Words words words. I don't know how to start. It's becoming the dry season now, daily rains giving way to long hot dusty days. The school is deserted, the teachers and students moving back into the deep village for harvesting. It's quiet.

I've found that my frustrations and cynicisms and despairs pile up over time. Like shoots of tough savanna grass they grow green and fresh in isolation and a fertile disposition, before they turn brown dead and dry as time marches on. Like an unkempt garden these frustrations grow into a prickly thicket, eventually obscuring even tomorrow's limitless promise and possibility. The process is gradual but the effect is cumulative.

But the clearance happens suddenly like a flame front across the plains. Instantaneous. An experience, a good experience, sometimes only a moment, so powerfully good that it wipes out weeks of the thorny nagging underbrush leaving behind only fresh scorched earth. Clean fertile earth to try it all over again. The lows are powerfully low, but the highs are intoxicating in their intensity. Cycles of despair and euphoria.

We finished up the term. And it finished.

Before we as a staff collectively broke huddle for the year we congregated for one last event, the end of year staff party. The event started late and there were long speeches from bloviating politicians (or rather their junior emissaries) and blah blah blah. That's not important. We ate a tremendous spread of fried chicken, cassava, pasta, rice, goat, beef, fish, salad and then Got. It. On.

A sound system was hired and several crates of beer were ordered and we started doing togetherness. In the past I've been hesitant to linger too long at these get togethers, perhaps equal parts sober concern for my reputation and a middle school boy's fear of the dance floor. The music is a reggeton/afro/acholi quick beat that made me look exactly what you think a white guy dancing with a bunch of African's would look like. Enough to shatter any delicate male ego.

With a single beer's assistance I set sail on those turbulent seas, trying to find paths of rhythms and the crests of bass lines. Mr. Okema saw me swimming (sinking) and came to my aid. "Uh huh, good!" as he choreographed "Now do like this." And I started to get it kinda. Either that or more likely I picked up another bottle of assistance.

(Digression: I don't know if there's a name for it but the night's weapon of choice was a big 500ml bottle of Senator beer spiked with a shot of Waragi gin. For the home bartender: buy a bottle of the cheapest high octane beer you can find, leave it in the sun for a day or so and then, still warm, open it and add some vodka or gin (any kind that comes in a plastic bottle will do) and drink it. Hooray!)

The tribal dance here is incredible. The Acholi school children win the national dance competitions on the regular and for good reason. Hips neck feet and drums in a flurry of coordinated contortions and culture. It's a joy to live in this region and witness these things. What would those bored screen addled American suburbanites give to have a culture like this, all they own?

So there I was. We were. The syncopated bouncing mob. Boozy, happy, dancing. Gaining confidence and BAC I was beginning to surf the lines of music. First was the school secretary Filda, maternal, unusually exuberant, though characteristically dignified as she approached and bounced and danced, circling around ululating. She flipped off back into the mass of now sweating bodies but she had opened the floodgates. Some recently graduated A level students, staffers, teachers, wives of teachers, children of teachers, students of children of wives of teachers (just kidding) all had a go at me.

One young woman came at me gale force in a hurricane of confidence, hips and vitality. A thick woman in an ankle length dress and covered shoulders who radiated a sexuality more fierce than her thin designer jean gym toned counterparts in college bars across America. She was a force. FORCE. I've never felt anything like it. As she trailed away she glanced back over her shoulder looking like "I just launched you into outer space, huh." Raised eyebrows and a noiseless whistle was my only reply. Because I had already torn past the moon and Mars and was zipping by Neptune.

At three thousand feet per second.

As I made the solitary walk home from the party, head still buzzing from cheap alcohol and the peculiar electricity that I imagine is only felt among the flirtatious youth, I realized that this had been the best party I had ever attended. It wasn't the food, the dancing, the drinking though they all played their part. It was the sense that I had finally found the people around me and that they had found me. For one night we punted everything out the window and just became people. People with faces and fingers and toes. I didn't feel like a white guy, an American, a math teacher, any of that. I felt together.

