Africa

I have thought for awhile now that my experience in Africa is different than I thought it would be. Different in ways that are difficult to put into words or express. This experience is hard in different ways than I thought it would be. In ways, less poetic than I thought it would be.

Sasha gave me Nine Hills to Nambonkaha last week as she had finished reading it. It is a book chronicling the service of Sarah Erdman, a volunteer who served in Cote D’Ivoire (just southeast of Guinea) in the 90’s. I am only 60 pages into it (I took a repose over the weekend to blow through Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country, a cadeau from Scott) but it has put into perspective a lot of what I have so far been experiencing here. It IS poetic, I just haven’t found the words to express that.

For example, my grandma. She is the cutest impish old lady. She is the one who most often opens the door for me late at night (by late I mean 10 or 11) when I’ve been out with other volunteers, her eyes just barely open, shuffling quietly across the floor. When she laughs it’s as though it’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen and it explodes out of her mouth. Her eyes are always smiling.

She prays faithfully at all the prayer times, even if there is a child crying and pulling on her clothes, as little Oumou was yesterday. Grandma would try to gently push her away, her lips still moving in her quiet prayers, but Oumou was just screaming, inconsolable. I was sitting right next to grandma and trying to get Oumou to come to me but I didn’t want to stand and scoop her up as she has been afraid of me since she arrived with my aunt a few weeks ago. At first, she would burst into tears whenever she saw me and as time went on she slowly began to smile at me from her mother’s arms and wave. I was afraid to just scoop her up because it might just make her scream even more and I wouldn’t know what to do. I did manage to get her to come to me and she cried into my pagne for a few moments until I decided to pick her up and plop her bare bottom on my lap. Surprisingly, she did not object (though she was still crying) and I bounced her up and down gently until she quieted down and ultimately fell asleep there in my lap until grandma finished her prayers, let out one of her impish laughs and scooped Oumou up to put her in a bed for a nap. It was one of those moments where I felt…useful. Part of the family.

Africa is a poor continent and Guinea in particular is a very poor country despite its rich soils and mineral wealth of which the poor infrastructure and imbalanced mining contracts have prevented the Guinean people from enjoying the benefits. But despite this being a poor country, I have never been overwhelmed by a feeling of poverty here. Every morning I drink my tea out of a plastic mug that leaks out the bottom, I get my hot water from an ancient Chinese thermos, I sit on old particle board chairs that in the States would be suitable for a child’s playhouse, I see the distended bellies of the malnourished youth everywhere I look, I buy goods from the open fronts of old shipping containers, stands made of sticks and off old rice sacks on the ground but I have never felt a sense of real poverty. This is just how things are here and I don’t feel an overwhelming need to change those things drastically or in quick fashion.

Everything here needs to be done “petit a petit”, little by little. You have to start with the most pressing issues and work for change in very small ways, as people here are used to doing things the way their parents taught them and the way their parents’ parents taught them. In their eyes, this system has served them well and they do not have a burning need to change. These are the reasons that development work must be done so carefully, on such small scales. Encouraging regular hand washing with soap and condom use and diet diversification are very noble causes here.

The only times I really feel despair is when I think about the relation between the sexes here. Polygamy is a reality and I had done what I could to prepare myself to understand and accept it before I came here but when you talk to the women and you hear them talk about how their husband jumps from room-to-room or house-to-house on a nightly basis to be with two or three or four different women and then STILL have affairs on top of it, it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because somewhere inside me I do believe in love and in commitment and in shared responsibility and shared life between two people. I don’t know if that exists here.

In addition, the rate of female circumcision, or female gential mutilation, is VERY high here (I think our session said the rate was something like over 90% of women have had it done). So in general women don’t experience much pleasure from sex, and are obliged by at least religion if not law to submit to sexual relations with their husbands at any time it is demanded, even directly after having been beaten by said husband. The rate of the FGM is going down, for many reasons including that the women told us that there are women who come to Guinea from the surrounding nations (Mali, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Sierra Leone) that have not been circumcised and the men have realized that they enjoy sexual relations much more with an uncircumcised woman.

I don’t know. I think for me the part that really gets me is maybe not the lack of love, but rather the lack of being IN love.