Five things

It's confirmed -- I depart for Guinea-Bissau this coming Sunday, for a little under two weeks. As silly as it sounds, I can't say why I'm going, because it's politically sensitive. So I'll have to confine myself to posting about the place itself, rather than what I'm doing. That's okay; I expect the place to be a lot more interesting than the work anyway.

This will be the first time in a long while that I've gone somewhere that I know next to nothing about. My knowledge of Guinea-Bissau can be boiled down to five things, in no particular order:

1. Former Portuguese colony located on the coast of West Africa, sandwiched between Senegal and Guinea (Conakry).
   
2. Consistently ranked one of the world's three poorest countries. (And yes, I have been to the other two, oddly enough.)
   
3. Main formal economic output is cashew nuts.
4. Main informal economic output is cocaine trafficking.
5. President recently had army Chief of Staff assassinated, resulting in assassination of the President. A tad politically unstable, in a nutshell.

That's pretty much it, unless you count "prone to devastating cholera outbreaks".

I'll be taking the cholera vaccine this time, I think.