The Best (Way)laid Plans

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans" is a Yiddish proverb I came in contact with the other day and I couldn't help but laugh myself as its relevance to my current state sank in. I am sitting on my bed in Ohio, my head still spinning nearly 10 days after uprooting the life I've known for two years and coming back to live with my parents at the age of 27. Certainly this is not a place I expected to be at this point in my life. To top it off, I am home and expecting a baby in a few short months, whose daddy is still stranded on his native African continent as we endure the long and arduous process of obtaining his visa. I'm not entirely sure I even know where to begin with the thoughts meandering about in my head over the last month of activity and bustle bringing me to the present moment of... of what I'm not even sure! At present I feel I'm in some sort of time warp. Waiting to find a job, to meet my baby, to be reunited with my husband, to start grad school and maybe at last settle down into my life. It really is like waiting to exhale. They tell you before you lift off for service, all through training, right up to COS conference that adjusting to life as you knew it before service will be even more challenging than adjusting to life in a foreign country was. They tell you to expect to be overwhelmed, to feel lost, but they don't really provide any direction on how to find your way forward. I guess because each volunteer's journey will be different and each readjustment unique. Myself in particular, extremely so, I think, as I also adjust to the new role I've taken on as a wife (now separated for an undetermined length of time from my spouse)and the very life-altering events that are soon to occur when I become a mother! All of this amounts to a heavy pill to swallow. I keep finding myself staring off into space, lost in thought. I open the window and think I will certainly see someone walking through the yard, someone peeking through the blinds, children playing noisily, people doing their daily chores; but everywhere is calm. People are at their offices or locked away in their homes. I hear only birds and cars flitting past- each with only one passenger, thinking only of their daily grind. I miss being able to walk out the door and wander anyplace my feet decide to take me. No real concept of private property, no fear of being abducted. The reassurance that wherever I may roam, if I tire I can always flag down a bush taxi or a moto ride home.

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.

Updates From the Dust Bowl

It hasn't rained in three weeks. My garden is slowly dying and outside is desolate like the dead feeling of a desert. Clouds of dust pick up like when I played softball and in a strong wind you'd have to turn your head and cover your face to escape the twister. You can literally smell the dust. I taste it while walking to school or riding to Bafoussam. It's like you are breathing with your nose in the dirt. It's far worse than I feel like it was last year. This rainy season was brief and less intense than my first year. Some days I feel like I'm 100% sure I want to extend and others I feel 100% certain that I can't wait to get the hell out of here! This morning while walking to class I realized that after my trip home I'll only have about 6 months left and it blew me away. My time is really... over. Have almost two years really gone by since I've been here? Sometimes it feels like nothing is changing but then suddenly it occurs to me that so much time has gone by. I guess this is all a part of the Peace Corps story. When you're in it, though, you just are. You're just unaware of so much. This is the busiest time of the school year. Between correcting countless tests and essays, calculating averages, completing report cards, while at the same time planning lessons, executing classes, and putting together a weekly program of about 4 hours with the Girls' Club each Sunday, I'm exhausted. I rarely have a moment's time to reflect on the fact that it's all coming to a close and when I do I feel overwhelmed at the thought of it. Anyway, this is why it's gotten so difficult for me to keep up with the journal. Where to even begin it... Well, I went to Yaounde at the end of October to meet with the Country Director for Peace Corps about getting married. After 3 weeks with the 9 page questionnaire from the State Department about "Who is Claude" we finally sent it in yesterday. We expect to hear back in 2 weeks or so about whether they have 'approved' us. After that Claude will have to go to Yaounde as well to meet the Country Director for final approval and that will complete the last of the first round of hoops we have to jump through. After that will be registering for our wedding in Cameroon and then the Embassy. So much is unclear at this moment. I'm finalizing my grad school applications and analyzing all my options. It's tough to imagine not coming home all at once with Claude in tow but I fear it is a possibility. My official Close of Service is in August but usually people begin leaving about 2 months before the date and that is the last group's departure date. If I wind up heading for grad school in September I'll no doubt be leaving in June or July. I am applying to schools in New York, Massachusetts, and Colorado so there will be a process of coming home and then scurrying off to a totally new city... again. Sometimes I freak out at the thought of all the things I'd be adjusting to all at once. I panic a bit and think the best thing to do is STAY HERE! In March we will have our Close of Service conference and I will probably at least apply to extend. That will be around the same time I'll start hearing back from the universities so at least I'll have choices. If I am accepted to a school I may be able to defer for a year if I choose to. If I extended service I'd likely be going to another part of Cameroon and doing a different type of job. It could be with an NGO, which would probably be a really good experience for me. But then, the thought of moving in this country is dreadful, especially to stay for probably less than a year. Not to mention that here we are so central and close to Claude's family. I have adjusted to one way of life and it would be like starting over in some ways. Lately our power has been out pretty regularly and it's made me half mad. I can't imagine winding up someplace that has even fewer resources than the West because I really lucked out with this post. You don't realize how much electricity and water completely shape your existence. I guess if there was anything appropriate to write about on Thanksgiving- this is it! Rumor has it that the power outages in Cameroon are because they export electricity to other bordering countries-- and since it's being exported they pay more! Most Sundays there's no power but it's mostly only during the day and comes back on as soon as it gets dark (which is really early in this equatorial region). Sometimes, though, it goes off at other very inconvenient times. I've gotten used to reading and cooking by candlelight but I cannot get the gumption up to actually sit down and grade papers or do schoolwork when there are no lights. As it is I'm already exhausted after walking to and from school and then being on my feet in a classroom, talking, writing on a chalkboard, and trying to control 60-80 brats. If the power goes out- forget it-- my day is over. I fall into bed lately sometimes before 9 o'clock. Water is much less reliable than power. We don't have it more often than we do. The first months were the toughest with this because it's a matter of a figuring out how many water containers you need to get through the times the water's off. Sometimes I had to pay the neighbor kids to go and carry water. Doesn't it seem so strange that a ten year old child can carry my water bidons and I can't? Well, I can but not very far and not at all gracefully or comfortably. They just plop them on their heads and off they go. It's genuinely a feat of nature. So, now I have about 265 liters of water storage and as soon as you start hearing the hissing from the pipes you have to line them all up and get ready. It's a blissful event every time. During the rainy season it's a dance of buckets inside, buckets outside. At the first menace of storm clouds you rush it all outside and right back in at the buzz of the faucets. We had two REALLY dry months in which I buffed up from my trips to the well. Forty pulls to the top for each 10 liter bucket. All of it has become somewhat second nature now. Survival. It's rare I have to panic about it like I did in the beginning. It's weird to think in two weeks I'm just going to take a vacation from it all in the US. How this simple little fact really makes my reality so outstandingly different from everyone else around me. In the end for me, it's all just one big adventure and for them it really is... just this hard and hopeless. I hate to say that it's hopeless. It sounds so pessimistic. More and more pessimism is what I seem to feel. The problems of education are so infectious. Like ignorance is truly a contagion in the society. Uneducated parents breed complacent students and so on down the line. Worse, parents who have so little ambition or direction themselves have so many children they can't take care of that neglect becomes a serious epidemic. Recently I have witnessed so many cases of this and felt so discouraged. So often children are taking care of children. I'm not talking about teenage parenthood either, I mean leaving the infant with a 5 year old for hours at a time. A couple weeks ago I was walking down to school with next to a mama and we stumbled on a crawling baby who was about to make its way into the street, crying on the side of the road by himself. The mama recognized the kid and saw the older one who must've been about 2. She explained that their mother had gone out so I wound up taking the two of them to a seamstress next door but they were literally all alone. I told her that in my country you would lose your kids in a heartbeat doing that and she said, "Of course! It's not for nothing they created nursery school!" I was happy to at least have this person to relate to about it but I still couldn't imagine anyone thinking this is okay. The other day I was grading papers on the porch and kept hearing a baby crying. I kept thinking it was a little girl in the street and didn't think anything because most of the neighbor kids are boys. Finally I realized it was coming from the compound and went to investigate only to find the three year old and my favorite baby who's 9 months just hanging out by themselves. I sat with the baby until his mom got back and got filthy dirty because his diaper was wet and he had snot, dirt, and tears all over his face and clothes. A few weeks ago when I was putting fliers up all over the village I spent an afternoon pointing nursery schoolers to the side of the road as they walked home. This will probably shock most Americans but here it's perfectly normal for a two year old to walk to school from a mile away all by himself. The funny thing is, they ARE a lot smarter and more independent than we give them credit for in the States but at the same time, a lot of parents here are just very, very lucky that their kid makes it home everyday. Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to a retreat home for a happy occasion for the first time since I've been here. I absolutely cannot wait to spend time with family and friends. The thought of being next to the fireplace with the forbidding cold outside, hot chocolate, warm company. It's so exciting but also kind of sad because I just wish my fiance would be there with me. But hopefully soon enough. Can't wait to see everyone!

