When in Guinea...

Well here is the blog I was supposed to post yesterday! I tried to connect to the internet for over an hour with no success but finally succeeded today!


August 21st,

Well this week started out pretty normal, but it didn't take long for crazy things to start happening. For example, yesterday I woke up to one of those mutant cafards (cockroaches) crawling on me. I had been exhausted and was going to stay in bed for a few extra hours, but after that horrifying experience, I was WIDE awake. I swear it must have been right outside my mosquito net and scurried in when I turned off my alarm. Speaking of mosquito's, they also continue to terrorize me. Even under the net, I get at least five new bites every night localized to my feet. Some nights, when I want to be sneaky, I remember to put on my socks. However, this means the bites move to my legs, or worse, my wrists and elbows. These critters sure know how to drive a person crazy. Between the anti-malaria meeds (which make you crazy) and the mosquito's themselves, insanity becomes almost inevitable. Since writing this, I actually have what I hope will be good news. I'm going to be switching my anti-malarial meds, so hopefully these won't bother me as much! Another crazy thing that happened was when I accidentally walked outside in my short-shorts. *GASP* I know. I didn't realize until about five minutes in that I was doing this and by that time the damage was done. Oh well, I'm sure I've already done so many shocking things that my family will get over it.
Today we had another one of those medical sessions that will go down in history. We were given 14 different case studies and had to diagnose each case. That led up to a list of over 50 different things that volunteers often suffer from here in Guinea. From tapeworms, to UTIs, to carbuncles, to pink eye, there are plenty of strange problems to go around!
Yesterday Chris' host mother died, so all of the volunteers went to her funeral. Basically, the women sit inside and wail, and the men sit outside. When you go over to the house, you greet everyone outside, then go inside and greet everyone. It's a lot of praying and a lot of sitting. The burial will happen this afternoon (no wasting time) but women aren't allowed to go to it so I'm not sure how the rest of the process works.
Hmmm what other problems?! Oh, the sad story that is my diet continues. The other night my host mom gave me popcorn for dinner. Malnutrition FTW! Other standard meals have become a baked potato with laughing cow cheese, or better yet, beignets and bisap.
I'll leave you now to work on my lesson planning! Practice school officially starts on Monday and so I'll be pretty busy. With the exception of Thursday, I'll be teaching two one hour chunks of math lessons to 10th grade. Thursday I'll have a 2 hour block of english classes with Terminale students.