Well it’s almost time for the next education training group to arrive in Guinea, which means I’m almost at my one year point. Unbelievable, I honestly don’t know where the time goes. I vaguely remember those last few months before leaving for Guinea as a blur of anxiety and numerous trips to Target. In an effort to try and make the process a little bit easier for those who are coming I wrote up a packing list. For all of you G-18ers out there reading this, keep in mind that obviously these are just suggestions and there are things that I think are useful to bring which might not make sense for you. So take everything I say with a grain of salt.
To all the rest of you, I’ll put up a more me-centric post (everybody’s favorite kind of post obviously) soon.
Things to Bring
• Photo Album - This is a great way to break the ice with your host family and people in your village. Throw some pictures of friends and family in there but also put a lot of pictures of stuff from The States that aren’t in Guinea or are done differently than here, like snow, or supermarkets, or pictures of you at work/school, or pictures of you cooking.
• Host family presents – You’re going to have a host family at least for training and you’ll want to give them some presents to thank them for having you, I think a new nalgene makes a good present. I brought two for myself to country but my host mom during training liked the one I was using so much I gave her the second one. They make a good present because they're pretty looking, useful, and high quality (which is something that is often lacking here). Other good presents are things that are obviously from America or related to America. Things with American flags, postcards, maps, American candy, etc. Don’t spend a lot on presents though, you might think a cheap present is no good but it’ll be nice here. And honestly it’ll mostly just be the thought anyways.
• Books – Don’t bring a lot, just a few that you really love or have always wanted to read. There are thousands of books in the Peace Corps transit houses in country left behind from past volunteers so you’ll never want for reading material. Don’t bring War and Peace, there are about a million copies here.
• Earplugs - Village life is loud! Crying babies, goats, roosters, people getting up at the crack of dawn. Not to mention when you're in transit houses with other PCVs and you just want some sleep. Bring some good earplugs, you'll be happy you did.
• Kelty Redwing Traveller 3100 - I definitely recommend some sort of mid sized backpack to use on trips in country. I like this one because it zips apart into two bags, a big one and a little one. When I go on bush taxis I put the big one on top with all my clothes and inexpensive stuff and then I keep my money and electronics in the car in the small one with me. That way if anyone goes through my bag up top (which happens sometimes) they can't get at anything I care about losing. Plus the small one is good for walking around in town.
• Something to break the ice with your host family (bracelet making stuff, drawing supplies, cards, something like that) - Moving in with a host family can be awkward, especially if you're language skills aren't cemented yet. Having a little activity you can do together that doesn't require too much talking is a good way to start off on the right foot.
• U.S. postage stamps and self sealing envelopes – The Guinean postal system sucks so if you want to send mail back reliably just put a U.S. stamp on it and give it to a volunteer going back to the states to drop in a mailbox there. There's always someone going back so this works fine. Also bring self sealing envelopes, the kind you have to lick don't do well in the heat. I didn't think I would do that much writing so I didn't bring stamps, but then I had people send me them in packages. It's a good way to keep in touch and you'll have plenty of time to write at site. Make sure you get people's mailing addresses before you leave though! Also you might want to get the U.S. postage pricing figured out before you go. I'm never quite sure if I need to put extra postage on my heavier letters so I always err on the side of caution and stick an extra stamp on. If I knew the actual prices I wouldn't have to waste stamps.
• Simple cheap weather thermometer – You almost definitely won’t have internet at your site. It's easy to forget how awesome it is to have internet and just be able to look up little things you want to know right away. I always want to know what the temperature is at site but I have no way of finding out. I wish I had one of these.
• World Map - For the same reason, no internet means no access to maps. You'll probably listen to a lot of BBC world news at site and it's nice to be able to look up where the different countries they're talking about are. Plus it makes a good decoration. It also helps to remind me that I’m not alone in the world when I start to feel a little isolated at site. You can buy these in Conakry if you don’t feel like lugging one across the Atlantic.
• Dictionaries, an English one and a good comprehensive French/English one - Again, no internet/computer so if you're writing letters at site there's no spell check. A good English dictionary is super useful for writing letters also if you plan on reading and studying a lot it's useful. I've heard it's necessary to have if you plan on studying for the GREs (which you can take in Conakry). Peace Corps will provide you with a French/English dictionary but in my opinion it was kind of lacking. Bring a compact but comprehensive French/English dictionary with you. I have the one made by Berlitz with the blue plasticy cover and I really like it.
