. The total distance between Kankan and Dinguiraye is 300 km, about 180 miles. Because the first 80 K from Dinguiraye isn't paved, it takes a land cruiser probably 5 hours to do this. It took me 21 hours. Where I went wrong was to leave the day after a massive storm that lasted all night and part of the next day. We made it about 60 K down the dirt road, with the apprentice mini bus driver hopping out to walk across flooded parts of the road to test the distances, fine fine. But then we got to the great flood. The inadequate five quasi-elevated dirt bridges with pipes underneath to control the water flow were completely flooded by a river (that's not even there during the dry season) that had become a massive lake. Almost a kilometer of the road was covered in waist-deep water (I know because I had to walk across it) fast moving in parts. So what did we do? The obvious Guinean solution- just wait a little while, it'll get better. It didn't. We waited 5 hours. It was almost dark when a group of 20 or so young ambitious bare-foot villagers started collecting donations from all the stranded motorists of both sides (it was quite a party by this point with 10 or morecars/trucks waiting to cross on each side- and I think I've told you before how many Guineans and livestock stuff into moving vehicles) and had the drivers wrap the spark plugs in plastic, shut down the engine, and then pushed/swam the vehicles across the inundation to the other side. All the passengers were told to cross by foot as to not weigh down the vehicle in the mud below. So we did, crossed hand in hand because of the strong current in places, and made our way slowly across. Our mini bus was lucky, several cocky semi-truck drivers decided to force their way through the river and got overturned or sunk(no one was hurt, but they lost their trucks to the river). So we made it past the river, the spark plugs still worked, and there was much rejoicing. Until 10km later. Our oil tank had not been as carefully water proofed as the spark plugs, and started making frightening choking sounds. We pulled over and opened the tank to have a look. River sludge glooped out, it was completely full and flooded. So the driver/aspiring mechanic cleaned out the tank- but we had no extra oil. It was dark now, we were still on the dirt road and were 15 km from the main road with a town with real mechanics and oil. The traffic wasn't exactly passing freely from behind us either because of the flood we just crossed. We waited about an hour until a motorcycle passed us and we waved him down. He went into town and brought us back some oil. After an hour of waiting and an hour of tinkering around the engine, the minibus was rolling. So we made the 15km to the village on the main road by around 10:30pm, (80k down, only 220 to go). Now that our bus was working our driver was tired and wanted to spend the night on the road because there are no hotels. After facing an almost mutiny, he reluctantly contiuned only 20 more kilometers. Then he stopped at a gas station and forced us to spend 4 hours cramped in the car all sleeping on each other, including chickens and crying babies. Needless to say, I didn't really sleep. So at 5 in the morning we complained enough that he started going again, only for us to get a flat tire an hour after starting. Losing more time, after repairing the tire we pulled into the next village for a car tune up. We could have made it to Kankan in 3 hours, but it still took us until 10am to get there because the driver kept pulling over every 10k or so to check the engine and try to find more passengers. But we got there, we always get there, it's just the getting there that sucked. Completely. So I'm here in Kankan, I slept all day yesterday and today I'm trying to get all my errands done. I want to head back to Dinguiraye before we get any more rain and I get cut off. "