Julian Dorey Podcast - #24 - Adam Herman

Starting point is 00:00:00 So you're hosting the family barbecue this week, but everyone knows your brother is the grill guy, and it's highly likely he'll be backseat barbecuing all night. So be it. Impress even the toughest of critics with freshly prepared Canadian barbecue favorites from Sobeys. One day after that, she was very sick. She went back to the hospital and she just didn't come back. My host mom came back without her from the hospital and had explained to me that she had passed from tuberculosis, something very treatable. So that was, you know, a horrible, horrible moment for, you know, me as an outsider there, but the family that I was with there. And it's hard for me to watch that knowing that there is something that could have been done. And, um, they're just so much of the mindset that like, it is what it is that like, I, you know, they don't think that there are, there's something that you can do about everything.

Starting point is 00:00:54 It's like seeing a car crash from far away in slow motion and trying to tell people to stop. And, you know, they can't. What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by Adam Herman. Now, chances are when you were growing up, you may have heard a line floated around on the playground or in school or whatever where somebody would say, I'm going to sell all my possessions and go into the Peace Corps. There's always a joke in the sense that no one ever knew anyone who actually went into the Peace Corps. Well, Adam did. And he just returned from around a two-year stint in Guinea, Africa.

Starting point is 00:01:37 This is something he decided to do right after college. And in this conversation, he's going to take us inside everything that happened. This was very very very detailed it was obviously very serious and i really really really wanted to just take a total back seat in in this one and just kind of let him spew and i think he did a great job doing it so i hope you enjoyed the conversation and if you're not subscribed please subscribe but other than that you know what it is i'm julian dory and this is trendifier everyone understands this, but few seem to do it.

Starting point is 00:02:29 If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. But New York's a pretty far cry from where you spent the last couple years. Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I went to school there, so I feel like I'm back, but definitely a little bit of a distance from West Africa. Yeah, so I wanted to bring you in here because I really admire what you did. And a lot of times growing up, you'd hear just as like a punchline a little bit,

Starting point is 00:03:01 like, oh, I'm going to join the Peace Corps. I saw my possessions and moved to Nepal in the Peace Corps or something like that. And I never knew anyone that actually went into the Peace Corps. And then you did. And the way you did it was very interesting to me because you're a really, really smart guy. You got a totally, like, you had a couple different degrees in college. Like, you changed majors, right? I changed, yeah, but I ended with one major and a minor right so this was not like it wasn't like you were planning on doing international whatever and as a member of the peace corps and towards the end of college you said fuck it i i want to do it so let's start there what first of all how did you even contact

Starting point is 00:03:42 the peace corps i think a lot of people are like, do they exist? Like, are they on the air or whatever? And secondly, what made you land on that? Yeah, going back real quick to you saying you don't know anyone and, you know, you hear about the Peace Corps or whatever. It's funny retrospectively to listen to, you know, one-liners in movies about that, joining the Peace Corps. That's exactly what, you know, when we were sitting in the Peace Corps together with other volunteers listening to movies, we would always, you know, give a quick cheer when they shout out the Peace Corps. It's kind of funny.

Starting point is 00:04:08 But it's kind of a long story that I don't think I recognized at the time why I was doing what I was doing. But looking back, I'm like, all right, that led me to this, which led me to that kind of thing. So, when I was in college, my sophomore year, I believe, I, you know, volunteered for this organization at Fordham called Global Outreach, or GO. And I think that sparked it a little bit. It was one of those, you know, classic volunteerism thing, you know, a little controversial. How so?

Starting point is 00:04:39 Well, volunteerism in general, the term, is like people taking advantage of volunteer projects to be able to travel. So, some people look down and could that money that you're spending to go to this place be used better if it's just sent to this place kind of thing. So, it's a whole conversation to be had. And I've been a part of those conversations before. And I'm kind of back and forth. It really depends on your motives. But I joined a group to go to New Orleans. It was more of an immersion than a service project. So, we went to an HIV transitional housing community. So, people who had HIV and AIDS lived there while they were kind of getting their life back together and finding a job. And so, we kind of went there and just kind of interacted with the people that were living in the house.

Starting point is 00:05:21 So, that was really interesting. And coming out of that, the leader of that group actually ended up doing something called Jesuit Volunteer Corps, which is another similar to Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, you know, domestic projects usually going somewhere for a year or so. Well, Fordham was a Jesuit school, right? Jesuit school, yeah. So there was a decent amount of students who kind of followed that path. So anyway, coming out of that immersion project, kind of put in the back of my head, like, I really like the feeling that I have coming back from that. Let's keep that on the back burner until I'm ready to make a decision after college and see where I stand. So that was one thing.

Starting point is 00:05:57 Second thing was probably really ironic. My dad put me in touch with somebody that he met at some conference, and this guy does some sort of data analysis. My dad always knew I was interested in some sort of number. So, he, you know, just put me in touch with this random person that I got on the phone with, just a short networking call. It was really lost as to what I wanted to do, as a lot of us are at that time. And so, I just spoke with him about what he does. But his number one piece of advice before I got off the phone was like, he was like, just do something that has nothing to do with what you think you want to do. Do something completely out there.

Starting point is 00:06:31 And he's like, this is the funny part. He's like, I'm not saying to do this, but for me personally, I joined the Peace Corps. So, that was the first time that idea hashed in your head? I guess kind of, but I knew that Peace Corps was on the table from that immersion project that I did. You know, I knew it was in the service realm. It was in the universe, in your universe. So, he said that and I was like, all right, great. I'm glad he's telling me not to join the Peace Corps because I'm definitely not joining the Peace Corps, like a two-year commitment over, like that's a lot. I don't know if I can do that. So, that was just another plant

Starting point is 00:07:00 in my head. And then senior year, finally, you know, in the fall to winter time, I guess, we went to, a friend of mine and me went to a like philanthropic job fair, which was all kind of like, you know, Army, Navy, Peace Corps, any sort of service, like Teach for America, all that kind of stuff. And so, I just stopped at the Peace Corps table and listened to this girl's story and it was interesting. And then I stayed in touch with her, got on the phone again with her. And, you know, her experience sounded really interesting to me. It sounded very unique, sounded like something that I very much wanted to do. And so I just kind of applied in the wintertime and was accepted. And they give you three days to accept it. They give you three-

Starting point is 00:07:41 You only have three days to decide. Three business days to jump on board and say, sure, I'll go for two years. Now, did you apply specifically to Guinea where you ended up going or did you just apply in general and then they, like, how does it work? Yeah. So, there are two ways you can do it. You can apply to go anywhere. Okay. So, they send you wherever there's need or you can apply to a specific country. It's said that if you apply to go to a specific country, it's less likely that you'll be accepted because depending on where you apply, I guess, because there are some more popular locations than other locations because back to the volunteerism thing, there are some Peace Corps volunteers going to Costa Rica where, you know, you're sitting at a Starbucks

Starting point is 00:08:17 doing your, yeah, or fun things or more developed places to be. So, it depends. But I applied to go anywhere because I didn't have a huge preference. But I kind of did want to go to an African country just because I had never been to that continent before. And I just wanted to kind of expand and learn more about that. So, Guinea was actually my first choice. I put it up there. But I'm pretty sure it was one of the least applied to places. So, I didn't, you know, in the end, it turns out that I probably wouldn't have been so hard to be accepted to that country. But I think I put all, you know, five preferences and they were all African countries and Guinea was up at the top. So how did you pick Guinea?

Starting point is 00:08:59 So looking at the options that I had, I think I had like Tanzania, Namibia, countries like that. One of the reasons was a lot of those other countries were a lot bigger. And when I read about transportation and travel throughout the country, they were like, oh, it'll take you two days to get from your site to the capital. And so I was like, all right, well, if I want to get home or just get to another part of the country or whatever, I think a smaller country would be better. And Guinea was one of the smaller countries. It was also a French-speaking country and I wanted to learn another language. So, that was, you know, a couple things were part of it.

Starting point is 00:09:34 You know, on the website they talk about the communication and cell service in each country. So, a whole bunch of things factor in, but you don't really realize that you can't really control any of those when you're there so you know guinea ended up being very very difficult to travel through um and so it wouldn't have made maybe much of a difference had i gone to another country that ended up being bigger but that those are kind of the thoughts that went into that choice well the other question is again like we just say peace corps like off, but the Peace Corps is literally a segment of the U.S. government. So, can you tell us a little bit about how it works and how many

Starting point is 00:10:13 people are in the Peace Corps and, you know, how they determine where they're going to send people to do projects and what the overall mission is? Yeah. So, originally, I believe JFK kind of just went to a couple universities and said what students would be interested in going abroad and helping some people. So, that was the initial thought. But there are three goals of the Peace Corps, and we can talk about this a little bit later too because they're interesting. Bring them up. Bring them up. The first goal is to, this is where some of the problematic things come in. But the first goal of the Peace Corps is to provide trained men and women to a country who asks for help in certain sectors. So there are, I think, five different sectors of the Peace Corps.

Starting point is 00:10:53 There's education, child development, public health, agriculture, or agroforestry, and maybe one other, but I'm not sure. So you can apply to a certain sector if you would like. You can apply to go anywhere for anything. There's a whole bunch of different ways to do it. But I believe a country has to reach out to the U.S. government saying, we would like aid. We can't just go into a country and just be like, we're here. We're here.

Starting point is 00:11:17 Yeah, exactly. So, a country has to reach out and say, we need help. And then within that country, a community has to reach out to the Peace Corps staff Peace Corps staff. They're saying, can you send a volunteer to our community? We would like this. So, that's, you know, kind of how it works. And what is the funding like? Because again, you guys are going generally to poorer countries, maybe not always, and you can talk about that, but're you're not you're not going into the pay to the peace corps to make money that's that is obviously not what you're doing you are you are sacrificing of yourself to to give time to to people who need it but what is the like how much has the government

Starting point is 00:11:55 supported it and continue to support it and and what does that look like do they have to like a lot of other agencies or whatever you want to call them, go and ask for a certain budget and try to grow it every year? Or is it more just this is what it is and it's allocated and it's pretty consistent? It's not worth our time and money. But I know that sometimes it can be used for political gain in countries that don't have a lot to offer us in terms of exports. I've heard that before because, you know, think about it. It's a lot of poor countries who don't maybe have a lot to offer in terms of exportation or business opportunity or whatever within their country. Wait, this is crazy, though, because I'm trying to picture this like guys in suits back in Washington, DC using like chips on the table. Like, oh yeah, I got the Peace Corps. They can come out here and help you out with your dams and your school system or whatever. And then they basically were able to negotiate oil trade or something like that as a result. And you're saying like, that's maybe not a realistic or maybe not an unrealistic thing to

Starting point is 00:13:04 think. Absolutely. And I think a lot of the time maybe our government can use the Peace Corps as some sort of leverage like, oh, we'll provide this aid if you vote for us on something, you know, that within the UN or it, you know, we'll pull this funding if you don't do this or something. I remember I think one of our Peace Corps staff was talking about when we were deciding where the next World Cup would be. And, you know, they've been trying to get in the United States. I think it's the World Cup, right? Probably. Or is it the Olympics? I think it's the World Cup. It's one of them. But anyway, Trump was, you know, saying to certain poor countries where the Peace Corps exists, you know, if you don't vote for us to host the World Cup, then we will pull, you know, something like that where they're not, you know, they're obviously going to vote in favor because it's just not worth it to them,

Starting point is 00:13:49 which is just like an unfortunate abuse of power. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, we see a lot of that in Washington, DC, no matter where it comes from. But when you applied, you had, you said about five, six countries on there. And when you were accepted, they immediately told you Guinea? Yeah. Well, they told you where you were interviewing for, I believe. Before my interview, it was a virtual interview. They said, you know, this is the country you're interviewing for, and then proceeded like that. And when was that? That was in January of 2018. Okay. And you knew going in that any type of term would be like a two-year term? It's always 27 months. Yeah. So, three months of training, two years of service

Starting point is 00:14:33 at your site. Okay. So, you got accepted by what? Like March, something like that? I was accepted like a couple days after my interview, to be honest. It was like maybe the next day. That's another reason why I think there's just so much need within Guinea. Like not a ton of volunteers wanted to go there. West Africa, very, very tough place to be sometimes. So they just, you know, the next day we're like, let's get people going. Because I actually think they ended up accepting more than they had planned. You know, they try and use that formula or whatever to accept a certain amount of people

Starting point is 00:15:05 who you think will accept the position or whatever. But, yeah, they just, next day was, I got a letter. I remember I was at, you know, a buddy's house and telling them, oh, wait, I got accepted. And they're like, wait, you're doing that? Like, that's where you're going to go? Yeah, exactly. They had no idea that I even applied, I guess, at the time.

Starting point is 00:15:24 Because I didn't know for sure, and I didn't know if I wanted to do something else. I also was going to apply to Jesuit Volunteer Corps, what we talked about earlier, but I landed on you chose to do this right after college, like right away, because you were graduating in May, and then you're like, all right, well, I'm going to go in the Peace Corps now. It's really the best time when you think about it, because it's not like when you're 35 years old, maybe with the family and kids, like, oh, I think I'll go to the Peace Corps for two years. Like, it doesn't really happen like that. And some people it might, but it's more rare. Whereas for you, there a million things you you could do in the world you as you put it you weren't really sure where you were landing or what you were really interested in so why not go get some kind of crazy cultural experience and literally drop your boots on the ground somewhere

Starting point is 00:16:20 where you don't understand anything and then find a way to help out the people who are there. It's really a selfless thing you did. Yeah. Well, thanks for saying that. But, you know, there are ways to think about it in terms of somebody being selfless, but at the same time, it can be looked at as a little selfish because of the experience that you're getting and the Peace Corps from the outside, you know, looks ideal. It's like, oh, these people are so nice giving up their time, like you just said, going to live in this foreign country with less means than they had where they, you know, they could have lived a lot easier life, whatever. But what people don't see from the outside is that I for sure gained way more out of that experience that I

Starting point is 00:17:07 could have ever given to the community that I served in, you know? And I don't think people understand that and I don't think people could understand that because they don't have that experience. So, I don't expect anyone to understand that, you know? But in terms of a development standpoint, Peace Corps is not, you know, breaking any glass ceilings they're not making any massive moves because one volunteer in a small community where there are what we would call problems in education and public health

Starting point is 00:17:34 and all these other sectors one volunteer, I'm not moving the bar that much to be honest so I think it can be looked at as selfish because I gained so much out of that in so many different ways that, you know, it's hard to live with the idea that everyone looks up to you for doing that when you don't feel that way all the time. Well, that's not why you were doing it. Right.

