Goodbye to Guinea

I know there’s a lot more to say about Guinea than I have in me right now.  As I may have intimated before, some of this is for reasons of privacy; my employer has been central to most of the drama that’s happened to me over the last few months.  Which makes sense, since most of my time has been taken up by work, and my home and social life have revolved around my colleagues out of necessity.  This blog is one of the first things that comes up when my name is googled, and I know it’d be bad form to air any grievances about my employer, which means that most of what I’ve spent the last six months talking about (to my friends, to Jenn, to myself) is out of bounds.  (Incidentally, expect another, less complainy post not long after this one, to push this down from the top of the page.)

But enough of what I’m not going to talk about.  How was Guinea?

...Wet!

As far as I can tell, nobody comes to Guinea on purpose.  That makes sense on its face: between the malaria, the political instability, the lack of access to stable power or internet, and the cratered, sunken roads that are always choked with traffic, this isn’t anyone’s first choice.  The diplomatic corps staff members were all assigned here because of their lack of seniority or unpopularity in the department—this is a necessary evil for most of them, a first step before they can be assigned to literally anywhere else.  As you might imagine, this leads to some pretty frikkin’ gross ‘tudes, gross enough that I wrote and deleted a long post shining a spotlight on the racist nonsense that comes out of their mouths sometimes.  Most of the expats here spend their time complaining about it—a common enough thing in cushier destinations like Japan, too, though here that note of bitterness is even more common.

As for me?  Despite all the corruption, the difficulty in recreating a middle-class American lifestyle here, the daily inconveniences?  I like it here!

I’m walking a fine line on this one, I know.  Media is awash in depictions of Africa as a place of unrelenting tragedy, and I don’t want to make this yet another bout of indulging in “Heal the World”-type pathos.  On the other hand, emphasizing what a lovely time I had would seem to be just wallowing in my own privilege, especially when, yes, Guinea suffers from terrible unemployment, corruption, medical crises, failing infrastructure, and more of the hallmarks of perennially exploited countries [/handwringing].

I would come back here, though.  I would live in Guinea again, even in Conakry.  I don’t know if Guinea and Guineans are all that distinct compared to other West African nations, if living in Senegal or Cote d’Ivoire or Ghana would have all the positive points of living here with fewer negatives.  From my own experiences, though, I know that much like people, places are absolutely formed by their history.  The scars of occupation in Seoul or Berlin, for example, are clearly critically important parts of those cities’ identities…and if that’s a self-built identity, one designed for tourists, that doesn’t make it any less important or authentic.

For the armchairiest of historical speculation: Guinea was the first West African nation to gain independence from France.  It did so nonviolently, but aggressively, definitively, casting out French influence to forge its own future, and has served as an example of African independence for decades since.  It’s also gotten extremely thoroughly screwed over by France, more so than many other former colonies, and according to the popular sentiment here, the fact that the French took everything with them when they left has been largely responsible for Guinea having such a rough go of it.

So basically, after being devastated and having generations of its people kidnapped and murdered, Guinea has still gotten the short end of the stick (less foreign investment, more neocolonial pillagers at the door).  It’s just that now, this time, that raw deal has been the unfortunate result of decisions that Guinea made for itself.  I know that can’t be any consolation to the families with no potable water and no mosquito nets, but from a cold, heartlessly romantic perspective, I think Guinea has something to be proud of.

This is why I teach kindergarten, right here.

To take it back to the personal: the people I’ve met here have been welcoming, friendly, and warm.  Some of the encounters I’ve had have been among the most beautiful moments of my life.  Jamming with friends—my ukulele, their traditional Kissian polyphonic singing.  Watching the sun set over the giant, unfinished stadium while bats flit overhead and the call to prayer suffuses the air in plaintive, cracking voices.  Hearing my students grow to express themselves more every day (one of my students, searching for a word to use when discussing the behavior of mosquitoes, hit on “heart water”).

One of the hardest things about living abroad is the realization that you’ve never “done” anywhere.  As long as I’ve spent anywhere I’ve lived or visited, there’s never been a moment where I thought, “I never need to come back to this place” (except maybe Sagada).  Even if Guinea wasn’t on my list of places to visit before, it’s definitely on my list of places to revisit now.

