Hello once again after several months. I have to admit, this time I had a few opportunities to do a blog entry and failed. However, I recently acquired an internet key and my own computer which will allow me to use the internet at site and make more frequent blog updates. Summing up the last several months is a pretty daunting task so I'm going to break it up into several posts:

Christmas Break
New School
Spelling Bee - ACCEPTING DONATIONS! donate.peacecorps.gov
Library - ACCEPTING DONATIONS! donate.peacecorps.gov
Half Marathon

I'm in Conakry once again, doing errands, working on projects, running races, and attending late night dance parties. The school year is flying by and it seems like it will be summer in no time. Spring break first I guess. I've heard there is an abundance of snow back home. I'm sure it's a pain but I really miss it. Guinea is in the middle of the dry season right now and it gets pretty stinkin hot. Speaking of hot, I recently got a new roof on my hut. I could explain how I jumped from hot weather to my new roof but it might take a while so I'll just show you a picture of my new roof being attached instead.

The US ambassador came to visit Telimele and we hung out with him for a day or two and then biked down to my village together where he visited my school and spoke to my students which was a lot of fun. He also brought us poptarts and chips and salsa.

I am completely addicted to eating peanut butter and bananas now. This is usually what I do after getting home from school. I'm sure I've already ranted and raved about the peanut butter here but it really is tasty. Especially after you realize how much healthier it probably is without all the silly things they put in it in America. It's probably the best thing you'll ever eat actually (after living in a Guinean village for over a year).

Because we don't have a ton of time left here in Guinea, I've started thinking more about what I want to do after Peace Corps. First on the agenda is getting home. Turns out there is more than one way to get back to Canton, OH. Two ways actually. You can get in plane in Conakry and be home in less than 36 hours or you can go on an adventure. If you tell Peace Corps you want to go on an adventure, they give you the money that would have bought you a plane ticket from Conakry and you can use that to buy a motorcycle which you can ride up the coast of West Africa, across the Sahara, and into Morocco where you can sell it and buy a bicycle which you can then ride up through Spain, into France, all the way to Paris. Then you can get in a plane and go back to Canton, OH.

Adios.

Hello! I’m in Kindia again working on a multitude if different projects. The last few weeks have been pretty crazy with a lot of time spent crammed into a bush taxi with my best bud. Here’s a quick rundown of the last month or so:

Teacher Training

We made a long weekend trip to Dalaba a few weeks ago to work on a teacher training manual that one of our fellow ed volunteers awesomely extended her service to put together. The idea is to give Guinean teachers a resource that they can use to implement new teaching strategies and develop best practices in the classroom. Once finished it will be distributed to education volunteers to share implement in their schools. The fact that most Guinean teachers didn’t actually study education means that there is a lot of potential for the project to make a big impact on education in Guinea. I’m pretty excited to be a part of it for this reason. So, a bunch of us met up in Dalaba to go through a draft of the guide together and make revision suggestions. It was fun to see some other ed vols I hadn’t seen in a really long time. It was also really cool to see Dalaba for the first time. It’s very pretty and they have strawberries. It’s also rumored to be the coldest place in all of Guinea but I found it to be only mildly chilly at night.

Thanksgiving

Last weekend was marvelous for several reasons. One was that we got to eat thanksgiving dinner at the country director’s house in Conakry. Another was that Ohio State beat M!ch*ig@n. But the best of all was spending 3 full days with about 30 other volunteers. There was dancing and swimming and turkey. But we also got some work done. I think I’ve mentioned the mini book project that our library committee is working on. We spent the majority of Saturday typing up and formatting five French fairy tales that will be distributed as mini books in our communities. We have a lot of cool plans for this project. The 20ish page booklets can be reproduced very cheaply so there is a lot of potential to get information into the hands of many people and get kids more interested in reading.

Gougoudje Library

The grant application has been submitted! After it’s approved it will be up on the Internet and ready for your donations. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to do much for the library project recently because I’m waiting for the building to become available when we finally move into our new school building which will be finished “toute de suite.”

National Spelling Bee

This is Geoff’s baby. And it’s a pretty big baby. The idea is to have each volunteer hold a spelling bee at their middle school. Then, two winners from each school will advance to a regional competition. Finally, two winners from each regional competition will advance to the national competition in Mamou. Local competitions will be held in January with the national final to be held in February or March. Since we started talking about the project we’ve learned that spelling bees are pretty much an American thing. From what we’ve heard, they don’t really happen in Europe and this will almost certainly be the first one in Guinea which makes it all the more exciting! We’ll be using the same type of grant that I’m using for my library so that means you can help us out! I’ll let you know as soon as the project is up on the PC website.

