Peace Corps Volunteer Amanda Rogers had two days' notice that she was being evacuated from Guinea



While the recent news from Guinea has been alarming - all television and radio stations shut down, journalists thrown out of meetings and soldiers reportedly killing civilians randomly - Rogers saw nothing remotely like that in her two years in the country. "I didn't have a scary thing happen to me in Guinea," she said. "There was a snake in my hut once." In late January, during the worst of the turmoil, Peace Corps coordinators - worried that they might lose their ability to evacuate volunteers if things got worse - went ahead and pulled the 105 volunteers out of the country to neighboring Mali. Rogers had just a month left on her two-year stint, but it was still hard to say goodbye, she said. But her Peace Corps experience has enriched her life, she said. "Weighing what I gave them versus what they gave me, they gave me so much more," she said. "They were so willing to give their time and resources, and they didn't expect to receive anything in return."

Peace Corps Volunteer Amanda Rogers had two days' notice that she was being evacuated from Guinea

Volunteer forced to flee calm by distant unrest

By Susan Palmer
The Register-Guard

Published: Wednesday, February 28, 2007

SPRINGFIELD - Amanda Rogers had two days' notice that she was being evacuated from Guinea. Two days to pack, to say goodbye to the villagers she'd grown to know and care for.

The 27-year-old Peace Corps volunteer from Springfield had been living in a grass hut for close to two years, volunteering in a small village.

The West African nation had been shaken by unrest during the past year, with powerful labor unions upset over widespread government corruption and calling massive strikes that prompted army crackdowns.

By January, nobody was sure what would happen next.

But the traumatic events had occurred far from Selouma, the small village of 2,000 people where Rogers lived.

It was something they heard on the radio. It was about politics in the capital city of Conakry over on the coast. It wasn't about the farmers who lived where the savannah meets the mountain slopes.
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Rogers didn't plan to go to Africa. A 1997 Springfield High School graduate who went on to get a bachelor's degree in wildlife science from Oregon State University, she started thinking seriously about the Peace Corps after an OSU study-abroad stint in Costa Rica.

When she told her parents about her Peace Corps dream, they were excited for her, with one caveat. Anywhere, but Africa, her dad told her. She was fine with that.

"I wanted to go to Latin America," she said.

But the Peace Corps had other plans.

Instead, perhaps because she had studied French in high school, they sent her to Guinea, a nation about the size of Oregon with 9.6 million people, tucked between Sierra Leone to the south and Guinea-Bissau to the north.

After three months with a host family in a city where she received training, she was sent to Selouma.

The experience was transformative, she said.

In her grass hut on the edge of the village, she had a bed, a desk and a chair. There was no electricity and no running water. She had to carry water daily from a nearby pump. There was a privy in a separate building. She cooked her meals on a small propane stove.

There were no phones, no televisions, just radios for keeping in touch with the rest of the world.

"I thought it would be one of the hardest things to get used to," she said of the primitive conditions. "But it was one of the easiest things."

Rogers who had gone on to North Carolina State University for a degree in international studies and natural resources, began helping villagers with an agro-forestry project, growing and planting trees whose edible leaves are high in nutrients.

Moringa tree leaves can be dried and pounded into a powder that can be added to anything, she said.

For her master's thesis, she worked on developing the leaves as a fertilizer for corn crops.

She was only able to communicate with her family and her fiance, a teacher in Portland, when she left the village for shopping excursions to larger cities.

"It made it easier that I couldn't talk to them," she said. "I was always lonelier after talking."

Her mother, Susan Rogers, said initially the family worried, especially when they learned that Amanda was losing weight and her hair was falling out.

But Rogers was just adjusting to a new diet consisting largely of rice and peanut sauce, and coping with the side effects of an anti-malarial drug.

Her village neighbors became close friends, kept an eye on her, and brought her eggs, peanuts and fruits almost every day.

The biggest change in her thinking about the experience came in response to polygamy, which is common in the mostly Muslim country. Rogers learned to see it from a less judgmental point of view.

Because the woman do so much work - farming, cooking, cleaning, raising children - one wife has a heavy burden, she said.
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When multiple wives share the work, it makes it much easier on individuals, she said.

"Especially when women get pregnant or get sick," she said.

While the recent news from Guinea has been alarming - all television and radio stations shut down, journalists thrown out of meetings and soldiers reportedly killing civilians randomly - Rogers saw nothing remotely like that in her two years in the country.

"I didn't have a scary thing happen to me in Guinea," she said. "There was a snake in my hut once."

In late January, during the worst of the turmoil, Peace Corps coordinators - worried that they might lose their ability to evacuate volunteers if things got worse - went ahead and pulled the 105 volunteers out of the country to neighboring Mali.

Rogers had just a month left on her two-year stint, but it was still hard to say goodbye, she said.

She plans to stay in touch as best she can.

She's made a "phone date" in March with her best friend from Selouma, a 60-year-old man with four wives who she came to know well.

To make the date, he'll have to go to a neighboring city to borrow a cell phone, she said.

She's moving forward now with her own plans, marriage this summer and finishing her master's degree in the fall.

But her Peace Corps experience has enriched her life, she said.

"Weighing what I gave them versus what they gave me, they gave me so much more," she said. "They were so willing to give their time and resources, and they didn't expect to receive anything in return."

Links to Related Topics (Tags):

Headlines: February, 2007; Peace Corps Guinea; Directory of Guinea RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Guinea RPCVs; Safety and Security of Volunteers

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