Guinea 2023 — Development Work in West Africa (Part II)
Walking the precarious tightrope between playing it safe and getting in too deep.
“Come on Kris, I don’t think we can cross it” my interpreter is beckoning me down from the precarious ladder of damp rotten wood. “the guide says there’s another way”
I look longingly at the shockingly flimsy bridge. While I paused to take pictures three of my local colleagues had already climbed the ladder and were hesitantly inching along the very beginning of the bridge, seemingly about to turn back at any moment.
Below the bridge, the broad Kokoulo River stretches about 60 meters in width. Placid here, but only about 100 meters further down river it goes over the 250 meter (818 foot) Kambadaga Falls.
I’ve always liked climbing things. Trees when I was young, more recently in 2010 I worked for 7 months on a traditionally rigged sailing ship and loved climbing around in the rigging. Crossing an Indiana Jones style extremely questionable-looking bridge might not be on everyone’s to-do list but it was definitely on mine (I joke that Indiana Jones is my role model).
Unfortunately with three colleagues traffic-jammed in front of me hesitantly trying to decide if they’d make the attempt I decided it would be best to wait until they’d either done it or not. So I followed my other colleagues along the side of the river.
Just a bit further down we reached the area just above the waterfall. Water levels were actually very low and one could walk right across bare rock all the way across the river here, the water flowing through some narrow channels that could easily and safely be hopped across.
We took some pictures as close to the edge as we dared, while meanwhile as I glanced back at the bridge I could see my friends there slowly making their way across.
Most of my colleagues were willing to get closer to the edge than I — I found I have a strong aversion to be within tripping distance of a 250-meter drop.
As we started to head back, everyone towards the non-bridge route, I headed resolutely to where my bridge-crossing colleagues had come down from the far side of the bridge after crossing it. More than one of my colleagues called on me to not do it, but, normally well-behaved and agreeable I ignored them and continued on. No one followed or tried to stop me beyond telling me sincerely not to attempt it.
I found the climb to the start of the bridge here to be more like a ladder, with some rungs entirely missing, and others rotten and slippery. Is this in fact a bad idea? I wondered to myself. It will be mildly embarrassing if I end up unable to cross the bridge after all!
But I started along and was able to make swift progress. I may not be comfortable standing beside a cliff but so long as I have something to hold on to I am fine walking along a narrow cable. I suppose there are different kinds of fear of heights — I don’t trust my legs and feet alone near a cliff but I’m fine if I can hold something — on sailing ships, I’m comfortable standing on a rope swinging through the sky 54 meters above the roiling sea because I have something to hold on to.
At one point, as you can see in the above picture, the flimsy metal plates were missing entirely, but I just walked on the bare cables.
Returning to where we parked, there were three Spaniards camped out on a year-plus trek to South Africa.
“How about that bridge??” I asked them.
“Can you believe we saw people cross it yesterday!” they informed me.
“What maniacs!” I exclaimed.
From there we had a long drive back out of the bush, during which we only got mildly lost, and of particular note saw a troupe of monkeys (dog sized, dry-grass colored) scampering away into the trees at our approach. Once we were on the main road we had another few hours to drive to our destination, during which the sun set and rain began to fall in torrents, reducing visibility at times to mere meters as we plugged along as safely as we could. At one point ominously passing a memorial to two Peace Corps volunteers who had died in a car crash. Finally, around 8 pm we arrived at our destination in the town of Dalaba.
Dalaba is a high altitude town, exactly how high every source on the internet seems to give a different number, but it's a place you’re more likely to want a jacket than suffer from the stereotypical African heat. In the mornings fog sits thick throughout the town and by early evening it looks like clouds are actually blowing down the street — this isn’t some form of pollution, I think it might be literal clouds.
Dalaba was a resort destination for the French colonials during that era so now there are some old ruins about town and mouldering dilapidated colonial buildings.
It was in this town that my project was based last year (2022). On this occasion, we’d just spend two days of follow-up with the local beekeepers seeing how they’d implemented what they’d been taught, and troubleshooting any issues that have arisen.
