Day 080 - Just Plain Miscellaneous Stuff

I was a little choked up when I gave the thank you (to host family and trainers) speech in Dubreka (where we had our training), had to stop my speech to regain composer. I don‚t know what came over me, but I guess that I felt that the Guinean especially the trainers were the unsung heroes who did so much to train us, and I really felt sad that we won‚t get to see them for a long time. 

A moving vendor - a lot of guinean women carry a tray of cooked peanuts, or a basket of vegetables, or a huge jug of porrich, and whole lot of other stuff on top of their head, all they have to do is just walk around the village or town and that's how some of them sell their stuff. 

The weather - with the rainy season slowly ending, it is definitely getting hotter. I thought I am getting used to the heat, but I am melting more everyday, but I am finally more able to live with sweaty and sticky skins. I still stand by my argument that the reason the pace is so slow here is because it is just too hot, sometimes all you can do is just sit around to minimize perspirations.

Word on learning French ˆ I wish now that I had studied more French before I came given that language immersion wasn‚t as good as I had expected, also it would helped if we trainees had practiced speaking French among each other during school. Although it is quite hard to do in the beginning. I feel that I can get by right now to convey simply daily needs on semi broken French. I actually speak better in class because I always write everything ahead with all the right tense, verb conjugation and gender for each object. Oh, French, can be such a pain with all these rules and irregularities.

Looking back and looking forward ˆ

I was talking to another trainee that I haven‚t felt much of culture shock during training, and was wondering if I am just being blissfully oblivious, or it is because the physical conditions I grew up with in China has some similarity to what I experience in Guinea, as well as that Chinese also had large size family, multiple wives before the independence and inequality between men and women. Also, all I had to worry about everyday in past few months was study and study some more, food was prepared for me and trainers look after all our concerns and needs, we hung out a lot among each other Americans. It will be very different when I get to site and be on my own, introducing myself to the community and feed myself. Everything takes a whole lot longer to do there. I am a little anxious how the first month will go with getting everything to my hut and getting settled in. It‚s not like I can just rent a car and drive up to my hut and load everything in, and if I forgot to buy something, I can‚t just drive out and pick it up. I will have to try to get as much stuff as I think I will need in my regional capital since it will probably be at least a month or 2 before I get out there again. The market at my site should provide me with basic food supply though, or I can go to my neighbor‚s (15km) away for a bigger market. 

Water supply - Now I understand why some past volunteer say if they had a choice they will take running water over electricity anytime. One of the biggest reason girls get to school late is because they have to work a lot around the house in the morning to help the household prepare cooking for the rest of the day, and one big task is getting water. Sometimes the water source is far, especially during dry season, when water is scarce. People need water for everything, washing dishes, cleaning food, cooking rice, washing clothes, etc. And this scarce of water also cause people here wash their hands less.  That combined with an agricultural society, where kids are always outdoors playing in the dirt, meals are prepared out in the open aired huts, chicken running around, men coming back from working in the fields, all these activities means hands are always dirty and there are never enough water readily available to wash hands, you can see where all these lead to.

Pet? - I've decided not to get a dog or cat because of worries of insects. A lot of dogs have so many worts and open wounds on them, really not pleasant to look at. I think it is because so many flies land on dogs and dogs are always scratching themselves till they get open wounds, then the flies feed off the open wounds, so it just keeps going. It will just be too hard to keep a pet clean here to my standard and I don't want to have to worry about what to do with them when I leave for vacation. There were a lot of dogs walking around in Dubreka. They were all very docile and always kept out of way of people and cars. I think most of them don't have a home but they aren't wild either. There are enough trash around for these dogs to stay fed.