When I'm ravenously hungry...

After class one day this week, I headed "downtown" to grab some food because I was very hungry, as it was nearly 3 pm and id eaten some peanuts at 10 am. (pardon the terrible typing, i got a new brace for my right wrist and am thus typing left-handed, which does not lend itself to correct capitalization or punctuation.)

When I say downtown, i mean the area of town called the "Carrefour". It means intersection, and it's a trianguar section formed by the fork of two paved roads. Nearly every volunteer has a carrefour, but mine is, I modestly think, the best. I have a gas station (aka walmart) with consistently cold drinks and a selection of overly preserved snacks and cookies. (think pringles and twinkies...but lower quality twinkies). There are also women selling ice, bananas, and fried cakes. There is also transportation to at least 3 major towns every single day. That's not to be taken for granted. Many of my friends have to wait for market day to get to even one town! And yet im still considered au village.

Anyway, there are also a multitude of women selling rice and a variety of sauces. The sauces are the best earlier in the day, so on this particular afternoon, I had to settle for cold sauce and slightly dried out rice. It was, however, my favorite sauce, so that made up for it. I bought the smallest plate for 3000 francs. It was a huge bowl of rice. I mean imagine a Chipotle bowl if its major axis was its diameter. (coughnerdcough) I also bought 2 sacs of filtered water, one of which i drank right away in the complete ecstacy known only to a chalk-coated teacher who just spent the last 6 hours talking and then walked ten minutes in the 90 degree arid sun, then found gloriously cold water. I ate maybe half of my rice bowl before I started to worry about popping the seams on my dress. So I left it to be finished by some passing child (oh thats not what you do with leftovers?) and started waddling home. But then I got distracted by freshly fried cakes and plaintains, so I bought one of each of those for dessert. And then I realized I was all out of cash.

My entire meal (too much rice and sauce for 3000 francs, 2  sachets of water for 1000, and 2 desserts for 1000 francs) had included a main dish (carbs, fats, proteins, and veggies), two drinks (albeit water), and 2 desserts (both delicious, btw). The American cost: 71 cents.

I wiped grease from the plaintain off my face and contentedly waddled home.

And they say life is hard here.

Parents in Guinea

What will I remember from my parent's visit to Guinea? The time we got ripped off on the islands for new years eve? The impossibility of finding a taxi out of Conakry? No.

Because when your real family (minus my sister) meets your adoptive family, all the stupid little stressful things go away. I'll remember making my favorite sauce with Bijou, and how she kept hugging and kissing my parents and telling them how happy she was. And how my parents played with her daughter, Hawa, as though she was a third grandchild. 

I'll remember my mom's surprise and happiness when she saw Ela, a child in my compound, dragging a box around by a plastic bag string and calling it his car.

I'll remember my students singing the national anthem to my parents, and singing the American anthem for them. Not to mention all the questions they were brave enough to ask my parents that they've never asked me. And the questions my parents had for my students.

I'll remember head-lamp reading with my parents in my enormous bed under the mosquito net, singing along to "Call me Maybe". And how disconcerted they were by not having light at night, something I'm completely used to.

I'll remember dinner out with all the volunteers and hearing my dad give the French line. The French line? If you've heard it, you'd know what I mean. Both hilarious and embarrassing, in that special way that only a parent can manage. 

I'll remember hugs and laughs and the happiness that comes with knowing that your loved ones can better understand what you're going through. 

Thanks, Mom and Dad. It was wonderful to have you here! I love you!

The lessons you learn

Coming into Peace Corps, I thought a lot about the lessons I would teach. Velocity! Optics! Wash your hands! Always use condoms! Don't cheat!

When I came to Guinea, I realized, as I knew I would, that teaching was just the background noise to my own personal learning experience. It's just that the lessons I have learned are not the lessons I expected to learn. I've learned:

• That life is precious. Oh, so precious.
• That in America, we build a wall between ourselves and death. Or we think we do, and that's just a facade. But living and knowing that death is always there, always intrinsically bound to life, is not easy.
• That I fight back.
• That this too shall pass. For better or worse, life will change.
• That my trash is a Guinean child's toy.
• Food is nourishment. It should not be wasted.
• That people can be there for you, even when you go weeks without communicating.
• That being called out for being different is hard to stomach day after day after day.
• That laughter can unite us all.
• Especially when you're laughing at yourself.
• That Guinean hospitality means opening yourself up to give too much. And that emotionally, I do that. But when it comes to chocolate? Oh hell, no.
• Just keep chipping away at things and they will eventually come to pass.
• That I am whole unto myself. Or I can be, sometime, when I self-actualize.
• That it's OK to just be on the path, and not have reached the destination yet.
• That nothing can be taken for granted--my health, running water, basic math skills.

Everyday brings lessons, but I have to say, I didn't anticipate having to learn from being attacked by a crazy person, an extended med hold in the US for stomach troubles, or burying an adorable kitten. Peace Corps kinda takes all the ups and downs of a regular life and shoves them all together into two years so every day, much less every year is a rollercoaster of challenges and overcoming those challenges. Boy, I am tired out today. If you didn't hear, the kitten I was taking care of died this morning on my way to Conakry. She was sick, but I am very sad.