To this end, we drove out of town to the area where the local cooperative has its hives and met up on a flat cleared space beside the road. I’d been seeing these spaces all around the country, typically just beside the road there’d be a clean area delineated by a curb of stones. There’d be trees growing from inside the area, giving it shade, but it would be free from weeds and small shrubs. It would almost have the appearance of a sacred grove really, and sometimes I’d see people waiting there, and sometimes I’d see people putting out their prayer rugs. So I asked someone to tell me about the spaces.
They’re called “garu,” I was told, and they are just what they look like, meeting places set up beside the road where people might often be waiting (ie the nearest place to the main road from where a village might be somewhere off the road) or meeting or resting. In a country where travelers will be wanting to stop and pray at the appropriate times during the day, it provides a flat shady place to do so. Often water is left at these places for travelers.
Normally I’m mostly lecturing indoors somewhere, with my PowerPoint, and then we’re going out into the field. On this occasion we just had kind of an unstructured discussion the whole of the first day, sitting on plastic chairs on the garu, a pleasant breeze blowing through, some empty hives as a visual aid.
The second day we suited up and did some beekeeping. There is no substitute for hands-on training and when all is said and done I just love getting amongst it.
A large shrub with round purple fruits was pointed out to me as edible, so I tried one. It wasn’t bad but wasn’t the World’s Next Top Fruit. As with most undomesticated bush fruit, I find it only had a thin layer of pulp between the large seeds and outer skin. Was unsuccessful in using the PictureThis plant identification app to identify it.
That very day when we finished our beekeeping we headed back down the one main highway towards the capital (Conakry). There’s been unrest in the capital nearly every day against the military dictatorship, and 7 people had been killed during protests just a week earlier. So the plan was to arrive at the last town (Kindia) before the capital this evening and then get up very early and try to get into town before the protests.
We started at 6:30 am and I was at my hotel in the city by 11. Now if I was prudent you would think after going to all this trouble to avoid unrest in the city I would then stay in. But other than a fear of tripping off cliffs I am perhaps not very prudent (I think I can thank Boko Haram for giving me my start in development, no one else was willing to go to Nigeria in 2012, but I was like sure why not). So within an hour of checking in, after making use of the nice shower and bathroom (first toilet seat I’d seen since leaving the capital two weeks earlier!), I was out the door again.
As I had discovered on arrival and mentioned in the previous story, my friends from the village of Doumba seem to have their own little colony in the capital, a compound in which all the young people from the village who are going to school or working in the capital live. My friends there had once again invited me over. In fact, my friend sent the very motortaxi which I had bought her to pick me up.
I should specify here that I am not one to flash money around, and not one to always be reaching in my pocket for expensive gifts to anyone who asks. I essentially never give out bits of cash to impoverished-looking people around me, something I see some other volunteers do, and have hardened my heart to a wide variety of stories of hard times. Maybe I seem cold-hearted for that, but I’m exposed to too much of it too often. But one of my friends, a young lady from Doumba, her family was threatening to cut her off financially if she didn’t marry a man she didn’t like (and she had a boyfriend she loved already!). I knew and trusted her, she proposed to me that if I funded her purchase of a motor taxi, which she’d allow a driver to use in exchange for weekly payments back to herself, it would allow her to support herself without her family. A bit of a hopeless romantic myself, I liked the opportunity to strike a victory for true love so I did so and everything worked out great. In fact, her family reconciled with her and there are now no hard feelings from her family.
At the compound, I just hung out all day with everyone. The hotel would have been more “comfortable,” but it's no comparison to being around the village community and sense of family.
To veer suddenly from the sentimental to incidental, they introduced me to a locally made juice that I found delicious and want to mention. Called bissap, it’s related to hibiscus, the reddish-purple juice tastes like a cross between blackcurrant, grape and cranberries, and I found it absolutely delicious.
The next day I flew to Ghana, where I’ve been ever since (ten days now). Look for more updates here. Daily “field reports” on livejournal (but frequently “friends-only” so you should get a livejournal.
