Chez moi

Since many of you have asked me for either GPS coordinates or some  directions on how to Google Map my village, here you have it.


A little bit of Google and Paint can do wonderful things:

Summa Summa Summa Tiiime

Long ago, when your friend and humble narrator was just a wee lass, the prospect of summer brought with it a intoxicatingly sweet taste of freedom.

So intoxicating, in fact, that little Kelsey often lost focus in class and became even more scatter-brained than normal (Remember, Mom? Thanks for putting up with me!).

I'd forgotten just how overwhelming the approach of summer can be.


That is, until all of my students seemed to develop a very serious case of seasonal ADMAFLAYDUID.

Oh, sorry, in layman's terms that stands for...

Attention Deficit Miss Aicha, For the Love of Allah, You're Driving Us Insane Disorder.




Nothing is more ego-deflating than when your students find a piece of mouse poop on their desk to be more entertaining than you.  While all other classes had long since finished their coursework, I met with Terminale students right up until their national exams.  It was tantamount to an extra 30 days of torture for some. 

Then again, it was a necessary move, considering the national exams were moved up by a whole month.  Normally scheduled for late June/early July, the national Brevet was held May 27-June 1st, followed by the Baccalaureat June 6th-10th.  In order to allow the regional department of education ample time to prepare test sites and materials, this meant that all our grades and review sessions had to be launched into warp-speed so they could be finished by the first week of May.  In the midst of all this chaos however, both students and teachers maintained a surprisingly positive attitude.  I was slightly more frazzled, but then again, I'm the newbie. 

Here's a cartoon I doodled in my journal, which I think aptly captures my sentiments towards the end of April...

But hey!  They finished their exams and now we're all free for a few* blissful months!

* a few = June, July, August and September

What am I going to do with all the free time?

First things first, we're planning training sessions for the incoming stage.  My responsibilities include reworking the TEFL program into 9 sessions for our math and science teachers.  Since most everyone, regardless of their primary job description, winds up teaching English in some capacity at their site, we want to offer a basic introduction to language instruction and materials design.

Never thought I'd be doing this but, truth be told, I'm eating it up!




After training I'll be heading back to site for a few weeks and also training for the 1st Annual Tour de Fouta.


What's the Tour de Fouta?



Well, instead of France, we have the mountainous and beautiful and (partially) paved Fouta Jallon.


Instead of French, we have... okay, so that's the same.


Instead of Lance Armstrong, we have Geoff and Ben, and Carlos and Shane - our resident biking fiend duos.


Instead of steroids, we have Jus-Jus packets to add that extra little kick to our filtered and bleached well water.



While I will not be competing in the race from Mamou to Labe (some 144 km), I will be riding at a more leisurely pace with another volunteer throughout the 2 day tour.


Wish me luck!



Too late to 'polagize?

So, I’ve been a terrible blogger.

The first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem, right?

Before you call off our friendship and close this window to go peruse stumbleupon or whatever new-fangled website they’ve come up with recently, let me share a story with you…

It begins in a quiet, picturesque village nestled in the heart of a fertile little valley.  National exams have just concluded and everyone is settling down to a much-deserved period of mental repose.  All except your friend and humble narrator.

Why, you ask?

Well…

BECAUSE OUR PROJECT GOT APPROVED, THAT’S WHY!!!!

The application has been sent, the forms have been signed, and the project is soon to be posted on the Peace Corps website.  We’re in need of about $1,800.00 to create a Learning and Information Technology Center, the goal of which is to provide a venue for computer literacy courses, and to allow students and teachers to access online learning resources.  

As things stand, our elementary and high school students have very few reading materials (and if they do, they were generally printed in the 1970s). Aside from helping educators inject some up-to-date classroom activities and literature, this will also give us a chance to connect students and teachers in Guinea with students and teachers in the ole U.S. of A.

If you’re reading this and thinking “Heck yeah!  How do I sign up??”, send me an e-mail!  

If you want to donate to the project, not only are you sure to earn some great karma points, but I will also personally write you an ode.

Seriously.  I’m getting pretty good at them.

In other “Life in Ditinn” news, Flo is a big, happy, and chub-ster again, thanks to the heaping bowls of rice my neighbor gives to her every day.  I’m going to have to up the mileage on our runs from now on, because right now she gets tired after running a couple circles around the cow in our compound (as opposed to her usual 12-20 laps).

All in all, life is going well.  The rains have set in once more, which reminds me of home.  Though generally, you don’t have sopping wet chickens blown into your living room when it storms in Tacoma.  Nor-Easters even pale in comparison to the intensity of these rains.  The other day while walking to school, I was caught in a storm (imagine, if you will, black apocalyptic-looking clouds appearing out of nowhere), and so was forced to run for shelter in a nearby “Credit Rural” building.  I spent the next half hour waiting for the rains to abate, in a dark room, sitting awkwardly across the desk from the manager as he filled out forms using a leaky pen and a sputtering flashlight beam.  I suppose that’s one nice thing about monsoons – they bring you into contact with folks with whom you’d otherwise have no real business interacting.  That, and they produce mangos the size of your face.

