The Syndicate Strikes Back

Ok – Now for my bigger updates, as promised, since I know I’ve been terrible about updating the last month. This will explain why.

After coming back to Guinea following the New Year, the first thing we found out upon walking into the volunteer house in Conakry was that nationwide strikes were planned for January 10^th. The possibility of these strikes was essentially a done deal ever since the last set of strikes had ended in June of last year. On the tenth, the strikes did indeed begin, though in Boke life went on as normal. The only difference that I could notice was the presence of four armed guards outside my compound, seeing as how I live in the prefet’s (cross between a mayor and governor) concession, which is a couple blocks long Little went on in Guinea the first few days of the strike really, until about day five of the strikes, when things started to kind of spin out of control. Peaceful protests eventually turned into violent demonstrations, especially in Conakry, Mamou, Kankan, and Labe, and by the end of the week more than 60 people had been killed.

In Boke however, where I was spending the strike along with 6 other volunteers, not much of anything happened. Some boutiques were close, but market ladies were out in full force, (some) taxis were still running, and the beer store was still functional. So the following were the most exciting events of the 15 day standfast:

• A drunk soldier shot his gun in the air around 2 a.m. I guess he was getting bored with the lack of any action in Boke.
• A rifle was cocked at us as we walked past the soldiers guarding my compound at 1 am on a return from the Tree Bar (so called because of the giant tree growing out the middle of it) a couple nights before evacuation. I won’t lie, the cocking of a gun in your direction sent a bit of a chill down my spine, but the second we heard it, we announced we were Peace Corps, and they simply greeted us. Any shooting and an exciting story was rather quickly avoided.

So this was essentially all the excitement relating to the strikes that we saw in Boke. Mainly, our days consisted of cooking, eating, going to the river, playing GameBoy, and listening to “My Humps”, “Shake That Ass for Me”, and “Smack That”. I guess sitting with six guys and one girl in a house for 15 days will do that to you.

Oo’o.