Around the house

My soy, a small nursery, and my cooking hut. The pile of sand in the background is for an eventual new house my family wants to build. They won't have enough money to buy cement for another year or two. Houses are always built bit by bit here. Many of my neighbors grow corn in their houses during the long years between being able to afford the walls and being able to afford the roof.

A view of the same that's less attractive photographically, but will help you see what's actually going on here.

This is my hut, seen from under my family's mango tree. I built the hut on the right and you can sort of see my rain gauge in front of it.

Formerly the hut of the young boys, now the cooking hut of the first wife. Why? Half of her former cooking hut fell down a month ago. The walls on the porch of the house and the walls of the house itself were completed about four months ago.

The cooking hut of the second wife. That's Nyari on the bed out front. He spends his days on a zip line that runs from the mango tree to the far side of the interior of this hut. He plays around behind their hut when they're home amid the lentils and tomatoes I'm growing back there and the mango nursery I planted with my brother.

The rain gauge, and my cooking hut with its newest roof extension. In the background: my neighbor the mechanic. His video club is just behind my hut, hidden from view by my brick wall.

My small garden in the back yard. A giant millet plant, butternut squash, and three pineapples are doing the best. The bushy plants are from bulbs. I constantly harvest the leaves to compost them.

My three compost pits, manure bucket, and gmelina nursery. There are also two lingues in the gmelina nursery for whatever reason.

Overview of the back yard with my small mango tree.

My fancy reclining chair with an expandable footrest in the back yard. Those morgina trees can also be seen in the first photo of this post, lining the edge of the cooking hut where they will grow to one day be a wall. The leaves are edible and make a nice tea. This is how I dispose of my trash.

Bread Economics

Ramadan leads to a greater consumption of bread because it's ready as soon as the mosques announce we can eat again. Bread is a fairly new phenomenon in Guinea, and especially in Haute Guinea. Almost 100% of the bakers are Puhls, the denizens of the Fouta Djallon, who make up 40% of Guinea's population and have been repressed by both governments since independence. They still manage to be the most prosperous Guineans, stereotypically being the merchants, bakers, and herders.

The elders in Kankan decided during Ramadan that because bread is so important and the Puhls are to be beaten down whenever possible, the price of bread throughout their jurisdiction would be fixed at 1500 Guinean Francs. To further demonstrate their power over the Puhls, they set the price of beef at 10,000 Guinean Francs.

The price of a standard loaf of bread in the city of Kankan is usually 1500 anyway, so that made no difference. It was in the villages that it changed: either they buy in Kankan and transport to the villages, or there is a baker in town who has to buy his flour in Kankan.

My village has a very good baker. I am working with him to develop different products, but he is already acknowledged as making far better bread than you can get in Kankan. His normal price is 2000.
For several days after the announcement, he continued to sell his bread at 2000 and nobody complained. Then there was a crackdown.

He was thrown in jail overnight for refusing to lower his price. I heard that and was furious. I predicted to my friend that either he would refuse to make bread at a loss, continue getting thrown in jail for selling at a higher price, or make smaller loaves.

Sure enough, there was no bread the day after he got out. Or the next. Or the next. Then someone started shipping bread in from Kankan, but that didn't last. Who wants to sell at a loss? Finally, once he was sure everyone was really sorry they threw him in jail, we were inundated with bread: each loaf smaller than before.

I went to see him once I'd seen he was working again to congratulate him. He was ecstatic that he was now making more money than before because people were now happier with his product even though they now pay more than they did before per measure of bread.

The Turtle

My brother caught this turtle and wanted me to take a photo. When I took a video, he insisted I show it to my friends. That's his little sister next to him.

David: What are you doing?

Lansiné: I'm cutting it open.

D: Cutting it open... What's that called?

L: A turtle.

D: A turtle? What are you going to do with it?

L: Cook it.

D: Cook it!?

L: And eat it.

D: And eat it!? Is it good?

L: It's really good.

D: That's awesome.

