As a seasoned and jaded volunteer, I've gotten used to exotic things that others might think were exciting, such as giant animals devouring each other:

On the other hand, I might display an unseemly enthusiasm for things which are ordinary in Minnesota, such as apples, canoes, various English speakers I know, democracy, and paved roads. It will be a good experiment. I hope to get the chance to write more about it soon, but I might not put it up here... let me know if you want final impressions.

Thanks to everyone for following my adventure and staying in touch. The brick of letters I'm carrying home as well as the emails you've sent made it a lot easier for me and helped me through difficult moments during the two years. Thanks!

See you soon...

1. Dogose dance



2. Fine ladies outside their shop

3. You never know when you'll bump your head

4. Sssss... actually, it didn't make a sound.

5. Good work

6. Went looking for elephants today, found footprints, spoor and a flower

I am always secretly happy to meet dirty carls, because they're so... I've run into a few in Africa; the latest is a newbie here in Burkina. I have to admit her Jula's frighteningly good for someone who just started off in village.

Carletonmuso! I ka kene wa? (Carleton woman, have you health?)

-I'm fine. What's up?

-How are the people of your village?

-Fine. And your family?

-Fine. You find that your village is sweet?

-It's very sweet to me. And how is your work?

-No problems.

-St. Olaf is bad!

-Ah, why do you wish to spoil my heart?

-What did you say?

-Why... do you wish to... my heart... spoil...?

-Oh- Why do I wish to spoil your very own heart? Our ideas are very sweet and fine; St. Olaf ideas are bad.

-It's not true!

-It is true, man!

The best part of the Peace Corps thing is local language. In a Tolm Wolfe book I read, the mayor of Atlanta says that it's not the money, the power, the attention that he enjoys about politics, it's seein' em jump when he walks into a room. And I like seein em jump when I start talking decent Jula. This is especially fun when I'm out of my own village and people don't know me.

A recent trip between my site and Bobo, a nice 70k ride on a narrow bush trail, summed up the different versions of life that exist in this country. Out in the bush, an old man in a dirty robe greeted me and asked where I was going. He sighed on hearing Bobo, as if disappointed by my predictable answer. Ala k'i nyuman don, he said, may God sweeten your arrival. That's a poetic thing to say to a stranger, isn't it? Much later as I entered Bobo and saw the crowds, dressed in filthy rags for work or stylin for hanging out and talking on cell phones, the thick fog of exhaust and noise, begging children and indifferent women driving motos, imported goods of all description for sale, good and bad food, everyone in a hurry, I was overwhelmed by the difference that exists between the life of that old man not so far away and the urban experience that his grandchildren are probably living. There was a transition zone, where instead of millet plantations I rolled through wastes covered in blowing plastic bags, then the dusty slums on the edge of town, women balancing loads of illegal firewood that they must have walked a great distance to find. I wonder how many generations have to live in the transition before they get The Burkinabe Dream- A moto and a cellphone for every man, gas and running water for every woman.

As for me, things are good. Later...

Hey Everyone,

Greetings again. It's fun to realize that it's February, that I have only a few months left, and that I'll soon be heading back to the U.S.A. Older, and not any wiser, but a master of many useless skills: carrying water bidons on a bike, scaring small children, eating any manner of foods (hot peppers, chicken livers, fish skins, caterpillars [well, only two], leaves, millet beer, the infamous Pomme d'Acajou, and the great staple tô), junior high math, bucket "showers," and showing up late to everything.

I saw someone's Far Side calendar the other day, and noticed something I'd never seen before. It's the one where the wolves are chasing the kid around a kitchen table and the floor has just been waxed, do you know the one? At an earlier point of my service, back when I was puffed up with Peace Corps pride, I would have singled out the "newly waxed floor" for a profound and righteous commentary on something. Now I just noticed that there's a jar with the fine print cookies sitting on the counter.

School is going well. I am getting to be competent enough at teaching that I am no longer the main roadblock to my students' education. The huge classes, the lack of materials and equipment and staff, and the overly theoretical curriculum are now bigger barriers than my still-apparently-hilarious mistakes in French. I have become more confident and friendly and learned my students' names, which minimizes discipline problems. The school built a blackboard on the outside of my house so I can deal with the crowds of students who come to ask me questions, which is rewarding. One student, a Coulibaly, actually laughed in delight when the points I had him calculate from a linear eq ended up in a straight line on a graph. Why does that happen, Monsieur? I am becoming impatient with the whole thing, though, and I think the junior high level is not for me if I continue teaching in the future.

The other math teacher at my school, who at the start of the year accused me of incompetence and tried to have me teach just one class so that he could get the others and, coincidentally, the overtime pay, has now asked me to take over his tenth graders for a few weeks because he is "tired." That's a small victory, not that I'm given to gloating, and it's fun to try the more advanced level with 96 students. That is a hot room in the afternoons!

Village life is dusty but otherwise all right. I am tired and lonely more often than I would like, but I still think my work is useful and that keeps me going. Occasional gatherings of voluteers help too. I met some cool Japanese in Banfora too, and they fed me pancakes with cabbage. Hey, it was better than fried caterpillars. I'm looking forward to the visit of some fellow Guinea exiles in March, to our last reunion and gathering in April, then to freedom in June.

Travelling around the world doesn't really appeal to me now- maybe a few days in Ghana or Morocco, then a trip home to the ancestral cookie jar and the world of fluent English speakers and canoeing.

So have fun out there and keep me up to speed on all the cool and useful and exciting things you're living. It's been great to get some emails recently.

Later,

Will

"This isn't a road-- well, it is a road-- but the real road is over there."

"Through those big trees?"

"Yes. You can go to the prefecture and look on the chart."

I was talking to one of my town's most successful entrepreneurs. We were standing by his new, almost-finished house. He'd build this house in a deserted spot on the outskirts of town that I pass every morning as I bike to school.

The problem was, he'd built the house across the road. Yes, on the middle of the road. On the sandy path, I should say. For months everyone using this path has had to stop, leave the road, and walk a tight loop around the house, rejoining the road 40 feet further down. Old ladies balancing heavy loads of firewood walk through the heavy sand and scowl at the empty house. When there are workers there they scowl back. A barrier of stones and cement blocks deters motorcycles, which slip and fall once they leave the path. I didn't get it on the first day they put it up and carried my bike over it, prompting some glares and a muttered "If you weren't a stranger..." It's a pain, and at night it's dangerous.

I was confused about it until I met the guy there one night as I came back from "doing sports" with the other teachers. It was dark and I didn't see him until I had started to lift my bike over the barrier. I was curious, and a little angry; I assumed he had build his house there just to make a point of how important he'd become.

He explained that he was just folowing the lot on which he had a building permit. Yes, even thougth there are no other houses and he appears to be building on the road separating a cornfield from the bush, the whole area is divided into lots. The road everyone uses now is not recognized. It's supposed to cut through what is now a thicket and a grove of old shea trees. Wait ten years, he said, you'll see.

