Back to School

December 18, 2013

(I apologize for the delay, but I have not had internet access since leaving Conakry on December 6.  Thus, this post includes several different topics of my life in Guinea.)

Back to School

My French teacher Charlotte

Life for a Peace Corps Trainee (PCT) is very well structured, no matter what country you might be posted.  Language classes, technical training, cultural education, safety and public health trainings, take up most of our weekdays. In order to keep everyone engaged and attentive, Peace Corps has learned to make these educational classes fun and interactive.  We do this through a lot of role-playing and group participation exercises.  By the end of the day, many of us are pretty well fatigued and ready to go home, though some PCTs are still interested in spending a night on the town. (Most PCTs are young college graduates… and they do what you would expect them to do… )

Thus, you have the beauty of the home stay.  Living with a host family who takes care of (most) of your basic living needs, along with a “petit” living allowance by the Peace Corps, relieves most of the stress of living in a foreign land.  We are given a private room, and are treated as an honored guest of the family.  (More on this later.)  Only when Peace Corps staff is confident that we can survive on our own… in a remote village… where English is not spoken at all... will they clear us to start the development work we came here to do.  The time frame for this to happen is 10 short weeks. 

I have been in Dubreka for two weeks, and am slowly getting used to the way of life here.  I am now comfortable with shopping at the local market on my own without holding the hand of a PCV who’s been here a year.   Everyone right now is anxiously awaiting his or her site assignments, which takes place on December 24.  Once we know where in Guinea we will be living for the next two years, we can start learning the local language.  As most of our communication will be in this local language while at our site, this will become a focal point for learning following Christmas festivities.

December 22, 2013

Small packages

It can be a bit confusing at first… seeing a single clove of garlic for sale at the local street market.  If I were back in the United States, I would think, “Who would do such a thing?”  But in Guinea, life is different.  Many, if not most things here come in small packages. I suppose that the street vendors buy in “bulk”, and then repackage their products in small plastic bags for resale.  Part of the reason is that things don’t last long without a temperature approaching refrigeration. A five pound sack of potatoes wouldn’t last 2 weeks before starting to rot in the 100 degree heat.  The other reason is that people are really, really poor here, and most can only afford to buy food for the current day, and at most for the current week.  Even if they could afford to purchase food supplies in “bulk” quantities, it would probably be eaten by a variety of pests.  So it can be a small challenge to find a “normal” size of anything here, especially for a “rich American” who wants to introduce his host family to the deliciousness of banana bread.