Matthew Engel

Guys!

So sorry you had to wait until today to hear, but I landed safely! Frederic picked me up at the airport, we got through baggage check somehow without paying a single bribe, and here I am at an internet cafe in Conakry. I got in last night at 5am my time and I’m very exhausted (excuse the spelling errors the keyboards here are totally different), but I had a nice shower and I even had electricity for an hour until the lightning started and a crazy deluge began like I’ve never seen; welcome to Africa!

Ginny, my colleague from school, was waiting outside of her room, when I got up and has been a huge help. I was crazy dehydrated and had no idea how to change money or where the city was, but she showed me the money exchange place (a very moblike operation) and he gave us some apple juice! So now I have a big stack of francs. Apparently rainy season already started; its been raining nonstop and i haven’t seen the sun yet. The city is really less developed than I thought it would be and it seems like nearly everyone lives in total squalor. My back window looks out into a couple shacks where kids are playing in garbage.

Alright more updates will come soon, I think I’m going to go get a SIM card for my french phone and maybe try to find a grocery store or something for a ton of water bottles.

OK I love you guys so much and I miss home already. Hope all is well and Ill figure out how to call you guys soon and try to email you in advance so we don’t miss each other.
Seth

June 14, 2009

Wooooooo! Africa!

So I’ve begun to settle in to my little hotel room in a Catholic mission…it’s small and the pillows smell like someone’s been hiding them in their armpit for the past 15 years, but I have my own bathroom and it’s relatively bug-free. Power outages are a fact of life here, but when there’s electricity I have my very own fan which, as you can imagine, is pretty important for someone as sweaty as me.

Last night I started to feel a bit overwhelmed. I mean, I’ve been to a bunch of 3rd world countries but I’ve never seen, experienced, or smelled squalor like this. It’s really crazy. There is literally no infrastructure. In econ classes I’ve heard that thrown around, but experiencing it is a whole different animal. Insufficient electricity, no potable water, no public transport, etc. It seems like the only thing that’s doing well here is the military (kind of like in the USofA!); except here at least they admit the country’s run by a junta.

So anyway, I began to feel a bit overwhelmed last night in the damp dark of my room with flickering lights and bats squawking outside. Two months started to feel like an awful long time not to see the people I love, and I got really worried about not being able to understand the detainees I’m going to have to interview (starting tomorrow). I calmed down and today had a pretty good day actually.

Took a walk along the water (Conakry is an island except for one Autoroute that connects it to mainland Africa). The beach is COMPLETELY covered in garbage….like not a square inch of sand. People were walking through it with huge bags slung over their shoulders, picking what gems they could find. It was honestly one of the most foul-smelling things I’ve ever encountered. But the landscape was nice, and I talked to some local toughs (who were about 6 years old), and bought some mangos. They are SO sweet and fresh, it’s ridiculous. Also got to do a little workout (I was dripping wet afterwards and had to take shower #3 of the day). 4 sets of regular pushups, 4 sets of incline pushups, 3 sets of overhead tricep extension (using a huge heavy vase behind my head) and 4 sets of dips (table + chair). By the way, the shower is handheld, only has cold water, and comes out in a trickle. Yay.

OK hope you all are well, and you’re all in my thoughts all the time.

Love,
Seth

June 15, 2009

So I’m typing from a bustling two-floor internet cafe and I’m completely soaked in sweat. This is probably the nicest building in the city, and is packed full of flat-panel monitors with colorful Guineans oogling over music videos, pornography, and yahoo.fr email. Here I am, dripping sweat onto the keyboard, keeping my Ray Ban sunglasses on my lap to limit the jealous stares.

Today was my first day at work! Everyone is really nice. I knew that once I started work and had an actual purpose, I would feel much better about things. Today was sunny and extremely hot; although the Africans are really used to the heat, I saw a bunch of them sporting pit stains and I felt a little bit better about myself.

The first thing we did today was go through introductions of everybody and talk about what everyone is working on. I caught about half of what everyone was saying…My personal communication in French is has been fine all along, but my listening comp has only started to improve. I remember it being like this in Paris; feeling hopefully lost at first and then gradually catching more and more until I can proudly have an actual conversation without nodding my head and saying “oui” or “bof” every other word.

