Mandy's Menagerie- SUPER SPECIAL POST

Mandy's Menagerie- Special Edition Blog Post!

Hello mes amis! I'm sure you know by now that I'm in love with animals and you can probably guess that my fellow interns are pretty sick of me stopping them in the street every five seconds to look at a chicken, lizard, goat, etc. I even get distracted when I'm talking with prisoners because they have farm animals in the prison yard! The guards/my coworkers always laugh at me because I am constantly (and often, I might add, successfully) trying to pick up the little baby chickens at the prison. (Side note: in French, chickens are called “poulet” and chicks are called “poussin”)

Anyway, I thought I'd dedicate one of my blog posts to my much-loved animal friends.

Monsieur Le Crocodile:

I finally got a picture of Monsieur Le Crocodile in all his reptilian majesty. For some reason, The Mission decided to drain his pool a few days ago, so him and his roommate, the prehistoric gigantic turtle, were stranded on dry/muddy land :( Don't worry, he has water again now! But I did manage to take advantage of the opportunity to get some frighteningly close-up photographs of my handsome scaly-tailed boyfriend:

Bats bats bats

Next, I've been observing the bat colony in the back of the Mission. The locals don't like them very much but I think they're AWESOME.

I can't get very good pictures of them flying, even with my zoom lens, so here's one of them in the trees!

MONKEY!!

This is my pet monkey. The guys who “own” him call him Boo Boo, but my name for him is Mr. Knightley. He doesn't give a shit if he perpetuates stereotypes- he will eat all the bananas. He's hungry.

He's called a Campbell's Monkey, but he doesn't like labels.

Last, but not least... GECKOS

How cool are these guys? This one hangs out on the ceiling by the lights at night ready to nom nom nom on some tasty weird bug things.

OH WAIT one more! Adorable kitten. Because kittens are universally good.  

Week 4, OR Haters Be Hatin'

Many of you probably already know that last Monday, there was an attempted coup against the president of Guinea, Alpha Conde. On the day itself, most roads leading into the city were closed, and only the interns came to work to use the internet. I'm not going to lie- it was a little scary. I spent most of Monday night worrying about whether there would be violence in the streets reminiscent of September 28^th. Mostly because, well, the locals kept telling me that there would be violence in the streets reminiscent of September 28^th.

Luckily, everything is okay-ish now! There haven't been any riots or outbreaks of violence that I know of. A new Minister of Justice was just appointed, so there have been a lot of changes amongst all of the tribunals, making work fairly difficult for the last week and a half. Add that to the attempted coup and additional security everywhere, and you have a recipe for a very grumpy Mandy.

The good news? I've liberated two people in the past week. So far, my count is up to five during my entire stay. The kid that we got out of prison last week came back to visit me at the office a few days ago. He said he wanted to thank me before he went back to his village in Sierra Leone. 


Then he asked for my phone number. Touché, kid.

They can take away your liberty, but they can't take away your game.

So aside from the attempted coup against the state and the closed tribunals, things have been going pretty well! I even got some souvenir shopping in last weekend, during which my fellow intern, Jeny, and I thought we would look for some novels to read in French. After spending a fair amount of time explaining to the book-selling-guy exactly what we were looking for, he got very excited and led us all the way through the enormous marketplace where we had been shopping. Ten minutes and three vendors later, he emerged holding several Harlequin romance novels looking quite pleased with himself. My favorite was “Le Cowboy Romantique”.

We eventually left the marketplace and abused our wallets at some great artisan shops next to the water. After all of our money was gone we were too tired to shop anymore, we sat on a wall along the boardwalk and looked out at the water while a live band played in the background. Lovely. 

Anywho, that's about it! I have some pretty cool updates about my animals here, which I promise I shall share with you soon. :)

Here's a sneak peak...