The Journey

Myspace Mood: Happy

We have posted our first video blog (about the trip over) to YouTube, and conveniently put it here for your viewing pleasure!

Animals

This blog is mostly for my brother Sam... the pastor who moved into our teammate's old house, who will be responsible for the center now, is named José Augusto (shortened to Ze Gusto, phonetically). He has a pair of parrots that live in the front lawn most of the day. They reminded me a lot of Adie's bird, but it might just be because I haven't seen her bird for a while. Anyway, they're about Benny's size. I haven't heard any words from them yet, so we'll see...



We are here and settled in and we really like our new place. There will be more details (and media) to follow on that subject, but for now I'll just give you a picture of the "greeter" that was waiting to welcome us to our room.


(Yeah, that's a regular sized door hinge below it.)


Fortunately, my new Chaco's had their first chance to prove their worth in Africa.

New Goals

Myspace Mood: Too Many

Dakar, Senegal

Well, first of all I must apologize for not blogging for so long! I saw a lot of you over the summer, which is the way I'd rather stay in contact, but I notice that my last post was several months before we even left Africa last time! One of the things that I am hoping to improve this time is keeping my blog updated more thoroughly. I am getting ahead of myself though...

For anyone who did not know (those of you I may not have seen this summer), Emily and I decided before leaving Bissau in April that we would return after the summer (aka right now) for some more time to continue developing the computer program that started last trip and for Emily to teach English again. She really enjoyed it last time and I am hoping that this trip will be no different.

We had originally decided to stay for three months this time, so that we could be home for Christmas (we have yet to see my side of the family on Christmas eve or day since we got married). However, as we began to quantify exactly what it was that we wanted to accomplish with the computer training program, we came to the conclusion that we could get it done in the three months we had planned but that it would come at the cost of not having any free time and not seeing each other much – similar to the way we allowed January-April of last trip to unfold. After weighing pros and cons we decided it was worth the extra time to not be in a hurry all the time. So we talked about padding the time by two months which would put us back in the States around late February. This would have made Emily less useful since the English semester at the school runs from January to April and there will be no Americans at the center to take over her class in February when we had thought to leave. Finally, after thinking of a few more computer training things that I would like to get done, we decided to stay for both semesters, making our itinerary almost identical to last time. Almost the same, but with a very fun twist. We will leave Africa in mid-April when the semester ends, and as it happened, the cheapest flight home connected through Germany. I've been interested in exploring Western Europe for a long time but never had the combination of time, money, and initiative to get it done. So I plugged a few changes into Expedia and figured out that we could have a multi-day layover in Germany with no increase in the cost of the plane tickets! The end result is a 19-day layover where we're hoping to explore some of Germany, Prague, Austria, and possibly Milan. We'll have to see how much our savings allow us to do, but no matter what we end up doing I'm looking forward to it!

Now that we have a plan firmly in hand, here we are back in the Dakar, Senegal airport (with all of our bags so far, a divine act in itself!) waiting out a 12 hour layover on the way to Bissau. (The plan is firmly in hand as far as I am concerned, though some of us have different definitions of a good plan than others. Here's a picture of Emily in the Detroit airport yesterday reading through guidebooks to try to plan the days of our eight-months-distant European exploring trip, haha...). We will (if all goes as planned) arrive in Bissau tonight about 7pm local time (3pm EST). Emily will begin teaching next week and we (I'm sure) will have plenty (other than nursing our jet lag) to attend to before then.



After thinking about the last trip (term, time, whatever you call it) and considering what we are hoping to accomplish with this trip, I have come up with a few goals. I'm not a big "goaler" – I hate New Years resolutions, statements like "I always..." and "I never...", five year plans, and the general tendency of American society to over think everything and plan to do what they think everyone expects them to do, missing out on what they should do. I understand the intentions of those things, but I think the temptation to live for the plan instead of living for the purposes of the plan is just too strong! However, in this case there are a few things in my mind that I want to change this time around. So in specific cases I guess I'm ok with a targeted list of goals. So here are a small list of goals/purposes for this time in Bissau:

