On jaarama!
Well, I promised you I’d tell you where I was headed next. The winner is…{drumroll}…Peru! Today I’ll leave my house for the airport at 6 a.m. There’ll be one quick stop in Mexico City, and then I arrive in the capital Lima at 12:30 in the morning! Sheesh, that’s late.
See if you can find Peru on a map. Is it North or South of the equator? What countries are Peru's neighbors? On what continent can you find Peru? It will be an exciting time. Peru is very rich with history and also very beautiful. The Andes Mountain Range passes right through it. Many of the mountains in this range are taller than the tallest mountain in all the Rockies!
While I'm there I will be volunteering at an orphanage in a town called Ayacucho. Ayacucho is in the center of the country, so I bet you can spot it if you look hard enough. The elevation is 9000 ft! Have you ever heard the word elevation? Maybe you can use the internet to find the elevation of Indianapolis.
And the official language of Peru? I’ll give you a hint: I won’t be speaking Pulaar there anytime soon. What time of year do you think it is right now in Peru?
Alright, time to catch a little shut-eye. I'll be dreaming about Christmas presents, I'm sure. Santa definitely makes a few stops in Peru.
Wish me safe travels!
Kevin
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
Chez Leno
Here's a video of the house where I lived during training. Whatya think? If you need to see a bigger version you can double-click on it, and the browser will take you to YouTube.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
'Til We Meet Again
On jaarama! Tanaala ton?
Now I can say that and be completely confident you all understand me. How does it feel to know a bit of another language, spoken only in a little corner of Africa? I was happy to practice Pulaar with you, because it's easy to forget a language if you don't practice it.
First off, I want to send off a huge thank you to all of you for inviting me into your classroom yesterday morning. It was so much fun to share some of my experiences in Guinea with you. I can only hope you had as much fun as I did. Were all of your KWL questions answered? If not, feel free to pass your questions to Mrs. Lloyd, and she can pass them along to me.
Which reminds me...there was one question I couldn't answer yesterday: How many miles is it from here to Guinea? Well, I found a realy cool website that lets you calculate the distance between two places. Want to know what's even cooler? I was able to find both Clark Elementary and my little village of Bodie on the map. Ready for the number? 4888 miles! I know, I know. Huge, right?
Well, I'm not certain where my next travel adventures will take me, but I'll let you know as soon as I find out. Keep the people of Guinea in your thoughts and prayers, because they want to become a free country like America.
Until we meet again,
Kevin
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
July 15, 2009
Wo nu wali!
We’re going to have a little lesson in Susu, the local language of the town where we’re training. Wo nu wali simply means, “hi all!” It’s pronounced, “Whoa-new-wall-ee!” If you want to say hi to one person, simply say, I nu wali! (“Ee-new-wall-ee!”) The response? Simple. I nu wali!
I’ve been in Forecariah for two-and-a-half weeks now, and things are finally starting to settle down a little. We came here after a week in Conakry (“con-ah-cree”), the capital of Guinea. Conakry is crazy busy. Imagine a city of more than a million people without a single stoplight! The airport is really small compared to Indy’s. Normally, only one or two planes arrive every day. The day we arrived in Guinea, both planes arrived at exactly the same time, so the airport was absolutely packed. I felt like one of 200 sardines packeed into a can for five.
Forecariah has 14,000 people, and I’ll guess it has about 20,000 chickens, 5,000 goats, and 3,000 sheep. Everywhere around me are animals. Just outside the front gate of my house a goat and her two children are tied to a tree. Sometimes during dinner in the main room of my host family’s house, a chicken or two will stroll in to see if any food was dropped on the floor. We have one rooster at the house, and boy is he annoying! Between 4:30 and 5:00 every morning he likes to start screaming at the top of his lungs, and his pen just happens to be right outside my window. When the kids mock him, they scream, “co-ro-ki-co!!”
Every corner of Forecariah is alive with sounds. Mixed with the rooster’s crows at 5 a.m. are prayer calls from the mosque. Guinea is primarily a Muslim country, so at various times of the day I hear the imam’s (the equivalent of a Muslim priest) voice in arabic over a loudspeaker. Later in the morning the vendors begin selling their various items. My house is kind of far from any main road, so only food sellers pass by. On my first Sunday here, my host father purchased some buille (“bwee”) from a woman walking by, balancing a huge bowl on her head. Buille, tiny balls of rice in a sweet sauce, is commonly eaten for breakfast. At the market, street vendors balancing food bowls mix with a thousand others, selling anything and everything under the sun.