The second thing I did was go to prison. I shadowed one of the attorneys there and we chatted as we walked. He actually had one of the thicker accents and spoke particularly fast, so I asked him to speak slower. he showed me around the prison….not a very nice. I obviously couldn’t take pictures, but they would probably be pretty heartbreaking. There’s a separate “cadre” for women, minors, drug dealers, and men. At first I didn’t think it was that bad…there’s a separate woman’s shelter w/ cots (provided w/ funding from the Canadian gov’t) and the kids center isn’t that bad…they have a little soccer ring and a courtyard. Their beds are stuffed in a hot room, 3 stacked on each other, and they all have various cuts and rashes…but I was expecting as much. Then I saw the sick person’s ward…really not a ward, actually more like a corner. They are all sitting or standing awkwardly with boils, warts, and rashes, and most of them are as emaciated as skeletons. They all stared at me as I walked by, more than the other people…it was kind of haunting. The men are stuffed to as many as 60 people per cell…the cells are about as big as my living room was in NYC.

Then the lawyer I was following, Emmanuel Buba, started his work. As we walked around peopele would come up to him and say it was time for them to be released, and he took down their name and the date they were arrested. Then we went to the office, looked up their arrest date, and asked the various bureaucrats to release them because they were overdue. 2/3 went smoothly…but this tiny little bespeckled man with an oral fixation (matches/tobacco pipe) started getting irate when Emmanuel insisted he release this one kid, Amadou. According to the bureaucrat, he was released but brought back in. We went back to the boys’ place and asked him if he was lying. He said no, and we picked his friend up from the mens’ cadre to verify his story. We brought them back to the office and he told his story, saying he was about to be released but some soldiers demanded 50,000 guinean francs (about $12), which he obvi didn’t have. The soldiers overheard him and started getting REALLY mad…and soon the tiny office was flooded with 5-10 screaming men in various stages of uniform dress, mostly with dark sunglasses/gold teeth, threatening to hit or “faire n’importe de quoi” to Emmanuel…needless to say, he screamed right back at them, saying he was doing his job and they couldn’t touch him. Well….they could, in theory, but they didn’t. We somehow got out alive, and here I am, still sweating, to tell the tale.

Emmanuel then showed me a couple courthouses and I went to get lunch. The organization coordinator (not sure if I mentioned it, but I’m working with what is basically a public defenders’ office, but it’s a non profit called Memes Droits Pour Tous (MDT)) brought out a stack of files for me to read, and I got to learn some legal jargon in French.

Pretty crazy, right? Well, don’t be worried, Emmanuel felt rpetty confident that the soldiers would never actually do anything, and eventually what looked like their superiors came in and hauled the crazy yelling guys away.

OK, I’m going to go read or something now. I hope the electricity doesn’t give out again tonight…I wet the bed (with sweat) when the fan (and lights) died on me. I leiterally felt like I had just gone swimming.

Hope you’re all having great summers, and that this wasn’t too long-winded…

Seth

June 16, 2009

…So the main side effect of my malaria medicine (which is especially important to take, as my colleague Ginny apparently came down with malaria last week) is something called “vivid dreams.” What that means is basically that you feel like you’re IN the dream EVERY night, and when I wake up I still think I’m there, and can’t fall back asleep for half an hour or so. Last night I dreamed that my mom was trying to drive me around in my old-man Lincoln but she couldn’t change the gear to “park,” so i pushed her aside and took over and had to run alongside the car with the door open for some reason, then a cop stopped us, who was driving an AT-ST walker (from Star Wars, yes) and was really pissed. very realistic.

Today I visited the prison today and it was “vraiment plus tranquile.” We basically went there to gather information on the women, because they had never been properly recorded. According to their semi-elected leader, there were 39 of them, but 13 didn’t want to talk to us or give us their “renseignements” (information). We were trying to get their date of imprisonment, names, ages, and court that oversees their dossier (there are 3 “tribunaux” in conakry). My god, the names. It was hell trying to get them down without seeming totally retarded. Last names include Toure, Ouwigaba, Doyabumba, Camara…and they say them SO fast. Also, the prisoners’ French are heavily accented with whatever their African dialects are, making it even harder. But I definitely noticed an improvement today in my oral comprehension, even of the prisoners.