Starting point is 00:17:56 You weren't doing it for people to look up to me. I'm holier than thou. I'm in the Peace Corps. You were doing it because, A, it was extremely interesting to you. And B, you felt like, even if that is the case, you can get a lot more out of it than you think you could give. You could go over there and give and you could, and we'll talk about what you did there, but it's pretty amazing. And the people that you surround yourself with in these communities, they'll never forget that. You the guy that that came in and lived among them and showed them things that they didn't know it's a very cool thing yeah and i think the motives

Starting point is 00:18:29 thing is the most important thing because they try and do because it's a government-funded program they have to track data and if you're you know working with a certain amount of students you have to put in exactly how many students you impacted and who succeeded and all this other stuff especially when you're writing a grant. But there's a point where, in my opinion, you can't track every volunteer and what they're doing all the time. You kind of just have to have faith that they're there for the right reasons. There are going to, of course, be people who are not there for the right reasons. I know some volunteer who, you know, took his two years to bike around the entire country from place to place was rarely at his site. And there's really no one to keep up with that, which is, like I said, you can't really

Starting point is 00:19:08 keep tabs on everyone. And it makes the volunteers who are doing the right thing feel like the staff are kind of like on them a little bit too much. And they're, you know, in placing a lot of extra rules about leaving your site and when you can do this and when you can do that. And it takes away from, you know, what you feel like you're doing. But motives is the biggest thing. And I think a lot of people do it for career advancement or to get into grad school, you know, a bunch of things like that. But hopefully, even that's just, you know, a byproduct of doing this.

Starting point is 00:19:41 But you're really there to, you know, do some sort of service and change somebody's life and all of those good things. Yeah. Even the best systems or the highest morally righteous systems have bad apples. It's what it is. And, you know, it's a shame when people do take advantage of it, but you have to hope that if you're there for the right reasons, a lot of other people are too. And it seems like you did meet a lot of people and knew a lot of volunteers with the Peace Corps in the country who were there for the right reasons. And you made a lot of lifelong friendships through that. Yeah. It's amazing. It's kind of like the only group of people in my life who will ever understand to an extent what we all went

Starting point is 00:20:26 through together. So, when I was there, I felt like I could have called anyone in my cohort and just shot the shit for whatever reason just to get stuff off my chest. No matter who it was, no matter how close we were, we always had something in common. For example, I had a site mate. He was my closest volunteer. He was about a 30-minute bike ride from me. And a lot of times, we would meet up in the middle. We shared a garden that we would get together once a week and just kind of like, you know, gardening wasn't like the main point of being there. It was really just to kind of like just chat and catch up and, you know, rant about stuff that was bothering us, whatever. But we, in the end, kind of discovered that we, in terms of personality and, you know, hobbies and likes and whatever whatever we are kind of polar opposites in that and you know in that facet like when we would

Starting point is 00:21:10 when we would talk about a movie i'd be like yo you ever seen this movie he'd be like never heard of it and then he would be like yeah i've just watched this movie recently it's really we didn't have a movie in common for the first three months that we ever spoke and that's hard to do that and music and all of these other things but we always came back to you know we have the peace corps we're going through a lot of the same shit right now we can talk about so many different things we can we can listen and um kind of um certify or whatever what what that person's going through you know i mean reassure i guess is a better word but um yeah so that was really really good to have and in terms of peace corps friends i still keep

Starting point is 00:21:44 in touch with them we have you, calls every once in a while to learn about what people are doing, but also just to talk about, you know, oh, are you still talking to your host family? Because I'm still talking to mine, you know, is the work still going on? How's the election stuff affecting your family? Like everything that's going on within that country, it's really good to have that outlet you know that group of people so you agree to go to guinea in the winter spring of 2018 and they tell you you're going to go from june 2018 for 27 months after that july yeah okay and you said the first three months we're going to be training right so when when you went to leave did you you go to Guinea with all the new volunteers who were going specifically to Guinea?

Starting point is 00:22:26 And how many of them were there? Yeah, so there were about 42 or 43 of us in my cohort. So, it's all of the people who went with me on the same plane and did that three months of training together. We were all education volunteers because within Guinea, there are education volunteers, there are agroforestry volunteers, and there are public health volunteers. But the public health and agroforestry go together in a cohort, and then the education by themselves go together in a cohort. Okay, so you had like 40 of you in the education cohort. Yes, exactly. Okay. And then each of you, as you've already kind of put it, we're going to go to a separate spot. So none of you were really going to be together at all. Yeah, you go to your own site. It could be close. Some people were in walking distance to another volunteer.

Starting point is 00:23:06 Some people were hours from another volunteer. That's the thing, like I was saying earlier in terms of choosing Guinea, no idea the distance, no idea how long it's going to take. Even if it's a kilometer or two kilometers, whatever, could be a dirt road that's like this. And you don't take your bike or you got to take a taxi or whatever, but you don't know how long it's going to take to get to the next volunteer. And then you fly into Guinea and you went to take a taxi or whatever but like you don't know how long it's going to take to get to the next volunteer and then you fly into guinea and you went to conakry first and that's the capital of the country right we flew what's that place like um it's not so nice the

Starting point is 00:23:37 roads are shitty there's a lot of traffic all the time there's no rules in terms of traffic so you know cars weaving in and out of each other not a lot of movement um there are a few nice buildings um and they're just a lot of massive massive markets where people are selling things um and it's just very crowded very crowded what's the population size there couldn't tell you all right we'll look that up after yeah it's pretty big though i guess right it's the biggest within guinea yeah yeah what's the total population of guinea i think it's the same population as the state of oregon i think that's what i no no no no that's false um the size of guinea is the same size of oregon just pulled it up 12.41 million so the

Starting point is 00:24:23 size is the size of oregon but they got 12.41 million people in there which is kind of a lot yeah it's not that big and it's on it's on the west coast of africa like kind of northern-ish end right a little bit um i kind of right in the middle of west africa okay um it's on the northern end of the west coast of yes but of that little like section that juts out of out of um africa it's like in the middle of that little like section that juts out of Africa. It's like in the middle of that little section. So, you knew that you were going to be working in an educational capacity and you knew that you were probably going to be teaching kids in that way. But when you went to Guinea, did you know exactly what town you were going to be going to, what grade levels you were going to

Starting point is 00:25:01 be teaching over there, what you were going to be teaching? Was any of this known or did they just kind of figure that out once you got on the ground? I applied specifically to be a math teacher, but they did not tell you where, what grades. We didn't know anything about the material, any of that. So we flew into Conakry, like you said, but the next day we go to Dubreka, which is about an hour from Conakry, depending, give or take. On any day, it could have been way longer, you know? Is that another city or? Yeah, it's like a, no, it's just, it's a village that's like about an hour north, but it's where our training center is. And it's where we stay with

Starting point is 00:25:34 our host families for the first time, like three months with the same host family. So, we do our training there and that's when they tell you, eventually, not, probably halfway through training is when we got our site placement. So, we didn didn't know any we didn't have any idea where we were going which kind of complicates things because eventually you learn you have to learn not only french but the local language of your region and so not knowing what site you're going to be in you can't really work on that until you get your site placement oh wow so the languages there are french and then there's like a million of them there's like a million oh there's like 40 or something but there are French and then there's like a million of them. There's like, oh, there's like 40 or something, but there are like four major languages within the four regions of Guinea.

Starting point is 00:26:10 So I spoke Susu, which was closest to the coast. The middle of Guinea is like the Pular region. So they speak Pular. And then there's Malinke, where like the Konkon is, which is like the upper capital of Guinea. And then the lower region, which is called the forest region they speak kisi but a lot of malinke there as well so but other than that you know in certain parts of the country you move neighborhoods it's a new language it's a new sub language of whatever you're speaking or something like that do they all demosum speak french though really i it's

Starting point is 00:26:41 that focused i don't know what the percentage is but you really only speak french if you're educated because they only speak french at school and in business you know whatever that may be so if you know only 30 of the population which it might be around that is educated or literate or whatever only that many speak french or they speak small amounts of french to get around but it's really tough because you know you live with you, my host mom speaks zero French. She wants to travel somewhere to like to the middle of the country. She can't communicate with those people because now they speak Pular and not Susu. And she grew up in a Susu land where that's all they spoke. So, it does complicate things a little bit. And I think that's why there's, you know, a universal language of French because if you want to travel outside of your region, it makes it a little bit easier but um and you didn't know french before you went there you

Starting point is 00:27:29 learned like right before you went you started learning i mean i did a little on my own learning no class or anything like that before i left but yeah i spoke zero french going in and it was that was probably one of the most frustrating parts was trying to learn the language in such a short period of time and this goes back to what i was talking about the first goal, trained men and women, like three months of training where you're learning language, culture, curriculum, history about the country, like everything like that shoved into three months. You can hardly call those people like trained per se. But it was very, very – a very unique experience to have to learn that fast and a language so new. So when I – you spend three or four nights at the training center where we were with all the other volunteers.

Starting point is 00:28:13 But then they have the host family ceremony where the families come and they pair you up. They say this volunteer goes with this family. And then from then on – For the three-month period. For that three-month, yeah, period. And from then on, you go with that family and you live with them and you don't come back to the training center except for training. You don't sleep there anymore. You see volunteers at training, but not after. And so, that first day, I go back to my host family. I knew maybe three words at that point in French, no susu, obviously. And I sat on the couch with

Starting point is 00:28:43 them and just, we sat across from each other and stared at each other for a while. And it was very, very, looking back, what a cool experience at the time, embarrassing and frustrating and, you know, just weird because I just couldn't say anything. At one point they pulled out the little kid, you know, number, like magnetic numbers and we're like, let's do some math. they were like like they would go through it with me but like if i felt like a child and it was so bizarre um but it was just a an amazing experience did you feel any connection when you were doing that though because i think here's the reason i asked us we take for granted the fact that like you and i are doing this right now or you out your phone and text somebody and you just kind of understand.

Starting point is 00:29:28 There's all these little things in language that this word before that word down to using this tone versus that tone that we understand and we use to communicate. And a lot of us don't really think about other than like if we're traveling with fellow americans or something like that to a foreign country we don't really think about what it's like to be able to walk into a store and maybe be able to point and that's it it's like a very foreign concept but what you experienced is a whole nother level because you're sitting in there with a family in they're hosting you in their country basically and you don't speak anything and there is no one around you who does. And so when you're in that room and now, like, it's not just like you're visiting a store or you're going to the cafe or whatever. This is like, no, I'm going to live with these people for three months. Like my bed's over there. Like, you know, I'm going to stay all their way.

Starting point is 00:30:22 They'll stay out of mine with certain things and whatever and then we're gonna eat dinner together we're gonna break bread the whole nine and it's like hmm my only form of like showing any emotion i feel or the connection i have with you is to be able to like physically look at you or like make a noise gestures only yeah so i mean was that it sounds like it was obviously a shocking experience. I'm sure it would be for anyone. But was there any, in that first meeting in particularly, was there anything in you that was like, hey, we do, even if we can't talk to each other, we understand each other and there's this connection we have? A hundred percent. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:59 I mean, they were there to teach me everything that I needed to know. They were there to teach me how to clean my clothes, how to wash my room, how to cook the food that they cook, everything and the language as well. They always wanted me to learn Susu. Although I was learning French at the time, they wanted me to jump right to their language. And so that was a little bit frustrating, but that was also kind of cool. But yeah, all gestures. And there was 100% a connection there because especially with my host sister, she took the best care of me she took me everywhere she's the one who ensures to meet everyone how old was she um 15 i think at the time when i got there um so she was just like we got along so well we joked a lot we laughed a lot that's the whole you know a lot of connection

Starting point is 00:31:43 you know when we couldn't when i couldn't come up with a word to say to her, we would just start dying laughing. So it was just things like that, small things where you could, you know, that there's, there's this connection there. It's not weird or awkward as long as you just kind of roll with it. And you can't, you know, there are times where I got frustrated and just like went off by myself. I can't deal with this right now. But a lot of times you just kind of have to accept that it's going to be weird. And I think that is what has helped me from then through the future be in any uncomfortable situation and just be okay with it. Just acknowledge, be conscious that it's uncomfortable, but just kind of sit in it and just like, you know, you're going to get through it. So that's, I can't imagine a situation where I could ever be more uncomfortable than that.

Starting point is 00:32:23 I can't think of one I mean a common one that a lot of people have is the idea of like being on a stage with everyone looking at you maybe for some people just being on the stage at all but then being on the stage and not performing or doing exactly what you're supposed to do or doing it wrong and all that attention but again a stage is something you walk onto you can walk off right you know you can leave when when you go in it's like nope i'm living with you for three months and like we're gonna have to plan our days and and figure out you know how we survive yeah i mean that's that it it comes down to that that's what's so amazing about your experience and hearing you talk about it like hey there's so much more i can get out of it than I can give. I mean, this is part of it. In our country, we don't have that,

Starting point is 00:33:11 by and large, we don't have that total survival mode, you know, like, hey, it's every man for himself and figure it out. There's a level to which, you know, America is a first world country. When you are being thrown into a third world country with people who do not understand you, don't see people who look like you in that way. I mean, we'll definitely talk about that. And you're a white guy in a black country and you can't even go back and forth with them at all. And you're just a kid out of college. I mean, that mode that has to be activated is a form of like, okay, now I'm going to think about where I get my meals and when I get them and make sure they're going to be available. Now I need to be able to communicate that like, hey, I got to sleep at this certain time. And I got to make sure, like, hope that my host you get to your site, there's so much more freedom.

Starting point is 00:34:12 You're so much more comfortable. It's going to get better. Just get through training. Training's brutal. And you're shitting yourself all the time because the food and the water that you're eating is all brand new and you're uncomfortable and you can't speak to people and the training goes from 8 to 5 at night. Then you have to go right back to your host family where it feels like more work because you're just always struggling to communicate and – but also kind of try and enjoy the experience at the same time. It was just a lot all at once. But yeah, I don't know. Well, actually on that topic, what what was the i mean let's start with

Starting point is 00:34:46 the two basic ones what was the food and the plumbing like i mean how because again take that totally for granted in this country and it sounds like you were it was a lot different yeah so food wise we ate rice and sauce for breakfast lunch and. The sauces, they would rotate in different types of leaf sauces or peanut sauces or something like that. But in Dubreka, it's a little bit more of a, I would say, wealthier relative to the rest of the country village. So the families were able to provide us with eggs, which is a delicacy, and meat sometimes, which is nice.

