Guinea 2023 — Development Work in West Africa (Part I)
Finding the familiar and comforting in a turbulent land
There’s a moment before catastrophe, where everything hangs in the balance, and slowly, inexorably, you see that balance falling the wrong way. This was quite literally the case as the large heavy beehive I had just put my hand on to open, immediately began to lean away from me like a capsizing ship. Desperately I tried to grab it but it had too much weight to stop as it lurched off its precarious stand and crashed to the ground amid the shrieks of the many bystanders.
It had taken thirty hours to fly from Melbourne, Australia, to Conakry, Guinea, and this was remarkably direct — it used to be I’d have to fly Melbourne-Dubai-Accra-Lomé-Conakry but now there are direct flights Dubai-Conakry. And by direct I mean we didn’t land anywhere in between but it was quite the circuitous route, apparently trying to avoid flying over Sudan, Libya or Mali we basically went around the top of Africa rather than straight through the continent.
Guinea is a beautiful country, lush, green and undeveloped. I come here to teach beekeeping, increasing the capacities of regional beekeeping cooperatives so they can reach the point where they have their own momentum to increase development in this particularly promising industry. This is my fifth visit to the country since 2014. I love the peaceful life of the rural villages, but to get there, one must first come through the capital.
In past years I’ve been menaced and extorted for bribes by swaggering soldiers before even getting out of the airport in this country which has only ever had one democratic election (2010, Alpha Condé elected, now under house arrest), but the pendulum this year seems to have swung the other way and I breezed through an airport peopled by officials who weren’t overly officious and no loitering soldiers.
Emerging from the airport, the capital, Conakry, is immediately a bit confronting. There appear to be shanties just across the busy street from the airport, one steps over smelly open drains full of trash. The air is hot, humid and smells of warm garbage. My ride, the Organization’s white Landcruiser, picks me up from the airport’s claustrophobic little parking lot and we wend our way through the city. I always marvel at the dystopian cityscape of mud and potholes and trash, but I’ve noted there are a lot of cities I’d feel less safe in. I’m not about to turn my back on my valuables in Conakry but one isn’t in constant fear someone’s going to smash and grab through the window as one is in some major cities of the world. One is in greater danger, I think, from the police in Conakry than criminal elements …
And then we arrive at my hotel, what a contrast to the outside city! The hotel the Organization has been putting me in lately is clean and elegant, a refuge from its surroundings.
Usually, I’m in the capital for two or three days before and/or after the project, during which time I’m mostly holed up in the hotel, and I’m not one to enjoy being holed up in a hotel. This time I discovered something novel.
One of my friends from the village of Doumba where I’d done my 2015 project invited me over to her family’s place in the city. She met me outside my hotel and we traveled across the chaotic city by motor-taxi and auto-rickshaw. Eventually, she led me down a narrow alley, but there, opening to the street on the far side, was a big gate leading into a nice clean compound. Within, I found that nearly all the youth from the village of Doumba who are attending school in the capital all seem to live together, presided over by their siblings who are young adults either attending college or working in the city. Here I spent several hours which I enjoyed much more than being alone in the hotel as siblings and cousins helped each other with homework, passed the time, and climbed on each other. It wasn’t quite the serene shade of mango trees and picturesque huts of the village but it was a bit of that community dynamic I love.
The next day (Day 3) we drove out of the city. As usual, we got started early to try to beat the traffic, though it still took an hour to get out of the slow stop-and-go crawl of the city. Outside the city though the highway was smooth and newly renovated and we cruised along up green valleys, past palm trees, steaming huts, and mouldering colonial buildings for a few hours until we reached the town of Mamou. Here we (my translator Bara, driver Bailo and I) met up with the Organization’s country director (Ibro) a photographer from Alaska who was here to document the Organization’s activities, and their driver.
Day 4 we were at the forestry school outside Mamou where the main training of this project would take place. There were the usual opening speeches with appearances from local notables, then some time spent on administrava, and then finally I was in with the nuts and bolts lecturing on the basics of beekeeping as foundation for the rest of the training. But the lecture isn’t ever the exciting part, and finally, in the afternoon it was time to actually don suits and do some beekeeping!
George, the photographer, shortish, bearded and soft-spoken, was asking if we could sort of act out beekeeping around an empty beehive “I can get better pictures that way,” he explained. I gamely assured him that not to worry, I had often gotten great pictures of people working active beehives, it’s not hard. But as he continued to insist an empty one would be better I realized he was apprehensive about the bees — a not unreasonable feeling for a non-beekeeper.
I tried to communicate the request for an unoccupied hive to whoever was about to lead us to the hives, but it was a game of telephone from George through me, Bara, and an unknown number of other people as I didn’t even know who was making that decision. Enthusiasm had swept up the group as they suited up and fired up the smoker, and then we were off like a swarm of bees across the small campus, behind a building, around a fence, along the top of the hill between the chainlink fence and shrubby forest, until we came to a beehive. It was occupied. I tried one last time to ask if there was an unoccupied one, but got no answer.
