The Great Fruit Exchange

The season of oranges arrived in December and I have been eating oranges non-stop since, averaging about 8 oranges a day (this is not an exaggeration). By the end of most days my tongue is sore from the massive amounts of citric acid (is it a bad thing to eat too much citric acid?), though with all the vitamin C I’m sure not to get scurvy (not to be confused with scabies, which I’m sure I will get again sometime). The way people eat oranges here is by peeling them and then cutting off a piece at the top and sucking out all the juice, it’s a juice box, really. The ground is littered with the “shells” of oranges – left for the goats to eat, or better yet, used as ammunition to throw at your little brothers like snowballs (we got in a orange/snowball fight in our front yard once and it was awesome).

Fruit is also a great gift. When I was in Yorokoguea at the end of December, the woman whose house I was staying in gave me a parting gift of grapefruit. 12, in fact. I was gracious, and I do love grapefruit, but 12 is a bit much, really. This was in addition to 5 oranges that someone else picked for me. When I had arrived home I thought that I could give some grapefruits to my family and neighbors in an effort to diminish the vast quantity of fruit in my possession. How wrong was I! When I offered 1 grapefruit to my neighbor Saibatou she was so thankful that she ran into her kitchen and came out with 10 oranges for me…It seems like everywhere I go I somehow manage to pick up fruit – other teachers give me oranges, students give me oranges, random ladies give me grapefruits, my friends give me bananas…

Soon the mango season will be here. The mango trees are already flowering (very beautiful). I call the area my house is in Mangeboui, which means under the mango tree, because in fact there are 9 mango trees in our front yard. It’s a good thing I love mangoes because I will probably be eating an average of 8 a day…

Invitation

One of the most beautiful things about Guinean culture is the way people share food. 95% of meals consist of people sharing a common (giant) bowl of rice. It is polite (and necessary, really) to invite anyone in the near vicinity to come and share the rice with you. And when I say “near,” I use that term loosely, because you could be walking at one end of a soccer field and someone eating rice at their house at the other end might yell at you, Invitation!! Usually I say Ali Baraka, meaning something like “thanks to God I already ate.” However, sometimes I take people up on the offer and share a few bites of rice with them. This of course works the other way around too. I am obliged to invite everyone to share whatever I’m eating. At school I usually buy, for a cost of 1000 Guinean Francs  (15c), a bean sandwich (a piece of a baguette with beans and spicy oil) and eat it on my way home. I have to invite everyone to share my sandwich with me – this includes people riding by on bikes, in cars, ladies selling things on the side of the road, students, etc…One time I was eating rice at my house with my brothers and a neighbor came up behind me and said, “you’re not going to invite me to eat with you?” and accused me of being rude.  I tried to explain that it was hard to invite people that you didn’t see. Some people are hard-core about their invitations!

I always eat dinner with my family – usually they make a separate bowl of rice just for me, but I actually prefer eating with my little brothers and sisters (with my hands). However, whenever we eat separately I always invite them to come eat my rice and they invite me to eat theirs and then we argue whose rice is better. My little brothers and I love to argue (not real arguing, but joking) and sometimes instead of the invitation we say evitation (eviter means to avoid).

My family has a pretty tough economic situation and they more or less live day-to-day. Earlier this week there wasn’t enough money at the end of the day to buy things to make rice and sauce  so no one was going to eat dinner. I gave my family money to buy bread for everyone but there wasn’t very much bread left at the bakery, so everyone got a tiny piece of baguette for dinner. Despite, in my opinion, this being a depressing and difficult time, Issiaga, Abou, and Mohamed Aliou still joked and we all invited each other to share our pieces bread – each taking a bite out of the other person’s baguette and laughing hysterically at how silly it was. It’s amazing how they can take such hardship in stride and how they learn to be happy with what they have. The following day I mentioned something to Abou  about no one eating dinner the night before and he corrected me and said of course they ate, I had bought them bread (did I forget?)! And I said eating a tiny piece of bread is not dinner, and Abou, in his wisdom well beyond his 18  years, informed that eating a small piece of bread is a great thing, because some people don’t even have that. Perspective

Musique

For this post I thought I would just share a few of the most popular songs in Guinea right now. I love music; I love the way it makes people think, smile, cry, dance etc...Music seems to always be resonating the air waves of Guinea and if you can't feel the beats then you can't understand the atmosphere.