One of the women recounted how she was tortured 5 different times, 4 of which were by male soldiers. I was at the prison with 2 other interns, one was Ginny (white girl also from Georgetown law school, occasionally very annoying) and the other a Guinean, this hilarious little energetic guy named Bonifast. He didn’t know what to do, so I took down her info and went straight to the lawyers at our office. They told me we had to be really cautious about it, because if the guards found out she was reporting on them they’d destroy her. So they said i should go back tomorrow and pretend to be doing more information stuff and surreptitiously pull her aside and get the full story. One of the female guineans from the office is going to accompany me (men obviously cant enter the woman’s building).

Also a bunch of the women complained to me about various ailments (a couple were refugees from Sierra Leone or Liberia and spoke only English!). One said her appendix was hurting (how does she know what that feels like?) and another said she cant eat because her teeth hurt so much. I spoke to the lawyers but they said they usually wait until its really serious, bec we dont have a lot of money to send docotrs to the prison, and obviously the prison itself isnt going to do shit. So i called up doctors w/o borders, which has an office in conakry, and got the medical coordinators’ number. she’s going to come by the office tomorrow morning at 9am to talk with us about setting up a program for them to go into the prisons! pretty cool. im starting to see how the summer is going to be, and im afforded a lot of independence to kind of create whatever project I want. my plan is to create a sort of education thing (sensibilitasion) to tell the prisoners their right to be free from torture, a right of which they are sorely unaware. also im gonna connect USAID to set up a medical program w them too. The lawyers said theyd love to hear from a compatriot and that i should call them “dude.”

During the week, the city has really come back to life. I guess it’s just like Washington in that it can get pretty dead during the weekend. That might’ve been part of why it seemed so shitty. During the week the streets and sidewalks are totally alive, and it’s just how I imagined africa. Hawkers, mango peelers, meat grillers, shoe polishers, shoe salesmen, pillow salesman, phone card salesman, little children, impeccably-dressed businessmen (who are somewhat rare) and robed Muslims all co-mingle in this loud hot mass that sprawls from the sidewalk and into the street. Cars swerve, honk, and speed. tried to take some pictures today, but i didn’t feel totally comfortable doing so, and some younger guys were yelling at me to take their picture (’ey boss!). sorry boys, no can do.

Alright im gonna go grab some dinner!

June 23, 2009

I wanna keep this one short because it’s so freaking hot and I think
Natalie Imbruglia is playing over the internet cafe radio and im about to kill myself.
As for work, did some more verification and stuff today and got
introduced to all the head honchos at the tribunal, who were mostly
quite pleasant. I found out that most of the bureaucrat guys dont get
paid at all, which makes their complete aloofness more understandable.
One guy today, Kokla, worked really hard today to help us track down
some cases, but everyone else was literally sitting there either
picking their nose or text messaging. Sometimes I feel like I’m in
Star Wars or something, when we open a door and it’s this huge
bustling room with women in all kinds of flagrant color dresses and
headscarves chowing down on what looks like crunchy worms and fried
bread, drinking various colored drinks out of reused water bottles,
all talking at once with papers flying everywhere and high-tech cell
phones scattered on the desktops.

Tomorrow is my meeting with USAID, looking forward to that, and this
coming weekend I think I might be traveling with one of the lawyers
and Ginny and 2 Guinean interns (Dakala and Bonifaste) to Kindia,
which is a couple hours away and is a mountanous town near some
waterfalls. I hear it rains even MORE out there, so I better be sure
to take my malaria medecine. Although it’s been sunny during the day
(i hear thatll only last another week at most), the nights have been
pissed on by someone who drank a 12-pack by himself. It’s really
pretty crazy, I’ve never seen storms quite like it.

