Pounding Fish Poison Wood

So, let's see. I haven't been writing as frequently as I'd like to but I figured that as my service progressed, my emailing would decline, which it has. But it's cool, cause I figure that by this point I've been gone long enough that you all are used to my absence and not needing updates on my life. Plus, I've reached a level of comfort here that makes my everyday adventures seem much more normal and perhaps less interesting. Though I often find it interesting how at home I feel in a place which is still strange and completely different from where I was raised. Anyway, I'd like to continue writing even if its infrequent and I'll try my best to hold your interest. I don't know what to focus on exactly so I think I'll do several paragraphs on various topics.

The bread project is officially underway. I now have fresh bread to eat straight from the oven most mornings. The women's groupement I am working with, while good at managing their money, has no experience running a business, which has created some issues. I may do a little training with them soon on how to fix certain problems they've encountered and to figure out ways they can maximize their profit. Nevertheless, the women are profiting from it, the bread is actually quite good, and there is always a demand for more.

My other bigger project at the moment is mosquito nets. I mentioned this last time and had some questions about it. We (my health center counterparts and me) started working with PSI who subsidize impregnated mosquito nets to be sold in health centers for pregnant women and women with children under five years old for a very cheap price. They're sold at the health center at 5.000 GNF (about $1 US) which is an amazingly good deal and most people want to buy them. The hard part is getting them out to more remote areas. So I've been riding all over the place with my friend Abdulai and we sell mosquito nets and inform people on the danger of malaria for children and pregnant women. Besides being an incredible cultural experience for me, it is also rewarding and Abdulai makes a little bit of money for himself while he's at it. We are warmly welcomed and often fed wherever we go. We go into people's houses and show them how to put it up and everybody is thankful. My only complaint would be that I'm often stuck riding my bike in the middle of the day, under the brutal sun, during the hottest part of the day. PSI also sells nets to local merchants to be sold closer to 10.000 GNF in the markets for people that aren't pregnant women or women with children. They also train them on how to market them and create a general awareness of malaria and its dangers. (side note - I've heard that malaria may actually start to die out naturally, apparently some kinds of malaria are now starting to kill the mosquitoes themselves. nice, right?)

Not to be a downer, but I feel like there has been an unusual number of deaths in my village since I've been there. Its been really eye-opening for me to see how these people deal with and talk about death. It's also been an interesting journey for me to be exposed to death on a more regular basis or at least in a more intimate way. I feel like at home, death is less unexpected and it often happens in old age. It is also a subject people tend to avoid. Here, it seems like it can happen any time and people deal with it head-on when it comes. A few examples. First off, a woman named Maimouna Sampou died about 2 months ago. This was a woman I knew well. She was my neighbor, the mother of three close friends (Moussa, the fishing guy, Ousman, 12 years old, and Hawa), and a member of the women's groupement I was working with. I'd guess she was probably around 35-40 years old. I ran into to Moussa one day as he was biking to Boke and I was biking to Dabiss. He said Maimouna had just been sent to the Boke hospital for a bad toothache. Later that night, word reached Dabiss that she had died shortly after the tooth was pulled and the entire village began weeping together at her house, right outside of mine. I'm guessing it was a cavity that got extremely infected. It was unexpected and a lot of people were quite upset, including myself. She was a prominent and well-loved woman in Dabiss. The mourning process, which I've described before, lasted over 24 hours and was draining. All because Maimouna had no access to dental care. That was a hard one.

About three weeks ago, a kid about 11 years old was high up in a mango tree trying to knock down ripe mangoes and fell. He broke his femur badly enough that the bone was sticking out of the skin. I got there right after Mr. Diallo bandaged and splinted him. This kids pain was palpable. His family refused to send him to Boke and had a "traditional" doctor care for him in Dabiss. Most likely, they simply couldn't afford to pay hospital bills and transport in Boke. The kid died three days later, just after they decided to send him to Boke. The doctors there said that he had also broken his hip and knee during the fall. This may seem like a freak accident, but the mango tree incidents are fairly frequent in this country.

