A Quick Update

Well, I am almost 3 months into my service!

So far, knock on wood, I am doing great. I have had a few housing issues. My villiage is changing my hut and dragging their feet. But all in all I am doing great.

Food, the biggest challenge up till now is completely solved. My best friend here in Guinea, the person that owns the coffee shack named Bahfodi, is now giving me food just about every night. Also, I discovered a dish they sell all over the place called KayKay which is pretty good and is delicious with bananas or Avocados (both in plenty in my villiage)

I also have gotten most of the children to stop calling my the name for white person (toubabu) and start calling me my African name, Mamadi Mara. This is key to my integration level and sanity.

I am really enjoying myself and feel very much a part of the community. The more I can do this, the easier each project I hope to do will be.

I am now in Faranah, my closest city, and on my way to Mamou where we are having our in-service training.

Basically, this is the time where we get back together with the other volunteers after we learned a lot about our respective communities. We will use this time to run ideas by each other for projects, learn about possible funding options (stressing possible ways of raising funds for projects locally), learning some local language (for me Malinke), and eating some good food. Also, for the last 3 days, our counterparts from the villiages come and we all brinstorm plans for the near future.

I am incredibly excited to hear everyones stories, and also excited for all of my project ideas to be shot down by current volunteers as impossible :-P

Well, that leads me into my possible projects... Now, bear in mind that is am absolutely certain that some of these will crash and burn, but I figured I wil take the shot gun approach, fire wildly and hope that something sticks.

Ok, so here is the current list of things i want to start right away, or have already done some work on:

Nutrition lessons for pregnant mothers, families with infants, and general community nutrition. This will include mainly weighing babies, targeting those that are malnourished and working with them to augment the food they are giving the child. I am also interested in working with a plant called Moringa (which is found here, packed with vitamins and nutrients, and currently used often in Indian cooking), Sumbara (a "spice" they use that is now being hijacked by a chemical susbstitute that contains tons of protein and calcium), and Cashew nuts (they eat the cashew fruit, but they throw away the nuts!).

Lessons on the ill effects and costs of smoking. I fell into this one by hanging out with a group of young men. I was kind of jokingly teasing someone who was smoking and it turned into a lesson that I am continuing to repeat, and I want to possibly do in a more formal way.

Talking about domestic violence. Another volunteer asked me to help her on a project on this subject, and when I was leaving to her site, some of my friends in Laya aksed me what it was about. This started yet another informal talk that I may make more formal if I can come up with some good ideas.

Water health. I have been talking with people on an indivdual basis on the importance of using clean water. I plan to continue this. There are a lot of poeple that live a great distance from the pump water, the only water they should be drinking, so I am tring to find ways to help them stay healthy.

Fixing up the health post. I would like to do some minor rennovations to make it look a bit nicer. i would also like to get into painting some heath based murals on the inner and outer walls. Fun and practical!

Working with the health care worker (yes, there is only one in my villiage of 2000 + people) on asking the right questions. I think he can use the times when he visits someone who is sick to talk to them about healthy living if I can get him to ask questions that relate to the illness but also reflects on their daily lives.

I also would like to work on some more difficult projects like those that follow, but that will take some more knowledge of French and my local language, as well as being even more well integrated in my community.

This includes working with HIV/AIDS and other STDs, Family planning (including the use of contraception), Female genital mutilation (rampant here in Guinea), and more.

I will report back as to how effective, if at all, these turn out to be.

Take care, and I will be posting again in a couple of weeks when i leave Momou.