There is a sort of chorus of animals that gather outside my window at
night. There’s the kid goat who’s tied to this brand new Toyota 4×4 in
the mechanic’s shop behind the Mission, which bleats more often than
Italian presidents talk to prostitutes. Then there’s this 3-legged dog
that hops around in the slums outside the mission that yelps literally
all night, approximately every 90 seconds. When it’s raining, which
has been 2/3 nights, the bullfrogs come out, which I hear are some of
the largest in the world (apparently called Goliath frogs and
sometimes more than 6 pounds). Add to the mix an 85-degree room and
HORRIBLE smelling pillows, i count my blessings that i brought
earplugs and tylenol PM.

Since Im hungry, I’ll chat about the new food thigns Ive found. I just
recently discovered the market. I THOUGHT i knew where the market was,
this crazy assortment of wooden benches piled ontop of each other to
make little shops, colorful and loud as you can imagine. But if you
penetrate the wall of shops by squeezing in between them, and go
through these crazy tunnels with no light and dripping ceilings, you
suddenly come out into what looks like an abandoned train stations
that is completely full of fruit, vegetable, spice, shoe, bra, and
electronics vendors. Some of the women sell these bags of freshly
smashed peanut butter. To use it you bite the bottom fo the bag and
squeeze it onto whatever you want, and the butter naturally congeals
over the hole until next use. I’ve also discovered this soft serve
place about 100 meters from the Mission, which serves
Pistachio/Chocolate mixes and is creamy as hell. So I’ve been mixing
the PB into that, which is amazing. Also I found nutella at one of the
shops, and some women sell these fried bread balls, and sunday morning
i put nutella ont hem and that was equally amazing. You might think Id
be GAINING weight here with all that crap, but au contraire, i can
actually tell im losing weight. I don’t know how this is happening, but
it really sucks. Its probably bec im eating waayyy less frequently
here, and im not as hydrated as i should be.

OK I’m gonna go translate the prison doctor’s diagnoses for my meeting
with USAID tomorrow. hope youre all well!

June 28, 2009

riday and Saturday were jam packed, and Saturday (yesterday, I guess?) was one of the most intense days of my life. However, I won’t be able to delve into the detail you all desrve because I got a thorn jammed up my pointer finger and it’s not very fun to type.

Fridays end early here because all the Muslims leave work after the 130pm prayer, and since nearly everyone here is Muslim, it makes it pretty darn hard to get anything done in the courts or offices. I left work at about 3pm and Maitre Mohamad Sow, one of the lawyers in the office, asked me if I wanted to eat dinner with him later that evening. Maitre Sow (no one calls him Mohamad) is a very quiet man with extremely dark skin, which makes his eyes pop out all the more. He has a bit of a gut and a slouch and his not very tall, but comports himself somewhat regally and, combined with his poise and quiet demeanor, make you eager to hear every word he says. At abut 5pm i got a call from him and he asked me if i wanted to walk around and to invite Ginny. Oh so unfortunately she was under the weather that day, so he picked me up in his brand new Subaru with…GASP…electric windows and A/C (Ma it’s the same car you have, but green), and we started driving. At first I felt a bit uncomfortable bec. he wasnt clear where we were going or what we were doing, and we were driving further out from the City than I’d been before. Then he explained to me how he lived near Frederic, a bit further than the US Embassy, and that we were going to get a bite to eat. It became clear that he’s just a kind of lonely guy who wanted a friend, and is tired of eating alone. So he brought me to this “restaurant”..really a rickety wooden structure with a cool porch that stands on stilts above the water. We sat pretty close to the edge, which dipped precariously downwards, and were served a single bowl full of rice and fish, which we shared. He also ordered a couple beers called Guiluxe (5.8% alcohol). I told him I didnt know muslims could drink, and he said his parents dont know that he does. The food was awesome and then he brought me to this bar that’s RIGHT on the water, and we watched the sun go down. I was getting my ass kicked by the moustiques, but it was very lovely and our conversation ranged from Guinea’s love of American culture, the plight of African Americans, to his fiance currently studying in Morocco (hence his loneliness) and his wife who died in childbirth nearly a year ago (hence his forlorn demeanor).