For those of you who are disgusted by the fact that he's eating a turtle, note two things: One, he's a kid, turtles, lizards, and songbirds are about all kids are able to hunt. If it's his dad who hunts it, he won't get to eat much. When the kids kill something, they all share it with each other. Two: the distended belly his little sister is sporting is caused by a lack of protein in diet, which leads to the under development of her abdominal muscles.

A Tour of My Hut

My good friend Musa is like the average Guinean: hard to photograph. They always want to be serious whereas I don't want him to look like he's having his portrait painted two hundred years ago. He obliged.

I built and hung a bamboo shelf above my kitchen/office. The office is a bit cluttered with the kitchen in this photo, but these things happen. Before his incarceration, Nyari used the kitchen as an exit from the hut, pulling down my wall bit by bit as he enlarged the gap between wall and roof. Those bits of metal on the wall (largely hidden by the shelf) are the stars of the constellation Orion, formerly known as the lids of cans of evaporated milk.

My bush boots, water filter, rice-and-corn cleaning thing and the first innovation in clutter reduction: a hanging piece of wood with things tied to it. I didn't think to concentrate on them, but almost all of my tools are hanging from nails behind that door and the filter. Rakes, shovels, machetes, hammers, drills, axes, etc.

The second hanging stick. That purple bucket is my washing machine, aka I keep my soap, brush, and stuff in it and it's the rinse cycle during the dry season. Rainy season I use a stream. It was originally purchased to carry Nyari across the country. My beekeeping equipment is hanging on the right side of this stuff-hanging stick.

My hammock and chair: where most of the reading takes place. This is also the most heavily decorated part of the hut with maps, a thermometer, a soap opera (written by Jess), and work-related propaganda.

Musa and I pose in the garage. My solar drier is hanging above our heads. My clothing is all on the table behind me, next to the bike. The yellow containers above the solar drier are the panniers I made for my luggage-intensive trips between site and Kankan. I don't use them as much now that I'm mostly moved in.

My mosquito net. And bed. And one-person bed (new) which I take outside to sit underneath the fam's mango tree.

The overview shot. Those two brown things on the bottom left: calabashes. Soon to be beehives. This also gives a somewhat better view of Orion. The hanging cloth is my towel, skirt, sheet, car hammock, pagne extraordinaire. My favorite pants are made of the exact same fabric. It was the first fabric I bought here, too.

Money

Peace Corps Volunteers are paid once every three months. The money is sent to a bank account and we are free to leave it in or take it out when we need it. Ironically, the policy about monetary theft encourages us to irresponsibly take out all our money at once. Unfortunately, the poor Guinean banking (up to and beyond five-hour waits in lines with only ten people in them), transportation and communication systems encourage the same behavior for those living in smaller, remote villages. So at times there are PCVs walking around town with millions of Guinean Francs in their pockets.

Nothing - not even Mefloquine - can make you feel as paranoid, posh or powerful as walking around with a sack full of money, which is your food and drink for the next three months.

* * *

Money, even when fresh from the bank, is a health hazard. Literally. It's a major disease vector. Some bills look like scraps of beat-up paper bag. If you remember most people's bowel movements here end up washed away with a hand and no soap (and for young women, so do the bowel movements of their children), you will realize just what's on the money tens of people will handle on a single day in the market. Don't think too hard about the food they hand to you, either.

* * *

The first time I withdrew money from the bank in Kankan was with Adam. The security is mindblowing. An average day sees It's a Wonderful Life-sized crowds huddling aroud three booths mostly enclosed with glass or plastic. The rest of the crowd is gathered around open counters. There is one military policeman outside. Lines are rare and even if present, often ignored: everyone who has business in a bank is "important" and therefore quite used to pushing to the front of any crowd. Order is, after all, overrated. And the tellers facing the mob sit in their boxes among bricks of money sufficient to construct a hut.

When Adam and I got almost to the front, there wasn't much of a crowd left - we're not very pushy guys. Adam turned to me and joked how easy it would be to rob the place what with hundreds of millions of francs within arm's reach of the customer. When we finally got to the front we had to fill out some papers and as we were more or less the end of the line, the teller took the opportunity to stash the bricks of cash below his counter.

