Videos!

In agroforestry, there comes a time when you simply have to smash a termite mound into powder to use in a mud stove. Luckily, when I was doing that for our presentation to the citizens of our training town, Julie was smart enough to want to take a video and I had my backpack with camera on hand. This is the best job I've ever had.

And like any good human beings, we agroforesters know how to relax. We go swimming in the river. But since we're on bikes, even the ride home is a good time. A good time to reflect on Guinea, bells, and life.

But again we must work. Gardening is vital to people's health and life. There are already enough problems without having a population devoid of vitamins, minerals, and healthy food. So we build raised beds and transplanted tomatoes into it. This is the end of the bed-making, if I had stopped to film during the middle, well, that would have been just lazy of me.

Of course what kind of blog can be named Travels with Nyari and yet have no photos of Nyari himself? This one apparently; so I'll have to settle for a video, which happens to be the first video or photo I shot in country. This is from the front porch of my home during training, eating breakfast with Nyari when he was just a kitten. He's about twice as big now, and many more times as deadly.

There was one morning I woke up and had electricity to light the room. After I'd gotten completely ready for the day (field trip) and prepared the key to give to the neighbors (family was out of town), I saw a spider walking across my wall. Not just a spider, but the king of spiders. Look at Katie's blog if you need a visual, she has a photo of a spider carrying a baby mouse, which she said was bigger than her hand. Well, I described my spider as big enough to strand over my face with ease and I didn't waste time trying to take a photo. I grabbed a machete and a daba and tried to kill it. But it was too fast and hid in my books. And I couldn't find him.

That evening, my neighbor, who was guarding the key, lost it, so I had to run off to work on a project (see the termite mound video, yup that same day) and come home after dark. Julie suggested I use a broom on the spider instead of a machete. Well, I got home and the electricity wasn't on, but I saw the spider anyway; it was too hard to miss, even with a tiny flashlight. I grabbed a broom and started sweeping him. The whole venture seemed futile to me until Nyari saw the spider and decided he was still hungry. He pounced on it and I'm guessing it was dead after the first bite. It took him a while, but he finished the whole thing and I had never been happier since arriving in Guinea.

Spider problem? Get a broom and a cat!

Photos from Stage and Site Visit

Voila part of my hut and my backyard. Yes, that's the toilet/shower in the background with the teakettle (toilet paper) and the bucket (shower). And I suppose those are my clean underwear drying there which I've only now noticed. That's my mango tree, too.

People tend to think my hobbies are funny. Here i'm sawing a boar tusk I was given at site to make it into a knife handle. That's not Nyari; it's Loki, the cat Julie saved from death by being an amazing animal mother substitute.

Agfo affectates! Aren't we all pretty?

Back row: Annie, Buttercup, Teale, Caleb, Alex, Monica (trainer extraorinaire), Brienne, Jean, Sarah, Justin

Front row: Me, Raven, Julie, Ciara

This is me with the family that hosted me during training. When I finally left, the old lady sort of tried to cry; I think it's culturally rude for her to do otherwise.

In the bush. Guinea is a beautiful country.

Among the many nicknames I've been given my my agfo buddies is "the cultivator."

January 6, 2008 Meat and Morals

I have been told there are supermarkets in Conakry, but I haven't been, so I don't know whether they're anything like those in America. What I do know is meat cannot be purchased in plastic bags after a life of being force-fed a diet of corn and antibiotics, which evolution never intended it to eat. I also witnessed the killing and butchering of three sheep during the Tabaski celebration in December, not to mention the chickens I've seen old women tearing to pieces with their bare hands.

Last night we used our barbecue pit again to make "pizzas." They were very good. If you need confirmation, ask Julie, she enjoyed it more than anyone else. We also used one of the chickens Caleb and I had previously acquired. I got a lot more close and personal to the death this time, killing the chicken myself. Apparently my knife wasn't sharp enough, but I was happy about that. It seems more humane to me to break something's neck than to slit its throat. I've seen bullfights; I know how quickly an animal dies when the spinal cord is severed. Lacking the proper knife, I wrung the chicken's neck. It is possible, not just a saying. I said the required Muslim sayings, Thank God, God is great. Or something like that; I've forgotten, but I said it right at the time. I was approved by the only Muslim present.

