10 December 2010
“I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.” - Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
At last I am free to break from the pressure of the suffocating workload I have been becoming accustomed to and come up for a few breaths of fresh air. I’m not sure what I anticipated when I volunteered for the Peace Corps, I certainly imagined there would be difficulties. I think I envisioned they would be of a different sort, however. I thought I would be learning to live without electricity, suffering through too many quiet hours to myself, boredom like I’d never known before. I guess I believed that the students would be mesmerized by my presence and so appreciative that they’d behave somehow differently than children normally do.
We have passed the six month point and some days I can hardly believe it. Home feels like such a familiar place in my mind but the thought of going back there at some point a year from now seems strange. Walking into the world of technology, skyscrapers, paved roads, running water, filled with so many apathetic individualists seems overwhelming. The world of restaurants, movie theaters, rollercoasters, and so many luxuries my students can’t even wrap their minds around.
Contrary to what I’d pictured, the real challenges have been far simpler such as the insane amount of work that teachers have here. When I first got here I did not understand why more students didn’t dream of becoming teachers as so many youngsters do back home but now I understand that it is hardly a glamorous and rarely a rewarding job to have in this country.
The first several weeks of classes in September I spent poring over the insanely dense national syllabus and combining it with the teaching program designed from the painfully lousy textbook to create a more logical schedule that I can also work thematically into a program for development. The past few weeks I have been teaching AIDS prevention and nutrition in my classes, for example. I plan to also teach about politics and democracy, sanitation and disease prevention, budgeting and saving, the environment, human rights and more. With this kind of agenda before me my impact feels far deeper than if I just taught English grammar 15 hours a week.
Due to the horrendous amount of bureaucratic work that is associated with the end of each sequence (half a trimester), we began testing about 4 weeks into school. That means I have to write tests for all 4 of my levels, then correct all 278 of them, most of which have some incomprehensible composition I must try to make sense of and evaluate fairly. Once the tests are corrected we have to average all the students’ grades, fill out several forms associated and then sign out the report cards while on the campus and fill in each one by hand with the students rote grade, the weight of the class in their studies, the weighted average, and then a remark based on their score. I was given the work of class master at my school even though Peace Corps encouraged us to refuse to do it because it doesn’t correspond well with our trainings out of town and is a lot of work we weren’t really trained to do. Given, though, that there are 13 teachers at my school and 13 classes, it would seem rather bizarre to exclude myself from a responsibility that every other teacher has, and it would also mean doubling someone else’s work. Thus, yesterday, for the second time in 3 months, I spent 6 hours in my living room calculating averages for all the subjects for my class of 54, giving them once again a remark based on their overall work, calculating the class average as a whole, and then ranking each student in the class. All things we have been using computers to accomplish in the States since before I was even in Kindergarten. Thank God I complained so much and threw a mini fit when I was originally assigned the biggest class in all the lycee.
So, this morning I will finally take my report cards into school, do a few minor corrections and walk back home in the mindset of my 3 week vacation being underway. On Sunday we head out for Kribi, a tourist hotspot on the beach that promises to be beautiful, at least somewhat relaxing, and to serve up delicious seafood. On the way home I will meet up with Claude in Yaounde, recover my package filled with much longed-for spices and clothes from the PC headquarters where I will perhaps use the uber luxurious washing machine and take a hot shower, then travel with Claude to visit friends and my host family in Bafia, where I had my training. The thought of all the free time I have to enjoy my surroundings for the first time really since arriving here is utterly blissful, and I’m very excited to have some quality time with my boyfriend where I’m not running off to work or too busy grading homework and planning lessons to pay much attention to him.
Other than the workload I have found that the biggest challenges are in dealing with things like seeing my neighbor beat her 2 young children mercilessly with a tree branch while they fall to the ground in their attempt to run away screaming. Yesterday a girl was beat at school, something I had not yet come across here. I initially thought I should just ignore it but to my own surprise I went right into the Discipline Master’s office and asked him what was going on. I told him right away that I didn’t approve of it and that it was illegal but that was really my first reaction from the shock and anger I was feeling. I headed toward the Principal’s office immediately to take it up with him but he was out and that allowed me a few minutes in the teacher’s lounge to blow off steam before I again approached the Discipline Master and spoke to him rationally about my concerns.
Our conversation was frustrating. At first I was trying to give him courtesy and respect by allowing him to finish his thoughts, but then I noticed that each time I tried to speak he had more to say. It occurred to me that my allowing him to silence me wasn’t going to get me anywhere so I finally insisted he let me finish. I know I made no impact on him whatsoever with my little speech on how even a child who may have stolen money from her parents has rights and how the Cameroonian government outlawed corporal punishment for good reasons. He even gave me a little tap on the butt to demonstrate where they hit the kids reminding me as well how inappropriate it is for a grown man to be hitting a little girl in the same way.
Despite all that, I did understand where he was coming from to some extent and I tried to rationalize that it is not a frequent thing at my school so at least they seem to be reserving it as the harshest form of punishment. Perhaps if some of the seriously delinquent children that I went to school with had gotten a red buttocks every now and then at school they would’ve straightened up a bit. He said a student that is too wayward needs a serious wake up call so as not to become later a threat to society.
Many of the kids here are essentially raising themselves. Their parents are in the bigger cities and come back here only occasionally. In the light of all that it stands to reason that the school stepping in to align children better and fill the gap their parents leave in their absence makes sense. In a land free of law suits, rampant accusations of pedophilia, and where people look at everyone’s children as their own, it is difficult to form a solid argument against their case. It still gives me a bad taste in my mouth but hell, my grandmother was beat, my mother and father, and they turned out alright. I certainly feel that the beatings are too brute, especially when given by an angry parent, even so emotionally charged that the parent seems out of control. In that way I cannot stomach it. Yet, after the event yesterday and my conversation with him, I actually did feel calmer, I did see his point of view. That doesn’t mean I condone it or like it but I accept that not everything here can be as progressive as things back home and in a country where government is another word for corruption, where people find democracy to be a joke, it’s also a joke when you come out preaching to them about what is illegal.
My lungs have been seriously suffering in the last month and a half as the rainy season came to an abrupt halt and the dry season has started kicking up dust reminiscent of the Grapes of Wrath. I was happy to hear that Christine is suffering the very same symptoms that I went to the clinic for; the dust must be responsible.
I spent Thanksgiving with she and Claude at her house, we had a meatless meatloaf (way more delicious than it may sound), lumpy mashed potatoes (anyone wanna send me a potato masher?), and banana bread. Now that I have a loaf pan and a good understanding of the Dutch oven I have been baking loads of cornbread and banana bread for all the neighbors who’ve given me loads of things since I’ve been here.
I have so many other things I could add but, it’s simply too much and I should really heat up my bath water and get my day started so I can be on time to meet Christine at the bank this afternoon. Happy holidays back home! 2011- wow! Didn’t I just graduate high school??!!
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
The Flux Capacitor
November 11
“In the Huerfano you live at the mercy of the sky. Dry Creek’s been dry for two weeks, and the spring box didn’t refill last night. The wildflowers fade and curl, and when the hot wind blows, dust flies up in the meadows.” - A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture: Huerfano, Roberta Price
It is difficult to believe that the holidays are already just around the bend, especially when I walk outside everyday and see absolutely no signs to remind me of them. After 2 ‘winters’ in Los Angeles I have become accustomed to hanging around in short-sleeves right before Christmas but there was still Jingle Bells playing in the Beverly Center in October. It’s fascinating to be living on a school schedule again and it seems to make life move much faster than countless hours spent at a desk in my office. Not to mention how much busier I have become lately.
In addition to teaching my 4 levels 3 days a week I have started a Girls’ Club at the Lycee. That eliminated one of my free days completely since it’s right in the afternoon and breaks my time into highly inconvenient pieces. I was also approached by some women in the community regarding an organization they’ve been attempting to engineer with the other ladies of the village. We’ve gotten together several times now to toss thoughts and ideas around with whichever women come to the meetings. I also started offering Saturday classes 2 times a month to all my students so I spend 4 hours almost every other weekend letting those who come tell me what they’re struggling with. It’s really become the day I enjoy teaching the most because my classes are a bit smaller, there’s no faculty around, the kids are less over-excited and more at ease, I feel like I’m really listening and helping them more genuinely, and the environment is more personal.
Teaching has been getting easier, finally. After attending a seminar for English teachers in the region I feel more like I’m on the right track and fear less that I’m failing my students. I have stopped worrying so much if I speak French to them and feel like they understand far more because of that decision. I finally feel like they get me a little better and I notice that I’m finding my rhythm with them and kicking them out less frequently. They seem to have noticed that I accept far less than I did in the beginning of the year and respect me for it.
At the seminar I spoke with a national inspector who told me that the national syllabus is the most important guideline for my classes, which is what I had thought initially until the staff at my school told me that the textbook was the priority. I explained that I was skeptical of that considering that not all of the schools in the country use the same textbook, but they insisted. I was feeling so frustrated and trapped in the idea of having to teach from a text that is lousy to begin with. Using it as the guide gave me very little freedom to teach the way I want to teach. Luckily, because of what the inspector told me I have now found a good balance using the textbook and my own syllabus that I wrote when first getting into the village.
Unfortunately, in a few weeks I will be forced to coordinate with the other English teachers at the school to write the tests for the class levels that we share. This means that I am unsure of how my students will perform considering that I will not be permitted to design a test that reflects exactly what I’ve taught. To prevent all my students’ grades from dropping considerably I have been giving lots of homework and I will give points to those who attend the Saturday classes as well. Unfortunately this also means I have an insane amount of homework myself in grading them! Reading an essay in elementary level 2nd language English is much harder than it seems. Props to all my French teachers over the years for that!
When I’m not running off to do something work related someplace or to a language lesson, I often walk out my front door and stand on the side of the road waiting for a raggedy old station wagon to come bumping along, squeeze me in (literally), and go into the regional capital or to the village next to mine to stock up on goodies. Bahouan is one of the smallest and least known villages in the region and doesn’t appear on the map. The market is only every 8 days and there really isn’t too much to offer aside from the usual stuff I can get at the local shops anyhow. Therefore when I get low on certain things, need to go to the bank, or just want to chow on something more exotic than the typical veggies I find here, I spend the majority of my day off getting toted around, negotiating prices, and wandering all over the place acquiring stuff.
Cameroon is known to be a bread basket in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, before coming here I read that if they ever closed their borders or had a natural disaster like a drought, many people in the neighboring countries would run the risk of starving. Now that I’m in my own house and have my gas stove, (automatically lighting, thank Heaven!) I have gone back to my vegetarian diet. It’s been a lot easier than I anticipated and even all the teachers at the school are not at all surprised when I don’t completely load my plate with chicken at our staff meetings.
I can find all sorts of vegetables here; some incredibly familiar and some totally new. Most days I’ve got tomatoes, onions, leeks, basil, celery, snap peas, carrots, and green peppers in the house. It’s a treat if I go into Bandjoan and buy romaine lettuce for a salad but soon I hope to be eating some from my own yard! I’ve found beets a couple of times but think they must be out of season now. There is eggplant, zucchini, cabbage, potatoes, avocados, guava, pineapple, okra, bananas and plantains.
New things include “batons” of manioc; I am not sure exactly what part of the plant they even are but they are incredibly unappetizing in appearance. In fact, I was absolutely disgusted by them when I first arrived here. They come wrapped in banana leaves and are gummy in texture. They are a clear, whitish color with a grainy appearance and really have no taste at all but somehow I have taken a liking to them and snack on them frequently when I get home from school. There is also something they call prunes which is nothing like a prune but more like a tiny avocado but hard. If you fry them in a bit of water and oil they soften and then you eat the skin and the green or white insides around the pit. Another thing I was not too fond of until after a few samples and now really enjoy. There are what the people here call ‘potate’ which is essentially a sweet potato but with a drier and unique sweet flavor.
I am still eating as well as I was in Los Angeles and since my mom sent me the best cookbook for a vegetarian ever (which I recommend to everyone- even carnivores) “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” I cook several times a week. I’ve been eating all sorts of delicious things like homemade minestrone, bean burgers with a side of sweet potato fries, couscous topped with fresh tomato sauce and eggs poached in red wine, vegetable pancakes, cabbage leaves stuffed with lentils and rice, Louisiana style gumbo, breakfast burritos with homemade tortillas and salsa, and pasta with panfried squash and tomato sauce!
Some days it feels as though coming to Africa is what makes time travel possible (rather than Doc‘s invention). A world where you can still find cassette tapes, where McDonald’s and Wal-Mart have not come barging in with hamburgers and low-low prices, on the way to work I pass kids who can’t be older than 3 walking alone down the street, during the day I hear the little boy who lives behind me chopping wood to put on the fire they use to prepare dinner. It’s a world less controlled by politicians and more natural.
At school I have finally adjusted to being allowed to touch my students somewhat without a law suit waiting to happen. Sometimes when I reach out to put my hand on an arm or to demonstrate something, they flea my reach in fear that I’m going to hit them like the rest of the staff. I definitely don’t hit them at all or even use muscle in any way, but I have gotten more used to taking the delinquents by an arm and pulling them to the front of the class to put their noses against the chalkboard.
There are chickens grazing on the side of the road constantly and I can tell the store-owner just up the street that I’ll pay him for my bread tomorrow. When I sit in my language teacher’s little office with his ratty old books I stare into his yard at a well that looks like it should be on Little House on the Prairie with stone sides and a hanging bucket. At night I often find myself working or cooking next to a little gas lantern or a candlelight. When the water is cut off in the house I am vigilant about putting all my empty buckets outside in case of rain and if I hear the water come on I am forced to hop out of bed in the middle of the night and retrieve all the buckets from the yard to fill them as quickly as possible before the opportunity for water is lost again.
I am finally reading the book my friend Bret sent me about the Huerfano Valley in Colorado. It was a commune established by people rejecting the war and the draft and all American politics in the 60s. It’s fascinating how much their little makeshift lives on a mountainside in Colorado 40 some years ago are strikingly similar to mine here. It feels almost strange the marriage of technology and lack of development here. I can hardly ever walk into the bathroom and flush my toilet when I want to but here I am, sitting on my laptop and at the school I can get on the internet and communicate instantly just like I’ve been doing since I was 9 years old. My family calls my cell phone every weekend, and even my students have cell phones.
