Mornings in Conakry

I realized that thus far I've been remiss in not posting anything at all about food, so going forward I'm going to start taking more pictures of the food we eat so that I can share that as well. In the meantime, I took some pictures of breakfast this morning and of folks getting ready for the day...

Here is Bountou with her morning coffee a la hot chocolate:

And this is some of the items on our table - ChocoAmigo chocolate milk mix, Jolly Cow sweetened condensed milk, and the ever-present Nescafe!

Here's some of the other things on our table - a bucket of butter and Bama mayonnaise, which I'm told is the best there is...

 and BREAD. I believe this is the most positive outcome of French colonization - one can find great French bread on every corner and in between -

 And this chicken dish is wonderful - Aly's mom prepares rice and sauce for us for lunch, and then a platter of something for dinner - this version is pieces of chicken with peas and carrots and potatoes. A little spicy, and very very yummy - eaten with more of that French bread above!

There goes Papis with his morning cleaning ritual, everything must be just so. I think my boss Laynne would be very fond of Papis :)

And Fanta is outside washing clothes

Here is Fanta's little daughter Suke, who is still a bit squeamish with me, yet for some reason prefers me to Aly!! I think it is a very fine line though. She was singing with me yesterday, but today she was again unhappy to see me until I gave her the chicken that she is eating in this picture!

Oh, surprise, another drummer...

And Fanta already scrubbed our shoes this morning - i find this task very interesting. Seems like shoes are being washed all day, and then as soon as you put them on they are dusty and red and need to be washed again!

Here is Ballaket getting ready for the day

And Khanaset wanted his picture while clapping and singing!

Back to the table - we have oranges and bananas. Oranges are served peeled with the tops cut off, and then you suck all of the juice out the top. Peeling oranges is an industry unto itself here, and you see girls peeling them everywhere you go here.

So the security guard's wife picked some Avocados this morning from somewhere behind the house. They are incredible, like butter in your mouth. Here they eat them mixed with milk and sugar, but I like them plain, just sliced. So I ate one half and made this beautiful sandwich with the other half!!!

Pepper sauce!!!! Need I say more?

Just another day in Conakry!

So, today is when our program with students officially started. We got the rehearsal space organized, I will have to take pictures of it tomorrow, because I neglected to do so today. My girls were quite enamored of the sheep they had there, and we attempted to feed it some grass and a carrot to no avail.

I have posted one video so far of the dundunba yesterday - this is Mamady Sano's younger sister - Rokia - doing a solo.

The rest of what I have for today is pictures that I took.This is Aly's beautiful cousin Alice serving us food.  She is the daughter of Aly's aunt who lives with us in Atlanta, and she is exuberantly full of energy and playfulness.

And here is Sophie dancing with Rokia Sano in our garage today.



Here's the little kids in the neighborhood who are fascinated with us. One of the boys says that he drums and dances both! They apparently climbed on top of the wall of the class place today -it has to be a 12 foot wall - so they could see Aly giving class! It is not very wide, and one of them was dancing on top of the wall!

Here is Seydouba - the butterfly - again

Here is Bountou happily eating Baxha on our front porch:

And here is a series of hungry faces waiting on dinner to be served! This shot is Papis, Aly and another drummer -

Gname, Bijoux and Yaoudi

Brad, Yetou and Khanaset

Gname requested a picture of himself alone -

Sorrel:

Khanaset, Yetou and Ballaket:

Yamoussa Soumah working with Merveilles

Here is a short little video I managed to upload of Yamoussa working with the Merveilles dancers.
He is amazing, he looks and moves like he is about 20 years younger than he seemed to be in Atlanta 5 years ago! And he works like crazy - every day he starts at 8:30 am working with the National ballet, Djoliba, until 1pm, and then he works with Merveilles until about 4:30 pm!

I will try to find a video editor or something that will make my videos smaller so I can load some longer ones soon. I have taken two days of Merveilles rehearsals so far, and should be going to a dundunba today.

UPDATE - 3/19/11
Finally able to update more video!! Here's the warmup from this date, with Diallo leading and Sophie in the front row of the dances

Some more warmup

Instruments!

Aly and Lope found a great instrument maker. I'm posting pictures of the djembes, bells and gongoma. If anyone would like us to bring back something for them, please email and let us know!

Here are five of the djembes - the quality is fantastic, and notice that there are two different types of carved designs on the bottom. I have closeups of them to follow.

