Back again, huh?  I am.  I'm apparently masochistic, obvious through the fact that I continue to stay where I am at.  How about you?  Do you go through life dealing with situations that you swear "this is the last time...."?

 

We're back in Conakry, the divine city of open sewers, government-controlled radio stations, and all the muffler fumes you can choke on.  I know this has been done already, but I'm going to have to complain about the ride down a bit.

 

You see, we went into the center of our village yesterday morning at about 7:30am and said we wanted to go to Conakry (Menen falla yahude ka Conakry.)  We were directed to a car, a nice Peugeot 505, a newer model.  Much pleased we went over and asked if the car was going to Conakry.  Yes.  Conakry, direct?  Yes.  Do you have places?  Yes.  Do you have passengers?  Well.....  Yes, but we're going to go to Hafia to catch more passengers.  Then to Labe if we have to.  Now, Labe is well out of our way.  In fact, it's in the opposite direction of Conakry.  It would be better for us to go to Hafia, jump out, catch a taxi on the side of the road, and be in Conakry by mid-afternoon.  However, we were psyched about the presence of a Conakry bush taxi in our little rinky-dink village so we got in anyway.  The driver assured us that he'd grab 2 or 3 more passengers and we'd be off in less than an hour.

 

Of course, who's the fool for thinking that might possibly be true?  Me.  Yes, yours truly apparently has an optimist buried deep in her shellaced heart.

 

So several hours pass where we yell at the driver a number of times about getting on the road.  He wasn't looking for a few more passengers.  He was looking for all the passengers necessary to fill the car to maximum capacity before going.  And the syndicate (bush taxi boss) snapped his fingers at me.  Don't ever snap your fingers at me.  Anyway, much yelling aside, we got on the road.  What a nice way to start the day.

 

We get on the road at a little after 10.  By 10:30 the little girl sitting on the lap of her granny behind me starts being sick.  She's sick about every half an hour into a bag I provided for the rest of the trip.  Right behind my ear.  Then the man sitting behind Adam projectile boots onto Adam and the woman sitting on his other side.  The idiot, a full grown adult, wasn't smart enough to recognize that he wasn't feeling good.  Yah, that was really nasty.  You should have heard Adam cussing.  What amused me (if amused could be used to describe any feeling I had yesterday) is that the driver appologized to us about it, but not the man who made the mess.  The poor woman caught most of it.... on the back of her head.  It was nasty.

 

When we stopped for lunch I not only did not eat, I bought a plastic sack for everyone in the back seat.

 

Trouble really started when our driver told us that one of the people in his car is really his buddy that he's giving a ride to for free, and he wants to empty out the trunk for his friend to sit in so he can get another passenger.  Oh, that one set Adam off.  There was a lovely little "conversation" for that one.  The driver won, of course.  What would you expect?

 

Luck stuck with us when we went through 2 gendarme (army) barrages.  "Americain?  Donne-moi l'argent."  "Heh, Americain, mido falla yahude ka ameriki."  Some people may like constant attention based on their looks, but our looks show dollar signs to gendarmeries.  We got through with nothing more than some annoyance, though.

 

We finally got even when we arrived in Conakry.  We argued the driver down until he paid for another taxi to drop us off at the front door of the bureau.  Anything that takes a single franc out of a chauffer's pocket is revenge.  Unfortunately, our arrival was still after dark.  C'est la vie.

 

We've been trying to get our village to stop slaughtering cows in our front yard on market days.  It is not only disturbing to have a cow led into your yard and cut down with a machete while you're "enjoying" some coffee, but it smells really awful when several hours later the full sun has started baking the pile of stuff they pulled out of the cow's intestines.  When I asked the man who owns our house, who happens to be the local magician (he speaks to devils) as well as the local mayor of sorts, if the cow killing could be moved to another locale he responded with basically a "we'll see."  In local speak, that means no.  Adam asked the people that do the bovid murder if they could find a better place.  Unfortunately, the lead man got mad.  We're still puzzled with why.  He informed us that they'd been doing the killings there for 15 years.  Adam said sure, fine, but why do they still do it there.  Because they'd done them there for 15 years.  Yes, but why here.  Because no one lived there.  Well, we live here now and we'd like it moved.  No, the cows have been killed there for 15 years.  Well, what about moving it behind the market?  No, no one likes the smell.  Well, we're people and we don't like the smell either.  Basically the conversation went around like that for a while.  Eventually Adam let the man go because the man kept getting angrier and angrier.

 

So in an act of defiance Adam locked the gate to our compound when we left.  Knowing that the mayor guy doesn't speak French very well, Adam carefully explained to him that he locked the gate against thieves.  The mayor said yes, we should lock our house up tight.  OK.  I'll be entertained to see what happens when we return.  The mayor definately didn't understand that we were talking about the whole gate.

 

But it's really all reasonable.  You see, we'd found that the last time we left the village that someone took several craps under our spare room window.  That's pretty gross.

 

We did some home improvements last week.  Adam made a cover for our pit latrine.  Every night and morning mosquitoes would swarm up out of the hole as someone squated over it and would kindly give us a nice good night or good morning serenade.  I don't want to sound ungracious, but I'd rather that all the mosquitoes died.  Our neighbors are constantly sick with malaria.  I can't be attacked by hundreds of hungry mosquitoes while in a vulnerable situation without thinking about how miserable malaria is.  I'm quite happy with the cover.

 

My camera is dead.  It appears that one tiny drop of water got into it an fried it.  I'm really quite sad.

 

Adam bought a bracelet in our market.  It said "Le souffrance est un conceil".  It means more or less "Suffering brings wisdom".  Adam gave it to a man he met who deserved it even more.  He only had one arm.  He had quite the story to go with it.  I got a bracelet too.  It says " Mieu vaut tard que jamais."  Better late than never.

 

That's what's up in our world.  My mom and grams will arrive tomorrow evening.  Guinea is not exactly what I would call wheel chair accessible.  This should be interesting.

 

More another day.  I stink and I'm hungry.