Ugly Ducks

While pets aren't really a thing here, people often do keep animals: mostly goats and sheep, chickens, and sometimes ducks. I see them waddling around the neighborhood, and I'm not sure what breed of ducks they are, but they are definitely not the sleek, adorable Mallards from Make Way for Ducklings. 

Despite spending all day hanging out in a trash-pile, these ones aren't really so bad, but some of the neighborhood ducks are really rough-looking - grimy feathers, feet caked in gutter-mud, misshapen wattles slowly taking over their faces. Poor little guys. It's sad to see a duck without a pond.

In other news, I managed to hook up a spare monitor from the Peace Corps office and am now starting to catch up on work stuff. Nothing spectacularly exciting, but it's nice to be busy again. 

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And also rabies.

I spend a not-insignificant amount of time thinking about all the many dangers of West Africa – various horrifying parasites, mango flies, car accidents, diarrhea, civil unrest, malaria, grotesque skin infections… and rabies.

I'm pretty sure that car accidents pose the most serious danger to Peace Corps Volunteers, and diarrhea is the only thing on that list that is pretty much guaranteed to make my life miserable (again) at some point. Still, each evening at dusk, as I watch a cloud of mid-sized bats that sweep out from wherever they shelter during the day, I wonder how many mosquitoes they eat and also if any of them are carrying rabies.

As luck would have it, yesterday RadioLab released a mini-episode about rabies, which was totally interesting: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2013/aug/13/rodney-versus-death/

Image courtesy of RadioLab & Wikimedia Commons

We have plenty of rabies in America, but if you are bitten by something that might be rabid in the U.S. (probably a bat) you can go to the hospital and get a series of (very expensive) preventative shots and you will almost certainly be completely fine. However, if you are infected and don’t get those shots before you start to feel symptoms, you will almost certainly die. Even if you're able to get (astronomically expensive and controversial) experimental treatments, the odds are very much against your survival. Basically, unless you have both world-class medical care and miraculous luck, rabies is a death sentence, and an excruciating one at that. 

According to Wikipedia, India has the world's highest rate of rabies in humans, followed by Vietnam and then Thailand. In Senegal (and also here in Guinea, I would guess) people periodically put out poisoned meat to kill off stray dogs, because they want to protect their chickens and sheep, because most people here don't have much affection for dogs, and because they know that dogs can carry rabies. Poisoning is neither humane nor pretty and I don't like that it happens, but people see that as their best option here. (I do like the tactics used to combat rabies in foxes in Western Europe, which involved baiting meat with an oral rabies vaccine and turned out to be quite successful, but that's a whole different context.) 

In any case, when it comes to rabies I am about as well-protected as a person can be. During my training in Senegal I received three rabies booster shots, and if I ever have the misfortune of being bitten by some spazzy, drooling animal, I will call Peace Corps, be rushed to a doctor, given a full round of preventative injections, and probably be just fine. 

I still wonder about the bats here, though. 

The Diamond Dog

"Here lies Chicago, the Diamond Dog."

This grave marker is on the side of the road near my house; I walk by it pretty much every time I walk over to the Peace Corps office. I don't know why it's there, just outside the wall of an upscale-but-relatively-ordinary-seeming family compound, and I like it because it is incongruous and sentimental, even though it must seem bizarre to a local population that doesn't generally keep pets. I imagine that enshrining a dog's bones is just written off as one of the many silly things that foreigners do because they are foreigners.

If you're interested in mining in Guinea, though, Patrick Radden Keefe wrote this piece for The New Yorker a couple weeks back, and it discusses mining, corruption and touches on some of Guinea's recent history and problems.