• Rechargeable batteries and charger - Batteries in Guinea are really shitty and I’ve heard they can blow up and ruin electronics (but I’ve never actually seen this happen). Rechargeable batteries sidestep this problem. You'll probably have access to electricity to recharge them somehow at site or at least on monthly regional capitol visits. I recommend it, plus it's good for the environment.
• Headlamp and flashlight - No electricity means no light (duh)! Headlamp is a must and a backup good long lasting flashlight too. I got the generic PETZL headlamp and I really like it. It's LED so it lasts a long time and it's bright. For a flashlight I have the Princeton Tec Attitude. That's also LED and it doesn't drain batteries that fast, it's small, and bright.
• I was told to bring a monthly planner, I never use it but I could see how it could be useful. I just make my own calendars at site, it's something to do.
• Mach 3 with replacements - The razors in Guinea are crap. I'm glad I brought them.
• Seeds - If you plan on gardening bring these. They're easy to buy in the states but harder to get in country. I can only find the few vegetables they grow here and I wish I had more variety.
• Cash - It's hard to get money out of a U.S. bank account in Guinea so if you've got any money you want to use for traveling I'd bring it with you and just keep it locked up with Peace Corps in the main office. Don’t worry about bringing money though, Peace Corps pays you enough to live comfortably and travel. And if you do bring money don’t go overboard, I wouldn’t bring more than $1,000 - $2,000. To give you an idea of how much money that is here, we get paid $200 a month and that goes a really long way. Travel money is nice but by no means necessary.
• Pillow - Someone told me to bring one before I came and I'm glad I did. That being said, if you can possibly avoid bringing one, don't bring it. They're big and bulky and a bitch to carry around. And you can also buy American style pillows in Conakry.
• Camp towel - It's not necessary but it's nice to have a small towel you can stuff in your pack for trips. There are volunteers here who just use a strip of fabric they bought in country and that works well also. I like my camp towel though.
Things Not to Bring
• Too many books - Bring the ones you really want/need but don't bring more than that. There will be tons of books in country from past volunteers who left them and if push comes to shove they make a good care package item.
• Too many toiletries - They're really heavy and you'll be able to find everything you need in country. Just bring enough to get you through the first month or so of training until you're comfortable enough to go out and hunt for them yourself.
• Too many clothes - Pack light! A) you'll want to buy Guinean clothes in country B)You'll probably wear your clothes for a lot longer stretches at a time than you do in the States because hand washing your laundry is awful and there's really no need to be clean. Also you can find tons of cheap American style clothes here like t-shirts and jeans, so if you need more you can buy them.
• Too much survival/wilderness type stuff - you're not gonna be camping for two years, you'll have a home with comforts. In general most outdoorsy stuff won't be all that useful.
• Too many bags - I recommend a large duffel bag and the Kelty I was talking about earlier. Keep it light, trucking around a lot of baggage is no fun.
• Too many things to pass the time - I brought a bunch of little things to pass the time with like a hacky sack/harmonica/Frisbee and I don't really use any of them. You'll have a bunch of time on your hands but you'll probably read a lot and do other things that are more productive.
• Dress clothes - Peace Corps will tell you to bring dress clothes, don't be fooled! Dress clothes aren't really that necessary except for maybe one or two functions. I brought all the dress clothes they told me to bring and maybe wore them once. I'd recommend bringing some outfit that you can wear casually but is also nice enough to get by at some sort of embassy event or something like that (like a polo with comfortable brown slacks). Honestly, you're a Peace Corps volunteer, people expect you to be dirty.
• Food - Some people brought some food from home but in general it was gone quickly and I don't really see the point. You're not gonna miss American food right away and by the time you start missing it all the food you brought will be gone. Plus you'll get used to the food here. And food is a great care package item.
General Things to Think About
• Anything you forget to bring is not a big deal so don't stress out about packing. Honestly you could probably show up in country with the clothes on your back and be fine, you'd be surprised the kind of stuff you can find in country. Also, if you ever really need something that you forgot it can just be sent in a care package (although this is a headache to coordinate and mail can get stolen so try and get it right with the important stuff the first time around).
• If you don't use it in the States you probably won't use it in Guinea. Life's different but in general you won't need all sorts of weird different stuff.
