The end of the peanut saga

I guess this is now part three of the peanut saga, or should I say the peanut trilogy.  This one will be mostly pictures, I think, because there's not much left to tell.

We worked for a few hours and then Mariama decided that it was time for us to eat.  She said something to Ans along the lines of us needing more energy to finish the work.  I wasn't actually too tired at at point... the work isn't super hard, you just have to be bent over a lot.  But we ate anyway.  It was rice and a fish/peanut sauce.  Pretty tasty, other than the little fish bones and a few bits of dirt.  Ans and I ate alone while the rest of them worked... apparently they didn't need more energy yet but thought the wimpy fotés did.

I didn't take a watch with me, so after maybe another hour of work, I asked Ans what time she thought it was.  She asked Mariama, and after looking at the sun in the sky, she guessed maybe close to 2.  I was supposed to be back to run the store at 2:30.  Ans drafted the two kids to guide me back, so off we went.  I actually got back a little before 1, which ended up being nice since it was tortilla tuesday, and I wanted to help get that started.  I also got to carry a little baby around on my back for a while because LaBelle brought her along when she came.

Ok, now for some pictures...

Everyone else working while I take pictures.  Notice the nice view in the background. :)

 

I did eventually start helping.

 

A termite mound we saw as we walked back to the village.

 

On the walk back with my little guides.

With baby Binta on my back.

 

My dirty foot after farming barefoot and then walking home in flips.

More of Charlie Brown & the gang (get it? peanuts?)

Where'd I leave off?  Oh yeah, we made it to the field.

Mariama's son was there, along with his son (I think) Ousmane.  Once we arrived, he quickly fashioned a little peanut sack with a piece of cloth and got to work planting the peanuts.

For peanut planting, there are two jobs.  First, you dig a hole and drop in a peanut.  Next, you cover the hole and pull weeds around it.  Usually this is split up and done by 2 different people, and there are specific Landuma words for each job.  So specific that it's different for each plant.  If you're digging holes and dropping in rice seeds, it's not the same word as when you're dropping in peanuts.  I don't remember either word, so I can't even try to tell you what they are.

We all started out doing the first job, digging holes & dropping peanuts, to get things started.  Well, I actually started out taking pictures and letting everyone else work, but I soon joined in.  Eventually, we let Mariama's son continue with that job while the rest of us went back over our work, covering the holes and pulling weeds.  It's all very haphazard, at least in my mind, because the whole time you're working around leftover stumps/roots from whatever used to be in the field before they burned it... mostly small bushes, I think.  And half the time, I felt like I was probably uncovering one peanut in the process of covering another, but oh well.  Ousmane started making sure that the weeds I pulled weren't actually peanut plants already growing... did that at least once, until he stopped me.

One of my favorite parts was that we all worked barefoot.  We walked to the field in our flips and then chucked them off to the side so we could walk around in the dirt in our bare feets.  A little painful when I stepped on some of those leftover stumps/roots, but otherwise fun.

Ok, I have to stop again here because my zucchini's done.

Anybody want a peanut?

Today I got to pretend to be a peanut farmer.  And I need to write about it before I forget the little details, if we're not already too late.

First, Ans came and got me in the wee hours of the morning.  Actually, it wasn't until about 8:30, which was kind of surprising to me.  I picture them going to their fields in the wee hours of the morning.  But I didn't think about things like packing a lunch.  Might not seem like a big deal to you, but they don't just whip up a coupla PB&Js and throw them in a brown paper sack.  Nope, it's gotta be rice and sauce.  So basically someone gets up nice and early and prepares a whole meal to take along with them into the field.

As we walked to meet the lady we were going to help (Mariama) at her house, we saw many people from the village.  They all gave us weird looks because of the hoes in our hands like, "You're going to go work in the fields?!"  We saw my house worker, who looked concerned about the idea of me doing that sort of work and said something along the lines of don't get sick.  Apparently I look like I'm easy susceptible to getting sick from too much physical strain.

Then we arrived at Mariama's house and were greeted by a bunch of people there.  One lady took a look at my hoe and told me (through Ans who translated) that it was too big for me, and that I'd get tired too fast.  It should be noted here that my hoe is the same size as Ans's... guess this means that I look not only very susceptible to getting sick but also just weak in general.  She proceeded to find me smaller, more light-weight hoe.

The walk to the field was done single-file along paths behind their house.  We eventually crossed the road leading toward town and started a trek up a small hill.  It turns out that this is a hill that I've wanted to go to the top of for a while, and guess what!  Their field is near the top of the hill.  The views were some of the best views I've seen in Guinea, especially when the sun came out to shine on all the greenness, and the skies were blue with puffy white clouds.

More to come later about the actual work.  And I'll post some pictures, too.

Catching up

It's been a while since I've written a coherent post about what I've been doing.  I can't guarantee that this post will be coherent, but at least I'll try to tell you what I've been up to.

Last weekend, I took a trip to the beach with some of the single ladies.  I've been to the beach a few times before, once overnight at the camping beach with the teens for Beach Retreat, and a few times for day trips.  This time we (Flermi, Ana, and I) took a taxi from here to one of the villages near the beach to spend the night.  From there, it should be about a 45 minute drive to the beach.

We meant to leave around 9:30 in the morning, but our taxi didn't arrive until about 1, which was ok because it gave me a chance to meet some of the missionaries I hadn't seen yet since I'd arrived.  All of us had been to this particular beach before, so when our taxi driver drove past the usual turn-off, we were a little unsure if he knew where we were going.  But I knew there was another road with a sign to the beach, and that's where he headed.  Since he knew about it, we figured he must have also known that it was the shortest route.  Nope.  We drove and drove and known of us saw anything that looked familiar.  All of a sudden we were pulling up to some random building at the end of a little fishing village, and our taxi driver was looking at us like we should know where we were.

