Guinea-Conakry!

... Ahh, another country where my chief souvenirs are those rosy ones of the toilet and my hotel bed. But at least now I can say that, after a childhood of skiing and snow days and an adulthood of Japan's Snow Country in a paper house with no heating, I've finally gotten pneumonia... now that, you know, I'm in Africa.

Food: Understandably, this is not something I can talk a whole lot about.

Worst Eaten: While I was sick, everything tasted like thick pasty sawdust.

Best Eaten: In Conakry, I had the absolute, hands-down best schwarma plate of my life. Incidentally, it was also one of the first things that actually tasted like food again. Still couldn't finish it, but merde was it good.

(Other) Hygienic Lows: To help my campaign to consume as many calories as physically possible towards recuperation, David kindly brought me a can of AriZona Green Tea. The tea-flavored syrupy mixture left me with considerabe doubts at first, but after an hour I began to get used to it and was even, I dare say, beginning to enjoy it when suddenly there was a fly in my mouthful of tea. It was very much alive, and very surprised to find itself buzzing around my gums, though probably not as much as I was. My carefully thought-out reaction to the fly in my mouth resembled an explosion of green tea direct from mouth all over floor and some furniture. Subsequent steps included washing mouth out, peering into can's dark and sketchy interior, and throwing rest of can away. Oh well, I thought. Back to water.

Quote: While I was sick, my only social contact was a protracted Sick-man's War with my broken-ankle neighbor over the armchair in our hallway; every morning I would screw up two hours' worth of energy to drag it over in front of my door and every evening he would crutch his way over to drag it back to his. (Note: Total chair displacement was probably less than five meters.) We each heard the other's clandestine operations, but never said a word to one another until my last evening, when we literally had to pass one another, and exchanged a stiff "Bon-soir."

Other than that, my social contact in the country was pretty limited to David and a man I talked to while watching pick-up soccer on the street. While I don't follow sports teams and have only most sporadically watched the World Cup, I love watching pick-up soccer. The enthusiasm is ten times what you'll find in a professional game - just look at what the players put up with in order to play. Misshapen, badly-bouncing balls, shirts v. skins for uniforms, two pots for goalposts, on a pothole-pitted playing field lined with sewage. If the pros had to put up with that and weren't getting paid for it, I seriously doubt they would play at all. But these kids do.

And they're good! You see some pretty incredible kicks in pick-up soccer and some pretty frightening saves, frightening because there may be oncoming traffic involved. The average pick-up soccer player commands a much broader skill set than the professional - dribbling up the field is not enough, you must also be able to steer around (or use) potholes; in addition to dodging defenders, be ready to dodge cars; know how to fix the ball when it has been smushed; rock-climbing skills will soon be necsesary for ball-retrieval when it goes over the neighboring wall.

Moreover, the game is rendered more exciting for the spectator by the greatly increased chances of actually getting hit with the ball.

I was watching one such game in Conakry one evening; David was somewhere in central Guinea, and I had nowhere else to be, so I stood around on a curb and watched some kids my age play. The game very nearly took an ugly turn when a wild shot nearly took the nose off a 'patrolling' soldier, but luckily the situation was quickly diffused. Soon after that, united in comraderie by the sudden fear of police, the man next to me struck up a conversation about the game; I continued it with a compliment on how talented the players were.

It could have stayed on the relatively innocent and apolitical topic of pick-up street soccer, but instead the man chose to nurse his personal grudge and launched into a political harangue about how racist Europe is because if those kids went to Europe, they wouldn't be allowed to play since they're African.

....Abundant evidence *disproving* this aside, it really pissed me off that the man just had to look at me as OH MY GOD YOU'RE WHITE instead of what it could have been - just a conversation between two kind-of soccer enthusiasts on a really interesting but unimportant game of street soccer. It could have been so simple. But no, it couldn't... we had two different skin colors. It just had to be about race. The incident prompted a rush of Africa-related bitterness that probably came out on this blog (apologies).

It's also possible that pneumonia may have seriously damaged my love affair with Africa.

Could I live here? I sort of did live here, consider I spent a full week in the capital alone. It would be, I think, a fairly easy city to live in for most people, provided you didn't mind the de-facto military curfew on the city, but sadly the city will always be a bit tainted with the memory of sick for me.

