Searching for Weevils

It’s a slow Saturday morning. As I sit staring at my muesli, making sure the small flax seeds don’t crawl out of my bowl, I realize that it’s been a while since the last time I’ve taken the time to just sit around in my boxers on a Saturday morning, listening to the monsoon rains outside, making sure my cereal isn’t infected with crawling fauna. You see, we have had company since our return here, and sitting around watching my cereal crawl out of my bowl hasn’t been an avocation afforded to me lately.

Our friends Jocelyne, Chloé and Alice have now returned to their igloos in Canada (this is what I tell the kids at school...and, they believe me) and, it’s back to the two of us, by ourselves, embedded in our little humblest of humble abodes in Conakry. Funny how on both trips to the airport to drop them off, the return ride back were both in total silence, except of course for Bivan who swears at the occasional errant goat on the road. Madeleine and I were both solemn in melancholia, as if we were grieving not only the loss of the company of friends, but also the loss of the easy, comfortable, cool, splendidly beautiful life that could be ours in the next 24 hours if we were on that plane with them. Indeed, their departures fueled and thrusted our persistent existential self-inquiry; our minds constantly revisiting the the same old question, ‘what the &%#@ are we doing here?’. But then, like gas, that too passes.

A lot has happened since our return in August (see previous blog), but one event that has really positively upset my whole psyche was our decision not to renew our contracts with AISC next year. Big decision, hard decision, but, in the end the right decision. We had been struggling with this decision since last April, putting it off until we could no more. I have to admit, until the last minute of our announcing to that staff of our decision (see Madeleine’s blog..http://madeleine-does-africa.blogspot.com/ ....could not have described the whole event better myself), I had been wavering between staying on another year or ending it all on June 15th, 2012. In the end, it became very clear to me that all that we had to give to and receive from this community, we would have taken and received by the end of our two years here.

Since our announcement to the staff and the school board, the heavy veil of the constant self deliberation has been lifted. What was really wearing me down was the lack of transparency with the people I worked with, dodging almost on a daily basis the infamous question, so are you guys staying for at least another 5 years?

I am at peace with our decision, and the expected and premonitory excitement of our future plans is slowly starting to creep into our busy days, all the while hastening us to think of, plan, and design everything we want to accomplish at the school before our time runs out. Both of us have promised to ourselves and the people we work with that we are not about to succumb into ‘repat mode‘ before we are actually sitting on that plane on June 15th.

Until then, I will continue working with and for the people here, I will continue forging ahead and making AISC nothing less than the premier international school of western Africa, and I will continue striving at making our lives here in Conakry as pleasurable as can be during the next 9 months, even though it means having to sift through my cereal in the morning, searching for weevils.