Just wait! In ten years, you might also see the spread of our leagalistic, it's-my-right-so-deal-with-it culture go even farther and deeper around the world.

I had visitors one day, and to my chagrin the neighbors killed a chicken for us. They don't eat much meat, so I was very embarassed to consume one of their precious fowls. Can't do anything but say thanks. Tasty!

A lake.

Aziz and his brother

Leaf sauce anyone?

Nere tree in summer (compare to the picture I took six months ago)

Omar, Fatim, and the tree of paradise

Map of Africa

My neighbor and his new wife at their wedding

Morning coffee

Pictures from an aborted trip to Gorom, in the north of Burkina, where we were going to ride camels.

(1) The only vehicle we could find was a camion.

(2) It made it across this "bridge."

(3) We made it across this, too, but there was a wider water later that we couldn't try.

There were a bunch of camions there, waiting for the water to go down. We camped in the foreground and the next day hitched a ride back whence we'd come. Fun was had by all. It didn't rain.

We made the trip from Bobo to Conakry in less than two days. The Kankan-Conakry leg took only 12 hours, better than I'd remembered, and I found myself wondering if some of those potholes hadn't been newly patched. Less than two days later I'd had enough of pizza and airconditioning and decided to head back to my old site alone.

24 hours later I unfolded myself from the taxi in Kankan and tried to decide into which part of that great and dusty city I had been spewed forth. All my clothes were red and brown with dust, I smelled of gasoline, my neck was skeptical about being straightened after switching between cramped positions for so long, I'd hardly slept, and my hat was gone. I was still angry with the Syndicat boss in Conakry who'd sold me a ticket for a Kankan car and let me wait all afternoon for it to fill up before telling me it was only going two-thirds of the way, to Dabola, at which point "the driver will find another taxi and pay your way to Kankan." The trip to Dabola went without incident, except that when we stopped to break the Ramadan fast I spilled my malaria pills (Doxycycline) all over the road. I picked out all of the pills that missed the dog vomit and wondered if their antibiotic virtues were up to the little bugs of Mamou Roadside Grit. We arrived in Dabola at 2AM to find an unsurprising lack of options for further transport. There were only four passengers out of six for one taxi. They argued for an hour until I got frustrated and gave up and crawled into the backseat to ignore mosquitoes and sleep. Two minutes later they agreed on the price and the driver took our money. He bought a few glass bottles of gasoline and poured them into the tank, the “tank” in this car being a plastic bidon in the trunk. A flimsy iron tube passed through a hole in the cap and descended through a rusted-out patch in the floor. The bit of plastic they lashed around the hole in the cap did not look sufficient to keep the gas inside, but was too tired to be impressed. We eventually struggled into Kankan, but not before being passed by four other, cleaner, faster taxis. I am sorry to say that all of this made me grumpy. But later that afternoon I was headed to Tokounou on a bright yellow school bus from Michigan. To my new Burkinabé eyes, everything looked greener, wetter, brighter, and more primitive than I’d remembered. The road was worse, either because I’m used to decent roads in Burkina or because it actually decayed since last year. I didn’t know those school busses were capable of the clever maneuvering our driver pulled off to slide around and through all the potholes, pits of mud, and cows. Sometimes everyone broke into applause. I felt like walking the last bit so I descended at Nialenko and shouldered my pack. I remembered all bends in the road. I remembered a rocky point to the left covered in streams of guano. I remembered the pitted section that the old man wanted America to fix. I remembered the silence and the way it was broken by the hackings of vultures. I wondered if I would climb the last hill and see a stream of white birds filling the valley in front of Tokounou. A camion passed me and stopped and the men in back waved to me to climb up. I waved them on and two minutes later it started to rain. Soon it was a vrai Guinean rainstorm. I stopped smelling like gasoline. I didn’t see any huts in the field so I ran, awkwardly in my bulky pack and long pants, the last few k into town. On the last hill I met Salet, one of the village fous, taking advantage of the downpour to “find” some peanuts in a field, and he recognized me and grinned and ran in with me. (I like Salet. He once gave me a plastic bag with a present of yams inside. As I took it a giant rat jumped out and ran down the street, to general merriment.) So I arrived in Tokounou somewhat filthy, with my hair in my eyes, my spare clotes mostly soaked inside my now-heavy pack, accompanied by a crazy man. Some of my former students were sitting under a shelter by an orange stand at the entrance to town. They looked at me skeptically, and then started grinning: Sékou Touré! I bara na! I bara na! I started grinning too. Everything was fine.I stayed in town for two days. My hut had been relieved of all my stuff, so I stayed with my friend Moussa who fortunately hadn’t traveled. It was great to see thirty people I hadn’t realized I missed, although I ended up having mostly identical conversations with them all. I got to eat leaf sauce and bush rat. I visited the top of the plateau and ran down the road towards Nafaji. I fasted one day except for a sip of water in the morning. I saw the papayas swelling on their trees and the green, green rice growing everywhere with the new appreciation that that don’t happen in Burkina. Fog in the mornings. I discovered that the principal had stolen half of the things on my “will.” I had, for example, left ten meters of fabric to old Mme. Traouré, who sold me peanuts. The principal gave her four. It was the same story with all the stuff on my list. The principal himself greeted me tentatively and then got in a car to Kankan without telling me. I wrote him a highly insulting letter, and left him my address in Burkina in case he wants to write back. Now I’m back in Bobo preparing to go to site until Thanksgiving. I’m eager to do work again and there should be no shortage of it. I might try to teach a physics/chem. class for some variety. In all it was a long and educational and relaxing summer, especially considering that I work for the Executive branch of the government of the USA in 2007. Hope you are all well. Thanks for all your letters and emails. Will

Greetings from Conakry. Hope all's well.

The last few weeks of summer vacation (from my arguably vacation-like job) are fading quickly, so I decided to take this last chance to use up leave days and see Guinea again. We went to Bamako by bus and then took a 24-hour bush taxi ride to Conakry, arrived this morning. I don't have time to write much but thought I would Officially Register my aliveness. Dear Mom, do not worry. Best-

Will

Giraffes in Niger, not nearly as cool as camels

Goats chillin

Looking back on Dogon country

Students who helped haul my bookshelf

Riding a camel

Our hiking crew.

Summer vacation! It doesn't have to end just because you're out of school...

Having had several people ask politely about my mental health, I should explain that that weird entry about eating cake and the samurai consisted solely of song lyrics in English that I hear ceaselessly in my village. No one understands them but they are played over and over again to the point where I will probably never forget them. The alarming thing is that some of these songs, which at first irritated me, as they should anyone with two ears, have grown on me so that I now catch myself humming along. I don't even laugh anymore at the guy who sings along with the samurai song, nodding seriously at the foreign words. And I still have a year to go... I'm sure that you, gentle reader, will do your part to straighten me out once I get back home.

