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!

The case of the stolen panties

Time moves here in Bafia as if in a continuum of minutes, hours, days, and somehow already- months. It is difficult to imagine that while merely day after day has passed here there has been nearly a whole season gone by back home. I am certain one of the strangest parts about returning after two years in such a time warp will be seeing how much so many people and things will have changed. Lacey and Brendan’s new boy Max will already be walking and talking and it seems as if I will feel like I just got on the plane to come here!




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…

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!

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.

Girls' Club getting their martial arts on

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.

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!