Starting point is 00:35:23 But Susu land, since in this close to the water there's a lot of fish there so i had a lot of fish in the rice sauces so a lot of rice and sauce but when i got to site it was absolutely all rice and sauce you know i had a couple families cooking for me and it was always rice and sauce so then you were getting the shits though you said for the first three months once i got to my site like i said life was a lot better i was a lot more comfortable yeah um but you know you just gotta get used to it but we also put ourselves through things like you know there was a bar to go to and they made their you know homemade in a old soda bottle fermented drink called um trezor and we would drink that some nights and like we knew it was gonna fuck our stomachs up

Starting point is 00:35:59 but we drank it anyway because it was just fun yeah um but you know so there were things that i couldn't control and things that i could control and that kind of all um affected that experience in terms of plumbing um latrines we shat in latrines that were shared by the entire you know neighborhood now is this like a hole in the ground or what what's the what's the story yeah it depends where you're at in my in my um host family's house had, it was like a, you know, full made of tin, small outhouse type thing where it's just a hole in the ground. And, you know, you squat over that and in the dark and there are a lot of creatures in there living with you. But, you know, you just kind of get used to it. Same place that you showered to.

Starting point is 00:36:40 But when you're at your site, actually, they make sure that you have your own bathroom situation. So whether it's outside or inside, it can't be shared with anyone else. So that's kind of a little bit of a perk coming out of training. You're like, oh, my own bathroom. Did you have a moment with any of that stuff where it was like, oh, shit. Like this is reality for a while. And I don't want to call it a freak out, but like a moment where you had to gather yourself and be like, okay, this is what it is. This is what I signed up for.

Starting point is 00:37:10 And it's different. But, you know, we're going to get used to this. It's going to be all right. Yeah. I don't know about the bathroom part. I remember the first one of the first nights I slept at the training center. You know, we got there in the summer. It's the training center. You know, we got there in the summer, it's the rainy season, it's really humid. And we sleep under mosquito nets in a room of, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:29 12 people at the time. So, I remember sweating into the sheets, like could not sleep for the life of me. And I was like, am I going to be feeling like this having a hard time sleeping every day for the rest of this two years? Like that is when the moment I had, it wasn't a freak out because I was like totally invested. I was like, let's do this but it was a thought where I was like like boy I hope that it's not like this but if it is we'll find a way to deal with it kind of thing um but that was like I don't know I think that was the one moment where I kind of felt that way yeah and and again it seems to me like you really had you were very much a go with the flow going into this which kind of had to be had to be but b you i mean you mentioned this maybe 20 minutes ago you had looked into like

Starting point is 00:38:13 okay well you know how long does it take to get from point a to point b in country x and how do you get there and then okay if that's how you get there then how do these people live what are what are their basic situations like so at least you had an expectation of it. But it is a whole nother thing to then actually go experience it and know like, okay, well, this is how I take care of myself now. So, again, going back to your experience, I mean, that's definitely a crazy thing that I can't relate to. And 99.99999% of Americans can't relate to. But yeah, so the training part, though, because you were living with this host family, and I'm trying to keep it straight, because it's already only three months to do all the things we outlined. But your schedule seems to be like it was very split, meaning you were spending a lot of time with your host family,

Starting point is 00:39:06 like going into town, like trying to learn to communicate and things like that. And then obviously you had the scheduled training. So how many hours a week were you actually at the center with the scheduled training? And was it like classes or how did it work? Yeah, we were at the center Monday to Friday. So normally kind of work schedule like eight to five. And they were all sessions. So,

Starting point is 00:39:27 it wasn't the same every day, but every day you had at least two language sessions, so a morning and an afternoon session just to really, really, really, you know, hammer that in. But then there were medical sessions, there were curriculum sessions, so we'd split up into English teachers, math teachers, teachers science teachers and go over the curriculum and how they teach in guinea and how you kind of have to follow the same methods that they do and the repertoire that they do um what's that curriculum like like i don't know how much you can compare it to an american no honestly it is very similar to an american curriculum they follow you know they seventh through tenth grade they have algebra and geometry, and it's split throughout the year.

Starting point is 00:40:07 So there are, you know, chapters in algebra, chapters in geometry every single year. And, you know, by the time they get to 10th grade, they're doing, they're solving equations, and they're using the Pythagorean theorem. So it is kind of correlated. They don't teach in the same way. They don't take math classes in the same way. You know, they're usually two-hour classes, every subject. But the curriculum, I would say, it's not crazy different than what we learned. Yeah. So, you were told that by the time you got there, like, okay, you're going to be teaching 7th to 10th graders? Like, you knew that pretty

Starting point is 00:40:39 early on? Yeah. Well, once you got your site placement, I spoke to my principal directly, and he's like, here's where we need a teacher. Can you do eighth grade math? Can you do ninth grade math? So, I did eighth and ninth grade. I taught three classes the first year. So, that's, you know, anywhere from two to six hours a day. It really depends. So, it kind of runs off like a college schedule. But you didn't get the site placement until towards the end of training right right so you went through a lot of training not necessarily knowing exactly what age group or you learn you learn all of the curriculum well you can't learn the entire curriculum but you because we already know the material we just have to know the buzzwords in french and make sure that we can teach you know multiplication division subtract all the

Starting point is 00:41:23 operations in french the methods that they use, because we come from using different methods, or at least my elementary school definitely used different methods. But so yeah, we learned, you know, all of the vocabulary and language, and then some of the curriculum, and then we did a lot of mock lessons. So we had to teach in front of our peers. And then we had students come in. We taught in front of them at the end of training. So, you know, it kind of progressed like that. So end of, I guess, like September 2018, you get your assignment.

Starting point is 00:41:56 And where did they assign you? It's a village or a suprafed called Coba. And I was specifically teaching in Coba Tatema, but I lived in Coney Valley. So it's like- Which is like how close? It was a 15 minute bike ride for me. Oh, that's not bad. So not bad. And this is far inland in the country.

Starting point is 00:42:13 No, no, I was on the coast. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that. Susu land, I was on the coast. I was actually, so where my site mate lived, he basically lived at the port where it was a big, big fishing port. The fishermen would go out, catch, come back and sell what they caught that day, you know, in that market. And that's where a lot of people would come actually from Conakry to my village just to get fish or to buy fish

Starting point is 00:42:33 and bring it back to sell in Conakry. Or even some of my host family would buy fish there and drive it themselves to Conakry to sell. So, it was a big fishing port. But yeah, I was on the coast. And you said his site mate, so he was in the other town yes he was well he was so i was 15 minutes to school he was 15 minutes beyond school got it yeah okay and this time obviously you had a new host family how much different was it from your first host family as far as like cultural integration and and now you at least have experience having being been dumped into a situation where it's like well i don't know anyone and i'm gonna live

Starting point is 00:43:10 with you now how how much easier i guess i should ask was it the second time to be able to go in and do that all over again yeah i don't even know if it was easier to be honest because dubreka i would say is a more educated population so a lot more people there spoke French and they know the volunteers, they understand the volunteers because there's been years and years and years of having volunteers hosted in that community. Going to my village, my host family who, you know, when you're at your site, you don't live with the host family anymore. You might live next to them, but you don't have to share the same house. So that's kind of a nice break. But my host family was fairly

Starting point is 00:43:46 uneducated, did not speak any French, almost any of them. My host brother did, but he didn't live in that house. He lived in another house. So he wasn't there all the time. And how big was the family? There was, it kind of changed a lot. So, you know, people would come in and out of the house all the time in terms of living there for a couple months, leaving, living there for whatever. So when I got there, it was just my host mom, my host sister, and her son. So, it was just three of them. But then later on, my host mom's other daughter and her baby, who was a newborn, also lived in that house. So, it was anywhere from like three to seven,

Starting point is 00:44:20 you know, at certain times. It really depended on the year. And I would go, sometimes I'd go away for a week and come back and there'd be someone new at the house and I'd be like, oh, who's this? And they would introduce me to them or whatever. So, but it was nice to have my own space, but we also shared a wall. So, it was all part of the same connected building and, you know, the ceiling didn't always go up to the roof. So, I heard pretty much everything that was going on in their house. I'm sure they heard everything that was going on in my house. Yeah. And what, I mean, would you guys eat together every day or how much? Because at least

Starting point is 00:44:46 there was a separation here this time. So how much of that wall was literally in between you versus, you know, you spending a lot of time with them? Yeah. So that was one of the tougher parts, figuring out kind of like my meal plan, because some volunteers went to their site and they were set up with a host family who already had a volunteer. My host family never had a volunteer before. It was very new to them. So we didn't know how to figure out who's feeding who. And my staff didn't tell them anything. They're kind of like, you have to figure it out as you go.

Starting point is 00:45:13 So when I first got there, I pretty much ate on my own. They didn't know they were supposed to feed me. Sometimes they fed me every once in a while, but it wasn't consistent. So I didn't know how to go about that. And asking was weird. So once I built a relationship with the host family and the other neighbors, I was getting fed every day, dinner, sometimes lunch, and whatever rice they were making. But my immediate host family who lived right next door was very poor. So sometimes,

Starting point is 00:45:36 some days they couldn't even make themselves a meal. So they would eat with the neighbors, two doors down, because anytime you make a pot of rice, you share it with whoever's around, no matter who it is. So I would always get invited to eat with random people which was kind of nice but um consistently towards the end at least at least my last year there or so i would get fed um sometimes you know two three four bowls of rice a day and i'm like i don't really know what to do with this but it's so easy to just invite any other kids that are around to share that with me and they would go. So it was a true community in a lot of ways as far as like the people who all lived in that area. Yeah, their motto is kind of like if you – the hope is that other people will watch out for your kids or you will watch out for other people's kids so that they will watch out for your kids. So basically, if I'm making a pot of rice, I invite anyone around that I see to come eat with me in hopes that, oh, if my kid's somewhere someday hungry, they will also watch out for my child as well.

Starting point is 00:46:35 So it's very much a community feel. Every event in the community, everyone's invited. So that was just something unique to be a part of. It's very poor, though. It's very poor. And you've described that pretty well. Do you, did you find that there was a decent level or any kind of level of happiness in the community? Yeah, Definitely is.

Starting point is 00:47:05 They're definitely aware of how poor their country is and how little they have. I think a lot is because they listen to the radio and there are TVs around here and there, at least in my village, where they can see the news and they see what, you know, the Western world has. And so, they're aware of, you know, how poor they are. But there are little things that they just absolutely love and find so much joy in, specifically music and dancing. You know, any event that they can go to, a wedding, a baptism, something along those lines,

Starting point is 00:47:35 they will go, they will dress up so nicely, and they will just dance the night away. And it's like, that was one of the most fun parts about my experience, especially with my host family in Dubreka, the first, you know, village I lived in. They were just absolutely very fond of dancing. So, we would get, you know, that was, we talked about connecting when I couldn't, you know, speak, but we could go to an event together. I could just look like a freaking idiot in front of them dancing because like, I don't dance like they do, you know, they would be cracking up. But yeah, so that's something they find joy in, I would say. But yeah, I don't know. There are other things as well. The work that they do sometimes, you know, when they have a nice garden, they get to

Starting point is 00:48:16 pull, you know, I mean, it just really depends what it is. But, you know, they could find joy and purpose in some sort. But a lot of them, you mentioned it was like a port town. So a lot of them were fishermen, I take it. What other kind of jobs were there? And, you know, what did your host family do? Everyone in the village usually owns or works on somebody else's rice hector. Like everyone does, you know, works with the rice process at some point because

Starting point is 00:48:46 it's, that's their staple. That's what they eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So if I don't own a plot of land to grow my own rice, I will work on my neighbors or, and then they will feed me at some point in the future, or they'll pay me or something, or, you know, they'll hire a bunch of young men to work with them as well. So growing rice, growing rice, it's not necessarily, um, a job I'd say, unless you're young and getting paid for it, it's more of like, oh, we have to do this to survive. So we're going to do this. Um, but you know, there are, there's a lot of masonry. So people making chairs and desks and shelves and all that kind of stuff. Um, there's, there are welders, there are, um, you know, lumberjack type people who cut wood for a lot of different uses. And then there are carpenters as well and a lot of different – like school because once you get through school, it's like, what do you do? There's not really a lot going on where you need an education to work. A lot of families will just sell little, kind of own their own little like boutique at their house and sell a little salt

Starting point is 00:49:53 or sugar here and there or make like a baked good and sell that or something like that. There's not a lot of, you know, money flowing through the community. What about dreams of going somewhere else though? Do a lot of them dream of going to the West, whether it be America or, you know, somewhere in Europe? I got that a lot. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:12 Everyone's dream was to go to some other country, to France, a lot of them, to Italy, a lot of them, to America, a lot of them, um,

Starting point is 00:50:20 which was hard to hear because like the chance of that happening is very low, but they, why is that? I mean, I could think of a lot of answers, but yeah, cause they the chance of that happening is very low. Yeah, why is that? I mean, I could think of a lot of answers. Yeah, because they don't have the money to do it. They aren't educated enough to go get a scholarship of some sort. Everyone else wants to do it, so that lowers your chances of being able, you know, there's just so many different reasons. So that was hard to hear all the time, you know, people having so many hopes and dreams and thinking to yourself like, oh, I hope that for you.

Starting point is 00:50:47 But, you know, it doesn't seem likely based on your situation. Yeah. And what, when did you start teaching, like right away? That's a great question because I, when I got there, there was actually a teacher strike going on, which happened quite often while I was there. The teachers were striking for more pay. They were not paid a lot at all. And that's based on, you know, countries surrounding Guinea, what they paid their teachers typically. So when I got there was actually the beginning of the school year. And there was an immediate strike right off the bat because the year before they had struck for a month. And I think they won and got a little bit of a pay raise, but not a lot. So they were hoping for more this time so right when I got there they I didn't start teaching I got there

Starting point is 00:51:29 in October they didn't I didn't start teaching until January because there was that three-month strike and I went to school every day and just kind of like felt out the situation my village was very calm other villages there's students who get violent um against teachers who aren't coming to school to teach them because they really want to be in school. So it was kind of a whole mess when I first got there. But it gave me time to kind of get adjusted, improve my language, which was very important because I was still nervous in front of the class, you know, with my language skills, and get to know my principal and his family.