Sarcasm seems to be beyond me. Knowing that people generally take me seriously when I'm trying to joke and laugh when I'm being serious, I should also point out that this entry I wrote earlier today was not meant to be taken seriously. I meant it as a spoof on Cormac McCarthy, who I am reading a lot of at the moment. So take what I said but not the ridiculous way I said it. I'm not sure that anyone but him can pull of his style, and even he seems to stretch it too far sometimes. I finished the terrible Blood Meridian this morning. I couldn't maintain the austere mood he was trying to impose because some of his madeup words are so inapt and unsuited to their purpose that I found myself laughing at the author. As you were supposed to laugh at me, but probably didn't, and instead maybe considered me with concern and pity.

To make up for it, let me tell a story from today in a straightforward way. This being a day when Americans abroad think a lot about hot dogs and fireworks, both seemingly hard to come by, we decided to create our own Americana in the form of an apple pie. I elected to bike into town to look for apples, since I also needed to get a passport photo taken for my Mali visa.

By the way, I'm going to Mali tomorrow with a small group to go hiking for a few days. Three free months... I also understand why so many people are professors.

Anyway, I soon came upon a red light. It was a T intersection and I was coming along the very top of the T in a way that made the light irrelevant, so I followed a moto that zoomed through. Suddenly I heard a whistle and a gendarme at the side of the road, a hundred yards on from the light, motioned for me to pull over beside him. I knew what that meant. There were two other gendarmes and one of them was talking to the man on the moto that had preceded me. The one who had flagged me down was older and he had a belly and wore sunglasses and a stern face did not remove either. The following conversation began in french:

Afternoon.

Afternoon, sir.

You violated the light. That is very serious. You will have to pay a fine.

Yes, I admit running the light. I can't deny it.

You need to give me 6000F [=$12].

Yikes, that's a lot... but if that is the law, I will have to pay.

Yes.

You'll write me a receipt, won't you?

What? Oh, no, we are out of receipts! We'll just have to settle this between you and me.

Well, if that's the case, 6000 seems like a lot.

All right, you can pay 2000.

2000, that also seems like a lot. I don't have it.

We'll have to impound your bike.

I looked at him and shrugged as though I had nothing better to do than to accompany him to the police station. Then I noticed that traffic was backed up and that the passengers of two taxis and a minibus were watching our conversation with great interest and giving the gendarme dirty looks. I pulled out my secret weapon and switched to Jula.

Do you speak Jula?

Whaaaat? Do you speak Jula?

Yes, small-small. Good afternoon!

Good afternoon.

How's your family?

Fine.

Your wife and children?

Fine.

Your health?

Fine...

Your work?

Fine. He laughed. Where did you learn to speak Jula?

In guinea, and near Banfora...

Ah, Conakry-Guinea? They have a bad president, don't they...

The passengers on the bus were now gesturing at me and laughing and poking their neighbors with their elbows.

So, you see I'm a tubabu, but look- I don't have big money. I do not have a car. I have to ride my bike to go to town. I am a volunteer. I teach the little children in the junior high. I teach math in 7th, 8th, 8th grade. I think you can just let me go.

Well... [He was wavering. The taxis had just left and he had watched them go with relief.]

Yes, you can go ahead. [he switched back to French now] But... do you have a cellphone? [I gave him my number.]

Well, goodbye. I promise not to run any more red lights.

And so I went on my way, wallet no lighter, wearing an aggrieved face but secretly happier than I would have been had I not been stopped. And maybe I have an improbable new friend in the Ouagadougou Gendarmerie if I should ever need one, which I won't, Mom.

Later I ended up eating baked beans from America and swimming in a pool. But that is another story. And maybe one day I will celebrate a Fourth of July without even a small bit of irony. And certainly I'm now going to leave this computer, hopefully having given evidence of my sanity and lightness of spirit, and go enjoy more food and music and people.

Best,

WHM

I come upon a vacant lot in the outskirts of Ouagadougou in the first unused light of day and circle it experimentally. There is a rubbish of broken glass and plastic bags and peels and rinds of unknown fruits and other organic matter now unrecognizable piled at the edges. Pitted red traces show where feet and bicycles have crossed the diagonal bearing improbably clean and immaculate persons through the dust. The central rectangle contains as do all vacant lots in this country the two netless aluminum goals which in the late afternoon will become the subject of intense passion. I am happy with the relative lack of incredulous eyes and pointing children and stay there running in circles as the delicate sky turns pink and rose and blue. Two others come to run, one in a soccer uniform continuing through and another in shredded baggy pants and sandales who circles a smaller perimeter and watches me. I become familiar with the locations of the newer items of refuse by their smell and by the localised buzzing of flies. Ragged vultures of enormous size flap dully from their place of nocturnal revelry or abiding and circle ahead as if they already know what scraps the day will bring to them. A girl in dirty clothes comes from nowhere and empties a plastic bucket into the edge of the pile. I keep running in circles to expend my useless calories. People go to work and to visit their friends. An old woman on a bicycle keeps pace with me for a minute. There is an ancient and defraying rice sack lashed to the back of her bike containing some small item of value to her. I do not ask myself: Where is she going with that? Why does she bother? I have lately happened upon Ecclesiastes and skimmed through it and dismissed it as something already known and observed. She ignores me as though I am Fate's practical joke and not to be believed in. As always I observe the poverty which surrounds me and regret it, though I did not make the world as it is, and as always the riposte sounds in my head: This may be unjust. But it is not more unjust because she knows about it now. And it would not have been otherwise had I stayed home to hide. Maybe this is how it always shall be. After a year I nearly believe it myself, that this state of things and the hardness of life are unexceptional and to be borne in silence, that efforts to deny or live in defiance of this law are dangerous and foredoomed to more spectacular failure still. That what is fine and pleasurable in life can exist only on a background of such uncompromised knowledge. Today's newspaper cries drought and the failure of agriculture in Alabama; Barack Obama swallowing a gnat; the release of Alan Johnston by the offices of Hamas. It leaves out the outcome of that woman's journey into town, her use or sale of that article, and what she will do to translate that effort into food and shelter and comfort and land and sex and learning and strength and piety and pride not for her but for her family and eternal hypothetical relations and descendants like the grains of sand or the stars and even for me and mine. Such impossible patient labors of people who do not think of themselves as remarkable and maybe are not.

You can never eat your cake,

You can never eat your cake and have it...

I'm a black samurai

Strolling through the dark night. [repeat 500 times]

Interplanetary war war

Interplanetary murder

Interplanetary war, war, war

Interplanetary murder.

I was going to leave my house at 4:30 this morning to bike here, which I thought would take about four hours. I had everything packed up and ready to go, and I set my watch alarm for 4:25. I woke up earlier than that, and lay in the dark listening to the sound of a light rain magnified by my corrugated aluminum roof. Then the rain stopped and I listened to a mosquito buzzing against the side of the net. There was nothing magical about the time I had chosen; I could have gotten up anytime and left. But I lay there waiting for the alarm to go off, and as I waited the sky grew pale beyond my window and slowly woke the roosters. Then I realized that the alarm hadn’t gone off and I was already two hours behind the plan. Why do I trust an electronic watch more than my eyes? It didn’t matter since it was overcast and thus not too hot, and the trip turned out to take an hour less than I’d thought. I had no plans for the rest of the day either. But I’m still confused about why I didn’t get up, or even look at the watch that was sitting beside my bed to see. In any case I made it, here, to the internet town, which this weekend boasts nine PCVs.