Here is the carved designs, i think you can see it well enough.

Here is Lope playing them:

And here are the bells we bought so far - the guy has more, even one about twice as big as the largest one here:

And here's another shot of the gongoma:

Just email if you need us to bring back something for you - ginenyira@yahoo.com

Who's at my house right this minute?

Here's who I see when I look around my front porch right now:

Aly playing his new very nice new gongoma - he's not sleeping, I think he is looking down at the gongoma. We also got some beautiful djembes, I will take some pics of them tomorrow, and we also got some big bells and we have a set of duns in the making.  If anyone's interested in purchasing anything, let me know!

And here is Papis, our director of operations, who has everything in order here at the house. He also appears to be sleeping, but he is just relaxing after a hard day's work.

Here is Lopes, a great drummer and one of Aly's good friends who played a pivotal role in helping us find great instruments! I think he has been here for about 3 days!

This is a drummer who hangs out with us, and his name won't stay in my head but it begins with a K!

Here is Aly's younger brother Seydouba, who decided to sing while I took his picture. He is always laughing, and I have nicknamed him Togotogoya, which means butterfly in Susu.

A couple of days ago, Aly's family came by and his younger sister braided my hair while they were here - finally! I don't have any pictures of my hair yet, because I'm the one who has been taking the pictures. In this picture is Aly trying to put Bountou onto Aicha's lap, and next to her Oumou is looking on.

The picture below includes Aly, Bountou, Aicha, Oumou, Marietou, Nga Bountou (who Bountou was named after), Fanta and her daughter Kadiatou, nicknamed Yetou.

Here is Aly's brother/cousin Diego and his older brother Elhadj.



Here are the dancers warming up at today's Merveilles ballet rehearsal

Here's another shot of the Merveilles warm up today

And here's the men:

You can see the back of Yamoussa Soumah's head in the bottom of the pic above - I will try to get a better picture of him tomorrow!

We have a Merveilles dundunba to attend tomorrow, so that will make some good video if I can only get it uploaded.

I've been trying to upload some little video of Sophie dancing with the Merveilles dancers for their warmup. It is telling me 4 hours to upload a 2 minute video, so I just switched to a little 16 second video about 45 minutes ago, and I'm still waiting on it to finish! I'm hampered by the fact that I do not have a video editor on my laptop either. Aha, here it is - I will keep trying to load more, but this seems to be the most difficult thing of everything i've tried to do here!

The Housing Saga

Things are much simpler here in Guinea, but nothing is easy! Case in point is the house where we are staying here in Conakry.

Before we arrived, we worked with someone who finds houses, and we were told that there was a good house available with 4 bedrooms in a good area for a reasonable price. We sent a deposit in advance to hold the house for us, and Aly's brothers viewed the house for us and wrote a contract confirming that the house would have electricity.

So the night that we arrived, they said well, don't come tonight because the electricity isn't on, and we need to see about getting a generator so we can have electricity when the power from the city doesn't come. Sounds reasonable.

The next morning, we went to the house. It is a nice house. The grounds are well kept, and it is large and attractive on the outside with a lot of space on the inside. I liked it. There are three bedrooms, a large living room, a little side room and the big balcony that was partially covered upstairs. The balcony would be a nice place for classes. Then downstairs had one bedroom, a kitchen, a big living and dining room and a little alcove with couches.

So we hung out at the house on Sunday for a while. We talked to the person who found the house for us, and discussed the fact that it was pretty scarcely furnished, so she offered to go purchase cups and plates and spoons and some other items that we thought we would need. So far, sounded pretty promising. So we headed off to visit family, and even returned in the evening only to find that the electricity still had not come on. But we had a nice time hanging out on the upstairs balcony, there was a nice breeze.

So that night, the woman who found us the house told us to come stay at her house with air conditioning while we waited for this house to be ready. The girls and I went there, and Aly, his brother and an assortment of drummers stayed at this house.

The house we stayed at was great. Air conditioning for much of the night, very relaxing, we were in a little house with two bedrooms and a front salon that was in a courtyard shared by her family, and there were four houses in total in the courtyard.  A big 4 bedroom house with two big salons and satellite tv, and then 3 little houses with two bedrooms and a small salon each. A basketball court. A big parking area. We ended up staying here a total of FIVE nights while we dealt with our housing situation. The next day we went back to the house, and watched while they carried in 3 brand new air conditioners. Another good sign. They had told us the water was working, but alas, no running water.

