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.