Excuses, Excuses

I have so much to write about that I'm going to separate it all...

First story -

We now have cell coverage in Timbi, which is amazing. (My number is 60-75-12-50. Go buy an international phone card and call me sometime.) But, Africans with cell phones are rude. Remember when there was all the drama at the schools in the US about phones? Well, that's what it's like here. People have to take all these "important calls" and have no respect for the school day. Umm, how the hell were they making do the last 2,000 years until 3 weeks ago? I refuse to believe that these calls are that important. Certainly not more important than Mrs. Daum's English class.

So my official punishment for forgetting to turn off a phone in my class is confiscating it for a day. Second offense is a week. This week I collected 4 phones in 2 classes. I threatened to use them to call my mom and dad so I could use up all their credit, which the kids thought was hilarious. Anyway, after class this one kid comes up to me. He's a good student and he gives me this song and dance about his sick grandmother and how I can have the phone any other day but Tuesday night and whatever. So we go to the Surveillant (the discipline guy at school) and the kid tells the story. I accept his apology and we make a deal that he will give me his phone on Monday for 2 days and I give him back his phone.

At this point the Surveillant tells me about how much respect he has for me and how annoying it is that none of the other teachers have rules about cell phones (because if they had rules for the kids they would have to turn off their own phones...) So I was feeling pretty good. He thanked me for always being on time and being a good role model, etc. Pretty heartwarming stuff.

I say goodbye and am leaving school when another kid comes up to me. Here's a (shortened and translated to English) transcript of our conversation:

Kid: Mrs, Please accept my apology and give me my phone back. I really need it.

Me: What you really need is to learn English and to not disrespect me in the classroom. You can have the phone tomorrow.

K: You don't understand, I live with a blind man and he was calling me to have me come help him leave the house.

M: Okay, if you really want the phone, you can bring this "blind man" (in my head I was thinking, yeah, right you little liar) to my house and if you ask my forgiveness in front of him you can have it back.

K: He doesn't walk very well, but can I have the phone anyway?

M: Okay, (thinking I'm going to catch him in this stupid, crazy lie) how about I go to your house and meet this "blind man who doesn't walk well" and then you can ask my forgiveness and get the phone?

K: I guess so.

So we go to his house, which isn't too far from mine. His room is outside the house and he drops his books off. Then we go inside the house and I'll be damned!!!! There was a blind man who could barely walk laying down on the couch!!!!! And the kid did say he was sorry and the man apologized and said that he wouldn't call during class. We made an agreement that the student would keep his phone on silent and that he would warn me at the beginning of class if he thought he might need to take a call.

I felt like such a jerk!! Luckily Guineans don't understand sarcasm, so he didn't realize that I thought he was a little liar. The moral of this story is that Guinea is not America and that the people here are desperate and sick people have no government or private support system and are forced to make do with help within families, so I need to understand that there can be actual emergencies here and I might need to accommodate certain situations.

It was really funny, though. Can you imagine a kid in the US using that story? It would most certainly be a lie!! But not here...

Back in Timbi

I got back to Timbi on Sunday and stayed until today, when I biked in to Labe to pick up some flip chart paper and markers for my compositions next week.

It's good to be back. I had to have a war with the mice that got bold and invaded my house while I was on vacation! Stupid mice - I found a ton of mouse crap under my night table and then there was one running around my bathroom at 11pm. I freaked out. Seriously, freaked out. I know that it's Peace Corps and I'm supposed to be hard core, but I'm just not. It ran under my bathtub, so I blocked it in with a 20 liter water jug and some cardboard. I was actually shaking. Then I took all my stuff out of the bathroom and shut and locked the door, putting duct tape in the space between the door and the floor. The next day I went to town and got steel wool pads and completely took care of all the spaces in my house. They haven't been back and I've been using my other bathroom. I'm a huge baby. Huge. It will probably die under my bathtub and stink up my house, but that's a chance I'm willing to take.

School is going well, I taught comparisons in class this week and found out that I am one of the fatter people in class...Guineans are so skinny! But my students did tell me I was "more attractive" than another student, which I appreciated. I brought a gift back for my vice-principal and he loved it, it was a $5 statue of the Sphinx. My principal is back too, so I'm interested to see how that changes the dynamic at school. He'd had surgery over the summer and had been living in a nearby town while he recuperated. Even though school starts at 8am I am one of the only people there at that hour. We don't really start class until 8:30. I would love to change that but have had no luck so far. Hopefully the semi-scary principal will regulate. In the meantime I'll continue to show up on time in the hopes that my good example will rub off. It's not likely, but it makes me feel better about myself.