My house is also filled with noise from day until night. I’m living with a family of 12, along with about 15 chickens and 12 little chicks. My 2-year-old nephew loves to test the strength of his vocal chords, as does his 3-year-old cousin. Of my seven brothers and sisters, two usually stay around the house on summer days to do chores (like washing the bowls and fetching water from the well). Four walls surround the two small houses the family shares, and tucked into a corner of two of the walls is a small little room with an iron-barred window looking to the outside. Several times a day someone will shout “cawn!cawn!”, the Guinean version of “knock!knock!”, looking to buy something from the tiny store. Jaqueline (13 years old) or Daniel (10 years old) will run over to the room and sell a pack of batteries, fuel for a lantern, or maybe a sucker. There aren’t many toys here, so young kids often play by just helping with the chores. My 3-year-old brother Benjamin spent 15 minutes last Saturday helping me wash a handkerchief as I scrubbed the rest of my laundry outside on a washboard. He finally decided he’d had enoughafter the rain began pouring down on us.
Gotta run. Can’t wait to share more with you. À la prochaine!
Kevin
Wo nu wali!
We’re going to have a little lesson in Susu, the local language of the town where we’re training. Wo nu wali simply means, “hi all!” It’s pronounced, “Whoa-new-wall-ee!” If you want to say hi to one person, simply say, I nu wali! (“Ee-new-wall-ee!”) The response? Simple. I nu wali!
I’ve been in Forecariah for two-and-a-half weeks now, and things are finally starting to settle down a little. We came here after a week in Conakry (“con-ah-cree”), the capital of Guinea. Conakry is crazy busy. Imagine a city of more than a million people without a single stoplight! The airport is really small compared to Indy’s. Normally, only one or two planes arrive every day. The day we arrived in Guinea, both planes arrived at exactly the same time, so the airport was absolutely packed. I felt like one of 200 sardines packeed into a can for five.
Forecariah has 14,000 people, and I’ll guess it has about 20,000 chickens, 5,000 goats, and 3,000 sheep. Everywhere around me are animals. Just outside the front gate of my house a goat and her two children are tied to a tree. Sometimes during dinner in the main room of my host family’s house, a chicken or two will stroll in to see if any food was dropped on the floor. We have one rooster at the house, and boy is he annoying! Between 4:30 and 5:00 every morning he likes to start screaming at the top of his lungs, and his pen just happens to be right outside my window. When the kids mock him, they scream, “co-ro-ki-co!!”
Every corner of Forecariah is alive with sounds. Mixed with the rooster’s crows at 5 a.m. are prayer calls from the mosque. Guinea is primarily a Muslim country, so at various times of the day I hear the imam’s (the equivalent of a Muslim priest) voice in arabic over a loudspeaker. Later in the morning the vendors begin selling their various items. My house is kind of far from any main road, so only food sellers pass by. On my first Sunday here, my host father purchased some buille (“bwee”) from a woman walking by, balancing a huge bowl on her head. Buille, tiny balls of rice in a sweet sauce, is commonly eaten for breakfast. At the market, street vendors balancing food bowls mix with a thousand others, selling anything and everything under the sun.
My house is also filled with noise from day until night. I’m living with a family of 12, along with about 15 chickens and 12 little chicks. My 2-year-old nephew loves to test the strength of his vocal chords, as does his 3-year-old cousin. Of my seven brothers and sisters, two usually stay around the house on summer days to do chores (like washing the bowls and fetching water from the well). Four walls surround the two small houses the family shares, and tucked into a corner of two of the walls is a small little room with an iron-barred window looking to the outside. Several times a day someone will shout “cawn!cawn!”, the Guinean version of “knock!knock!”, looking to buy something from the tiny store. Jaqueline (13 years old) or Daniel (10 years old) will run over to the room and sell a pack of batteries, fuel for a lantern, or maybe a sucker. There aren’t many toys here, so young kids often play by just helping with the chores. My 3-year-old brother Benjamin spent 15 minutes last Saturday helping me wash a handkerchief as I scrubbed the rest of my laundry outside on a washboard. He finally decided he’d had enoughafter the rain began pouring down on us.
Gotta run. Can’t wait to share more with you. À la prochaine!
Kevin
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
This is going to be great!
Hi Kevin!