1. Roll out three new intermediate level computer classes – I'm looking forward to these because they'll be more challenging for the students than what we did last time.
2. Get the teaching portions of the computer classes video'ed and put into Powerpoints to make sure the quality of the lessons doesn't fall off when I and this directly trained group of teachers move on. This is going to be a TON of work, but it will be worth it.
3. Continue training the computer teachers about network maintenance and most importantly how they can teach themselves new programs in the future.
4. Network improvements – A lot of the 233 lbs of checked luggage we have is new computer equipment. We are expanding the network capacity, speed, and most importantly redundancy to make sure things will keep running smoothly for a long time.
5. Time at home – Em felt a bit abandoned for the last part of the last trip because the computer work occupied so much of my time. Spreading the trip out will make it so I don't have to pick between slacking at work or slacking at home this time. (No, slacking at both isn't what I'm saying, lol... I am working on 3 hours of sleep in the last 48, so cut me a little slack!)
6. Get out! We saw less of Guinea Bissau in eight months last year than most 10 day vacationers would because we didn't allow ourselves enough time for anything but working at the center. There is a lot more to see and we're going to make a point to take trips to some different places in the interior and back to the islands again. We're also hoping to spend a few weekends exploring the neighboring countries – we'll see how that part works out.
7. Pictures! Last time I didn't bring much camera gear because I didn't know how safe it would be. As a result (combined with the no free time thing) we didn't end up with much to show you guys. This time I have a good arsenal of equipment, including a tough pocket sized point and shoot we're going to take just about everywhere, and also a video camera, so we are hoping to have a lot more to show you! Stay tuned!

So there you have it, the seven habits of highly effective Guinean missionaries, haha... This summer it was nice to catch up with friends and family, to enjoy good food and hot showers, and to have a fun graphics design job (at Cayman Chemical) – but also in other ways the roughest three months of my life. I am excited to get to work but I don't feel like I have anything left to offer. I am clinging to the promise that God can do the most with us when we are the least. I wouldn't have chosen to have a wounded heart, but I am glad for a God who is willing to use us and a wife who loves me.

I appreciate all of the support from you guys back home. Going forward, we really need your prayers for health, safety, and for God to continue to pull us closer. We are missing you all already! (Well, maybe not Em so much, as she has been asleep most of the trip, haha... That's not true, but it makes a really good story, and since I have pictures to back it up... what can she say, right?)







Alright, thanks for keeping up on us, we welcome emails so we can stay connected to you too!

Quick Update

Myspace Mood: Accomplished

I have been a little lean on blogs lately – but I have a good excuse, so let me update you on what's been going on here recently. One of my projects here at the youth center is to upgrade the computing facilities. We got news in early October that American missionaries from another area of Guiné-Bissau were going to be sending a shipping container over by boat and that there was a little extra space we could have. So, in the space of a few days I had ordered a slew of computers and equipment, including everything we needed to network all of the computers at the center to facilitate some things we needed to be able to do in order to teach our computer classes better.

We expected the container to arrive in Bissau in late November, which was perfect because installing of this new stuff was going to be a pretty substantial project (especially with inexperienced helpers), and we have a break from classes for three weeks in December. The container arrived in mid-December and was tied up in customs until Jan. 4th. So, the last two weeks have been spent feverishly trying to get everything installed so that we can get back to the already large job of curriculum development that was scheduled for January. The project has been made more difficult by the fact that the work has to be done without interrupting the typing students that are using the system from 9am to 10pm with a small window in the afternoon where we can work without having to worry about disturbing them. So my typical day since the container got here two weeks ago has been to go to the internet cafe at 7:45 before staff meeting to try to find answers to the problems we ran into the day before, working from 8:30 to 1, breaking for lunch, working from 2 to 8 or 8:30, going home exhausted, and waking up the next morning to do it all over again. It's been tiring and it feels like we've been doing this for a month instead of just over two weeks, but when I look back at all that we've accomplished I'm kind of amazed, especially by African standards – because things happen here s-l-o-w-l-y. (I know I've written about this aspect of life here before, but just by way of another example, it took me a whole morning to find and buy some plain old metal washers we needed for installing wiring conduit on the wall – and even then I had to pay twice the price because of the color of my skin!)

Fortunately, we are now closing in on the end of the installation/networking project, so now we can get back to the work we were actually supposed to be doing in January – preparing new classes for February! The next few weeks are going to be busy, but shouldn't be as crushing as the last. We're here to get work done anyway!

African Tamaguchi

Myspace Mood: Irritated

Do you remember the Tamaguchi craze a while back? (The little digital things that had a "pet" on the screen?) I never had one, but I can see how people liked having a little thing to take care of and help grow. Well, in Africa now that it's the dry season, we have something just like that: Mango Worms! The mango trees are pollinating right now (the trees are everywhere), and apparently there are little worms that hang on them and sometimes fall to the ground. Em and I found out the hard way that sometimes they decide to burrow into your foot, and boom! – you have your own pet to feed and help grow! :)

We were getting these weird little swollen blisters on our feet that had a black spot in the middle of them. We soaked our feet in salt water, etc., but they wouldn't go away. So finally we asked our teammate about them and she told us about them and that it's really common this time of year. The black spot is actually the worm's head. As you might imagine, Em almost puked when she found out it was a worm, but she immediately convinced herself it was more of a worm bite than an actual worm. :) Anyway, they're pretty easy to dig out once you know how so I think we're both set now.

