Ditinn, Guinea, West Africa
7 March 2000

Hi!  

I just moved into a new house.  It's clean, with 2 rooms and a nice porch.  Above all, it's nice and quiet!  It wasn't that hard to move, either.  A bunch of kids from the 5th grade came and transported all my furniture.  (That's normal here.)  My friend Mohammed moved the rest of my personal stuff for me, because he has a car.  I did it all in one day.

Ever since I moved into the new house I've been keeping myself pretty busy with work.  I've started 3 ecology clubs, with about 75 students total and 4 teachers who work alongside me.  We've installed 3 pipinières (tree nurseries) of which may produce 1,500 trees or so, if we are lucky.  It's pretty hard to organize work like this with so many kids, but I am a pioneer for environmental education in Guinea.  I think of my work as an experimentation.  If it works, it work.  If it doesn't, it doesn't.  I can then help other volunteers who will follow in my footsteps.

I've been teaching little lessons every week or so.  For example, the first week I had the kids describe their environment, then we read a children's book which one of the teachers translated into Pulaar, the local language.  My main focus for every meeting is to talk about environmental education issues in a way that is not so formal, so the kids may have some fun.

Another type of work I've been doing is mud stove sensibilizations with students.  A mud stove is, you guessed it, a stove made out of mud.  It's a nice mixture of termite mound clay, cow manure, hay, and water.  Why do we make these?  They are cooking stoves for rice and sauce.  The stoves concentrate the heat thereby using less wood and cooking the food much faster.  They're also safer (less burnt kids).  This decreases deforestation (less wood), it's less expensive for families, and it's fun, compared to the traditional method of three rocks:

traditional stove
"3 rocks"; lots of wood

vs.

mud stove
little wood & safe!

 

I got together with a governmental group, SNPRV, and we met up with the Junior High.  We got each grade together one day and did a theoretical class and a practical class with the students.  We went to people's homes and built several stoves each day, with the SNPRV workers and me leading a group of 8-10 students.  One hope was that the students would go home and build one at there homes.  Some of them already have!

I've also started to work with a discussion group for girls.  We've formed this group so I can get to know the girls, because I have to involve them with a magazine called "Aïsha", put out by the Peace Corps.  I can get them to write articles, poems, draw pictures, etc., about issues such as those I've listed earlier.  Also, there will be a Gender and Development Peace Corps conference in a couple of weeks for the girls.  Each volunteer can choose one girl to go to the conference.  It's a 3-day conference, which deals with feminism issues, mostly lead by volunteers.  I'll be discussing the importance of literature.  I'm also organizing the food and drink arrangements for the conference.

One of my guy friends - Tory - and I are in the process of organizing some summer work at the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center in Faranah, Guinea, in the National Park Haute Niger.  We might stay in the park for several months, helping out with the project - taking care of the chimps and such.  We're not really sure if it's a sure thing or not, but it doesn't hurt to try.  The problem is that the project is under-funded.  However, the project itself seems very interesting.  The Center finds chimps that were taken from the wild and sold as pets, then they try to rehabilitate them so they can go back into the wild.  

If this project doesn't work out for us, I'll probably help out with the training of new Peace Corps volunteers this summer in Senegal.

After the girls' conference, I'm planning on biking 80+ kilometers to my site from my friend's site in Missira.  We're going to celebrate his birthday here at the waterfall, I think.  I'll try to take some photos.  (Note: Mike ended up not going on this trip, because the friend he was planning on going with became ill.)

Well, I hope all is well for you.  Keep me up to date as much as possible.  Even if you think it's trivial information (it isn't, by the way!)  I hope you all had nice holidays over there.  I've been doing a lot of work, but I do miss my family a lot.

Bon Chance!

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