And just like that weeks of frustration were razed to the ground and I get to start fresh all over again. Two days later and I'm still glowing. I chased off three people who thought I was away and had come to rob my house. I fished a dead rancid rotting lizard out of my sofa cushions when I noticed the horrible smell. I ate beans and rice for three hundred and eightieth sixth time. But I don't care. I love it here. The highs tower above the lows.

The next morning I woke up early and went to get a cup of milk tea and a plate of cassava. I saw a co-reveler from the night before. He politely inquired about the status of my hangover (incredibly non-existent) before, like a proud father, adding, "You learned a lot last night."

And I was like "yeah."

One of the Volunteers here had originally joined in the '60s and had served briefly in Somalia before getting evacuated to India. I bought a guitar when I first arrived here (that would be failed teach my self guitar attempt number 3) and he came over for Thanksgiving and played it. He described his guitar playing as a nice relic of his first stint in Peace Corps and it's something that made an impression on me. Relics of Peace Corps service. I've picked up a couple languages, read a bunch of good books, filled up my passport and made some life long friends.

I was in the staff room one morning preparing some of my lesson notes when the fine art teacher, Mr. Okema, pulled up at my table as asked if he could sketch me. Do I have to pose? Nope. Well sure, fire away. I continued working and he started sketching and by the time I had finished my notes he had a rough sketch on paper. He fleshed it out for two full days, then he colored it in and gave it to me as a present. I've become so image desensitized probably due to the ubiquity of digital cameras and the way they can machine-gun images out into the world. I hadn't even considered having my portrait done by an artist. I had forgotten that that was an option.

It was such a valuable thing to receive as a gift. It was a time consuming labor of love executed by a friend of mine exercising his considerable talent for my benefit. And it was unsolicited. It is, perhaps, my favorite gift and once framed will be a very tangible relic of my Peace Corps service.Candid shots are so difficult here. The only thing more conspicuous than being the one white guy at a 1,000 person strong gathering is to be a white guy holding a camera. Most shots taken by local photographers are posed portrait shots. During big events when everyone is all dressed up, there is a village photographer who goes around snapping portraits and charging about 30 cents a piece to develop them. He comes back several days later with a messenger bag full of pictures which he returns to his customers. I have no idea how he keeps track of who has paid for what photograph but he seems to be doing good business as he's got customers whenever he's around.

Now there is a very real possibility that I am missing several layers of nuance and subtlety but 90% of these posed portraits look exactly the same. It's a very formal affair. No smiling. Rigid posture. Looking off into the distance and never at the camera. It was kind of funny at first but with a memory card full of rather bland portraits I've been trying to figure a way around it. I snapped the above shot of the kids from my lap while someone was giving a speech.

Kids here are left pretty much unsupervised by around the time they can walk. The ever quotable Mr. Owiny quips that the children here "just move anyhow, as if they were goats" which probably doesn't help paint the picture for you as you're likely not familiar with free range goats. If the child is still crawling they're put under the charge of a (not much) older sibling. It is quite common to see a girl of about 8-10 years with a baby wrapped to her back with a piece of fabric while she fetches water or fire wood.

There's another aspect about the village children that I really struggle to articulate. It's like they're not really viewed as people or at least as a person with a name and personality. Any boy is called merely "boy" and girls are called "girl" in lieu of a name. It's impossible (for me) to tell which child belongs to which family and where they are supposed to be and when. Free range children I guess.

Well yeah.Before I got the new ones in a care package, I thought my orignal t-shirts were still white. Nope.Fourth of Ju-ly and long exposure sparklers.Veranda sunsets. It's something like this every night.Hell kittens from hell! 5 kittens, no cat mother, it almost broke me. IT ALMOST BROKE ME!