“In the Huerfano you live at the mercy of the sky. Dry Creek’s been dry for two weeks, and the spring box didn’t refill last night. The wildflowers fade and curl, and when the hot wind blows, dust flies up in the meadows.” - A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture: Huerfano, Roberta Price
It is difficult to believe that the holidays are already just around the bend, especially when I walk outside everyday and see absolutely no signs to remind me of them. After 2 ‘winters’ in Los Angeles I have become accustomed to hanging around in short-sleeves right before Christmas but there was still Jingle Bells playing in the Beverly Center in October. It’s fascinating to be living on a school schedule again and it seems to make life move much faster than countless hours spent at a desk in my office. Not to mention how much busier I have become lately.
In addition to teaching my 4 levels 3 days a week I have started a Girls’ Club at the Lycee. That eliminated one of my free days completely since it’s right in the afternoon and breaks my time into highly inconvenient pieces. I was also approached by some women in the community regarding an organization they’ve been attempting to engineer with the other ladies of the village. We’ve gotten together several times now to toss thoughts and ideas around with whichever women come to the meetings. I also started offering Saturday classes 2 times a month to all my students so I spend 4 hours almost every other weekend letting those who come tell me what they’re struggling with. It’s really become the day I enjoy teaching the most because my classes are a bit smaller, there’s no faculty around, the kids are less over-excited and more at ease, I feel like I’m really listening and helping them more genuinely, and the environment is more personal.
Teaching has been getting easier, finally. After attending a seminar for English teachers in the region I feel more like I’m on the right track and fear less that I’m failing my students. I have stopped worrying so much if I speak French to them and feel like they understand far more because of that decision. I finally feel like they get me a little better and I notice that I’m finding my rhythm with them and kicking them out less frequently. They seem to have noticed that I accept far less than I did in the beginning of the year and respect me for it.
At the seminar I spoke with a national inspector who told me that the national syllabus is the most important guideline for my classes, which is what I had thought initially until the staff at my school told me that the textbook was the priority. I explained that I was skeptical of that considering that not all of the schools in the country use the same textbook, but they insisted. I was feeling so frustrated and trapped in the idea of having to teach from a text that is lousy to begin with. Using it as the guide gave me very little freedom to teach the way I want to teach. Luckily, because of what the inspector told me I have now found a good balance using the textbook and my own syllabus that I wrote when first getting into the village.
Unfortunately, in a few weeks I will be forced to coordinate with the other English teachers at the school to write the tests for the class levels that we share. This means that I am unsure of how my students will perform considering that I will not be permitted to design a test that reflects exactly what I’ve taught. To prevent all my students’ grades from dropping considerably I have been giving lots of homework and I will give points to those who attend the Saturday classes as well. Unfortunately this also means I have an insane amount of homework myself in grading them! Reading an essay in elementary level 2nd language English is much harder than it seems. Props to all my French teachers over the years for that!
When I’m not running off to do something work related someplace or to a language lesson, I often walk out my front door and stand on the side of the road waiting for a raggedy old station wagon to come bumping along, squeeze me in (literally), and go into the regional capital or to the village next to mine to stock up on goodies. Bahouan is one of the smallest and least known villages in the region and doesn’t appear on the map. The market is only every 8 days and there really isn’t too much to offer aside from the usual stuff I can get at the local shops anyhow. Therefore when I get low on certain things, need to go to the bank, or just want to chow on something more exotic than the typical veggies I find here, I spend the majority of my day off getting toted around, negotiating prices, and wandering all over the place acquiring stuff.
Cameroon is known to be a bread basket in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, before coming here I read that if they ever closed their borders or had a natural disaster like a drought, many people in the neighboring countries would run the risk of starving. Now that I’m in my own house and have my gas stove, (automatically lighting, thank Heaven!) I have gone back to my vegetarian diet. It’s been a lot easier than I anticipated and even all the teachers at the school are not at all surprised when I don’t completely load my plate with chicken at our staff meetings.
I can find all sorts of vegetables here; some incredibly familiar and some totally new. Most days I’ve got tomatoes, onions, leeks, basil, celery, snap peas, carrots, and green peppers in the house. It’s a treat if I go into Bandjoan and buy romaine lettuce for a salad but soon I hope to be eating some from my own yard! I’ve found beets a couple of times but think they must be out of season now. There is eggplant, zucchini, cabbage, potatoes, avocados, guava, pineapple, okra, bananas and plantains.
New things include “batons” of manioc; I am not sure exactly what part of the plant they even are but they are incredibly unappetizing in appearance. In fact, I was absolutely disgusted by them when I first arrived here. They come wrapped in banana leaves and are gummy in texture. They are a clear, whitish color with a grainy appearance and really have no taste at all but somehow I have taken a liking to them and snack on them frequently when I get home from school. There is also something they call prunes which is nothing like a prune but more like a tiny avocado but hard. If you fry them in a bit of water and oil they soften and then you eat the skin and the green or white insides around the pit. Another thing I was not too fond of until after a few samples and now really enjoy. There are what the people here call ‘potate’ which is essentially a sweet potato but with a drier and unique sweet flavor.
I am still eating as well as I was in Los Angeles and since my mom sent me the best cookbook for a vegetarian ever (which I recommend to everyone- even carnivores) “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” I cook several times a week. I’ve been eating all sorts of delicious things like homemade minestrone, bean burgers with a side of sweet potato fries, couscous topped with fresh tomato sauce and eggs poached in red wine, vegetable pancakes, cabbage leaves stuffed with lentils and rice, Louisiana style gumbo, breakfast burritos with homemade tortillas and salsa, and pasta with panfried squash and tomato sauce!
Some days it feels as though coming to Africa is what makes time travel possible (rather than Doc‘s invention). A world where you can still find cassette tapes, where McDonald’s and Wal-Mart have not come barging in with hamburgers and low-low prices, on the way to work I pass kids who can’t be older than 3 walking alone down the street, during the day I hear the little boy who lives behind me chopping wood to put on the fire they use to prepare dinner. It’s a world less controlled by politicians and more natural.
At school I have finally adjusted to being allowed to touch my students somewhat without a law suit waiting to happen. Sometimes when I reach out to put my hand on an arm or to demonstrate something, they flea my reach in fear that I’m going to hit them like the rest of the staff. I definitely don’t hit them at all or even use muscle in any way, but I have gotten more used to taking the delinquents by an arm and pulling them to the front of the class to put their noses against the chalkboard.
There are chickens grazing on the side of the road constantly and I can tell the store-owner just up the street that I’ll pay him for my bread tomorrow. When I sit in my language teacher’s little office with his ratty old books I stare into his yard at a well that looks like it should be on Little House on the Prairie with stone sides and a hanging bucket. At night I often find myself working or cooking next to a little gas lantern or a candlelight. When the water is cut off in the house I am vigilant about putting all my empty buckets outside in case of rain and if I hear the water come on I am forced to hop out of bed in the middle of the night and retrieve all the buckets from the yard to fill them as quickly as possible before the opportunity for water is lost again.
I am finally reading the book my friend Bret sent me about the Huerfano Valley in Colorado. It was a commune established by people rejecting the war and the draft and all American politics in the 60s. It’s fascinating how much their little makeshift lives on a mountainside in Colorado 40 some years ago are strikingly similar to mine here. It feels almost strange the marriage of technology and lack of development here. I can hardly ever walk into the bathroom and flush my toilet when I want to but here I am, sitting on my laptop and at the school I can get on the internet and communicate instantly just like I’ve been doing since I was 9 years old. My family calls my cell phone every weekend, and even my students have cell phones.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
The toughest job you'll ever love
“If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emit’s a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, starry, more immortal-- that is your success” -Into the Wild (quoting Walden; Henry David Thoreau)
The Peace Corps slogan has taken on much greater meaning in recent weeks. After being in country nearly 5 months and teaching nearly 3, the initial awe and charm of it all has begun to wear off and it has started to feel a bit like actual work.
Even in the time I am not physically in the classroom or preparing to be, there are so many additional, unanticipated responsibilities to deal with. Things such as being prepared at any minute to receive visitors who arrive spontaneously and insist you serve them an impromptu coffee; being constantly vigilant of my appearance, my dress, my attitude and demeanor. I must be willing to smile and greet any number of people along the road to anywhere I happen to be walking, and willing as well to carry on complete conversations with those who desire it. When a crazy person stops me for an extended period of time while I’m in the market I have to wonder about the culturally appropriate approach to escape (which is actually quite similar to that of the U.S. approach, I learned the hard way, as Claude walked on, leaving me stranded with a woman babbling nonsense at me before a crowd of onlookers for nearly 10 minutes once).
I had envisioned Peace Corps always as this tranquil, perhaps even lonely 2 years of my life. I always figured I’d have a chance to make a hefty dent in my “Read Before I Die” list. To the contrary, everyone in the village seems to notice every move I make. The children of the neighboring compounds have taken favor with playing in the yard and veranda of my house so oftentimes when I am not shouting at kids at the top of my lungs to “STOP NOISE” I am listening to them chase each other in droves, in circles round my house. Yesterday when I went to plant some seeds in the garden, another thing I envisioned being a bit peaceful aspect of my experience here, at least 7 kids stood staring at me, speaking in mother tongue and laughing as though they’d never seen a person put seeds in the ground despite that the entire culture is pastoral.
Leading such a public life is far more exhausting than I‘d imagined and as a result I have found myself slinking into a more introverted personality than ever before. I have begun to look forward to evening and thunderstorms for the opportunity for a few brief instants of freedom from scrutiny and relative calm. Some days I find I do not even feel like opening the shutters because it is the only way to escape the worry of visitors dropping by and children staring at me until I can‘t stand it and move to another room away from their peering eyes.
I suppose that this behavior sounds a bit depressed but that is not the case at all. I am still extremely happy here and never doubt my long carried desire to join the Peace Corps. Some excerpts from my journal can provide insight into the euphoria, in fact, that I am feeling:
15 October-
…Is it really possible that life can be this good? Everyday I feel completely shocked at what I’m living right now.
At the moment I am sitting in the bedroom of my very own house with a glass of warm coffee as a cool breeze is blowing in through my ancient pane-glass window. I can hear the sound of a foreign language being spoken as people barter and exchange goods at the market down the mud road. There are a great variety of birds chirping, the leaves of banana trees swaying calmly in the breeze. Out the window I can see the rusted tin roof of the entrance to the Chef’s quarters, surrounded by an array of fauna including my favorite tree here; long and skinny in the trunk, they sprawl out with scrawny, broad arms and bushy leaves at the top and our polka dotted with a beautiful deep but bright orange flower. When the sun hits them they look like something from a children’s storybook illustration…
…At 25 I don’t believe there’s any place or experience I’d prefer to be having right now. I partied my ass off and lived up my early youth as appropriate; I feel ready at last to march into that period of adulthood where you slow down a little, let a little calm in and start contemplating the next chapters of your story.
Overall I am finding the experience as a whole rather humbling in many ways. I have never been the biggest patriot but after spending a bit of time in Africa, seeing the rampant corruption, stumbling through problems with seemingly simplistic solutions which wind up becoming inherently more complicated than they initially seemed, understanding that though I feel like a poor youth barely out of the post-college ramen noodle diet days, I am actually extremely wealthy here; all of it molds a rather deep appreciation of my country’s accomplishments in a relatively short period of time. Granted most of our success lies rooted in the fact that a few British soldiers relocated, slaughtering everyone in their way to build exactly what they wanted of a nation, but, I am loathe to admit that just a few hundred years later the world is an altogether better place for it. I’m certainly not absolving our nation’s role in a multitude of vile things throughout our history; I did, after all, spend the two years of my life before coming here repudiating such things as our grossly excessive military arm as a career choice. It’s simply more clear now how undeniable it is that the world in general looks on our history, people, and way of life as a model of what they’d like their nation to be and such admiration turns the wheels toward a certain intellectual progress.
As nearly a half a year has already rushed past in my time here and I have already taken on virtually an entirely new identity, it is impossible not to speculate about who on earth I will have become at the end of all this. One near certainty is this, in the long run the impact will be deep and I believe that for the most part the changes will be positive.
The Peace Corps slogan has taken on much greater meaning in recent weeks. After being in country nearly 5 months and teaching nearly 3, the initial awe and charm of it all has begun to wear off and it has started to feel a bit like actual work.
Even in the time I am not physically in the classroom or preparing to be, there are so many additional, unanticipated responsibilities to deal with. Things such as being prepared at any minute to receive visitors who arrive spontaneously and insist you serve them an impromptu coffee; being constantly vigilant of my appearance, my dress, my attitude and demeanor. I must be willing to smile and greet any number of people along the road to anywhere I happen to be walking, and willing as well to carry on complete conversations with those who desire it. When a crazy person stops me for an extended period of time while I’m in the market I have to wonder about the culturally appropriate approach to escape (which is actually quite similar to that of the U.S. approach, I learned the hard way, as Claude walked on, leaving me stranded with a woman babbling nonsense at me before a crowd of onlookers for nearly 10 minutes once).
I had envisioned Peace Corps always as this tranquil, perhaps even lonely 2 years of my life. I always figured I’d have a chance to make a hefty dent in my “Read Before I Die” list. To the contrary, everyone in the village seems to notice every move I make. The children of the neighboring compounds have taken favor with playing in the yard and veranda of my house so oftentimes when I am not shouting at kids at the top of my lungs to “STOP NOISE” I am listening to them chase each other in droves, in circles round my house. Yesterday when I went to plant some seeds in the garden, another thing I envisioned being a bit peaceful aspect of my experience here, at least 7 kids stood staring at me, speaking in mother tongue and laughing as though they’d never seen a person put seeds in the ground despite that the entire culture is pastoral.
Leading such a public life is far more exhausting than I‘d imagined and as a result I have found myself slinking into a more introverted personality than ever before. I have begun to look forward to evening and thunderstorms for the opportunity for a few brief instants of freedom from scrutiny and relative calm. Some days I find I do not even feel like opening the shutters because it is the only way to escape the worry of visitors dropping by and children staring at me until I can‘t stand it and move to another room away from their peering eyes.
