Neighborhood Happenings

A girl selling bread in our neighborhood

Loaded Up

Anyone need a pan for cooking?

Here is the classic “loaded taxi, broken down on the side of the road” picture. We see a lot of funny sights on the road!

Out of Towners

A village we drove by on our way from Conakry to Boke

Yesterday we drove from Conakry to Boke to spend a week at our mission center. It was a four hour drive in a taxi, with six other people, on a bumpy pot-hole infested road. This is our first time outside of Conakry! Despite the bumpy road trip, we were thrilled to see some of the sights of Guinea! We passed a number of huts and small villages, a monkey for sale, and tons of termite hills. We are here with the other new missionary families who are in the same NCLA (National Culture Language and Acquisition) program that we are.  We are here to see our mission school, the dorm, and to meet the missionaries who serve here in the area. We are also looking forward to a time of fun and relaxation as we get to know the others as well as a break from all of that traffic noise in our neighborhood!

Language Sessions

Every morning  you will find us at our kitchen table with Monsieur Elie. He comes and helps us with our French. This is not, however, your typical class period. Complete with homework, chalk boards and tests. We are continuing to learn French using language learning methods that we learned in the NTM training. We are actually in charge of planning for our session everyday, so that the next day, we can lead the session to gain the kinds of verbs, phrases and tenses that we wish to learn. For example, right now we are using wordless children’s books as a language learning tool. The first story that we used was about an elephant that sneezes and blows down a building, and ends up in court. We point to various characters in the story, and our teacher says what that object or verb is. Then, he points to something and we repeat what it is. Then, he tells the story and we listen. Eventually, we are telling the story back to him using the vocab that we have learned from listening to him. We can then ask him questions, or sometimes he asks us questions to make us form proper responses. For example, “Why did the elephant sneeze” “The elephant sneezed (past tense) because he is allergic to the flowers that the mouse is selling.” We are using this method because someday we may be learning an unwritten language, and we can’t always run to the dictionary for the answer. We have to talk it out to try and understand the meaning. There’s a little glimpse into our language session!

Home Tour Continues

Where life happens: at the kitchen table. Behind those curtains (it’s the culturally appropriate way to separate “your space” from guests by hanging curtains in front of the hallway) you will find our bedroom on the right, the bathroom right in front of you, and our guest bedroom/storage room/fridge and freezer room on the left. We keep the fridge and freezer in there because that’s the only place they would fit!Here’s where we lay our heads at night, hoping to be mosquito free!  Where the cooking and dish washing takes place: our kitchen. Yes, those Tupperware containers are necessary! Bugs and ants have some sort of amazing food/sugar sensor. They smell it, they’re there! Not to mention, this is the rainy season, so even our matches (which we use to light the propane stove) go in a container. Sadly, the moisture already got to the macaroni noodles that we sent over. Which is why you see noodles (made from scratch, mind you. I’m no fancy Betty Crocker…it was my first time, and if it wasn’t for moldy noodles, it would probably be my last. Ha!) hanging to dry over the counter.

We payed for a carpenter to make those cabinets for us, since there weren’t any…and we love them! The barrel to the right is full of water that we use to wash dishes and cook with, since we don’t have running water. The view out of the kitchen window is a courtyard where people live, wash dishes, cook over the fire, etc. It gives me something to look at (aka: free entertainment) while I’m cooking!

Chez Nous (Our Place)

Bienvenue!! Welcome!!

Well, here it is: the grand tour of our apartment. We shall start with…the living room. When we bought our used solar powered system from a missionary woman here in Guinea, she threw some of her old furniture in on the deal. Which was, of course, a big help to us. We inherited the couch, the chairs, a desk, a bookshelf and a TV, among many other “odds and ends”.  Looking out the window in the living room, you see the chaos of the taxi’s below. People coming and going from the market, live chickens tucked carefully under their arms, and vendors searching to make a buck.

The map on the right is a map of Conakry, and the blue picture is a painting a local artist made of giraffes and the night sky. 

News from Conakry

Shawn drinking African tea with some guys below our building.

Hello friends! Hip hip hooray for internet! As of today, the 3rd of August, we are once again in touch with the world! The internet that we have purchased is not a cheap luxury, but it’s worth it to be able to communicate with our families and friends around the globe.

We can’t believe it: we have been here in Guinea for almost six weeks already. We have been busy with our language sessions, swatting mosquitos, meeting our neighbors, learning our way around town and, as always, trying to grow accustomed to seeing life through an entirely different set of lenses.

Now that we have access to the internet, we look forward to sharing with you some of the cultural differences that have seen and experienced so far.