Slac is the unique nickname of my very unique, very awesome host brother. He and the Neighbor Teacher are my best friends in village, and I don't know what I would do without them. Slac has helped me buy a phone, get transport, kill spiders, fix blocked showers, learn susu, and have guinean social skills. He is basically the source of all of my social adventures because he knows EVERYONE. He is the older brother I never had. Let's tell some stories about Slac.
Slac works at a nightclub and is a DJ/jack of all trades, so whenever there are events at the nightclub we get in for free. He's been studying arts administration at a nearby university, so the nightclub experience is his "internship" per se.What he really wants to do is be a sports journalist, but in Guinea your university major is decided by the state taking into consideration your grades. But he tells me that most journalists didn't major in journalism either, so he's still aiming to do that as a career.
This is a good example of his vision for the future which I see so rarely in other Guineans. Another example is the fields he has bought and farmed since 2004. We walked out to see the cashew trees, peanuts, manioc, and cotton trees on his plots. His land, and that of his uncle (my host dad) is the only green in a sea of burnt black fields of stones and stumps. Their land has cut plants lying around to increase the soil quality. The other land seems to be mostly sand. When I asked him why he started buying land, he told me that he knew that our town would be growing and that land was going to be more valuable in the future. Talk about an investment in the future!
Slac and I have talked about everything from Guinean corruption to Martin Luther King to the role of women in Islam to family structure to....the list goes on. It is incredible to find someone as well-educated and engaged as my brother who is also nice enough to take care of me. Our discussions reveal him to be a compassionate, moral, humorous person. We spend a lot of time laughing, between my Susu, his english, and my "spoiled baby" status.
On Tuesday, Slac's mom passed away. I've never met her because she lives in a village far away, and I guess she's been sick for a while, but it has been a difficult time for my friend. Guineans do not show a lot of emotion, but I can tell that his is saddened by his loss by the way he zones out when we're sitting outside, by how red his eyes were when he came back from the burial, and by the comments he makes about his mother. Apparently she was a pretty incredible individual, well-known and well-respected in her community. It's been hard to watch him grieve and not be able to provide the sort of support I would like to give, and would know how to give in the American context.
Grief is different here. Immediately after someone passes away, they grieve intensely. Women come over to comfort each other and wail, pouring their pain into eerie sounds. They bring out cool water to wash away the tears and steal the redness from their eyes. The next day is the burial, and a week later there is a sacrifice, but life resumes its normal pace very quickly. Death is a much larger facet in life here, so I suppose they must move forward more than we do.