Starting point is 00:51:58 They fed me a lot in the beginning, too. I would go over there for lunchtime every day and get to know their family. And they would teach me French. You speak French? Yeah. Great. Yeah. Great. Yeah. And that's where I met, you know, one of the best friends that I had while I was there was somebody who was living with the principal, not his son, but someone who was my age, but living there because he was closer to the school.

Starting point is 00:52:15 So I got to know him really well and he became, you know, my best friend throughout that whole experience. I forgot to ask you, how big was this village approximately? I can't tell you exact numbers. I know the supri-fae of Coba that I was in was like 60,000, but that spans like 10 different villages. You know what I mean? So, um, my village or the village that I taught in itself, I'm not sure, but the number of kids in the school we had, you know had close to 800 kids for the grades 7 to 10. And they split each class into two. So I was teaching classes of 80-ish students.

Starting point is 00:52:53 Yeah. So you're teaching 80 kids who speak French, obviously, because they're in there. Kind of. Kind of. Yeah. You're in a foreign country. You're young. You don't look like them

Starting point is 00:53:05 you never taught before how'd you do it? trial and error you know I got in there used whatever training I had and it was very tough because what they don't really train you for

Starting point is 00:53:22 is the discipline because the students are just so misbehaved as are students here, as are students in any other country. But it's just so much so because of the volume of students and they don't – a lot of the students don't really understand why they're in school. They don't really understand the point. They don't understand the goal like I just spoke about. Getting through school, what does that do for you in that kind of country? Do you get to have a good job and a good life if you're educated it's not the american dream that they're born in exactly yeah so the hardest part for me was was figuring out how to

Starting point is 00:53:54 discipline the students because i was sort of set up for failure in the sense that the other teachers were actively using corporal punishment and hitting students with a variety of things um but i paddle on the side no no no paddle but you know rubber whip or a stick or something it was it was quite violent and something that a peace corps and of course myself would never take part in yeah and so if i had students who i couldn't get in line i would send send them out of class or I would make them sit in front of – I thought you were about to say I would send them to the other teacher to whack them. No, no, no. For the first year, I had a really, really hard time with that and watching it.

Starting point is 00:54:35 And there are some volunteers who would take the initiative to try and stop it throughout the school. But in the end, I don't know how beneficial that is to those students in that school, because then the students will just stop listening altogether. And if they're not going to hit the students, and there's really no form of punishment that the students will listen to, they're not going to end up learning anything. So it kind of has to be weaned out, in my opinion. But I couldn't really start that. I could get on my principal and be like, hey, did that kid really have to be hit for that reason? You know what I mean? But I couldn't really make a major change in that sense, I felt, while I was there. So, I didn't make that a priority of mine. I kind of

Starting point is 00:55:12 just told the other teachers, like, I will discipline the kids in my classroom, in my way. You may not touch my students. If you do, like, the threat that I always had was, if you do, I'll just, I'll leave. I can always go to another village. I can always do something else. I don't have to be here. I'm choosing to be here. I tried to push that point along, especially for the students too. When they were misbehaving, I was like, like this guys, this is not, I'm not gaining anything out of teaching you guys math that I already know.

Starting point is 00:55:40 I could up and leave at any point. And when that didn't work, you know, I just had to move on to a lot of different things. But there were always students in the class who were there to learn and who were listening to everything I had to say. So I really tried to teach to them and I really felt bad for them

Starting point is 00:55:56 when other students were just yelling and speaking over them and not paying attention and fights broke out or something like that. So that was like, that was more uplifting that there were students there who were there for the right reason, but also kind of disheartening because I couldn't really give them everything that I wanted to give them. Well, how good did your French get too? I mean, because you literally have to teach them by speaking to them. It's not like you can kind of sit down and look at them.

Starting point is 00:56:23 By the end of my time, I would say I was fluent in what I would call Ghanaian French. So, you know, if I up and go to Paris right now or somewhere in France, they speak a lot faster and they have more of an extensive vocabulary, I would say, than Ghanaians do. Ghanaians speak very slow and they use a lot of the same vocabulary, a lot of the same phrases. So, I would say in terms of Ghanaian French, I had, you know, no problems by the end, able to communicate every point I wanted to to anyone that I came in contact with, but it could always, you know, it could always improve. Yeah. And then the kids who were in there who were misbehaving, because I'm trying to think of like the curriculum, because you said it's actually like not terribly different from like how they run it in American schools.

Starting point is 00:57:06 But, you know, you're giving out quizzes, you're giving out tests, you're giving out homework. Is kids doing any of that or is it totally fuck off mode? Most of it's fuck off mode or most of it's get in and copy my neighbor, which is like not so unusual. We have that here too. Yeah. But it's like copy my neighbor who scribbles something that doesn't make any sense or relate to the problem that I gave them. And I was a harsh grader because I wanted them to learn, but a lot of, you know, they can do that in other classes and a lot of teachers would just pass them no matter what because they don't care about the grades. They

Starting point is 00:57:38 have to pass the students because of sheer volume. There's no, you know, there's no time to hold anyone back. And the students know this at this point, so they know that they can just fuck around and, and really move on no matter what. So that was really hard. But yeah, I gave tests and quizzes and, and homeworks. And the whole first year, I spent a lot of time yelling during the test, because kids would just blatantly cheat, like so openly, you wouldn't even believe it. And then by the second year, I was like, all right, it's not even worth getting upset about you know just like if a kid's gonna cheat I will calmly tell them not to cheat but then I will you know just continue on because a lot

Starting point is 00:58:10 of times they're cheating off of someone who doesn't know anything better than they do and they end up getting a poor grade anyway so yeah so that didn't like you know I didn't put too much energy towards kind of disciplining people by the end because it just

Starting point is 00:58:25 didn't feel like it was worth my frustration. Yeah. But to go back to the point of the corporal punishment, because of how shocking that must be. I mean, you know, you don't even see that done at homes with parents in this country at this point. Your viewpoint on that is very interesting to me because obviously you're horrified by that obviously you you don't want that to happen and you mentioned that other members of the peace corps would try to make it an initiative to to stop it you know come in and be the hero there which is an admirable thing but the acceptance acceptance is a bad word the level-headedness with which you approach that is it's very mature because you look at like okay i'm somebody who's an outsider here i come from an entirely different

Starting point is 00:59:13 culture i'm also young as far as like the other teachers go even and this is the order of how they do business here it may scare me and i'd like for it to stop, but I can control what I can control, which means I can control that I'm not going to do it to my kids. And perhaps setting that cultural example, other people over time may say, well, maybe I could try that too. And then I think you used a term like it's more of like a slow burn trickle down like type effect over time. Yeah, this is a prime example of like when when you have

Starting point is 00:59:47 established cultural norms whether it be in this country or any other country or within groups within the same country people want to come in because they see something different than what they know and they want to establish their entire world order onto that cultural whatever it is whereas you know you had the the self-awareness to know that that's a that's not realistic and and b that's probably not going to be good for anyone because you talked about like the trade-off the kids are probably then just going to totally fuck off and then they won't get educated and the number one goal here ahead of you know the means to justify the ends is to make sure the most number of kids get

Starting point is 01:00:25 educated. So, I mean, to have that, the ability to think above that and be able to say, hey, there's some, there's going to be a pill like that that I got to swallow and it's, I don't like it, but, you know, let's see how I can improve it rather than let's play hero. That's a pretty cool thing. Yeah, that's kind of how I approach everything there because like I said, one volunteer in a community where there are endless things to work on, you just kind of had to be of the mindset, I'm not going to make any massive changes. I'm going to be a small part that hopefully over time will make a greater change, but something that I probably won't see in my lifetime. You know, it happens, it has to happen over years and years and years because these, years because these norms have been

Starting point is 01:01:05 ingrained in this culture for thousands of years. So, what can I do with two years of my life? Yeah. So, you taught the first year starting in January, and their school year, does it run similarly like September to June type deal? Typically, yes, but because of the strike, they extended a little bit so they could do their finals. So I think we went into July last year just to squeeze in those, you know, those finals. But then the second year, we actually started on time and then ended with a strike. So, you know, we started normal September, October-ish, and then the strike started in January. So I taught for three months. You know, and then the strike started in January.

Starting point is 01:01:45 So, I taught for three months. We did our finals for that semester, and then we moved on to January, and I didn't go back to school until I left in March. Right. That's the other thing. You were assigned to be there for 27 months, first three being training. We covered that. And then it was going to be 24 in the village.

Starting point is 01:02:04 But you got cut off in march because of covid yeah now what did you know about covid like did you were you connected like understanding what's going on in the news or how serious it was or what the response was going to be or was this kind of like it happened really really fast um i would say both we got a couple emails like a couple weeks prior to us being evacuated like, oh, this thing exists called from our Peace Corps staff. This thing exists called coronavirus. Here's a little bit about it. Just be wary and like, you know, keep your ears out for it. But like, it doesn't sound like a major threat. And then, you know, right before we came home, it was like this weekend where I was reaching out to – it was a big group of people texting from many Peace Corps countries.

Starting point is 01:02:49 It wasn't just within Guinea, my friends within Guinea. I was hearing from – I had a friend who served in Lesotho and someone who served in Indonesia, I think. And people just like chain texting like, are you hearing about this virus? It's getting a little bit more serious. Do you think we'll be sent home? How do you think this will happen so it started with you know we were given the option you can go home with no consequences if you're worried about this virus and that was what like that was beginning of march yeah but that lasted like a weekend and

Starting point is 01:03:17 then by the end of the weekend they were like no no everybody's going home because this is getting very serious they're starting to close borders um there's no other option all 7 000 volunteers are being evacuated immediately and we had 24 hours to pack up in the country all 7 000 in the country no no 7 000 worldwide every peace corps country wait that's it that's the total because i was going to say you went with 40 for education i'm thinking there can't be like 6 000 agriculturists no no In Guinea, there were probably like maybe close to 200. Wow. I didn't know. So the Peace Corps is only like 7,000 people.

Starting point is 01:03:52 At a time, yeah. Wow. That's not much. No. But they evacuated from every single country. Yes, all at once. Well, a couple actually decided to evacuate earlier because places like Morocco where a lot of people are coming in and out of, it got worse there first. But by the end of the weekend, the head of the Peace Corps, she emailed and put out on the website that we're done.

Starting point is 01:04:16 Everyone's got to go home and we'll see what happens from there. But that was all we knew. What did your village think of the whole thing? And what was that like telling them you know i gotta leave because this and by the way you guys are forced to stay here and i hope it doesn't come here and i hope you're okay if it if it does yeah um it was already like people knew about it you know the government was trying to send um places like schools some sort of cleaning supplies i think they got like one

Starting point is 01:04:46 pack of like Clorox wipes for the entire school, like something like that. You know what I mean? They were trying to mitigate as much as they could with the budget that they had, whatever. People knew about it and they listened to the radio a lot. So they were listening to, you know, Donald Trump talk about it and closing borders and everything like that. So when I did finally announce that I was leaving, you know, that day that I got the email, people were more understanding than I thought they'd be. I thought they'd be confused and sad and really like, you know, not knowing what's going on. But a lot of people were like, oh, yeah, you better get home now because, you know, you're not gonna be able to get home if you don't do it now. And so that was good. But

Starting point is 01:05:22 leaving school and host family was not easy. Was there any fear for you or confusion as to whether or not you were going to get out? Because I mean, things were changing. You think to the beginning of coronavirus, because I remember the week this was happening for you. This was like that week of like March 16th or whatever. Things changed every hour. I mean, we went from everyone going to work, having a good time on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, the 10th, 11th, 12th, and then boom. I mean, like a rock. And then I'm just talking about America right now, you know, like our own businesses and our own streets and whether or not there were even cars on them, it just flipped overnight. Now add

Starting point is 01:06:02 to that that you're in a very far away place tucked in a village in the country and you know there's a million things going on at home and now the government's got to figure out all their people around the world every agency to figure out how to get home and it's like you know it's not the most stable environment and you are forced to respond to this whole event happening and not knowing that's why i'm asking this like potentially oh are they just going to suddenly say, you know what, the risk is too much, you got to stay here, and then what does that mean for me?

Starting point is 01:06:29 What if I get it? Like, can I, is there a hospital around? You know, like, are some of these things, was it going through your head? Like, hey, I'm going to believe I'm home in America when I'm actually home. Yeah, that probably, I think it was just so chaotic that I didn't, in terms of packing up and

Starting point is 01:06:46 leaving and saying my goodbyes, that I didn't have time to think about the virus and the borders closing. I was also under the impression of like, I'm going to be with all of these other volunteers and staff. So we're all in the same boat. If we get stuck here, we get stuck here together. If we get, you know, to go home, we're going home together. But yeah, like you said, things were changing rapidly. And I was told to be in the capital the next day conakry yes conakry to fly out the next day um but there were no planes available and then the next day the flights got canceled and the next day and it got pushed back day after day i was in the capital for five days i think until they finally got us all 100 volunteers that were there

Starting point is 01:07:20 at the same time or more onto one plane. So you literally up and left your village inside of 24 hours. Like they said, get out. And you were out like that day. Packed my life up, gave a lot of shit away, said goodbyes, had, you know, I actually had to have my principal come with me to my host family to explain, you know, in depth in Susu, this is why he's leaving. So I did those goodbyes. And then the next morning, bright and early, got in a taxi to go to the Capitol. You know, as crazy as it sounds, it's almost like that was a bigger cultural shock than

Starting point is 01:08:00 when you got there. Because when you got there, I mean, you knew like with your first family, okay, I'm going to be with them for three months, and we're just going to shotgun learn about each when you got there because when you got there i mean you knew like with your first family okay i'm gonna be with them for three months and we're just gonna shotgun learn about each other in this time especially the first few days whereas you know at the end it's like the light turns out and now yeah i'm gonna go back to my world as long as I get out of here, okay, but I'm leaving all this behind and I have to say goodbye to these people and there's no final dinner, there's no ability to go see all your friends in the village and actually spend time with each of them and talk about the good times or things you remember. And I can imagine it was pretty emotional.

