Mission Make Friends: Accomplished

The first week or two in Voinjama were pretty lonely. I was living by myself in the IRC guesthouse, which is in the same compound as our office. Since most days it would start raining in the late afternoon or early evening, this meant that I would not be able to go into town or walk around anywhere when work ended at 5pm. Instead, all I could do was just walk the ten feet to my room, at which point I would be forced to occupy myself for the next several hours, the sound of the rain magnified by the tin roof in the background, until I could justify going to bed (I decided 8:30pm was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances). Needless to say, when the weekend arrived, I decided to embark upon a mission to salvage my sanity: Mission Make Friends.

My M.O. for this mission was to walk around town greeting people and hoping that someone would invite me to hang out. Though this would never work as a way to meet friends in most parts of America, it works quite well in West Africa since the culture here is very welcoming to outsiders, not to mention that people enjoy the novelty of having a white person for a friend. So naturally it was not too long before I started meeting people and getting invited to sit down and chat.

Eventually, I stumbled upon a Peulh woman with two small children, and based on the fact that 1) she was Peulh, 2) she had a baby, and 3) she seemed slightly broussey (aka she acted like she was from a village rather than a town), I decided pretty much instantaneously that I would make her my friend. (For those of you who don’t know, the Peulhs are the ethnic group I lived with in Mali, although Peulhs from Guinea are pretty different culturally from those in Mali.) Luckily for me, I was successful in my endeavor, so now I hang out with my new friend Aissata Diallo each weekend. Granted, since we speak different Peulh dialects, we only understand about half of what each other are saying most of the time, but the friendship seems to be working out nonetheless.