I suppose that this behavior sounds a bit depressed but that is not the case at all. I am still extremely happy here and never doubt my long carried desire to join the Peace Corps. Some excerpts from my journal can provide insight into the euphoria, in fact, that I am feeling:
15 October-
…Is it really possible that life can be this good? Everyday I feel completely shocked at what I’m living right now.
At the moment I am sitting in the bedroom of my very own house with a glass of warm coffee as a cool breeze is blowing in through my ancient pane-glass window. I can hear the sound of a foreign language being spoken as people barter and exchange goods at the market down the mud road. There are a great variety of birds chirping, the leaves of banana trees swaying calmly in the breeze. Out the window I can see the rusted tin roof of the entrance to the Chef’s quarters, surrounded by an array of fauna including my favorite tree here; long and skinny in the trunk, they sprawl out with scrawny, broad arms and bushy leaves at the top and our polka dotted with a beautiful deep but bright orange flower. When the sun hits them they look like something from a children’s storybook illustration…
…At 25 I don’t believe there’s any place or experience I’d prefer to be having right now. I partied my ass off and lived up my early youth as appropriate; I feel ready at last to march into that period of adulthood where you slow down a little, let a little calm in and start contemplating the next chapters of your story.
Overall I am finding the experience as a whole rather humbling in many ways. I have never been the biggest patriot but after spending a bit of time in Africa, seeing the rampant corruption, stumbling through problems with seemingly simplistic solutions which wind up becoming inherently more complicated than they initially seemed, understanding that though I feel like a poor youth barely out of the post-college ramen noodle diet days, I am actually extremely wealthy here; all of it molds a rather deep appreciation of my country’s accomplishments in a relatively short period of time. Granted most of our success lies rooted in the fact that a few British soldiers relocated, slaughtering everyone in their way to build exactly what they wanted of a nation, but, I am loathe to admit that just a few hundred years later the world is an altogether better place for it. I’m certainly not absolving our nation’s role in a multitude of vile things throughout our history; I did, after all, spend the two years of my life before coming here repudiating such things as our grossly excessive military arm as a career choice. It’s simply more clear now how undeniable it is that the world in general looks on our history, people, and way of life as a model of what they’d like their nation to be and such admiration turns the wheels toward a certain intellectual progress.
As nearly a half a year has already rushed past in my time here and I have already taken on virtually an entirely new identity, it is impossible not to speculate about who on earth I will have become at the end of all this. One near certainty is this, in the long run the impact will be deep and I believe that for the most part the changes will be positive.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Otia
September 30th, 2010
“One of the greatest rewards of travel is an expanded rubric of understanding. Exposure to different cultures cannot but broaden a traveler’s frame of reference.” - Erika Walburn, Where the Pavement Ends
Wishing my brother and grandmother long-distance happy Birthdays today. I realize it has already been about a month since my last post, a testament to the simplicity my life has taken on and also how much busier I’ve become in the last few weeks.
Things move at a slow pace here which at last I think I’ve begun to adjust to and at times even kind of appreciate. Living a simpler life was one of my motivations for joining the Peace Corps and one that I have already accomplished. After four months in country I barely notice that I have no internet, no television, no radio, no refrigerator, no washer/dryer, no kitchen sink, rarely any running water, never any hot water, and hardly any furniture!
My time has become much more saturated as compared to the two somewhat painful weeks of serious down time after my arrival in village. Since my last post I have spent countless hours attempting to piece together from the horrendously dense syllabus, a program for my classes which I think may actually be useful to my students in their lives rather than the completely irrelevant muck in the textbooks which they don’t understand a lick of anyways. I also started studying mother tongue with a native intellectual who began with the alphabet so that I can actually learn to read as well as speak, something many locals can‘t even do!
School is well underway; in fact, we are already about to close the first sequence, which seems absolutely absurd considering that half the student body and staff doesn’t even come for the first week or so, and considering that I don’t even have a textbook yet for one of my classes and considering that not one person has attempted to verify that I am performing my job well.
There are many frustrations in the day-to-day program. The classes are so large that you can easily spend 10 minutes of a 50 minute period taking roll. The discipline master never rings the bell on time and students are always attempting to trail in late then attempting to persuade me to let them in and eventually standing outside the classroom distracting the others when I refuse. Between my smallest class having at least 50 kids and my attempts to make things less conventional, the noise level can often get out of control. Taking the advice of my trainers in Bafia, I try to avoid doing things that will result in me losing my voice in the classroom. Using the chalkboard, the most traditional teaching tool I can think of, often creates an eruption of chaos as there is a problem of lighting in the classrooms. Each time I write on the board the students on one side will ask me to close a window or a student will just get up and do it, immediately inflaming the students on the other side of the room who become blinded by the darkness on their cornerof the board. This back and forth often continues with another student coming and opening the window and the other shutting it again while all of them are yelling at me and at each other that they cannot see.
I do not like to send students out because they are forced to do manual labor, which I’m not sure really even bothers them in the first place and which also forces them to fall behind in my class. I have started giving extra homework to those who misbehave but the other day when one of my classes was absolutely off the handle I wound up assigning all of them an insanely long sentence I belted out in a fury and making them write it 25 times apiece. You’d have thought I had just given them each 25 lashes they complained so much! Evidently this annoying form of punishment from my youth works in Cameroon too! There are also frequent interruptions which wind up causing overall a substantial amount of class time loss. People come to classes selling study materials or even soliciting donations, disciplinarians come to check that students fingernails are clean or take out students who are supposed to be punished, or to beckon me to see an administrator despite that I’m in the middle of a lesson. The challenges for the students are many and sometimes trying to overcome them is exhausting for me but overall it has been very rewarding so far.
I find it extremely challenging to find the balance between all the expectations of me all around. I have the Peace Corps, my life at home, my life in Cameroon, my reception/ mild celebrity in the village, my responsibilities at school; it really is a juggling act but as time ticks rapidly on I can see it etching out changes in me that I doubt I will ever fully recognize until I am back at home re-adjusting.
Occasionally being here in the capacity of an educator feels silly and seems to affirm my doubts about being capable of avoiding being another stain from the white man on this continent rather than an aid to development. Yet, when I manage to step out of the cloud of the impact living and working in such a foreign environment has on you, I can easily see that touching so many young minds 15 hours a week must be one of the most powerful tools of development possible. I am certain that no matter what I manage to eek out of my time here as far as blatantly visible development, the students are going to remember me the rest of their lives. I have done things in class that surprised even me like rapping a song about the present continuous tense in front of a total of about 250 students or throwing a Frisbee around the classroom. We laugh, we joke, and even when I have to be serious or I start to become angry with them, my handle on things is calm, warm, and reasoning.
Claude arrived for a visit to an impromptu dance party in my living room with about a dozen kids who live behind my house. They are mostly of a brood of children belonging to my landlord and one of his who knows how many wives. Just behind my house is an entire compound of wives and children so numerous I find it impossible to keep track. Soon after the arrival of the few who stay directly behind me I discovered that their mother often leaves for an entire week at a time. The oldest girl is 12 years and in total there are eight of them living in a two room apartment. I found that it was she who was preparing dinner for all the children over an open fire on their floor while some of the older boys (maybe 9 years) were constructing an outhouse. They are responsible for bathing the little ones and getting everyone off to school in the morning, washing all the laundry, and doing all the usual things a parent should be doing. So, I am faced with a personal conflict when my students arrive to class late because I know these are the sorts of responsibilities many of them are facing at home. Despite that the constant knocks on my door, little feet following me down the street, and little brown eyes staring at me through the bars of my windows can be pretty daunting, I feel a certain pressure to be a role model and someone they can rely on in a time of need. I also feel somewhat obliged to constantly give them bread and cakes and things to fill their bellies.
It’s been nice having Claude here. When I’m not working we do a lot of exploring, relaxing, and cleaning! With his help I think we have finally rid the floors of their irritating coating of mud and my formerly cold and empty house is beginning to feel like home. The other day we started my garden and I’m extremely stoked for the veggies to start coming in abundance, especially the lettuce which I have been missing! He and I work extremely well together for two individuals from two extremely different places. We have little tiffs over silly things like him not being terribly keen on my American cooking (except hot baguette sandwiches, which he loves), or sometimes because of things getting lost in translation, but overall I am the most comfortable with him that I have ever been in any relationship and that’s pretty damned remarkable considering our backgrounds.
Some days it still has not set in that I’m here, living this dream. Every morning I awake to exquisite sunrises over the valley in front of my house. The usually damp mud road is serene and peaceful as birds of myriad colors sing their morning songs while fluttering past me on my walk to school. I greet people in mother tongue and smile to myself as they oftentimes continue on behind me laughing together and saying, “C’est bien ca!” (That’s great!), tremendously impressed that I can already speak a few words of Gomala.
My life is drastically different than six months ago among the hustle and bustle of L.A.; I do not miss the brilliance and adrenaline of the big city. There is something more refreshing about walking into my front yard at night to a blanket of stars that I’m fairly certain it’s impossible to see in the United States anyplace. In many ways this world is more appealing than mine back home. I would not trade the cold scenery of steel skyscrapers, their lights twinkling in the night as bankers and lawyers plug away plotting their next big grab. Here I am entrenched in row after row of lush mountains, forests rich with banana and eucalyptus trees, the sounds and scents of nature all around. After spending my early 20s in the 2nd largest city in America, trapped often in smog infested traffic jams, rushing always from place to place, working tirelessly to pay that next car payment, it feels amazing, soul enriching, fulfilling, to stop, to breathe, and to reflect life. Though I look out on the horizon and feel a certain comfort knowing I will eventually walk back into the familiar tidiness and rush of my own country, there is no other place in the world for me at this moment than right where I am.
News came last weekend of a fellow volunteer’s death in Lesotho, a country in Southern Africa, and I was struck by the impact it had on me. It reminded me that in many ways what I do is dangerous, something it becomes easy to forget in the hustle and flow of the everyday. It also reminded me that I am part of a bigger community and when someone is lost in a tragic way you feel it just like those in Baghdad and Khabala must, though granted with fewer nightmares. I couldn’t stop myself thinking, wow, that’s me out there; that’s one of us. His accomplishments during his barely a year of service are stunning. I hope to live up to what he did in one year during my two and his death inspires me even more my efforts.
“One of the greatest rewards of travel is an expanded rubric of understanding. Exposure to different cultures cannot but broaden a traveler’s frame of reference.” - Erika Walburn, Where the Pavement Ends
Wishing my brother and grandmother long-distance happy Birthdays today. I realize it has already been about a month since my last post, a testament to the simplicity my life has taken on and also how much busier I’ve become in the last few weeks.
Things move at a slow pace here which at last I think I’ve begun to adjust to and at times even kind of appreciate. Living a simpler life was one of my motivations for joining the Peace Corps and one that I have already accomplished. After four months in country I barely notice that I have no internet, no television, no radio, no refrigerator, no washer/dryer, no kitchen sink, rarely any running water, never any hot water, and hardly any furniture!
My time has become much more saturated as compared to the two somewhat painful weeks of serious down time after my arrival in village. Since my last post I have spent countless hours attempting to piece together from the horrendously dense syllabus, a program for my classes which I think may actually be useful to my students in their lives rather than the completely irrelevant muck in the textbooks which they don’t understand a lick of anyways. I also started studying mother tongue with a native intellectual who began with the alphabet so that I can actually learn to read as well as speak, something many locals can‘t even do!
School is well underway; in fact, we are already about to close the first sequence, which seems absolutely absurd considering that half the student body and staff doesn’t even come for the first week or so, and considering that I don’t even have a textbook yet for one of my classes and considering that not one person has attempted to verify that I am performing my job well.
There are many frustrations in the day-to-day program. The classes are so large that you can easily spend 10 minutes of a 50 minute period taking roll. The discipline master never rings the bell on time and students are always attempting to trail in late then attempting to persuade me to let them in and eventually standing outside the classroom distracting the others when I refuse. Between my smallest class having at least 50 kids and my attempts to make things less conventional, the noise level can often get out of control. Taking the advice of my trainers in Bafia, I try to avoid doing things that will result in me losing my voice in the classroom. Using the chalkboard, the most traditional teaching tool I can think of, often creates an eruption of chaos as there is a problem of lighting in the classrooms. Each time I write on the board the students on one side will ask me to close a window or a student will just get up and do it, immediately inflaming the students on the other side of the room who become blinded by the darkness on their cornerof the board. This back and forth often continues with another student coming and opening the window and the other shutting it again while all of them are yelling at me and at each other that they cannot see.
I do not like to send students out because they are forced to do manual labor, which I’m not sure really even bothers them in the first place and which also forces them to fall behind in my class. I have started giving extra homework to those who misbehave but the other day when one of my classes was absolutely off the handle I wound up assigning all of them an insanely long sentence I belted out in a fury and making them write it 25 times apiece. You’d have thought I had just given them each 25 lashes they complained so much! Evidently this annoying form of punishment from my youth works in Cameroon too! There are also frequent interruptions which wind up causing overall a substantial amount of class time loss. People come to classes selling study materials or even soliciting donations, disciplinarians come to check that students fingernails are clean or take out students who are supposed to be punished, or to beckon me to see an administrator despite that I’m in the middle of a lesson. The challenges for the students are many and sometimes trying to overcome them is exhausting for me but overall it has been very rewarding so far.
I find it extremely challenging to find the balance between all the expectations of me all around. I have the Peace Corps, my life at home, my life in Cameroon, my reception/ mild celebrity in the village, my responsibilities at school; it really is a juggling act but as time ticks rapidly on I can see it etching out changes in me that I doubt I will ever fully recognize until I am back at home re-adjusting.
Occasionally being here in the capacity of an educator feels silly and seems to affirm my doubts about being capable of avoiding being another stain from the white man on this continent rather than an aid to development. Yet, when I manage to step out of the cloud of the impact living and working in such a foreign environment has on you, I can easily see that touching so many young minds 15 hours a week must be one of the most powerful tools of development possible. I am certain that no matter what I manage to eek out of my time here as far as blatantly visible development, the students are going to remember me the rest of their lives. I have done things in class that surprised even me like rapping a song about the present continuous tense in front of a total of about 250 students or throwing a Frisbee around the classroom. We laugh, we joke, and even when I have to be serious or I start to become angry with them, my handle on things is calm, warm, and reasoning.