It’s been a while since I wrote. This is good: I like my new site, a lot, and I didn’t want to leave. The two sites are remarkably similar in some ways: medium towns of ~15000 people, school of about 500 kids, big market, kids lurking behind every tree to yell TOUBABOU with great glee. Both towns lie on roads built by foreign nations beginning with C: Cuba in Guinea, Canada here. The nearest large town is 60k away. There are good bike trails in all directions. There are differences too: they have pigs and donkeys in Burkina, none at my old site. It’s drier here and the land less productive. I have a new, enormous cement house with screens to bar the bugs as opposed to a hut. Other changes, such as a competent school admin, seeming interest of lots of kids in math, a chess-playing fellow PCV in town, functioning post office, and frowen yogurt on some days, have not been too hard to get used to. I’ve found a nearby family to eat two meals a day with, and haven’t been sick at all. I have swept a gold scorpion and a tiny black snake out of my house, so it was certainly worth it to buy a broom as opposed to the bunches of grass the Burkinabé use.

I have no good friends here yet, with the exception of everyone under age eight, who are invariably delighted to see me coming and run towards me crying “Ça ba? Ça ba? Donne-moi cadeau!” The other exception is Omar, the chess player, who will be a good neighbor until he leaves in August.

My school work is actually productive and appreciated. I have three classes, the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades, with 83, 111, and 83 students respectively. Surprisingly, many of these students come from distant towns larger than Sidera, which have their own school systems, because those numbers are actually really good class sizes. When I expressed surprise at the number 111, some of my students were confused. “Monsieur, is that a lot? Or is it small?” Tomorrow I have to grade my first test, which will not be fun. Many students come to visit me after class and ask questions.

It’s frustrating to type on these French-layout keyboards, but I have time for two anecdotes. But don’t worry if I don’t write for a while again – it means I like where I’m at and don’t want to leave. You can send letters to the trustworthy post office less than a mile from my house :

Will Mitchell BP 2180 Sidéradougou Burkina Fasoand I promise to write back. Here goes : 1. I went over to the blue resaurant one morning for an omelette sandwich. There were no other customers and the woman who runs it was sitting on the back steps handing out pills to her children. After the standard greeting I examined the pills. One kind was in a round white bottle with a label in English stating that the World Health Organization had distributed them in an effort to eliminate lymphatic filariasis. The other was in a brown plastic tray covered with foil. On the foil was printed a label, the first part in French and the last two sentances in English: Keep away from sunlight, heat, and humidity. By prescription only. Keep out of reach of children. Do not swallow. For vaginal use only.

The kids were sucking on them with goofy grins on their faces. They are always excited when I come by and one of them will pretend to use his karate moves on me. No doubt you can imagine the awkwardness and consternation I felt at that moment—how do you tell someone something like that? I asked what the pills are for; apparently they are supposed to cure white spots that appear on the tongue. I explained that the label said “do not swallow,” saying the words in English and then translating. That didn’t work – they were dissolving them in their mouths, not swallowing them. Finally I said that no, that wasn’t good either, that they had a certain use that I did not know how to explain, but that they were only for girls. At this, one of three men who’d come to buy tea helpfully did a graphic pantomime demonstration of the intended use of the pills. The woman nodded simply, got up, and made my sandwich and some tea. We did not mention it again, nor have I seen either kind of pill since that day.

Why would anyone manufacture pills and write the instructions in two languages – not one copy in each language, but half in each, so that you have to speak not either but both in order to avoid poisoning your child? And who sold her those pills, and what did they tell her? The first question must remain a mystery, but to find the answer to the second you have only to visit any of ten thousand village markets within any nearby country. You will find, among the thousands hundreds of stalls selling wrinkled vegetables, fabric, tools, and cheap imported goods, several specializing in Western drugs, or what look like them. You can talk with a man whose life is an itinerary of village markets to which he travels bearing a pair of suitcases full of pills, tablets, and capsules in various containers. He may not be able to read any of the labels, or anything else for that matter regardless of language. But most of those ignorant or desperate enough to play this kind of roulette are themselves “unalphabetized,” so he can fake it, gravely hear out your complaint, your history, your symptoms, and select a kind of pill of a certain size and color, and ask a price several times what he himself paid for it in a secretive exchange in a larger city some number of years ago. If the price is too high or you think he looks shifty, you can go to his competitor ten feet away, who may offer an assortment of ropes and carpenters’ tools in addition to his drugs.

The world is complicated my friend, and it is dangerous to invoke powers you don’t understand. Fortunately I don’t have to rely on either the suitcase drugs or the (more genuine) traditional healers. 2. I went to look for cow poop because I wanted to plant some trees near my house. I biked out to the place where they all go to drink in the afternoons and pulled out a plastic bag. Then I saw three men watching me from under a nere tree so I went over to greet them. I am proud to say that the following conversation, after the typical greetings and salutations, was all in Jula:

He: What are you doing here?

Me: I came to get some cow poop.

He: You came from Francie to get cow poop?

Me: No, I came from Ameriki.

He: Oh, that's all right then.

I started to pick some dry pieces up.

He: What are you doing? That's interdite!

Me: Really? Whose is it?

He: It's mine.

Me: OK, give me a cowpoop gift.

He: Ha ha ha ha ha.Best-

WHM

When we got to customs at the Mali-Burkina border, we had to get off the bus and wait in a line with our bags open. When I finally got to the front, the officer read my T-shirt.

He: So, you're from Peace Corps Guinea?

Me: Yes...

He. There is some problem in Guinea, isn't it so?

Me. Yes...

He. Well, you should not have left. There is no peace in Guinea.

Me. No, there is waaaay a lot of violence.

He. Your mission is not finished! You should have stayed and made them have peace. You have lost, I guess.

I finally understood, and threw back my head and laughed.

Me (wiping my eyes): Yes, yes, it is my fault. It was me who was charged with choosing a new prime minister. I chose Eugene Camara, and then everyone started rioting, so now I've had to flee...

He (relieved that I finally understood his joke): Ha ha ha! Well, go on through.

He didn't look in my bag.

So, see how Guinea has prepared me to appreciate Burkina: instead of harassing me for an hour trying to get a bribe, he tells me a joke. I could get used to this. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

We're in Ouagadougou (pronounced Wahgadugu) for six days of orientation, and then off to new villages to pick up classes two-thirds of the way through the year. I don't know where I'm going or even what language they're going to start teaching me tomorrow, but, whatever, man. It'll work out.

And:

(1) Birds in the sky above Kankan

(2) Downtown Kankan seen from our old digs. Fortunately we had relocated to outside the city before the January riots.

(3) The pitted road between Tokounou and Kissidougou

(4) The inside of my hut

(5) The guitar-maker, his children, the first and second attempts at guitar. Contrast the deadly serious and competent face with the evidence of the hole in the wrong side of the white guitar.

