I'm trying to get to Conakry using Chase UR to visit my sister in the Peace Corps!

Aim is to get leave ATL around Dec 25.

We want to somehow get ourselves back to Los Angeles, leave Conakry around Jan 5-6.

Any tips? I'm struggling with availability...

Sadly, you're many many months behind a lot of other people. Award availability opens up around 330 days before travel and you're attempting to travel around some of the most popular times in the year. Combine that with less than average number of airlines flying to Guinea and you'll find awards are more complicated. Getting yourself as close as possible to a gateway is probably the best you can hope for and that is going to be a struggle.

Or you just redeem your UR points at a preset cents per point value depending on which card(s) you have.

You may want to enlist the services of an award booking service but I would only use one that pays if they find you the ticket. Some charge a reduced fee just to do searches.

I would probably use points to fly US-Paris then buy a ticket round trip Paris-Conakry, which averages about $450 it seems. I'd build in at least a day on each end in Paris as flights in/out of West Africa sometimes can be troublesome.

Availability to Conakry isn't very good not only from a number of seats point of view, but many of the flights down there aren't daily and many of them aren't airlines you can use points on.

I took a quick look and it seems there are daily flights between CKY (Conakry) and DKR (Dakar). If you are using Chase UR points, you will need a fair amount to go from LAX to DKR. Assuming you convert them to United miles it will be about 80K miles per person for a round trip coach ticket. If you find award flights you would then need to buy tickets to/form CKY out of pocket as I doubt if any of the carriers are bookable with UA miles.

If you have the points/mile you will need to aggressively search for flights ASAP. I totally agree with Yoshi212 about when to search and the likely dearth of availability.