So you don’t wanna wait
I hate to hear, that’s such a shame
Cuz if you play it side ways
Ain’t no time out in my game
They already on the way
I know you wanna win
And you wish I would let you in
Get in line over here
You can play, but hold up
It’s just the way the game is played
It’s best that you just wait your turn
-Rihanna
I guess an update is due. The very night I made my last post, the ministry of education got on the radio and declared that school would start the next day: October 4th. This was kind of a surprise for everyone. School is officially supposed to start the first week of October, but the ministry of education in Guinea has a strong history of officially delaying the start of the school year, usually for logistical reasons. Not this year. Politically motivated? Probably not...
Shortly thereafter, the transition president proposed that the final round of presidential elections occur on October 24th. This may or may not happen in reality. The leading candidate is not all too happy with the new head of the election commission (the old one died and had to be replaced). Like with so many things here in Guinea, we’ll have to wait and see.
But throughout receiving this news, we continued training the response volunteers (new Guinea volunteers who have done Peace Corps in other countries). I was dying to get to site, but we were told that we would finish the training in Dubreka as scheduled, then be allowed to go to site. We even had a counterpart workshop, where we all met our principals. My principal seems nice, and I’m very glad that he had the time to come down to Dubreka for a day, considering it was the during second week of school over there. I’ll talk more about the Lycee in Yembering when (and if) I actually get there.
The response volunteers were officially sworn-in on October 13th in Conakry. We were all hopeful. The country had been peaceful.
The following day, our acting Country Director told us that she would like to be sending us to our sites… but instead we would be heading back to the training center in Dubreka for consolidation. That very day. For an indefinite period of time.
Devastating.
The reasons we are being held back are complicated. Technically it’s safety and security, but there’s so much more to it than that. I’ll just say that the relationship between a US Embassy and a Peace Corps program in a country is not uniform worldwide. The relationship is not as simple as it may appear on paper. It depends heavily on the history of the host country, the history of the relationship between the Embassy and Peace Corps in that country, and the personalities of the decision-making people involved on both ends. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
It really sucks that I couldn’t be at site for the start of school. I’m sure this will seriously damage my ability to integrate into my community of teachers, and the community of Yembering in general. Each additional week I sit here in Dubreka is a week of my Peace Corps service being robbed from me. I guess that’s what I get for deciding to come back to such an unstable place. The soul-scorching heat of Burkina Faso doesn’t seem so bad in retrospect.
I just hope I get to site soon. I came here to teach, not to sit by waterfalls all day. And sitting by waterfalls all day with a completely uncertain future is actually getting to be kind of stressful.