Conakry - Post Report Question and Answers
Are there any particular mental health issues that tend to crop up at post, such as Seasonal Affective Disorder (winter blues)?
SAD unlikely due to the sunlight here. There is poor morale, general stress, depression and insomnia in the community. - Sep 2022
Lots of sunshine, though things do get gloomy when it rains nonstop for an entire day or days. I'd say the biggest problem is morale, especially since expats often get together and just complain and talk ugly about things because they think that's what everyone is expected to do. The net effect is a real downer. Others have commented on how stressful life is here in Conakry. I can relate to this, especially if you're someone who likes to feel in control of things. To be at peace in Conakry you need to get rid of any pretense of total control. It is an “in-your-face” place; the poverty is visible, the garbage is out on the streets and clogging the creeks, the sexism and patriarchy are palpable. This can be overwhelming, and if you're sensitive to these sorts of environmental downers (like if they can trigger a full blown depressive episode), this is probably not the place for you. That said, I've found that the rawness and vitality of daily life here has actually made me a less-stressed, more well-rounded person, and improved the way I see and live life. Seeing garbage everywhere in Conakry reminds me that the average European or American actually generates like ten times the garbage of a Guinean, but that we hide it in a landfill or send it to Asia to be thrown into their seas. I have seen kids in my neighborhood almost die of preventable things like measles or malaria, and I've also seen the whole neighborhood come together to succor these kids and help their parents pay for the hospital bill and transport. Death and privation are very present here; perhaps they're present everywhere, but in Conakry they're not disguised or pushed under the rug, and this constant proximity of real suffering and possibly death makes you live each moment more consciously, more exuberantly. It works in reverse too; if you live bravely, you’ll inspire your Guinean acquaintances to do things they hadn’t thought of before. The learning goes in both directions. Conakry can also make you more humble, less self-righteous (or it can cement you in your intolerance for human foibles, if that’s how you roll). Coming face to face with such intractable problems, even with the daily traffic jam, reminds you that this is not just someone else's problem, or even someone else's fault. You are dodging the same pothole as everyone else, which in turn makes you block the other lane of traffic, which perpetuates the traffic jam, just like everyone else in your lane is doing before and after you have to do it. You realize that your education or your wealth or even your full awareness and critical reading of that particular problem, none of these things necessarily make you better-equipped to solve it. And it also dawns on you that perhaps the Guinean masses suffering stoically through all these daily indignities aren’t just unconscious of them or accepting them as what should be; they’re dealing with life as it is, while not necessarily accepting these indignities as “normal” or desirable. They’re picking their battles just like you are, in an environment where affronts to dignity abound. Such reflections will bring you to the recognition that the problems in Conakry, and the way people deal with them, aren’t so inherently different from what people deal with in the rest of the world. It’s often a question of degree, and whether the place you happened to be born has more or less of these enervating problems to deal with on a day-to-day basis. All this has made me have more sympathy for those people (which is to say all of us) who unwittingly contribute to big problems because they don't have other avenues open to them. Ultimately each individual person (whether Guinean or expat) reacts similarly to, and is affected similarly by, a given problem. This makes it clear to me that there is no such thing as “someone else's problem”. There are problems that affect a given person more or less directly, and problems that each person is more or less well-placed to help solve. I mean, I guess a pothole in Bangkok, or a failing COVID response in India, may directly affect me less than it affects the people in those places, but I now know that, were I in those situations myself, I probably would react pretty similarly to how the people there react to the problem. For me it's no longer possible to scorn or get annoyed by problems suffered by an average Conakry resident that is no more or less individually responsible for the genesis of the problem than I myself am. It’s like when you step into a poorly air-conditioned waiting room and are hit by the overpowering stench of body odor. Initially you think, “Man, everyone here smells terrible. They should do something about that.” When you get out of that room and back into air conditioning, sometimes you’ll get a whiff of your own armpit, and realize that you were right: “everyone” did smell terrible, including you! And the “something” that “they” should do about it, which ultimately would be to install air conditioning in that waiting room, is no more within your power than it was for any of the other people suffering through the same situation. If I ever manage to project this understanding onto a global scale and live my life more coherently as a result, it will be thanks to my having lived and learned here in Conakry. - Jun 2021
Nothing in particular. In my opinion, this is a very stressful place to live. - Nov 2019