I'm not going to get into the physiological details of the event, but I will say I was very aware of what was involved in eating dinner that night. It was almost a spiritual experience when I ate my piece of barbecue chicken pizza. I had held the animal days before, I had fed it some bread and water when its life was originally spared because a sheep showed up. I rounded it up when its time really was up, and I took its life with my hands.

I'm not yet one hundred percent certain how I feel about it; I've heard people say it's easier to take life the more you do it. I would bet that's true of animals and humans. Certainly, working in an assembly line of killing is a lot more desensitizing than killing one chicken for dinner. And I feel it's a lot healthier for me to know exactly what went into procuring that meal. I'm certainly more aware of what eating meat means now than I was before when it was nothing more than a product on a shelf. It's good to think about these things.

Eating is one of the most important things we do as humans; losing touch with how and what we eat is almost like losing a part of what it means to be a living creature. I'm not saying I feel more human than everyone in America right now. If anything I feel like a took a step closer to understanding what it means to be a part of a food chain.

I have to doubt vegetarianism would be anywhere near as popular or resemble anything like the movement it is in America if our meat lived a happy life like it does here. Imagine PETA trying to run a campaign with posters of happy chickens running around eating grass and grubs; or cows happily grazing in fields of lush green grass. I don't care how little clothing their supermodels would wear, PETA just wouldn't be able to run an effective campaign with pictures of happy animals.

On that note, one of the three vegetarians here (I should also say one of the three now eats and likes fish, too) ate a barbecue chicken pizza. I'm sad I wasn't there to see it, because I've been told she couldn't stop raving about how good it was. She said she was comfortable eating it because it hadn't lived the life of the typical unhappy American chicken. The third vegetarian also confirmed to me later that she would be able to eat meat if she knew the animal had lived a natural life.

P.S. It's also worth noting the meat tastes really good. It's nothing like what you buy in a supermarket in an American grocery store.

December 30, 2007 Black and White

Everyone here is black, a foreigner, or an albino. It's known and accepted. The Lebanese are the majority of the non-blacks, so I've been told. I haven't seen any, but I trust the people who've passed along that information. There is a word for white person in most of the local languages. In Susu, that's fotay. Everywhere we go, kids chant fotay, fotay, fotay. It's a fun game for them. I started out teaching them my name. I would ask their names, too. Pretty much everyone here is Mohammed. Makes it easy. There are several factors at work that have led me to change my strategy. First, other trainees started coming up to me to inform me they had been called David. Male and female. Apparently that telephone game has real-life implications. I can imagine how it goes:

1. I met this cool fotay named David. He asked me what my name was.
2. Mohammed met this cool fotay named David.
3. Mohammed said Mohammed met a fotay. Apparently we should call him David.
4. Mohammed said Mohammed said Mohammed said all fotays are called David.
5. Really? That's weird, because David is a name here and it's only for men.
6. No way, Mohammed part 5, if the fotays all want to be called David, so be it.

And by that point, we've covered everyone in town and the old people near me have decided it's better to call me Doudi (dowdy).

Factor number two:

I was riding my bike to the pineapple plantation and some kids near there started chanting fotay. I stopped and rode over to them to introduce myself. A little kid, maybe two years old, was the one who had gotten closest to me, so I rode up to him. I couldn't even tell him my name wasn't fotay, because he threw his bowl up into the air, raining rice all over his dirt yard, and he sprinted into his house, sparking a stampede of fleeing children. His mother had a pretty good laugh as I cornered the only remaining kid to introduce myself. Those kids still all call me fotay, but for the sake of saving rice, I just let it go.

And that's part three - when you call them fohray, which is Susu for black person, they find it hilarious. There is so little racial tension here, skin color is largely a joke. People are curious about white skin (and freckles). I made a group of teenaged girls laugh (at me) when I explained why white skin is a horrible handicap because I always have to put on sunscreen or I'll get burned.

That said, yes, white skin is a status symbol. In spite of everything it is in America, too. People make assumptions. Here, since white people are largely aid workers, the assumptions is that white people have come to give away money, seeds, or infrastructure for free. But it's not a question of tension or stress. Except for the rice boy. And several babies who scream and cry when they see me.