I suffer increasingly powerful anxiety when I'm around...whatever, let's just say it....white people. My Peace Corps brothers and sisters don't really count because we all bathe, figuratively speaking, in the same bucket of dirty water. So generally any white person in Uganda outside of about 140 people mildly freak me out for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me.

Sure I spend a fair amount of time at my site and those prolonged exposures naturally change the way I talk and think and act to the point where western small talk absolutely flummoxes me. Peace Corps talk inevitably devolves (evolves?) towards global politics, the weighty metaphysical, the Development Carnival or... poop (and the quality/consistency of). Village talk with my teaching colleagues usually centers around rain (the absence/presence of) and how "stubborn" our students are (very stubborn).

(Quick aside: A bunch of us were at a bar where we met this German backpacker who was traveling through East Africa. "Oh you guys are in Peace Corps? You guys are all the same, you sit around drinking beer and talking about how much you hate being in Peace Corps." He had a beer with us and then went on his merry little way. When he left, we kept drinking beer and now talked about how much we hated German backpackers. I will always grudgingly admire that man for speaking truth to power or at least truth to a bunch of smelly inebriated PCVs. In our defense I would argue that most of our complaining in merely venting and most of us cherish our experience and opportunities here.)

None of these things (metaphysics, global politics, poop) really interest anyone outside of Peace Corps or at least not in the context of oh-hey-here-we-are-standing-in-line-at-the-supermarket-together conversations. I was in Gulu buying supplies (Gulu is like the regional capital of northern Uganda and the armpit of the Developement Juggernaut) and some guy noticed my Twins hat and started in with the baseball small talk. I felt a constriction in my chest and the normally free flowing opinions regarding bowel movements or the ongoing NATO led Libyan "intervention" slowed to a trickle. Nothing I was comfortable talking about fit the scenario so I stammered out some platitudes about Liriano and darted away as quickly as possible. I don't think this affliction hits all the other PCVs to the same extent as it does me but I'm positive it's there in some shape or insidious form.

Right. I'm at the Johannesburg airport to see the Africa Region Peace Corps Medical Officer (or AR PCMO in Peace Corps parlance) located in the PC regional headquarters. If you're afraid of white people airports are like the seventh circle of hell. But anyways there I am in the Johannesburg airport waiting in line to get my passport stamped and doing my best to be non-nondescript. Like actively thinking about looking non-nondescript lest some passerby make the mistake of talking to me about anything other than, for example, Ayn Rand's hypocritical rejection of idealized socialism via a book touting an idealized capitalism. I'm wearing headphones and sun glasses more to discourage potential interlocutors than for entertainment or fashion purposes respectively. My hands are tightly locked to the straps of my backpack because I've consciously decided it's likely to draw the least amount of attention while giving me the added bonus of having something to hold, tightly, on to. Occasionally I glance up from the floor to monitor the progress of the customs que lest I inadvertently am holding it up (thereby drawing attention to myself) and that's when I saw her.

She's mid forties, tall, thin, blonde and I suppose attractive, though what really catches my eye is what she's wearing. The first layer is your standard issue khaki cargo (too) shorts and muti pocketed button down short sleeve shirt which, while a bit silly on any occasion, is not out of the ordinary among safari tourists. But the "over layer" of this first layer is a distressed leather frilled frock/vest that is too large to be a vest but too short to be a free standing dress (hence my "frock"). Imagine a blonde hippy from the late '60s trying to dress like a Native American but without the beads. Frilled like that but more so. And instead of hippie think aging yuppie. I'm trying to avoid the word garish but I can't. It was garish. And expensive. There are some articles of clothing, or maybe ensembles, that you can just look at and realize "Whoa that must have cost a lot of money." She also carried a handsome canvas travel bag again in her alliterative khaki color. Naturally this whole array was crowned with oversize sunglasses and an audacious safari hat. She didn't look like she had come from a safari so much as she looked like she was trying to look like she came from a safari. An expensive safari. She was making a statement.

