Winding Down

So... I have fallen off the map, but not off the world. I last wrote in November and a lot has changed since then, but mostly things feel the same. I'm a married woman now! I am also counting down the end of my time in Cameroon. As it all starts setting in I am beginning to look back on the major alterations that have taken place in my life over the last two years. It's very hard to believe it's been that long.

We had our Conclusion of Service Conference at the beginning of the month and it was enlightening to hear from other former volunteers about their readjustment to America... mind you, all of them are back in Africa now! It was thrilling and terrifying to be talking about writing our resumes, going through job interviews, adjusting to strolling through stimulus overloading supermarket isles. It was a reminder of how everybody else's lives have moved forward while I've been away as well. Of course, facebook has made that connection to other people much easier than it was for Peace Corps Volunteers of yore, but even so, I have tried my best to maintain as much psychological distance from American life as was possible since coming to this isolated spot. As reality starts to hit, I feel a lot of things. I was accepted to grad school in two of the three programs I applied to, the University of Denver and Brandeis University outside of Boston. But, due to a lot of personal factors I've decided to take a year off and be home with family for a while. I will defer my acceptance and hang out in Cincinnati waiting and praying for my husband's visa to be a simple and painless process. After 5 years so far from home I'm eager to have some down time close to the loved ones who are never far from my thoughts no matter where I roam. I doubt there will be another time in my life when I will have that option. Yet, I'm tense and agonizing over leaving my new husband behind with really no idea of when we'll be together again. A lot of people seem to misunderstand the immigration process. It's never easy- regardless of the route you take, and though marriage is considered one of the more direct ways, it's still no guarantee. As the Consul from the Embassy recently told a group of volunteers, "Just because you marry someone does not necessarily give them the right to come to America". So, there you have it. Claude's paperwork arrived in Chicago last week and has already been sent on to a California processing center, which is not even what we expected to happen according to Intel we got from a friend I have in the State Department in D.C. Thus, the process is underway but it is impossible to know what hoops we'll be made to jump through. Many couples suffer long separations as they are asked again and again to provide more evidence that their relationship with their spouse is legitimate. So, keep your fingers crossed that we are not among those unlucky applicants. Our wedding was a great success... and also a great stress. I have to say, I think getting married here was the most powerful cross-cultural experience I've had. I think I got a lot of gray hairs as in the few days before the marriage we finally sat down to plan a budget, menu, and general plan for the ceremony... after having already informed the guests. Obviously, as an American it was terribly frustrating for me to plan a budget around the invited guests and then have to scramble for the money to complete it rather than planning a list of guests around the money that we had. I wanted to drop dead when people kept saying, "It will all work out, God will help us" when we were still trying to come up with hundreds of dollars days before the wedding to make sure there'd be enough to eat. Being the simple girl I am I have never dreamed of a big fancy wedding. In fact, I don't even like being the center of attention-- that's always been my brother's thing and I was happy to let him have the spotlight. I wanted a small, inexpensive ceremony without a lot of fluff. I had imagined that this would be even easier to accomplish in Africa than back home. Yet, I overlooked a few small details, one being the African family and another being the cold, hard fact that almost nothing is easier here. As I learned from a lot of Cameroonians as I went through this process, there is no small fete. (party) I came to Yaounde the week before the wedding and had a to-do list that would've taken maybe an afternoon or two in the States. Here it took the entire week of rushing around exasperated, hot, with my heart racing in every direction I went. For example, finding a pair of shoes would've been a piece of cake back home, but here it entailed harassment in the market, finding lots of shoes I liked, but which weren't in my too-small size for Africa, (for some reason all the women here have basketball players' feet; maybe it's all the walking they've done in bad shoes since infancy), and the other problem-- I needed them in white. Unlike in America where there is always a stock of every size and sometimes color shoe in the backroom, in Cameroon shopping is just luck. If you have it you may stumble upon the shoe you like, it will look almost new, and it will be in your size. If you don't, you will walk around for hours from store to store, salespeople calling out to you in every direction (especially if you're white), sometimes people touching you or trying to pull you their way, and always worrying if someone is about to try digging into your pocket. That was my experience. Luckily the day before the wedding Claude's sister loaned him her car so we were able to get around way more quickly than we would've had we been forced to take taxis to run the remainder of our errands. Otherwise I don't think we'd have had a wedding cake, I probably wouldn't have had a bouquet, and we may not have had a nice room at the Hilton to spend our wedding night in! All-in-all the wedding was perfect. The only problem being that the majority