Girls Conference

Hey all! I'm in Mamou this week for Girls Conference. We left Momebey 8 to a 5 seat car and made it here without any complications (like wheels falling off, that sort of thing). It's now day 2 and things are going great! It has been a lot better than Lifeskills, the workshop I was here for last time. So far we have talked about public speaking, a trip to the health center to talk about nutrition, and relationships with men. The girl I brought has been vocal and just all around great.
I hope everyone had a great fourth. Mine was spent dancing to Michael Jackson and lighting matches (you know, in place of fireworks) and eating some "good" food. While I was in Conakry at that time, I booked flights for Gambia! I'm going there in the middle of August with Rachel. I'm very excited about that.
Things at site are going well. It's weird that I'm not teaching, but I've still been working at the health center with the doctor. Also Madame Bah has decided to start up a boutique so I've been helping her with that.
So I just finished a great book called The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It's about this missionary family that was in the Congo during the 1960s, but a lot of things that were said in it I could totally relate to, so I decided to type out some of the things that made me think of Guinea and since I have such a hard time putting things into words, I thought this would help.
This is what one of the daughters in the book said about clothing:
"Women are expected to wear just one style of garment and no other. But the men, now that is a course of a different color. They dress up every different way in the world: some have long shirts made from the same flowery African cloth that is attired by the women....Others wear American-style buttoned shirts and shorts in drab, stained colors. A few of the smaller men even go gallivanting around in little undershirts decorated with childish prints, and nobody seems to notice the joke...As for the accessories, I hardly know where to begin. Sandals made of car tires are popular. So are antique wing tips curling up at the toes, black rubber galoshes unbuckled and flapping open, or bright pink plastic thongs, or bare feet-any of these can go with any of the before-mentioned outfits. Sunglasses, plain glasses, hats, no hats, likewise. Perhaps even a knit woolen cap with a ball on top, or a woman's bright yellow beret-I have witnessed all these wonders and more. The attitude toward clothing seems to be: if you have it, why not wear it? Some men go about their daily business prepared for the unexpected tropical snowstorm, it seems, while others wear shockingly little-a pair of shorts only. When you look around, it appears that every man here was fixing to go to a different party, and then suddenly they all got plunkered here together."
This book is just so amazing, here is one about food.
"And food, that was another song and dance. Finding it, learning its name, cutting or pounding or dashing its brains to make it into something my family would tolerate. For a long time I could not work out how all the other families were getting by. There seemed to be no food to speak of, even on a market day when everybody came around to make the tallest possible pile of what they had...Yes, I could see there was charcoal for cooking it, and shriveled red pili-pili peppers for spicing it, and calabash bowls to put it in, but where was the it, whatever it was? What on earth did they eat? At length I learned the answer: a gluey paste called fufu. It comes from a stupendoub tuber, which the women cultivate and dig from the round, soak in the river, dry in the sun, pound to white powder in hollowed-out logs, and boil. It's called manioc...It has the nutrional value of a brown paper bag, with the added bonus of trace amounts of cyanide. Yet it fills the stomach. It cooks up into the sort of tasteless mass one might induce an American child to try once, after a long round of pulled-up noses and double-dog dares."
This is one is in reference to how they conduct village meetings.
"I can just picture the parliament room: a hundredy-some-odd Tata Ndus in pointy hats and no-glass glasses all flicking flies away with animal-tail magic wands in the sweltering heat, pretending to ignore each other. It will probably take them one hundred years just to decide which person gets to sit where."
This is how I feel when I try to explainwhat I see here and what I do here.
"Since the day we arrived, Mother has nagged us to write letters home to our classmates at Bethlehem High, and not one of us has done it yet. We're still wondering, Where do you start? "This morning I got up..." I'd begin, but not, "This morning I pulled back the moquito netting that's tucked in tight around our beds because mosquitoes here give you malaria, a disease that runs in your blood which nearly everyone has anyway but they don't go to the doctor for it because there are worse things like sleeping sickeness..., and anyway there's really no doctor nor money to pay one, so people just hope for the good luck of getting old because then they'll be treasured, and meanwhile they go on with their business because they have children they love and songs to sing while they work, and..." And you wouldn't even get as far as breakfast before running out of paper. You'd have to explain the words, and then the words for the words."
Okay, I just thought I would share that with you. This book is by far the best book I've read in country or maybe ever. Love you guys all and miss you like you wouldn't believe!