Kankan Christmas!

Here are a few photos from the wonderfully festive Christmas celebration at the Kankan house. Stacy and Carolina made the fireplace, and then Carolina and I made the Christmas tree, with a little help from pretty much everyone. 

I'm not sure why my hand is so shiny here - maybe glue? Or oil from baking cinnamon rolls? In any case, our Christmas Eve feast was magnificent, the gift exchange was fun (I got a really cool wallet from Michelle!), and, much to my delight, when we woke up Christmas morning all the stockings were filled with little candies and treat and nice things.  

 

Kankan Christmas, 2013

Most people are back from the holiday break, so the office power, water and internet are more or less back to normal, which is really, really, really nice. So, I'm off to read some e-mails and upload some more photos. Happy New Year! 

Upgrades & Updates

While I was settling in to my rooms I pondered various keep-everything-off-the-floor strategies. Oatmeal-can furniture legs didn't seem appropriate (or tall enough) and commissioning tables just to hold up my suitcases isn't included in my living allowance. Then I realized that there was a whole fleet of chairs in the conference room and under the stairs, and that solved my little problem quite nicely. 

Chairs are much classier than old Quaker tins. 

Also I put up some photos and postcards and color swatches cut from the Pantone stationary set that I bought on my way out of California but have not yet used for any actual letter-writing. Maybe this weekend will be the weekend that I find the post office and send some test letters to see if the U.S. has started accepting mail from Guinea yet. 

In other news, I am not sick (knock on wood) and had a nice time over the weekend, reading, doing yoga podcasts, and checking things off my to-do list. Ramadan kind of puts a damper on things en ville, but the Catholic Mission was open for business, and I met up with a few of my PCV neighbors for dinner there. I had loko, which is fried plantains, and a “hamburger”, which turned out to be a hard-boiled egg wrapped in spiced ground meat (beef?) and thoroughly grilled, like a barbequed Scotch egg.  We were joined by another American I met last month in Conakry; she's doing a three-month internship in Guinea, working on the same maternal health- and family planning-focused MCHIP project as I am, and came through Kankan during a field visit trip. It was nice to talk shop and good to hear about what she's been seeing at health structures around the country, as unpleasant as some of those things are.

Things are starting to pick up around the office, which is nice. I've got documents to read, people to meet, Peace Corps reporting files to fill out, and things to prepare for upcoming meetings and conferences. Office life is about as exciting here as it is anywhere, but wondering how long the power will stay on keeps things interesting.