Riots and unrest

Well it turns out that Guinea really has gone down hill. All the peace corps volunteers have been evacuated from the country, and it does not look like they will be re-entering anytime soon. The US embassy has evacuated all non-essential staff. It saddens me to hear that things are going so much worse, but at the same time I can only hope that this will mean a change for the better sometime in the future. The situation can be followed more closely via the Friends of Guinea blog: http://friendsofguinea.blogspot.com/

Guinea

"Last year, Guinea was ranked by Transparency International as the most corrupt country in Africa."

A quote from a BBC article about the current worker strikes racking the country. This is sad news that depresses me. I can't help but wonder what is going to happen to the country. I have a feeling that it has gone down hill so much since I left that it will take some drastic measures and major time to fix things up.

I think that any place you live for a couple of years finds a way to imprint itself on your soul. Guinea, especially in the form of Koundara (my village) and the people there, have done that to me. It makes it all the more sad to read news articles that highlight the backwards steps the country seems to be taking. What is going to happen? And how long will it take before I can say that Guinea is doing better then it was when I was there. No country should have to fight so hard not to lose ground.

50 places to see before you die

Last night on the service bus my group of compatriots started talking about travel destinations (our favorite topic). The conversation slowly got around to the BBC's list of 50 places to see before you die. Out of curiousity I went on-line to see how many of the 50 I had hit. 12 if you count the trip I'll be taking in two weeks to Egypt and Jordan: Grand Canyon, Great Barrier Reef, Florida, South Island of New Zealand, Sydney, New York, Petra, Pyramids, Luxor, North Island of New Zealand, Iceland, Abu Simbel - Egypt. Not to bad...The fun thing is that I also found a sight which will calculate how long it will take you to hit all 50 places at the rate you're going right now... http://twisty.com/misc/50places/ According to it I'll be 113 before I finish off the list. Just out of curiousity I also put in how many years it's been since I saw the first on my list (Iceland in 1999) and it came up with a much more reasonable 26 additional years. Now I don't really thing that I'll have seen all of these places in another 26 years, but its a nice dream.

Exams

Well it's exam time, which means that I have a pile of grading to do. It also means that I'm procrastinating on that in any way I can. There's only so long you can look at students murdering math before you go crazy and want to do someone some harm or else take a nap. I'm 3/8 of the way through my grading. Unfortunately that doesn't seem like too happy of a number to me right now. Daily I'm regretting the format of the math department here. Thanks to the Turkish ministry of education, math and geometry are considered two separate courses requiring their own notes, exams and schedules. What that means is that for my 6 hours I have each group in class I have to come up with grades for two separate courses. All in all not so bad until I realized that it means I have double the number of exams to grade - 2 for each of my students. Sigh....back to the grindstone.

Logic Puzzles

Today we had our New Year's Party at school. Yeah, one of the sad parts about some international schools is that you don't get that lovely two week holiday around Christmas. No worries. I'll be enjoying at the beginning of February when I head off to Egypt and Jordan. So back to the party. One of the teacher's put out a logic puzzle challenge for a free bottle of champagne. Now me, I was excited about the puzzles but not about the champagne. In fact when I e-mailed in my responses I even told her that I didn't want the prize, I just wanted to know if my answers were correct. Turns out they were. And the first three people with the correct answers got a bottle. The amusing part? Two of us don't drink alcohol at all. We were just entering to know if our answers were correct. You just can't tempt a math teacher that way.

If you're interested, here's the three puzzles we had to correctly answer in order to gain that bubbly drink...

(1) Reindeer Games
Santa is standing on one side of a cold lake and with him are an abominable snowman, a reindeer and a box with carrots. In the lake is a small iceberg. Santa wants to cross the lake with all three “items” which are with him. There is only room for Santa and one item on the iceberg… But if he leaves the reindeer with the carrots alone on one side of the lake the reindeer will eat the carrots. If he leaves the abominable snowman and the reindeer on one side the abominable snowman will eat the reindeer. Only Santa can separate the abominable snowman from the reindeer and the reindeer from the carrots.How can Santa cross the lake with all three items, without one eating the other?

(2) Who is Naughty or Nice?
Santa is delivering presents and takes a wrong turn somewhere, now he is lost in a forest. The forest is between two villages. In village “A” live only liars, they always lie. In village “B” people always tell the truth. Santa meets a stranger from one of the villages in the forest and can ask him only one question.Which question should Santa ask him to know for sure where village “B” is?

(3) Who owns the Zebra?

The tags have fallen off some of the Christmas gifts and Santa needs to figure out which presents go where. Help him use the clues below to figure out which house is which and where the presents belong….

There are five different houses.
Each house has its own color.
Each house has a child of a different nationality.
Each child left out a different drink for Santa.
Each child has a different pet.
Each child asked for a different Christmas present.

The English child lives in the red house.
The Australian has a dog.
The Turkish child left out tea.
The Green house is on the left side of the white house.
The child in the green house left out coffee.
The child that asked for world peace has birds.
The child in the yellow house asked for a trampoline.
The child in the middle house left out milk.
The American lives in the first house.
The child that asked for a new bicycle lives in the house next to the house with cats.
The child in the house next to the house with the horse, asked for world peace.
The child who asked for the new Harry Potter book left out beer.
The Canadian child asked for a White Christmas (snow).
The American lives next to the blue house.
Water was left out in the house next to the house where a child asked for a new bicycle.
Who owns the zebra?

I'm not going to post the answers, but let me know if you think you got them right and want your answers checked.

Closing in on Christmas

It's really odd to stop and realize that Christmas day is only 4 days away (almost 3 as I'll soon be heading to bed). As I get closer it feels less and less like Christmas. One of the oddest things is that I'm still teaching, with 3 days to go. I have class tomorrow which makes it feel like the Christmas season doesn't start until after that. Sure makes for a short Christmas season when you tie it into time off, which being a teacher I tend to take for granted. I guess I was lucky to get a Christmas to New Year break while I was in Guinea. That at least made it seem much more like the holiday season. Although thinking back I don't actually think my break started much before the 25th. It's just that having the extended break made it at least seem like a holiday. I'm not entirely sure it will seem that way here. Even though I have Christmas music streaming through my computer I can't quite come to terms with the fact that Christmas is almost upon us. Hopefully I'll be more into the spirit by Saturday.

Baking Cookies

As part of my attempt to recreate the holiday season here I invited my neighbor's daughters (4 year old twins) over to make cookies with me. What fun! I wasn't really sure how well it would work. After all I was going to have two kids to keep occupied and interested. Luckily I had two different types of cookies that I wanted to make - chocolate chip and mint chocolate cookies (yes I found that I could make mint chocolate cookies with mint extract since I can't get mint chocolate chips here). I just gave each of them a bowl, added ingredients to each bowl according to the recipe sitting in front of each kid and had them continually mixing. The fun really came when we went to put cookies on the tray. No spoons for us! It's always more fun when you use your hands. We rolled balls until they got bored with that and then moved on to making cookie snakes. I figured it couldn't hurt the cookies. And half the fun of doing things with kids is seeing what their imagination comes up with. In this case cookie snakes. Thanks Carmen and Katrina for the smiles and laughs which helped make the cookie baking a continuous part of my holiday tradition.