Finally with my money in hand, I decided to be Guinean and I counted every single bill. That was 600 sticky, torn pieces of paper and it took a while. Adam waited with me, and said the security had increased dramatically now that the cash was out of sight. It was still funny because when you're one of the last to leave, the front door is locked and you have to exit by going behind the counters through the door that's directly behind the tellers's boxes. Once I'd finished counting, we left and as we walked away the teller politely wished us a good afternoon. In perfect English.

Un sendero en el bosque

Fui a ver el bosque protegido de un pueblo cerca del mío. Los habitantes habían plantado la mayoría de los árboles allí, pero la naturaleza también metió unos cuantos.

Los de los hombres crecían rápidamente y tenían mucho éxito. Los de la naturaleza daban a comer y a beber. Probé una variedad de frutas igual a todas las que había comido en mi vida. Bebé el agua de una planta que siempre la retiene, aún en la estación seca.

Llegué al pueblo ya habiéndome dado cuenta que el programa de hacer bosques del hombre no tiene valor. Decidí en ese momento que mi trabajo sería un programa para plantar los árboles que la gente use. Esto se hará al lado del pueblo para que dejen el bosque natural. Así el bosque puede exprimir su diversidad.

Sólo así se puede salvar los bosques trópicales. De otra manera, tendríamos bosques, pero perdimos lo salvaje y acabamos con una ciudad de hombres hecha en madera.

Mefloquine Nights

Malaria, likely the number two killer in West Africa behind traffic accidents, affects my life in direct, omnipresent ways.

I sleep in a mosquito net and never spend an evening minute outside the net without first having slathered my exposed skin with insect repellent. The net, at least, serves other purposes. Undesirables (roaches, scorpions, spiders and the many other denizens of my hut) don't sneak into my bed at night. I'm reminded of how wonderful that is every time I find a potentially painful or shocking experience lurking on a wall.

The number one malaria countermeasure isn't the net or the repellent, it's a weekly prophylaxis, Mefloquine (Lariam). It has interesting side effects, though to avoid a closer acquaintance with malaria, I suffer them with joking complaints.

I have woken up a few times with my hut laid out before me in perfect clarity. The most striking thing of those moments was a large yellow bucket with the word Best written across it in bright red script. I own no such bucket. And one of the greatest parts of living in my hut is lying in bed in the morning until I am surrounded by the glowing halo of sunlight creeping through the gap between my brick wall and the straw roof. At night, it's as dark as a cave inside, and I can no more see my hand in front of my face than I can see the contents of my hut.

The first few times I could clearly see my hut at night were confusing. Yet I was able to puzzle it out thanks to an experience one night in January during training.

I had a room in a house there. I was blessed with a window and the town frequently had electricity at night. Sight at night was never a big problem. When I woke up one night to see a lumberjack's torso climbing through my window, I was forced to reconcile myself to the irritating reality of a Mefloquine-inspired hallucination. Vivid dreams are one thing, and often fun, but flat out seeing things can be bit irritating when you're trying to sleep.

Mefloquine has been the alleged cause of mental problems for many people. It causes anxiety and the usual vivid dreams and hallucinations. I've heard it shouldn't be taken for more than six months at a time and every ten days. I've been on it for almost ten months now and I have the privilege of taking it for at least 17 more, every Monday - read, every seventh day.

The real problem for me came the night I woke up in darkness with tiny things crawling all over me. I smacked them for about an hour, waiting for the hallucination to end. It was only when I woke the next morning I found I had had hundreds of baby spiders in bed with me - all tiny enough to crawl through the small holes Nyari had long-ago ripped in my net.

I don't consider myself to be susceptible to mental health problems and I have no intention of getting malaria. I have faith - everyone needs to have faith in something - in my individual biology to be strong against mefloquine's side effects for the long haul. In the mean time, I'm still waiting for my Kublai Kahn.