(6) The road to Moregbedou

(7) Fried plantains with Moussa

(8) Ferry across the Niandan, 10k from my door, as seen from the far (western) side

(9) Ibrahima and myself, holding Sidiki, in front of my hut

(10) Griot and hunter in Sidikourouma

Here are some pictures. We have:

(1) Conde and myself and curious children in his village, Sidikourouma

(2) The griot who sang our praises, with three hunters and kora

(2.5) The stream down the hill from Sidikourouma. This is the washing-clothes place; the filling-drinking-buckets place is upstream and uncrowded.

(2.9) My brother Sekouba and desertification on the plateau above my village. This is why the air is full of dust seven months of the year.

(3) A typical empty bush taxi in the center of my village, on the day I wanted to go to Kissidougou for Christmas. It didn't have enough passengers so it never left. Fortunately a passing car picked me and Moussa up. A car like this could easily handle seven adults, maybe a few babies, a trunk full of gasoline bidons, and three feet of baggage lashed to the roof, topped off by some chickens.

(4) Hal and I at the National Museum of Mali. Note the heavily irrigated grass.

Not much happens here in Tubaniso (our facility on the Niger in Bamako). Or rather, I have not made much happen. Once again I have to hit myself over the head with

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

but while this may be technically true, it takes a lot more effort here than it did au village in Guinee. Two nights ago I walked down to the river and found a guy who gave my his pirogue for an hour; it was great to paddle out on the water. Giant barges labored up the river, going who knows where (to guinea?) and the sky was bright with yellow glare from a complex across the way. But I've passed most of my days idly sitting around, eating a lot, playing ping-pong etc. Unfortunately my chess opponent was one of the first to go home. Other days I go into Bamako but the novelty has worn off and the smog and touristy stuff annoys me. Other days are devoted to waiting in lines for medical tests and the continuing admin paper shuffle.

The dentist yesterday was an unexpected exception to the tedium. The bus dropped about ten of us off in front of an unmarked door in a three-story building on a random street downtown. After we milled around for a minute, Dr. Jen took the lead and started up the stairs. I hung back and, once I was the last one outside, asked the owner of a boutique: this is the dentist, right? His face lit up with an entirely too enthusiastic grin and he laughed. "Yes! Yes, it's up there." He thought this was very funny, and I suppose something was.

I went up the stairs and around a corner to find everyone sitting in a small, clean room with mirrors covering almost every wall and door. It gave the room the appearance of being much larger and more crowded than it actually was. Two trees growing from pots were the only colored objects in the place. A large framed sketch occupied the only non-mirrored wall, depicting a fierce naked woman strangling an oversized eagle, which had one claw stretched out to rake her thigh. A small sign, printed off from Microsoft Word, was posted to the door:

Dr. xxxxx xxxx, Dental Surgeon.

We pray you, do not touch the plants.

The dentist soon appeared, seeming surprised that there were ten of us. "They said that only two were coming, but it is no problem, only we will take a break at eleven for a different patient, yes?" We had known we'd be there all day, so this was not a surprise, although I wondered if the fact that there was only one non-PC patient on the books for the day was a good endorsement of the clinic. Rose bravely volunteered to be the first to be examined, and accordingly was shown through another mirrored door. She came back half an hour later looking slightly shaken. By the time it was my turn I had high expectations, and they were not disappointed.

I had noticed in Guinea that people who know a little English are always eager to use it and to learn more. I did the same thing with the languages I'm learning, but I've noticed that some situations are not appropriate as language tutoring sessions. So, when the dentist said something incomprehensible in "english," I responded in French: "I did not understand." He then switched to Franglais, which is actually the language spoken by most Peace Corps Volunteers. I lay down in the chair and was treated to, well, an enthusiastic teeth-cleaning which inspired the kind of terror that amusement park rides can only aspire to. Meaning that, although you think you are staring death in the face, you are actually safe and can even enjoy it if you have the right temperament. My teeth emerged very clean and without some of those irritating bumps they used to have. Afterwards:

He: Il faut bien faire le Cleaning pour éviter les cavités.

Me: Nyeh!

He: Because ton dent de sagesse n'est pas encore bien sorti de la gencive.

Me: Nyeh.

He: OK, you can get up now. Do not be forgetting the wash-mouth.

Me: OK.

Peace Corps Guinea has officially been suspended. I had options: Go home; go home and re-enroll next summer; go home with option to re-instate to Guinea if it reopens within a year; stay in Mali for a three-month assignment; and transfer to any new African country that would take me. Of these, going home and reinstating to Guinea seemed the best, or would if I had any confidence that Guinea would reopen in a year. I don't, so I asked for a transfer. I had to choose between Lesotho and Burkina Faso, and after a brief period of indecision I opted for BF. I decided I was romanticizing Lesotho as a land of alpine rigor, and that it would probably not turn out to involve endless snowstorms, good music, isolation, deep thoughts, and herding. Better stick with the West African devil I know. Plus, I hear the schools in Burkina are less corrupt, which would allow me to be more effective than was possible in Guinea. We shall see.

I might have changed my mind if I had known that Burkina Faso doesn't want me until the end of next week. Another six days in this place and I might just... well. There's a giant film (that's fleem! in local language) festival in Ouagadougou and there's no room for us until then. Ghash.

Later

WM

By the way, my new address can be

Corps de la Paix

BP 6031

Ouagadougou 01

Burkina Faso, West Africa

A good letter is worth a lot, in fact more than package of food, since there is already lots of food here, and I don't know what to do with the trash. But both give me a connection with home. Thanks for sending so many.

One night in January I came back to my hut and found a scrap of paper torn in several pieces by the door. I had written on it:

Arianbale 3.5

Fese 4

Sobalia 3.5

These were the names of villages after Sidikourouma, the one I mention in the previous entry, and the distances between them. I met a man named Bangalyfule who'd mastered the reed flute and offered to teach me, if only I'd come visit him there in Sobalia for a few days. Unfortunately, Guinea is ruled by an obdurate and dangerous man who's determined to squeeze every drop of profit from his plantation with no regard to anything else. The national trade unions went on strike the 10th of January, whereupon I was forbidden by Peace Corps to leave my village as we waited to see what would happen. I sat there for two weeks+ with nothing to do (school being canceled at the first whiff of trouble), knowing that my teacher was only a few hours away by bike but unwilling to disobey the mandate. At first I thought I could just wait for things to get back to normal, and then as the crisis heated up I was genuinely unwilling to leave. You wouldn't have noticed anything in my village, Tokounou, except that the school stayed closed, and that's hardly unusual anyway. But riots and demonstrations broke out in the cities to the north and south, and the Volunteers who were stuck there for the two weeks had an unpleasant time of it. In all 59 people were killed in the protests, most of them on Monday, Jan 22nd, in Conakry. People who were closer to the action put their lives on the line to make a better future possible. Everyone in my village listened to the radio obsessively.