Hopefully that’s good for a summary of my Guinean life. I guess there are a few things I forgot to mention that didn’t really fit in with the other stuff…

I got some pretty awesome new pants made from a bunch of random scraps of fabric sewn together.

I lost my ipod so now I listen to a flashdrive full of Geoff and Ellen’s music on my Guinean radio and 

I try to guess which songs came from which site mate

Geoff and I are going to join a street gang in Telimele called “Papillon Bleu.”

I have a washtub full of peanuts in my hut that I don’t know what to do with (I already have several pounds of peanut butter).

Dry season is definitely dirtier than wet season.

Ok Bye.

Bonjour tout le monde. Once again I apologize for the long time without a blog post. I’ve been pretty busy recently. Things are back to normal in Gougoudje as school is in full swing. I am teaching 8th, 9th, and 10th grade math this year. I can already tell that it’s going to be a good year. Since my french has improved a lot, it’s much easier for me to write lessons and much easier for my students to understand them. I’m also doing a lot of after school review sessions which a good number of students are coming to. It’s been really cool to see them improving, petit à petit.

In school related news, the library project I’ve been working on is coming along well.We’ve got a building selected and the carpenter is building tables, chairs, and shelves. We also recently formed a library committee in Gougoudje to brainstorm ideas, make big decisions, and get different parts of the community involved. The grant we’ll be using to get books and other supplies will soon be posted on the PC website so if you want to help us out you’ll be able to donate online. I’m also part of a recently formed committee of volunteer librarians. We have all sorts of cool things going on including a mini book project and a potential 20000 books for Guinea from a group called Books for Africa. That grant should also soon be up on the web to receive donations. I recently started another map of Guinea in our elementary school and the kids teachers are pretty excited about it . We’re going to try to do a different map or other educational drawing in each classroom. Also, I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention our new school. It’s not completely new but three brand new classrooms will be opening up toward the end of this year. The classrooms we’re in now will be used for teacher housing. It’s a very exciting transformation. The library will also be opening around the same time because we’re using the old administrator’s office to house it.

Hmmm. Other stuff. I guess I am just super excited about my second year of service. There’s a lot more going on this year and I’m excited about the projects I’m involved with. People in Gougoudje have already started talking about how they don’t want me to leave. It makes me sad to think about leaving now but I’m happy that I’m sad about it if you know what I mean. I’ll leave you with some pics that I dug through my camera to find. I haven’t been doing a good job with the photo thing lately but I took one today of Geoff in a phone booth that we found in Kindia…

Just kidding. Pictures didn't work. Sorry : ( We'll be in Conakry for Thanksgiving so I should be able to get some pics up then. Also, Macklemore is excellent. See ya.

After leaving the Peace Corps bureau in Conakry around 7:00am, I made my way to the gare to catch a taxi bound for Labe. The trip to Labe went pretty smoothly. At one point the accelerator got stuck so the driver just ran a string from the engine, out from under the hood and back in the window so he could operate the accelerator by hand. We drove like that for about an hour and then we stopped outside Kindia to fix it. After that it was smooth sailing to Labe. This was the first time I had travelled to Labe by taxi so I got to see some beautiful countryside I hadn’t seen yet. I got to Labe around 7:00pm, got some food, and then thought about going to bed but it was hard because I was so excited about my trip. I finally managed to fall asleep around midnight, only to wake up around 4:00am so I could leave for the gare around 5:00.

I wanted to be sure to get the first taxi heading to the Senegal border. I got to the gare around 5:30 and there was practically no one there yet. After talking with a few people, I learned that this was probably not the best place to catch a taxi for the border so I got in another taxi and headed for a village outside Labe who had a marche that day and likely some taxis heading to the border. I managed to find one rather quickly and by 8:30 we were on the road. This leg of the trip went pretty smoothly. For some reason, we tied a bunch of large leaves to the roof for about an hour and then took them back off but that was the only weird thing that happened.

We made it to the border right before it closed at 6:00pm and got across with no problems. Then we continued on to Manda, a transit hub in Southern Senegal. We took a shortcut on a non-paved road to get to Manda and while driving on this road we saw A TON of monkeys. They were crossing the road in packs. It was pretty awesome. Also, there are donkeys in Senegal and a lot more people ride bikes because there aren’t as many hills. So, when we got to Manda, we then got on a bus bound for Dakar. I had made some friends in the taxi so we all continued on together. The bus ride wasn’t too bad and we rolled into Dakar around 6:00am on Friday. I had made a friend in the taxi from Labe who was selling gold in Dakar so he showed me around a little bit before I struck off on my own. I even went with him to a few jewelry shops while he was trying to sell his gold. I found a decent hostel to stay at for 5000 CFA or about $10. It was right above a delicious fast food place called Ali Baba’s that made amazing chawarmas. I stayed there for two nights and spent my first two days in Dakar scoping things out so I would be ready when Kelsey arrived on Sunday.

