Courrant

Today was one of those days I did not want to leave my house. I have now been at site for a week and it seems to have gone by rather quickly. If I had managed not to leave my house today, it would have been the first day that happened. However, life had other plans.

I was productive in the morning before the heat hit and did some cleaning, put up some things on my walls, stuff like that. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and started in on Eat, Pray, Love which my cousin Maggie gave me to read here when I visited her in Brooklyn last June. I have already completed two other books just since being at site: Sundays at Tiffany’s, which Amy’s mom sent me (thanks again, Mama Urban!!), and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a novel about Nigeria at the start of colonialism.

I had some visitors today, as I do every day, including but not limited to the Sous Prefet, who told me I have two jobs for the Prefet’s visit tomorrow: one is to be at his house at 8am to help the women prepare the rice and the other is to present the calabash of Kola nuts with two young girls to the Prefet when he arrives. Both are doable and I am happy to be included. Nene also stopped by a couple of times and hung out for awhile.

For lunch I made two fried eggs with onions, avocado, vache qui rie (Laughing Cow cheese) and piment sauce. It was tasty and filling.

Late in the afternoon, like 4ish, I did decide to leave the house and go down to the chango (the mystery water) to wash my dishes and the dog, who hadn’t had a bath in like 3 days. I forgot that I had wanted to wash my hair, which is unfortunate.

As I was on my way back from the chango, Nene met me on the path and said the Sous Prefet wanted me to come to his house right away. So we deposited my things at my house and went to his house. There was a group of about 8 women sitting on the porch with him and he explained that this was a meeting to discuss the preparations for tomorrow. Almost all of it was in Pular, so I didn’t understand most of it, but basically he was just giving the women the money to buy the food.

The meeting was interrupted when a shiny silver truck pulled up to the house and three men got out and went into the house to talk to the Sous Prefet. When they emerged the Sous Prefet announced that courrant (electricity) was coming to our village. The women yelled and clapped and danced and continued to do so in bursts for the next couple of hours.

So what my village is getting is called a Platform Multifunctionalle, which is like a big gas-powered generator from what I gather. It is a project done by the UN (their symbol was on the truck and also on the poster describing the machine). I came to understand that they knew this was coming and the women’s groupement had been raising the money for it: 1.5 million Guinean francs or about $600 US. At first I had thought this was the first they had heard of it but that was not the case.

The men went about some sort of business, finding other men, I think touring possible locations for the machine and talking logistics. I was hanging out with the women, though, who were singing and dancing so I don’t really know what the men were doing. They were walking around and talking.

Apparently this is going to bring courrant to the village Centre, which has about 300 residents, including myself. I’m not sure exactly how it is going to work: what hours, if they will be hooking up powerlines to have power in people’s houses or if it will just be the government buildings, how they will pay for the gas, etc… But I DID happen to have the thought that this would be great for the Centre de Sante because I remembered that the doctor’s medicine fridge had been out of gas during site visit and regular courrant would keep the vaccinations at the proper storage temperature. (This also brings up another point – where are they going to get a regular petrol supply?)

One of the men told me that they would start working on it on Saturday and that it should be up and running in 2-3 months. Also I don’t know if this means my village Centre will be getting reseau soon or not because one of the women held a cell phone up to her ear and pretended to call me and we went through all the French salutations before dissolving in laughter.

The hub bub was concluded when the sun went down and it was prayer time and I watched about 20 men pray in the Sous Prefet’s front “yard”, led by the President of the CRD and all the women went inside to pray separately.

Then people started to disperse and I ended up at the SP’s house for awhile longer waiting for someone to walk me home (we are not supposed to walk by ourselves at night: Peace Corps policy) and ended up eating rice and soup sauce with the family for dinner. That scrapped my plans to make spaghetti with olive oil, onion, garlic and diced tomato, which I had been planning on since reading all the stories about food in Italy in this new book (thanks A LOT for sending me off with a book that makes my mouth water for food I can’t have, Maggie!!!).

It’s always good to eat with a family, though, and it is bien integree.

So instead of staying in my house all day I ended up out and about with a lot of different people from about 4-8:30 or so. Tomorrow I go to the SP’s house to help with the food at 8. The Prefet is supposed to arrive at 10 (we’ll see if that happens) and then hopefully I will still be able to hit the marche in the afternoon. Saturday I am going to try to go up to Ian’s site to check out his marche, see his site and steal some books that he’s inevitably finished reading.

Tuesday I think I will go meet with the groupement doing the pepiniere and get them started on finding Coyah sachets and seeds for the kinds of trees they want to plant.

Just another day in Africa.