Starting point is 01:08:41 Yeah. Like literally, I mean. Absolutely. It did kind of evaporate very quickly. I went to the school first, didn't tell my host family in the morning because I didn't know how to tell them. So I went to school first and, you know, I think my principal could tell something was up. So he pulled me aside into his office. I brought him and my director of studies in, the two people I was closest with at the school, and kind of told them what was happening. And they were very upset, and I couldn't really hold it together at the time to explain it to them. But they understood, and they had me go into each classroom and tell all the students, class by class, what was happening, which was not easy at all.

Starting point is 01:09:19 And then from there, I came home and, you know, spoke to my host family and I wasn't saying any words, but as they were explaining it, I could see my mom, you know, start tearing up and my host sibling, you know, this little, you know, five-year-old kid, Sidia, who was like, you know, my brother at the time, he was kind of understanding at the same time and he's like, you're not coming back. And I was like, oof, God, I can't look into your eyes and tell you I'm not coming back. This is really hard. So, yeah, all very emotional goodbyes. And then in Conakry, when we were with other volunteers, the five days we were waiting for our flight out, that was such a crucial time for me. Because if I were to have to get on a plane right after leaving the village and be home in America just like that, I don't know how I would have reacted. Not that I reacted in a great way anyway, but having those five like buffer days to kind of like de-stress and, you know, kind of like be emotional together with other people and kind of have people to talk about it with was super

Starting point is 01:10:16 helpful. And then being home was just, yeah, really bizarre. We flew into JFK. My sister picked me up the next day and just home after that was like, I cannot believe I'm here. I didn't, you know, I didn't come home throughout those 20 months that I was gone. I didn't plan to because I thought it would have been too hard to come back to Guinea. So, you know, being home at the snap of your fingers, like you just said, it's just like, like really, really bizarre feeling. Um, but you know, time, time did it for me, you know? Now, when, when you were there though, you were doing the teaching and that's like the main day-to-day job, but, and I'm going to want you to explain this a little

Starting point is 01:10:57 bit, cause I know the Peace Chord and I didn't know this before you told me, but when, when you go into it, there's like a set ability to have a project where you go and make the difference in the community. But you had been working on a project this entire time with the plan that you were going to be there until September, and obviously, you left in March. So, tell me about the actual project and what that was like and where it stood when you left and maybe where it stands now. Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, my main role in the community was to be a teacher. So as a volunteer, you could have left it at that.

Starting point is 01:11:33 I could have been a teacher for those two years. I didn't have to pick up any other project. That would have been just fine. That's the reason I'm there. But because we have so much time outside of school, a lot of volunteers will choose to pick up a second project that can relate to education, but it can also relate to public health or agroforestry. Anything that you want that's a need in the community that your counterparts can identify, you can get training for that. So every once in a while we go back to the training center in Dubreka and they would train us on something new that maybe we can incorporate into our community. So I went with

Starting point is 01:12:02 a counterpart, my director of studies to this training, and we had decided what's the biggest need in our community. It's some sort of, you know, technology, computers, computer lab, even if it's one computer, if it's more computers, something like that, because... Did they have any of that? No. I mean, my principal had one that he used for a lot of the things, but every grade, every name written is all handwritten, all hand calculated. Wait, what about like the quizzes and tests? By hand.

Starting point is 01:12:31 So you would write out the quizzes and tests personally for each student? No, no. So that's actually a good question. I would write it on the board and the students would have to copy it onto their paper and then take the quiz on their paper. Yeah. But the most mind-blowing thing to me is that all those teachers calculate all of their grades by hand. Just like there are hundreds of students, you know? So, computers were a need there and there's no electricity at the school. So, some sort of, you know, electricity there would be helpful as well. You keep on bringing up, because you're like filling in all these blanks of stuff and then questions I have like about your own day-to-day and so electricity is one of them in in your village you had mentioned something about like there are tvs in certain areas and stuff like that but like your house that you lived in any electricity um i actually was able to buy a solar panel so i did have enough electricity

Starting point is 01:13:21 to charge my phone and to charge my laptop and have a light bulb in my room. But most people had no electricity. If they did, they were wealthier, obviously, and they had either a generator or a solar panel like I had. And your school had none? None at all. Yeah. Except for the high school across the street had solar panels. But that was not really in our realm where we were allowed to use it as teachers, but like students can use that or anything like that. So how do you build a computer lab without electricity?

Starting point is 01:13:47 You apply for a grant for a lot of money. Okay, so walk me through that. So after we identified this project, I had to write out an entire grant, which I really didn't know how to do at the time, but there were other volunteers who did something similar, so I kind of based it off of their grant. We had decided how many computers we wanted, how many solar panels we would need with those computers. Do we need a printer? Do we want a projector? Like everything that we needed,

Starting point is 01:14:10 we had to put it in a budget and we had to explain to, you know, it's called the Peace Corps Partnership Program. It's where if your grant is accepted, they will put it on the website, the Peace Corps website, and anyone can come in and donate to that. And then if you apply alongside of some sort of initiative, so mine was also a LGL grant, which is Let Girls Learn, which was Michelle Obama's initiative, because I was trying to target female, you know, students with this project, you know, increasing their resources for learning, maybe have a girls club in that computer lab. That allowed me to apply for an LGL grant. So whatever wasn't funded by people after a couple weeks on the website,

Starting point is 01:14:54 LGL would maybe donate $1,000 or $2,000 to finish off the project, something like that. So I applied through this. You have to very extensively write out how is this money being used, what are the goals, how many people is it going to affect? And that's a really, really. And how did you, how did you even, I'm just thinking out loud because you said there's a lot, there's a lot of kids in this school, 800 kids. How do you even, there's no electricity there. So how can you even budget it out versus figure out everything you actually need for it? Like, how did you go about that? Well, we weren't going to have, you know, like a computer per student or per two students. We were just going to go with a set amount of computers. We ended up choosing 11, 10 for students, one for the instructor. But we were going to use that as kind of an incentive for students to do well in school. So, the best students in each class would have the opportunity

Starting point is 01:15:40 to go off and learn computers. And that would be a major skill so that way that's another you know way to discipline students oh oh you're not you're not sitting in your computer yeah you're not sitting at your bench learning you don't get to go use the computer lab wow so you've been and and you tied that back in that's crazy so anyway there's there is in that situation you still have a significant ratio of students to computers so it's it's pretty special if if they go in there but the teachers themselves did they have any experience whatsoever with computers and did they use phones like that there's another question like what you were using your phone during this i know you and i would video chat on whatsapp and i'd be able to text

Starting point is 01:16:21 you on that and sometimes it'd be very shoddy connection or whatever but what's the culture with that kind of technology there like do they use cell phones are they iphones what's the story yeah most people do have cell phones actually most of them are not smartphones no iphones there most of them are um what was the brand razors no tell something it was a chinese brand of smartphones. If they had a smartphone, it was that. But for the most part, they were dial phones, like old school, what we call dumb phones now. And we actually, each volunteer got a dumb phone in case they didn't want to use their smartphone there. Because there's more chance that it would be charged longer and it would have better reception or something like that.

Starting point is 01:17:02 So most people had them there. They would call friends and family just to, just to say hi, nothing really crazy, but it was good for me to be able to communicate with my director of studies if I needed something or my counterpart or whatever. Um, so a lot of people use cell phones, laptops were scarce and only obviously again, wealthier people had them and they didn't printers anywhere. Um, printer at the high school. So that was the closest printer, but that people had them. And no printers anywhere. Printer at the high school. So that was the closest printer. Yeah, but that's not yours. That's another option for, you know, a business plan.

Starting point is 01:17:30 Some people would open a boutique where you can come, use their computer, type something up, print it. And, you know, this person gets paid for that. So that's another opportunity for somebody in the community to kind of make that money. So that was the extent of the computer use there before this computer lab. So yes, we applied for this money. And with any Peace Corps project that you apply for a grant, the community has to come up with at least 25% of those funds themselves.

Starting point is 01:17:59 However they do that is their choice. Maybe the mayor has money set aside for this kind of thing. Maybe they fundraise somehow. Maybe they just ask for donations throughout the community. It depends. But that wasn't really my concern. My concern was to get the grant through and get my 75% of it. So I did that.

Starting point is 01:18:17 And I waited a long time for that 25% of their funds because they had a corrupt mayor. He owed a lot of people money. So immediately when he got, what we used was a lot of expats. So people who used to live in the community who no longer do, who are wealthy. They, you know, we reached out to them and said, hey, this project's going on. Can you send some money? I think it was between three people got us that whole 25%. Sent it to the mayor, which was the first mistake.

Starting point is 01:18:43 It should have gone right to us. Went to the mayor and he used that to pay off people he needed to pay off. And then he said, all right, well, the next batch, whatever comes through is coming to you guys. So he put us off for a long, long time. And I kept warning them. I was like, there's a chance that I get sent home at some point because of this coronavirus, because of the political tension in this country. And if we don't get this done, I think you're going to lose the project. So we need to make this happen. And it never did to an extent. It didn't until I got the email that we were going home because of coronavirus. So this was still at the point where we didn't have all the money. We had some of it from there, 25%, but we didn't have all of it.

Starting point is 01:19:21 Now, what was, let's back up for one second. Coronavirus aside, because we didn't have all of it now what was let's back up for one second coronavirus aside because you didn't know until the last day that you were being sent home where you're in march and where did you think the finish line would be like did you have an idea in your head like okay we're i think it's reasonable to say after all the bullshit from the mayor we'll have the money by june and then we'll be able to put in the computer lab in July. Like, was there any timeline like that in your head? There was an ideal timeline that was definitely not followed. So, I think on paper, I had it that we would have all the money, and we would have bought

Starting point is 01:19:58 all the equipment by March, and it would be installed, and we would start training the teachers that summer so that they could start giving lessons to the students. Who's we? Me and my counterpart. Okay. Yeah. Because he actually did have knowledge of computers. So, he would have been able to help me train those other teachers.

Starting point is 01:20:15 And ideally, the next school year would start lessons for the students. Wait, your counterpart is... Is a Ghanaian. Someone in my community that I work alongside. Not the Peace Corps guy you had mentioned. Okay. Got it. So, yeah, my community that I work alongside. Not the Peace Corps guy you had mentioned. Okay, got it. So, yeah, that would be the ideal timeline. But honestly, by the time I got to January, February, and I didn't have that money from the mayor, I was kind of accepting the fact that maybe this isn't going to happen.

Starting point is 01:20:37 And that was really hard because it had been over a year we were working on that. And I, but I was just like, you know, throughout the frustrations of Peace Corps, I learned that there are some things you can't control and you can't let it get to you. So I just kind of had to accept that. And I, but I was just like, you know, throughout the frustrations of Peace Corps, I learned that there are some things you can't control and you can't let it get to you. So I just kind of had to accept that. And it really was, it sucked, but that's the way it stood. But I was just like, you know, if they get their money together, great. I have mine sitting. I wasn't allowed to give them any of my money until they had their 25% together. So I was sitting on, you know, that cash. But eventually coronavirus came. I was evacuated.

Starting point is 01:21:07 When I told them at school, they're like, what happens with the project? I was like, I think, you know, I think it ends here because you still don't have your part of the money. I can't really just give you my money. That was my initial thought. And then, but I felt horrible. I was like, we worked hard. This isn't their fault. The people that I was working with, my counterpart, my principal, it was not their fault that this fell through.

Starting point is 01:21:27 It was the mayor, 100%, and his staff and whoever else was involved in that. What is a mayor in a village? Is he the mayor of the whole Coba village? Coba, yeah. So the 60,000 people. What does that look like? And I don't even want to be stereotypical, but does he work out of, you know, City Hall or does he work out of a hut? He does actually, yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:48 They actually had built a City Hall. Well, the funny part is, though, Coba is where the second president of Guinea is from, Lansana Conte. He, you know, he lived in this village. So, he actually dedicated a certain amount of funds to build the high school that I worked near and to build this, you know, mayor's office. And he's the reason why I had a paved road through my village, because without that, it's usually just the main routes in Guinea. There's like three main routes that have paved roads, but because the president used to live there, he, you know, took advantage of that and paved that road. So there is an office that the mayor works out of. To be honest, I don't know what kind of work he did but i knew he traveled a lot and he would you know i guess um he throughout susu land he kind of you

Starting point is 01:22:31 know the region that i was in just traveled to other cities i guess talking about how we can work together in some sort of aspect was he democratically elected or oh that's a great question um i don't remember i think he was yes i think that he was i think they have a separate right i'm doing in air quotes yeah yeah um i think they do have elections outside of their presidential election that are democratic so um actually i do know that for a fact because when i first got to gu to my site, there was a different mayor. And the transition had just happened a couple months after I got to the site. So yeah, now that I remember that. Now, let's go down this rabbit hole.

Starting point is 01:23:15 Politically speaking, and if you don't know some of this, no problem. I'm sure it's very complicated. But somebody who becomes a mayor of a decent-sized village like that, are they associated with a national party very similarly to here? And are they just also very similarly to here trying to use that to get to the next type of job, like whether that be some sort of regional governor or something like that? Yeah, I think it works in the same fashion. I don't think their democracy is respected as much, obviously, because it's pretty much brand new. But yes, there are a couple different parties, two main parties similarly. I don't remember the names of them, to be honest. But yes, you kind of work your way up in that

Starting point is 01:23:59 aspect. After May, hopefully, you'll work in a higher level. But I don't remember what the two parties were. And you knew coming into this whole thing that if you were going to do a project, which is obviously the goal, you were going to be working with whoever the Mayer were. I guess I could have assumed that. I didn't really think about it at first, and I didn't think about who this was. I had met him a couple times before the project started, so I knew who I'd be working with. But I just kind of, I guess, made the naive assumption that people in that office would be good people. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:32 Now, how did you get an intro to him? Like, when did you meet him at the very, very beginning? Yeah. So, when you do your site visit, which is halfway through my training, when you figure out where you're being placed, they send you to your site for three days and they just kind of leave you there and say, you know, get to know the site a little bit. So my counterpart and my principal took me around to meet all the important people, quote unquote, in the village. So that's, you know, the mayor and the police and the superfe who's like in charge of, you know, similar to the mayor. The mayor is, I don't know if the mayor is higher.

Starting point is 01:25:08 I think the superfe is higher than the mayor. He's in charge of all of Coba while the mayor is maybe Coba, Coney Valley to Coba Tatema or something like that. So, yeah, I got to meet all the important people. And that was my first introduction to, you know, those kind of people. And how did they, I mean, it sounds like you knew fairly early on that there was a ton of corruption and bullshit. But how did they receive you, at least to your face? Were they like, oh, here we go? Or was it more like, oh, hey, yeah, come in. Like, I'm your best friend.