On Sunday morning, I took the bus to the airport to check on the flight. It was delayed of course. Probably because Obama was coming to Dakar that Tuesday! After waiting for basically the entire day, Kelsey’s flight finally arrived around 5:00pm. Just seven hours late. I was very, very, very excited to see her! She got to stay in Senegal for two weeks. We didn’t have anything planned so we mostly just walked around and looked at things. One afternoon we rode a pirogue packed with at least 50 people across a short stretch of ocean to a cool island. Another day we walked to the westernmost point of the African continent. About a week of our time was spent in St. Louis, the first French settlement in West Africa. The beaches near St. Louis were marvelous and one day we walked all the way out to where the Senegal River meets the ocean. We ate a lot of good food and got a chance to hear some live music. We went to the marche too so I could get a “WATI B” shirt and Kelsey could find some fabric to make a bag. We spent the last 3 nights in Dakar and then Kelsey flew out on Sunday afternoon, two weeks after she arrived.

I headed back to downtown Dakar to prepare for my return voyage. I stayed at the same hostel and was up early the next morning to get a taxi toward the Guinean border. I had planned to spend the night in a town called Dioube where there is a large marche and probably lots of taxis heading to Guinea. Unfortunately, the taxi going to Dioube didn’t leave until 12:30pm so I decided it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go all the way there because it would be dark when I arrived and I didn’t have a place to stay picked out yet. Instead of going all the way to Dioube, I decided to get out early in a larger city called Tambacounda. There is a Peace Corps volunteer house there and I was hoping I could stay there for the night. Unfortunately, due to some recent rule changes, they couldn’t let me stay at the volunteer house. They gave me the address of a cheap and respectable hotel. When I got there though they told me that it wasn’t open because the owners were on vacation. Luckily, there was a super nice guy named Joseph who lived on the property and offered me HIS room for the night. We chatted for a little bit and he told me about the soccer club he runs in Tambacounda called the “JOEstars.” I got some good sleep that night and Joseph was even nice enough to show me to the gare in the morning.

I decided at this point that it wasn’t worth it to go all the way to Dioube because people told me I could get a taxi direct to Telimele in Manda. This turned out to be true. I found the Telimele bound taxi within seconds of my arrival in Manda. It wasn’t full yet so I walked around the busy marche for a while to kill some time. Around 1:00pm, I asked the driver if we had all the passengers yet. He said we did and that we were just waiting on some baggage so we would leave right after the 2:00pm prayer. It turned out that we were waiting for a lot of baggage. And apparently more people. There were 8 seats in the taxi including the driver’s seat. When we finally left Manda around 7:30pm, there were ten adults and eight children in the taxi, plus another guy on the roof. There was even a guy in the trunk. We got to the border after it had closed so we had to sleep there for the night. Apparently this is a pretty common thing to do because there were at least 15 other taxis doing the same thing. The setup was pretty cool. There were food stalls all along the side of the road. You picked one to eat sinner at and then that person let you sleep on the ground in or in front of their stall. I was super tired so I managed to get a little sleep but the next day was the first day of Ramadan so everyone got up around 4:30 to eat before the sun came up. We got moving around 7:00 and had a successful border crossing. After a grueling eighteen hours in the taxi (and outside of it, climbing mountains that it couldn’t go up with all the passengers inside) I eventually made it to Ellen’s site around 1:00am. I spent two nights there and then took a taxi back to Gougoudje. It was quite the trip. Not something I would want to do again but it makes a pretty good story…

Luckily Kelsey took some pictures. There are more on facebook...

Isle de Ngor

Yassa poulet and fried sweet potatoes!

Here in Africa, we drink water out of bags

One of the beautiful pirogues in St. Louis

Sunset at the beach in St. Louis

A bientot!

So, I was back in Gougoudje and my right foot was starting to swell up. There was a small red bump on the top and a large bump on my ankle. Foot infections are very common in Guinea, probably because it is pretty hard to keep your feet nice and clean all the time. You either have to wash them constantly or where close toed shoes all the time which can be a pain. During the rainy season, exposed feet get covered with mud. During the dry season, exposed feet get covered with dust. And there isn’t much in between the mud and the dust. I suspected that the swelling was being caused by an infection of some sort. By this time you may have already heard about this incident because I believe my mom made a post about it on facebook. Anyway, I was also concerned that the lump on my ankle (which seemed to be growing) being caused by something else. I’ll warn you now, if you’re easily grossed out, you may want to skip the next paragraph.