Claude arrived for a visit to an impromptu dance party in my living room with about a dozen kids who live behind my house. They are mostly of a brood of children belonging to my landlord and one of his who knows how many wives. Just behind my house is an entire compound of wives and children so numerous I find it impossible to keep track. Soon after the arrival of the few who stay directly behind me I discovered that their mother often leaves for an entire week at a time. The oldest girl is 12 years and in total there are eight of them living in a two room apartment. I found that it was she who was preparing dinner for all the children over an open fire on their floor while some of the older boys (maybe 9 years) were constructing an outhouse. They are responsible for bathing the little ones and getting everyone off to school in the morning, washing all the laundry, and doing all the usual things a parent should be doing. So, I am faced with a personal conflict when my students arrive to class late because I know these are the sorts of responsibilities many of them are facing at home. Despite that the constant knocks on my door, little feet following me down the street, and little brown eyes staring at me through the bars of my windows can be pretty daunting, I feel a certain pressure to be a role model and someone they can rely on in a time of need. I also feel somewhat obliged to constantly give them bread and cakes and things to fill their bellies.
It’s been nice having Claude here. When I’m not working we do a lot of exploring, relaxing, and cleaning! With his help I think we have finally rid the floors of their irritating coating of mud and my formerly cold and empty house is beginning to feel like home. The other day we started my garden and I’m extremely stoked for the veggies to start coming in abundance, especially the lettuce which I have been missing! He and I work extremely well together for two individuals from two extremely different places. We have little tiffs over silly things like him not being terribly keen on my American cooking (except hot baguette sandwiches, which he loves), or sometimes because of things getting lost in translation, but overall I am the most comfortable with him that I have ever been in any relationship and that’s pretty damned remarkable considering our backgrounds.
Some days it still has not set in that I’m here, living this dream. Every morning I awake to exquisite sunrises over the valley in front of my house. The usually damp mud road is serene and peaceful as birds of myriad colors sing their morning songs while fluttering past me on my walk to school. I greet people in mother tongue and smile to myself as they oftentimes continue on behind me laughing together and saying, “C’est bien ca!” (That’s great!), tremendously impressed that I can already speak a few words of Gomala.
My life is drastically different than six months ago among the hustle and bustle of L.A.; I do not miss the brilliance and adrenaline of the big city. There is something more refreshing about walking into my front yard at night to a blanket of stars that I’m fairly certain it’s impossible to see in the United States anyplace. In many ways this world is more appealing than mine back home. I would not trade the cold scenery of steel skyscrapers, their lights twinkling in the night as bankers and lawyers plug away plotting their next big grab. Here I am entrenched in row after row of lush mountains, forests rich with banana and eucalyptus trees, the sounds and scents of nature all around. After spending my early 20s in the 2nd largest city in America, trapped often in smog infested traffic jams, rushing always from place to place, working tirelessly to pay that next car payment, it feels amazing, soul enriching, fulfilling, to stop, to breathe, and to reflect life. Though I look out on the horizon and feel a certain comfort knowing I will eventually walk back into the familiar tidiness and rush of my own country, there is no other place in the world for me at this moment than right where I am.
News came last weekend of a fellow volunteer’s death in Lesotho, a country in Southern Africa, and I was struck by the impact it had on me. It reminded me that in many ways what I do is dangerous, something it becomes easy to forget in the hustle and flow of the everyday. It also reminded me that I am part of a bigger community and when someone is lost in a tragic way you feel it just like those in Baghdad and Khabala must, though granted with fewer nightmares. I couldn’t stop myself thinking, wow, that’s me out there; that’s one of us. His accomplishments during his barely a year of service are stunning. I hope to live up to what he did in one year during my two and his death inspires me even more my efforts.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
A series of awkward experiences
September 10th, 2010
“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: “I’ll go take a hot bath.”” -The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
I survived my two weeks of serious down time and already my first week of school! Life is going pretty well thus far, though there have certainly been challenges and frustrations. Lack of communication continues to irritate the shit out of me, but I am at least beginning to expect it. Last weekend I went to the market in the neighboring village with my friend Christine and then we went on a mini-hike up a mountain and were rewarded with great views and a beer at a cozy little spot we found with nice people!
I finally have electricity and a table to eat on as well as one to cut vegetables! My house is beginning to resemble a home! Even the red mud that seems to be permanently layering the floor/my feet/everything seems to have dissipated a tad. Last week I threw on my dirtiest clothes and scrubbed the walls of my kitchen and bathroom with a scrub brush to remove its thick coat of dirt. It also removed much of the paint, unfortunately, which caked the entire floor and my entire body in white dust meaning I will most likely die in a few years from lead poisoning. My toilet still isn’t installed, (though- fingers crossed- they are coming to do so in the morning) but at least my aim in the latrine has finally been perfected! I now know exactly how to place my feet so I do not pee all over myself but I can’t say I am going to miss that hole in the ground one bit (figuratively and literally)!
My bathroom also means the prospect of running water in my house which is probably the biggest challenge of life for me here. When you turn the taps in your kitchen, or bathroom sink, or the shower today, please remember that you are lucky as all hell because not only does water unquestionably arrive immediately, but it is safe, clean, and by God, there is even a knob to make it hot instantly! Quelle luxe!
The nearly constant string of visitors I’ve had has made me into a bit of a recluse as I have hesitated to open my shutters some days to possibly deter spontaneous drop- ins. Literally, the other day I lay down after getting home from work and 3 different people stopped by within about 10 minutes. This would probably excite me if they weren’t all awful conversationalists! Most of the time they just stand awkwardly looking off in the distance, not saying anything at all unless I ask questions or start absently talking about the rain or any random thing that comes to mind to distract from the silence. This must be an American necessity- filling that gap of noiselessness, but damn! It’s one I kind of appreciate! It’s one thing to stand around not talking to someone you already know but when it’s a practical stranger stopping by it’s just freaking uncomfortable!
The first week of school was nothing at all like the first week of school in the U.S. Over half of the kids do not even bother to come at all and it seemed fairly optional for me as well. I went, however, and actually taught most of the days, though primarily very basic review things such as “My name is Ms. Caldwell. What is your name?” and the alphabet. I gave an assessment to my classes that I based on the syllabus of the lowest grade in the school and none of the levels did very well on it. Nonetheless, they seem to like me so far and their behavior the first week was far better than that of the students in Bafia. One of my classes is supposed to have 89 students so we will see if they are so easy to manage once all of them are actually present.
I guess the whole concept of making learning fun is kind of new-age or something. Here school is work. It is all about copying notes from the board, drawing perfectly straight lines in your notebook, going unnoticed by not bothering anyone until test time and then regurgitating all those notes you copied. If you fail to make yourself invisible enough you may be forced to kneel on the concrete floor, a form of corporal punishment (supposedly outlawed) which I have already seen this week. I taught for 5 hours yesterday but the time actually flew by because we played Twenty Questions and Hangman, went over the alphabet, discussed grammar points and the kids were engaged,, laughing, participating and they may’ve even been enjoying themselves; I know I definitely was! I hope that I will earn the students’ respect by being strict and serious when necessary but also being fun, cutting them some slack when appropriate, and showing them that school can be enjoyable and without even noticing, they’re actually learning something in the process! When we discussed classroom rules this week, I told them they were not children so they should not behave like children. That, if they do I will treat them as such and otherwise they will be treated like adults. I really do love teaching, I simply hope that in the end I will not face confrontation from the administration because my kids are not learning in their way or at their pace or something of that sort.
Aside from my total comfort in the classroom, there are still some days here I wonder what in the hell I was thinking dreaming all my life of signing up to come to a third world country to help people! Ha! I must be insane! For instance, Wednesday the mason came to pour concrete in the bathroom (finally). Prior to him coming I waited a week before bumping into my landlord in town and asking him about the unfinished and, of late, untouched work to which he acted shocked that it hadn’t already been completed. The technician then came the next day only to inform me that he couldn’t do his work until the mason came and poured concrete first. The following day the mason came, without notifying me, only to find that I was at school. He came the next day again and discovered there were no bags of cement so he couldn’t do the work then either.
That afternoon was our first General Assembly meeting at school, which went well. While there I saw the sous-chef who is also President of the lycee. I told him about the various excuses everyday for the work not getting finished and on his way home from school he organized for them to come that very night. That was the same day I had about a thousand visitors right when I was trying to unwind and all the million kids that live in the house directly behind me came back from the city and were hollering and going wild all over the place. Two teenagers dropped by with my cabinet for my stove and as they were walking out two of my students were dropping by to say hello while about 3 other dudes were walking in and out doing god knows what in my bathroom. Suddenly I needed to get the hell out of dodge and jetted out the front door to go buy tomatoes. Once I’d done that I felt like I should just keep walking to clear my head. It was a beautiful walk- peaceful and forested. I ran into a bunch of students coming home from a soccer match and talked with one of them as we strolled along. I was feeling much better and happy with myself for getting out of that funk, but then suddenly realized I had wandered awfully far and actually didn’t recognize a thing and had no idea where I was. The student I had been talking with arrived to his house and I asked him where to go; he said the intersection I was looking for was just a little further on so I kept walking as the group of students began to disintegrate.
An older boy approached me and started to flirt. We chatted casually a bit as the students marched behind giggling as he was getting shot down. Suddenly it occurred to me I needed to turn the hell around and go back the way I‘d come! He turned to walk back with me and then looked up at an ominous cloud-covered sky and beckoned toward the bar next to where we were standing, encouraging me that we could not walk in a downpour. He was right after all so I went with him and sure enough the rain came just a moment later, drenching the already soggy ground for at least 45 minutes. To my surprise the guy got a phone call and said he had to go but that he was leaving me in the hands of his friend, who happened to be a much more courteous young man (the same age as me, actually) named Frederic who waited out the rain and had a beer on me, and then bought a flashlight so he could walk me all the way to my house only to turn right back around and go home.
Ah, at least I was in my own home and it was quiet and empty. The electricity was out so by candlelight I began to reheat the lentil soup I’d prepared the day before. I was sitting in my room and heard something so I walked out to see what it might be and noticed there was an awfully bright glow coming from the kitchen. I walked in to find that somehow there seemed to be flames coming out of both burners and even the back of the stove, and hopping around on top of it as well, shooting up the back of the new cabinet I’d just arranged a few hours before. My heart pounding and in shock, I quickly glanced around the kitchen and saw that, luckily, there was a half-full bucket of water still on the floor. I doused the entire stove and was panicked when the fire merely flickered a second and kept burning. Suddenly it occurred to me to shut off the gas which immediately ended the mysterious catastrophe. I stood there panting in a puddle of water that was already snaking a trail into my living room and creating gobs of mud everywhere my shoes had dropped dirt from my long lost wandering adventure. Once I caught my breath I began to laugh hysterically; perhaps it was the only way to keep from crying from the day I’d just had and from the sight of my poor, formerly delicious lentil soup and because all the sudden I really felt like a foreigner. And I guess really I just had to laugh because altogether it was, after all, exactly what I signed up for…
“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: “I’ll go take a hot bath.”” -The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
I survived my two weeks of serious down time and already my first week of school! Life is going pretty well thus far, though there have certainly been challenges and frustrations. Lack of communication continues to irritate the shit out of me, but I am at least beginning to expect it. Last weekend I went to the market in the neighboring village with my friend Christine and then we went on a mini-hike up a mountain and were rewarded with great views and a beer at a cozy little spot we found with nice people!
I finally have electricity and a table to eat on as well as one to cut vegetables! My house is beginning to resemble a home! Even the red mud that seems to be permanently layering the floor/my feet/everything seems to have dissipated a tad. Last week I threw on my dirtiest clothes and scrubbed the walls of my kitchen and bathroom with a scrub brush to remove its thick coat of dirt. It also removed much of the paint, unfortunately, which caked the entire floor and my entire body in white dust meaning I will most likely die in a few years from lead poisoning. My toilet still isn’t installed, (though- fingers crossed- they are coming to do so in the morning) but at least my aim in the latrine has finally been perfected! I now know exactly how to place my feet so I do not pee all over myself but I can’t say I am going to miss that hole in the ground one bit (figuratively and literally)!
My bathroom also means the prospect of running water in my house which is probably the biggest challenge of life for me here. When you turn the taps in your kitchen, or bathroom sink, or the shower today, please remember that you are lucky as all hell because not only does water unquestionably arrive immediately, but it is safe, clean, and by God, there is even a knob to make it hot instantly! Quelle luxe!
The nearly constant string of visitors I’ve had has made me into a bit of a recluse as I have hesitated to open my shutters some days to possibly deter spontaneous drop- ins. Literally, the other day I lay down after getting home from work and 3 different people stopped by within about 10 minutes. This would probably excite me if they weren’t all awful conversationalists! Most of the time they just stand awkwardly looking off in the distance, not saying anything at all unless I ask questions or start absently talking about the rain or any random thing that comes to mind to distract from the silence. This must be an American necessity- filling that gap of noiselessness, but damn! It’s one I kind of appreciate! It’s one thing to stand around not talking to someone you already know but when it’s a practical stranger stopping by it’s just freaking uncomfortable!
The first week of school was nothing at all like the first week of school in the U.S. Over half of the kids do not even bother to come at all and it seemed fairly optional for me as well. I went, however, and actually taught most of the days, though primarily very basic review things such as “My name is Ms. Caldwell. What is your name?” and the alphabet. I gave an assessment to my classes that I based on the syllabus of the lowest grade in the school and none of the levels did very well on it. Nonetheless, they seem to like me so far and their behavior the first week was far better than that of the students in Bafia. One of my classes is supposed to have 89 students so we will see if they are so easy to manage once all of them are actually present.
I guess the whole concept of making learning fun is kind of new-age or something. Here school is work. It is all about copying notes from the board, drawing perfectly straight lines in your notebook, going unnoticed by not bothering anyone until test time and then regurgitating all those notes you copied. If you fail to make yourself invisible enough you may be forced to kneel on the concrete floor, a form of corporal punishment (supposedly outlawed) which I have already seen this week. I taught for 5 hours yesterday but the time actually flew by because we played Twenty Questions and Hangman, went over the alphabet, discussed grammar points and the kids were engaged,, laughing, participating and they may’ve even been enjoying themselves; I know I definitely was! I hope that I will earn the students’ respect by being strict and serious when necessary but also being fun, cutting them some slack when appropriate, and showing them that school can be enjoyable and without even noticing, they’re actually learning something in the process! When we discussed classroom rules this week, I told them they were not children so they should not behave like children. That, if they do I will treat them as such and otherwise they will be treated like adults. I really do love teaching, I simply hope that in the end I will not face confrontation from the administration because my kids are not learning in their way or at their pace or something of that sort.
