The Flux Capacitor

November 11

“In the Huerfano you live at the mercy of the sky. Dry Creek’s been dry for two weeks, and the spring box didn’t refill last night. The wildflowers fade and curl, and when the hot wind blows, dust flies up in the meadows.” - A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture: Huerfano, Roberta Price

It is difficult to believe that the holidays are already just around the bend, especially when I walk outside everyday and see absolutely no signs to remind me of them. After 2 ‘winters’ in Los Angeles I have become accustomed to hanging around in short-sleeves right before Christmas but there was still Jingle Bells playing in the Beverly Center in October. It’s fascinating to be living on a school schedule again and it seems to make life move much faster than countless hours spent at a desk in my office. Not to mention how much busier I have become lately.

In addition to teaching my 4 levels 3 days a week I have started a Girls’ Club at the Lycee. That eliminated one of my free days completely since it’s right in the afternoon and breaks my time into highly inconvenient pieces. I was also approached by some women in the community regarding an organization they’ve been attempting to engineer with the other ladies of the village. We’ve gotten together several times now to toss thoughts and ideas around with whichever women come to the meetings. I also started offering Saturday classes 2 times a month to all my students so I spend 4 hours almost every other weekend letting those who come tell me what they’re struggling with. It’s really become the day I enjoy teaching the most because my classes are a bit smaller, there’s no faculty around, the kids are less over-excited and more at ease, I feel like I’m really listening and helping them more genuinely, and the environment is more personal.

Teaching has been getting easier, finally. After attending a seminar for English teachers in the region I feel more like I’m on the right track and fear less that I’m failing my students. I have stopped worrying so much if I speak French to them and feel like they understand far more because of that decision. I finally feel like they get me a little better and I notice that I’m finding my rhythm with them and kicking them out less frequently. They seem to have noticed that I accept far less than I did in the beginning of the year and respect me for it.

At the seminar I spoke with a national inspector who told me that the national syllabus is the most important guideline for my classes, which is what I had thought initially until the staff at my school told me that the textbook was the priority. I explained that I was skeptical of that considering that not all of the schools in the country use the same textbook, but they insisted. I was feeling so frustrated and trapped in the idea of having to teach from a text that is lousy to begin with. Using it as the guide gave me very little freedom to teach the way I want to teach. Luckily, because of what the inspector told me I have now found a good balance using the textbook and my own syllabus that I wrote when first getting into the village.

Unfortunately, in a few weeks I will be forced to coordinate with the other English teachers at the school to write the tests for the class levels that we share. This means that I am unsure of how my students will perform considering that I will not be permitted to design a test that reflects exactly what I’ve taught. To prevent all my students’ grades from dropping considerably I have been giving lots of homework and I will give points to those who attend the Saturday classes as well. Unfortunately this also means I have an insane amount of homework myself in grading them! Reading an essay in elementary level 2nd language English is much harder than it seems. Props to all my French teachers over the years for that!

When I’m not running off to do something work related someplace or to a language lesson, I often walk out my front door and stand on the side of the road waiting for a raggedy old station wagon to come bumping along, squeeze me in (literally), and go into the regional capital or to the village next to mine to stock up on goodies. Bahouan is one of the smallest and least known villages in the region and doesn’t appear on the map. The market is only every 8 days and there really isn’t too much to offer aside from the usual stuff I can get at the local shops anyhow. Therefore when I get low on certain things, need to go to the bank, or just want to chow on something more exotic than the typical veggies I find here, I spend the majority of my day off getting toted around, negotiating prices, and wandering all over the place acquiring stuff.

Cameroon is known to be a bread basket in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, before coming here I read that if they ever closed their borders or had a natural disaster like a drought, many people in the neighboring countries would run the risk of starving. Now that I’m in my own house and have my gas stove, (automatically lighting, thank Heaven!) I have gone back to my vegetarian diet. It’s been a lot easier than I anticipated and even all the teachers at the school are not at all surprised when I don’t completely load my plate with chicken at our staff meetings.

I can find all sorts of vegetables here; some incredibly familiar and some totally new. Most days I’ve got tomatoes, onions, leeks, basil, celery, snap peas, carrots, and green peppers in the house. It’s a treat if I go into Bandjoan and buy romaine lettuce for a salad but soon I hope to be eating some from my own yard! I’ve found beets a couple of times but think they must be out of season now. There is eggplant, zucchini, cabbage, potatoes, avocados, guava, pineapple, okra, bananas and plantains.

New things include “batons” of manioc; I am not sure exactly what part of the plant they even are but they are incredibly unappetizing in appearance. In fact, I was absolutely disgusted by them when I first arrived here. They come wrapped in banana leaves and are gummy in texture. They are a clear, whitish color with a grainy appearance and really have no taste at all but somehow I have taken a liking to them and snack on them frequently when I get home from school. There is also something they call prunes which is nothing like a prune but more like a tiny avocado but hard. If you fry them in a bit of water and oil they soften and then you eat the skin and the green or white insides around the pit. Another thing I was not too fond of until after a few samples and now really enjoy. There are what the people here call ‘potate’ which is essentially a sweet potato but with a drier and unique sweet flavor.

I am still eating as well as I was in Los Angeles and since my mom sent me the best cookbook for a vegetarian ever (which I recommend to everyone- even carnivores) “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” I cook several times a week. I’ve been eating all sorts of delicious things like homemade minestrone, bean burgers with a side of sweet potato fries, couscous topped with fresh tomato sauce and eggs poached in red wine, vegetable pancakes, cabbage leaves stuffed with lentils and rice, Louisiana style gumbo, breakfast burritos with homemade tortillas and salsa, and pasta with panfried squash and tomato sauce!


Some days it feels as though coming to Africa is what makes time travel possible (rather than Doc‘s invention). A world where you can still find cassette tapes, where McDonald’s and Wal-Mart have not come barging in with hamburgers and low-low prices, on the way to work I pass kids who can’t be older than 3 walking alone down the street, during the day I hear the little boy who lives behind me chopping wood to put on the fire they use to prepare dinner. It’s a world less controlled by politicians and more natural.

At school I have finally adjusted to being allowed to touch my students somewhat without a law suit waiting to happen. Sometimes when I reach out to put my hand on an arm or to demonstrate something, they flea my reach in fear that I’m going to hit them like the rest of the staff. I definitely don’t hit them at all or even use muscle in any way, but I have gotten more used to taking the delinquents by an arm and pulling them to the front of the class to put their noses against the chalkboard.

There are chickens grazing on the side of the road constantly and I can tell the store-owner just up the street that I’ll pay him for my bread tomorrow. When I sit in my language teacher’s little office with his ratty old books I stare into his yard at a well that looks like it should be on Little House on the Prairie with stone sides and a hanging bucket. At night I often find myself working or cooking next to a little gas lantern or a candlelight. When the water is cut off in the house I am vigilant about putting all my empty buckets outside in case of rain and if I hear the water come on I am forced to hop out of bed in the middle of the night and retrieve all the buckets from the yard to fill them as quickly as possible before the opportunity for water is lost again.

I am finally reading the book my friend Bret sent me about the Huerfano Valley in Colorado. It was a commune established by people rejecting the war and the draft and all American politics in the 60s. It’s fascinating how much their little makeshift lives on a mountainside in Colorado 40 some years ago are strikingly similar to mine here. It feels almost strange the marriage of technology and lack of development here. I can hardly ever walk into the bathroom and flush my toilet when I want to but here I am, sitting on my laptop and at the school I can get on the internet and communicate instantly just like I’ve been doing since I was 9 years old. My family calls my cell phone every weekend, and even my students have cell phones.