So, during PST we learned about several nasty sounding insects, one of which was the Tumbu Fly. This fly lays its eggs on your clothes while they’re outside drying. Then when the eggs hatch, they burrow under your skin and grow. When they have reached adult size, they emerge from your skin and fly away. Super gross right? Well, I had recently suffered a particularly itchy mosquito bite on my ankle which I had stupidly scratched open. The wound had almost healed but the skin was new and very week. A perfect place for the fly to lay its eggs. I had also just worn socks that weren’t dry yet and had been sitting out all day.

I was concerned enough about the swelling by the time I got back to site that I called the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) and asked if I could come in for treatment before I left for Senegal. I was very excited to see Kelsey and I didn’t want a foot infection to ruin the trip. I got the ok to come into Conakry and they gave me some powerful antibiotics that took care of the infection which turned out to be the small red bump on the top of my foot. The other bump on my ankle remained a mystery. I still don’t know exactly what it was. But no flies ever came out so it wasn’t the Tumbu Fly! If you don’t believe me that such an awful creature exists, read this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbu_fly

I had left for Conakry on Friday and by Tuesday night my foot was feeling much better so I hopped in a bush taxi early on Wednesday morning to start my trip to Senegal…

The tale of Geoff’s cursed keys...

On June 7^th, 2013 Geoff Delperdang and I climbed into a bush taxi bound for Kindia. We were promptly joined by Caleb upon our arrival and spent the afternoon waiting at the bank to receive large wads of Guinean francs. After eating some dinner and meeting some volunteers who had just finished their service in Morocco, we made our way to Michelle’s house where we had arranged to spend the night. It was a bit of a walk and when we were about halfway there, someone (probably me) commented on how it hadn’t rained all day. Within 2 minutes it was pouring. By the time we got to Michelle’s house we were completely soaked. We were also pretty tired so we changed our wet clothes and went to bed. The next morning we headed back into town for a day of food and internet. We spent a good portion of the afternoon sitting at a restaurant purchasing whatever the people who walked by happened to be selling. We joked about how we were being “patrons” but in reality I don’t think any of us spent over $3.00. After patron day, we ate some pizza for dinner. Then the group split and half of us went dancing with the Moroccan volunteers and the other half spent the night at Chico’s farm near Kindia where they would be attending various PC functions the following day. It was a wonderful weekend in Kindia and I was a bit sad on Sunday morning when I had to leave. I packed up my stuff which was still a bit damp and grabbed a few of Geoff’s items that he had left drying at Michelle’s place. Then I headed out to climb into a bush taxi bound for Telimele.

Geoff came back on Tuesday and because I had left my bike at his site 30km away, I hopped in the taxi with him when he passed by Gougoudje. I was planning on getting to his site, hopping on my bike, and riding back to Gogoudje the same evening. If we got delayed because of taxi breakdowns or some other such thing, I would just spend the night at Geoff’s and go back in the morning. Perfect plan. The only problem was, as soon as we got to Geoff’s, he realized that he had forgotten the key to his house in his shorts, which he had left drying at Michelle’s in Kindia, which I had brought back to Gougoudje but had now left sitting in my hut. Then it started pouring. We sat on his neighbor’s porch contemplating what to do. This is what we came up with:

1.       We spend the night with our site mate Dee

2.       I borrow Dee's bike in the morning (mine was locked in Geoff’s house) and ride to Gougoudje to retrieve the shorts

3.       I bike back to Telimele on Dee’s bike and hand the shorts and keys off to a moto-taxi who delivers them to Geoff

4.       Geoff opens his house, hops on my bike and rides to meet me in Telimele

5.       We then exchange bikes and I ride my bike back to Gougoudje and Geoff rides Dee’s bike back to his site

The next morning, I hopped on Dee’s bike and headed out. The plan was complex but seemed to be working alright. It was a little challenging riding Dee’s small bike but I still made it back to Gougoudje in less than 2 hours. I grabbed the goods, got back on, and rode to Telimele where I ran into one of Dee’s counterparts who agreed to deliver the keys to Dee who would in turn deliver them to Geoff. This is where things started to fall apart, after waiting for a couple hours in Telimele and trying to contact Geoff and Dee numerous times, I found out that Geoff was feeling sick (with potential malaria) and didn’t feel up to riding so Dee was going ride my bike to Telimele and then we would exchange bikes as planned. Ok. No problem right? Well, unfortunately I forgot to inform Dee that I don’t use some of the lower gears on my bike because I couldn’t get the derailleur screws set correctly and the derailleur shifts too far into the spokes if you try to use those gears. Lacking this critical knowledge, Dee attempted to use these gears and the derailleur shifted into the spokes and was pretty much snapped in half. I was certainly not able to repair it so we walked it back to Dee’s and I spent the night at Geoff’s place. The next morning I rode Geoff’s bike to Dee’s, then walked my bike to the taxi gare, tossed it on top of a taxi and headed for Telimele. After arriving in Telimele, I hopped on and rolled most of the way back to Gougoudje. Luckily it’s mostly downhill. When I finally got back to site (on Thursday afternoon), I noticed that my right foot was starting to swell up…

