My Conakry day

You know, I think I could live this life in many months. If I could just figure out a way to have electricity a little bit earlier in the day, so that I could do my work at home - or if I could get some extra battery packs and charge them at night! A slightly faster internet connection would be nicer too - but other than that, sitting here on my veranda with a light breeze and all the sights and sounds of a conakry household around me. I think I could do another few months without missing home at all! Across from me, Aly's aunt and sister-in-law are making today's rice and sauce. Above them hang the clothes they washed this morning. To the right of me, Aly's friend is tightnening his new djembe. Behind me, Rokia Sano is working with Sophie on her dance for the Merveilles performance on Sunday. Off in the distance, I can hear the rhythm of Aly's drum class. All is GOOD!



And now we have the generator turned on for 30 minutes and I'm recharging my battery, so I'm trying to upload a video from the Dundunba we attended on Monday - we will see how it goes! It is a little over a minute, and I used avidemux to edit it a little, and that made it about 8MB smaller than it was.

I didn't write last night and couldn't upload any video because I was trying to move a couple of big emails out of my work email account so that I would have space for new messages, and that took all my bandwidth!



I did manage to upload some photos from yesterday, though, and am including them here now.

First, does anyone have any idea what this might be? this is what it looks like after being drenched a bit in water. They call it Tombinyi, and nobody has any idea even what the French name might be. Even the people who sell it don't seem to know what it is called. It reminds me of tamarind a bit in look and taste - it is very sour - but is definitely not tamarind. It has very long roots coming out of it.

The ever-glamorous Ms. Alice eating a hearty meal of African rice and sauce:

 

 Here's Fanta and Bountou:

And here's Papis and Bountou in our Salon:

Here's the fabric that I bought at Madina the other day, It is two different pieces - the brown on the left and the white with stripes on the right - that came together as an ensemble. I am completely in love with it!

Here is Amahma - he is a friend of Amara Camara's who I met on my first trip here. He is very sweet, and makes jewelry. This was him the first day he came by, and then yesterday he brought me a bunch of jewelry to check out. I just took pictures of it and will upload those tonight. He is also getting me a new silver djembe!

 Here's a shot of Rokia Sano, Sophie's dance teacher, taking a little break

Here is Aly's cousin Sana, the son of Aminata who lives with us in Atlanta. He is particularly fond of us because we helped him out when his appendix burst a couple of years ago!

Aly's big brother, Salifou:

Here is little Suke, Salifou's daughter. She still doesn't like me too much, but tolerates me now, and was trying to jump out from the house and scare me this morning!

Yetou!

Sana and Yetou:

Aly's drum class with Mohammed, Seydouba, Ballaket, Abou-Brad, and Tozo:

The other side of drum class - Tozo, Abou, Ballaket, Seydou, Aly, Mohammed:

Here's a long shot view of drum class place from the yard out front:

Here's the sheep that lives at our rehearsal place. It seems very happy, and follows its owner around like a dog, along with the dog below:

And this is the dog at our rehearsal place. It is very sweet and always wagging its tail, but it has a sore on its ear, and I noticed it was walking with a limp the other day.

Three brothers - Seydouba, Aly and Amado:

Here's Brad, Tozo and Ballaket drumming:

Aly's big brother Amado:

A full shot of everyone - Seydou, Sekou, Amadou, Mohamed, Ballaket, Tozo and Brad:

Little Yetou watching class from the stairs:

Ok, I'm tired of waiting on these pics to load! I'm going to post this and do another posting with the rest of the pics I took yesterday!!!

A day of rest in Conakry

Today we had no classes, and the plan was to take a sightseeing tour of Conakry.

Before we could get our adventure, we had some logistics to take care of.

First of all, we moved the food preparation enterprise to our house today. Aly's mom had wanted to do all of the cooking for us. She has been preparing rice and sauce for us every day, and then having it delivered to us from across town. She was cooking great food, but the traffic on the way from her house to ours was interfering with eating times, so we have now moved the operations to our house here. Fanta and tanti Bountou, the guardian's wife, are now responsible for the cooking.

That means that we had to build a pantry of the supplies that would be used every day, and then also the specific needs for today. We had use of one cooking stove (which I'm now told is too small, so we are getting another big one tomorrow), but you must have two - one for the sauce and one fore the rice, so we had to buy a stove, and we had to buy the charcoal for the stove. Then we had to buy a big bag of rice, and tomatoes and potatoes and onions, and maggi, and oil... I say we had to buy it - all that I needed to do was participate in the making of the list and fund the new enterprise. Papis and Tanti Bountou went to the market together to buy everything.

Here's our new cooking stove:

Here's the other cooking stove that was here:

Here is a rather small version of the mortar and pestle thing they use here:

Here's Fanta and Suke cutting up the bulare:

Here's the two oils we bought - that palm oil is gorgeous! Aly wants me to try to carry some back on the plane - i have no idea how that will go over. I did once carry a whole lot of smoked catfish without any trouble...

Here's some bags of potatoes and carrots and a bottle of vinegar:

Once Papis returned from the market, Aly's sister had arrived who is a tailor. So thus we entered a big discussion about what we would like her to do, and how many of what we need, and taking measurements of everyone, and writing down our list of requests. By then it was after noon!

We commenced on a tour of Conakry in the method of the locals - took a regular taxi all the way to downtown - four people in the back seat and two in the passenger seat. Papis had the taxi drop us at the big main commercial port and we walked through the city center. Below is the big church of the archdiocese of Conakry. You can't see it in this shot, but there's a big painting effort going on down the left side of the building, a lovely cream color.

We walked past the presidential palace, and I didn't try to take pictures. Even though there were no military in sight, I've heard loads of stories of people who tried to take pictures and the military came to them and said it was forbidden.  So we walked all through the downtown, checking out the sites, and around the Novotel hotel and through the fishing area and Boulbinet where I stayed on my first trip to Conakry in 2002.  Below is where the fishing boats come in.

This is the Palais du Nations, which still has a lot of scaffolding around it, so I think it is not finished yet.

 After that, we changed some money and visited my favorite internet cafe, Mouna, which wasn't quite as nice as the last time I visited, but still had a lot of computers, decent speed connections, and U.S. keyboards, which makes life so much nicer. After that we stopped into La Gondole for ICE CREAM!

Then we took a taxi to Coleah, where Aly's family lives, and visited with his neighbors and family for a bit and then headed to the grand market at Madina. On the way out of Coleah, we ran into one of the Fiston's friends, and I took a quick picture of him.

So then we headed to Madina market, which is quite subdued on Sunday compared with yesterday! I think that made for much better deals from the vendors! I bought some beautiful fabric that I will take a picture of tomorrow and post. In the meantime, I took a couple of little video shots from the bridge that goes to Madina.

A little more dundunba video

Hi all,
I was able to upload one more little video - this one has Sophie dancing a little ways in and is a mix of different dancers. Still haven't found a free video editor that i've been able to download so I can trim some of the others - wish I had thought of that before I left home! I will try another editor tonight when the power comes on again...

Happy New Year!!!