Affectation!

I'm back. I shall start with some physcial stats. For those of you who thought that I did not have any weight to lose, you were, well correct, but I went ahead and lost some anyway. I have dropped 15 lbs in the last 2 months to my true fighting weight of 169 lbs...they should come up with a new wight loss plan to put on the front of cosmo......"20 pounds in 2 weeks! Come to Guinea" Or they could just call it "completely stop eating anything but rice" I have heat rash covering most of the areas of my body covered by clothes and some that aren't. My feet, previously pretty darn gross, have reached new levels of disgustingness, and my hair cuts have left something to be desired. Ladies look out...I'm pretty damn irresistable. However, this scrawny poorly groomed rash covered white dude is doing pretty well. Over the last two months I have been in training in a town called Forecariah in lower Guinea "Bas Cote". There we lived with host families, and went to school 8-5 for language, technical, and cross culture sessions. Summing it up here would be difficult...but in general it was a great experience. Living with my host family was truly amazing. Today I said goodbye to my family at our departure ceramony and I was genuinley sad...they truly made me a part of their family. Yesterday my mother, through my brother's translation, gave me a beautiful speech about how she will always think of me as her son, and how she admires my character, and is sure I will succeed at my site. This was very powerful for me just because the language barrier prevents us from ever exchanging more than salutations in a lanugauge I don't understand. They were truly a great family.



Part of training was going through three weeks of "practice school"....the PC pays for Guinean sumer school and it doubles as our practice school. So for three weeks we planned and taught lessons to classes that ranged from 20-40 students (nothing like the 80-150 we will have at site). This was tiring and labor intensive, but extrememly enlightning. I'm great in front of the students and control the class very well, but am a complete organizational disaster and don't know a thing about english grammar. All my freinds, family, and previous teachers probally could have told me all this without coming to Africa. But..alas, thats the point of the practice school I suppose. It was confidence building and shaming in equal measure and I feel much more prepared to start teaching.

Ok this entry is boring, and Guinea is not boring. Let me see if I can go better. Lets talk about Ramadan, or as my non-eating masicistic but loving and nurturing guinean family would call it...le mois de Carame. The rules are as follows; you can only eat, drink, or swallow your spit when the sun is completely down. So, if you are a good muslim, you wake up at 415 in order to shovel down a huge bowl of rice and fish sauce, and then you daydream the day away and pretend your not hungry enough to jump a four year old for the bread their brining back to their mother. When the sun goes down-- 715ish-- you drink some tea, eat some rice, go to mosque, come back and eat some more rice, and then chill outside on mats looking at stars, salueing neighbors, and generally loving the fact that you dont feel like your stomach is eating itself.

So you may be curious how I participated in this wonderful month. Here's how it went down. One volunteer (Joe) thought about fasting/maybe told his family he was thinking about fasting/had a dream about it...i don't even know. Then, his host family, told another host family that Joe hadn't eaten for like three days and he was pretty much the best Muslim ever. Than that host family told their own volunteer that Joe hadn't eaten for weeks and that they should be a good Muslim like Joe. So the web of lies spread and spread and spread with the host famlies loving every second of it until almost all the volunteers had given fasting the old college try.

Its freaking hard. Going without food is rough, but going without any liquid all day is the killer. As for swallowing your own spit...i'm not convinced anyone follows that one. I fasted every friday as a gesture of solidarity and dreaded it every thursday evening. One time I went to mosque at 5 in the morning with the fam after destroying a bowl of rice and sauce and everytime I bent down to pray I was sure I was going to vomit on every person within a six foot radius. Only by trying to come up with a speech in french about how sorry I was that I vomited all over prayer service was I able to take my mind of my nausea and avoid vomiting.

Overall, I am becoming more and more comfortable with Guineans. It is so easy to get Guineans to like and respect you. You do not have to be smart, ultra capable, good looking, or have any other attribute that is somewhat beyond your control....all you have to do is be open and freindly and saluer everyone you meet. Ask about their days, their familes, their children, their jobs, it doesn't matter. You an have the same convo with the same person 5 or 6 times a day and that's completely ok. As many of you know....this is a skill I happen to have in spades. I swear I saluer my freind Luke's dad like 10 times a day, with almost the same conversation, and he thinks Mamadi Diobate is the sweetest cat around.

At first, you get frustrated because its hard to ignore the negative consequences of placing so much cultural emphasis on friendliness and hospitality; you can take bribes, mistreat your wife/daughter etc, or engage in all sorts of corruption, but still be treated with much respect if your hospitable and a grade-A Saluerer. One could make similar crituqes of some American values. We value intelligence, specific skills, physcial prowess, ambition etc... and people that do not count these amoung their primary assets are hamstrung from the getgo. While this set of values certainly pushes our society forward in many ways, it also ensures that many peolpe will never have a chance to participate in American sucess. Guinean social values certainly do not promote efficiency, but they do give the vast majority of people a chance to be respected by their peers.

These are of course gross simplifications...and I am merely using them to demostrate that the characteristics a cluture values (are you born with them or do you develop them, can everyone have them or only a few, do they promote social happiness, efficiency, both, something else?) seriously affect a socities trajectory and how people achieve happiness and success. Tons of other social forces interact with this simplistic model and make it almost useless, but I hope it is somewhat helpful to see how Guinean values, though an athema to American emphais on efficiency, achieving objectives, and being the Smartest, fastest, strongest, etc....might be liberating in some ways for some people.

Tomorrow we affecte! Swear in! I don't actually know how to translate that word...but regardless were going to the U.S. embassy to take our oath, chill in the AC, rock our African clothes, and rub shoulders with some of the Guinean Ministers. I will be giving a speech at the ceramony in French and I'm a little worried, but I think it will be fine. I'm more worried about forgetting to thank the huge list of invitees in the right order and causing a scandal (thanking people from the top rank down is a huge deal....you can't mess it up) . Afterward we have an american style bbq at the Peace Corps directors house to celebrate, and then on Sunday or Monday were off to our sites! Today I went to the bank in the Capital, Conakry, and withdres my move-in allowance and my living allowance for the first three months. I took out 4,000,000 Guinean Francs in 5 thou notes! It was like a movie...huge bricks of bills that I and everyone else stuffed in duffel bags. To give you some reference pts for how far money goes here...a 50k sack of rice that will feed a family of 6 for a hair less than a month goes for 55 american dollars or about 225 gf depending on the daily exchange. A loaf of bread is 1.5 thousand G.F. An egg is 800. A beer or an hr at the internetcafe is 5000. A nice dinner at a resturaunt in Conakry would run you 120,000 gf. Food in W. Africa and all over Asia is absurdly expensive right now and seriously hurts families.....the government doesn't subsadize rice costs they just forbid selling it above a certain price....i'll let my economist freinds figure out how that will work out. Anyway. the point of this story was that I have a duffel full of cash and I'm looking for a party.

Ugh, I'm finding it frustrating to write this because I get the internet so seldom that there is too much to cover in the 45 minutes i'm allotted before i have to give up the computer. I have recieved wonderful letters and care packages from a wide range of family and freinds and each one has made me extemely happy. I have been able to sneek a few letters home with freinds that were going back to the states, and more are on their way more and more of the older volunteers leave for the U.S. But, I want to thank each and everyone of you for your calls and letters...they're perfect. Oh, for those of you who are on skype...bien fait. Everyone should get on! Its dirt cheap and absurdly easy to set up! My phone number is one of these posts.

Much love to everyone. I hope to speak with you soon!

Much love to everyone. For those