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...