Next week compositions start, they are like end of semester exams. No one seems concerned that there have only been 9 weeks of classes. That means that I have nothing to do next week and no tests until a week from Monday! It will be nice to hang out in my house and to lesson plan more than a week in advance. I have my two classes of Terminale at the same time, which means that I can't be at both exams, which means that the kids who don't have me will cheat up a storm if I don't do something to stop it, so I'm thinking of writing 3 separate exams and paying to have them photocopied here in Labe. I think that if I hand them out and put the kids who are friends far from each other and put all the smart kids together and the idiots together I might be able to prevent most of the cheating. Ugh - so much work!!

I have some really great news from Timbi - there's cell reception! I have to switch phone numbers and use a different provider, but you can reach me anytime!! It's 5 bars of service, which is practically unheard of. It was definitely the most exciting news of my return. Unfortunately, I can't find out my number because the call won't go through and they don't tell you your number when you buy the SIM card. Oh, and there's power in my neighborhood again! But not at my house. It's so bittersweet - I'm glad it's back and everything but it's a little sad to be sitting in my house with my candles when my neighbors have electricity! I found out that there's an outstanding debt of about $40 from before, so I paid it today and am assured that I'll be repaid by the owners of the house. While I have my doubts about that, my host dad (who pays my rent) promised that he would take the money out of the rent to repay me if it didn't happen sooner). My rent is $12 a month. Yes, you read that right. And my neighbors have been bitching up a storm to all the officials in my town about how I came here to teach and I should have power, so that's been really cute of them. I brought a jewelry case back from Egypt for my favorite neighbor and she now loves me even more than before. The other day I went to say hi and she was in the process of showing it off to her friends. It made me happy that she liked it so much and it also makes me happy to know that she'll always look out for me and my house, even when I'm on vacation.

Camilo and I talked to our boss about 3rd year options and we are hopeful that it will all work out. We think our first choice is to work for an NGO in Labe, where it's colder and there are lots of NGOs to choose from, but we'll have to see how it all pans out. Worst case scenario is that we finish our service in September and meet my mom and aunt in Morocco before applying to grad school.

It's dinnertime, so I'll update again next week. Miss you all!

Strike called off/postponed until April

Camilo and I arrived in Conakry at 4am to some good news - the strikes have been called off and the unions will revisit the issues at the end of March to determine if they want to announce another strike. So I'm heading back to Timbi Madina either tomorrow or Sunday and will start teaching again Monday.

Here's a BBC article about the situation here...and yes, the upcoming soccer tournament really was one of the reasons referenced for the postponement...

Guinea general strike called off

By Will Ross BBC West Africa correspondent

After days of negotiations, trade unions in Guinea have called off a nationwide strike planned for Thursday. There were fears the strike could have led to a renewal of violence which left close to 200 people dead last year. The unions last week accused Guinean President Lansana Conte of breaking the power-sharing agreement which ended last year's violence. They have now agreed to work with the government to ensure the deal holds, leading to a sense of relief.

It is a hand-to-mouth existence for many who simply could not have afforded to strike. "We have decided to suspend the strike, taking into account the situation which currently prevails," union negotiator Boubacar Biro Barry told reporters. "The government has made a commitment and we have no reason to doubt it, and religious leaders will be in charge of monitoring the implementation of the agreement," he said.

The trade unions said the decision was made in the interests of peace and even mentioned the forthcoming African Cup of Nations football tournament as one of the factors influencing the decision. In addition to the personal economic impact, the planned strike was also not popular with many Guineans because of the fear of repeat of the chaotic scenes witnessed one year ago.
At the time the government was barely functioning and the trade unions tried to force the ailing Mr Conte from power. The move was hugely popular, so the unions brought the whole country to a standstill. But protests soon became violent and when the president turned to the military, close to 200 people were killed. Despite his poor health, President Conte clung on but agreed to hand over some of his power to a consensus prime minister, Lansana Kouyate. But in recent months loyalists to Mr Conte, who found themselves sidelined from power and resources, have done their best to derail the peace agreement. When the president last week sacked Communications Minister Justin Morel Junior, considered by many to be performing well, this prompted the unions to once again raise the red flag.