Then I got a call from Erica, Jean Louis’ girlfriend (the Franco-Italian who had been an intern at MDT’s other office in the forest region and just left to work in Congo two days ago), to meet some of her friends at a pizza bar that the Peace Corps usually hang out in. Maitre Sow drove me back towards the city a bit to meet Erica in an area called Kipe (with an accent aigue over the “e,” so it’s proncounced Kee-pay). Then I got a call from an olllllld buddy that I took, but invitd Maitre Sow to get a drink and meet Erica’s friends. Her friends include: Paul Andre, an english guy whos hilarious sense of humor includes nearly as many pop culture references as that of an NYU students’, his gf Mary, a quiet French girl, and this German guy who had a sore throat and I was sure was compltely gay, but Paul Andre assured me that i was mistaking his europeanness for a preference for men and that he had a gf back home. Maitre Sow was then kind enough to bring us to the pizza bar, where he deposited us and we had drinks with some Peace Corps people (who’ve mostly been there for 1.5 years+, i dont knwo how they do it but apparently they do very little work). The DJ kept interrupting his music to give eulogy after eulogy for Michael Jackson, who he was convinced was a civil rights worker and the first black pop singer. Not sure if he was aware that MJ(ackson) changed his skin color or not.

On to Saturday: During the week Ginny, Bonifaste, Dakala (MDT’s other itnerns) and I had decided to go to Kindia, the 2nd biggest city in Guinea located 2.5 hours east in the mountains. Bonifaste met us at the Catholic Mission and the three of us took a taxi to pick up Dakala and then got dropped off at what used to be a train station and is now just a chaotic marketplace next to the highway where station wagon taxis depart for Kindia. We packed in to a taxi (13,000 francs a person, or 2.75 dollars, and ginny and i paid for dakala and boni’s tickets) along with 4 other people plus the driver, which means 4 to a row of seats meant for 3, and were stopped at the first checkpoint about 2 hours into the miserably bumpy and curvy journey. Once the soldiers saw two whiteys in the car they ordered us all out, looked at our IDs, and yelled at Bonifaste for having a camera, accusing him of spying ont he military. After it was clear they weren’t going to get a bribe, they let us all go and we piled back into the taxi. Pretty much the same scene repeated itself half an hour later, and after those the 2 other “checkpoints” were laughable, as they consisted of a bunch of kids holding ropes over the road and fanning the car with huge banana leaves, which our cabbie just barreled right through. It’s also worth noting that the countryside was absolutely stunning, and is really what youd think of when you hear Africa. It was pretty much a jungle carpeted over a vibrant mountain range with palm trees rising above the others like basketball players in a crowd. Totally beautiful and i was glad to have left the crowded polluted city, despite the horrid trip conditions.

We got to Kindia, which is really nothing at all to describe. 2 or three streets of vendors plus a university, a court, a church, and a prison, and a bunch of suburbs sprawling into the mountainside. We went to a restaurant which was out o fpretty much everything on the menu, including bottled water, so we got sandwiches with (not kidding) canned beef and some hot coffee. Needless to say, pretty gross. The REAL reason we had come to Kindia was to climb the mountains.

They were absolutely amazing. For those of you who have seen my Ecuador pictures (or been to Ecuador, wink) can imagine pretty well a lush mountainside teeming with exotic animals and plants. Once we started the first step of the journey i was instantly SO happy to have left Conakry. You see, up until then i had been vowing to never leave the city again, where you can find comparatively any food you want. Also, Ginny was killing me. Without getting into details, i had had enough of hearing her prattling on to our Guinean friends about “les Etas Unis” and how similar Indiana is to things we were doing in Guinea or how she had to literally disagree with everything eveyrone said. But once we started embarking on our voyage up the mountain, i forgot all that, and we were all huffing and puffing together and it was glorious and beautiful. It was quite an experience to plunge through the untouched countryside like that, and the climate and feeling of awe reminded me a lot of Ben Nevis in Scotland with my buddies.