• Keep visibly expensive items to a minimum. There's some stuff I brought (like ipod speakers) that I just don't use that often because it's awkward to have really conspicuous nice stuff when everyone else around has nothing. Nice stuff is good, but make sure you can be discreet with it.
• Communication back home is nice, try to plan it out. Get yourself a mass mailing list, collect people's e-mails, mailing addresses, and phone numbers, figure out good calling cards for people to buy so they'll know ahead of time what to do to get in touch with you, start a blog. The blog's actually kind of bitch to update but it's worth it, it keeps people connected to me who would otherwise just drift away.
• That being said, communication back home is tough. Keep that in mind and say your goodbyes to people you might not talk with for two years.
• Make yourself Journal. It can be boring and I often lack the motivation to do it, but force yourself to do it. You'll be really happy you did. I look back on my entries even now just from the beginning of my service and I'm really happy I have them. Your journal will be something you'll have for the rest of your life and it'll help you remember your time in Peace Corps. Just do it!
• Stay in the moment! It can be easy at times during service (especially on bad days) to be in a bad mood and just count the days till it's over. Resist the urge to do that! This will be one of the most unique experiences of your life and don't fall into the trap of not appreciating it as it's happening.
Ok, I think I’ve touched on the big things that I wanted to mention. Good luck to everyone out there and I’ll see you soon!
June 3, 2009
May 15, 2009
Always look on the sunny side of life
You know who’s a bad mofo? The sun. Yeah, that’s right, I crossed the sun the wrong way this month and it fought back, with a vengeance.
I like to go for a morning jog these days at site which I usually do before school just after dawn so the sun isn’t much of an issue. But the other day I didn’t have school so I slept in a bit (until an unbelievably late 8:30am). So, by the time I went for my jog it was 9am and the sun was already blazing. That’s life en Afrique. After an hour and half of jogging and working out outside I realized that I needed to call the Peace Corps main bureau and try and get some business done. Being a Friday (the Muslim holy day) I knew the bureau would close at lunch so I needed to head out right away and bike to the closest place to get cell phone reception, a hill about 7km away.
So I took off again under the ever fiercer sun and proceeded to spend another hour and half or so on top of that hill with no protection whatsoever from all that wonderful UV radiation coming my way. Big mistake.
By the time I got home I began to feel a bit woozy and fatigued. I chalked it up to, well, fatigue. After all I had already jogged for about an hour and biked a total of 14km that day. I figured chugging some water and chilling in my hammock for a bit would cure what ailed me. Unfortunately it was not to be.
As the day wore on my general state of well being got worse and worse. The fatigue gradually turned into full body aches. The mild feeling of wooziness turned into severe aching all over my body, nausea, and an inability to stand up without stumbling around looking like I was drunk. I started to get a splitting headache and a fever which eventually got up to 102 degrees. In short, I had a bad case of sun stroke.
I spent the rest of the day moaning in my hammock just trying not to throw up and wishing the aspirin would do something to make my head stop feeling like it was about to rip in half. Not a fun situation, not to mention the fact that my host family was giving me a nice old dose of “we told you so”. Although, to be fair, they did tell me so, there’s a reason people here spend the entire day hanging out in the shade.
Anyways I spent the rest of that day and a good part of the next morning recovering from the sun stroke and didn’t really feel 100% until two days later. But, every day here brings a new lesson, and I learned mine something fierce that day; when in Rome… Stay out of the goddamn sun!
I like to go for a morning jog these days at site which I usually do before school just after dawn so the sun isn’t much of an issue. But the other day I didn’t have school so I slept in a bit (until an unbelievably late 8:30am). So, by the time I went for my jog it was 9am and the sun was already blazing. That’s life en Afrique. After an hour and half of jogging and working out outside I realized that I needed to call the Peace Corps main bureau and try and get some business done. Being a Friday (the Muslim holy day) I knew the bureau would close at lunch so I needed to head out right away and bike to the closest place to get cell phone reception, a hill about 7km away.
So I took off again under the ever fiercer sun and proceeded to spend another hour and half or so on top of that hill with no protection whatsoever from all that wonderful UV radiation coming my way. Big mistake.
By the time I got home I began to feel a bit woozy and fatigued. I chalked it up to, well, fatigue. After all I had already jogged for about an hour and biked a total of 14km that day. I figured chugging some water and chilling in my hammock for a bit would cure what ailed me. Unfortunately it was not to be.
