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.

'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

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

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.

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.