This euphoria lasted about an hour and a half, until we got to just about the summit, and could literally see and hear the storm front approaching us from the back side of the mountain. We looked at each other briefly, then immediately started scrambling down. The first lightning hit nearly immediately, and was so clsoe that the flash was nearly blinding and the thunder deafening. At first it started to drizzle, and we all whipped out our raincoats, laughing like “hey, this isnt so bad!” as we descended daintily down the rocky outcrops. Then it hit. It rained like i had described in previous emails, but had never actually been exposed to while outside, a complete deluge comparable to Noah’s downpour. We all started shivering, and the rocks started getting slipperier. “Doucement!” Dakala cried out from behind me, nearly slipping himself. We did our best to avoid the streams of water that formed along the rocky path, but eventually there was nothing we could do but get completely soaked and jump through puddles and walk across mini-waterfalls shooting off of rocks adjacent to the path.

Then the path stopped. What had once been the path towards Kindia became an impassable river, which terminated in a rushing waterfall about 20 meters away. We had no choice but to attempt to cross, because the rest of the mountain was now a series of smaller waterfalls that had 15-20 feet drops. Ginny crossed with only a minor slip, but made it to the other side. I began to cross rather recklessly, exposing my side to the current instead of walking sideways like a crab. It immediately seized my mistake and pulled me down, the current taking control fo me completely. Everyone shouted and started to run after me, but there was really nothing they could do. I did my best to swim, although my shoes, raincoat and backpack were still on, and manage to grab onto a branch that hung over the river. I pulled myself towards the shore and by taht time Dakala was there, and he pulled me to safety by the armpit. Dakala, Bonifaste and I, shaking and shivering with fear and cold, told Ginny to wait there on the other side and managed to find a naturally formed rock bridge further up the mountain. we came back to ginny and made our way down to the path, which picked back up after the river and was visible just a little ways further down the mountain. At this point the rain had let up somewhat and was now just a normal storm, but lightning was crackling all around us, which scared the hell out of Dakala. He would crouch down and hold his ears every time there was thunder. When we finally re-found the path, there was once again a river in the way, this time even wider and stronger. You oculd see that it had pulled several trees down already and ended about a football field away in a huge lake that had formed within the past 30 minutes. Dakala and Bonifaste told us to wait a few minutes for the current to subside, which it did, and I found a palce where a huge stone allowed us to traverse only have the river, and several branches were available to grab onto. Boni tried it first, using the branches to cross, and made it to the other side. Dakala did the same. I went next, and lo and behold, the first branch cracked under my weight and i would have been taken by the current again if it wasnt for the other branches taht i quickly grabbed hold of. Dakala and Bonifaste pulle dme to safety, and we formed a kind of human chain to get ginny across safely, since there was no more initial branch for her to grab. Needless to say, all of our pockets, shoes, and packs were full of water. Ginny’s camera and phone broke, but somehow my phone was intact. Thank heavens i had forgotten to bring my camera and mp3 player, an oversight i had been kicking myself for just an hour later.

Alright gotta cut this short…Bonifaste, who had studied in Kindia and had smoe “family” there (actually just people of the same tribe, but they called him uncle), and after walking “pas loin,” which ended up being 40 minutes, we got to the family’s home. They were SO welcoming and reminded me of how my mom is with people who come to my house. They gave us towels, made a fire in their nearby “mud hut” for us to get dry by, gave us a change of clothes, and served steaming bowls of rice w/ manioc sauce, bread, and mayonaise-egg dip (mayonegg..). I gave one of the young men a dime i found in my backpack and explained the signifiance of “e plurbus unum” and “in god we trust,” and told him it was eiseinhower’s face (is it???). Some of the family vacated their beds for the night for us, which was again saintly of them, and before leaving early this morning Ginny and I wanted to thank them with a little gift of money. They turned it into this huge ceremony, as i guess is traditional here, and the old woman gave this speech about how thankful she was and we all shook hands etc. After an uneventful taxi ride back with no prolonged checkpoint stops, i got back home and was overjoyed to see my bathroom and take an (ice-cold) shower.

The End.

Told you it was crazy. Well, you already knew that I’m safe so it may not seem just as scary as it was, but anyway, no need to worry! Now i know to bring a scuba mask next time i climb a mountain in Guinea.