I don't really know how to go about finding more of the traditional music online to share with you. But here are a few of the songs that are very popular on Radio Kamsar right now (and that my family loves to dance to). On any given day, or any taxi ride or on the radio you're bound to hear these songs.

1. Makale - by Tiranke Sidime (Guinea). This song is often referred to as the unofficial Guinean national anthem. I doubt if I've gone one day in Guinea without hearing this song.

2. Nwa Baby -by Flavour (Nigeria). This song is not heard as often on the radio, but I dig the beats and it mostly makes me think of my little host brothers and sisters in Dubreka. They would sing the chorus of the song while dancing around our yard. I had never actually heard the song until I went to site, so now it always makes me think of them (though after seeing the music video I'm not so sure I want to associate this song with them...)

3. Désolé - by Sexion d'assaut (France). A favorite of mine and my little brothers at my site:

Dedicate yourself

One of the toughest weeks of my Peace Corps service…yet also one of the best…

It started on Monday.  My brother Abou told me that his pen and French notebook had been stolen during class (9^th grade chemistry) while he was out of class running an errand for his teacher. No students owned up to it and the teacher couldn’t do anything to get it back. DISBELIEF. I bought a new pen and notebook for Abou and he spent hours and hours recopying 3 months of notes so that he didn’t fail the “contrôle de cahier” (notebook check) in 2 days. I lent him my flashlight so he could even stay up at night to finish in time.

On Tuesday my other little brother Issiaga got kicked out of class (5^th grade) because his hair was too long and needed to be cut. He didn’t have money to buy a razor so I got one for him. The elementary school is also requiring all students to  bring pictures of themselves to class to attach to the report cards - just one more thing that the students can not afford. FRUSTRATION. Tuesday night my little sister Hawa came home with her report card for 6th grade. She brought it over to me with a pen to sign where it said, “parent’s signature.” I guess being the only one invested in the education of these children my sister thought that I should sign there (I didn’t, I told her that her mom needed to do it). I also refused to sign it because she was failing all of the subjects. DISAPPOINTMENT.  She has so much working against her and she already has a 2 year old son. I told her that she needs to study harder and tried to explain the importance of education for her and also how she will be the one to pass on her knowledge to her son. Abou was sitting on the porch with us and I told him that, being the most responsible and smartest student of the family he needed to step up and be a role model and encourage the other children in our concession to keep going to school. I told him how DISCOURAGED I was about education in Guinea. As I was saying goodnight he told me, “Il faut pas être decouragé” – don’t be discouraged.

Wednesday. Feeling pretty down about education. I get to school and my 3 best students inform me that they won’t be in class because their family friend died the night before, but they didn’t want to skip class without telling me. SADNESS. I went to class wondering how students manage to make it this far with so many things going against them, when, 2 students from Terminale came into my class to make an announcement. They were asking students to donate whatever small amount of money they could to help another Terminale student whose hut had burned down and whose notebooks, uniform, and everything else had been destroyed. At this point I was just about ready to cry in class. Luckily I made it through the lesson. When I was finished with class and packing up my stuff Abou came into my classroom to ask for some chalk. He told me he wanted to do some math revision with our younger siblings. HOPE at last. I wasn’t sure if he was really going to do it, but when I got home a few hours later all of the kids were outside copying notes, 2 of my younger brothers and a neighbor were at the chalkboard on my porch doing math with Abou supervising their calculations. Tears of JOY. I have never seen of the kids in my family study outside of school. No one hardly noticed when I came home because they were all focused on what they were doing. HAPPINESS.

Thursday. My students, having sensed my discouragement the day before, came to me after class to talk with me. A group of 12^th grade girls and I spent about 20 minutes talking about the issues that students face and I told them they’ve made it this far and they need to do everything they can to keep going. One of my top girls wants to be a doctor and asked if I had any resources about medicine that she could borrow. She really enjoyed when we talked about parasites and wanted to know more about them. The next day I was able to give her a few copies of info that I had relating to that. FULFILMENT.

It’s easy to get discouraged working in this environment – poverty, suffering, sickness, etc... But at the same time there are so many people that are working hard to change their lives and to change Guinea and that’s what keeps me going.

Peace Corps staff reminded me of this when confronting  these hardships (I think it comes from a Buddhist saying):

1.       Accept that there will never be an end to all suffering

2.       Dedicate yourself to the end of all suffering

This is my dedication.