Birthday girl!!

le 22 juillet 2010: 5h30am

J’entend les chants des prières de la mosquée de ma chambre a coucher. Je me lève pour
aller voir sur mon balcon. Quelques hommes marchent lentement dans la rue déserte.Un petit vent frais me caresse le visage. C est une bonne facon de commencer ma journée de fete…mes 55 ans….je vois les palmiers qui se font balancer par ce vent tropical et les oiseaux chantent, des chants d’oiseaux que je ne reconnais pas. Me voici a Conakry, en Guinée. Qui aurait cru que je me serais retrouvée ici? La petite fille de St-Pierre Jolys est rendue bien loin de son monde qu’elle a connue, bien loin de son comfort canadien. Aujourd’hui cette fille n’est plus fille mais bien femme, femme qui ouvre un nouveau chapitre de sa vie. Bonjour mes 55 ans!

After the chaos of the arrival at the airport last night, so typical of 3rd world countries, it is nice to sit in the quiet of this new apartment with air conditioning…thank you very much! Last night was an adventure! The expeditor was at the airport to greet us, Djana (pronounced Jana)the business manager of the school greeted me with a hug and Bevan the driver managed to get our 6 pieces of luggage in the car. I was relieved that we were welcomed by the persons Raymond had met in May during his exploratory trip in Conakry. No one had confirmed that they would be at the airport to pick us up; we had talked about plan B if no one would be there. Luckily we did not have to execute plan B. We arrived at our apartment at 9pm; it was dark outside so I had no sense of our surroundings, but I could guess it was pretty shabby, dirty and poor. The apartment is ok, not luxurious, but clean. After realizing that we had no bottled water, soap, pillows and toilet paper we asked the apartment manager if we could buy these somewhere tonight. No problem he said. We walked with him down our dimly lit street to a corner store….well it was a shack of some sort and I could not even see the woman serving us, just her shadow. On a small table in the middle of her store, the size of a closet, there was a small candle. How interesting I thought…corner store by candlelight. It did create an ambiance, though a little spooky for this barely landed Canadian chick. Perhaps our North American corner stores could modify their high powered florescent lights and loud music with candles. We bought the soap and water. Toilet paper??? No they did not have that. What I would do now to have a Seven Eleven! No toilet paper…so we got creative, but I’ll skip the details. This was our first night in Conakry…welcome to my new world!