Peace Corps noticed that Volunteers were starting to run out of antimalarials, and that their gas tank to run the office in Conakry was running low. They decided to move us to Bamako for a few weeks to wait for the crisis to pass. It is not, we were repeatedly told, an evacuation, rather a month-long training.

When I got the word I debated myself for about two hours about leaving or resigning and staying on in the village. I had money to last for a while, and my village wasn't tense or remotely close to seeing violence. I didn't have endless antimalaria pills or any work to do, though, so I quickly dropped the idea. A trip to Bamako! I had planned to go there next summer anyway, so why not? We received encouraging news about the strike being negotiated away on the day they came to get me, so I figured we wouldn't be gone long. I said See You in the Morning and not Adieu to my friends. But, just to go through the the motions, I packed up all the objects in my hut and wrote three inventories, designating everything to various community members, like Bilbo Baggins, all with the proviso if I'm not back in a month. Why did I write three inventories? Do you know the principal?

I took some stuff, more than I need, but left a lot as well. It's probably healthy to do that once in a while. There were 70 people sleeping in the Kankan house when I arrived, and some had been on the road for days to get there. By contrast I suffered a two hour car ride, a sleepless night, and then an uneventful and speedy ride to Mali the next day.

Aside: I have learned about boils. It took me a while to recognize the egg hanging from the right side of my neck as such, but eventually I read our health handbook and realized the awful truth. Actually it was kind of exciting. It turned a variety of startling colors before it finally and anticlimactically oozed out. Sound familiar?

A SOMPNOUR was there with us in that place,

That had a fire-red cherubinnes face,

For sausefleme he was, with eyen narrow.

As hot he was and lecherous as a sparrow,

With scalled browes black, and pilled beard:

Of his visage children were sore afeard.

There n'as quicksilver, litharge, nor brimstone,

Boras, ceruse, nor oil of tartar none,

Nor ointement that woulde cleanse or bite,

That him might helpen of his whelkes white,

Nor of the knobbes sitting on his cheeks.

Although plenty of children in my village were sore afeard of my visage even before it had a boil. Maybe that would have changed in another year. And don't worry, my countenance has regained its usual radiance, thanks to powerful antibiotics and new soap.

Mali! A desert country, and a far more developed one than Guinea. Even just on the other side of the border we noticed bizarre and inefficient standards: cars where the baggage on top was less than half the height of the car. Seat belts, and one for each person. Electricity even in the tiny huts lining the road to sell meat, and on a few occasions TVs. Road construction. A team filling potholes! The clothes less worn. And everything much much more expensive. People, including women, speak French, and well, even when it's not strictly required for their work. Schools are open and relatively fair. Garbage trucks carry trash to the outskirts of town. All of this has happened in the last 15 years; Mali did then what Guinea is (hopefully) doing now. I'm glad to see it; otherwise I would have thought all of Africa was like Guinea.

We're living large off the federal dime here. We're lodged in a training center outside the city on the banks of the Niger, a gift to PC from the Malian government. Bamako has been fun to explore. I spent a day at the National Museum and saw some stuff, such as a long mask with gaping mouth and an antelope flowing out of the forehead, its antlers mingling with the hair; we hung out at the Marines' recently vacated compound and used their swimming pool and weights; I had a nice conversation with the guards outside a Lebanese supermarket; most of the zoo animals left me with a sense of tragedy (it's too bad they're mistreated, but there is also just not room in the world for that kind of wildness anymore. I can't complain because my ancestors made the same choices and I'm still making them today) but I did get to see an ostrich and a lion with uncomplicated delight; an encounter with prostitutes gave me a lot to think about and made me realize how much of a moral pedestal I unconsciously put myself on.

Despite the excellent food and scenic compound we are starting to get tense. 105 people, no matter how high-quality, in close quarters without anything to do is a recipe for trouble. Everyone is dealing with it differently; those who left new husbands or other significant Guineans behind are trying hard not to fall apart. So far we've been keeping busy and occupied with various projects and with a trip to a music festival in Segou, but there is a limit to our ability to stay sane.

So, I'm still in Mali. And I'm not going back to guinea anytime soon. Even the BBC is starting to carry the story of the newly flaring violence in country. The agreement that ended the strike involved Conte naming a new prime minister who would more or less replace him as the head of state, in all but the title. For some reason, though, the unions left the choice up to Conte, with vague threats in the case that he chose wrong. I wonder if that wasn't because of splits within the opposition. Yesterday Conte named one of his most famous yes-men to the post, and he is realizing now that the choice was not a good one. Mostly he was sticking his tongue out at the unions and saying, ha, I duped you for another week. People rioted died again today even in cities that had been calm during the January strike. So we're not going back. I imagine that I'll be officially informed of this on Monday or Tuesday.

I was just at the point of understanding a little how my community worked; just at the point of becoming an effective teacher; just at the point of making close friends; just at the point of learning the reed flute; just at the point of making peace with the crowds of petites that swarmed constantly around my hut. I was starting to be able to distinguish between people being rude to me and people being polite in a foreign way. So I feel I'm leaving with the job only half-begun, like so many of my other endeavors. Could have, could have, could have, didn't, didn't, didn't.

What's next? Lots of paperwork, no doubt, and then... it feels seditious, but I'm thinking about transferring to another assignment in Africa. Niger looks interesting. I imagine they're delaying the announcement of suspending the program in Guinea until they can give us a concrete list of options, so I have a few days to be fuzzy. I am not even considering going back to Guinea alone, as I was a week ago. I don't want to be a burden on my community and I don't want to be robbed on the road. Guinea will be lawless for a while now, not that there was ever any organized police force outside the cities. I also don't want to go back to Ameriki yet, at least not for more than a week or two.

Tomorrow I'm looking forward to a long bike ride. Best,

Will

So yesterday, after waiting at the bank all day to get another brick of cash, I finally got the President of the Bank of Kankan's signature on a post-it note, shouldered my way to the guichet, and waited as the post-it note and my "card of expert" were parlayed into a check. They were out of money in the first line in which I waited, so I was led into a back room. It was a small place with glass dividers randomly distributed across it, and there were five or six men hanging out. The atmosphere was very informal: loud laughter, horseplay, jokes in Malinke. This contrasted strangely with the fact that everyone was wearing a suit, and more so with the giant bricks of cash, bound together with rubber bands in 2-million-GNF bricks, stacked up all across one table and filling several battered trunks. One guy was trying to stuff 50 million into a leather briefcase, not bothering to count it closely, since the largest bill is for 5000. I had my order filled, signed three pieces of paper, and walked out with my own brick. My friend Hal, who had also waited all day but who had been told his account was dry, put the brick in his backpack and we headed back across the city.

We got back to the house and I decided to go running. After two weeks at site I started keeping track of cumulative time spent and I was up to 10:10, ten hours of running in three months. I used to do that in a week. But there are various factors, not least the fact that I have other things to do and no-one to run with, that stop me. Anyway, I thought it would feel good to move after waiting in line all day.