Aside from my total comfort in the classroom, there are still some days here I wonder what in the hell I was thinking dreaming all my life of signing up to come to a third world country to help people! Ha! I must be insane! For instance, Wednesday the mason came to pour concrete in the bathroom (finally). Prior to him coming I waited a week before bumping into my landlord in town and asking him about the unfinished and, of late, untouched work to which he acted shocked that it hadn’t already been completed. The technician then came the next day only to inform me that he couldn’t do his work until the mason came and poured concrete first. The following day the mason came, without notifying me, only to find that I was at school. He came the next day again and discovered there were no bags of cement so he couldn’t do the work then either.
That afternoon was our first General Assembly meeting at school, which went well. While there I saw the sous-chef who is also President of the lycee. I told him about the various excuses everyday for the work not getting finished and on his way home from school he organized for them to come that very night. That was the same day I had about a thousand visitors right when I was trying to unwind and all the million kids that live in the house directly behind me came back from the city and were hollering and going wild all over the place. Two teenagers dropped by with my cabinet for my stove and as they were walking out two of my students were dropping by to say hello while about 3 other dudes were walking in and out doing god knows what in my bathroom. Suddenly I needed to get the hell out of dodge and jetted out the front door to go buy tomatoes. Once I’d done that I felt like I should just keep walking to clear my head. It was a beautiful walk- peaceful and forested. I ran into a bunch of students coming home from a soccer match and talked with one of them as we strolled along. I was feeling much better and happy with myself for getting out of that funk, but then suddenly realized I had wandered awfully far and actually didn’t recognize a thing and had no idea where I was. The student I had been talking with arrived to his house and I asked him where to go; he said the intersection I was looking for was just a little further on so I kept walking as the group of students began to disintegrate.
An older boy approached me and started to flirt. We chatted casually a bit as the students marched behind giggling as he was getting shot down. Suddenly it occurred to me I needed to turn the hell around and go back the way I‘d come! He turned to walk back with me and then looked up at an ominous cloud-covered sky and beckoned toward the bar next to where we were standing, encouraging me that we could not walk in a downpour. He was right after all so I went with him and sure enough the rain came just a moment later, drenching the already soggy ground for at least 45 minutes. To my surprise the guy got a phone call and said he had to go but that he was leaving me in the hands of his friend, who happened to be a much more courteous young man (the same age as me, actually) named Frederic who waited out the rain and had a beer on me, and then bought a flashlight so he could walk me all the way to my house only to turn right back around and go home.
Ah, at least I was in my own home and it was quiet and empty. The electricity was out so by candlelight I began to reheat the lentil soup I’d prepared the day before. I was sitting in my room and heard something so I walked out to see what it might be and noticed there was an awfully bright glow coming from the kitchen. I walked in to find that somehow there seemed to be flames coming out of both burners and even the back of the stove, and hopping around on top of it as well, shooting up the back of the new cabinet I’d just arranged a few hours before. My heart pounding and in shock, I quickly glanced around the kitchen and saw that, luckily, there was a half-full bucket of water still on the floor. I doused the entire stove and was panicked when the fire merely flickered a second and kept burning. Suddenly it occurred to me to shut off the gas which immediately ended the mysterious catastrophe. I stood there panting in a puddle of water that was already snaking a trail into my living room and creating gobs of mud everywhere my shoes had dropped dirt from my long lost wandering adventure. Once I caught my breath I began to laugh hysterically; perhaps it was the only way to keep from crying from the day I’d just had and from the sight of my poor, formerly delicious lentil soup and because all the sudden I really felt like a foreigner. And I guess really I just had to laugh because altogether it was, after all, exactly what I signed up for…
Patientiez
September 2, 2010
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.” - A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
It’s been about three months since I left the US. According to Critical Periods in the Life of a Peace Corps Volunteer I should be experiencing “fright, frustration with self, loneliness, weight/health changes, homesickness, and uselessness“. I can’t really claim to be feeling any of those things but I am certainly feeling other emotions which point to my extended time away from home.
I am feeling frustration, but not toward myself. I have been in my house nearly a week. When I visited in July the sous-chef told me the people staying here were working everyday on it and were going to install a toilet and lights before I arrived. Unsurprisingly none of that had happened by the time I got here. I spent a week and a day with the sous-chef and started to think he wasn’t in a huge hurry to get me into my house. Every morning as we drank coffee I drilled him with a dozen questions regarding the progress of the house, coordinating with the school, setting up my language courses, and information on how to get around town. As my interrogations became more routine I became acutely aware of my own cultural obsession with organization and planning as well as their lack thereof.
As I am sitting here, 2 weeks after my arrival to post, there are 2 boys crawling around in my ceiling installing my electricity and though they‘ve dug the floor up in my ‘bathroom‘ and installed a lot of pipes, my toilet is sitting upside-down in my living room at the moment. At least it has felt more like Peace Corps since leaving our chic quartier in Bafia. I’ve spent most nights crouched over my gas stove on the floor with a flashlight in my mouth and have resorted to peeing in a bucket at night rather than bothering to go out in the yard. Luckily I like camping because life pretty much feels like that at the moment.
Water is a huge aggravation and something I will hopefully never again take for granted in my life. The village just got ‘l’eau de robinet’ (tap water) prior to my arrival but unfortunately it is available only at the discretion of the water company and they frequently decide to cut it off for days at a time. Plus, with the work underway at present on the house my running water has been rendered inaccessible, period. My kind neighbor Victorine has offered her barrell of rain water, which is currently dry, or her underground water storage container, which is absolutely filthy, but, better than nothing. Sadly, impure water is probably the number one cause of health problems on the continent and it seems so needless because they are easily avoidable maladies with boiling, filtering, or treating the water before consumption. I have not yet understood why people don’t bother to practice these sanitation habits because at least in the case of Cameroon I don’t think lack of education is to blame. Hopefully at the very least I can serve as a reminder of these easy fixers.
Village life is startlingly more different than life in Bafia than I‘d anticipated. More than likely we were sheltered from a great many realities there, however, because of living in such a more posh area of town. For instance, here people have a very limited sense of privacy. The neighbors will look right in the windows if the shutters are open, or even open them themselves if they are not locked. If the doors are open people just walk in, needing only to utter “konk-konk” while doing so rather than actually knocking and awaiting the invitation. Victorine’s 3 small children are seemingly home alone most of the day most days since I’ve been here while she goes out working in her field and they have all taken to coming to my house and staring at me doing no matter what through the bars of my window for most of the afternoon. They also love to just walk right in if the door is open, though I am trying to steer them away from this habit. We were told we may begin to feel like zoo animals but I had to laugh yesterday when it occurred to me what an accurate analogy that is as I glanced at their 3 little faces staring at me in such wonder as if I was the very first person they‘ve ever seen.
Last week when the sous-chef suddenly informed me we were going to the school I began to follow him out wearing Claude’s soccer shorts and thinking nothing of it when he informed me that I could not do such a thing. I responded in my usual stubborn way at first but he insisted and I was forced to go and change clothes. All the more frustrating that he himself was wearing wind pants and a t-shirt but stated that a woman dressed in such a way would be said to be out in public naked.
A few days ago I walked down the street to pay for my phone credit and bumped into some young guys in the military who said they wanted to buy me a drink, a very common practice to welcome me to the town. Peace Corps encourages us to integrate as much as possible so turning down invitations such as this seems in poor taste. They were all very nice and interesting to speak with. Afterward they offered me a lift back to my house which was about a 5 minute walk up the street. I had them drop me at the sous-chef’s because I needed to buy something anyway and as I got out of the car an older lady I recognized from the compound was saying something to the guys in Patois (mother tongue). When I walked past her she seemed annoyed and angry with me and was mumbling something so I inquired what the problem was. She responded, “Ce n’est pas bien. Tu es la pour le travail, n’est pas?” “That isn’t good. You’re here for work, aren‘t you?” and then seemingly went on to discuss how disgusted with me she was with all the old women at the bar at that particular moment for several minutes.
When I got home I shed several frustrated tears. Despite that my mother is probably reading this and agreeing whole-heartedly with that old bag, it is actually a lot more complicated than it seems. First of all, it was the middle of the day and the whole interaction was perfectly harmless. Of course they turned out to all basically want to date me because it is seemingly impossible to have a platonic relationship with someone of the opposite sex on this continent, but I made it very clear that I was not available in that sense. Overall they were friendly and I accepted the offer of a ride because that is a much less risky gesture than in the States. The old woman apparently saw this car with mostly men and assumed I was whoring around town. The fact that she, who I don’t even know in any way except having maybe greeted her a handful of times, had such a strong opinion that even on a Sunday I should’ve been working instead of being in any situation involving a group of guys was infuriating and made me realize how great it is living in a culture where it is perfectly acceptable to tell someone to mind their own damned business!
My response to her was a light-hearted “Je peux pas travailler chaque jour!” “I can’t work everyday!” but I later informed the sous-chef of the whole story because it had so irritated me. The whole thing was so innocent and casual that for someone I don’t even know to have so much to say about it was maddening! Fortunately the sous-chef sided with me completely on the issue and said it was totally inappropriate for villagers to be concerned about what I’m doing in my personal life. As I described the woman to him he finally said that she is crazy and doesn’t even talk at all to one of his wives because she is so opinionated and has problems with everyone. This made me feel somewhat better but in the back of my mind I felt that she probably did at the very least represent the old fashioned views of some of the people of the community.
Additionally the day after moving into my new house the chef’s (the real chef) wife stopped by and mentioned that I should be staying at my house because it wasn’t good for me to stay so long with the sous-chef and that I would start to cause problems with his wives. This frustrated me as well considering there was certainly no one who wanted me out of his house in a timely fashion more than me and how could I cause so many problems for women who are already sharing a man in the first place when I myself would never agree to such a thing and have a boyfriend of my own! I would add that I am also way too young for the sous-chef and find the very thought of an intimate relationship with him nauseating but it turns out that one of his wives is 2 years younger than me and he married her at 15!
One day on the way into Bafoussam we happened to share a taxi with a very nice man who works at my school. He and the sous-chef started talking about his daughter who had just passed the probatoire, equivalent to becoming a Senior in high school. The sous-chef said she was ripe for marrying now and implied she should marry him. The father of the girl said no way, that he would have to divorce all his other wives first for such a thing to be possible. The sous-chef couldn’t believe he would turn down the proposal of such a prominent figure for his daughter. Finally they arrived on the topic of her being a more suitable match for the sous-chef’s son, an idea they settled on amicably. This entire conversation was a both amusing and sad; a young girl’s future being discussed completely in her absence and without any consideration of how she herself might actually feel about it.
Last night I had a nightmare that school was starting and I showed up 100% unprepared. Not knowing my schedule, not knowing my lessons, and with no clue what to do. As it turns out this wasn’t far from the reality. School starts Monday and so far the only contact I’ve had with school administrators is that which I’ve initiated myself. I was given 4 levels to teach, which is going to be a shit-ton of work. So far I have only 3 of the textbooks, student edition- not the teacher‘s, and have not even seen my actual work schedule. Today I called the discipline master to see about getting a copy of the Schemes of Work which outline broadly the schedule for which material should be presented to the students. He is out of town and said I would get all of that on Monday. I could even show up at 10 am Monday- the first day of school. I cannot get over the absolute lack of preparedness and total calmness about it. The entire student body will be there and that is the day I will find out what times I will be required to come to work and what I will be expected to do. It makes no sense to me and I find it incredibly frustrating. Each time I’ve pressured the staff to give me information it is almost as if they are laughing about my concern over it. They are perfectly content to begin preparations for the year after it has already begun.
I made a new friend the other day just walking down the street. Her name is Linda and unfortunately she lives in the capital and has already gone back. I laughed when she too implied that I didn’t need to stress too much about the first week of classes because that is the week of introductions. A WEEK!? Of introductions!? “Hi, I’m Miss. Caldwell from America and this is English class”; that introduction takes about a minute and then we could actually have class! Now I see why the people in this ‘bilingual’ country do not actually speak English!
Nonetheless, I guess I should try not to worry more than they are worrying. The longer I’m here, the more aware I become with my own “American-ness”. It is pretty fascinating, actually, to see how very different a whole cultural mentality can make a country. It’s like, people don’t connect their being behind with their being totally chill about every single thing. But alas, c’est la vie ici and I guess I’m stuck with it for the next 2 years!
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.” - A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
It’s been about three months since I left the US. According to Critical Periods in the Life of a Peace Corps Volunteer I should be experiencing “fright, frustration with self, loneliness, weight/health changes, homesickness, and uselessness“. I can’t really claim to be feeling any of those things but I am certainly feeling other emotions which point to my extended time away from home.
I am feeling frustration, but not toward myself. I have been in my house nearly a week. When I visited in July the sous-chef told me the people staying here were working everyday on it and were going to install a toilet and lights before I arrived. Unsurprisingly none of that had happened by the time I got here. I spent a week and a day with the sous-chef and started to think he wasn’t in a huge hurry to get me into my house. Every morning as we drank coffee I drilled him with a dozen questions regarding the progress of the house, coordinating with the school, setting up my language courses, and information on how to get around town. As my interrogations became more routine I became acutely aware of my own cultural obsession with organization and planning as well as their lack thereof.
As I am sitting here, 2 weeks after my arrival to post, there are 2 boys crawling around in my ceiling installing my electricity and though they‘ve dug the floor up in my ‘bathroom‘ and installed a lot of pipes, my toilet is sitting upside-down in my living room at the moment. At least it has felt more like Peace Corps since leaving our chic quartier in Bafia. I’ve spent most nights crouched over my gas stove on the floor with a flashlight in my mouth and have resorted to peeing in a bucket at night rather than bothering to go out in the yard. Luckily I like camping because life pretty much feels like that at the moment.
