Way out

We had the windows of our old Renault closed, although the humid heat was suffocating. The heat was certainly more bearable than the red dust clouds that would enter the car through the smallest open cracks. It was early February, the dry season in Guinea.

We were mostly driving on unsealed roads from the capital Conakry to Lomou, the birthplace of my dad. The scent of jasmine, coffee plants and the perfume of the forest wet with rain, were so eminent that I couldn’t decide whether I enjoyed them, or if their intensity dazed my olfactory sense, and would eventually make me faint.

It was my first time visiting Guinea. It was also the first time I traveled alone with my dad. Guinea, its people, their lifestyle, their food, have always been part of my life. My mom, who is Romanian, adopted their cooking habits, and we often had Guinean friends over at our place in Munich. I was 20, and finally ready to go and experience this country myself.

Hias vans, transformed into little transit-buses with ale-benches, are crammed with more passengers than fit. Honking cars push over pothole prone roads from the suburbs to the city. People wrapped in colourful traditional fabric walk in light shoes over the unpaved sideways. From fragile booths women are offering rice covered with various sauces, toa paste with manioc leaves, lunch for the workers. Carpenters sit in front of their newly made furniture on the street, wood cravers praise their ebony figures, and children sell little plastic bags with ice cooled water from a bucket they carry on their heads. I realize I‘m in a different world. Only hand-painted commercial billboards and the rubbish lying everywhere, remind of the global features of Western capitalism.

Guinean life is taking place outside. Due to the frequent power failures, small bars and restaurants, are the places were people met at night. Guineans are very social. Although the mode of entertainment is differing, Conakry can be cited on one list together with New York or Las Vegas, as a city that never sleeps.

As we drive on, we leave the hustle and bustle of the city behind us, and pass pictorial landscapes of different vegetation, quaint hills, waterfalls, green covered valleys, and tropical rain forests. 26 hours and about 1000 km later we finally arrive in Lomou. The village is located in the far eastern highlands of the rainforest region. In recent years, the area around the Mont Nimba, the highest mountain in Guinea, had been a shelter for refugees from the bordering Liberia.

Small clay hats are dispersed over a large area surrounded by tall palm and banana trees. I notice that the village is much cleaner than the city, maybe because the nearest shops are 50 km away, in N‘Zerekoré. The welcome of the people is overwhelming. My impressions are overwhelming, and I‘m still wondering how my dad managed to find his path to Europe from here.