I headed out of the PC house and down the red dirt path. If you think people stare at you when you're doing something normal, like walking down the street, you might imagine that doing something highly visible and eccentric like running would multiply the effect. But I found that it wasn't much different than usual: everyone stares anyway, and they can't use any more eyes than they normally do. What really provoked gasps of astonishment was when I exhorted crowds of children to run with me, in Malinke. An ye bori! An fila- An ye wa! Let's run! Us two- let's go! Like the Pied Piper I cruised off into the flat and deserted plain north of the bureau, along the ring road and past the airport, into the thick red sunset and a cloud of dust. Motos and cars passed me and the kids had long since been left behind. One of the motos was driven by a man, with a woman clinging to his back, with a baby held to her own back by a strip of red fabric. Another was driven by two girls laughing. After the airport I passed at least four soccer games at the side of the road, one after the other, boys having fun before dinner just as I was. The fumes got a bit heavy and I turned off the big road and down a winding track between heaps of rubbish, huts, and walled-off houses. Children pointed and squawked; young women giggled and looked away; one boy who didn't see me until I had almost reached him jumped in terror and sprinted away from me. I didn't speed up, and after a minute enough people were laughing at him that he sheepishly turned off the road and watched me pass harmlessly by. I wisely decided to turn back, and unwisely decided to improvise a short cut that added ten minutes to my route. But once I figured out where I was, that was fine. I felt good enough to tell myself I hadn't atrophied much and ran faster. Then this morning my calves were swollen and stiff and I had two new blisters on my toes. It was great, and now I'm up to 10:54. Having crashed and damaged my bike, I may have to run more often now.

And now for a glimpse of a world far away from piles of money and useless exercise. I visited Sidikourouma, a small village about 13k into the brush from my hut by the paved road. To me the road was barely passable by mountain bike, but apparently most of Kankan's oranges come down this road on camions. There's a big river, the Niandan, which I crossed by gondola, or rather by pirogue. The piroguier let me paddle. There's also a big ferry, which made me believe the reports of camions a little. I was going to evaluate the village as a possible site for an agriculture PCV, and I went with Konde, an enthusiastic chauffeur for Peace Corps who was born there. We arrived at dusk and spent a long time greeting his large family, who were very excited to see him. We sat on a bench eating raw manioc, and each old uncle and aunt and sibling came to shake hands. A crowd of children formed around us and stared at me, but dispersed as darkness fell and dinner called.

Apparently I was the first Toubabou to enter the village since Guinean independence in the 1950s (before that, French people sometimes came to levy a large fraction of the rice harvest). They threw a big fete for my arrival, for showing off their hospitality and also because Conde had told them about the possibility of installing a Volunteer. People came in from nearby villages to see it. There was a griot, drummers, balafons, a kora, and ten or fifteen women dancing in a circle of hundreds of kids, a few teenagers, and 60 old people. Conde and I were seated in big wooden chairs at one end of the circle. It was cool. After a few minutes heartfelt speeches were exchanged by the Imam, another old man, the griot, and (awkwardly) myself, Conde translating into Malinke. I tried to thank them and said it was one of the greatest honors I'd ever received; I now regret modifying the superlative. I said it was rare in 2006 to find a village that could turn down a lucrative timber-export deal for the sake of their children (they had). Actually, I only tried to say that and other things in French, but I'm sure Conde's retranslation into Malinke smoothed over the rough edges and added some rhetorical flourishes besides. His version was certainly about five times as long as mine. It went over well.

After this we had one final dance. The griot took the kora and started singing the praises of all of Konde's ancestors, and a lot of other things besides. He spun and danced around in the circle as he sang and played. Three old men dressed in bright white robes followed him around the circle, doing a slow shuffling dance and cradling guns, to represent the hunters of the village. Then some of the kids next to me gasped and everyone looked over.

An ancient, thin man, also dressed in white and carrying a gun, had pushed his way into the circle, preceded by a kid holding his hand. His bearing was striking. He held himself high, the head straight up and shoulders square, and looked directly ahead with the intense dignity of one who has learned to live with a great and undeserved misfortune. The three hunters made way and the child led him to the from of the procession and then slipped into the crowd. Conde whispered to me that he'd once been the simbon, the greatest hunter of all of the surrounding villages, but was now blind. He did the dance with the others, moving rigidly and with strength, accepting the correcting hands of those who turned him when he strayed out of line.

Then I went back to my village and thought about teaching the Pythagorean Theorem to a bunch of listless tenth graders. It's hard to avoid the impression that the world's going downhill sometimes.

Best,

Will

The average Guinean student, like the average student in any country, goes to school because his friends do and because his parents want him to. He, and it usually is he, does not think much about the ways in which school will be useful in ten years; at best he is motivated by the prestige of getting good grades or of understanding the curriculum. Maybe this is a bad idea, but you can't criticize students for it; I certainly would not have met a higher standard when I was in junior high. If good grades are sufficient motivation, a well-run school should be able to

give students tools that will later be useful to them regardless of their reasons for learning.

My junior high is, by that standard, poorly run. For most students, school consists of an exercise wherein the teacher writes a bunch of words on the board to be copied verbatim. After the course, the student has a beautifully written notebook, with headings in red and text in blue, titles underlined with rulers, and he understands nothing of what's inside it and can in no way apply it to reality. Math and science are particularly bad in this regard. Since it takes until 9th grade before they really understand French, they enter 9th grade with the math level of maybe our 3rd graders. The ambitious syllabi we have to follow are mostly incomprehensible.

So if you're a student sitting one of these classes, chances are that everything the teacher writes is for you a kind of magic, a foreign language, a useless manipulation of symbols for the sake of mental exercise. Your smart friend gets most of it, and you admire her for it, but for 85% of the class school is a waste of time. But it gets you out of field work, and you get to wear the uniform when you walk through town in the mornings and hold a notebook, so you sit through it every day. Needless to say, junior high students have a hard time sitting in silence for one minute listening to something they understand; two hours of material that holds no interest is just not realistic.

On the other side of the room is Sekou Toure, the idealistic and naive American who just came from a university where exams were given without supervision. He's worked hard to prepare the lesson and he really wants you to take it seriously and understand it. To you this is hilarious and arrogant at the same time-- as though he thinks he can actually do you any good. So you listen quietly for a few minutes and then get bored and start talking to your friend. This is where things start to get interesting; the white guy thinks everyone should listen to him and try to figure it all out. He's the only teacher who gives homework, and he gives a lot every class (some students, those sellouts, actually do it).

He thinks it's rude to talk when he's talking. He thinks it's rude to stand up, yawn, and spit out the window in the middle of a lecture. He thinks it's rude to walk in half an hour late. We have a discipline problem, and as long as you don't get punished, that's hilarious too. Even those who don't speak much French understand that very well.

So, as you can see, the greatest challenge for me so far is not pedagogical but disciplinary. I hate to admit that some of my students don't care. I want to think math could be useful to all of them. I want to be respected and I want to be friends with my students, many of whom are my own age or older. The problem is that I also want them to learn a lot of math, and I have a govt-mandated syllabus to follow and a national exam to prepare them for, and I don't have time to spend three hours a week asking them to be politely quiet.

