How Da Business? Fine Fine.

Happy belated Halloween everyone!

I’m in Kan Kan for a few days to relax with some of the other volunteers so I’ve got some time to post here. Sorry for the lack of updates but I’ve been at site for the last month and obviously there’s no internet there. Get used to it, I live in an African village. C’est la vie.

It’s been quite a month. My village is really remote, even by Guinean standards. So I haven’t had any contact with other Americans for the entire month. As you can imagine, that can be quite a plateful at times.

The actual day to day happenings of life are pretty uneventful for the moment. School only started 3 days ago so I’ve spent the majority of the month just trying to get to know my community. Almost nobody there speaks French so I’m having to start all over again with the language learning process, this time with Malinke which is a local language spoken here. There’s no lack of people who want to help me practice, which is great, but there are definitely times when I just want someone who will speak to me in French so I can have a real conversation.

When I’m not wandering around my village trying to blunder my way through a usually nonsensical interaction in Malinke I’m usually spending time reading or with my host family. Activities with them involve eating toh (corn paste served with dipping sauce), teaching me Malinke, eating more toh, and asking me if the things we have here can be found in the U.S. (yes we do have the moon and stars back home). Did I mention we eat a lot of toh?

Tea drinking is also a huge pastime here. Wherever you go in the village you find tons of groups of men sitting around with little charcoal stoves boiling tea. The process of making/drinking the tea takes hours and it’s really more of a way for people to socialize than anything else. The socialization aspect of it is nice but I’m still getting used to the tea itself. It’s made with a really bitter green tea which they then load up with an unbelievable amount of sugar. The result is quite, umm…. sweet, to say the least. As the honorary guest at any gathering I always get the first and biggest cup of tea. Lucky me.

Slowly, the more I get used to my community and venture around further I’m starting to find the little secrets that I missed when I first got here. The market lady who makes awesome peanut butter cookies. Or the goat meat salesmen at night who grills delicious kabobs on an old oil barrel. Or the perfect time to show up at the bakery to get the fresh baked baguettes right out of the brick oven, mmmmm. I’ve also started to explore the surrounding area. There are plenty of paths and hills around here to check out. It’s a good place to go for a hike. Although you always have to be wary of snakes and scorpions.

So I guess you could say I’m slowly figuring out my new life here. The language, the people, the customs. Little by little it’s coming to me. It’s not always easy (in fact I’d say it’s pretty much never easy) but it’s definitely been interesting so far.

I’ll leave you with a little story from one of my first weeks at site, before everyone there knew there was a white guy in town. I was lying under the mango tree in the middle of my family’s concession one night when a man walked through on his way home. In the dark, only sensing that there was someone there and not knowing who I was he gave me a polite “I ni wura” (good evening) and kept going. When I responded in my obvious American accent he stopped, did a double take, and came up to me. “Eh! Tubabu! (White person.)” he said excitedly. “What’s the matter? Are you lost?”

I sat up and looked around at the rows of huts and my African family sitting with me. I listened to the drumming coming from the shortwave radio. I thought of the fact that the closest American was 5 hours away and that it was pretty much impossible for anyone I know to contact me. I shrugged, “I guess so.” He smiled and told me over his shoulder as he walked away “Have courage.” As he disappeared down the path I settled back down against the tree. Have courage indeed.