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.