I should interject that from where I left I bought a banana for less than ten cents from a bare footed woman clad in what would be described in America as "rags" with a bunch of bananas carried on her head like the Chiquita banana lady. The contrast between that and the slick cleanliness of the Jo-burg airport already had me reeling even without including the airport chic fashion show.

I was mesmerized. I wish I could have taken a picture but that would have been decidedly conspicuous and anti-nondescript. No sooner had the question "is she married?" scrolled across my mind then I saw, who I assumed to be, her husband who was dressed like the spitting image of The Man in the Yellow Hat from the Curious George children's books.

Are these people real? Where are they going? Do they dress like this all the time? Maybe this is the "jet set" and they dress according to the airport they will be parading through. If that's so, is this their Africa get up? Do they have a special sub-Saharan Africa get up? Better yet, do they have an even more specific sub-Saharan Big Game Safari Outfit to contrast with a a Just General Safari Outfit? Do they also have a sub-Saharan designer Desert Nomad airport chic outfit for Addis Ababa? Freaks! FREAKS!

While these thoughts and observations are tumbling through my mind I snap back into white people paranoia mode and notice the customs que is about to pass me by. To avoid the stern looks and any chance of possible brief (!) conversations I quickly scuttle off through customs, dutifully avoiding the eye contact of any passerby.

There are millions of experiences out here for the experiencing and perhaps the most poignant is the experience of being a minority. Dispatches from the frontier: being a minority sucks.

I can't disappear, I can't fade into the background. I'm always on display. Sometimes it's not so bad and some days it's unbearable but it's something that never comes off and never goes away.

My otherness is impossible forget as each day brings subtle, flat and overt reminders addressed as offhand comments or jeering children or slurring drunks. As tiresome as these things can be, especially one year in and one to go, they bruise only. More than insults and irritation it's the isolation. There are some things that nobody in my ever really "gets." Somethings I can't explain to even the most willing, educated, kindly people in the township. The people I consider to be my closest friends. I don't have the words. And if I do, they don't have the ears. They listen politely but they don't understand.

More than the harassment it's this isolation that festers.

But like nearly every hardship I face in Peace Corps I can stand outside of it, to some extent, as my life here has a two year expiration date. None of my challenges are permanent and that's comforting. It's like in middle school when some teacher duck tapes your thumb to your palm for the day. It sucks but not too much because you know it's only for the day. Owing, perhaps, to the time bound nature of the experience I am afforded a rather clinical perspective of my own frustrations.

Sometimes.

skee doo bop bop bom-ba way ow whoa whoaoh whoa whoa

ho ho hoopatupa tupawam ba whoawhoa whoa

yeah.

Crawling (and occasionally flying) out there in this fine wide world is a little beetle whose body is packed with caustic acid. When this insect is squashed, the acid smears onto the skin of the sqausher and causes a rather nasty chemical burn. It would be a decent defense mechanism except I've never even seen one. You see, I can't avoid swatting them because they crawl around on me while I'm sleeping.

(Actually, this doesn't really bother me all that much. The crawling while I'm sleeping thing. I can't say I'm pumped about it, but I'm sure there are plenty of things creeping around on all of us whether it's in Uganda or America. You see, most of the night time crawlers are considerate enough to practice "Leave No Trace" ethics and I wake up the next morning none the wiser. Great.)

For whatever reason, I have a sub-concious Kung Fu reflex and I keep swatting them dead in my sleep and waking up with these nasty chemical burns. This is my third such burn, the first on my face. When the burn is on your face it's apparently called "Nairobi Eye." I have no idea how they've managed to (repeatedly) gain access to my net covered bed.

I don't want to moan about my health problems too much, it's bad form, but I've gotten walloped pretty good the past couple months. Torn (?) ACL and meniscus, esophagus burn from my malaria meds, the flu, and these damn beetles...sheesh. Don't tell my mom but there was a case of Ebola in Uganda earlier this month. During training, while seemingly half of my group was suffering from persistant gastro-intestinal problems and I was regular as a Twins first round playoff exit, I made the mistake of bragging about my good health. This is what come-uppens feel like, it seems.

