Labour Day Weekend

It's Monday of Labour Day weekend, and while my friends and colleagues at home are grieving the end of summer and the return to work and school, I sit here contemplating my life in dark Africa. As often happens on weekends, I wake up this morning with this gnawing reoccurring self-questionning thought of 'why the heck am I here ?' Perhaps this is a natural andropausal reaction when people find themselves sitting in the middle of no-where-Africa and succumb to the usual existentialistic self-doubt mood that guys my age experience all the time. Yeah right....

To help me along in my voyage to enlightenment, and to commemorate the six weeks that Madeleine and I have been away from our 'real' home, I have decided to do what most anal retentive people like myself do...make lists.

Six things I realize I took for granted in Vancouver:

1-) Whole wheat bagels

2-) Electricity 24 hours a day

3-) Save-On-Foods

4-) Port Moody Rec Centre

5-) Wallmart when I want to buy a coat hanger

6-) Colleagues at work who took their jobs seriously but did not take themselves too seriously (you know who you are...)

Six things I miss the most about living in Vancouver:

1-) Walking outside without sweating profusely after 3 minutes

2-) Sitting outside without sweating profusely after 3 minutes

3-) Driving in organized traffic

4-) Morning radio

5-) Buying stuff without the haggling

6-) My balcony, my house, my home, my kids

Six things I hate doing without but that I know will help me in the long run become a better person (I guess I've been reading a bit too many self-help books lately...)

1-) No paying via Interac or VISA. Everything is paid in cash here. One would risk getting a hernia carrying around those wads of bills and counting all the time. The picture above of Madeleine holding two wads of money...she is holding approximately 60$! (Yes, that is my foot on the upper left hand corner...don't ask). Good thing is you really get a good sense of the value of money; you think twice before buying anything knowing exactly how much money you have to make it to next pay day.

2-) Being idle on weekends. Not used to this, and as written in an earlier blog, this is something we need to learn from our African bros. Is it always necessary to do something all the time? Savour the moment...you have nothing to do, no internet to surf?... no TV to watch?..., no books to read?..., is there anything wrong with just sitting there and pondering?

3-) Molasses internet. No high speed or reliable internet here, no matter how much one is willing to pay. Guinea has yet to discover high-fibre-optics cable. Although I find this most difficult to live with, especially in the realm of education and modern pedagogy, on a personal note, Conakry is the best rehabilitation centre for someone like myself suffering from acute internet addiction.

4-) Ashram the baker. A few steps from our apartment building sits Ashram the baker. This 6 foot of a man bakes bread in his stone oven. His stone oven sits in a small shack, nothing else there, barely enough room for his oven, a side table, and this huge man kneading his dough all day (boy does he punch out that dough!). When buying bread (22 cents a baguette), you can't actually physically enter his space; you just stand at the door. Anyways, his bread is extremely good, and always hot. And we all know how dangerous hot, good, and inexpensive bread can be. What I'll eventually learn from this (might take some time...) is just because its good and cheap, doesn't mean that I have to have it. I need to learn to say no to that 16th baquette.

5-) Getting paid a fraction of what I was getting paid in Vancouver for working twice as hard. I know, I know...I'm not being paid a lot, but the work I'm doing here is perhaps more meaningful and I'm getting more satisfaction out of doing this than I would working in a public school in Canada. So what if I don't get my mortgage paid off by the time I'm 98 years old....so what if I can't help my kids pay their tuition and get a good footing on their lives...(Hmm, need to work a bit more on that one....)

6-) Socially speaking, I have officially become a hermit. I have always enjoyed the occasional and rare times when I was able to be alone. On July 21st, we left our very active, busy, social lifestyle and moved to a rather sedate and sometimes lonely one here. We not only moved to a foreign country, but to a foreign lifestyle. The move and the change was drastic, and thus culture shock set in. Phone ringing, unexpected visits from friends, frequent dinners with friends, places to go, garden to putter in, grass to cut, drains to unplug, you know, all the fun stuff...all that stopped almost overnight (27 hours to be exact). Madeleine and I all of a sudden found ourselves, by ourselves. Eventually, due to lack of the many distractions mentioned, we were again living together, and not side by side. And that is a good thing.