Training: Week 2

Hello once again!

I don't have too many things to say today because it has been really hard to condense all of my experiences and put them into something short. Someday maybe I'll try writing out my post ahead of time instead of trying to chug it out during my one hour of internet time.

The long awaited sickness that visits all volunteers here in Guinea finally arrived! Yesterday I spent several hours throwing up while my host family would stand on the other side of the door and repeatedly ask me if everything was "ça va".  I guess it's good to know that I have people rooting for me. Thankfully the vomiting has now stopped but the other end of the spectrum has just begun! To re-hydrate my body, I've started taking Oral Rehydration Salts… and they taste like bottled up sadness (very, very, salty). On top of sickness, we got more immunizations today which brings the count to five in the past two weeks. By the by, I also have malaria in my body. The malaria meds that we take actually don't kill the parasites until they try to leave the liver and head throughout the bloodstream. Just something else to worry about.

The rainy season here is really rainy! We get rain at least once a day. Actually, once a day is quite a relief. When it is not raining, it's extremely sunny. Because of this, I got my first sunburn on Sunday from spending several hours at the port. I also have yet to make my first million. So far, I've been walking around with 250,000 francs and even that feels pretty awesome.

I'm starting to get really sick of the imperative which seems to be the preferred tense of the Guineans. Christine, eat! Sit down! Come here! Leave it! Take more! Eat! (Yes, my family is trying to fatten me up and marry me off) It is part of the culture that people don't seem to ever ask you to do anything, and you are never really supposed to ask for anything.

Some good news…I think I officially became Guinean on Saturday afternoon. I ended up walking around 5 miles with Raoul, in FLIP FLOPS, in the rain, and through some wonderful dirt/mud roads jumping out of the way whenever motos zoomed past.

It's only been two weeks and I already feel so disconnected from the world. Simple things like changes in Facebook's layout remind me that I'm here in Africa living it up bush style! My apologies, but I am still not able to upload pictures :( The internet is much too slow.