Reading by Flashlight…How Else?

Date: 2/18/14

The evening started off rather badly- recovering from a bad day at school, I’d spent hours on the internet, researching post-PC graduate school opportunities. Which isn’t inherently bad, but nowadays I get a hollow feeling if I’m inside, on the internet instead of outside doing pointless crap with real people. Boring, sometimes, but never the hollowness that comes from zombie-like content saturation, brain turned to hibernate.

I’m not here to lock myself up. While it had to happen early in service (I was still undergoing the transformation that would allow me to live here), it doesn’t have to happen now, and I’d decided to make it a priority that these last 6 months, I’d get as deep into Guinean culture and Guinean life as I can. I’ll never have this chance again, after all.

So I was banking on a dinner engagement to get me some valuable me-Guinea time. It paid off- besides the rich fish sauce and the chance to feed a cute kitty, it was the Barcelona- Manchester City game. So there I was, crammed into the living room of one of the village wealthy with what seemed like every kid in the neighborhood, watching Satellite TV on a flat screen. Take that, image of Africa that only contains fly-ridden babies.

It was TV and some interesting conversations with Fof, and then I was on my way back home. On the way back, Fofana said some students were expecting him, so I tagged along. I found my most adorable petite at a table with a bunch of other kids I knew, all elementary school kids. It’s 9 o’clock at night, so they’re there with a lantern and some pens, pencils, and review books. I smiled at what I was seeing- kids who actually care about their education, who are revising, who are determined to become literate. It reminded me of my other petit, Lye, who likes to sit in on my classes and copy down whatever happens to be on the blackboard. Some kids are just attracted to learning, the atmosphere of it. That’s true the world over.

Fof wrote up a lesson, and I read with some of the kids, and then it was time to leave. Little kids reading by lantern-light late into the darkness isn’t something that easily filters out of the American imagination, though. My mind popped over to “unfortunate” and “brave” and “library.” It reminded me of a documentary about Guinea that just came out recently, talking about the university students who flock to the Conakry airport and to the Conakry gas stations, because those are the only places with reliable power they can use to study late at night. It was a sad story, all the more so because it was ohhh so relatable! Imagine having to walk a mile to study! Kiss Duke goodbye.

I turned to Fof to tell him these brilliant musings.

“Oh! I was a student like that! I went to the airport to study! It was great!”

-Fofana.

???

We talked for a while about this. Fofana saw the airport as a great opportunity. Not only was there light, there was quiet. You need quiet to study just as much as you need light, and finding quiet in Guinea can be challenging.

Our first instinct is to contextualize using our own experiences. That’s generally a mistake in this kind of situation. My first impression to the story was, “this is terrible, I can’t imagine having to leave my house just to find a place to study, this needs to change, it’s a priority.” Fofana’s impression was, “this is kind of cool, my other choice is studying at home by lantern and being continuously distracted, I’m glad the airport exists as an alternative.” Would he have preferred a nice library with soft lights and soft chairs? Was he sometimes annoyed at having to walk out the door every night to get ahead? Of course!!! A library would definitely be a good thing, no one is contesting that. But what I saw at first as a terrible and perverse situation, Fofana saw as an improvement and good fortune. Perhaps Fofana wouldn’t have targeted the lighting situation for his expose documentary, if he were asked about the saddest aspects of the Guinean experience. Life is relative, what seems terrible to Westerners just might not be that bad. I don’t believe that “natives know best” works in every situation, but this episode demonstrated to me the necessity of getting inside their heads, of using our modern perspective *without* losing sight of the local experience. Anything else runs the risk of being misguided.

“In Africa There Is Too Much Improvisation”

Date: 2/4/2014

The day started at a brisk 6:30am as I went out to water the garden. Dry season getting worse meant a lot of the nearby wells had dried up- leaving hordes of women and children to attack our well every day, making late day watering infinitely harder (by the end of the day the water level must have been a hundred feet lower than it started, and it takes all night for the water table to recharge it). The day continued at 4:30, with more hauling water and digging into dirt. The kind of physical labor that can get exhausting quickly- good thing I just have a tiny school garden to take care of and not a peasant’s field.

Pests are by far the most unmanageable aspect of our project, from insects to viruses to…chickens, apparently. Now that most of the edible leaves have dried up, our garden is a hot spot for strafing runs by the little veloceraptors. My most brilliant contribution to date: let’s put bricks around the bottom of the wire fencing, so they can’t dig under there. The idea is met with enthusiasm! …so off to haul bricks we go, Fofana, Fode, two students from the club, and myself. No wonder everyone around here is so strapping.

Of course there’s always the background conversation with Fofana to turn to. One of the ways he studies English is by studying our (many, truly odd) proverbs. Sometimes he comes back at me with French proverbs (which are even stranger than our own). As we decide to do another round of brick-hauling, he tells me in French “why do tomorrow what you can do today?” I smile, and tell him that’s a proverb after his own heart- like I’ve mentioned before, the man is more industrious than most Americans I know, defying the stereotype.

Cue him lamenting the, “how do you say it”, certain African inclination.

“Lazy?” I offer. Plenty of Africans leverage these attitudes better than any redneck or redditor who’s thought about “Africa” for five seconds. Hard to tell if it’s indicative of entrenched global racism, a post-colonial PTSD, or plain honesty.

“No,” he said. Comment dit-on…”improvise!”

I asked him to explain.

“See, maybe I want to quit today, and come back tomorrow to finish the job. I say I’ll be back tomorrow at 4. But tomorrow at 3:50 my wife may ask me to go to the well and get water. I could not refuse her. And then something else may pop up that I cannot refuse. In Africa, there is too much improvisation.”

I will think about these words of his for a long while, I suspect. It might just be an accident of translation, of our third languages…but there’s something to the fluidity, the improvisation, of responsibility here. It seeps into explanations of corruption and laziness and weaken and taint those ideas- make it clear they can’t tell the whole story. I’ve tried to talk about this before, about how there’s no split here between professional self/time and personal self/time. Their master isn’t the clock, but a more nuanced social balancing act, an act that demands, as Fofana says, a lot more improvisation.

Still, for him, there’s too much of it.