Starting point is 01:25:40 Yeah, absolutely. They're super grateful that you're there. They're, you know, excited to meet you, excited to have you in their community, excited to brag about you. They're very welcoming, which, you know, maybe putting on a face for you, but who knows? And you can't tell I'm there. I'm so scared to meet anyone because I'm like so embarrassed about my language level at the time that I'm not thinking about that at all until later on when I hear people who are actually respected in the community talk about the corruption and talk about the issues that they have, while a lot of people just ignore it or don't know that it exists.

Starting point is 01:26:10 Yeah. And as far as the timing of the project, was it, I couldn't tell, was it concepted almost immediately? Like you're like, oh, this is what I want to do? Or was it a few months in? It was months in. Yeah, you have a, we have like a mid-service training or an in-service training before the mid-service training where you kind of conceive the product like ideas for a project with your

Starting point is 01:26:33 counterpart and so maybe around january february of that first year that i was there we kind of talked about the project and so that's why i'm saying we worked on a full year and still didn't have everything together because of the corruption. Yeah, and as far as what you were doing actively on the project, it seems like a lot of it was you had it planned out pretty early. You knew the number of computers you wanted to get. You knew the potential benefit there. You knew you were going to have to train people to use it, and you at least had someone else who could do it with you. But was a lot of it kind of figuring out how to get the funds and doing the behind-the-scenes work on that, whether it be with the mayor or back with the Peace Corps? Or was there actually a lot more work going into like, okay, well, here's what we're going to do when we have it, And here's how we're going to go about doing that. Yeah. It was a lot more work on the backend in the sense that I needed a lot of information that my counterpart wasn't willing to like settle on.

Starting point is 01:27:31 I was just kind of like, you guys don't understand like to write this grant, they need to know every single tiny little detail planned out on paper, how it's going to go. And they were like, oh yeah, yeah, we know,

Starting point is 01:27:42 we know, we know. And I was like, all right, so we need to sit down and have a meeting, talk about this. Then we'd have... Handwritten? No, I did it on my computer.

Starting point is 01:27:48 Okay. Yeah. And we needed to sit down and have this meeting. And, you know, we would sit down and then they'd just bullshit for a while, answer maybe one of my one million questions I had for them, and then we'd move on. And then I'd be like, we still need this information.

Starting point is 01:28:02 And then, you know, go through that process so many different times that it took forever just to gather the information that was a problem. And then we had to go throughout the village to find, all right, if somebody is installing these solar panels, we need to go to that person and ask them how much they charge and then put that in the budget. And so we had to go from place to place as well. And so I needed help with that as well. I needed people to navigate that part of the village for me. Yeah. It's amazing how many balls you had to throw up in the air and juggle at the same time

Starting point is 01:28:28 because i'm trying to picture how annoying a lot of this process is i mean let's be honest i mean anytime you got to go raise money it's it's annoying in anything now do it in a third world country where you know you're speaking the secondhand language of anything and you're dealing with you know corrupt governments that you don't you can't even understand and then you're dealing with people who don't even know what it is you're trying to build. You put all this together. It's like, that's a full-time job. And then you have your full-time job. And then you also have, you know, you're trying to be a part of your culture there. You know, you're spending time with your host family, going into town, doing things, traveling sometimes, which by the way how much

Starting point is 01:29:05 how much traveling did you do like around the whole country um i was able to travel during like holidays so the first christmas that i was there we a couple of us volunteers like took a car all the way out to the forest region which is the furthest part from me took you know it was two days worth of travel and spent christmas there we went hiking there. There's, you know, the second highest peak in West Africa is out there. So, we hiked that. And the second Christmas, I was able to travel down to Sierra Leone, which is, you know, the next country over, but still, it was beautiful, but very difficult to get to. I did miss out on the middle part of Guinea. There's what they call like, maybe it's called like the

Starting point is 01:29:45 grand canyon of of this country or of west africa it's beautiful and if you're a tourist going to guinea that's maybe like the only thing you're really going to see um but i didn't make it to that i had plans but you know got cut short so you're you're traveling you're doing all these things and you know was there ever a time where you're like, damn, this is a lot? Yes, of course. A lot of – I think I had time to think that because from the outside, it seems like it's a lot. It seems like I'm going, I'm thinking about all this stuff all the time. But what people don't see is that Peace Corps is a lot of downtime, a lot of time at home, in my house, alone, or with my host family,

Starting point is 01:30:26 whatever. But you have so much time on your hands to think, which can be dangerous sometimes, but it really, you know, gave me some good practice and kind of helped me become comfortable with being alone and being, thinking about all these things, all these issues that we're facing, that Guinea is facing, that I was trying to help out with. So the downtime was, in the end, great for me personally, because especially during coronavirus, everyone's worried about isolation and that kind of stuff. And I think I'm able to deal with that a lot better now. But yeah, there was always a lot going on in terms of not just physically a lot going on, a lot of responsibility, but mentally a lot going on all the time. And would you read a lot?

Starting point is 01:31:11 Like what were some hobbies you picked up sometimes to fill the time, especially when you were alone? Yeah, I really did want to find like one hobby that I could get really good at or something like that. But no, I did a lot of reading. I had a laptop, so I was able to watch movies that a lot of reading um you know i had a laptop so i was able to watch movies that you know a lot of volunteers have hard drives that will pass movies around on you know like like the old days wait walk walk me through that you have hard drives you're passing like i would

Starting point is 01:31:34 have an external hard drive and you know every other volunteer in the country would have one so whenever we got together we would share whatever we had downloaded so someone would give me sopranos and i would give you know I mean? We just pass along something back and forth and so I could watch stuff at site. And then you got through all that and then you went back and you're like, all right, I need to update my hard drive. That's a big thing in the Peace Corps. And you could do music and books and all this other kind of stuff you could share. French materials, SUSU materials, things to learn. It was really good. What was the best stuff you watched over there? I watched a lot of things. I started and finished Mad Men while I was there. And that's, you know,

Starting point is 01:32:11 a fantastic show. Fantastic show. So that was one of them. But you know, I had never been a big Star Wars guy. So I watched all the Star Wars movies while I was there and had a new appreciation for them. I read Harry Potter for the first time while I was away. And that's- You never read that? Never. I read probably half of the first time while I was away. You never read that? Never. I read probably half of the first book as a kid, but I hated reading as a child, like hated it. And I hated it up until I left for Guinea. And I was like, I should probably bring a couple books because I don't know what I'm gonna be doing there. And Harry Potter was the first one I started because I was like,

Starting point is 01:32:40 this is probably a good place to start. And it just hooked me on reading. I absolutely love reading now. And people were so jealous. They were like, you're reading Harry Potter for the first time. Like, what an amazing experience that I'm so, you know, jealous that you get to have. What do you like to read besides that? Because obviously, like, this is kind of a new hobby. So what else were you getting into besides some of the fiction?

Starting point is 01:33:00 I was all over the place. I like novels a lot and memoirs, a couple good memoirs that I read while I was away. And since I've been back, some nonfiction stuff, kind of all over the place. I don't even know if I have a favorite. But yeah, a lot of reading and downtime, for sure. Well, you mentioned the idea that it can be a dangerous thing when you just have a lot of time to think and no pun intended but i think about this a lot too you know i was saying to someone on a podcast recently you know one of the hardest things if not the hardest thing for a man or woman to do is sit alone in a room with their thoughts and be all right and especially when

Starting point is 01:33:43 you're balancing all the realities you're dealing with there which go all the way down to your basic needs you know like literally like how what your hygiene is and what you're eating like the most basic things in the world and you get in this room and and you're thinking about all this and even you get used to it after a while no doubt about that but you think about home there's no doubt about it. I mean, how much were you sitting there thinking about like, damn, I wonder what's going on in America right now? Or damn, I wonder what so-and-so is up to? Or I wonder what's changed that I won't be able to understand right away when I get back? Yeah, I did a lot of thinking about home for sure,

Starting point is 01:34:26 but at the same time, every time I thought about like, ooh, what are my friends doing? What am I missing out on? How's my family? All that kind of stuff, I would bring myself back and be like, you know, be here, be present. This is a once-in-a-lifetime unique experience. You're never going to have anything like this again. So, stay here and, you know, be excited about it all the time. Try and, it really enticed me to do new things and meet new people and explore and say yes to more people asking me to do things in the village when I didn't want to, you know? But yeah, a lot of thinking about what was going on at home and what was changing and am I going to be behind when I get back and I'm going to be lost when I get back. And, you know, I was and I have been and I've changed a little bit since I've

Starting point is 01:35:10 been back, I think. But overall, you know, it made me more fond of the people that were in my life and the people who did stay in touch and all that kind of stuff. So, overall, I don't know, having time to think is just a great thing for me. Yeah. Were there ever any moments where, I shouldn't say moments, but were there just certain things that would really trigger your thoughts of home? Or, you know, whether it be things you carry around or just like things that happened to you or daily things you're doing that made you think like, oh yeah, that was my life. Yeah, I mean, the good news is I didn't have access to social media, so I didn't have to see it all the time. Some people did, and I think that might have made their experience a little tougher, to be honest.

Starting point is 01:35:58 Luckily, the service where I was at allowed me to just leave my phone at home, go teach, come back, use it if I have to kind of thing. Um, but in terms of things making me think of home, I did keep some, you know, I brought pictures and stuff with me, um, not knowing what I would have access to. So it has stuff hanging on my wall and whatnot. A lot of books made me think of home, obviously, cause I was reading, you know, American stories or American novels or American, um, biographies or whatever. Um. So, you know, that brought me into the thoughts of like, oh, even though I'm here, what am I going to be doing when I get home? Like, what's my next step? Because I was still in that, you know, don't know what I'm doing with my life phase. So, I was, you know, that put me down that rabbit hole a lot of like, what's my next move?

Starting point is 01:36:41 But at the same time, just focus on this move. But also, I got to kind of think about what's ahead, but stay here. And I mean, back and forth a lot. Yeah, you're in your head about it. And you're also at that point in your life where you did just graduate college and you know, like, okay, I picked a good time to do this. We talked about that. And this is my reality right now. But yeah, there's going to be a day where I leave here and then I'm going to have to figure out, well, what the hell do I want to do with my life? And we all sit here worried about that, whether we're in jobs or trying to get a job after college or whatever, we're figuring out what we like and what we don't. And we're in America, right? And, you know, we can sit here on Google and think about it. We can talk with people to drop of a hat and think about it and all these simple things that we take for granted, but you're in a foreign place. You don't even have

Starting point is 01:37:30 access to half the internet. It's not like when you're getting curious about things, you can be like, you know what? I think I'll go do research on this right now. There's a lot less of that. So there's like that balance of, hey, I know that that can't be my reality right now i can't really think all about that but when i get home i need to be ready like there's gonna be a hurricane because now i'm gonna have to a catch up culturally again and then be like yes get my shit together and start figuring out what i want to do so was there was there a part of you that was like all right just i'll get to that when i get to that and you know it for now yeah there was a lot of notes on my phone yeah that anytime i had a question that i would like to research or

Starting point is 01:38:11 a thought or an idea of a career or something even when i was watching a movie and i'd be like oh wait i know that you know that cast member from something else but i can't just get on my phone and look it up i would put that in a note so i had a whole list of notes that every you know month or so when i would go to the capital i would use the computer or use the internet at some point to look all of those questions up for that past month and then restart it for the next um for the next cycle or whatever but yeah there's a lot of a lot of that like save that for later yeah well actually because you're you're bringing it up kind of right now so let's let's talk about that some of the reintegration because yes it was a shock that you had to do it when you had to do it, and it was very quick.

Starting point is 01:38:48 So there wasn't like a process and getting ready for it and all that. But coming back, you land in America, you land at JFK, you're picked up in a car, you're driven to a house with beautiful toilets, nice mattresses, great food, whatever you want to choose from, electricity everywhere, Wi-Fi, a phone, a laptop armed with the Wi-Fi now, TVs, people around you who are like you, Americans, also literally like your same race too. That's not something you've been used to what what was that like and and you mentioned earlier that it it took a little while to get used to that but what were some of like the i guess like emotional things you were going through to get used to that and and did you have a a reverse freak out where you're like oh shit my reality is in guinea and now i'm not there

Starting point is 01:39:44 anymore like i got used to that now it's like you're kind of you're ripping, oh shit, my reality is in Guinea and now I'm not there anymore. Like, I got used to that. Now it's like, you're kind of, you're ripping the bandaid off and you're in this spot where it's like, well, now I got to get used to what I used to know. Yeah. A lot of the first, you know, hours, days, weeks that I was here, it was a lot of the thought that like, I don't feel like I belong here. I don't feel like I should be here. And I don't know why. I mean, I guess I know why because it happened so quickly. It's like, oh, I should still be there.

Starting point is 01:40:08 I had at least until September. I would have had more time to say goodbye and plan that, you know. But it was definitely a lot of I don't feel right. And then a lot of I don't know what I'm feeling, so I'm just going to cry. You know what I mean? And it was just very bizarre, and I've never really been like that before. So, it was a very bizarre and i've never really been like that before so it was uh it was a really really weird experience but in terms of what were you crying about that's what i'm saying i couldn't put my finger on how i was feeling so i was just so

Starting point is 01:40:33 overwhelmed that i was just like you know very sad to be somewhere where i didn't feel like i should be you know i should be in guinea still i shouldn't be here i don't know how i feel about it so that's just the bodily reaction that I had at the time, you know what I mean? Yeah, but is there a part of it that's like, just thinking, I'm digging a little bit here, and if you don't have an answer, no problem, but is there a part of it thinking about like, relationships you had, you know, with your family there and like, oh, I may never see them again. Or, you know, even some of the things you left behind that were unfinished business

Starting point is 01:41:05 that you felt could make such a difference in people's lives. Was there some specific nature or was it just literally what you're saying? No, at that time, I don't think I could put my finger on it at all. I don't think there was one specific thing. I think more so now, even though it's been a lot of time, those things that you're saying are more sticking out of my head. Like, oh, now I'm thinking about, you know, the best friend that I had in my village who I'm never going to see again. I try and talk to him as much as I can now, but it's not a lot and it's not the same as being there.