I think I have figured out how this works now, and I am awfully excited about our communication over the coming school year! I know the kids are going to really interested to hear about the things you see, the people you meet, and and the places you visit. How often will you be able to update this blog? I hope everything is going well for you, and thanks for getting this all set up.
I think I have figured out how this works now, and I am awfully excited about our communication over the coming school year! I know the kids are going to really interested to hear about the things you see, the people you meet, and and the places you visit. How often will you be able to update this blog? I hope everything is going well for you, and thanks for getting this all set up.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
A Little About Me
Hmm, let's start with the normal stuff.As I said before, my first name is Kevin. My last name, Roche, comes from the very south of Ireland in a county called Cork. People say I look very Irish because I have red hair, but I'm also part German, French, and Czech. If I were a dog, people would definitely call me a mutt. Last January I was lucky enough to visit County Cork while traveling for a work trip. Here's a picture from the trip. It's of a fort!
I am 27 years old, and my birthday is Feb 25. This year I had an awesome birthday, because that was the day I received an envelope in the mail inviting me to join the Peace Corps and live in Guinea!Before I joined the Peace Corps I worked at Eli Lilly in Indianapolis. Most days I worked alongside Mrs. Lloyd's husband. Mr. Lloyd is very funny and fun to jump on (we even did it at work!), so I encourage you all to plead with your teacher to bring him to school one day :) At Eli Lilly I was an automation engineer. Much of the time I made changes to computer programs so the equipment making the medicine would work better or so the people using the software could work more easily. It was fun and challenging work, but I was ready for a new challenge--one you'll soon be learning a lot more about!
I was born in Illinois but went to grade school and high school in Highland, IN, which is all the way in the Northwest corner of the state. Think of me if you ever drive to Chicago and see a big sign for Cabela's, because you're really close to my house!
When I was your age I involved with Cub Scouts (4th grade = Webelos, right?), karate, and piano; but my love was definitely baseball. I played first base until my coach told me I was too short, and then I had the time of my life chasing after fly balls in the outfield. All that running around must've payed off, because when I got older I started playing ultimate frisbee and liked it just as much. If you don't know what ultimate frisbee is, think of it as a combination of soccer and football, except you use a frisbee and are not allowed to hit each other. I also really enjoy running, hiking, reading, riding my bike to work, and taking pictures with my camera.
I have one older sister named Becky who lives in Boston, MA. It's a long way away, but I still get to see her quite often.
OK, enough for now! Time to run home and eat my last dinner with my parents before the big trip. Pork tenderloin and green beans, mmmmm.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Welcome!
To Mrs. Lloyd's 4th Graders,
Hello! My name is Kevin, a future Peace Corps Volunteer in Guinea, Africa. I don't know about you guys, but the first thing that came to my mind was...
Is that where guinea pigs are from?
The answer? Surprisingly, it's "no". Guinea pigs originated in the Andes mountains, all the way on the other side of the world in South America. I know, I know. Crazy, right? Sometimes the ways of the world just don't make any sense. It kind of reminds me of the rules of spelling. Just when you think you've got it all figured out ("I before E...ok, easy enough...piece, lie, tried..."), they throw the whole "except after C" loophole in there and the world just goes outta whack again!
Enough lamenting. I know that in the next couple years I'm going to find myself in plenty of situations where the world just doesn't seem to make sense anymore. Why? Because I'll be experiencing the world through the eyes of a different culture. Certain values very important to Americans might not be as important for someone living in Guinea. For example, if you were running late for a very important meeting but passed your best friend on the way there, would you stop to talk with her? In Guinea, it might be considered rude if you didn't stop, even if it meant you will be even later for your meeting.
Have you had the chance to look up Guinea on a map? If a map is available to you, go ahead now and take a look. Or, you can click here. Find it yet? If you haven't already, try and locate all three African countries with Guinea in the name. Hint: they all border the Atlantic Ocean.
Here's a map of just Guinea:
Guinea's about the size of Oregon, the 9th largest state in the USA. It's also about the size of the United Kingdom. About two weeks after I arrive, I'll get the chance to visit the place where I'll be living and working the next two years. None of the new volunteers knows where we will be staying yet, but we're all pretty excited to find out!
Well, I've already had a long day scrambling to pick up a few last minute items before the big trip (like a hammock that compresses down to the size of a softball!) and saying goodbye to my grandparents one last time. Next time I'll tell you a little more about myself and my project. Until then, I'd like to sign off saying that I look forward to sharing my experiences with you all.
Have a great school year!
Kevin
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)