Kids in Guinea Study Under Airport Lamps
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
The Associated Press
Thursday, July 19, 2007; 5:39 PM
Young Guineans study under the dim parking lot lights at G'bessi Airport in Conakry, Guinea. Only about a
fifth of Guinea's 10 million people have access to electricity.
By Rebecca Blackwell, AP
CONAKRY, Guinea -- The sun has set in one of the world's poorest nations and as the floodlights
come on at G'bessi International Airport, the parking lot begins filling with children.
The long stretch of pavement has the feel of a hushed library, each student sitting quietly, some
moving their lips as their eyes traverse their French-language notes.
It's exam season in Guinea, ranked 160th out of 177 countries on the United Nations' development
index, and schoolchildren flock to the airport every night because it's among the only places where
they'll always find the lights on.
Groups of elementary and high school students begin heading to the airport at dusk, hoping to
reserve a coveted spot under the oval light cast by one of a dozen lampposts in the parking lot.
Some come from over an hour's walk away.
The lot is teeming with girls and boys by the time Air France Flight 767 rounds the Gulf of Guinea
at an hour-and-a-half before midnight. They hardly look up from their notes as the Boeing jet begins
its spiraling descent over the dark city, or as the newly arrived passengers come out, shoving
luggage carts over the cracked pavement.
"I used to study by candlelight at home but that hurt my eyes. So I prefer to come here. We're used
to it," says 18-year-old Mohamed Sharif, who sat under the fluorescent beam memorizing notes on
the terrain of Mongolia for the geography portion of his college entrance test.
By Rebecca Blackwell, AP
Students gather at the airport. They sit by
age group with 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds on a
curb in a traffic island and teenagers on the
concrete pilings flanking the national and
international terminals. There are few cars
to disturb their studies.
Only about a fifth of Guinea's 10 million people have access to electricity and even those that do
experience frequent power cuts. With few families able to afford generators, students long ago
discovered the airport.
Parents require girls to be chaperoned to the airport by an older brother or a trusted male friend.
Even young children are allowed to stay out late under the fluorescent bulbs, so long as they return
in groups.
"My parents don't worry about me because they know I'm here to seek my future," says 10-year-old
Ali Mara, busy studying a diagram of the cephalothorax, the body of an insect.
They sit by age group with 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds on a curb in a traffic island and teenagers on the
concrete pilings flanking the national and international terminals. There are few cars to disturb their
studies.
Most are working on memorizing their notes, struggling to commit to memory entire paragraphs
dictated by their teachers on the history of Marxism, or the unraveling of colonial Africa, or the
geology of Siberia. Tests are largely feats of memorization, a relic from Guinea's French colonial
rulers.
According to U.N. data, the average Guinean consumes 89 kilowatt-hours per year- the equivalent
to keeping a 60-watt light bulb burning for two months- while the typical American burns up about
158 times that much.