African One-Liners

Since I'm stuck recuperating in Conakry with the kind of internet connection that comes once in a lifetime in Africa, seems like as good a time as any to dump a collection of quotes that, over the past few months, have made me laugh.. or tilt my head and think: "?"

David, in Arusha, Tanzania, on finding a guide: "If we stand around and look white, sooner or later we'll find someone."

"Now we're full." -- the herder of a 14-passenger bus in Rwanda, on boarding his 26th passenger. (Several of us immediately protested amid general laughter that we could surely fit at least two more...)

Butros Butros Ghali, on being asked to distinguish between the Arabic bukra, insha'allah and the Spanish mañana: "The Arabic 'bukra' has none of 'mañana's sense of urgency."

David to me, haughtily, after I made a snarky remark about how unexpectedly luxurious our Congolese hotel room was: "Unlike you, I don't need to be in a nest of cockroaches to get a good night's sleep."

Debating whether or not Libya was a swell country, in response to my comment on the governmental status the (pro-Libya) Nigerien dude responded: "Well, yeah.. but who gives a fuck about democracy??"

On the mass of hair that came away from my head when I took out my braids from Zanzibar - "Man, you could stuff a pillow with that." And pressed as to the color of that still attached to my scalp: "Uh... if I had to say, I would probably say... indeterminate."

"Hey, it takes a lot of willpower to go through a can of tuna!" --David, defensively, to my stare of disgust as he tuna-stank up our squalid hotel room in Kenya.

Anna and Matt, two friendly Peace Corpsers, on the obstacles to tourism in coastal Benin and Togo: "The tourists come out here in the morning with their towels and there are like six to eight people shitting on the beach."

"And this is for.. grabbing and strangling something, I guess." --David, in all seriousness, describing an item at the label-less National Museum of Ethiopia.

(This one I can't claim to have seen myself, but it's good enough to merit repeating) On a billboard in Nigeria: Do you suffer from virginal drip?

From me to David, on a random street in Masindi, Uganda after leaping out of the way of yet another honking taxi: "You know, I'm getting kind of sick of people threatening me with vehicular homicide as a means of getting my attention."

An idealistic museum docent in Benin, showing a morality statue of a woman naked to the waist, explained to the assembled Beninese (and me) how female nudity to the waist is 'okay' in African culture. One of his countrywomen heartily disagreed, and a spot of bickering ensued. The man was persistent, but the woman soon won it beyond all claim with: "Now just what do you think would happen to me if I wandered around the street naked to the waist??"

On the crowds of people swarming around our huge bus and waving their arms madly as we attempted a cramped 3-pt-turn in congested Nairobi: "Gee, everyone here's a budding traffic director."

"Hm.. One minute." -- David's estimate for how roughly how long it would take to break down the rickety plywood-and-rusted-bolt combination ambitiously calling itself my hotel door.
(15 minutes - time spent relocating all furniture in my room to directly in front of said door.)

And finally, one more to make his parents proud: David, discussing my student health plan in the EG airport, in response to my apprehension about the insurance supplier: "Man, I would take Satan himself if he was offered to me at a 75% discount!"

(Which, with insurance companies, is more or less the same thing.)

Jana Gets The Plague

I wasn't feeling like the pick of the litter Friday, but just chalked it up to CTF (cumulative travel fatigue) until I began vomiting Saturday night. My stomach, inspired by South African's labor unions, had decided to go on its own strike in protest of Africa. By Sunday afternoon I didn't seem to be throwing up any more, but I wasn't eager to put anything else in there to find out until evening the next day. Though I didn't know it at the time, that Monday night dinner, the first meal I'd had in three days, would also be my last for about a week or so. At the time, thinking myself already well en route to chipper health from a simple flu, I assumed my recovery would follow the normal trajectory and by Wednesday I'd be chowin' it with the best of 'em.

Wednesday I was definitely feeling better, if troubled by a bit of a sore throat that had come out of nowhere; Wednesday was also our travel day from Sierra Leone to Guinea. As we crossed the border we had to do the normal formalities, and though I didn't notice it when I gave him my passport, the border official had sores all the way up and down both arms. I only noticed it when, as I was giving my profession, etc., I overheard him complaining to his coworker about the chicken pox. That got my attention, alright.