Water is a huge aggravation and something I will hopefully never again take for granted in my life. The village just got ‘l’eau de robinet’ (tap water) prior to my arrival but unfortunately it is available only at the discretion of the water company and they frequently decide to cut it off for days at a time. Plus, with the work underway at present on the house my running water has been rendered inaccessible, period. My kind neighbor Victorine has offered her barrell of rain water, which is currently dry, or her underground water storage container, which is absolutely filthy, but, better than nothing. Sadly, impure water is probably the number one cause of health problems on the continent and it seems so needless because they are easily avoidable maladies with boiling, filtering, or treating the water before consumption. I have not yet understood why people don’t bother to practice these sanitation habits because at least in the case of Cameroon I don’t think lack of education is to blame. Hopefully at the very least I can serve as a reminder of these easy fixers.
Village life is startlingly more different than life in Bafia than I‘d anticipated. More than likely we were sheltered from a great many realities there, however, because of living in such a more posh area of town. For instance, here people have a very limited sense of privacy. The neighbors will look right in the windows if the shutters are open, or even open them themselves if they are not locked. If the doors are open people just walk in, needing only to utter “konk-konk” while doing so rather than actually knocking and awaiting the invitation. Victorine’s 3 small children are seemingly home alone most of the day most days since I’ve been here while she goes out working in her field and they have all taken to coming to my house and staring at me doing no matter what through the bars of my window for most of the afternoon. They also love to just walk right in if the door is open, though I am trying to steer them away from this habit. We were told we may begin to feel like zoo animals but I had to laugh yesterday when it occurred to me what an accurate analogy that is as I glanced at their 3 little faces staring at me in such wonder as if I was the very first person they‘ve ever seen.
Last week when the sous-chef suddenly informed me we were going to the school I began to follow him out wearing Claude’s soccer shorts and thinking nothing of it when he informed me that I could not do such a thing. I responded in my usual stubborn way at first but he insisted and I was forced to go and change clothes. All the more frustrating that he himself was wearing wind pants and a t-shirt but stated that a woman dressed in such a way would be said to be out in public naked.
A few days ago I walked down the street to pay for my phone credit and bumped into some young guys in the military who said they wanted to buy me a drink, a very common practice to welcome me to the town. Peace Corps encourages us to integrate as much as possible so turning down invitations such as this seems in poor taste. They were all very nice and interesting to speak with. Afterward they offered me a lift back to my house which was about a 5 minute walk up the street. I had them drop me at the sous-chef’s because I needed to buy something anyway and as I got out of the car an older lady I recognized from the compound was saying something to the guys in Patois (mother tongue). When I walked past her she seemed annoyed and angry with me and was mumbling something so I inquired what the problem was. She responded, “Ce n’est pas bien. Tu es la pour le travail, n’est pas?” “That isn’t good. You’re here for work, aren‘t you?” and then seemingly went on to discuss how disgusted with me she was with all the old women at the bar at that particular moment for several minutes.
When I got home I shed several frustrated tears. Despite that my mother is probably reading this and agreeing whole-heartedly with that old bag, it is actually a lot more complicated than it seems. First of all, it was the middle of the day and the whole interaction was perfectly harmless. Of course they turned out to all basically want to date me because it is seemingly impossible to have a platonic relationship with someone of the opposite sex on this continent, but I made it very clear that I was not available in that sense. Overall they were friendly and I accepted the offer of a ride because that is a much less risky gesture than in the States. The old woman apparently saw this car with mostly men and assumed I was whoring around town. The fact that she, who I don’t even know in any way except having maybe greeted her a handful of times, had such a strong opinion that even on a Sunday I should’ve been working instead of being in any situation involving a group of guys was infuriating and made me realize how great it is living in a culture where it is perfectly acceptable to tell someone to mind their own damned business!
My response to her was a light-hearted “Je peux pas travailler chaque jour!” “I can’t work everyday!” but I later informed the sous-chef of the whole story because it had so irritated me. The whole thing was so innocent and casual that for someone I don’t even know to have so much to say about it was maddening! Fortunately the sous-chef sided with me completely on the issue and said it was totally inappropriate for villagers to be concerned about what I’m doing in my personal life. As I described the woman to him he finally said that she is crazy and doesn’t even talk at all to one of his wives because she is so opinionated and has problems with everyone. This made me feel somewhat better but in the back of my mind I felt that she probably did at the very least represent the old fashioned views of some of the people of the community.
Additionally the day after moving into my new house the chef’s (the real chef) wife stopped by and mentioned that I should be staying at my house because it wasn’t good for me to stay so long with the sous-chef and that I would start to cause problems with his wives. This frustrated me as well considering there was certainly no one who wanted me out of his house in a timely fashion more than me and how could I cause so many problems for women who are already sharing a man in the first place when I myself would never agree to such a thing and have a boyfriend of my own! I would add that I am also way too young for the sous-chef and find the very thought of an intimate relationship with him nauseating but it turns out that one of his wives is 2 years younger than me and he married her at 15!
One day on the way into Bafoussam we happened to share a taxi with a very nice man who works at my school. He and the sous-chef started talking about his daughter who had just passed the probatoire, equivalent to becoming a Senior in high school. The sous-chef said she was ripe for marrying now and implied she should marry him. The father of the girl said no way, that he would have to divorce all his other wives first for such a thing to be possible. The sous-chef couldn’t believe he would turn down the proposal of such a prominent figure for his daughter. Finally they arrived on the topic of her being a more suitable match for the sous-chef’s son, an idea they settled on amicably. This entire conversation was a both amusing and sad; a young girl’s future being discussed completely in her absence and without any consideration of how she herself might actually feel about it.
Last night I had a nightmare that school was starting and I showed up 100% unprepared. Not knowing my schedule, not knowing my lessons, and with no clue what to do. As it turns out this wasn’t far from the reality. School starts Monday and so far the only contact I’ve had with school administrators is that which I’ve initiated myself. I was given 4 levels to teach, which is going to be a shit-ton of work. So far I have only 3 of the textbooks, student edition- not the teacher‘s, and have not even seen my actual work schedule. Today I called the discipline master to see about getting a copy of the Schemes of Work which outline broadly the schedule for which material should be presented to the students. He is out of town and said I would get all of that on Monday. I could even show up at 10 am Monday- the first day of school. I cannot get over the absolute lack of preparedness and total calmness about it. The entire student body will be there and that is the day I will find out what times I will be required to come to work and what I will be expected to do. It makes no sense to me and I find it incredibly frustrating. Each time I’ve pressured the staff to give me information it is almost as if they are laughing about my concern over it. They are perfectly content to begin preparations for the year after it has already begun.
I made a new friend the other day just walking down the street. Her name is Linda and unfortunately she lives in the capital and has already gone back. I laughed when she too implied that I didn’t need to stress too much about the first week of classes because that is the week of introductions. A WEEK!? Of introductions!? “Hi, I’m Miss. Caldwell from America and this is English class”; that introduction takes about a minute and then we could actually have class! Now I see why the people in this ‘bilingual’ country do not actually speak English!
Nonetheless, I guess I should try not to worry more than they are worrying. The longer I’m here, the more aware I become with my own “American-ness”. It is pretty fascinating, actually, to see how very different a whole cultural mentality can make a country. It’s like, people don’t connect their being behind with their being totally chill about every single thing. But alas, c’est la vie ici and I guess I’m stuck with it for the next 2 years!
Friday, August 27, 2010
PCT-PCV
August 22, 2010
“I woke up and the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was- I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” –On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The tick-tocks have added up and it’s already been 2 or 3 weeks since I’ve written. Things have changed a great deal since then. Model School officially closed, the group of 41 Americans I’ve been trotting around with for the last 10 and a half weeks and I were sworn in as volunteers, and now I’m at my post watching a rainfall that seems never-ending.
We had a lot of goodbye dinners and parties to attend before leaving town and all the people of Bafia seemed genuinely sad to see us go. My neighbor said her son Georgie (of the aforementioned brood of brothers) wondered what they will do since Lindsay, friend of all the children, was leaving! I was flattered. My host mom gave me a cute pair of shoes and made me peanut butter from scratch and when I called her from my post the day after arriving she told me she didn’t sleep all night and that Boy, the youngest child at the house, was knocking on my door forever.
Claude and I had some amazing moments together before leaving and so far we are keeping in close contact despite the distance. I was voted “Most likely to marry a Cameroonian” by my peers- go figure! He shed a few tears when he and his entire family helped carry my things to see us off. After all the time I’ve spent with him in the last almost two months it is an added challenge to be missing him in the midst of adjusting to my new life but what better way to figure out if we are meant to be than to face such difficulties from the get-go.
The time here has begun to take its toll a bit. We were given handouts created by volunteers in the 70s which outline the range of emotions and attitudes we should expect to encounter within ourselves over the next 2 years. So far they are pretty spot on. Currently I’m feeling easy irritability and as I become more entrenched in the culture, my patience has started to dissipate.
The cultural norm here is failure to communicate. For example, for the Model School Closing Ceremony all the students and Trainees arrived at 8 am to discover that the program didn’t begin until 10 am. They did the exact same thing to us at the Opening Ceremony stating, after we’d complained about waiting for hours, that we had come early to set an example for the Cameroonians, who, incidentally did not come early and thus never witnessed our fine example. In fact, we waited an additional hour or more after the ceremony was meant to start for all the special dignitaries to arrive. The Closing Ceremony seemed to last forever and we could not hear anything being said because the students were out of control in the tent next to ours and the sound system sucked. Finally it was well past lunch time and we were set free, only to be utterly mobbed by our Girls’ Club because we had never been told we were supposed to select a club President and keep attendance records and therefore they were not giving prizes to the girls. These kinds of things happened our entire training period and may’ve been even more annoying than all the rules we had to live with.
Moving to post was a smoother transition than I’d anticipated although technically I’m still moving. We had a private bus, an outdated Mercedes (how chic!) that we loaded to the brim with our metal trunks, suitcases, bicycles which took up the entire rear half of the thing, and 25 blancs and made our way up the road for the relatively short journey to Bafoussam. There we searched vigorously for all of our things among those belonging to the other blancs not stopping in Bafoussam but continuing on down the line. Once that feat had been accomplished we set off in smaller groups in a pickup truck which had to be once again loaded down and which, highly conveniently, dropped us off right at our front doors!
Unfortunately and also not too surprisingly, none of the things my Director asked my landlord to do and paid for him to have been done yet. Therefore my “bathroom” is still just a smaller room in my house than the other empty rooms and only 2 of the rooms have lights and outlets. Thus, for the last 3 days and until who knows when I am staying at my community host’s house. It has been extremely frustrating, tiring, and boring for the most part and I am overwhelmed at the thought of all the hours and minutes collected ahead of me for the next 2 weeks until school starts. Additionally, my house is entirely empty and the Peace Corps settling in allowance is enough to buy hardly anything at all. I’ve gone through half of it and the only things I’ve bought are my bed, sheets, and a part of my stove. I didn’t go fancy, either! It is all the more infuriating because lots of people moved into already fully furnished houses that volunteers over the years have been adding to and they got the exact same amount of money as me with my big, empty, cold space. I’m trying to make the best of it and be patient and know that before too long I will be at least minimally comfortable in my house but there have been moments over the last few days when I just start to cry because of the aggravation. I didn’t join the Peace Corps to live in luxury and I am becoming more familiar with financial burdens people may actually face, but at this moment I can’t even cook myself a meal or sit down someplace and read. After being a guest in someone’s home the last 11 weeks, I am thoroughly prepared to lounge around my own home, blaring CCR and Radiohead and doing yoga on my living room floor if I feel like! Instead I am currently confined to the sous-chef’s guest room or bar because he too lives in an unfinished house.
The fatigue of eating foreign food, especially that you don’t particularly care for, and not controlling when you eat it, of constantly being told where you’re going and when you’re going there, the aggravation of being entirely dependent on others for every want and need, and moreover, the absolute dullness of not having any work to do yet and knowing hardly anyone in the community is immense. I’m not depressed or even surprised that things are this way at the moment. I fully anticipated a challenging first few weeks as I begin to get in the swing of things here. Mostly I’m learning patience and I’m looking on knowing that very soon I’ll have a very robust schedule, at the least an equipped kitchen and a comfortable bed to sleep in, and that my boyfriend will hopefully visit next month!
In the meantime, I’m also thinking of how lucky I am in my post because I have gone into the regional capital the last 2 days to buy things for the house and discovered that you can find just about anything there including cheese!! I also live very close to a lot of other volunteers and will be able to escape to the comfort of their familiarity when necessary with ease. Volunteers in other regions are truly on their own right now and I can’t help thinking about their hardship and how mine pales in comparison.
I finally feel like I’m really in Africa now that we strapped my brand new bed on top of a bush taxi and were comfortably riding along with the appropriate number of passengers in our station wagon before being bombarded by people trying to get to my village who piled in making us 11 in a car meant for 5. The driver slid and bumped all over sheer clay roads that you wouldn’t imagine even exist while trying to avoid the fine he was certain to pay if he passed a police checkpoint. A fine, mind you, that wouldn’t actually have gone to the government at all but to the policeman himself because that’s how absolutely rampant corruption is.
So far internet is scarce with the service I bought and who knows when I’ll be able to purchase another so posts are going to be a lot more infrequent for now! I can’t believe it’s already almost September. Often there are days here that feel like I should be going to a fall football game in Bethel and that scent on the air is soothing like holding a warm mug of coffee while watching a peaceful snowfall out the window. I hope life at home feels just like it does in my imagination right now!
“I woke up and the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was- I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” –On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The tick-tocks have added up and it’s already been 2 or 3 weeks since I’ve written. Things have changed a great deal since then. Model School officially closed, the group of 41 Americans I’ve been trotting around with for the last 10 and a half weeks and I were sworn in as volunteers, and now I’m at my post watching a rainfall that seems never-ending.
We had a lot of goodbye dinners and parties to attend before leaving town and all the people of Bafia seemed genuinely sad to see us go. My neighbor said her son Georgie (of the aforementioned brood of brothers) wondered what they will do since Lindsay, friend of all the children, was leaving! I was flattered. My host mom gave me a cute pair of shoes and made me peanut butter from scratch and when I called her from my post the day after arriving she told me she didn’t sleep all night and that Boy, the youngest child at the house, was knocking on my door forever.