But, you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and then you have...

Sub-saharan Africa is a lot of things and one of those things happens to be the dumping ground of the consumer world. The t-shirts you donate to the Salvation Army eventually end up here (and oddly enough Japan) where they are sold in unsorted bundles to market vendors for about $100 a bundle. This phenomenon can be followed to its conclusion where local textile manufacturing has been steam rolled by the impossible task of competing with second hand goods and those firms have mostly run for the hills. The textile industry has historically been one of the first "rungs on the development ladder" for developing countries and it has been argued that the knee capping of this industry by the second hand clothing market has contributed to the rather lowsy state of economic affairs in Uganda specifically and Africa generally. But that's an argument for another day and another post.

For a variety of reasons (poor regulation and lack of domestic competition are my bets) the quality of new things is generally terrible. It's better to buy just about everything here second hand. Of course the vendors know this, because it's their business to know this, so second hand goods actually cost more than most new goods. A good example is soccer cleats. Ugandans love soccer and know the equipment very well. You can purchase crappy Chinese cleats brand new for about $10 that fall apart in a month or second hand cleats for about $20 that will last you a couple years.It's hard to get a good bargain on anything related to soccer because it's a product that is much better understood by the market vendors than it is by me. Outdoor gear is the opposite case because the vendors don't know the brands. I picked up this North Face Windstopper fleece for $3, they're going for about $125 on ebay. Though now that I'm doing a web search it is possible that mine's a fake and that's why it ended up going to the Salvation Army in the first place.I bought this Camelback backpack for about $15 and they usually go for about $75. There's something off about the bag though. The guy seems to have a supply of them as he sold identical seemingly new bags to me and my buddy on separate occasions for the same price. Originally I imagined that he hijacked a Camelback truck and was selling them off one by one. Though after a couple months of ownership we both noticed that the bags have the relatively minor defect of a crappy label. My current guess is that these bags were rejected by quality control and dumped here at a fraction of the price.

You never really know what you're getting new or second hand although you can generally be sure that whatever it is you buy is defective in one way or the other. The people here know that too and sometimes I wonder if that idea is internalized.

I don't think I've bothered to explain transportation here. The transport here is a rather large improvement over what it was in Guinea, but that says more about the sorry state of Guinea than it does about Uganda.

There is a fairly decent network of major arteries spreading through the country and plenty of vehicles to get you where you need to go. There are buses, private compact vehicles, taxi vans (matatoos) and motorcycles (forbidden!).

PCVs have an ongoing who's-been-in-the-fullest-taxi-game. Adults count as one, children count as one half, and chickens and drivers count as zero. The most I've heard is 23 in a taxi with a 14 person carrying capacity.

This what it looks like outside my front door these days. Perhaps you can compare with the photo taken a couple months ago. Same mango tree, different season.

We're in the heart of the dry season right now. It began in November and will continue until the end of February. I would previously gripe about the mud and general sogginess of the wet season but I have been reformed! The rain keeps down the dust and provides merciful coolness to the hot grasslands of northern Uganda.

The dry grass is also regularly set ablaze by the villagers for reasons not entirely understood by me. I have been told by it's done for aesthetics, replenishing soil nutrients needed for agriculture, or assisting hunters in their quest for game meat (the Ugandan Cob is a regional favorite).

I find the whole endeavor to be madness. The constant grass fires kick up waves and waves of wispy ash that coat nearly every interior part of my house. The fires quickly spread beyond the purview of the originator across vast stretches of plains. Grass thatched huts in their path can be set ablaze like dry Christmas trees. The whole territory now looks somewhat post apocalyptic.

But, hey, it is what it is.

I'm praying for rain.

Pony tail ahoy!