Note to the potential adventurer: Never eat an entire grafted mango before going on a 3.5 hour bike ride up mountains.  The idea of eating something that looks like a dinosaur egg is awesome.  Later feeling like a miniature velociraptor is going to rip its way out of your stomach is not.

Now that school has ended, I’ve been keeping myself busy with (you guessed it) home-improvement projects and in-service trainings.  On the home-improvement front, I have now successfully crafted a utensil-holder and a dog travel-crate, and I have also screwed innumerable screws in half and broken two hacksaws.  Guinea has apparently bequeathed me the strength and clumsiness of a she-hulk.  Go figure.


On the in-service trainings front, I just completed a 3-day conference called the Youth Entrepreneurs Training Program.  It was excellent, and I hope to begin offering courses this August!  The plan is to take on a student intern or two to help me run the LIT Center at our school.

As I write this (quite scattered) blogpost, I am sitting in a hot and humid office in Dubreka.  If you’ll recall, that’s where I spent the first 3 months of training.  Well, we’re getting ready to welcome the new group of education volunteers, due to arrive in July!  I’m psyched to begin training the language and technical teachers, and to help with organizing the new stage’s training schedule.  This also means that I will be around computers more frequently, and thus able to post blogs more than once every three months.

So, pretty please, don’t write me off as a complete blog failure yet.

Deal?

Peace and love,

K

Peace Corps Meets the Land Before Time

HEY!  

I had a stellar Spring Break in a magical place called Doucki.




Go ahead, get the poop-jokes out of your system before you continue...

I posted a bunch of pictures on the "Guinea Ginge in Action" photo thingy-ma-jig, but thought I'd share some of my favorites with you here!

There were 7 of them in there. Thankfully, we didn't have to use the same taxi.  

Overlooking the valley

First waterfall of the trip

Your voice could echo for miles here 

Yup.  Land Before Time.

 We climbed all the way down and back up this beast.

Phone home, anyone?

Apparently Doucki is also the land of mutant bananas.

This is part of the "Indiana Jones" hike...

... my favorite, obviously :)

He's like a monkey, that one :)

A funny thing happened on the way to the luumo...

10 months in Guinea, and a number of funny changes have occurred.

1 _ While I may have arrived in Guinea with the intention of drastically developing race relations for the better and spreading oodles of knowledge about the United States of America, I've found myself gawking at pale-skinned people passing  through my village along with the rest of my community.  The other day, I stared at a pair of American-looking folk (the fanny-packs and croakies tipped me off) who were sitting at a booth in our weekly market (luumo).  When I realized what I was doing, I snapped myself out of it, strolled on over and very tactfully initiated conversation with...

"Hi.  What are you doing here?"

So much for manners, Kelsey.  (Sorry Moma and Gramma, you taught me much better than that.)  I gracefully recovered with...

"I mean, um, well... It's just that I don't see many white people out here.  Hi.  My name is Kelsey."

Smoooooth.

Thank goodness my new-found friends were gracious conversation partners.  They smiled, nodded, and explained that they were Christian missionaries who'd been working in Guinea for over 18 years.  We chatted a bit, but on account of the sun beating down on my poor, un-sunscreened scalp, I bought an English-French-Pular phrase book from them and retreated home.

I'm beginning to understand how strange it is to be a part of such a visibly apparent minority.

2 _ Remember how I used to joke that it would be really cool for my freckles to fuse together?  Haha-well it doesn’t seem to be as much of an impossibility anymore.

Folks, it’s HOT here.

I’ve been taking care to hydrate and lather on the sunscreen, but poor Flo is having a rough time of it.  I took her out for a bike ride (sadly, no, she can’t reach the pedals so she has to run alongside me) that lasted about 20 minutes.  By the end of it, she was running from spot of shade to spot of shade, flopping on the ground, and then lugging herself back up to catch me once I’d gotten far ahead.

When we arrived back home, I left her on the porch and went inside momentarily to get her some water.  When I came back out, I found her passed out with her muzzle still in her water bowl.

So you get the picture.  Luckily, this heat will only stick around for another month or so.  For Spring Break, I plan on going to a waterfall-filled valley in the Fouta with a couple other volunteers.  Swimming will be a welcome luxury.



3 _ In my former life, I must have been a carpenter.


        Yours truly built this rickety shelf...

...and just last weekend, converted a busted table into this lovely clothing shelf.

All this accomplished with sandpaper, a piece of re-bar (no crowbar available), hammer, nails, and a Swiss Army knife saw.


  IKEA, 
          eat 
                  your  

             out.