I’ve been living in Africa for a year!

Once again I apologize for the long gaps between my blog posts. I really don’t have a good excuse this time. I was even in Senegal recently where the Internet is abundant and I couldn’t bring myself to sit in front of the computer for an hour or two. It can be pretty overwhelming to come back to the Internet after being away for a month or more. Luckily, I am now in Conakry getting some work done and I’ve had enough time to take the Internet in small doses until I could build up a tolerance again haha. It’s been so long that I’m sure there are a few things that I wanted to write about that I have now completely forgotten. Instead of summarizing the last two, perhaps three months, I will tell you about several important events over the course of several automated blog posts. There will be stories and pictures and maybe even a video! I’ll start with a school related update.

The end of school was rather chaotic this year because Guinea’s legislative elections were planned for the 30^th of June, just after the national exams usually wrap up. Because of the close proximity to elections, the government decided to move all the exams up by about 2 weeks. This changed the 10^th grade exam from the second week of June to the last week of May, giving us two weeks less to prepare our students for the exam. Luckily, I was almost finished with the math program and we were able to breeze through the last couple sections and start reviewing for the brevet blanc, a practice for the national exam that I got to write the math questions for. My students took the brevet blanc about three weeks before the actual brevet. I tried to make the questions as similar to real brevet questions as possible so my students would know what level of difficulty to expect. They did alright on some portions of the brevet blanc (biology, history) but they really struggled with my math questions and with chemistry too. After the test, I was in charge of compiling all the scores from the different sections and calculating the overall grade for the test. This is part of my job as the professeur principal for the 10eme class. If the brevet blanc was an accurate representation of the real brevet, it seemed like about 50% of my kids would pass test and continue on to lycee (high school). This was actually a pretty high percentage compared to a lot of other schools. After the brevet blanc was over, a lot of my students stopped coming to class. It was hard to encourage them to come too because the brevet blanc was their last official grade for the year. They started showing up again about a week before the real brevet for the review sessions that I had prepared. The real brevet began on May 27^th in a nearby (18km) town called Sinta that served as a testing center schools in our area. Math was On the very last day of testing so I planned to ride my bike to Sinta on Thursday, which was a non-test day and on Friday to give math reviews. I was excited to see my students show up to my reviews in large numbers accompanied by students from other schools as well. It also seemed like they had done some studying during those days they had skipped class which I guess is good haha.

After the real brevet was finished the only thing I had left to do was give the final exams for Geography and Math to my 9eme class. After I finished grading these exams I was done for the school year! It was a bittersweet moment because I was relieved to be done with the exhausting aspects of teaching, like grading, but I felt like there were still so many things I could teach my students. Luckily, some of them requested that I continue math review sessions throughout the summer and even more asked me to come to their villages and teach English which I have been doing on a daily basis since returning from Senegal. Upon my return, I also learned that 91% of my 10eme students had passed the brevet and would have the opportunity to continue on to lycee! Although I knew that some of them had probably figured out a way to cheat on a national exam, this was still a pretty exceptional success rate and I was very proud of them for putting in a lot of hard work throughout the year. I’m even more excited about my 9eme students who will get to spend a second yeah with Monsieur Ben. These are the kids who ask me to hold reviews and come during the summer even when it rains. They have great potential and I’m excited to see where they go! So long for now! I’ll leave you with a schedule of future blog post topics so you can know what’s coming. Check back once a week to see if my automated posts are working…

Geoff’s cursed keys

Feet

Senegal

Ramadan

Also, here are some pictures!

This is my awesome collection of Guinean pants! My favorite is the second from the left...

This is what the stinking wind did to the fence behind my hut. It's all fixed now though!

Aussi, le vent a decoiffe notre 10eme! We collected the pieces of the roof and a carpenter fixed it rather quickly.

Luckily the map of Guinea I'd been working on wasn't damaged

It's not finished in this photo. I finished it right before leaving for Senegal but forgot to take a picture...