As the day wore on my general state of well being got worse and worse. The fatigue gradually turned into full body aches. The mild feeling of wooziness turned into severe aching all over my body, nausea, and an inability to stand up without stumbling around looking like I was drunk. I started to get a splitting headache and a fever which eventually got up to 102 degrees. In short, I had a bad case of sun stroke.
I spent the rest of the day moaning in my hammock just trying not to throw up and wishing the aspirin would do something to make my head stop feeling like it was about to rip in half. Not a fun situation, not to mention the fact that my host family was giving me a nice old dose of “we told you so”. Although, to be fair, they did tell me so, there’s a reason people here spend the entire day hanging out in the shade.
Anyways I spent the rest of that day and a good part of the next morning recovering from the sun stroke and didn’t really feel 100% until two days later. But, every day here brings a new lesson, and I learned mine something fierce that day; when in Rome… Stay out of the goddamn sun!
April 15, 2009
South of the Border
I just got back from a week and a half vacation with some other volunteers in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It was great, after spending 9 months with only the bare minimum for amenities it was nice to be in a place where you can actually find some luxuries. There was electricity, running water, toilets. You could also buy tons of American style food on the street there; hamburgers, hot dogs, fried chicken, chips, root beer. I couldn't believe it, in Conakry I get excited when I find someone selling steamed cassava root (which is actually really good).
Freetown also has a lot of really cool buildings and architecture. A lot of the houses from the British are still there and in some sections of the city you can look around and almost pretend that you're in some kind of trendy part of San Francisco or something. Considering that they're coming off the heels of a civil war I don't really understand how Freetown is so much better off than Conakry, but it was a nice change of pace.
After we spent a few days on the town we headed out to a beach about an hour outside the city for a week or so. The beach was also strikingly different from anywhere I've been in country. There's no real tourism industry in Guinea and as a result there isn't any money going to keeping the beaches clean. So I've yet to see a beach here that I'd want to swim in. Usually the sand is littered with trash and you can be sure that there's at least a couple sewage ditches emptying into the water nearby. But the beach we went to in Sierra Leone was pristine. The sand was white, the water was clear, there was even a lagoon that you could float along in like a lazy river. It was probably the nicest beach I've ever been to and for most of the time it was damn near empty so we had the whole place to ourselves.
Freetown also has a lot of really cool buildings and architecture. A lot of the houses from the British are still there and in some sections of the city you can look around and almost pretend that you're in some kind of trendy part of San Francisco or something. Considering that they're coming off the heels of a civil war I don't really understand how Freetown is so much better off than Conakry, but it was a nice change of pace.
After we spent a few days on the town we headed out to a beach about an hour outside the city for a week or so. The beach was also strikingly different from anywhere I've been in country. There's no real tourism industry in Guinea and as a result there isn't any money going to keeping the beaches clean. So I've yet to see a beach here that I'd want to swim in. Usually the sand is littered with trash and you can be sure that there's at least a couple sewage ditches emptying into the water nearby. But the beach we went to in Sierra Leone was pristine. The sand was white, the water was clear, there was even a lagoon that you could float along in like a lazy river. It was probably the nicest beach I've ever been to and for most of the time it was damn near empty so we had the whole place to ourselves.
To top it all off when we got back to Freetown on Easter Monday to spend the night before we left we found a huge festival going on. Apparently Easter is a really big holiday there and there were tons of people completely packing the streets all night long. People were singing and dancing and dressed up in different traditional costumes. It was a lot like how I imagine Mardi Gras in New Orleans would be. It was a cool slice of local culture and it was an interesting way to finish up the trip.
So yeah, I had a good vacation. It was just what I needed. I like Guinea a lot and I like my life here but it's definitely good to take a break once in a while. Not to mention that it's always interesting to see a new part of the world. Now I'm back off to site feeling refreshed and ready to get back to work. I put up some pictures from the trip so if you want to check them out go to the photos link on the right side of the page.March 20, 2009
God willing
Well hello again. Apologies all around for the sabbatical I’ve taken from updating this thing but I find that as my time away from regular contact with computers increases my ability to spend any prolonged amount of time with them decreases. I’ve had many points in the last few months where I set out towards an internet café with the intention of posting an update here only to be deterred at the last moment by any number of things from the unbearable heat (142 degrees Fahrenheit a few days ago) to my general fear of all things electrical as of late.