It may come as some surprise to those back home but until two days ago I hadn't updated my journal since August. My track record with letter writing is even worse and you can see how poorly I've been updating my blog. The first months at site have been a struggle. Though hardly the black death of loneliness and isolation I expected, it has taken all of my available faculties to tread water. Apparently these same over taxed faculties are also responsible for my journaling and letter writing.

I recently (and smugly) underlined the passage: "A neck tie is a noose inverted and if you're not careful it will hang you just the same" from the "The Life of Pi" as if it were a reaffirmation of my beard and pony tail life style.

One of the things that enticed me, and I imagine others like me, to the Peace Corps was the idea of living on the edge of the known world. Going farther, deeper, better, faster, harder, stronger than would otherwise be available via the more traditional school-to-more-school-to-cubicle-to-office-railway. In private pre-departure moments I imagined myself a yogi of the African grassland, personally growing through rich cultural experiences followed by careful meditation and quiet reflection.

As I roll up on a year and half of skipping around the the world, my experience has been more "square peg pounded through round hole" than "Buddah of the Serengeti." I run, but sometimes walk, face first into brick walls nearly every day. That is to say, rewarding though it has been, the experience has not been without it's discomfort and contortions. Some of the very basic ideas about myself and society at large have been re-opened for debate and debate can be uncomfortable because it is uncertain. I won't be quite sure until I return home to my friends and family but I feel as if squared edges are being rounded.

Just recently I inherited a cat, actually kitten, from another PCV. Initially I named her J-Woww though after careful reflection she is now known as LeFleur the Cat. Her interests include sleeping, being insufferably noisy in the early morning and leaving disembowled rats and lizards on my living room floor. LeFleur the Cat is named in homage to a good friend of mine who has a predilection for yoga and terrible taste in movies.

The view right out my front door.

Teaching in Lira during training.

My students dug up a giant termite mound and proudly brought me the queen termite.

These guys are our friends. They eat mosquitoes.

Three months of running on dusty roads caught up to me and my lungs to the point where I could barely breathe. For the past week I've been taking an extensive battery of drugs for breakfast lunch and dinner. Six pills, a shot of cough syrup, and a beer.

Between a severe shortage of internet, a busy schedule, and just honest lethargy I haven't put a post up in months. I just wrapped up my first term as a math teacher and I'll be spending my holiday attending seminars for language and technical training before starting up with school again in late August.

Morale is a few degrees over luke warm at the moment, the bad days are ceding territory to the good, though I am happy with my progress as a teacher. My frustrations are not uncommon to any teacher or parent where the 'good' isn't seen until deep into the future and the bad is a nagging daily reminder. I'm generally happy with my students as they are improving, however slowly, though there is still so much work for us to do.

In any case here's an email I sent to my Peace Corpsing colleagues that hopefully you'll find amusing...it's the Peace Corps experience in a nutshell as you often find yourself in strange positions doing unexpected things. I'll get something better up soon, I promise!

Hey you people!

For the past two months I've been attending "wedding planning

meetings" for some lawyer in Gulu who is the OB of my head teacher.

This entails mostly sitting around and nominating each other to

various offices of power which is to say we do next to nothing for

about three hours every Sunday.

Now it has thus far been a breeze...I show up, throw down some cash,

sip my VIP Coca Cola, and carefully weigh the pros and cons of whether

Mr. Ojok or Mr. Odong would make a better Deputy Secretary of Litrugy

(Mr. Odong by a landslide by the way). Things have been humming along nicely for the past month or so but my obsolescence has been disturbed. I have been nominated as the Wedding Photographer.

You see I have photographed a couple of the events at the school and

church with my snap shooter and apparently the Head Teacher has taken

notice. He nominated me for the post (naturally neglecting to inform

me of his intentions prior to the meeting) telling the assembly of the

Gulu business set that "Mr. Jacob is a photographer at the MASTER

LEVEL. He will take wonderful pictures I am CERTAIN."