Micha politely asked, "What's the name of this place?"  He responded with something that was not at all where we should be, and asked, "You don't recognize it?"  Nope.  We turned around, but there was a noticeable difference in our taxi driver's demeanor.  I don't think he likes being lost.  The music was turned off.  The speed was turned up, which is all kinds of fun over bumpy roads.  He stopped to ask just about every person on the side of the road.  At some point, we turned onto the road to the camping beach... I tried to tell him it wasn't the right place, but I don't think he wanted to hear it from me, so instead he stopped and asked someone again.

Eventually we made it to the beach.  And the tide was still in enough to swim for a while, which was excellent, although we found out the next day that the tide came in much more when it was actually high tide and swimming was even better.  We got a little rain that first day, but I was able to go for a walk/jog down the beach in the rain and managed to avoid the lightning on the way back.  Then using my beginner's luck, I snuck into a round of skip-bo and won, which was convenient since Micha declared that only the winner would get to eat dinner.  And eat dinner I did, along with the other girls... so much for that.

Our electricity at the little cabin ran into a few snags, so lights were out pretty early.  Turns out that I was exhausted for some reason, so I'm pretty sure I fell asleep around 10 and didn't wake up until 8:30.  Maybe it's because we had real windows or something... I can rarely sleep in that late here at my own house, even when I stay up late.  Turns out I was about the only one that slept well that night, but I don't think it was because of my snoring or anything...

A few more beach highlights:
* Delicious fish.  I only recently started liking fish (well, within the last few years), which turns out to be a really good thing because the fish they served at the beach was delicious -- better than the chicken, and I like my chicken.
* Sunburn.  I did actually put on some sun repellent as I like to call it, but it was after first getting wet, so I'm not sure it really worked.  Well, I know it didn't really work for my legs, since I came back with legs the color of a cooked lobster, with a nice abrupt line where my shorts ended.
* Mosquitoes.  I don't really get along with mosquitoes.  It seems they really like the taste of my blood, even after I've slathered myself with layers of insect repelling lotion and some of the spray stuff for good measure.  The second night my feet itched so much that it woke me up in the middle of a sound sleep.
* Crabs.  There were lots of crabs all over the beach in front of our hut, and I spent many hours stalking them.  Or at least many minutes.  They seem to have acute vibration sensors, so you have to sit still near them for a while to get them to come back out of their holes long enough to get pictures.
* Being away from home.  There's something nice about being away from the usual routine and the usual people knocking on my door asking for things.
* Beachness.  I love the beach.  The sand, the sun, the ocean waves.  It's wonderful!  God is an amazing creator.

Miltary Escort

I've learned this past week that the best way to travel is with a military escort.  Scattered around Guinea's lovely highway system are a bunch of barrages, or military check-points, or something like that.  Basically your car gets stopped, you have to hand someone your passport, sometimes they try to make some money off of you and hassle you about little things, sometimes they don't even try to pretend that they have a legitimate reason to make you pay and just ask straight up for cigarette money.  Occasionally they're lenient and just let you through.  Other times they make you pile out of the car, listen to them go on and on about some little thing that's supposedly wrong with your passport, and then they wait to see if you'll hand over some money.

BUT it turns out that if you have a military guy riding in the back seat of your taxi, they will simply salute him and wave you on through.  No hassles, no checking of passports, no nothing.

So, now I just need to find somewhere I can buy a Guinean military uniform and then hire some guy to wear it and ride around in my taxi whenever I travel.

Zoology

This post has nothing to do with zoology, but I was looking at my autofill old-post titles, and none of them started with a Z, so I thought I'd give it a try.

Here's a couple pictures of some cute kids you might see if you happened to be hanging out at the guesthouse here in Conakry...

 

 

To the capital!

I'm heading down to the capital today with Martha who's flying out to Colombia tomorrow.  So, that being said, I'll try to come up with something scintillating to write when I get back, maybe even throw in a few pictures to give you the multimedia effect.

Until then, peace out.

Side note(s)

I now have a toad living in my house, joining T-Rex and the cricket who I'm sure lives somewhere in my bathroom.  Soon my house will be overrun by small living creatures.

Also, my legs are coated in baking soda tonight in attempt to stop the itching caused by some of my least favorite small living creatures (i.e. mosquitoes).  After waking up last night itching like crazy and hardly able to fall back asleep, I'm trying out baking soda paste, recommended from online sources.  So far, so good, as long as baking soda doesn't have any negative effects on my sheets...

B#.  Get it?  Side *note*.  Yeah, you're right, B# isn't even a note.  But I do remember it somehow being the punchline of a Cutco joke.

Someday, I'll finish telling you about the beach and stuff, but for now, it's time for some shut-eye.

Blurb expounded

Instead of doing the things I need to have done for tomorrow or getting some sleep, I'm expounding on my blurb.  I don't even know what that means.

So, the beach!  The beach trip was good.  We had some interesting taxi experiences.  The taxi ride from here to Kiffinda was pretty uneventful.  I took a good snooze at some point -- it's the whole motion-induced narcolepsy thing.

I just realized I never took a shower today.  I need to go do that...

See ya.

Blurb

Just wanted to give you a quick blurb of what's been going on, what's coming up, etc.  I'll post more when I take a breather (may be tonight if you're lucky...)

Kelsey killed a computer last week and hasn't fully resolved the implications of that.
Kelsey went to the beach over the weekend.
Kelsey came back sunburnt.
Now Kelsey has to fix some other computers, run the store, make it through tortilla Tuesday, etc.
Tomorrow Kelsey goes to Kamsar to check on & hopefully pick up some wedding rings.
Thursday Kelsey journeys to Conakry.
Meanwhile, computers fix themselves?  Hopefully...