You might think I'm bragging (ok, maybe a little bit), but what I really want to call attention to is that I still have a good amount of time on my hands.  I've finally put forth the grant proposal for our computer center project, so all there is to do now is wait.

4 _ My students continue to delight, amuse and frustrate me every day.  Absences, tardiness, and general teenage-hormone-induced surliness makes me want to douse them all with a cold bucket of water sometimes.  Truly, I'm amazed at my high school teachers - you all must have had more patience than Mother Theresa.

Despite the frustrations, my spirits are frequently lifted by their enthusiasm, earnestness, and unwittingly absurd (and often poetic) statements like these:

"I burned my journal before she read it."

"She left me before I hated her."

"I ate my father last night."

"Ronaldo was angry because you slept with Roberta."

"If I go home, I will cook my wife."

"I dream to earn a lot of money, to fly a plane to Jamaica, and to promote full racial equality for whites and blacks in America."  (We'd talked about Martin Luther King the previous week.)

And, when I caught a student cheating on a test and took away half of his total...

"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT DO THIS." 

They're a good-hearted bunch, and they can sure make you smile :)

That's all for now.  To sum it all up, I'm doing well, staying healthy, and trying to come up with a plan of action for this summer.  It will most likely include many art projects (MURALS!!!), working out the details on my computer project, and beginning a waste-removal and recycling initiative in Ditinn. 

I'll keep ya posted.

<3

Yo

Sup ginge-followers?!

I don't have much time, but wanted to let you know that I updated the "Projects Underway" section.

Here are some highlights from the last 2 weeks:

1. I finally went swimming in the waterfall with a volunteer, her friend, and one of my buddies from Ditinn.  The water was great, the day was hot, there were little-bitty leeches, and it was GLORIOUS. 

2.  Flo has moved on from eating pebbles to chewing on our walls.  I think she must not be getting enough vitamins/salt in her diet.  Any tips?

3.  There are under 40 days of school left.  WHAT?  Where did the time go?  Things are still going smoothly with my class, and I have high hopes for them.

4.  I just bought knock-off Ray-Ban sunglasses.  They have Lil Wayne sketched on the sides.  Jealous?

5.  I'm in Mamou for a peer-support network and diversity committee meeting.  Hope things go well!  In 2 weeks, I'll be going to the islands off the coast of Guinea with a couple of other volunteers.  Then, well, it'll be summer before you know it.  I hope to stay busy with my computer center project and biking adventures.


That's all for now, I promise to stop being lame with the blog posts.  I'll devote myself to writing this next week so that I can give you a thorough and entertaining update.

Love,
K

The Best of January - February

Dearest ones,

Happy V-Day!  My day commenced with a paper heart and a Guinean chocolate at my door.  (Thank you, lovely volunteers.)

The rest of the day I spent in training with 21 other Education Volunteers.  It's our In-Service Training, and it marks the 7.5-month point in our service.

Hard to believe, right?


Most of the group went dancing, but as I was feeling a little sickly, I stayed in bed and read a book about the battle of Thermopylae.


Yep, that's what "300" was inspired by.

Judge me.


I have longer posts to send to you, but lack the time now.  I promise to be more heart-felt in about 2  weeks. 

For now, here are some pictures that I trust will make you wanna say:

a) awwwwww
b) WOW
c) Kelsey-what the f***??


First things first.

SAM - You said it wasn't real until there were pictures.  Well...

Yes. 

    This exists. 

        I don't know who made it. 


                 And I also don't know what this is about...

The ridiculousness makes me want to laugh and cry all at once.











Second:  This is my new house.  It's pretty awesome and currently undergoing many a home-improvement project.

As you can see, I'm still as pale as a frog's underbelly. 

Thanks to my sun-protection regimen, I smell like a Hawaiian resort almost 24/7.  (Instead of hibiscus, however, you must imagine the smell of hay.  It mixes quite nicely with sunscreen.)



Third:  I have a puppy.  Her name is Flo. 

Please feel free to bask in the cuteness for as long as you wish...

 

Fourth: Adrienne came to visit me last weekend.  We walked to the waterfall (About 9.5 miles, roundtrip.  What now, G.I. Jane?)




This is what we saw...
 

 Some ladies walking to market...

 Artsy landscape shot.   

Sorry, couldn't help it.

The countryside looks much different during dry season.

At the falls...

Yes, this was an exclusively ginger excursion. 

 And, of course there was a cow.

Really, you should have guessed it.  You know this is a recurring theme...

 

There were no other cows in sight.  Who know how it got all the way through the forest into the little gulley there.  Hey, at least he was eating well.

Fifth:  I just want to share with you the magic that is my friend, Adam.   

Prepare your eyes for something I can guarantee they've never seen before...

Speechless?

So am I.

UNTIL NEXT TIME!!

<3