Guinea 2022 Day 5 - First Day of Training
Wednesday, July 27th, Day 5, Today - Just after nine we began our first day of training here. Normally I'm accompanied by one "program assistant," but because I'm the first since covid I'm accompanied by the entire staff right now -- two program assistants, two drivers (the Organization's drivers themselves aren't "just drivers" but are long term employees who are very involved and sometimes fill in as program assistants), and the country director himself.
I have about 25 trainees this time, bout half of what each of the trainings in Ghana was. I look forward to being able to have more of a back and forth, with the larger groups its hard to leave it open for questions for too long before you start getting questions on tangents and lots of chatter amongst themselves.
I always begin by having all the participants introduce themselves and usually say how many hives they have. On this occasion everyone was very vague about this, despite my interjecting several times to ask them to please tell me how many hives they have or what their experience or involvement is. They'd say which organization they belonged to and sometimes mention how many hives the organization itself had.
Now I've taught beekeeping three times before in Guinea, but most recently was six years ago. I began my first of the three projects in Ghana using my old Guinea presentation, but as it begins with very basic bee biology, I got the feeling some of the more experienced people in the audience were getting very restless with it. So I adapted and by the end had an entirely new totally reformatted presentation which actually began with common problems found with topbar hives, and the essential bee biology stuff is tucked away with some more advanced things. I was actually really proud of this presentation, it came together very nicely.
Anyway so I started to give the presentation I'd perfected in Ghana here and... even the initial overview slides were too much for them -- a passing reference to both "uncapped honey" and "brood" both required thorough explanations. I quickly realized I needed to start not with "common problems with topbar hives" but "so there's three castes of honeybee."
But worst of all, just about the time I realized I needed to retreat back to my original old presentation, and was trying to surrepticiously make the transition without it being obvious, is when the USAID people showed up. USAID funds most of these projects. Visiting with USAID at the US Embassy is often on the agenda but has only happened once, every other time it's cancelled at the last minute as they're busy. So them actually showing up at a training project is a Has Never Happened Before event for me. Again, probably because its the first post-covid project.
The two women from USAID were wearing local clothing, and didn't look ethnically out of place, and weren't immediately introduced to me, so I didn't even know they were there. And in actual fact it was one of them who asked "what is brood" (in a perfectly American accent, but that's not totally unheard of as a lot of people seem to travel back and forth) so they might have inadvertently contributed to my feeling the people needed the basics, though I think they really did. But anyway so here I was trying to present a presentation that was over my audiences head and then trying to mid presentation switch presentations whilst the whole Organization's staff AND two USAID observers were watching me ::facepalm::.
All that being said, I don't think anyone really noticed. Other than Ousman asking "wait did I translate that slide" ("no I just made it"). Oh also he had translated my presentation into French but the translated version was only on his laptop and I had pushed for hooking my own laptop up so I could access all my numerous materials on my laptop, which turned out to be a really good decision considering.
Presently the local prefect (mayor) arrived, in a blue military style uniform with "gendarme" emblazoned on it. He was introduced as colonel something-or-other. He read a short speech handed to him by an aid, then the USAID woman made a speech (in English), and Ibro our country director might have made a speech too, I already forget, and then we were done with opening ceremonies. We went outside to take a few pictures together (the leaders). The USAID woman had seemed a bit dour but she explained apologetically she had a bad headache and actually seemed nice. She said we should definitely come by the USAID office in Conakry when we're done.
Then we got back to the training and the rest went very well. We talked about the very basics of "there's three castes of bee" and the jobs bees do in the hive and all that, following basically my old Guinea presentation but I inserted a lot of new slides completely on the fly. Finished training around 13:30. Lunch rice with a sauce with fish in it.
I spent most of the afternoon working on my computer at what is already my usual spot here at the hotel restaurant. In the later afternoon I went on a walkabout around town with Ousman and (Kamera?) the driver. Just outside our hotel there is questionmark a wedding? or something? going on, hordes of predominantly teenagers have been showing up there and there's loud (but not bad, traditional sounding) music. We walked up through the university. It's a vet-med university and had a nice statue of a fish and of some horses and outside the horticulture building a statue of a fruit salad. Its at the top of a hill and the clouds/mist were moving in to town so it looked quite nice around. A bunch of students were playing soccer just behind the back gate of the university where we exited. Walking around town we shortly passed some men playing a version of that game where you toss balls trying to get close to existing balls. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves in this town. Walked through a large park full of grand old trees, the mist moving amongst them. Then crossing the street, passing between some market stalls, we found ourselves in what appeared to be like a pine forest, of once again lofty trees with the canopy high above and in the open space among the trunks... young people playing soccer.
While walking I asked Ousman how old he was. He said he's 32 but his official records all say he's 38. It was common to misreport children's ages here to the government for a long time for... reasons which aren't clear to me but somehow related to taxes and sometimes evading going to school as far as I can gather. I think in his case his parents wanted to get him a passport when he was younger than should have been eligible or something, but now he's stuck with that incorrect age for all official purposes.
I think I neglected to mention about yesterday during the drive, it's ubiquitos to see red xs painted on the front walls of houses beside the road. I assumed these were walls that need to be knocked down for road expansion but on seeing some that didn't seem to be in the way of road expansion I asked Ousman, and he said yes they're walls that need to be knocked down. "These people, they should know they can't build their walls there, but these people are very wicked."
On the subject of thigns I forgot to mention yesterday, there were baskets and baskets of tomatoes for sale in teh villages around this town. Ousman mentioned that they grow many tomatoes here but they have a major problem in that tomatoes are too fragile to ship on the bumpy roads here, and don't last long especially without generally available refrigeration, so a great deal of their tomato crop is lost to spoilage.
And then we returned to the hotel, I'm back in my usual spot. It's 20:04 and I'm rather wondering when we'll have dinner, they definitely tend to eat late here.
I plan to update this before bed, about dinner, so if this line is still here check back in a two or three hours. Just in case I have something exciting to say about dinner ;) or to answer the question of just how late will it come???
***EDIT TO ADD: so the driver finally came to fetch me for dinner at 20:30 at the host's house. Once again there was rice with cassava-leaf sauce, but also a salad with avocados, and some delicious onion fritters and chicken wings of which the meat was actually delicious and soft not the rubber chewiness I've come to expect in Africa. I'm in a state of amazement how they managed this. And those onion fritters, yum! Definitely some more cosmopolitan cuisine in their house. I had been asked if I wanted to continue to go to their place for dinner or just eat at some local restaurant and I had opted for the former because it seemed more social, and I'm glad I did! (regarding the salad, those who know me will know I loathe avocados but after already avoiding the fish earlier in the day and the tomatoes that were also in the salad I felt a bit like I'd look a bit too picky if I was seen to be clearly avoiding the avocados :X )