Front Lines

Just a short update in case you haven't been following the news (or even if you have; Guinean news doesn't tend to dominate CNN even when we don't have a human kielbasa belch as president).  This is cobbled together from the scant English-language news I've found online, poor translations of the scant French news I've found online, rumors, hearsay, and my own limited impressions, so take with an entire shaker of salt.  Warning: this isn't a fun one, might want to skip ahead if you're looking for cute kid drawings and weird food stories.

Photo by Reuters (so don't worry, Mom)

For the last three weeks, local schools in Conakry have been closed.  Teachers and students have been striking in solidarity with junior teachers who have been laid off and in protest of low salaries.  On Monday, the demonstrations grew in scale and severity, with blockades being put across the roads (apparently by strikers) and violent clashes between security forces and protestors.  Numbers vary, but around six people were killed, some of them police, and at least thirty have been injured (likely many more).  The official government line is that these protests have been illegal, a scary assertion given past governments' actions against "illegal" demonstrations.  Though an agreement was reached on Monday between the government and representatives of the teachers' union, disruptions have continued to interrupt daily life.

For the last several weeks, I've been hearing stories of a different kind about life in Conakry.  A significant problem facing the city, among many others, is the high rate of unemployment among young men, who come to the capital from all over Guinea to find a job.  Finding none, these young men, many of them university-educated, soon find themselves with little money and a great deal of time.  Unemployment and poverty, combined with bad roads, a rapidly increasing population, and lack of access to reliable electricity and water, has led to high tensions that have only gotten hotter in recent years.  Police and the military have had little luck addressing these problems or quashing protest; government employees are paid badly enough that it's common for the police to put up "security checkpoints" of their own, where they shake down passing cars to supplement their incomes.

On Monday night, one of my coworkers was picked up from the airport by a driver hired by our school.  The 10-km drive took them an hour and a half, as they were stopped at two dozen flaming barricades where they were confronted by young men demanding payment.  When they ran out of money, the driver surrendered his phone to buy them passage.  When that was gone, the men surrounded the car, pounding on the hood and the roof, trying to open the door, and trying to snap off the side-view mirrors.

My coworker did make it back safely, as did the driver, though they both still have a shaky smile and haunted expression much of the time.  They and several of our colleagues were stranded in various safe places throughout the city (mostly hotels and embassy housing), but they all made it home sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Photo by Getty Images

And me?  I didn't leave my house for two days while all this has been going on.  I feel a bit silly for drinking most of my emergency water already, but apart from a looming toilet paper crisis, I've stayed as safe as possible.  The teachers' housing is pretty distant from the worst of the unrest, and I've been looking at the guards, walls, and razor wire that I was complaining about a few weeks ago through different eyes.

For the moment, things have become quiet.  There are still reports of shots being fired, and outside the walls of the school, sometimes there is chanting that lacks the reassuring regular melody of the neighborhood mosque's call to prayer.  Allegedly the local schools reopened today as promised, but few students have returned to classes, and the streets are mostly empty (not that I've been venturing out to look).  One of my Guinean coworkers predicts that the rest of this week will be eerily quiet and periodically explosive, but by Monday things will be back to normal.  Such as it is.