IMF help

Prior to Mr Kouyate's appointment, to say governance in Guinea was chaotic would be an understatement. It was not uncommon for a cabinet reshuffle to be announced on state television and then cancelled the following evening. Guinea was rudderless and corruption grew ever more rampant while the population grew ever more desperate. What is worrying for Guineans is the return of these signs of trouble at the top. The country is rich in resources, including bauxite needed to produce aluminium, and institutions like the International Monetary Fund have been trying to help Guinea back on its feet.

However, after years of misrule, that is a huge task.

NY Times Article about Peace Corps

January 9, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

Too Many Innocents Abroad

By ROBERT L. STRAUSS

Antananarivo, Madagascar

THE Peace Corps recently began a laudable initiative to increase the number of volunteers who are 50 and older. As the Peace Corps’ country director in Cameroon from 2002 until last February, I observed how many older volunteers brought something to their service that most young volunteers could not: extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger volunteers.

However, even if the Peace Corps reaches its goal of having 15 percent of its volunteers over 50, the overwhelming majority will remain recently minted college graduates. And too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.

This wasn’t the case in 1961 when the Peace Corps sent its first volunteers overseas. Back then, enthusiastic young Americans offered something that many newly independent nations counted in double and even single digits: college graduates. But today, those same nations have millions of well-educated citizens of their own desperately in need of work. So it’s much less clear what inexperienced Americans have to offer.

The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.

The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.

In Cameroon, we had many volunteers sent to serve in the agriculture program whose only experience was puttering around in their mom and dad’s backyard during high school. I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma’s cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I’m pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.

For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth.

Every few years, the agency polls its volunteers, but in my experience it does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying themselves, it doesn’t matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries. Any well-run organization must know what its customers want and then deliver the goods, but this is something the Peace Corps has never learned.

This lack of organizational introspection allows the agency to continue sending, for example, unqualified volunteers to teach English when nearly every developing country could easily find high-caliber English teachers among its own population. Even after Cameroonian teachers and education officials ranked English instruction as their lowest priority (after help with computer literacy, math and science, for example), headquarters in Washington continued to send trainees with little or no classroom experience to teach English in Cameroonian schools. One volunteer told me that the only possible reason he could think of for having been selected was that he was a native English speaker.

The Peace Corps was born during the glory days of the early Kennedy administration. Since then, its leaders and many of the more than 190,000 volunteers who have served have mythologized the agency into something that can never be questioned or improved. The result is an organization that finds itself less and less able to provide what the people of developing countries need — at a time when the United States has never had a greater need for their good will.

Robert L. Strauss has been a Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter and country director. He now heads a management consulting company.

Still heading back as planned

Cam and I just got word from Peace Corps that we should head back as planned and they'll get us at the airport. We'll just have to stay in Conakry until the strikes are over - I have a feeling we will be watching Hairspray and Ratatouille on a loop since those are our only new movies!! I'm sure that lots of you faithful blog readers were planning on sending care packages, but please don't. Last year I missed out on quite a few due to the strikes since the mail system shut down. And I really have so much food and so many goodies that it's embarrassing. I'll let you all know if I ever run out and want anything!!

Camilo and I are going to load most of our pictures once we are back in Conakry. Today we are headed to take a felucca boat ride down the Nile and then to the Sphinx-narrated sound and light show at the Pyramids. Isn't that fantastically touristy??

Good news and Bad news

The good news is that the trip is going fabulously - we went to the Pyramids yesterday and it was just as cool as one would hope.  Now we are checked into the Marriott in Cairo, where the breakfast buffet includes sushi.  It would not be an overstatement to say that I want to marry this hotel.  We are going to see belly dancing and do some more sightseeing for the next couple days until our flight back to Conakry, which brings me to the bad news...

There was some violence in Conakry the last couple days because of a minister who got sacked.  The union leaders have called for general strikes starting the 10th...Cam and I are scheduled to arrive at 3am on the 11th.  So we aren't really sure what's going on and are currently waiting to hear what Peace Corps wants us to do.  I sincerely hope that the strikes will not be like last year's and will be less violent, but we'll have to see what happens.  Grr.

Anyway, Pyramids are amazing and life is good.  I'll keep you posted!