(Pictures were omitted on purpose for your benefit...)

Three more “West African” moments...

Myspace Mood: Happy

Feliz Natal! I hope everyone's Christmas is going or was good depending on when you read this. It has been a little difficult to get into the Christmas spirit this year for us, for several reasons, but we've been doing our best! It has seemed less like the holidays for several reasons: the fact that we're away from our families, the warm weather, lack of smothering monotone gray cloud cover (Michigan), and finally the fact that Africans generally don't worry about anything more than a day ahead meaning that Christmas wasn't really a topic of conversation until, say, yesterday.

Last blog I gave a couple of recent things that have made me notice where I am, I have three more today that are funny and also very African. The first one was humorous but doesn't have much of a story. Emily and I were driving around downtown on the TVS (checking the mail and picking up a few groceries) and a monkey ran across the road in front of us. It was spindly, but standing up its arms would reach higher than mine. I might have expected such a thing a little further out of civilization, but not downtown! So, there's another first for Jason – I have never before almost run over a monkey with a small motor scooter. :)

The second story gives you a little window into banking in Guinea-Bissau. There are only three banks in the whole country who offer personal accounts, and all three are in Bissau. One of the center employees, Fernando, needed to open an account to help with the visa he's trying to get to study English in the U.S. for a year. I took him into town on the TVS, dropped him off, and went to do the other errands downtown that the center needed. I came back half an hour later and asked him how it was going. The bank had been open for an hour and a half and his number was 110. They were helping #50 at the time. Yes, that's right folks – there was a three hour delay... even to deposit or withdraw! (While we were waiting I had plenty of time to tell Fernando how miraculous ATM's are, haha.) Apparently lines like this aren't at all uncommon and if the bank closes before they get to your number, you get to come back tomorrow, get a new number, and continue hoping.

The third story gives a good insight into West African society, but I'll give you the cultural interpretation after so I don't spoil the story. We were doing our Saturday morning shopping last weekend downtown, so we were driving from the store that has canned beans to the store that gets good soup mixes (appreciate Wal-Mart, friends), and the road the second store (Mavegro) is on is bad – so sometimes we drive on the sidewalk (which is good) for the last half block.

You might be thinking to yourself at this point, "Jason, you lawbreaker – you have a scooter and now you think you own the road and the sidewalk too!" In my defense I should more clearly define what I mean when I say the road is bad. It has potholes that are four feet wide and up to 18" deep. Not just a few of them either, it looks like the craters of the moon. So we drive on the sidewalk for that half block in an effort to avoid getting lost in one of those potholes and never being heard from again. Sure you wouldn't do it in America... but this is Africa.

Last Saturday we drove the bike up over the curb and onto the sidewalk, past a woman selling bread, past a house, and then as we passed a man washing a car on the street I noticed that he was growing slightly taller. In fact what was happening was that our bike was sinking into the wet cement that we were driving on. You'd be surprised how similar cement with carwash water on it looks to wet (uncured) cement. Or I was at least.

Fortunately only about four feet of the cement was being repaired, so the TVS hummed on through, hardly slowing down. As we drove the last 20 feet to the store, Em looked back to see a disgusted looking man with a trowel in his hand emerge from the house and glare at us. We ran into the store quickly hoping he would not follow. We picked up what we needed, headed back out to the bike (relieved that he wasn't there waiting for us), and took off – not before noticing the cement had been smoothed back out and now had several big rocks on either side to warn anyone else who might want to drive through it that the cement was in fact wet.

Now we come to the cultural learning portion of the program. If I asked an American what was the cause of the problem in this situation, I think most of us would identify two things: First, I was driving on the sidewalk. I'll give you that one, but take my word – it's totally acceptable here. In fact, I would venture to say that a majority of Africans would have thought it a little odd for me to be driving on the road rather than the sidewalk, given its condition. The second cause an American might identify in this situation is that the mason working on the cement didn't put up any markers to alert people that the cement was wet. And here is where American and African mindsets separate. Despite the fact that Saturday is the busiest shopping day of the week, I am convinced that if I had stopped to ask why he didn't put up any warning signs he would have told me in all honesty that he saw no need.

A second example of this lackadaisical approach to warning signs is illustrated by a giant hole in the sidewalk. This hole appeared one day in the middle of one of the busiest paths for foot traffic on our side of the city. It appeared with no apparent explanation or markings and was 6-7' deep and the whole width of the sidewalk when it was dug. I assumed that they might be working on underground pipes or something. A few days later (possibly because someone fell in, lol) there were four corn stalks marking the four corners of the hole with a little plastic stretched across them. The corn stalks disappeared a few days later and now (whatever its original purpose) the hole is filling up with trash as kind of a spot-landfill.

