From Conakry to Casa to Cairo

Cam and I are on Day 3 of the Egypt trip. So far we have done a lot of eating and shopping with not a whole lot of culture thrown in. That will change tomorrow when we leave for Luxor and begin our Nile cruise. Ana and Felipe arrived really late last night so we rescheduled our Pyramids tour that was supposed to leave this morning at 7am. Which would have been horrible!

We had a funny thing happen our first night here - we met a girl from PC Niger who knows 3 of our friends who transferred. She was headed to Jordan for a friend's wedding but the flight from Niger got pushed back a day so she was homeless in Cairo for 30 hours. We brought her back to the hotel with us and went to the mall, which was a delicious culture shock for all of us. I ate Quizno's. Unfortunately there is no bacon in this Muslim country, but beef bacon isn't so bad!

Yesterday Cam and I went wandering around downtown Cairo (actually, there is no real downtown since the city is so huge - 20 million people!) We had a nice time and just walked and looked at the buildings and all the people and everything. I took a picture at a Harley Davidson shop to email my dad. We ate Korean food. Life is good.

Okay, we are off to dinner now. I'll update again when the cruise is over! Happy New Year!

Break it down, Christmas style

Good times, good times.

Bonding with the new stagieres

It looks like we are having fun, right? Not exactly Christmas-y, but you do what you can to make the holidays festive around here.

Merry Christmas!

This was taken after a few baggies of whisky and fake pineapple juice...

My Lovely House

Cam has posted pictures of my house on his flickr account.

www.flickr.com/camilo11

Much nicer than my apartments in NYC and North Carolina. Too bad about the lack of running water, electricity, dishwasher, fridge, etc.

And the birthday paella is glowing because I put birthday candles in it!

Going to Forecariah for the weekend

I got a phone call from my boss Mohamed a couple days ago asking me if I could come down to Conakry a couple days early to go to Forecariah and encourage the new people. Could I? Clearly the answer was yes. So I'm headed out in a couple minutes and will be back Christmas Eve.

Tabaski was a lot of fun, I wore my complet and ate a lot of rice and sauce (special fete rice and sauce, which is much better than your daily stuff). And my family here (El Hadj Bah and all his wives and kids) had a special visitor - his son-in-law from Columbia, Maryland! He met El Hadj's daughter in the US and they got married a couple years ago. He hadn't been back to Guinea in over 20 years because his dad died and his mom moved the Cote d'Ivoire! He went to France to study and then made his way to the US (he says it was much easier then). So it was fun to talk to him and hear how life has and has not changed here in la Guinee.

Yesterday morning was a brutal travel day. I woke up at 5:30 so I could be at the taxi park by 6:30, a 3km walk with a really heavy bag. Then I waited until 9:30 for the car to fill up, which was only taking me as far as Labe. We made the 45 minute trip in almost 2 hours because the car kept overheating and we would have to stop and cool it down. Then I waited 2 hours for a car to Conakry, which meant that I left Labe at 1:30pm and didn't arrive at the office here until almost 10pm. It was a bitch, let me tell you. But the men in my car were really nice and the chauffeur took me all the way to the PC office so I wouldn't have to try and find a taxi by myself so late at night. What nice guys.

I gave a test to my students last week and it was very interesting. Some of it was good, some was bad. I'll write more about testing in Guinea when I get back from Forecariah. I hope everyone is looking forward to Christmas! I had Christmas dinner with the adorable missionaries on Wednesday night (complete with pumpkin pie, yum!) and taught my kids Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Jingle Bells in class on Wednesday, so I'm officially in the Christmas spirit. All I need is a little bit of snow...

My neighbors

The woman on the left is Adama and the one on the right is her mother, Marley (Marly??) Adama had been in Conakry with her husband and just returned a couple days ago, but Marley and I are buddies. She is always giving me little presents and helping me out - she's the one who found me a kid to get my water, since it was the bane of my existence before. I ate some delicious rice and chicken at their house on Tabaski. Yum!