Starting point is 01:41:35 You know what I mean? So there's a lot of more so of those feelings now that like every once in a while make me really upset. It's like, well, you know, I mean, like not having the option to go back there. I mean, I guess I have the option, but it would be mean? Like, not having the option to go back there. I mean, I guess I have the option, but it would be really hard for me to go back and then not stay there. You know what I mean? So, more so those feelings now than at first. At first, maybe I was just numb or overwhelmed with feelings where I couldn't really stick anything to it. Yeah. And you also, you know, side note here, but you had the hanging

Starting point is 01:42:03 leftover of, oh, we didn't get to finish that project and you had said like you weren't sure maybe it just wasn't going to happen and it sounds like you had that last minute meeting with the mayor and got the money to come through so what kind of involvement did you have in back in america seeing that it actually went through how you planned it yeah well i planned for the planned it for the most part. I couldn't train anyone, which was like the worst part. But yeah. So, when I came back, I stayed in touch with my main counterpart, who is, you know, he is actually an English speaker as well. So, he spoke French and English, easy to communicate with, someone who knew computers. So, I stayed in touch with him. I was like, here's the curriculum that

Starting point is 01:42:40 I was going to teach. So, I sent that to him. Please use this. Please try and follow through on what we were talking about. I gave him the Peace Corps money to buy those computers because I trusted him and I knew his motives and I knew that he was very different than anyone else in the community. So when I communicated with him, I gave him that curriculum and he kind of updated me every once in a while. Here's what's going on. We're meeting every Saturday.

Starting point is 01:43:03 Oh, the teachers just finished their certification. We have plans to teach our students this year. Like all of these great things that reassured me of my decision to do that because there are going to be hopefully a lot of great outcomes from that and a lot of like make life a little bit easier at school, at least for them. What's, what has been the feedback on it and, and how much did it, from what you know, being over here and not being able to be there and see it, how much did it early on seem to accomplish some of the progress and goals that you had in mind for the community to make it better and, you know, a better place? Um, I think it did well for them towards the end of their school year when they finally got back to school after the strike and they had to finish their finals,

Starting point is 01:43:47 there's a lot of things that involved the computer for that, calculating grades and printing and stuff like that. It made their life easier in that sense. And a lot of the teachers are trained now. But I can't say exactly how it's affecting the students at this point because I think they're still out of school because coronavirus is still a threat everywhere. And the political tension was really bad for a while these past couple months. So, I don't think they were in school for those reasons too. So... Yeah, actually, can you fill us in on that a little bit? So, the political tension you're referring to has to do with the presidency, correct? Correct, yeah. When we first got there,

Starting point is 01:44:19 we heard a lot about the current president, Alpha Conde. He was elected president at that time. It was nine years ago. Their term is five years per term. They can do a two-term limit. He's the one who decided in the Constitution we're going to have a two-term limit. And so, by the time it got to spring to summer of 2019, there were rumors that he was going to try and, you know, change the constitution that he created to run for a third term. And so there were rumors. He never confirmed or denied them ever until the election, which just happened this past October, I think,

Starting point is 01:44:58 or maybe it was November. I think it was October. And so he ended up running for a third term. People say... October 2019? No, 2020. No, literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The rumor started back in 2019 that he was going to run in 2020. So when you left, it was still like rumors, kind of.

Starting point is 01:45:12 It was rumors, but also elections kept getting pushed back and pushed back because they were saying, oh, we need to reform the Constitution so we can't have this election. And there were so many excuses and a lot of corruption, again, involved. You saw where it was going. Exactly. To push the election back so that he would have a bigger platform to run on. Um, and so, yes, I wasn't there for it, but I assume that if it hadn't been coronavirus, we would have been sent home for the violence in the streets that was, you know, that were happening because of protests to this, um, constitutional change. So. Were they, and those protests, were they started at all when you were still there? Oh yeah. They were the, almost the entire two years I was there since the rumors started. They were protesting.

Starting point is 01:45:53 The rumors were that long. Oh yeah. They were a long time coming and there were other things to protest about as well. A lot of the teacher strikes, there were a lot of protests in the Capitol as well. And what did their protests look like? Are they peaceful protests? Yes, they look actually very similar to how we've been protesting in New York and other places around the country. Yeah, depends where you're looking.

Starting point is 01:46:14 A lot of marching, a lot of signs, a lot of chanting, that kind of stuff. But it gets violent when the military comes in and starts open firing on crowds. And that has been what's happening, especially the past couple of months. While I was there, that happened a couple of times. And, you know, 20 or 30 people had died, I think, because of that.

Starting point is 01:46:33 At this point, you know, a lot more people have died in the short span of time because they've confirmed that Afkande has won a third term, even though there are, you know, there's a lot of voter fraud there, but a lot of the times, or a lot of the time after the election, I had heard that the other, the other candidate, Diallo, had actually won, so we don't really know, but the military backs Alpha Conde, so they're now, you know, taking the streets and unloading on people, and people are dying, and it's actually on Instagram, like, there's somebody who holds an account on Instagram that's showing all of this stuff that's happening in guinea people bleeding out on the streets it's very very graphic but it's portraying exactly what's happening there my counterpart who lived in conakry at the time um was texting me i haven't left my house in two

Starting point is 01:47:17 days it's very unsafe i haven't been able to get food or water anything like that um so it's caused you know tragedy there at this point and it's focused that stuff is focused more in the cities though like conicree yes my village was calm throughout the entire time i was there there was no issues no marches no nothing um but if you live closer to to major cities within the the country there there's definitely some trouble and what did your host family say about any of this or did they not really care um they didn't speak about it too much they were just like you know they were anti-alpha conda when i was there a lot of the susu and malinke were because you know took advantage of his power and all that

Starting point is 01:47:55 kind of stuff so um a lot of them were against him and but that's the to the extent that they would go they wouldn't speak about it too, too much. Yeah. And actually, because you keep on talking about the Susu and Malenke, can you just expand upon exactly what that means for people? Because then I want to ask about that. Yeah. They're like the subcultures within Guinea. So, the four major regions of Guinea, like I said, there are four languages and four kind of subcultures. There's a lot of, you know, sub-subcultures of those, but the Susu is the region that I lived in. There's the Pular in the middle of the Malinke in the upper part of Guinea. And so, what I have been told historically is that the Pular people came down from Senegal

Starting point is 01:48:38 and they split the Malinke and the Susu kind of up the middle. And that's where maybe it was all one culture at one time, when they split, they turned into the Susu and the Malinke kind of. So now it's Susu, Pular, Malinke people. And there's a lot of tension between Pular and the rest of the country, because the Pular are the ones who usually are the most wealthy. They run a lot of the most, a lot of the boutiques. And they're spread all throughout Guinea. They're mostly in the center part, but they, you know, I had a lot of Pular people in my village as well. So there's a lot of tension there. And so the candidate who was running against Alphacande this past year was Pular.

Starting point is 01:49:12 And surprisingly, a lot of Susu and Malinke were backing him because they were just so against Alphacande, who was Malinke. Are any of the tribes tied to religion at all? Or is it strictly, literally, they were just painted down that line from the people that came in from Senegal? That's it. Yeah, because I think 90% or so of the country is Muslim. Oh, interesting. So it's not like a lot of religious differences there. There's a small Christian population in the forest region, but mostly Muslim. And was your village religious? A lot of religious people in there? Oh, everyone goes to the mosque every Friday.

Starting point is 01:49:46 Really? So was there also morning prayer every day? Morning prayer every day. I lived right next to the mosque, so 5 a.m. I'd be woken up by those. Really? I didn't know that. The megaphone, yeah. Morning prayer every day. You know, people pray throughout the day.

Starting point is 01:50:01 They don't have to pray on time every day. They have to make sure they get their prayers in every day. And then every Friday, anyone who's like respected or educated or anything like that, they go to the mosque. You know what I mean? It's only the people who, I guess, do not – aren't super religious. But there aren't very many of them who don't follow that. Yeah. I mean, you often see in a lot of these situations just around the world where there's some sort of tribal culture where there can be clashes within a country. It technically happened here 150 years ago.

Starting point is 01:50:33 But whenever you see that, it's so often tied to religion and it's tied to like existential beliefs but the other thing you often see is there's some kind of like identifier you know whether it be the races are slightly different or very different or um yeah i mean that's usually what it comes back comes down to but with these guys again because it seems like it was drawn on a line pretty organically like they're in in the streets like is there rivalry with with the tribes and the second question to it would be are there things where like people can walk up to someone and know right away like is there some sort of identifier like oh i know you're susu or or whatever or is it just totally kind of secretive a little bit um there's not really like super open rivalry and aggressive rivalry i guess there's political rivalry but it doesn't get super violent all the

Starting point is 01:51:30 time um but the pular people and the susu people the monkey people all look they have a lot of different facial features so you can tell interesting um but there are a lot of jokes too between um the cultures a lot of joking like cousins who will call each other, you know, thieves or something like that as, you know, just like playing around. But nothing like, I didn't see anyone treating or discriminating against like the Pular people in my village per se. Yeah. And when it comes down to like the presidency for a country like this, it's very interesting to me that even if it's not as aggressive as you point out in this country between the tribes, that you see one side actually go to

Starting point is 01:52:14 the other side. I'm talking about like the other tribes supporting the non-tribal candidate. And was that something that happened right at the beginning of the rumors coming out that he might stay because people already didn't like him? Or was it something that happened where people started to say, you know, I might like him, but he shouldn't be staying? I'm talking about the Condé guy. And, you know, just because of that, I want to have this democracy like we set up in the Constitution. Fuck him. I'm going to leave him behind even if he's in my tribe. I think I remember it happening before he even talked about running for a third term. Like right when I got there, I remember hearing people say that he's not a great president. He's not for the people. He does a lot of things for himself and his own wealth and all that kind of stuff. So I do think it started before he talked to that, just kind of emphasized it like, hell no, we got to get this man out of there. You know, listening to you describe the political situation over there and how fucked up it is, it actually has given me a little bit of self-reflection just because, let's be honest, we complain, myself included, all the time about our own political process here and there's a lot of problems with it. And I think with any ruling body anywhere where there is power given there's always

Starting point is 01:53:25 going to be problems there's going to be corruption there's going to be crap but it's kind of a whole another level when you can openly watch a country devolve into yeah you know i i think we're just not going to do the constitution we made yeah i know it's a democracy, but no, it's not. And I'm just curious, like, did that give you any kind of perspective on how we have it here and make you appreciate it more? Or was it just two totally separate things in your head? Like, no, this is just how it is here, and it's fucked up. I guess it did. But I think you have to keep in mind that their democracy is brand new relative to ours. So, you know, who knows how, you know, if ours could compare to theirs when our democracy was this new, you know? So, I think that's something that I always kept in mind and I can never be like,

Starting point is 01:54:38 I guess I appreciate coming, you know, into this world at the point that we're at in terms of how our democracy has aged. But I don't know if it's been like, you know, I guess I kind of have been like, yeah, it sucks for them to live the way that they're living and not being treated fairly. But I don't know, you see that often here as well. So, I don't think it's all that different. Yeah. And as far as like the people themselves go, I mean, obviously there was a lot less concern of it in the village, like you said, but is there some sort of resignation in their attitude towards the fact that anything that seems like it could be fair for them just isn't going to be? Yeah. It's just a very defeated attitude.

Starting point is 01:55:28 And their go-to motto, everyone's just like, c'est la guinea. It's like, that's guinea. That's guinea for you. This is the way it is. There's no changing it. It sucks, but there's really nothing that we can do. And that's, you know, they kind of joke about it after a while because it's just like hit after hit, blow after blow.

Starting point is 01:55:43 They just can't really do anything. So they're just like, you that's that's that's how it is so it's not funny but they kind of made a joke out of it so you know when they laugh you laugh but in the back of your head you're like damn that's really really hard to hear you know yeah because it's it goes back to hope you know that's when people talk about like the american dream here there's an element of hope in that it's supposed to represent you know that people who are born here have the opportunity to do great things and people who come here have the opportunity to do great things and there's great things you can do here that maybe you can't do yeah i mean historically you can't

Starting point is 01:56:22 do in other places and so then you go and you live in a culture where that's not what they know and they may be aware of what's called the american dream but like you said earlier like the chances they're ever gonna even have an attempt at experiencing that are they're low and so it always strikes me how much we could take for granted how we are just ingrained with – like again, just like politically, we always look back on what's negative. And it's – in a way, there's some good to that these little things that we all take for granted, other people, you know, in a country like this that you went and lived in and spent time with these people, they don't even know that to be a possibility. Yeah. So, like, what you're saying is true. And, you know, like I said, their motto is just like,

Starting point is 01:57:20 it is the way that it is. And unfortunately, they say that about everything to the point where there's things that they can actually do something about and they choose not to, or they just don't have enough information to do so. So, for example, there are many illnesses there that are very treatable, and we know how to treat them, and they know how to treat them, but they don't know to go to the doctor, or they don't want to go to the doctor, or they fear going to the doctor because they think someone who goes to the doctor goes there to die. So, for example, one of my host sisters at my site had, you know, at one point tuberculosis, which is, has been treatable, you know, for a long time. And they know how to treat it as well. If you go to the hospital, they will give you the correct medicines.

Starting point is 01:57:59 And she waited a long time. I slept many nights next door to them, listening to her cough a lot, a lot, a lot. How old was she? She was probably 28. That's my guess. I don't know. Ages there are very, they don't even know their own age. They don't really care about age. It's really bizarre.