At first, I was nice like a college professor who puts a shaky faith in the maturity of the student body. I laughed at their jokes and waited for them to be quiet. I accepted latecomers and even random students whose teachers didn't show. I tolerated a small hum of conversation. But the small hum became a chaos, the latecomers multiplied, the jokes became rude, and class slowed to a crawl. Always there were the four or five who wanted to learn math, sitting quietly and wondering why I couldn't control the class. I failed them for months.

One day I observed the French professor's class. He's not much older than I am, so I thought he would have the same problems. I was astonished to discover that everyone was on time. The teacher walked in a few minutes late and the class stood and fell dead silent. He sat at his desk facing everyone and opened a notebook. He read silently for a minute and they watched in silence before he told them to sit down. Then he told the chef de classe to call roll. Half an hour after the class was supposed to start, he began the lesson. The lesson, on descriptions seemed pretty innocent to me; it consisted of a definition (a description is a story, account, or chose that gives the reader four kinds of information about...) and then various examples of how to describe things. The pace was very slow and those students who wanted to tune out did. But they were silent the whole two hours. At one point someone in the back muttered something to his friend. The teacher paused midsentence and raised an eyebrow, and silence was restored immediately.

So I decided they could treat me with the same respect and have been trying to figure out how to get there. I force myself to do some things which feel mean. At first, I still ask a student to be silent once. The second time, I have the chef write down his name. The third time, I kick the student out and report him to the principal, who then forces the student to kneel on a concrete floor for fifteen minutes, or beats him with a cane. On the hand, as you read about in frontier American schools 150 years ago. It's not pleasant.

According to David Bevington, Richard II is about the conflict between "a sensitive but flawed ruler and his efficient but unlovable successor." And indeed, the sensitive and idealistic Will Mitchell that came to Guinea has in some ways been deposed by a more pragmatic, effective, calloused, and ruthless Will Mitchell. I wonder if this experience is common to many new teachers.



The experiment is bearing fruit. Already the classes are better behaved, and the students who care are getting something done in class. Those who don't are at least pretending to follow along. The real troublemakers are still testing my limits, and I fear I'll have to make more examples when school resumes in January. Oppression and crowd control are parts of my job now. But because of this I actually get to do the interesting parts of the job, which is still fun and now actually happens occasionally. The last lesson of December went very well: I gave out equilateral triangles on white paper and had everyone trace the Sierpinski triangle. During break I'll tape them all up to make a giant one at the back of the room, and hopefully I'll be able to post a photo of all of us in front of it in a few months. Afternoon review sessions are still productive and fun, since only those 10-15 students who care show up.

In the interest of not depressing you, I will say nothing about a problem I have with my fellow teachers and the principal, many of whom see no problem with "student-teacher dating."

I went down to Kissidougou for Christmas, which was great and relaxing. Being constantly surrounded by a different culture can make you seasick after a while; it was nice to be among people who shared my assumptions about what's normal and acceptable and what's not. We were 8 volunteers, plus one former volunteer who works for an NGO and has just married a Guinean. We ate well, really well, sang carols, opened presents, etc. The most unexpected part was when one of the older volunteers broke into uncontrollable sobbing at the tragedy of Frosty the Snowman:

Frosty the Snowman knew the sun was hot that day,

But he said 'let's run

And we'll have some fun

Now before I melt away.'

Ah, the foreknowledge of one's own mortality. I was the only education volunteer, I was by far the youngest, I've been in Guinea for the least amount of time, and I came here straight from school. I felt green that weekend, which is probably very good for me.

Now I'm in Kankan trying to draw my exorbitant salary from the bank; if all goes to plan I'll be back au village for the fete of Tabaski on Sunday, the biggest event on the village calendar. From there we have another week of break and then, if there's no strike, natural disaster, or laziness it's back to opressing the world's youth. I personally am doing well although I'm slightly scrawnier than usual. But I bought a lot of potatoes and beans in Kissidougou and plan to cook for myself more often now.

That's it for now. Keep the emails coming! Best,

Will

My fellow volunteers are excellent. You can't imagine what it's like to roll into Kankan after waiting all day for a dusty bush taxi ride, walk across the dark city for an hour, and finally arrive bone tired at the courtyard of the compound, and then to hear people speaking English, and to see the remnants of a real american thanksgiving dinner strewn across a long table. (I drank some cold turkey gravy. On Saturday we're going to roast a goat, so I will get my feast.)

It's amazing to me how well I relate to these people, most of whom I have spent almost no time with. One night last month I dragged a mattress out into the living room (we're still disorganized from the move) and lay down with eight or nine others. The conversation, with the lights out, had started without me. I was baffled:

"A drive-by shooting of crows."

"A cannabalism of crows."

"A genocide of crows."

"A defenestration of crows."

"A cyanide cult of crows."

"A stoning of crows."

This continued, and I listened, for at least an hour, and we came up with ever more exotic and gruesome forms of deaths "of crows." I contributed a few myself, without understanding what we were talking about (I was quite proud of "a syphilis of crows"). Eventually this petered out and we all fell asleep. I asked someone the next day what had happened. Apparently we had been speculating on how a public-relations firm might respond to an embassy from the crows, requesting that they come up with a new name for a group of crows. A gaggle of geese, a herd of cows, a murder of crows. Not the best image, huh?

What an idiotic conversation to spend two hours on. I love it.

My stay in Tokounou continues to be educational, fun, and safe. The guitar is almost finished (he had to start over after cutting the hole in the wrong side). More news as events warrant...

Peace,

Will

So, recently I was headed from my village off to Kankan, and it was a typical bush taxi ride. Specifically, the exhaust was puming into my face as opposed to out the back, the guy "next to" me was more accurately "sitting on my thigh," and we were making maybe 20 miles an hour when we weren't stopped for a breakdown. There are mile markers every 5k, so occasionally I'd have a moment of intense frustration as I realized that, in fact, I hadn't just missed the last four markers and we really were going really slow. I was thinking it would be good to do some biking and spare myself the pain next time. Even at 125k, it couldn't take much longer. We came up on three massive cows crossing the road. One started to cross in front of us. The driver then revealed the lack of... brakes, by downshifting to slow a small amount before we crashed into it. There wasn't time to think about it, but right up to the last moment I was unconsciously sure that some unknown safety mechanism would swing into action and prevent tragedy. In fact, the car transferred some of its mechanical energy to the aforementioned object. I swear I saw the cow's flesh ripple at the instant of impact; then we hit the skeleton and knocked her back a few feet. Fortunately the cow didn't fall or stumble and was able to get out of the way before we hit her again. Otherwise...

In thinking back on this I am most struck by my actual belief that something would intervene and save the day. I have never seen violent death and do not really accept that the laws of physics operate on animal just as on celestial bodies.

By the title you can surmise that school has started. We're doing factorizations. Some of the students are indeed lazy fools, but some are very motivated. I hold review sessions three times a week in the afternoons and some of them come and stay for three hours. So I no longer feel completely useless.

As for salinity I will let you wonder. Later

Will