The good news for all of you loyal fans out there is that wheels have been set in motion that should eventually end up with me in possession of a small laptop I can use to prewrite e-mails and blog entries. So with any luck I’ll be kicking up the update frequency by quite a bit once that gets here. We’ll see though, nothing’s certain in a place where people habitually add the phrase “god willing” to simple comments like “I’ll be back in five minutes” or “I’m going to the bathroom”.
I’ve been advised recently by a certain gringo friend of mine that the best way to draw people in to the wonderful charade that my life has become is via an anecdote. So in the spirit of illustrating the uncertainty of even seemingly simple things here I present to you all the story of my chicken farm.
I decided recently that I had too much time on my hands and not enough chickens in my stead (the number at the point being zero). So, I figured the optimal two bird with one stone solution would be to build a chicken coop and give raising a few of our fowl friends the old college try. So I talked to my host dad who, knowing full well that he was in for a windfall of shared KFC, immediately took a liking to the project and helped me build a little mud hut for our future guests near our family’s concession.
Now, I feel it’s necessary at this point to explain the general viewpoint towards chickens here. Villages in Guinea are all teeming with chickens and various other birds such as ducks and Guinea fowl. Supposedly they all have owners and everyone can find the ones they own when they want them but I don’t really know how since as far as I can tell no effort is spent here keeping one’s animals detained in any way. In fact most of the fowl in my village don’t even get fed and they just wander all over town all day long looking for spare bits of corn or rice.
As a result of this somewhat haphazard approach to chicken raising almost all of the chickens here are what are called “village chickens” which give only a small amount of somewhat stringy meat but also are very resilient to disease. In other words they’re a good bird to have if your idea of raising a chicken is letting it run around for six months on its own and then one day grabbing it and lopping its head off for dinner. But that’s not what I wanted, I missed chicken wings that don’t look like they belong sitting on the table of a miniature doll house. I wanted real meat! Which brings me to the second kind of chicken one can get in Guinea, the infamous “Tubabu chicken”.
A tubabu chicken is a chicken that has been bred from genetic lines coming from western chicken farms. As a result they are nice and plump and they lay a bunch of eggs but they’re not very hardy at all. In fact they need a bunch of vaccinations and they need to be fed a regular balanced diet or they won’t live to be much bigger than an hor d’oeuvre. Obviously all of that special treatment can get costly which is why tubabu chickens (which is Malinke for “White person chicken”) don’t general end up in the hands of your average Guinean. But I figured, hey I’m a tubabu I might as well live up to my namesake and get me some nice plump meaty chickens to start my farm off right.
So, my next trip into Kankan I decided to buy some of these infamous birds. I walked into the market under the typically blazing hot African sun and began what I hoped would be a quick process of getting to the nearest tubabu chicken stand, buying my tasty new buddies and retreating back to the shade of the volunteer house, god willing. Well as you can probably guess the ordeal turned out to be neither quick nor painless and after four hours of searching high and low chasing down fruitless leads in the hot crowded market I was at the end of the road. The trail had run cold and it seemed that there would be no buffalo wings in my future.
Just as I turned dejectedly to head home and sulk out the rest of the day sipping lukewarm water mixed with rehydration salts one of the vendors in the market who knew the mission I was on came running up to me excitedly pointed to a guy walking by with a big cage full of what must have been thirty or so month old chickens. I had found the mythical beasts, they really did exist and after a bit of haggling I was told they could be mine for 5,000 FG (about $1) each. I agreed to buy six and asked the guy to load up my basket with four hens and two roosters, a ratio that I thought would lead to many delicious little chicken nuggets further down the line.
So my newfound friendly chicken vendor starts pulling out what appears to me to be random birds from what looked like all identical chicks. Worried that I wasn’t going to get the right ratio of males to females I made sure the point was made again that it was important to me that I got exactly four hens and two roosters. He said he understood and although I might not be able to tell the difference he was very adept at distinguishing the two from each other. So he loaded my six new chickens into my basket and we said our goodbyes as I headed off to the vet to vaccinate my new babies, uneasy but (naively) confident that the vendor knew what he was doing.