-->

Guess I had more in me than I’d thought.  Tune in next time for more photos of adorable children!

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.

Child's Play

Based on what I'd been told before arriving, I was expecting the most difficult things about working at this school would all be tied to life in a developing country: frequent power outages, periods with no running water, difficulty accessing the internet, safety, etc.  From my arrival in Conakry, however, I've been pleasantly surprised to find the people of Guinea friendly, the walk to school dusty but safe, and the housing comfortable if not exactly without excitement.  The teaching, on the other hand, was immediately way, way harder than I'd anticipated.  Working with my mentor teacher, I'm only teaching nine students (soon to be ten), and compared to the kindergarten classes I'd observed in Kansas and the kindergarten I'd taught at in Osaka, nine students sounded like...well, child's play, if that's not too clever.  I was a little anxious about starting to apply all the skills I'd been learning in my grad program related to differentiation, assessment, collaboration, etc., but classroom management would be no big deal, I figured.  Kindergarteners like me.  Kindergarteners are sweet.

That was the biggest surprise, one that had me in literal tears (the worst kind) after my first day teaching: even though there are only nine of them, classroom management was way, way harder than I'd anticipated.  During those first few days, six of the nine students would be crying, running away, or punching the other children at any given time.  I felt horrible at my job, especially with this apparent failure to keep control of the class in front of my mentor teacher.  I could come up with several reasons these students behaved the way they did, and I tried to let these ideas inform my response (not that it helped me feel much better): they came from vastly different cultures from my own, most of them have low levels of English, most are still unused to school, all of them were getting used to a new teacher and new routine halfway through the school year.

Along with my crisis of confidence, I began to have a real crisis of conscience: why was I so bothered that it was so chaotic in the classroom?  They weren't obeying me, but did I really want to be an authoritarian, a force for telling these students to sit down and shut up because I said so?  That's certainly not the teaching philosophy I'd studied for the last year and a half in my education program, and it's not what I had imagined I'd be doing as a kindergarten teacher.  And to put it bluntly, I didn't want to be the white guy yelling at a room of nine black people (children, but still people) to stop talking!

Perhaps most critically, I think I had been comparing these nine international students to Japanese kindergarteners who were in a culturally homogeneous, strictly regimented school environment.  These students are from Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, or were international school brats.  What do I know about the school or home culture these kids come from?  What if...well, what if yelling is what these students know as a sign to be quiet?  What if my mild-mannered, touchy-feely, hippie-dippy persona doesn't register as an authority figure as them?  Or worse, as a teacher?

Well, last week, this particular crisis came to a head.  I decided I didn't want to be the yelling teacher, the overwhelmed, frazzled teacher.  I wanted to be the hippie uncle teacher, the one with the dopey ponytail and the ukulele and the dumb print shirts.

Easy fix: I brought my ukulele to school.

And how did it go?  Well, a bit anticlimactically.  My students enjoy the ukulele, and they enjoy singing, and while there's still a lot of punching etc., when I can get them on board with "Down By the Bay" or "The Green Grass Grows All Around," for a minute or two, I can stop shouting and get them to behave like adorable little children instead of complete maniacs.  For now, that's enough.

Compound Sentences

For the last several months, I've been making the same joke about the oncoming international move: "Ha ha, I'm pretty sure I have no idea what I've gotten myself into!"  It might have been funny at some point, but I don't think there will be any huge outcry if I kill this particular thigh-slapper by dissecting what makes it (ostensibly) funny.

The root of the humor here, like 80% of the things I say, is self-deprecating.  If I had to pin down a thesis statement, it'd be something like: "Only a complete fool would move to a foreign country without knowing a great deal about that place.  Before you stands one such fool."  And as should be clear from the last few posts, there's a lot of truth to this statement: I did shockingly little research before this, my first time living in a developing country, my first international school post, my first visit to Africa.  As tends to happen, I found myself with very little time to do any reading about these subjects in the weeks leading to my departure...or more accurately, I had a lot of other things I just preferred to do instead of that research.  Karaoke may have been involved.