Claude and I had some amazing moments together before leaving and so far we are keeping in close contact despite the distance. I was voted “Most likely to marry a Cameroonian” by my peers- go figure! He shed a few tears when he and his entire family helped carry my things to see us off. After all the time I’ve spent with him in the last almost two months it is an added challenge to be missing him in the midst of adjusting to my new life but what better way to figure out if we are meant to be than to face such difficulties from the get-go.
The time here has begun to take its toll a bit. We were given handouts created by volunteers in the 70s which outline the range of emotions and attitudes we should expect to encounter within ourselves over the next 2 years. So far they are pretty spot on. Currently I’m feeling easy irritability and as I become more entrenched in the culture, my patience has started to dissipate.
The cultural norm here is failure to communicate. For example, for the Model School Closing Ceremony all the students and Trainees arrived at 8 am to discover that the program didn’t begin until 10 am. They did the exact same thing to us at the Opening Ceremony stating, after we’d complained about waiting for hours, that we had come early to set an example for the Cameroonians, who, incidentally did not come early and thus never witnessed our fine example. In fact, we waited an additional hour or more after the ceremony was meant to start for all the special dignitaries to arrive. The Closing Ceremony seemed to last forever and we could not hear anything being said because the students were out of control in the tent next to ours and the sound system sucked. Finally it was well past lunch time and we were set free, only to be utterly mobbed by our Girls’ Club because we had never been told we were supposed to select a club President and keep attendance records and therefore they were not giving prizes to the girls. These kinds of things happened our entire training period and may’ve been even more annoying than all the rules we had to live with.
Moving to post was a smoother transition than I’d anticipated although technically I’m still moving. We had a private bus, an outdated Mercedes (how chic!) that we loaded to the brim with our metal trunks, suitcases, bicycles which took up the entire rear half of the thing, and 25 blancs and made our way up the road for the relatively short journey to Bafoussam. There we searched vigorously for all of our things among those belonging to the other blancs not stopping in Bafoussam but continuing on down the line. Once that feat had been accomplished we set off in smaller groups in a pickup truck which had to be once again loaded down and which, highly conveniently, dropped us off right at our front doors!
Unfortunately and also not too surprisingly, none of the things my Director asked my landlord to do and paid for him to have been done yet. Therefore my “bathroom” is still just a smaller room in my house than the other empty rooms and only 2 of the rooms have lights and outlets. Thus, for the last 3 days and until who knows when I am staying at my community host’s house. It has been extremely frustrating, tiring, and boring for the most part and I am overwhelmed at the thought of all the hours and minutes collected ahead of me for the next 2 weeks until school starts. Additionally, my house is entirely empty and the Peace Corps settling in allowance is enough to buy hardly anything at all. I’ve gone through half of it and the only things I’ve bought are my bed, sheets, and a part of my stove. I didn’t go fancy, either! It is all the more infuriating because lots of people moved into already fully furnished houses that volunteers over the years have been adding to and they got the exact same amount of money as me with my big, empty, cold space. I’m trying to make the best of it and be patient and know that before too long I will be at least minimally comfortable in my house but there have been moments over the last few days when I just start to cry because of the aggravation. I didn’t join the Peace Corps to live in luxury and I am becoming more familiar with financial burdens people may actually face, but at this moment I can’t even cook myself a meal or sit down someplace and read. After being a guest in someone’s home the last 11 weeks, I am thoroughly prepared to lounge around my own home, blaring CCR and Radiohead and doing yoga on my living room floor if I feel like! Instead I am currently confined to the sous-chef’s guest room or bar because he too lives in an unfinished house.
The fatigue of eating foreign food, especially that you don’t particularly care for, and not controlling when you eat it, of constantly being told where you’re going and when you’re going there, the aggravation of being entirely dependent on others for every want and need, and moreover, the absolute dullness of not having any work to do yet and knowing hardly anyone in the community is immense. I’m not depressed or even surprised that things are this way at the moment. I fully anticipated a challenging first few weeks as I begin to get in the swing of things here. Mostly I’m learning patience and I’m looking on knowing that very soon I’ll have a very robust schedule, at the least an equipped kitchen and a comfortable bed to sleep in, and that my boyfriend will hopefully visit next month!
In the meantime, I’m also thinking of how lucky I am in my post because I have gone into the regional capital the last 2 days to buy things for the house and discovered that you can find just about anything there including cheese!! I also live very close to a lot of other volunteers and will be able to escape to the comfort of their familiarity when necessary with ease. Volunteers in other regions are truly on their own right now and I can’t help thinking about their hardship and how mine pales in comparison.
I finally feel like I’m really in Africa now that we strapped my brand new bed on top of a bush taxi and were comfortably riding along with the appropriate number of passengers in our station wagon before being bombarded by people trying to get to my village who piled in making us 11 in a car meant for 5. The driver slid and bumped all over sheer clay roads that you wouldn’t imagine even exist while trying to avoid the fine he was certain to pay if he passed a police checkpoint. A fine, mind you, that wouldn’t actually have gone to the government at all but to the policeman himself because that’s how absolutely rampant corruption is.
So far internet is scarce with the service I bought and who knows when I’ll be able to purchase another so posts are going to be a lot more infrequent for now! I can’t believe it’s already almost September. Often there are days here that feel like I should be going to a fall football game in Bethel and that scent on the air is soothing like holding a warm mug of coffee while watching a peaceful snowfall out the window. I hope life at home feels just like it does in my imagination right now!
Monday, August 9, 2010
The case of the stolen panties
However, life in Bafia will soon be no more because the week after this we will swear in as volunteers and I will officially never have a curfew again in my life! It is an exciting feeling to be set free in Cameroon at last and to feel again like an adult, yet, at the same instant a little intimidating. After being looked after and taken care of for the last 3 months in our homestay families it is overwhelming to think of how much work it will be to take care of just myself in this country!
There are so many responsibilities of day-to-day life that are substantially more challenging than the same activities in the States, plus the general pressure of teaching 15 hours a week in a difficult setting as well as thinking about my secondary project within the community and being active and well integrated there.
First of all, I’m moving into a house with absolutely no furniture. Furnishing a house in the States is somewhat of a hassle but here it is at least tenfold. I will have to go about negotiating from what is likely an even more than usually elevated price for every item I purchase which means I will need to do a bit of research before setting out in order to know what I should expect to pay. It’s never fun to get home and realize that when you thought you were bargaining you wound up still paying the white man price. Additionally there is the consideration of transporting all of these purchases to said house. I expect that my community host Wambo will be a tremendous aid in this whole process and so I am not sweating it too much but it will be nice to feel settled in sooner rather than later.
Once that happens I will need to worry about feeding myself. Luckily I have been posted in one of the most productive regions of the country and the country is the breadbasket of Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, I read before coming here that if Cameroon closed its borders or experienced a catastrophe that destroyed crops it would potentially starve a number of the neighboring countries. So, the market is chocked full of goodies like almost any kind of bean, nuts, an array of vegetables including carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, yams, okra, eggplant and more, and fruit like avocados, the most delicious pineapples I’ve ever tasted, mangoes, bananas, plantains, grapefruit, papaya and so on! You can also find pasta, bread, and fresh herbs. The only things that are difficult to come by are cheese and fresh milk but you can opt for the powdered sort if you really crave it and La Vache Qui Rit if you’re willing to settle for something that is mysteriously not cheese…
So, cooking should be just as much of an adventure as it had been for me the last year in Los Angeles but I am initially daunted by the thought of needing to discover where and when to find all these ingredients and what’s worse, lighting the gas stoves here scares the shit out of me! Many times I have attempted it in my home and chickened out. I have only done it successfully twice and I felt that I came close to setting my hand on fire both times! Hopefully I can find one of those long lighters we have in the States and put myself at ease.
Other than that, the idea of starting over in a new community is both exciting and fatiguing. There will be the initial integration steps all over again but perhaps multiplied many times by the fact that this time I will not be one of 42 other Americans in the village. I will have to train everyone all over again that my name is not “La Blanche” but Lindsay. I will have to deal with the initial phase of being with people most likely every waking minute of everyday for the first few weeks or months, foregoing the ever-so-comfortable “me” time and space we Americans hold so dear. I will need to try explaining to everyone I meet why I don’t need to eat at every social occasion or drink for every staff meeting and I’m certain I will have to make exceptions and accommodations in this regard in order to please. I will have to start over again in explaining my ‘religion’ to nearly everyone while avoiding the lack thereof truth and implying that I am somehow kind of Buddhist because that’s the religion I feel the most attuned to in general and which seems to be far more acceptable/ easy to grasp than Agnosticism or Atheism.
Yet, in all this starting over there are also new possibilities and opportunities that make it worthwhile and thrilling. I have spent the last 3 months preparing for this departure and have readied myself emotionally for it for practically as long as I can remember. I will finally be living my dream and hopefully touching lives at the same time. I will actually get to know my students and hopefully feel they’ve actually learned something from me unlike in Model School. I will be able to make new friends and become intimately familiar with a place and a people that very few Americans ever have and if all goes well I will throughout my time here find a way to bring something to their lives to improve it someway, somehow.
Since another week has passed I will give a quick wrap-up before closing. Monday I finished teaching around noon and had the rest of the day free so my friend Christine and I decided to take a bike ride out to the river where I had gone last week again. This time I had remembered to blanket myself in bug repellent and so when we got there we stopped to have a drink and unwind a little. We made some friends there who were enjoying playing around with Christine’s binoculars which she has all the time because she is an avid birdwatcher. I tried the “I’m married” trick for the first time on some men who were beginning to flirt and was amazed at how effective it was! Instead of driving me nuts asking for my number or something they just asked if my husband was a really jealous man.
The last time we had gone to the river a man had told my friend Andrew that he had just seen a hippopotamus and this shocked me so I asked a lot of questions about it of our new friends. They assured us that there are many in the water and that you could see them just about anytime.
When we finished our drinks we left our bikes unlocked and wandered down with our new friends onto the ferry to see if we could catch a glimpse of such a prehistoric- seeming mammoth animal as a hippo! Before we knew it the ferry was taking off and we looked at our new friends in shock because we had not intended to actually leave the dock! They told us not to worry, we were coming right back and there wasn’t too much we could do at that point but relax and look for hippos. Unfortunately this story would be better if we’d seen one, which we did not, but nonetheless, it was a beautiful ride on the ferry and the bikes and it was nice to feel like we could escape Bafia a bit.
Tuesday one of the Host Country National teachers observed my class of troisiemes, a grade above the quatrieme class I’ve been primarily working with. They were being seriously rotten that day and I was in the process of making them all stand as a punishment when she walked in and they immediately shut up completely. After class she told me that I am not intimidating enough and my voice too high which is apparently true because whatever she’s doing is obviously working better! One of the Americans even got a note from one of his students that said he was a very good teacher and should try speaking French more because he is good at it but that he doesn’t beat them enough. I think there are certain adjustments we American teachers will never make and perhaps as a result certain classroom behaviors we may just have to deal with.
Wednesday we had Girls’ Club and I spent two hours showing four girls at a time how to create their own email addresses before proceeding to the computer lab for another hour with them. Unfortunately when we got there only one computer had working internet so my efforts were in vain. I even used my laptop to work with one girl to set up her account but after we had done all the work and it said, “Felicitations Allison!” it wouldn’t let us sign back in. But alas, c’est la vie en Afrique and hopefully they will know now how to do it themselves if they get the chance.
I had washed my laundry that morning and hung it out on the line to dry while I was gone for the day. My host mother had been ill and so the children were the only ones home that day. When I got back I realized that it seemed like some of my things were missing from the line. I mentioned it casually to my host father, unable to really remember what it might have been but pretty certain they were underwear. He launched into a full-fledged investigation of the matter, all in front of Claude. He called in every kid in the neighborhood who had swung by the house that afternoon and had them all recount the details of their interactions with my panties. Then he told my host mother about it and questioned the teenaged girls in the neighboring houses. Finally he said he wished to take the matter to the police which I declined politely through a bit of laughter and assured him that even if the panties were found I would just let the thief keep them at this point. Overall, a hilarious incident that is still being discussed in the household with the utmost of sobriety.
Thursday I was back with my favorite brutish class and we played some review games to close out summer school and prepare for their exams yesterday. We each had to proctor 2 tests which was annoying because they weren’t for our classes or the tests we had prepared and so the kids were mostly angry with us because we couldn’t help them at all with instructions and if the teacher hadn’t written they could use a calculator we had to forbid it. Nonetheless, the exams finished and only about ¼ of my class actually failed which, believe it or not, is really not so bad. The teachers are thrilled to be finished with Model School as well as hoping that real school will be easier…
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| The quatrieme nightmare class on our last day |
After grading tests Claude and I went to see my host mom in the hospital because she has typhoid. It was a reminder of my days in the clinic in Ouakam and always eye-opening to see health care in Africa. Afterward we stopped by the home of a very sweet woman I pass everyday on my way to school as she tends to her beautiful flowers. She always has a huge smile on and greets me more warmly than anyone in the community so we had promised to come by and see pictures of her kids, 2 of whom married Peace Corps volunteers and now live in the States. She fed us some delicious Sanga, a dish made with corn, spices, and greens, and sent us off with some peanuts freshly harvested from her field as well as the advice that I can not forget her son Claude when I leave and we are a good couple and should be married.
This morning the running club had a race for anyone in the community to participate in and they had a great turn out of over 50 people. It was fun seeing so many kids come out for it, even though many of them were running in chuck taylors or even flip flops! The boy who won third place was a tiny kid in jelly shoes and Claude’s brother took first! I was the only American female who ran so I was pretty far behind most everyone but ran with a couple students which was nice. Then this afternoon we got together with our girls’ club to practice our song for the cultural party this week and they are all very excited to perform.
In a little bit Claude and I are going into town to buy my host sister a present for her 4th birthday this week. Tonight is our curfew free night so we will most likely chill at Martin’s bar and may decide to go do some dancing in the late hours at the night club. Tomorrow I will play Sunday soccer with my other friend Martin and then Claude and I have plans to take a picnic lunch and go on a real hike nearby. I am very excited about this!
As things wind down in training there should be a lot of exciting things happening this week so stay tuned!
Sunday, August 1, 2010
All About Sports
I blinked and it is already the weekend again. This week is the last week of Model School already and training is over in 2.5 weeks. It is exciting to think that in less than a month I will be living in my new house, cooking for myself again and not living under the strict regulations of trainee life.
