And the way to be happy is to make someone happy...

Voila, it's Sunday afternoon again and I guess that means it's about time for an update. Every week seems to go faster than the one before it and life continues to get better. Living with a host family has started to become sort of draining and I have definitely been more "American" in recent weeks. This means not always sitting in the family room and trying to have some time to myself when possible. Teaching went pretty well this week in spite of some minor blips that I think are simply unavoidable in teaching.

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.

Today was pretty fantastic because I played soccer and Claude made a surprise visit to the field to watch. Afterward we were supposed to go with his family in his dad's car to see the plantation he manages in a neighboring village but his dad was on what we in Peace Corps call Africa Time. That means that while I was at my house waiting for Claude to show up for 3 hours I did some work and watched the neighbor kids hanging on my window, excitedly chattering, "La Blanche, la blanche, Auntie Lindsay, La Blanche"! I was going to go add credit to my phone to finally call him to figure out the situation when I remembered that my American friend and neighbor Martin had invited me over for hamburgers at exactly the time happened to be walking past! Thus, I was the first one there and we ate what I am pretty sure was the best hamburger I've ever had in my life but what may've just been the only American food I've had in 2 months. I will post some pics of the kids hanging on my window and of the bliss on the faces of the Americans mange-ing our burgers!

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!