of the guests were Claude's and his family's and I missed my own entourage's presence. But, I did have a healthy representation of volunteers and my host mom came to sign our wedding certificate as the head of my family. The party had great food and of course, dancing. All-in-all, though, the best part was the end of the day when I felt like I could finally breathe easy for the first time in months. Of course we did not get to have a honeymoon where I'd be able to breathe even better for about a week, in fact I had to go almost directly to COS Conference, and I don't think Cameroonians even understand the idea of a honeymoon anyway. We spent 3 more days in Yaounde and while I wanted to soak up the newlywed couple-dom as much as possible, Claude seemed to find that whole idea girly. I hope someday we may get our chance for that time together someplace exotic without distractions. In the meantime, we are just continuing to live our lives in the simplistic way we know. As I begin putting my life together to get home, I find myself longing to possibly be in a classroom there. Kind of surprising considering the frustrations of being an educator here, but I think that is actually what inspires me. I got my certificate to teach English at OU and I feel like this experience may have jaded me on something I'm actually quite good at. I feel like I'd like to try teaching in a real setting-- with a reasonable number of students, with a decent amount of resources, with parents who understand the importance of education in their child's life. Or else I'd like to go back to tutoring. That was a far more rewarding job than what I've done here, I hate to say. It's funny, coming into Peace Corps everyone is aghast at the challenges they imagine you'll face. Yet, the things they envision are actually the things you adjust to the quickest. Fetching water, taking bucket baths, dealing with frequent power outages, language challenges. Those are the things you can handle innately better than you realize because they are essential to overall survival. Every human being is born with at least this adaptability. After all, as arrogant as we are, we are only a couple generations separated from similar hardships in our own country. My grandpa raised livestock and got water from a well, and there are still Americans who do the same. That is definitely not the end of the world. The hardest things I've faced here have been much more related to the effectiveness of my work. The frustration of feeling like you're alone behind a boulder, pushing and pushing for 2 years and not seeing it budge a bit. There are so many challenges. At first the challenges bring pity, empathy, a longing- and energy even, to motivate. As time has passed, though, many of those initial feelings have faded to a certain helplessness. I hate to say that. I don't want to discourage anyone who's ever considered doing this sort of work because you should absolutely do it. Undoubtedly it brings about something positive for the volunteer and the people the volunteer touches. The problem is identifying what that positive thing is exactly. And as the volunteer, not being able to define it or quantify it, is a hard pill to swallow, and I think most of us are forced to do so. In reality, 2 years is too little time. You spend the first year getting over the initial shocks of your environment and your place in it. Accepting being the minority. Then the second year you start to run around like a crazy person, attempting to realize all you've managed to muster up as development efforts. This is all particularly frustrating in a classroom setting where so many cogs in the machine have to be in working order for the machine to function well. Parental involvement, general culture and standards of success have to be in place, the administration and the other faculty have to have a synched work ethic, and students have to themselves feel motivated and appreciated, which is generally difficult to accomplish in an environment where it's basically impossible to even learn all your students' names before the school year is out. I also learned at COS Conference that I am probably not being replaced. This adds to the feeling of having very little impact here. In the end, what I will go away knowing is that I had the chance to plant the seeds of a lot of important ideas in the minds of probably over 500 young people. And though many of them will have probably already forgotten the great majority of those ideas, a handful of them will cherish those things and will blossom and develop into more apt and confident adults as a result of it, and maybe some of them will even one day bring about the development in some sense I feel I didn't necessarily do. Many of the girls I've worked with will probably still wind up mothers before they are 20, in thankless polygamist marriages, some of them being abused. Many of them won't leave this village or make any fledgling efforts to change a thing about it, and most still haven't grasped even vaguely the concept that they even have the power to change it. Yet I know that a couple of them will, hopefully in some part due to what they've learned here, allow their lives to take a more controlled direction. These girls will have babies by choice, marry for the right reasons to someone who respects them, some will become professionals, and I what I dream the most is that many of them will teach their own children some of the important things they learned from me about loving yourself, believing in yourself, and going after what you want, despite what obstacles there may be. It will be really interesting going to grad school for International Development after being here. I hope I am not going to encounter a lot of bloated theories that I've already learned do not work in the field. I look forward to the next phase of my life, though I still can't really believe this chapter is already coming to a close.