where to go from here?

Peace Corps Guinea was evacuated this week. I’ve been anticipating this for a while. It still upsets me. The Volunteers are now in Mali, hanging out, waiting to see if the turmoil will blow over and they can go back to their sites, or if things will get worse and they’ll have had their services yanked out from underneath them. I don‘t know what to expect or hope for. But now that the Volunteers are out of the country, I suspect it’ll be a while before PC goes back. Côte d’Ivoire was evacuated shortly after I ended my service in Guinea; over the previous year, if I recall correctly, there had been a couple of in-country evacuations, i.e., the PCVs gathered in Abidjan. But once they were moved to Accra, Ghana, that marked the end. They haven’t been back since.

Some background: things in Guinea are bad. They weren’t good when I was there, and they have steadily declined since. Inflation and unreliable salaries have made both gasoline (hence transport and travel) and rice (hence eating) almost entirely unattainable. The state of affairs is blamed on President Lansana Conté, who for his part doesn’t seem to have had his country’s best interests in mind. He came to power in 1984 via a military coup following the death of the first president, Sékou Touré. He was officially elected in 1993, under a constitution that was supposed to limit the president to two five-year terms. But I recall November 2001, when a “national referendum” vote removed these term limits, allowing Conté to run again in 2003. I remember hearing the stories of soldiers watching people’s votes, and telling them, if they voted against the proposal to remove the limits, “Are you stupid, or did you just forget what to mark?” (We need to take the problems with voting in the States seriously, but we should also recognize how incredibly fortunate we are to have as reliable a system as we do.) Conté is a diabetic and has been taken to Paris multiple times while in a coma, and I don’t think anyone expected him to live out a third term. Problem is, no one knows who’ll fill the vacuum when he leaves, either by passing away or by finishing out his term.

On January 10, a “general strike” was begun, which as far as I can tell means just about everyone stopped working. No teaching. No bauxite mining (which is Guinea’s primary source of income). No transport. PC admin gathered up the PCVs from up-country, because (as you’ll all be grateful to know) Peace Corps really does make great efforts to care for its Volunteers. But things got bad before that. I found a blog by a current Volunteer, serving in Siguiri, which is one of the towns where I visited some friends during my service. She tells the events of when the street protests reached Siguiri on Tuesday. She reports that two people died in those protests. Many more have died in Conakry. Everyone in the country is suffering and stagnating and scraping by in this awful, awful situation. I taught over 200 students there, some of whom are probably at universities now.

You can find more about the strike, including the reasons for it and the terms to end it which the union leaders published, by looking at the Friends of Guinea blog, linked in the sidebar.

I’d like to say more, but I don’t think there’s anything we ordinary people can do Stateside (or even from here in France, former colonial power in Guinea), except perhaps petition for the president to step down? How on earth would that work? And even though that’s what most of the people of Guinea seem to want, it’s certainly not a good or sufficient solution. But I’m writing about this because the events really upset me and I feel the need to bring them up. I hate the state of affairs across most of sub-Saharan Africa. I’ve said to many people before that it seems somehow the colonizers convinced the entire continent that black people are inferior to white people. And the divisions among tribes and the selfishness of the rulers exacerbate what are already miserable situations. I will vouch that the people of Guinea are generous and rich in culture, but they are also frustrated. They do not see justice, and they do not see progress. The strike is a symptom of a nation deeply troubled, but it is also becoming a new source of destruction. How do we escape from this vortex?

a short story 2

I took another walk at sunset today. As I returned from the plaza I spoke of yesterday, I saw a baby stroller running up the hill at me. Now, I just watched The Illusionist last night at the theater, so I had thoughts of magic tricks in my head. As it got closer, I observed a pair of very short legs behind the wheels. I suppose this child got tired of being in the chair and decided to take over. He stopped right even with me and gave me a big smile. I hope he keeps surprising people with his magic stroller.

something amazing every day

(This essay is dedicated to Hannah, who encourages me, especially when I feel lonely, to find something amazing every day.)

You might think, as I used to, that among locations near our apartment, the harbor is a good spot for watching the sunset. You’d be mistaken. The harbor is downhill and surrounded by forts, so what you’ll see from there is a not very satisfying vision of the sun vanishing behind buildings some time before it actually settles beneath the horizon. So while I’ve described before how fun it can be to people-watch at the Vieux Port, it’s not where you want to be au moment du coucher du soleil.

Tonight I walked to La Canebière and turned away from the harbor, up towards L’Eglise des Réformés. I believe I’ve already told how La Canebière is under construction all the way from Les Réformés down to the Vieux Port, but the worst section is towards the harbor, where the sidewalks are reduced to tiny passages, and if you stop to try to watch natural events you’re likely to get swept up in the tide of people. However, due to the curious diagonal intersection of La Canebière and the Allée Léon Gambetta (along whose length I photographed Les Réformés while standing in the Place des Capucines), there’s a sizable plaza right at the foot of the church. It’s substantially uphill from the harbor, so the view of the sun in the evening is superior. Presumably it’s even better to climb into one of the towers of Les Réformés and watch from there. (The doors of the church were closed, however.) Most of the construction of the tramway is done here, although the fences remain up, and there are lines of trees through whose branches the sunlight becomes laced as it reddens. The crowd is thinner, particularly in the square, which isn’t on the way to anywhere as it juts out into the intersection.