Tabaski

Here are my neighbor and I with another neighbor's baby. She's 27 and unmarried, which is very old by Guinean standards. She asked me to send this picture to America to see if anyone wanted to marry her, so just let me know! I've tried repeatedly to explain the concept of dating and choosing a spouse after going out for awhile in America, but no one seems to understand.

The kids in my old compound

They were so proud of their new Tabaski outfits! The one on the left looks like a bug. They are so funny, I still go there to say hi and to stand on the porch to make phone calls and they will take my bag and wear my sunglasses and imitate me. What a riot.

Hidden Bathroom

So there was a room in my house that was locked, just off my bedroom. I decided to try all my keys on it to see what it was and, lo and behold, I found a bathroom! They had told me the room was unfinished and that's why I couldn't open the door. Clearly not the case. It was, however, completely dirty and disgusting. But no longer! Now it's a lovely bathroom. Yay! Still no running water, but that's just par for the course here in Guinea.

In Labe for the weekend

The new volunteers are here! And Christmas is coming! So many good things are happening.

I solved a problem the other day. My Censeur (asst. principal?) has been wanting me to teach his middle school daughter English. I don't want to, but couldn't come out and say no. You can't really say no in Guinea, unless it's to a sketchy dude inviting themselves over. So I've been telling him that we'd discuss it "next week" since my arrival. Which in Guinea means "no," but for some reason he wasn't letting it go. So I finally got the ball out of my court - I gave him my schedule for the week (including the Health Club I'm restarting twice a week) and told him to find a 3 hour block so that I could teach her 1.5 hours and then he can teach me French the other half of the time. He's a French teacher. But it was totally the right thing to do because he hasn't said a word since. His daughter couldn't care less about learning English, so asking him to make a sacrifice too totally got him off my back. And if I end up doing it I'll also get better in French and I can just suck up having to teach her!

Omg - I got hate crimed! It would have been terrible if it wasn't so funny. Some kids wrote on the wall that surrounds my house, in chalk, "Fock les blanchs." Obviously fock is not what they meant! The only thing that Guinea imports from America is rap. Grrr. But the idiots can't even spell in French, because it should have been "les blancs" or "les blanches." The school system here is dodgy at best. I told my neighbor, Marly, and she was so pissed! The next morning I was asleep at 7:45 when everyone was walking to school and I heard her screaming at all these kids, she's convinced it was some stupid middle schoolers. We erased it before I got a picture, but if it happens again I'll get my camera out...me, hate crimed. Wtf??

Yesterday I rode my bike the 35km from Timbi to Labe. I was moving slowly so as not to kill myself and it took almost 2.5 hours. I went straight to the bank since I was down to my last 2,000 francs. Which is less than 50 cents. Not a good situation. I even have a 1,000 debt from buying bread at a boutique! Camilo is arriving today along with a married couple who are in Dalaba and just got back from the US - they had some dental things to take care of before they could be cleared. It will be fun to hang out - there will be 5 of us, which is virtually a party now that we are so few!

School is going exceptionally well. I've been really enjoying my Terminale classes - they are so eager to learn and so many kids have been showing up for review sessions. They are even getting more creative with their sentences, which may not sound like a big deal to you, but here in Guinea you learn by rote memorization and are not encouraged to think creatively. The fact that they say "I went to the US" or "I went to the river to swim" instead of "I went to the market." actually means a lot! Something that's a little frustrating is that the PC will measure my success on how many students I teach, PC Washington loves numbers. So even though I think I'm doing such a better job this time around I have about 70 total students as opposed to my 350 in Mamou, so according to their standards I'm not making as big of a difference. There are so many frustrations in development bureaucracy, I just have to do the best I can and try and let the other stuff go.

Also, many of you have emailed me about care packages. You are all amazing and so nice to think of me, but please don't worry about me, I have lots of treats here and am really happy. So if you are poor, treat yourself to a nice dinner or a new shirt or something instead of spending so much on shipping! And if you send me something anyway, know that I will truly appreciate it. Bill's mom took me to Sam's Club when I was in the US and I still think of her and smile everytime I eat a fruit snack packet or make mac and cheese!

That's all for now. Hope everyone is getting ready for Christmas and enjoying the season!