And cookies.

To put it bluntly, I don't think that decision says a lot of good things about me.  I know that there's only so much preparation that could be done from thousands of miles away, and I've already had a fair amount of experience moving and living abroad.  More to the point, though, it's too late to prepare; I'm already here.

All of this is an incredibly long-winded way of saying "OMG, you guys, SO MUCH has happened in the last week!"  Enough that I'd have a hard time compiling it into one post, so...hell, it's my blog, let's break it up a little bit.  What follows will be in no particular order.  First up: the housing and security situation.

The view from my window.  The constant cloud of red dust and smoke from garbage fires makes for some killer sunsets!

Despite the occasional foibles that I understand are common to housing in developing countries (frequent power outages, mouse problems, unreliable laundry facilities), the living situation here is chock full of amenities.  The internet works great, we have a swimming pool, the geckos are puny and inoffensive, and the compound's guards are friendly and helpful, most of the time.  Yeah, compound.  Guards.

I've never lived on a compound before; the term definitely suggests cults or militias, neither of which really jives with the hippie lifestyle of the kind of tool who still says "jives."  Yet here I find myself, living behind a tall stone wall topped with razor wire, with a front gate manned by guards 24/7.  My place of employment is likewise surrounded by walls, razor wire, and guards, and I have a driver to transport me to school every morning though it's just a 15-minute walk around the local stadium (which is also surrounded by walls, razor wire, and guards).  Everyone here in the school's employ who's here to help the teachers stay safe and happy has been incredibly friendly and welcoming.  So why do I feel like such a schmuck when I cross paths with them?

In a lot of ways, I feel incredibly unsafe being surrounded by such imposing security measures at all times.  It reminds me of some fond memories of my research on Gothicism back in grad school: building enormous castle walls is done to keep out danger, yet those walls are a constant reminder of that danger, and having one's mind filled with the threat of violence gives rise to nightmares when it grows dark within the walls.  The guards at my compound naturally carry some of that baggage with them, like it or not.

More immediately, the walls and guards are a constant reminder of the specter of colonialism that hangs over my life in this country.  It's kind of hard not to think about the fact that I, a white man from a wealthy country, being paid more in a month than most families here will see in a year, am scared and defenseless in this place.  For all my power—to move among countries freely, to find employment at an international school, to have near-constant internet access—I am powerless in my daily life, and I am completely reliant on locals to get through even basic daily tasks.   Being reminded of one's privilege is a good thing, I think, and necessary from time to time, but it's also kind of a punch in the gut.

I'd like to think that I'm contributing something to the community here, that I'm not exactly here to plunder natural resources, but the fact that I'm reliant on the much poorer local people to keep me safe, drive me around, and clean my house is deeply unsettling nonetheless.  It's taking a lot of getting used to.

I think some of what's pulling me up short when it comes to speaking with servants (and I really think that might be the right word) is that the whole institution feels so...well, un-American.  In all the books and movies that I can recall from when I was growing up, bad guys were generally the ones who had servants; the hero tends to do things for himself, sidekicks notwithstanding (and they're more frequently compelled to serve through friendship, not a paycheck).  I don't particularly like the idea of becoming comfortable interacting with servants.

So now, when I find myself interacting with the school or compound guards, I do so sheepishly, even brusquely.  I'm not generally rude, I hope, but I find myself tending to look away rather than smile and make eye contact, nodding rather than asking "Ça va?" or "Comment allez-vous?"

My new coworkers don't seem to have the same problems as I do.  Some of them are unapologetically distrustful of our staff, citing previous thefts, rudeness, drinking on the job, etc..  Some are coldly competent when discussing how to best vet locals we're considering hiring to cook or do our shopping.  Some have no qualms about greeting them with a handshake, a smile, and a "Hey, brother, how are you going?"  (This last happens to be Australian.)

I'm really trying not to keep myself on the rack about this one.  Interacting with people through a new power dynamic is a hard thing, and it's not anything that anyone is born with.  I really think I'm going to make it through the next six months in one piece; let's hope I can leave in June not having made anyone's life harder or more demeaning for having met me.