That's actually how he talks...he always puts tons of emphasis on the

last word of any sentence.

Anyways at first I was mildly (majorly) alarmed. I've never

photographed any event seriously and certainly nothing like a wedding! The guys throwing

down this wedding have the scrilla to hire a professional so I'm

assuming they're expecting professional quality. My nomination was

immediately called into question by the chairman of the planning commission as he questioned my experience and ability. My Head Teacher immediately launched into an impassioned defense of my unparalleled abilities as a photographer.

And sweet baby Jesus can my Head Teacher talk, he once gave a rousing

hour long speech to the morning assembly that touched on brochial

pnuemonia, poverty in Bolivia (of all places) and the importance of

sweeping the dirt outside your compound. Now I'm no fan of hour long

speeches but this one was down right majestic. When he gets some

momentum he can just roll like a freight train.

Anyways he's going on and on about how I should be the photographer

and eventually my mild (major) alarm gives way to righteous

indignation. How dare they! Goddamnit, I am a photographer at the

MASTER LEVEL! Who are they to question my nomination!

Naturally he convinced them (and me) that I was the only one for the

job so that is how I now find myself as the wedding photographer for

an event planned for the 24th of August. Guys, all of this has been a

very long and indirect way to get to my direct point:

If I don't have a decent camera for this thing I'm boned.

So, please, please, please with extra matoke on top does anyone have a

dSLR that I can borrow for this wedding? I will guard it with my life

and guarantee payment if it is returned to you in a condition in any

way less than it was lent. Hopefully I can get it at IST or after we

go rafting and return it to you in a most expedited manner.

My life is in your hands dudes. Look at me I want to repeat that. My

life is in your hands dudes. Dudes....My. Life. Is. In. Your.

Hands.

Love,

Jacob

(1)One of the weirdest things about going to Guinea was losing the ability to distinguish what was weird. Since there were so many new things to see and smell and eat and do; it was hard to tell the mundane from the truly bizarre. I felt emotionally monotone on a day to day basis but when I'd sit down to write a letter or pick up the phone to talk to people back home I would have a mental log jam of ideas. There was an overwhelming amount of context required for each story and so many stories to tell. I didn't even know where to start. I still don't know where to start. I guess my host family may be the best place to begin.

The Bah's were good people. They opened their home to me. They fed me and scolded me for coming home too late. They invited me to Ramadan prayer and diligently helped me with my French. They treated me with an incredible kindness and hospitality and I didn't realize how amazing it was until I left.

They took someone into their house who looked different and displayed an embarrassingly small understanding of social decorum. This someone lacked even the most basic ability t0 communicate. With infinite patience and good humor they polished my manners and language and sent me on my merry way. I wonder if I would have taken in a non-English-speaking-mildly-rude-strange-looking-person into my home. I doubt it. Guineans are great people.

(2)It's because of part (1) that I am so frustrated with part (2). In the year preceding my departure to Guinea I read a handful of books about the development world. I had the thought that we had poverty and development on the run. It seemed as if these things were beginning to be solved as if they were a particularly complicated algebra problem.

Sachs writes that if the developed world were to commit .7% of their GDP to the developing world they would escape their "poverty traps." Easterly thinks Sachs is a grandstanding buffoon. Collier argues that smartly timed and targeted investments will lead countries slowly out of poverty. Bornstein writes about empowering locally minded social entrepreneurs.

Unsurprisingly they could all be right, they could all be wrong, or they could be a little bit of both. Even though they all argue with tremendous conviction, none of them (or any of us) really has any idea what's going on. There are too many moving parts.

I've really struggled with that since leaving the country, knowing that something needs to change but not knowing how to change it. I've read strong arguments for and against democracy or education or business development as the pathways out of poverty and now I've actually seen a small part of where those arguments come from and why.

At times the difficulties facing Guinea seem cyclical and overwhelming but occaisionaly good news trickles out and I'm reminded that even in tough times there's always hope for the future.