It has been another good week here in Bafia, though. Monday I had a new class which was a bit frustrating considering that the school is almost finished and going into a class you don't know is like starting all over but alas, I survived. After school Claude took me exploring on it wound up being one of the best memories I've made in Cameroon so far. Last week on one of our walks we'd gone down to a little stream for a little privacy and just as we were getting settled on the perfect sitting log I realized I was being eaten alive by these little irritating insects called moot moots. We were forced to leave immediately and I walked home like an antzy child, rubbing my legs together to scratch the horrendous itching I was experiencing. This time when he told me where we were headed, I coated myself in bug spray and put on my jeans!
When we got to the river there was an elderly woman bathing who said she didn't mind if we passed. The water was about knee deep and I was nervous as I rolled up my pantlegs and stuck my toes in so Claude carried me piggyback while oh so gingerly tiptoeing across a log hidden under the water's surface. I closed my eyes and buried my face in his shirt because I was certain we were going to end up in the river with my purse in tow. Even he breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the other side. He then led us up through several isolated plantations on a hillside and when we got to the top we could see all of Bafia off in the distance and beautiful, lush hills that seem to be infinite in the other direction. It was the closest thing I've done to a real hike since being in Cameroon and it was blissful to feel the sense of being someplace less traveled.
Tuesday I finished Model School and had the rest of the day free so my friends Jeneca and Andrew and I hopped on our bikes and rode about 45 minutes away down a dirt road where the children shouted, "Chinois" to us because apparently they haven't had much contact with whites. In certain parts of the country the government has brought in a great many Chinese laborers for things like road construction and so sometimes foreigners in general are thought to be Chinese.
Oftentimes in this country when I find that the view takes my breath away I think to myself that wow, I really am in Sub-Saharan Africa and speeding down dirt roads in dense growth like forest in the middle of nowhere was one of those moments! We rode all the way to where the river becomes very wide and you have to await the ferry to cross. Unfortunately on this particular day I had once again forgotten my bug spray so my excitement for our ride began to wane as the flies biting me pretty much forced all my energy into self-loathing after I'd spent the whole week caring for the unappealing peppering of bites from the week before.
When I got home the neighbor boys were hanging out at my house. They are a brood of 4 or 5 brothers who like to violently wrestle for fun, but man are they cute! (See photo from last post) I brought out the frisbee Mom sent and we made a game of me throwing it as far as I could and them all racing for it. It was hilarious watching them run as fast as they could and then pile on top of each other!
Wednesday morning was my day off from teaching so I went running and then Claude actually came over to help me wash my clothes. Yeah, I have found like the most domestic African in... well Africa! Then we went to fetch water, a chore I have come to loathe. The containers we must use are impossible to carry comfortably. Not only do they weigh a ton but the handle gives you blisters and you must change hands every few steps or your arm will tire easily. Most of the time women or children carry them on their heads and I am often stopped on the way home and told that it will be easier if I do the same. I always smile politely and respond that I am not Cameroonian.
After the chores Wednesday a friend of mine from the bar we frequent showed up, as promised, to teach our girls' club some martial arts moves. He did an awesome job of giving us some very useful self defense moves and kept the girls giggling. Afterward we chose the song they will sing for our cultural night at the close of Model School.
The rest of the week was pretty average. Played our usual soccer match on Thursday and I taught my favorite and everyone else's least favorite class on Thursday and Friday. They seemed happy to see me and I felt it went pretty smoothly even though I had to send out two students, one of which was in trouble for saying, "Je n'aime pas les blanches" ("I don't like whites"). I feel I've made an impression on them to some extent. We did an AIDS lesson Friday and they behaved like angels.
Yesterday I went to the less posh side of town than where I live to meet Claude's last remaining grandmother. She doesn't see well but was elated to have us there and said to her niece in her mother tongue while Claude had walked off that if she doesn't live to see tomorrow she will know in Heaven that he and are together because he has never brought a girl to meet her before.
It has been another good week here in Bafia, though. Monday I had a new class which was a bit frustrating considering that the school is almost finished and going into a class you don't know is like starting all over but alas, I survived. After school Claude took me exploring on it wound up being one of the best memories I've made in Cameroon so far. Last week on one of our walks we'd gone down to a little stream for a little privacy and just as we were getting settled on the perfect sitting log I realized I was being eaten alive by these little irritating insects called moot moots. We were forced to leave immediately and I walked home like an antzy child, rubbing my legs together to scratch the horrendous itching I was experiencing. This time when he told me where we were headed, I coated myself in bug spray and put on my jeans!
When we got to the river there was an elderly woman bathing who said she didn't mind if we passed. The water was about knee deep and I was nervous as I rolled up my pantlegs and stuck my toes in so Claude carried me piggyback while oh so gingerly tiptoeing across a log hidden under the water's surface. I closed my eyes and buried my face in his shirt because I was certain we were going to end up in the river with my purse in tow. Even he breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the other side. He then led us up through several isolated plantations on a hillside and when we got to the top we could see all of Bafia off in the distance and beautiful, lush hills that seem to be infinite in the other direction. It was the closest thing I've done to a real hike since being in Cameroon and it was blissful to feel the sense of being someplace less traveled.
Tuesday I finished Model School and had the rest of the day free so my friends Jeneca and Andrew and I hopped on our bikes and rode about 45 minutes away down a dirt road where the children shouted, "Chinois" to us because apparently they haven't had much contact with whites. In certain parts of the country the government has brought in a great many Chinese laborers for things like road construction and so sometimes foreigners in general are thought to be Chinese.
Oftentimes in this country when I find that the view takes my breath away I think to myself that wow, I really am in Sub-Saharan Africa and speeding down dirt roads in dense growth like forest in the middle of nowhere was one of those moments! We rode all the way to where the river becomes very wide and you have to await the ferry to cross. Unfortunately on this particular day I had once again forgotten my bug spray so my excitement for our ride began to wane as the flies biting me pretty much forced all my energy into self-loathing after I'd spent the whole week caring for the unappealing peppering of bites from the week before.
When I got home the neighbor boys were hanging out at my house. They are a brood of 4 or 5 brothers who like to violently wrestle for fun, but man are they cute! (See photo from last post) I brought out the frisbee Mom sent and we made a game of me throwing it as far as I could and them all racing for it. It was hilarious watching them run as fast as they could and then pile on top of each other!
Wednesday morning was my day off from teaching so I went running and then Claude actually came over to help me wash my clothes. Yeah, I have found like the most domestic African in... well Africa! Then we went to fetch water, a chore I have come to loathe. The containers we must use are impossible to carry comfortably. Not only do they weigh a ton but the handle gives you blisters and you must change hands every few steps or your arm will tire easily. Most of the time women or children carry them on their heads and I am often stopped on the way home and told that it will be easier if I do the same. I always smile politely and respond that I am not Cameroonian.
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| Girls' Club getting their martial arts on |
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| A bidon used to carry water |
After the chores Wednesday a friend of mine from the bar we frequent showed up, as promised, to teach our girls' club some martial arts moves. He did an awesome job of giving us some very useful self defense moves and kept the girls giggling. Afterward we chose the song they will sing for our cultural night at the close of Model School.
The rest of the week was pretty average. Played our usual soccer match on Thursday and I taught my favorite and everyone else's least favorite class on Thursday and Friday. They seemed happy to see me and I felt it went pretty smoothly even though I had to send out two students, one of which was in trouble for saying, "Je n'aime pas les blanches" ("I don't like whites"). I feel I've made an impression on them to some extent. We did an AIDS lesson Friday and they behaved like angels.
Yesterday I went to the less posh side of town than where I live to meet Claude's last remaining grandmother. She doesn't see well but was elated to have us there and said to her niece in her mother tongue while Claude had walked off that if she doesn't live to see tomorrow she will know in Heaven that he and are together because he has never brought a girl to meet her before.
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| Claude with his Grandma & Aunt |
We also got some rather sad news this week. Coincidentally in the photo I of Claude and I in last week's post you can see a brief glimpse of a young man who officiated the basketball match we'd gone to see. Unbelievably while looking through the photos a couple days later Claude informed me that the man was dead. Monday morning, the day after we'd seen him, he went to the clinic to change the bandage he had on his hand after a moto accident he was in. They found that his hand had been infected with gangrene and had gone septic and before they could do anything about it he had dropped dead. It was a shocking and sad reminder that we are not in Kansas anymore and that life is short in general but that life is even shorter for the people on this continent.
On a lighter last note, I forgot to give a special shout out to my awesome friend from LA Bret Rea last week for being the first one to send me something from my Amazon wishlist! I cannot wait to chill at post and learn about the lives of individuals living in a hippie commune in the mountains of Colorado! If anyone else wants to try sending something, it seems Bret was able to send direct shipping from the website so you can try that too if you'd like. However, I also recommend half.com for much too low priced used copies! Thanks again, Bret!
Sunday, July 25, 2010
And the way to be happy is to make someone happy...
My biggest frustration thus far has been the limits of the language teaching methodology we are expected to use here and the fact that I can literally observe my students getting nowhere because of it. When I was taught ESL education at OU I learned to teach English without needing to use the native language of the learners at all. This is how ESL is taught, primarily because of the growing demand for English teachers worldwide and the fact that such demands could not be met if teachers needed to speak the native language in order to teach. In Cameroon we are expected to use the Communication Method and that means every word I use in class and every word the students use in class is supposed to be English, even when that means clarifying things or worse, that the kids just won't understand me.
My class of quatriemes are now notoriously the worst class in all of Model School and some of the teachers who had them after me last week gave up completely and called in the Discipline Master for help. I, on the other hand, tried another approach and had a heart-to-heart with the class... in French. Our theme that day was stories and when I wrote the definition of the word and that also of 'characters' and they all stared at me blankly and said, "Madame, we don't understand the words you are using", I felt at my wit's end and told them I was going to tell them a story! They said, "En Francais, Madame?!", surprised that I was speaking their language in class. I told them yes, in French because I felt it was incredibly important that they heard me and understood me well. I told them the story of a girl I went with a week or so ago, the sister of my friend, to see the results of her national test to get out of high school. It was the kind of story with which they are all extremely familiar. Here your entire schooling success, the possibilities presented for your future, rest solely on the passing or failing of 3 tests throughout your high school career. We have actually been given samples of these tests and the questions are vague, subjective, and hardly comprehensive at all in consideration of all they are expected to acquire in the seven year span they cover. One English test we were shown had a text about a girl who had turned to prostitution out of desperation and one of the comprehension questions was, "Do you think Mary's mother loved her?"
I asked them what they thought the girl saw when she went to get her results. They guessed she had not been successful. I told them they were right and asked them why they thought that might be. They said she must not have worked hard enough. I explained to them that according to the national syllabus they should all be able to speak English in my class so by their standards they were also not working hard enough. I asked what they thought would happen when it was their turn to take the same test. They said they too may fail. This is all too common. The students who fail must repeat the whole year over again as many times as it takes; many of them just drop out. It's hard for them to see the point at all in the first place when there is so much unemployment and corruption anyway. After this my class was more attentive than ever and they we have still hit bumps in the road some of the worst behaved students in the beginning are now some of the most active.
That night I had an epiphany. I had told them I wanted us to work together for them to learn and that they have to tell me when they don't understand things; I needed to come down to their level more. The next day I came in and changed my definition of characters from: "the people or animals who are the subjects of a story", to: "Who". They caught on easily and did group work to outline all the different parts of some African folktales I'd found.
Friday I had the group of older students again and I was actually impressed by my own creativity. Having been inspired to higher standards after the student stopping me after class last week I made dice for our class boardgame out of tape and wrote an entire murder mystery set in a neighboring town and made them use the grammar lesson from that morning to solve the crime. I feel very lucky because I really enjoy teaching and not of the trainees do; I would hate to think I was going to spend the next 2 years of my life doing something I didn't feel that way about.
Wednesday is club day and our girls' club had specifically requested to play sports that day. We arranged to get some balls and it was fun to see how much the girls enjoyed it when for once, as boys approached to join our soccer match, we would shout to them, "Est-ce que tu es une fille??!" ("Are you a girl??") and then quickly made them leave the field. It's amazing how many boys want to be in our club! After sports we did a self esteem building activity with the girls. This week I'm hoping a friend of mine from the local hangout is going to come introduce the girls to a few martial arts techniques.
Thursday is our sports day in Peace Corps and I have become a regular on the PC soccer field. I am thrilled to be playing and to have so many people to do so with all of the time. My Cameroonian friend Martin even invited me into a new soccer club on Sunday mornings that I played in today. I was the only woman on the field that was not being a goalie and I think as a result they took it easier than usual but they complimented me after the match and told me I have to come back next Sunday.
At the risk of sounding redundent or predictable, I have met someone here. In a somewhat humorous coincidence he is the host brother of one of the other trainees. We have been spending a solid portion of our time with one another. Most of the time we just meet after my classes and walk all around town together to places I haven't seen yet, just talking, joking, laughing, learning about one another. We have an insane amount in common in terms of our beliefs and characters for two people from very different worlds. He usually winds up at my house after walking me home in time for curfew and then we sit on the front porch, holding babies who are usually crawling all over us like monkeys and watching the sunset. Often he comes in to eat dinner because my host mother insists on it and it is rude to refuse, sometimes we play cards with the family. Regardless of what we are doing, we are always totally at ease with one another. It's not something I ever would've envisioned happening with another African really, and particularly not at such an early stage in my Peace Corps life, but he does make me extremely happy for now and I feel that for once in my life I should just try not to analyze it much farther beyond that.
There's something heartily romantic about the simplicity of things here. There's no need to go out someplace and spend money having a date, we just walk and we learn one another. It doesn't hurt either that he's extremely easy on the eyes.
After watching a terrential downpour from the bar at Martin's house I met Claude to go watch a quickly organized Peace Corps basketball team get totally licked by a far superior and clearly more invested Cameroonian team. After we dropped in on one of the Americans of the slew of them who was diagnosed with typhoid this week, as well as worms and some kind of gastrointestinal bacteria, then stopped by to say hello to Claude's family briefly and headed off to someplace private where we could just relax and be together. Now I am writing this and it is already night because I left the post many times throughout the day so I'm going to call it a wrap! Hope everyone at home is doing well!
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