Double Rainbow--double hope?

A New School Year

I know it's been forever and a day since I posted. I've been busy and occasionally sick and just not able to think about blogposts!

But I figure most of you are curious about what I'm up to at site, now that the school year started in October. We actually got off to a pretty fast start. Kids started showing up on the 8th, when it was supposed to start the 4th. And I gave my first real class the 15th and we've been rolling since then! All of the consistent teachers from last year are back, although the other English teacher has been mostly MIA as well as my counterpart (the economics teacher) until November. So I've had a lot of my students from last year and the new 11e kids asking for English classes, and I've had to refuse them.

I am teaching the two "senior" classes, also known as Terminale. I have a social sciences class and an experimental science class. I teach SS English, which is a subject they have to pass on the BAC, their national exam, at the end of the year. I teach SE (sciences experimentales) Physics and English. They have to pass the BAC in Physics, but not in English, so we just have fun in English class.

The two classes couldn't be more different. SE has sixteen kids signed up, and 14 of them show up on a regular basis. When I had review class in the evening on the first week of school, ten of them showed up. Can you imagine American kids doing that? They are curious and hardworking. They like learning English, even though they have so much work to do for their BAC preparation. And they have, well, WE have a LOT of work to do. These kids are supposed to be able to understand vector accelerations based on the derivatives of position and then velocity vectors. They don't even understand what we're drawing when we draw vectors. They still mess up multiplication by zero. They mix up plus signs and multiplication signs in the pythagorean theorem. They can quote me a beautiful definition of angular velocity, but they don't understand what a radian is or how to convert to it. It makes me so angry, because these are smart, interested kids, and they want to learn soooo much, but considering the atrocious mathematical education they've had and the lack of teachers over the years, it's unsurprising that they struggle. These kids are also going to have to take a test in Biology, when there hasn't been a Bio teacher at their school since they were in 11th grade, two years ago. Sometimes I get mad and I have to explain that I'm not mad that they don't know what tangent means, I'm mad at their education system, which fails them and then demands so much of them at the end of their schooling. Last year's physics BAC was mostly a question about interferences fringes created by the young's slit experience. If any of you know what that is and the formulas involved, you took physics in university. And they are just high schoolers! In a developing world country!

*deep breath*

The other class has over 50 registered students, and about 40 of them show up physically, and about 10 of them show up mentally. Passing the SS test is supposedly much easier, since it's essays and some history memorization, but no math or science. So this is where the people who aren't really sure why they are in high school go. Which is unfortunate for the people who really want to go into a social science field like journalism or business or politics. They get pulled down by all these slackers. The students don't listen to me, they don't seem to care about English, and they simply don't respect me. It's frustrating for all sorts of reasons that are different than my SE class. Nonetheless, I feel really bad for the motivated kids in my class, and I'm going to see what I can do to make sure that those kids pass their BAC.

I'm also officially teaching 11e SE in English, although I picked it up last week and then fell unfortunately ill. I'm now better and heading back to site! Apologies on the lack of picture in this post!

Guess who's back?

MEEEEE!

Back in Conakry, working on some physics resources for high school teachers before heading back to site tomorrow.

I do not, as yet, have any answers for you. I tried to get riz gras today and they had run out--so no rice and sauce yet!

I'm a terrible blogger

The truth is, all the time when I'm in Guinea I think of things to tell you guys about. A post on the role of women, or funny things kids say, or language learning, Guinean music, or cooking or... or... or....

But then I came back to the US, and I have all my pictures at my disposal and all my time to use to blog--and I couldn't think of anything good enough to talk about. I hope you guys enjoyed my house tour, which I filmed in February and have been trying to post. At least something good came from my being in America!

Tomorrow I head back, breaking what seems to be a bit of a curse. We've had 3 volunteers recently medically separated/decide not to return for medical reasons, and ALL of their names start with Ma--. I'm pretty excited to be heading back, especially now that I have a flight that gets in at a reasonable time. Peace Corps tried to book me a flight that got into Conakry at 2am. I mean, I love Guinea and I feel safe in my town, but we're talking about a city where a) I've been attacked by a crazy man b) the political situation is explosive and c) there are police checkpoints after midnight. Luckily, Peace Corps Guinea immediately rectified Peace Corps Washington's small oversight. Win.

My apologies on my failures to post. At least this time when I go back to Guinea, I'll have a working battery in my computer and can type up posts when I think of them!

Five big questions I need answered:
1) Have the mice taken over my house?
2) Has the dust taken over my belongings?
3) Will I have enough time to prepare for school starting in October?
4) What will my community say when I come back?
5) When can I get some rice and sauce?

You'll have to tune in later to find out! (predicting an update mid-September!) But for now I'll leave you with this:

A video for your viewing pleasure