So I get to the vet and set my chickens down. He gets the vaccines out and we start making small talk as he’s getting the job done. I let him know that I’m planning on breeding these chickens in my village and that I hoped to have a whole farming operation going in the future. He just looked at me and kind of laughed and told me I’d have to think again, because my chickens were “infecund”. Not knowing the definition of infecund but assuming it meant something along the lines of sterile I asked him if he was sure and he nodded his head, no doubt about it.
Well, I was understandably upset as the prospects of my whole farming operation diminished with the realization that all I had were these 6 chickens that for some reason or another had all been rendered sterile. He finished up the vaccines and I paid him and thanked for the help. Just as I was getting ready to leave he said in passing that the smart thing for me to do would be to get some nice village hens when I got back home and breed them with the tubabu chickens I had with me. He said the babies wouldn’t be quite as meaty as a purebred but it would still be a huge improvement over village chicken. When I asked him with a puzzled look how my sterile chicken were going to do any mating at all he just laughed at me. “Your chickens aren’t sterile,” he said “they’re just all males.”
My reaction was definitely a mixed bag, on the one hand I was happy to hear the news that I would be able to have my farm after all, but on the other I was pretty pissed at the guy who sold me the chickens who either knew well and good that they were all roosters or was just lying when he said he knew how to tell the difference. Either way it wasn’t too big of a deal and when I got home I bought myself 5 young village hens to stick in with my gang of roosters.
I guess I didn’t learn my lesson the first time though because now my “hens” are getting old enough to where even I can readily tell the difference between them and roosters. Well, imagine my surprise when lo and behold 3 of the 5 hens started cock-o-doodle-dooing all day long and sprouting those tell tale red crowns that are the unmistakable sign of a rooster.
So now, when originally I wanted a 2 to 1 ratio of hens to roosters, I am the proud owner of a chicken farm consisting of 9 roosters and 2 hens. Although the situation is a bit annoying and it’s not the ideal way to start down the path to a steady diet of chicken and beer at this point I’m just thankful I’ve even got any hens at all.
I’ve talked it over with my dad and he agrees I messed it all up pretty royally but he says not to worry. When the time comes we’ll just ask around in my village and find someone willing to swap me some hens for some roosters and we’ll be able to restore a more reasonable male/female ratio in my endeavor. So soon we’ll be heading off looking to make the third time a charm, god willing of course.
The good news for all of you loyal fans out there is that wheels have been set in motion that should eventually end up with me in possession of a small laptop I can use to prewrite e-mails and blog entries. So with any luck I’ll be kicking up the update frequency by quite a bit once that gets here. We’ll see though, nothing’s certain in a place where people habitually add the phrase “god willing” to simple comments like “I’ll be back in five minutes” or “I’m going to the bathroom”.
I’ve been advised recently by a certain gringo friend of mine that the best way to draw people in to the wonderful charade that my life has become is via an anecdote. So in the spirit of illustrating the uncertainty of even seemingly simple things here I present to you all the story of my chicken farm.
I decided recently that I had too much time on my hands and not enough chickens in my stead (the number at the point being zero). So, I figured the optimal two bird with one stone solution would be to build a chicken coop and give raising a few of our fowl friends the old college try. So I talked to my host dad who, knowing full well that he was in for a windfall of shared KFC, immediately took a liking to the project and helped me build a little mud hut for our future guests near our family’s concession.
Now, I feel it’s necessary at this point to explain the general viewpoint towards chickens here. Villages in Guinea are all teeming with chickens and various other birds such as ducks and Guinea fowl. Supposedly they all have owners and everyone can find the ones they own when they want them but I don’t really know how since as far as I can tell no effort is spent here keeping one’s animals detained in any way. In fact most of the fowl in my village don’t even get fed and they just wander all over town all day long looking for spare bits of corn or rice.
As a result of this somewhat haphazard approach to chicken raising almost all of the chickens here are what are called “village chickens” which give only a small amount of somewhat stringy meat but also are very resilient to disease. In other words they’re a good bird to have if your idea of raising a chicken is letting it run around for six months on its own and then one day grabbing it and lopping its head off for dinner. But that’s not what I wanted, I missed chicken wings that don’t look like they belong sitting on the table of a miniature doll house. I wanted real meat! Which brings me to the second kind of chicken one can get in Guinea, the infamous “Tubabu chicken”.