The next day, which was a holiday because of the inauguration of the new president, they sent technicians to fix the wiring to the house.  The technicians worked thru the day, and then said we just needed to wait for the power to come on in the city that evening, and then everything would be good. But no power came on. And when the power finally came on, it was no better than it had been. It was inconsistent and could not power an air conditioner.So we gave up on this house and told the lady that this was not going to work for us.

Aly then began the search for another house. One of his brother's woke up early the next morning and went looking for available houses, then came back and got Aly and took him to see two promising options. He was really excited by one of them, and called me to tell me that he found a really good house with everything we need. It was 1.5 times the price we had planned for, but he suggested that we just take it for a month, and then he could find something smaller and closer to his friends the last couple of weeks that he his here. Sounding good! The only problem is that they guy did not want drumming at the house, but apparently Aly had already found a nearby option for a class space that we would be able to rent. Even more promising!
So Aly would need to go meet the guy in the evening and everything would be finished. He waited all night, and the guy never called to say that he was ready. The next day, Aly called and was told that the guy had said that he did not want to rent to us. Ugh.  Aly even sent someone else to ask about the house, and that person was told that the owner does not rent to artists!!!

So, they started again the next day. One of Aly's brother's went again and found some new options. Aly called and told me that he had found something with air conditioning and running water, and he had paid them for a month and signed the contract.  So then the next morning, I went with him to see it. I was not thrilled. This was the ground floor of a multilevel building. Only one other unit was occupied, and the guy would be at work during the day when we would be drumming. But the inside was kind of dark, even though the rooms were actually pretty nice, and the bathrooms were clean with running water. But the outside looked dingy and messy, and there was a swimming pool in the back full of algae that just seemed like it would be a hotbed for swarms of mosquitoes. He told me that there was also a place to drum on the roof, but he hadn't seen it yet. We got the guard (every house we looked at had a live-in guard) to unlock the door and we headed up. The stairs were pretty wide and not too dark at all. When we got to the top, there were a lot of heavy cables lying around, but there was a really nice hut-like structure that would be big enough for classes for quite a few people. If it was cleaned up it would be decent, but there was also a school within shouting distance across the way, so that meant we couldn't use it during school hours!!! Ugh. On top of that, to have electricity, we either had to buy 60 litres of gas per night for the massive generator that was built to run the whole house, or we would need to buy our own generator and test it an make certain it would work to get the house going. Another few days of effort would be ahead of us.

So, I was thinking to myself that maybe if I went to talk to the guy with the nice house, and explained that we weren't really artists, we were a program with adult students and very responsible, that maybe he would reconsider, and right then Aly walked over to me and said hey, why don't I take you and the girls and go see the guy at the other house. Maybe when he sees our family he will reconsider. Perfect.

So, we headed to the other house, which we couldn't quite find at first. So we walked around the neighborhood a bit in blasting hot sun with very dusty dirt roads and whiny children, until we found this little oasis -

Aly told the guard that he wanted to show me the house and then speak directly with the owner. So the guard showed me around, turned the generator on, demonstrated the air conditioning and the running water and flushing toilets and HOT WATER HEATERS! Wow. He said the owner was sick and was resting, so he left and went to his house to wake him up and ask if he would consider renting to us. We waited a bit, and the guard came back and said that we needed to meet with the owner, but he was too sick to come to us, so we would need to go to him, and he had brought us a taxi. So we piled in and headed to the owner's house a few miles away. We went inside, and he did look rather week, but seemed nice enough. He talked to us a bit, and then agreed to rent to us, and said we would need to go to the house so he could show us some things and sign a contract. I learned that he had just been in the hospital for a month with typhoid. So glad I took those typhoid pills!!!

So we signed the contract and we had a house!!! Just one more night at our friends house, and we were able to hire her chauffeur on his day off to lug all of our bags to the new place. Phew. But all was not done. Then commenced the effort to recoup the deposit we had made on the first house and the full payment we had made on the second house. That only took two days, and we only lost $100 from the whole thing, which I thought was fair since Aly and the drummers had slept at the first house for a few nights. But it did require that Aly's brother wash and iron all the bedding from the second house in order to get the full amount back!

So here we are, and all is well. We've been in this house now for about 3 or 4 nights, and it has worked out really well, and I finally have music here. i'm going to end now so I can go videotape the gongoma playing of Aly's little brother and upload it later!