Pictures from our trip to Africa

In Janaury, my parents and I went to visit my sister in Guinea where she's a member of the Peace Corps teaching math. It was quite an interesting experience.

We flew into Bamako, Mali since it is a lot closer to Siguiri (Urska's town) than Conakry (the capital of Guinea) is. After spending a night in a horrible, run-down hotel, we rented a bush taxi for the 200 km drive to Siguiri. Bush taxis are horrible cars which probably wouldn't be legal in any Western countries since they're in such bad condition! Once we left Bamako, the road was no longer paved. So it was an extremely bumpy ride and of course there was no air conditioning, so the windows were open and by the end of the trip we were completely covered in red dust. Throughout the trip our car broke down about six times. This included the muffler falling of at one point! This here is a picture of us stranded in the middle of nowhere...




Things were a lot more relaxed once we were to Siguiri. We had originally planned to travel around the country a bit, but then changed our minds after seeing how exhausting travelling was. Also, we would have been limited to the region of Haute Guinee since most of the country is not safe. And once you see one village there, the others are pretty much the same.
Siguiri is a cute, little town of around 60,000 people. It's pretty big compared to the towns many other PCV's (Peace Corps Volunteers) live in. Most of the houses are little, round huts with straw roofs. Urska lives there with another Peace Corps volunteer, Kristin in a lovely house which has running water most of the time. They used to have electricity in the evenings but ever since the problems on the Sierra Leonian and Liberian borders started, all the fuel has been diverted to the southern part of the country.
Here's a picture of my father, Cass (the dog) and Urska sitting on the porch.


My father, Cass (the dog) and Urska in front of Urska's house.

While we were there we walked around the town and visited the marketplace. I believe our visit was probably the event of the year (or at least the month) since they never get tourists or visitors. Walking down the street we got a lot of stares and the little children would all shout "Tubabu!" (which means 'white person' in Malinke). We were quite an attraction!
We also took a walk along the Niger river one morning which was very nice. Until one of Urska's students told us that that's where one would be most likely to find cobras, pythons and vipers. So we never went there again! The same student also told us that he had been bitten by a snake there. My mother asked him what he did about it and he said something about putting a rock on it which sucked out the poison and then turned purple. And something else about soaking his foot in fresh milk so the fangs would fall out. Then he went on to talk about how some people turn into snakes...
We also had endless streams of visitors. Guineans are extremely friendly people and Urska's students, as well as other friends, always came to visit. They're also very big on speeches and letters. We were told about a gazillion times how they were "incredibly honoured" that we were visiting their town of Siguiri.



Urska with her "lap dog".

Ok...I've decided I should maybe do some homework...but there is more to come!

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