Starting point is 01:58:18 But bizarre to me. It's not bizarre, you know? Yeah. So anyway, she went, eventually it got really bad. So, she did go to the hospital. She came back, she got some treatment and she was doing a little better, but not immensely better. And so, it continued on. One day after that, she was very sick. She went back to the hospital and she just didn't come back. My host mom came back without her from the hospital and had explained to me that she had passed from tuberculosis, um, something very treatable. Um, so that was,

Starting point is 01:58:49 you know, a horrible, horrible moment for, you know, me as an outsider there, but that the family that I was with there. And it's hard for me to watch that knowing that there is something that could have been done. And, um, they're just so much of the mindset that like it is what it is that like i you know they don't think that there are there's something that you can do about everything it's like seeing a car crash from far away in slow motion and trying to tell people to stop and you know they can't exactly crazy and how close were you with her um i was you know we interacted i wasn't as close with her as I was with my other sister, but her son is the one that I said, Sidia, who's like, you know, was like my brother. He's like, he was probably five at the time that his mother passed. So, this kid has no idea what's going on in life, let alone, you know, where did my mom go? Oh, she passed. Everyone else is crying. Should I be crying? I don't know if I should be crying because i don't really know you know why everyone's crying kind of thing so um i was you know he's like my kid so that's that was a lot harder than than the relationship i lost with her but still

Starting point is 01:59:53 incredibly sad to see my family react the way that they did and did you talk to him at all personally about it to sidia yeah uh no we couldn't get down into very deep things because again he doesn't speak fresh oh oh he's you know he's young and he speaks only susu so we communicate at the very basic level and then a lot of gestures you know yeah back to that so um you know i just kind of was there held him when he was sad um but that's like the best I could do for him at the time, you know? Yeah. And what kind of bond, because again, like someone like him, he's a kid, it's special, right? So, even if you can't really talk with him because of the language barrier, it's like, okay, there's just a different element to that than there would be if he was like your age. But what kind of bond did you find yourself

Starting point is 02:00:46 having not just with your host family but with the culture itself like when you think about it nostalgically as i'm sure there's aspects of it you do what what things do you think changed in you that made you say like hey i belong here? I think the community feel was the biggest thing. Like, the way that they do everything together and they're always outside, they're rarely in their houses alone or isolated. I think that sits with me well and saddens me being here sometimes. I know coronavirus is not a time that we can be getting together. But even outside of that, even before I left, I think back to like, you know, living in college or at my parents' house or whatever. Like, do I know my neighbors? Do I see my neighbors? Do I have a good relationship with them? You know, not as much as I would have in Guinea where

Starting point is 02:01:37 you're outside all the time seeing everyone who's passing saying hello, sharing food, conversing, you know, asking about other people who are farther away that those people know or something like that. I really think that community vibe sits with me a little bit more now and something that I wish that we could work more towards. And I think in my life, I will always work to have that in my life, because I think that's very important to a culture in general, to, you know, our mental health as a society. And I think that's, yeah, that's just something that will forever be important to me. Yeah, I just got in a conversation, you're making me think of it,

Starting point is 02:02:18 but I'd be curious your thoughts on it, where we were talking about how when you become or over time as you get more options as you acquire more things around you so to use the example of america when we didn't have electricity in 1860 versus today there's a lot more options today there's a lot more options in two seconds today than there were in two weeks at that time so as we progress and become as societies like in general technologically more advanced or just knowledge base more advanced and have more things that we can do and and more opportunities there there forms a greater and greater separation among the people. Because as all these things happen, people can become more self-reliant. And as they become more self-reliant, they feel less of a need to have to be around other people all the time. And it turns from needing to be around 15 people at a time to needing to be around 10 and 5. And

Starting point is 02:03:23 eventually, now we're at a point where a lot of people can just be content to live alone and so it's almost like you trade off all the great modernistic things that come with that like in a country like ours or in countries in the west for the intense connection that you're wired when you're born to desire which is with other humans and with those little moments you have where you're sitting with each other or just talking with each other or hanging out walking around where there's those unspoken things you just kind of understand so when you came back to this country and you talk about trying to integrate the aspects of that from guinea into your life here with the people you're around was there a part of you that says like well fuck these people just don't get it you know they're they're so content to just

Starting point is 02:04:10 be alone and and actually that's why they're miserable and yet i came from a place that was so poor that had so little but it and i asked you this directly earlier you gave a long answer but there is a level of happiness among these people even if they're resigned to things like their government and democracy that are never going to be good or the fact they're always going to be poor. There's a level to which they relate to each other and appreciate one another and find goodness in that. Yeah. I mean, so coming back here, I think we are able to be alone and be with ourselves easier, but with that phone or social media in your hand where you don't feel alone at the time, but it also contributes more to your social anxiety and

Starting point is 02:04:50 your stress. And so, I think that's something that I fear is the more advanced that we get, the more likely it is that we'll have more anxiety and depression issues. And that's why I try my best to steer clear of those kind of things. And isolation is fine. I think I'm very okay with being alone, but I don't think that I should always be alone with my phone in my hand. I could be alone doing other things as well.

Starting point is 02:05:17 But the community feel is important to me as well, because I remember even, you know, Guinea was eye-opening for me. But back in college, my favorite part of college was living in an apartment with friends who, at the end of the day, you sit on the couch and you shoot the shit, you know, about your day. It's just like the most fun time of your day. And thinking back to college, that was one of my favorite parts of the experience. So that community feel will always be something that I'm striving for. And right now, again, it's a hard time to strive for that and coronavirus. But in the future, I always hope to have some sort of community in my life of friends and family and

Starting point is 02:05:52 neighbors and strangers and, you know, people that I live around and just, you know, something along those lines. It's one of the gifts you get from an experience like that because you, that's what you relied on, like from the beginning where you just had to make noises or look at each other all the way to forming these relationships and i mean by the end obviously you're you're speaking french you're at least communicating somewhat in in susu is that what the language was called too um and you're close with, with your host family. And we talked about how sad that was to leave and how shotgun quick it was, obviously. But what, was there like a feeling besides the chaos at the end with coronavirus, like before that, was there a feeling like when you were just sitting down to have dinner with these people or, you know, waking up and saying, well, what are we going to do today on a Saturday or something like that? Was there a feeling where it's like, oh, this is just so natural and I love this and actually, I'll take it another level. If I had to be here into perpetuity for a while, I feel all right about that.

Starting point is 02:06:57 Yes, there were moments of that. There were definitely moments where there would be a holiday and I'd wake up and I'd be a part of the festivities wherever and I felt like, wow, like I'm starting to belong a little bit here, which was like the best feeling that I've had. And, you know, maybe ever was just like feeling like you belong to somewhere where you, you truly stick out, you know, but there were always moments that brought me back, you know, language barriers, cultural barriers that would be like, oh, okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, you know, fully fully ever 100% fit in here. So that was always pushing me to, not to challenge that, I guess, but to kind of sit in that and be like, I do belong to an extent and they are including me in a lot of these activities.

Starting point is 02:07:39 But at the same time, I think that they always think that I'm also coming from the outside. So I don't know. It's really hard to tell. But the connections that we made made it feel like I was part of their, you know, their family as well sometimes. So it was a lot of back and forth, a lot of in my head about it a little bit. But being able to connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime is just the most amazing feeling. Because that's, in my opinion, the reason that we, you know, inhabit this planet. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:08:14 Well, speaking of the outside, I know we hinted at this earlier, but you are also a white guy in a country that has literally no white people. Was there – I mean, what was that like? I had talked to you once, and you said that sometimes when you go into town, you're like, it's weird. You're like a celebrity. But is it parallel to that? Or is it more just like you have the attention like, oh, wow, he's different versus like, oh, wow, he's famous? I think in my opinion, it's pretty parallel to being a celebrity because not only would people greet you, they would try and stop you and want you to come over to talk to their family or share a meal with them or take a picture with you or something like that. So it really did feel like that. And it was exhausting. And I truly feel like I never need to be famous in my life.

Starting point is 02:08:47 I think that I had that period, and that's great, but it was exhausting. And it was like it kind of hindered me from sometimes going outside or going to the market, or sometimes I just didn't feel like having that attention, so I just wouldn't leave. But to your point about being a white person in a community of black people, I think it might have even been more challenging, probably definitely more challenging for volunteers who were minorities, because they are going into these communities as a non-white volunteer, getting comments like, wait, are you actually American? Or where are you really from

Starting point is 02:09:20 instead of are you American? I went to the market with many of volunteers who were minorities and got those comments. And I just was sitting there like, this must be really, really hard to bear when you're alone at your site, let alone, you know, with your, with other volunteers who are experiencing the same thing. But yeah, for me, it was tough, but I didn't have it the worst by far. Yeah. And it's also, I mean, it gives you a perspective on things too, because then you can come back to America and you can be in anonymity again, you know? And there is, like, if you think about famous people and stuff, they're easy to make fun of and all that.

Starting point is 02:10:01 And sometimes they do ridiculous things. But there's an aspect to which when everything you do is followed and tracked and photographed and escape it exactly and i you have an understanding of that from the sense that like what that can do to your mental and and how you know sometimes you just want to be able to say you know what i'd like to blend in today and you can't really do that so you were it's amazing to me because you live through that and again it's not like you're doing that as a famous person and with all the riches and the whole big ball of life and whatever you're there you're doing work like like you're you're you're putting the work in every day and you're also trying to like change long-standing norms in

Starting point is 02:10:42 some cases that aren't positive so So, there's like this psychological aspect and you're also dealing with the fact that, you know, you can only control what you can control and you have a limited amount of time to do it. So, balancing all these things and then accomplishing what you did is, it's a pretty amazing thing. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I agree that that was something I was looking forward to coming back was anonymity. I can never say that. But something I will miss is how friendly people were.

Starting point is 02:11:10 You know, me out on the street, everyone's saying hello. You know, here you walk down the street and it's like maybe a head nod, maybe nothing, maybe no eye contact is awkward. It's socially uncomfortable. I don't know. But that's something that I think I'll miss for sure. But we'll see. Because it was like even traveling when I was in, you know, you get in a taxi to go somewhere. You get in a taxi with five strangers.

Starting point is 02:11:30 You're not alone in that taxi. You're sharing a car. You get in the car. Every single person in the car greets you. Like what a nice thing to be a part. That's something that I will forever miss. Yeah. And it's also like extreme right now as far as like the adjustment and harder because, I mean, let's just call it what it is.

Starting point is 02:11:48 A, as you pointed out, we're not seeing a ton of people just because of COVID already. And B, when we do, you know, you're going into places where people are masked up and stuff, which is, that's got to be a shocking departure. Because you and I both know reading the entire face is like the way to understand communication and connection and we already struggled with that in this country we already don't do enough of that we already kind of keep our heads down when we walk by people and shit and you're coming from a place where everyone stops and greets you and you greet them and there's like this custom and there's this reality of like oh this is what you're feeling right now this is what i'm feeling you know and then you come to a place where it's like we already aren't

Starting point is 02:12:29 like that and now we're really not like that and has i mean did that make any kind of transition back harder i mean i don't know if i could say if it made it harder um because i think everyone's probably dealing with that right now like everyone needs you know a friend in their life right now and walking down the street you're not going to make one right now because nobody wants to interact with a stranger. But yeah, it probably would have been slightly easier had I been able to come home. And even if it wasn't strangers, but see, you know, my friends and family immediately. Or there's some people I still haven't seen since I've been home who I feel I'm close with, you know what I mean? So, um, it's been weird and it hasn't made it

Starting point is 02:13:08 easier, but I always, you know, take a step back and think everyone's, everyone's having a hard right now. You know what I mean? Everyone's having a tough time. So I'm not, I'm not special in any way, you know? Is there anything that if you went back to do this all over again, you would want to do way differently? And the other question is, is this something that what you expected going in, you came out of it with everything you expected and more? I would not do anything differently. Definitely not.

Starting point is 02:13:42 I don't think I've ever thought that about something in my life up to this point. I just think there's no point in, you know, reminiscing on that kind of thing. So brief answer to that question. But in terms of, I think I gained things that I, like, different things going into the experience, like, what I kind of assumed I'd get out of it other than, like, this, like, selfless philanthropic, like, oh, giving, you know, type feeling. I don't know. But I think I just gained a lot of self-awareness and cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity. A lot of things along those lines that I gained out of it that I bring back here. And I think I'm very sensitive to that stuff now. What do you mean by cultural sensitivity? Just because it can mean a few different things. Yeah. Things that relate to somebody's, I guess, background and how they might

Starting point is 02:14:38 portray or see something that we're talking about or doing differently. And just being able to take a step back and be like, they're not wrong for thinking that way they're just thinking differently kind of just a different mindset i guess is what i'm talking about yeah so it's like you have a very special level of empathy that you don't think that you know you couldn't have had if you just like stayed here and gotten a job that's a great way to put it yeah yeah well this is just a podcast but there is no doubt in my mind that people listening to this can understand that your worldview is just entirely different from what people like me and the average listener is going to understand. And what I envy

Starting point is 02:15:17 so much about it is that you are going to be able to live the rest of your life, not just with this experience that you got that you spoke about, but with how this experience shaped how you view other people. And it's a very, very special thing because even if we have a lot of different cultures in this country, when you go to a foreign place, you know, it's one thing to go study abroad or do something like that. There's things you can pick up there. But when you actually live in a very, very different place where there is no English, there is an entirely different structure and way of doing things as like what bothers you and what doesn't and what actually seems great to you and what might not and where the simple things in life actually matter and where the more complex things don't. And I think it's a really beautiful thing. And I hope we got that across today. This was definitely, for me, this was a very difficult podcast to do because there are just so many different things that we could have talked about. And we could probably do a whole 10 episode arc on this. But I hope that, you know, you felt like you were able to get enough out there and that

Starting point is 02:16:41 the people listening feel like they can understand that it's a pretty special thing you just did. Yeah, no, I appreciate you saying all those things. And I hope I was a little bit articulate because when we talk about this stuff, my mind goes in so many different directions, but it's way easier to talk about when somebody's posing questions rather than like, someone comes up to me and is like, how was it? I'm like, what the hell do you want me to answer? How am I going to answer that? So, you know, this platform and the way that you're posing your questions has been super helpful. And I'm always excited to share about my experience with everyone. So appreciate the opportunity to do that. Well, thanks for coming in, man. I really appreciate it. And I'll be back at some point. I know, you know, you have a lot of thoughts on things that are going on in general. And,

Starting point is 02:17:20 you know, you have a perspective on what happens here in america related to literally in some ways right now related to things you saw in guinea so i would love to pick your brain on that more and also like some of your some of the intellectual nature that you picked up like you talked about not really reading much before you went there and then doing that when you were there and i know we didn't talk as much about that today, but I think some of your perspectives on, on, I think some of your perspectives on how you learn things and how you then apply them are wise beyond your years. That's the best way for me to put it. So I really appreciate you coming on and we'll do it again soon. That's generous. Looking forward to it. Thanks. All right. Well, you know what it is.

Starting point is 02:18:06 Give it a thought. Get back to me. Thanks, Adam.

CODACE Plant Stand

Julian Dorey Podcast - #24 - Adam Herman

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CODACE Plant Stand

Julian Dorey Podcast - #24 - Adam Herman

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.