Why hello everyone,
I am doing fine and am still very happy here in Guinea. Right now i am rapping up more training and working on great ideas of projects ranging from very small to very large scale operations that i want to start-up here in the next few weeks.
The first three months, an explination:
Feb, March and April are months of observation for us. So what i did every day was observe how people in my village perform the everyday stuff. Like, where do they get water, who prepares food, why only certain kids go to school, what types of medicine do they have at my health center and things like that. For those of you sitting inside your little cubicle from 9-5 or longer this might seem like an ideal day. Waking up when you want, going where you want, doing whatever you want, but let me tell you, it is a lot harder than it sounds.
There were certain days where getting out of the house seemed worse than crunching numbers in a cubicle under fleurissant lighting all day. Imagin, being dropped off in a place you don't know, where you don't know anyone, a language you don't speak, it averaged about 110-120 degrees a day and a culture you can't even begin to understand. Well that was my every day life. Don't get me wrong i loved every pain staking minute of it, and i wouldn't change it for a cubicle at all. Things did get easier and conversations became more fun and less work as the months began to pass but i am still working on understanding the culture here. There are certain times when you just want to throw your hands up and scream, like when you just finished telling people you can only get malaria from mosquitos and then you ask and they tell you that you get it from mangos and milk..... But those things just take time.
I have made great friends and some of my favorite times thusfar are just sitting around under a mango tree, drinking (strong, sugary) tea, watching the traffic go by (about a car every 20 minutes, on the NATIONAL HIGHWAY) and just talking about life with my friends. That is where i feel i will be able to make the biggest difference. Opening up the eyes of the youth in my town to a world larger than just Guinea. But i have big plans, we will see what really happens while i'm here.
I'm begining to adjust to things as well. I no longer detest rice and sauce, i can now tolerate it. I no longer get the wicked cravings for food that i got while in training. OK thats a lie, i still miss american food but i try to tell my self i don't. I take a bath from a bucket, i squeeze into a compact car like the best of them and i even have eaten with my hands (but i DON"T like to make a habbit of it). Who would have thought. The heat is still killer, but i have learned to take naps (mainly sitting in bed trying to remember the days of snow) after lunch until about 4 when the sun starts to cool down.
My all time favorite part of the day is right after the last meal of the day (9.30 ish) when i know i made it through another day and i look up into the sky and see a million stars twinkling. There are no city lights, no lights period so you can see every star in the sky. It is an amazing site. I never knew how many stars there were until i moved here.
I have learned lots of valuable information that i hope to share with everyone back in the states especially about how to do business in a country ranked 166 out of 177 on the world development scale (USA is in the top 3 fyi) but if you have specific questions about anything at all, please e-mail me so i can answer any questions you might have and there are no dumb questions. Lord knows i asked a lot before coming here and about 95% of what i thought before i came was wronge.
Well my time is up at the internet "Cafe" so i'll write more next time ;)
