So in my nice long essay of happenings, I left out a story from my site visit, a story that left me wondering what just happened.
I am in what is called a cluster of volunteers. There are five of us who are considered 'neighbors,' a loosely used term to refer to the people who live closest to me, such as 20-30km away in a 1.5 hour bush taxi ride or someone who lives 140km away in a 3-4 hour bush taxi ride. But during site visit, we were all to travel together back to our training site so we gathered on the last night at one of the stagaires houses in the largest city in our cluster. That night, the daughter of the family that volunteer is living with, as well as the president of the organization the volunteer will be working with, drove two hours to saluate here. Now you know how important it is to saluate but she insisted that all five of us go visit her farm and not only that she would provide us transportation in an NGO land cruiser (highly preferable to a bush taxi) not only to the farm but the two hours back to our training site as well. So the next morning, we head out to the farm where we spend the next five hours on a tour of the facilities and fields, learning about the mission, business, agroforestry tools in use and philosophy of what turns out to be a training plantation. Basically, Guineans can come for free, work in the fields in the morning using organic and non-technology intensive agro-techniques and receive agro, business and computer trainings in the afternoon. The plantation sells its produce which covers most of its costs while the remainder is covered by outside sources. Not only were we amazed by all of this, seeing everything us SED and Agfo volunteers had been learning in action, we were amazed at the ability of it to be successful and the premise of Guineans empowering other Guineans. Not only that, the hospitality was amazing. We were welcomed openly, provided food and the owner was eager for us to return. When we asked for her contact information and she handed us a business card, a rare occasion here, we were somewhat star struck. Plus, we got to eat lots of pineapple, always a delight.
I realize I wrote a giant post yesterday so I will keep it short today but, I have posted a slide show of my photos, I promise more will come but if the slide show is not visible, the link to the photos is: http://picasaweb.google.com/jabarbour/Guinea?authkey=6Ypj7fzaiB8&feat=directlink#
