Terrence's story

The rooster has crowed and signaled the coming of yet another Sunday in Bafia. Already only a few remain before we move on with and begin our lives as Peace Corps Volunteers. Life continues to run smoothly and I feel joy at the possibilities offered by each new day.

This week I had the opportunity to go out with some Cameroonian friends and had really meaningful conversations. I feel I am connecting deeply with people and that is the part of my work here that will eventually mean the most. My friend Martin told me the other day that he hasn't enjoyed himself so much in a long time.

This week also marked the opening ceremony of Model School and after waiting 3 hours for all the special dignitaries for which the ceremony was planned we began with the group utterly butchering the National Anthem before the entire population of students, teachers and important folk. Unfortunately I was in the front row and was quietly singing while attempting to stifle my need to laugh hysterically at the spectacle. Luckily I think it's harder to tell when people are singing poorly when it's in a foreign tongue.

We observed a lot this week and I got the chance to watch a truly inspirational lesson from one of the teachers here. The class was the Premiere level which is students nearing the end of their schooling but the age range is anywhere from 15-19 and beyond. The teacher asked the students what career was the most important and a student rose (they stand to answer questions) to say that a teacher was the most important profession because you pass on knowledge to children. Next a student stood to counter this view by saying that a doctor is more important because you can't go to school if you aren't well. Everyone saw this was a good point and laughed. Then a third student stood to say that if the doctor hadn't a teacher they wouldn't have learned medicine and the whole class erupted in applause for he had clearly won the argument.

When they were asked what they wanted to be and why it brought me nearly to tears as they rose one after another to talk of their dreams of wanting to be a translator so as to help people understand one another; being a doctor and building a hospital for those who suffer from AIDS and Cancer but don't have the means to get the care they need; to be an advocate for children around the world because every 5 minutes a child dies from hunger. I was wowed and awed by their wordsand their intelligence and reminded that regardless of where you go the dreams of youth remain linked.

I will beging teaching at the Model School that we undertake during training this week and I am very excited to finally have control of a classroom of children and to see how things go. I think I will learn a great deal from the children and of course, I hope they will learn even more from me!

Yesterday we had a whole afternoon of training in mountain bike maintenance and then brought home our bikes. I am somewhat intimidated but hoping to become at least a better than mediocre biker by the time I return to the States.

This week marks a bit of a sad turn of events in my homestay because the person I've been the closest to in the house, my younger host brother Terrence, is moving on. I want to share his story with you because it has touched my heart and reminded me of why I'm here. Sometimes in the day-to-day it's easy to lose track of the challenges people face. They carry the weight of their burdens with grace and sometimes we seem to have so many things in common that it's easy to lose track of how much different our lives have been.

Terrence is 18 and is not really my host brother. When he was only 16 my family discovered him through another family member. His family was too poor to manage having him at home and needed him to go and work so after finishing only his primary school studies he came far from home to live with my Anglophone family and care for their children. Since I've been living here I have seen him rise every day before 6 am to begin the daily chores including but not limited to sweeping, mopping, cooking, fetching water, washing everyone's clothes, taking care of the children and generally doing anything everyone asked of him at any moment of every day. I have very seldomly seen him do anything resembling the life of a boy his age in the States but I have made an effort to get him out of the house a few times over the last few weeks and to try to get to know him a little better.

In that time he has opened up to me about his girlfriends, his brothers and sisters and his suffering. He has barely seen or spoken to anyone in his immediate family in years and when one of his elder sisters passed away last year after having not seen her for a long time it wore on him. He tells me the family doesn't pay him for the work that he does and he may or may not be telling me the truth about but either way whatever he is being paid is not much. He hardly leaves the house except to run an errand and often when he does he gets in trouble upon his return for something or another, because of the language barriers of Pidgin and broken English it is often hard to decipher the issue.

Last night during a heart-to-heart discussion in which I tried calmly convincing him that his way with one of the little ones was too harsh he opened up to me after I gently persuaded him as he wiped his eyes to hide the tears I saw building up in his lids.  With effort because he was reluctant to share his long-guarded pain with another person, he spoke of how every person in Bafia knows him because he is like the town handiman. He spoke of the suffering he's had from chronic back pain caused by his constant manual labor and how no one has bothered getting him medical attention for it. He described how all his peers are beginning their studies in Form 5, equivalent to Juniors or Seniors in the States, and he has rested the same for the last 2 years, falling behind everyone else. He spoke of his anger, fatigue, frustration and the way he has given and given of himself which had an obvious sense of him having little left at all to give.

This week his family has been calling my host family regarding him. Evidently there was always some kind of arrangement that he would eventually have some part of his schooling in a chosen trade funded by my host family after he had worked for them a given period of time and now that time has come. I'm disappointed to see him go and will deeply miss having him in the house to play cards and soccer and laugh with regularly but I am glad to see some new opportunities on the horizon for him.

Getting to know him has reminded me of so many lost childhoods on this continent and many other parts of the world. It has enlivened a part of me I've never had the chance to feel, almost the love of an older sister towards a younger sibling. Tonight I will give him a long and meticulously worded letter describing what I hope will be words of wisdom and love for him as well as a little bit of money for all the work he's done for me since I've been here, and a mostly deflated soccer ball that he will probably appreciate just as much as one from the States.

Once again I am reminded of how lucky I have been in my life and I hope his story reminds all of you reading from the States as well of your own privileged position in this world.