Getting through a day in Conakry

One of the hard facts of life in a truly poor country is the extent to which most people have to live from day to day. Resolving today's problem of basic needs for food, water, electricity, transport, just gets you to tomorrow and having to resolve them again. And in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the problems are major. For food, most of us in the Caribbean, Europe and North America are not too concerned about having to buy food for today's meal. But we have have lost the habit of having to do that every day: we have storage possibilities like fridges and freezers to deal with perishables, and we can often stock a lot of non-perishables. For water, we turn on the tap and water comes out; it's clean and it's usually plentiful. We have to deal with occasional outages, but we are not used to having to tote buckets of water, or deal with a tap that gives no water at all, perhaps for days, or water that comes out looking like soup. For electricity, we have become used to "always on". We dont really have to deal with outages that last for more than a few hours, and only occasionally. We would find it really shocking to have no electricity most of most days, or at best two days in seven. While we rail (bad pun) against traffic congestion or the lack of good public transport, it's relative. Buses that are only once every 15 minutes, for example. If you have lived in places like London or New York with good bus and subway systems, you think of overcrowding as a regular irritant during rush hour, meaning having to stand with lots of other people for perhaps a 15-30 minute ride. How about sitting in a minivan, full to overflowing, and going along dusty, bumpy roads for about 2 hours and doing that twice a day for five days a week? Those things that we are not accustomed to are part of the daily grind in Guinea, and many poor countries.

What is pitiful is that public adminstrations have not been short of money to deal with these problems, but the money has rarely touched the solutions. More pitiful in the case of Guinea is that you have water in abundance and can generate enough hydroelectricity, but poor management and execution has left the country struggling to give basic services. What serves as transport is often a mix of tired, second hand vehicles that are always full of people and their goods. You have to get used to seeing a small car full of people, with chickens, wood, steel bars, and water drums, scraping the ground in the city or on some country road. When a taxi comes along, it's survival of the fittest, and if you feel like saying "After you" then get ready to wait a long time. Most 5 seater cars used as taxis often carry 7-8 people.

You have to get used to the fact that with little income and usually no savings a day's spending may not get you through the day. Get used to broken down cars, because people have enough money to buy a little petrol, or parts cannot be replaced.

One of the major problems with food is dependence on imported "essentials". We know in the Caribbean how much we love rice. In Guinea, a day starting without rice, and I mean for breakfast, is a day not started. So, huge quantities of rice are imported, even though the country can easily be self-sufficient in rice.
Sounds familiar? Here, it arrives in large 50 kilogram sacks and are loaded and loaded by hand. If a truck breaks down, it takes little time for people to help distribute the contents!

Having a solid income is no guarantee that these things will not affect you. They may hit you less directly, but they may hit your staff and lot, and so affect you indirectly. So, think about some of these things during a normally uneventful Sunday.