This final story, though it involves a death, is more uplifting but will be difficult to describe. It involves my two health center counterparts, Mr. Diallo and Mr. Tolno. Mr. Diallo used to be the health center chef but was suspended for the last 10 months because his moto was stolen. He was just recently allowed to return to work. He is a doctor though Tolno is now the chef. Mr. Tolno was the vaccinator back when Diallo was in charge. He's a "community agent", which means he never studied medicine in school but has done some training and taken a few health courses. He became health center chef when Diallo was suspended and has become used to the position. Tolno is a really really nice guy and has good intentions but is a pretty ineffective health worker. Diallo, on the other hand, is my new hero. Here's what happened. Tolno and I were at the health center the other day and we had just received a big load of mosquito nets. Tolno was very excited. As soon as PSI left, a father came up to Tolno and pointed to his wife and baby child. The child was maybe 4 months old and had a serious case of malaria. You could tell by looking at it that it was on the verge of death. Emergency right? Well, from the Tolno was acting, you would never have guessed. He walked right in the health center and over to the nets and started looking over them with contented smile on his face. He immediately disregarded the child and distracted himself. Now, please don't think I'm trying to paint Tolno as a bad person, his lack of urgency wasn't actually surprising at all. This is how many health care workers operate here. I don't know why. Most likely he probably just figured that the child could wait a few more minutes and was sincerely more interested in inspecting the new nets. It was especially disturbing to me in this case. I told him that I'd put away the nets so he can attend to the baby, wishing that Diallo could show up from his vaccination trip. I left the health center and came back about 30 minutes later, when Diallo had come back. I walked into a scene that will stay in my memory forever. Diallo was there and he was visibly moved at the sight of this sick baby. He infused that sense of urgency into the room that needed to be there. He was moving around, taking temperatures, wrapping the baby in cool wet cloths to cool his 102-103 fever. He was talking to the mother, asking her why she had never once come to the health center for a consultation, not even after giving birth. Why she had no mosquito net for her child. He was working with such extreme passion and care. Its really quite rare that I see someone who is as passionate about his work in this country as he is. After he had done all he could, we were all just sitting together in the same room with the baby. The sun was setting outside the window and he started talking about how babies should never die. He said that if people take the basic precautions to protect the health of their children, they should never die. He said that the people who grow up are the ones who must die, not the young ones. He talked about how people say, when a baby dies here, 'Oh, it was God's will. God killed this baby'. But it is people's ignorance that usually kills a baby. He was really upset. Now, I think Guineans' strong faith in God is a good thing and I know that conditions make it very hard to keep a baby healthy here, but Diallo was doing something amazing. He was talking about how health care should and could work in this country. He was talking about the need to develop and I could see so clearly that he knew how to do it. But the most moving thing was his passion. He deeply cared about this stuff and his intentions seemed so pure. I had chills running through me. What was interesting was that it was such a dramatic and unusual occurrence, that it made Tolno visibly uncomfortable. I was in a trance. No one is used to seeing a Guinean health agent behave that way. I had never seen someone act that way. So anyway, Diallo became my new hero from that moment on. He's also really cool guy and I love hanging out with him. The next day, I asked Diallo how the baby was doing and he said it died during the night. So it goes.

Let's see... On a different note, my neighbor Moussa returned late from working in the field one day with a friend. We were all sitting at the boutique talking casually when he rolled up in a taxi and pulled up strangely close to where we were sitting. He got out of the car without a word and went to the trunk. All at once he popped it open and lifted a 20 foot long snake out of the trunk and flung it at our feet with dramatic flair. Those who didn't pee their pants and take off running soon noticed that the head of the snake had been chopped off. And though the snake was dead, its muscles caused it to unwind and straighten out after being in the trunk, which made it seem very much alive. In the next 30 minutes, I watched them pull the entire skin off in one piece (which took some real work), remove the long stringy heart, cook it, eat it, and the divide the rest of the meat up between friends and family. The next night I had snake meat in my rice and sauce and I must say it was quite delicious. You should really try it sometime.

I got up the other morning and Moussa asked me if I wanted to go catch some fish the other morning. I said yes I'd meet him there at the river in a little bit. I got some petites to take me to the location. Petites, by the way, have an incredible knowledge of the woods and an excellent sense of direction. As I we headed there, I was wondering how we would be able to catch any fish since we are now at the end of the dry season and the river was nothing more than a series of connected stagnant pools. I'm not a fisherman, but it didn't seem like prime fishing conditions to me. Turns out they weren't fishing. I got to the river to see a group of about 5 or 6 boys and 4 guys closer to my age. They were all spaced apart across a section of the river pounding wood on either rocks or logs or the river bank. It was a very casual, relaxed atmosphere. It was also bizarre. We were thankfully shaded by the overhanging trees from the forest and the guys, in between the pounding, prepared tea, smoked, and bantered. Each person had a club, made of some stronger wood, and with it, they were pounding other branches into pulp, continuously dousing in the river. I didn't see any fish yet and I wasn't sure how pounding wood could accomplish the task. But I decided to help out anyway and started pounding (my hands are still blistered today). What I saw after that was pretty amazing. The wood, when pounded, released a milky liquid onto the surface of the water. They told me the fish would come and drink it and then either die or get "drunk" and therefore be quite easy to catch. I was still doubtful when we finished the pounding and took a rest to wait for the poison to set in. Sure enough, after about 30 minutes, tiny little dead fish began floating to the surface, some bigger than others, but mostly sardines. Then the big guys came. They didn't die, and I had trouble spotting them, but the petites were catching them like crazy. I'm talking about fish up to two feet long, that are so drunk on the wood stuff, that a young kid can dive underwater without being able to see and catch it with his hands. Other large fish would come break the surface of the water and rest there long enough for one of the guys to come by and swiftly slice its head off with a machete before it submerged again. It was pretty amazing. On my way back into the village people asked me where I had been and I told them I'd been fishing, I didn't know exactly how to describe it in Landuma. They then told me what to say. You're supposed to say, "I was out pounding fish poison wood".

So that's all I got for the moment. It's a lot, I know. A lot has happened. Like I said, I'm pretty used to my life here, but things are still absolutely crazy sometimes. Everyday I think about how much time I have left here as if I were dying to get out. Yet I'm amazed how often I find myself in a situation where I'm nothing but thankful to be where I am and in awe of the infinite diversity in this world. Some of it is not always easy to deal with it but all of it is worth it. I have no regrets about my experience so far. I hope you are well back home. I still think of you often. Love,

Anders

p.s. - This is my new email address. I'll still check my old one but I hope to eventually move everything here. Write back if you get the chance. Let me know if you have questions about whats going on over here in Guinea.