A tubabu chicken is a chicken that has been bred from genetic lines coming from western chicken farms. As a result they are nice and plump and they lay a bunch of eggs but they’re not very hardy at all. In fact they need a bunch of vaccinations and they need to be fed a regular balanced diet or they won’t live to be much bigger than an hor d’oeuvre. Obviously all of that special treatment can get costly which is why tubabu chickens (which is Malinke for “White person chicken”) don’t general end up in the hands of your average Guinean. But I figured, hey I’m a tubabu I might as well live up to my namesake and get me some nice plump meaty chickens to start my farm off right.
So, my next trip into Kankan I decided to buy some of these infamous birds. I walked into the market under the typically blazing hot African sun and began what I hoped would be a quick process of getting to the nearest tubabu chicken stand, buying my tasty new buddies and retreating back to the shade of the volunteer house, god willing. Well as you can probably guess the ordeal turned out to be neither quick nor painless and after four hours of searching high and low chasing down fruitless leads in the hot crowded market I was at the end of the road. The trail had run cold and it seemed that there would be no buffalo wings in my future.
Just as I turned dejectedly to head home and sulk out the rest of the day sipping lukewarm water mixed with rehydration salts one of the vendors in the market who knew the mission I was on came running up to me excitedly pointed to a guy walking by with a big cage full of what must have been thirty or so month old chickens. I had found the mythical beasts, they really did exist and after a bit of haggling I was told they could be mine for 5,000 FG (about $1) each. I agreed to buy six and asked the guy to load up my basket with four hens and two roosters, a ratio that I thought would lead to many delicious little chicken nuggets further down the line.
So my newfound friendly chicken vendor starts pulling out what appears to me to be random birds from what looked like all identical chicks. Worried that I wasn’t going to get the right ratio of males to females I made sure the point was made again that it was important to me that I got exactly four hens and two roosters. He said he understood and although I might not be able to tell the difference he was very adept at distinguishing the two from each other. So he loaded my six new chickens into my basket and we said our goodbyes as I headed off to the vet to vaccinate my new babies, uneasy but (naively) confident that the vendor knew what he was doing.
So I get to the vet and set my chickens down. He gets the vaccines out and we start making small talk as he’s getting the job done. I let him know that I’m planning on breeding these chickens in my village and that I hoped to have a whole farming operation going in the future. He just looked at me and kind of laughed and told me I’d have to think again, because my chickens were “infecund”. Not knowing the definition of infecund but assuming it meant something along the lines of sterile I asked him if he was sure and he nodded his head, no doubt about it.
Well, I was understandably upset as the prospects of my whole farming operation diminished with the realization that all I had were these 6 chickens that for some reason or another had all been rendered sterile. He finished up the vaccines and I paid him and thanked for the help. Just as I was getting ready to leave he said in passing that the smart thing for me to do would be to get some nice village hens when I got back home and breed them with the tubabu chickens I had with me. He said the babies wouldn’t be quite as meaty as a purebred but it would still be a huge improvement over village chicken. When I asked him with a puzzled look how my sterile chicken were going to do any mating at all he just laughed at me. “Your chickens aren’t sterile,” he said “they’re just all males.”
My reaction was definitely a mixed bag, on the one hand I was happy to hear the news that I would be able to have my farm after all, but on the other I was pretty pissed at the guy who sold me the chickens who either knew well and good that they were all roosters or was just lying when he said he knew how to tell the difference. Either way it wasn’t too big of a deal and when I got home I bought myself 5 young village hens to stick in with my gang of roosters.
I guess I didn’t learn my lesson the first time though because now my “hens” are getting old enough to where even I can readily tell the difference between them and roosters. Well, imagine my surprise when lo and behold 3 of the 5 hens started cock-o-doodle-dooing all day long and sprouting those tell tale red crowns that are the unmistakable sign of a rooster.
So now, when originally I wanted a 2 to 1 ratio of hens to roosters, I am the proud owner of a chicken farm consisting of 9 roosters and 2 hens. Although the situation is a bit annoying and it’s not the ideal way to start down the path to a steady diet of chicken and beer at this point I’m just thankful I’ve even got any hens at all.
I’ve talked it over with my dad and he agrees I messed it all up pretty royally but he says not to worry. When the time comes we’ll just ask around in my village and find someone willing to swap me some hens for some roosters and we’ll be able to restore a more reasonable male/female ratio in my endeavor. So soon we’ll be heading off looking to make the third time a charm, god willing of course.
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