A Day in the Neighborhood

I'm starting to get to know Kankan, and other day went for a walk in the Airport Neighborhood, the part of town in which, as the name suggests, there used to be an airport of sorts.

It had rained the previous evening, so there were lots of puddles and muddy places, but it was pretty easy to get around without too much trouble. (Today is a different story; it poured half the morning and the street outside is basically a long, shallow pond at the moment.)

The other day, though, there were goats and a fair amount of kids out and about. I stopped by the Peace Corps office and took some photos from the rooftop, looking out on the neighboring lots and trees.

Because of all the rain most streets have these treacherous giant-gutter-drainage-canal-type things along the side of the roadway. Some are relatively small and narrow, like this one, and some are intimidatingly wide and deep. Sometimes there are little cement walkways, but more often people make little bridges out of planks or metal sheeting or whatever is on hand, and some of these improvised bridges are more stable and sturdy than others.

Roadside Drainage Canal-Ditches

Don't let the power lines fool you - municipal electricity is rare and unreliable. Most people or organizations who have the resources own generators and/or solar panels, and everyone else uses candles, flashlights, battery-powered lamps after dark. There are a few solar-powered streetlights downtown, and they seem to be working pretty well.

The area around Kankan is strikingly flat. It's less humid than the cast, though, and I like the red-dirt-green-grass color scheme of the rainy season. It will be interesting to see how things look in a few months.

Peanut Field by the Old Airport

The Cost of Living

It can take a little while to get a handle on how much money is worth and how much things should cost in a new place. I'm starting to get the hang of shopping here, but when I'm asking about prices at the market I'm still constantly converting Guinean francs (GNF) to Senegalese francs (XOF) and American dollars (USD), trying to infuse the numbers with some sort of sense of value. 

There are the official conversion rates... 

1.00 US dollar = 6,908.58 Guinean francs = 504.68 Senegalese francs

...and then there's the actual purchasing power; 6,900 GNF goes a lot farther in Guinea than 1.00 USD does in America. 

Here are some things that I bought yesterday:

                                     

Five small yellow bananas: 2,500 GNF
They turned out to have an odd, mouth-drying, sour residual aftertaste. I think I'll go with the bigger, greener ones next time. 

                                        

Two pieces of fried sweet potato with spicy stuff: 1,000 GNF
Hot and crispy and delicious.

                                             

Two bags of peanuts: 1,000 GNF; four eggs: 6,000 GNF; two tomatoes: 2,000 GNF; three onions: 1,000 GNF
I thought the peanuts were roasted and salted but they turned out to be sugared. Oh, well.

Big and small sheet: 50,000 GNF; three place-mats and a dishtowel: 20,000 GNF

Generally, things seem to be significantly cheaper than in Senegal, but for the most part the things being sold are the same - rice, dried fish, Goodwill clothes piles, greenish-yellow oranges, phone credit, mangoes, bread, palm oil, etc. There are a lot more avocados for sale here, too, and popcorn and lots of fried banana patties, which I'd almost never seen in Senegal.