“I’m sorry, I tried!” I said to George. He had a suit on, but had declined the offer of my gloves, reasoning I’d need them more. We had about half a dozen suited-up people and maybe twenty more unprotected onlookers standing a short distance away.
And so I smoked the hive, and then reached forward to put my hive tool under the lid and open it and … that’s when I saw the whole thing immediately shift, totter, and in slow motion fall to the ground. There was a general shrieking of onlookers and a scramble to get away. And then there were just four of us, all suited. Two women trainees, one of the school’s instructors, and myself.
The hive incidentally was full of honey, which had detached itself from the topbars on falling, so we harvested that all into the bucket we had at hand, and put the hive back on the stand, careful to put it back more securely than it had been. I was particularly impressed with the women, not experienced beekeepers, who kept calm and collected throughout the whole incident. Even wearing the bee suits, the sound of angry bees can be psychologically terrifying, and other people’s panic can be contagious, but they stuck through proactively helping me straighten the topbars like pros.
George and the others did hang around long enough to talk to me after, through the window of their car, explaining that they had to leave and go somewhere else. I could have sworn they were originally intending to spend two days with us.
But the most ironic thing is then the next afternoon I got all our trainees suited up, the smokers going, and only then was I informed they didn’t have a second occupied hive. So the next day we did all go look at an empty hive. And for the rest of the week this group was unable to find any occupied hives, which was a bit frustrating for me but one must expect problems.
After a week in Mamou we moved up to the town of Labé a few hours further into the interior. From here on the Saturday I visited the first village I had had a project in in Guinea, in 2014.
In 2014 it had been a peaceful little village of mostly small cottages, a few thatched huts, no electricity. They produced 1–2 tons of mediocre quality honey at the time, and after training Bara and I would sit talking for the rest of the afternoon as the village kids played around us, and then adults came in from their daily work to join the conversation. As darkness set in Bara would be meticulously pouring tea from the kettle into a jug and back again for seemingly hours, the only light the coals under the kettle and flickering lightning on the horizon.
Now they produce 7–10 tons of high-quality honey a year, which they put in professional-looking bottles and successfully sell to great demand. The houses are all well-roofed and painted, and all have power now. Personally, I miss sitting under the starlight talking compared to indoors under the electric lights, but it’s still so nice to see the adults I remember, and the kids all grown up. I’d returned before, but with a different translator, this time I was with Bara who had been the one with me there before so it was really like old times.
The next day we began training in a new village, including actually beekeeping on occupied hives, and then in the later afternoon swung past the village of Doumba where I’d been in 2015. To get there from the current site we took rather a shortcut across the meandering bush tracks so that was an entertaining trek across the hinterlands — grasslands and small isolated villages or farm homesteads, patches of scrubby forest, and then finally we were approaching the familiar surrounds of Doumba, and its gorgeous huts rising above the surrounding wall.
Sanpiring will always have a special place in my heart as my first village, but I think I have to admit Doumba is objectively more idyllic. While Sanpiring seems to have done away with huts as soon as they could afford to, Doumba maintains several absolutely gorgeous large huts. Add to this plenty of trees and some beautiful mossy walking paths bounded by rustic fences that crisscross the village and its a mystical little place. And I was so blessed as to have the opportunity to spend two weeks here in 2015!
This was my first time returning to Doumba since then so the village notables gathered rather formally to welcome me back, the mayor even putting on a mayoral sash. There was a bit of speechifying, and then when it came my turn to talk, I expressed in a few sentences my genuine appreciation of them and their village and gladness to be back, but that only occupied less than a minute of talking time compared to the several minutes each of them had talked. I may be a writer but I’m not good at things like really drawing out a hospitable greeting … but no worries, because my ever skillful translator Bara easily spun out my brief remarks to a more appropriate length with some innocent elaboration.
That evening after getting back to our hotel Bara said to me “let’s go sit in the restaurant for a bit” and I’m very happy to go along with whatever so sure why not. I was mildly surprised he didn’t go on to order anything, I’d assumed maybe he was after tea, but I really didn’t think much of it, and occupied myself with catching up with things on my phone.
And then I looked up to see the beekeeping federation staff who had thought our driver had gone half an hour ago had all come in.
“Oh, they’re still here?” I said to Bara in surprise. And to my further surprise, my guileless innocence, I didn’t put it all together until they placed a large box on the table and opened it to reveal a cake. It was, after all, my 41st birthday, and they were here to sing happy birthday and present me with cake!
I don’t think I’ve ever had a surprise birthday before, and my previous, 40th birthday, I had “celebrated” by having pancakes for dinner alone, so I was really touched. What a great birthday!
That was the trip up to May 14th, stand by for future updates (will I cross the river on this extremely dodgy bridge??) Presently in Ghana, the adventures continue!