The amazing thing I found today was a monument in this square. A monument whose original engraving stated that its purpose is to honor those soldiers from the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône who died defending la patrie in the War of 1870–1871. Wait, which war? I had to look this up when I got home. Those were the dates of the Franco–Prussian War. Léon Gambetta, it turns out, was a statesman during that period who organized an army in Tours during the war, and who continued to fight for a brief period even after Paris surrendered to the Germans. The monument was erected in 1894 and is known as the “Monument des mobiles.” Since then, it has acquired plaques commemorating soldiers lost in wars throughout the 20th century, from the World Wars to the Algerian War to the Korean War.

At the base of the monument are twenty names of locales in the Bouches-du-Rhône that contributed soldiers. Four are distinguished at the corners with theirs coats of arms, crested by miniature stylized fortresses: Marseille, Aix, Arles, and Tarascon. The coat of Arles bears a lion carrying a staff whose top is the chi-rho symbol (superimposed X and P, for the first two letters of Christ). The coat of Tarascon has the city’s castle on the top half and a dragon devouring a person on the bottom. Aix’s coat has vertical stripes on the bottom, a crusader’s cross in the top left corner, and various arrangements of fleurs-de-lis in the top center and top right. Marseille, the department capital, simply has a large cross covering its entire shield.

Marseille can be beautiful in the twilight. I expect that in five or ten years, by which point hopefully the larger part of the construction will be done, it will be a marvelous place to visit. For now, since I’m living here, I need to continue to search out these gems. It’s easy to turn the wrong direction when you walk out on the street. Persistence is key.

kilts and auld lang syne

The last major event of my trip to the States was the New Year’s Ball of the Chicago branch of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. This was my first time to go out Scottish dancing (I’d attended a couple of evenings of practice before), and I was rather pleased with myself by the end of the evening. No, I didn’t get all the dances right, but I did dance all of them (18 in all, plus the waltzes) and I never felt like I was struggling much more than the average dancer. It was a lot of fun. It’s a dance form that’s occasionally demanding intellectually, and it’s not as accessible to the casual dancer as some other styles of social dancing (contradance in particular), but I think I’ve developed a taste for it.

The conventional wisdom, as explained to me by Hannah and Mike (who loaned me the outfit I wore) is that every man looks better in a kilt. So that you can decide for yourself, compare this image with other times you’ve seen me:
(It’s no fair to point out that Hannah still looks better than me, even though conventional wisdom is also supposed to hold that Scottish events belong to that rare category of times in which the men shine and strut while the women accessorize them.) That’s a military jacket I’m wearing. The blue tassles near the tops of the stockings are called “flashes”, and they’re held on by a band that actually functions to hold the stockings up. The pouch in front is called a “sporran”, and it functions as a purse. Quite useful when one wants to inconspicuously carry around the directions for the dances. The kilt’s a bit longer than it should be (not bad for being borrowed, however), because the knees are supposed to be visible.

Despite being nearly a fortnight past December 31, this was a New Year’s event (scheduled as it was to allow other year-turning activities to run their course and not interfere with the dancers’ attendance), and so we sang “Auld Lang Syne” at the end. Also, that’s just appropriate for any time a group is celebrating Scottish culture. They sang two verses, skipping about on the second, which I didn’t know at all (I saw a couple others “loo-looing” with me, as well). The evening ran much later than Hannah and I expected, but was exhilarating the whole time, so I never felt tired. My calf muscles took a couple of days to relax, though; Scottish dance requires you to be on your toes, pointing and bouncing incessantly. The styling is part of the fun.

I heartily encourage all to get out and dance (in whatever style) when the opportunity arises. It’s social, it’s fun, and it’s great exercise.

marseillais once more

I’ve just returned from my travels to the States for Christmas and New Year’s. I spent the last three weeks with Hannah, which is the longest we’ve seen each other since the end of classes last spring. (Of course, that’s mostly due to the fact that we didn’t start dating until the beginning of classes last fall, which was five days before I left Ithaca.) We shuttled between our two families, danced and talked and kissed a lot. More details later. But now my clock is set back to CET, my verbal communication will be done via Skype rather than cell phone (I was having to use Hannah’s phone anyway, because I suspended my service for the school year while I’m gone), my coffee is espresso from a cafetière italienne rather than brewed in a French press (which, despite its name, I’ve only seen used in the States and the Copenhagen airport), and it’s time to get back to work. I’m not yet sure what I’ll be doing this spring, since a calculation I made before leaving in December reduced our hopes of obtaining the result we were looking for to essentially nothing. I’m preparing a talk for the Teichmüller seminar on other topic, however, and questions abound that require addressing.

Happy New Year to all.

enneadecahebdoversary

Hannah and I had our third date tonight. We went to the Memphis Pizza Cafe and got a medium vegetable supreme (olives, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, spinach, broccoli) with pepperoni, then drove down to the riverfront. We looked at the Pyramid with the replica of a Rameses II statue out front and walked through Tom Lee park, named for a levee worker who saved the lives of 32 passengers when a steamboat capsized. There was a superb metal sculpture of him riding out in his dinghy “Zev” and reaching to a man holding to a broken piece of wood. Before heading home to watch an episode of “Firefly”, we stopped by Perkins for some pie. It was a great date, very relaxing, but different in character from our previous dates, which were also lovely but involved dressing up and going out for a nice dinner. Even though it’s only our third time to go out, I think I can affirm that we like each other and this’ll work out. Tonight’s events were pleasant in themselves, but almost more importantly they formed an unobtrusive backdrop to several hours of conversation alternating between light and philosophical, as any good date conversation should. We’re looking forward to the time when we can have dates on more than a bimonthly basis.