Generally, West Africans much prefer to deal with problems when they occur rather than preparing for/preventing them beforehand. As nearly as I can tell, the rationale is that preparing for or preventing a problem is work that might end up being pointless (if the problem doesn't end up happening). I'm not sure if the thinking is that clearly defined or just happens based on the fact that so many people are living hand to mouth that they don't have time to worry about problems that aren't problems yet – but either way the effect is the same. I think another factor that plays into this is that predictability is not prized here as it is in the States. We plan partially to make sure we know what's coming – so many bad things happen here that trying to have a predictable future is seen as a futile exercise in frustration. (Of course it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the lack of planning leads to even more bad things happening, reinforcing the idea that there's no point in thinking ahead.)

Our teammate has done a good job of convincing some of the center employees of the virtues of planning ahead by putting away some money, but even after they understand the importance of it, there is a curious thing about African society which prevents them from saving. If a neighbor or family member comes and asks for money (which happens often), if you have any, you have to give it to them. This causes all sorts of funny idiosyncrasies (such as causing everyone to spend as much of their monthly pay as quickly as possible to avoid being obligated to give it away) but also has the side effect of making saving impossible. Our teammate has set up an envelope system in the center's safe to allow the employees to save without anyone knowing, but even then they almost have to lie when someone asks them for money by saying they don't have any available. Interesting, huh?

You know you're in West Africa when...

I think that when you live somewhere else for long enough, you start to adapt to it - no matter how different it is from what you're used to - and begin to stop noticing some of the differences. We've been in Africa for four months, and many days I am used to everything that happens. There are still some things that happen every once in a while that make you realize "hey, I'm in Africa" again. A few of those things have happened recently so I thought I'd share them with you.

First, I woke up at midnight a few nights ago to the sound of tribal drums and chanting. This may happen in your neighborhood too, but it wasn't something I was used to in Michigan. It was a funeral and they were still going at 1:30 when I fell back asleep. Pockets of people from different tribes live in different areas of Bissau, so tribal ceremonies aren't all that uncommon, but this one was loud enough to wake me up (even though I'm sure it was blocks away).

The second thing that happened recently was that our neighbors (in the other side of our duplex) got a goat. This also is not uncommon, our "street" is like a petting zoo - various neighbors own chickens, pigs, ducks, dogs, and other assorted things that are all loose and go wherever they want. This seems quite normal, actually. I'm not sure if any of you have ever been around a goat for very long, but they are loud. It could be that goats are naturally whiny, or that this one isn't being fed, but it bleats before we wake up and is bleating most nights when we fall asleep. (Too bad goats can't seem to get soar throats.) The house is surrounded by a tall wall and the two sides of the duplex are divided by a shorter wall, and since the goat lives inside the wall, the bleating echoes off of the wall and gets louder before coming in our house, lol. To make matters worse, one of their kids (human) the other day was teasing the kid (goat) by mimicking the bleating which only made the goat bleat louder, lol. Anyway, it's not the most annoying thing we've run into (their rooster is much worse), but we were glad this week when the time came for us to move out of the duplex into the apartment above our teammates' house which was vacated when Thomas went back to the States on Wednesday. (Pictures of the new diggs next time, for now here's the goat.)

The third thing is satisfyingly related to the second, which is that we ate goat (unfortunately not the same one) for the first time early this week. We were invited over to dinner at the house of one of Emily's english students (who is somewhat famous for great dinner parties), so we were excited. The first thing we ate were grilled shrimp with spicy lemon sauce (a great combination!) that still had the heads on them. Em almost lost it, hehe... The lights were dim (using candles since the city light wasn't on) so I don't think she realized what was on the end of the shrimp until Thomas said something when she jump/twitched so much she dropped it on the ground and could barely pick it back up, lol. Anyway, they were really good. Next we had squid salad, which was also tasty. The only squid I've had in the States is fried calamari, which doens't resemble squid much after it's been fried so long - fresh squid is a different deal. The different parts of the squid are different textures, so you'd get one bite from the body that was chewy, and then in the next forkfull you'd eat a tentacle which was a little crunchier. :) For dinner we had something like goat pot roast over rice (everything here is over rice - actually it's more like rice with a little of something else on top). The goat was really good! I've been craving pot roast recently anyway, so that may have something to do with my evaluation of the goat, but it was like tastier beef. Very tender too. I'm a fan!

Ok, I have some wilder stories to tell when we get back, but for now this is all I have time to tell! I hope everyone is having a good Christmas season!