"Chicken pox can kill you if you get it as an adult," I whispered, wide-eyed, to David.

"I know!" he said with seriousness, adding that he basically was an adult when he got it at 16.

I paused. "I've never had it."

He gaped. "You haven't? Have you had the vaccine?"

"Er.. no." (Was that foolish of me?)

We let that information hang in the air for a moment, and then I got out my Purell and coated both my hands and forearms with it.

When I did begin feeling really awful again a couple hours later, it was, the doctor later confirmed, too fast after exposure to be related to the chicken pox. The fever that came on around the time we finally arrived in Conakry was not "the sickness of chicken" (what the heck is 'chicken pox' in French anyway?), but it was definitely something nasty. I have, in fact, never been this sick in my life. Whatever I got I strongly suspect doubled as population control in the good ol' days before the advent of modern medicine. (In other words, THE PLAGUE.)

I believe it started with some sort of lung infection, because aside from fever, body aches and fatigue the first thing I noticed was chest pain. My lungs felt like they were filled with lead, and deep breaths caused an exquisite pain to shoot throughout my chest. By Wednesday evening breathing had become extraordinarily difficult and painful, and the effort required just to keep doing it over and over exhausted all available energy resources. Every now and then I would have a coughing fit and nearly choke on my own disgusting and occasionally bloody phlegm. I didn't bother to eat. Fevers alternated with chills; David assured me that my room was a thousand degrees, but it felt like a refridgerator to me. The Guinean summer sun outside was even worse, and I protected myself against it on my frequent trips to the loo by wrapping my sheet and towel around myself. I noticed on these trips that the sky was a brilliantly sparkling pinky-purple. Most of the time, though, I lay in my bed like a useless slug for several days, hacking and retching, sweating and shivering, stomach cramped for lack of food but definitely still on digestive strike.

If I was in Japan right now, I thought to myself, they would have me on an IV before you could say ganbatte, and I would be up and about like lickety-split.

But I was not in Japan. I was in Guinea, I was damned lucky to be in the capital of Guinea where a licensed doctor was able to prescribe an antibiotic and some other badtasting pills and syrups. Not the rainbow armful I would have bagged in Japan, but nearly as cheap. An IV wasn't offered, but I wasn't about to get anywhere near anything intravenous here anyway. That left one alternative: I began forcing food into my stomach the pre-needle way.

Eating became, next to breathing, the worst part of my life. I felt like I did nothing but eat for three full days, yet the sum total of my efforts was never more than a couple hundred calories. After two exhausting hours of concerted eating, I would realize that I had eaten like five saltines, and feel like crying. Periods of eating were broken by periods in which I willed food so hard-won to stay put in my union-inspired stomach. As I stared hatefully at the saltines, I cast about for foods that, if not appetizing, were at least not wholly revolting, and found myself oddly attracted to foods I normally hate - gatorade.. cheeze-pretzel combos.. a hamburger. Subconscious American nostalgia? The hamburger ended up not working out so well - at least the ants enjoyed it - but in one epic six-hour session of determination I finished two full snack-packs of combos.

Saturday morning I woke up after a record five hours of continued sleeping with no improvement and a fierce determination to accomplish two goals that day - (a) to shower, cos I smelled like a nursing home, and (b) to eat at least 1500 calories' worth of food. That night found be having accomplished goals, and I was highly pleased with myself.

I was also highly pleased that I was not roughing it into the center of the country the 13 grim hours to Kankan with David the next day. Though it had been the original plan that we would go together and then continue overland to Guinea-Bissau, we decided that he would do it alone and then we would fly on to Dakar from Conakry. I felt bad pooping out on David in French territory... but not bad enough that I was prepared to go. I would instead be spending my Sunday very much as I had spent my Saturday - eating, and showering.

So many hours lying awake gave me ample time for reflection, and I kept coming back to reflecting on the foolishness that makes people want to shed fat. After eight days of not eating, whatever fat I carried over my bones was quite literally the only thing keeping me alive. More than ever, I realize why your body works so damned hard to store a bit away - 'cos if you get the plague and you look like one of the Hill girls, you ain't gonna make it.