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!