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Published: November 24th 2006
Happy Thanksgiving! I’m celebrating in Labe with other volunteers. Our country director sent us a turkey! I’ve heard there are some old taped football games around too. It’s also about time to get paid, yay! We were paid in September, the equivalent of about $485 American to buy everything we need for our houses, transport, school supplies, and living until December. It’s not much money but there’s not much to buy in the village, so I’ve actually managed to save some money for traveling.
Big news...a friend of mine is going back to the States for Christmas and will be bringing some things back for me. So if you've thought about sending a letter or some pictures or an mp3 CD...now would be a great time. Send things to my mom and she'll take care of it 😊 If you need my parent's address, email me or better yet email my mom at ekanasty@gmail.com. Get things to my mom's before Christmas if you want them to make it.
Since my last update I’ve been back in the village, teaching. On Sunday I took a bike trip to Poredaka to visit another volunteer. Poredaka is a larger village that has an even larger market on Sundays. Cars come in from the city packed with city treats to sell, and people walk in from surrounding villages to sell produce or to buy goods unavailable in small villages. On my bike ride home I passed some of my students - 8th and 9th grade girls who had gone to work in the market that day and were walking home with large bowls of goods on thier heads. It’s a 22 km hike up and down rock hillsides. The road is awful and the bike ride was rough, but I stopped complaining when I saw the girls walking all that way in cheap plastic flip flops.
My friend in Poredaka had just moved into a new house. She’s a new volunteer like me, and I guess her first month or so was difficult. She’d wanted to move into a new house because her old one was a bit isolated - no neighbors in view, just an empty house across from hers. Kids would constantly follow her home, hang in the windows, and try to get inside. She talked with some people in her village and told them she wanted to move because she didn’t feel safe there. She was promised another house, but ended up waiting and waiting while no progress seemed to be made. After having a particularly rough few days, fed up and overwhelmed, she packed her bags and decided to quit and head back to the States. As she was looking for a taxi to take her out of the village, she ran into a friend who said they’d found a new house for her. It belonged to a buisenessman who was in China. It was in a walled compound with another family and a guard who would keep theives and gaping kids away. So instead of heading back to the States that day she moved into her new and glamorous house with solar electricity and running water. A new member of the Posh Corps.
When I visited she seemed to be a lot happier with the new living arrangement. The compound is peaceful but not isolated, and the family that lives there is very sweet. She has a huge porch, built into a hillside so it’s like a balcony on one side. Inside she has a large sitting/dining room, a kitchen (something that only exists in fancy houses with running water), a bathroom with a shower, and two bedrooms. Each bedroom has a queen-sized bed, an armoir with full-length mirrors, and a dresser with a mirror. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a full-length mirror. It reminded me that I’m short. Anyway the move seemed to improve her ability to work in the village and her attitude toward her whole PC experience. I hope it continues to go well.
THE STORY OF THE CELL PHONE
Ok, so I was supposed to have a phone but it got stolen. Here’s the story.
My village is so far out in the bush and isolated that the last volunteer had trouble with communication, and Peace Corps didn’t want to put another volunteer there because of this issue. A rich Guinean who grew up in Kourou really wanted another volunteer there, so he decided to buy a cell phone for the volunteer, solving the communicaion problem. When the old voluteer left in June, he left the phone with another volunteer and it was given to me when I moved to my site.
My principal at the time kept asking about the phone, telling me it was not a personal phone but a phone for the school, therefore I had to share it. As no one had ever told me otherwise, I let him use it. Now and then he’d say things like, “You have numbers saved in the phone, you should write those down because it’s a phone for the school, not a personal phone,” or he’d tell me how he was mad at the last volunteer for leaving the phone with another volunteer and not with him. One day he came to my house and said he needed the charger for the phone and all the papers that go with it, because he had to fill out forms for the school or something. Though I didn’t see why he needed these things in order to write down that the school had them, I had no real reason not to trust the guy at the time.
A couple of days later, a new principal was sent to our town from Mamou. First there were issues with the old one refusing to give up his position, etc. A couple of days later the old principal came to my house to tell me that he was being transferred to another village where he would be principal. He told me a messenger had come in from Mamou to give him this news. He also told me that he asked the messenger about the phone. “I told him that it should be a personal phone for you. You shouldn’t have to share it. The DPE should just give it to you, cadeau,” on and on and on. “So when the DPE makes a decision on it, we’ll let you know.” When I asked if I could have the phone back until that decision was made, he told me he’d already sent it to Mamou for the DPE. Once again I didn’t see why the DPE needed to have the phone to make this decision, but I thought it too audacious to say, “Monsieur le Principal, I think you’re full of it.”
So at this point, knowing I wouldn’t see the phone for a long time, I got incontact with my coordinators at Peace Corps, who contacted to rich guy who bought the phone. He said that he bought it exclusively for the volunteer in Kourou and that it should not be shared. When I was in Mamou a few weeks ago, my coordinator and I went to the DPE office and asked about the phone. They knew nothing about it and it was pretty clear that the principal had never sent it there; he had either kept it or sold it.
Later that day I ran into my new principal, a nice guy who’s young and seems to be honest, and I told him the story. He said he wasn’t surprised, M. Diakhaby had also stolen over 200 books from the school, taken money from the students, and done a million other shady things. He was on his way to the DPE and would ask about it.
When I talked with my new principal again, he said that the DPE had confirmed that Diakhaby had sold the phone. The DPE was furious and is now withholding his salary to buy me another one. So just maybe I’ll get a phone after all.
Losing the phone has been an inconvenience, but I’m more aggrivated by the fact that this guy came over to my house, sat down on the couch, looked me in the eye, and told this huge lie about how he insisted that the phone should be mine, they should give it to you, cadeau, etc, etc. At the time the only reason I had to believe the man was that it seemed impossible for someone to tell such a ridiculous, drawn-out, blatant lie. Since then I’ve told the story to a few other people and I keep finding out about more shady things this guy did, and I’ve learned that just about everything he ever told me was false. If you mention the name “Diakhaby” to a small child in my village the child goes wide-eyed and says, “Diakhaby...no good, no good.”
Though I’m a little angry that no one warned me about this guy to begin with, at least now I have a solid excuse to never lend anything to anyone. I feel I can now be skeptical and cynical of anyone who gives me a bad vibe, and I don’t have to care about offending them because one of their counterparts has lied and stolen from me. The village seems happy to have Diakhaby gone, the new prinicipal is very good, and even with this frustration I think it was worth the switch.
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Jaimee K
non-member comment
Happy Thanksgiving
Hey there Rosie: I hear that Thanksgiving is going to be rather small this year in MI, because you and I are gone, along with Eric and Amy are up north! Crazy. I'm getting really bad about checking my email but feel free to call me anytime or email me! Miss you tons lady and Happy Thanksgiving!~~Your Cuz, Jaim