New Blog Address and Update

Hi everyone,

So sorry for the long silence - things have been a bit crazy for the past couple months. As you can see, we now have a new blog address (with no mention of a specific country name). I posted a message at our old address directing people here.

For those of you who haven't already heard, we have been reassigned to Guinea, another Francophone country in West Africa, with an early December departure. See the column to the right for some basic information on Guinea. Our program assignments are almost identical to Mauritania - Small Enterprise Development for Jacob and Public Health for me.

We are happy that our new assignment is still in Francophone Africa, happy we got essentially the same programs, and very frustrated that, assuming we leave on time, we will be the last ex-Mauritania people to leave the US by almost a month (including another couple). In case you're curious, yes, we tried VERY hard to leave sooner, but Peace Corps claims they did a worldwide search and this was the absolute earliest placement that was a match for our skill sets. We are also frustrated that not only do we have to wait so long, but we were assigned to another country that had a coup within the past year and has elections coming up - read: decent chance of being delayed/canceled again (more on that in a minute).

As I mentioned before, we are incredibly grateful that we were able to get our old jobs back for the summer/early fall and that we were able to stay with Jacob's parents until we got our feet back on the ground. We were thankfully able to find a somewhat affordable short-term lease on a studio in Capitol Hill and we have been living there since the beginning of August. We will be staying in DC for another two months (when we're not scoping out graduate programs for post-Peace Corps), then we will be leaving for France, where we will stay/work on an organic farm and practice on our French for a few weeks. Assuming our Peace Corps departure is not delayed/canceled, we will be flying back to the US for Thanksgiving and reporting for "staging" (Peace Corps orientation) a few days later. If we find out we will not be leaving for Guinea on time before we leave France, we will simply extend our stay there. Or that's the theory at least.

For those of you that are wondering about the political situation in Guinea, here is a brief summary:

Last December, Guinea's president died and a group of military officers immediately seized power (bloodlessly) within hours and suspended the constitution. The junta promised to hold a presidential election by the end of this year and said that no members of the junta would stand in it. The UN, the European Union, the African Union, etc were all very supportive of this. However, in the past few weeks, first the elections were pushed off to early 2010, and then it became clear that the junta chief, Moussa Dadis Camara, fully intends to stand in the election. Not surprisingly, this triggered a variety of protests/riots/demonstrations. The junta has responded by cutting off text message service to the entire country and banning "politics from all types of interactive broadcasts in any language."

Here is a discouraging excerpt from the blog of a current Guinea volunteer:

"Also, because of protests in Conakry, I have decided to apply to law school this fall. It is unlikely that we will be evacuated, but given the elections in January and the possibility that they will not happen, I wouldn’t be surprised. This way if we do get evacuated I will be able to go to law school in the fall, and if not I can request to defer until my service is finished (assuming I am accepted)."

That being said, we are trying our best to stay positive and roll with the punches. We will try to be better about posting updates as our scheduled departure approaches. Thanks as always for all your love and support...