Please read entire entry!!!!

Cliffnotes of my last week:
• Riots in Conakry (Capital of Guinea, where I am/was) leading to 150+ deaths
• Rapes and Pillages
• Standfast
• Consolidation
• Goodbyes
• Captain America / Jack Bower
• Refugee camp in Mali

Did that get your attention?? OK, I am fine! No really, I’m fine.

It all started last Monday September 28, 2009. Lead by the opposition leaders against Captain Dadis Camara the “President” of Guinea there was a demonstration at the soccer stadium. One thing lead to another and the Military opened fire on the crowd. By the end of the day the BBC was reporting over 150 deaths while the Guinaen government was only reporting 10. Ok so really quick, I highly encourage you to look up official articles about this event because there are a lot of things I am forgetting and I kind of forget English so reading another source will really help you understand the situation I am in.

This lead the Peace Corps Guinea staff to put us under standfast, which means that we are not allowed to leave our site (home) and we have to call and check in with staff twice a day. Well when your cell phone mountain is about an hour walk a way that gets kind of hard and hot in the sun. But whatever I make the walk and it helps pass the day when four hours is devoted just to getting phone calls. One afternoon while I’m making my phone calls I get a call saying I need to pack a bag and prepare to be consolidated in Mali (the neighboring country).

By the time I get back to my house I’m in shock. The country that I have been devoting my last ten months of existence is falling apart and there is nothing I can do about it. I pack my life back into the same three bags I came to Guinea in and have to start the goodbye process. I devoted two days of taking photos and emotionally dealing with the situation.

There is no official word from Peace Corps Headquarters saying as to whether we will be going back to Guinea or if we will be evacuated as of now, so saying goodbye was difficult because we were not to say that we wouldn’t come back but statistically there is no chance of going back. I told me friends that I was going to a month long conference in Mali and I would be back. Some people believed me, while most knew that I wouldn’t return.

While I was saying goodbye to some of my students from my English class they asked me if I had heard the news. I was like, what news? It turns out one of my students was in Conakry for the end of Ramadan and went to the stadium for the protest and he and his older brother were shot to death in the demonstration by the military. He was one of my best students and only 20.

But my last night in Dounet (my village) I was burning all of my trash around 10 o’clock at night when my best friend from site comes running up to my house. This never happens so I was like, “hey whats up?” And he just looks at me and says “Your not coming back, I’ll never see you again. Will I?” That is when I broke down. Because I couldn’t lie but I couldn’t tell the truth.

The next morning the Peace Corps picks me up in the bus and we start our long and emotional ride to the border. What feels like 27 hours later we reach the Mali – Guinea border. It was a long uneventful trip until the border that is.

We reach the border around 9:30 at night. We are all spent but expect this process to take several hours trying to get a bus of Americans through. Little did we know that Captain America was waiting at the border for us. When we pull up to the first of several “gates” Captain America jumps onto the bus and literally is just oozing red white and blue. By midnight we were all through into Mali and in our Bamako “refugee camp”. Yep that’s right, I am now a Peace Corps refugee.

I have no home, yep I’m homeless. All of my stuff is spread across two continents and I have no idea where my future home will be in two weeks time when we are transferred out of refugee stage. But I am ok, I am safe and all Americans have evacuated Guinea.