Eyes Wide Open

Lately whole entire months are passing by and I seem to keep forgetting that they have. Like- September... I keep thinking it's still then. Work life is so loaded now that last year actually feels kind of like a walk in the park, though I have to say that this year's schedule gives me far more pleasure than that did. Girls' Club has been off to a good start and we seem to finally be establishing a consistent circle of girls who participate every week. They are even noticeable braver already than they were a few weeks ago and it's really exciting to imagine the changes I might actually see in them by the end of the year. My classes are going much better in most respects though some things seem simply unavoidable. I do feel more in control than last year, despite the protests from students half my size as I am kicking them out of my classroom, I feel righteous or something! I am trying to maintain a formation each month with the village women though this has begun to feel like more of a chore than a project. It feels in many ways like a pointless endeavor which serves little purpose except to eat up my time and money and encourage women to stop and ask me for a variety of things constantly. On the other hand, I have also been keeping busy by just trying to spend more time with neighbors or coworkers or other friends around town. Nowadays I really don't even notice the long silences I used to want nothing more than to avoid at all costs. I will probably make a lot of people feel very uncomfortable when I get back to America. As November creeps up I realize that already in just another month and half the bulk of the school year will be over. After December is essentially referred to as holiday season because literally there is a holiday that seems to warrant a whole week of slacking off every few weeks until May. As I filled out my first round of report cards for the first sequence today I couldn't help thinking how before I know it I will already be going to my Close of Service conference and thinking about transitioning back into American life. Or will I... I'm not asking that question to allude to a decision I've made but simply decisions that are actually available to us and that I have certainly already thought quite a lot about. For as long as I can remember I've had a plan. A very specific, to the T picture of exactly where I was going in my life. Any veering off track was a huge disappointment for me and only pushed me harder to correct my steering back to where I'd been headed before. For a long time I think that plan really kept me from falling in love or even looking for real love, or from settling anyplace. I didn't want to be safe, not until I could be here, doing this. Security may have been too tempting to turn away from, and I had just started feeling a bit too comfortable in Los Angeles when my invitation to Cameroon finally came. After Peace Corps my plan was always graduate school and once I had a Master's, that was where I finally had it in my head that I could loosen my collar and take a few breaths and stop worrying so much about being right on schedule. Maybe this whole scheduling thing in the first place was subconsciously my biological clock rushing me through all my adventure before starting to focus on my children's adventures. Whatever it was, after grad school the plan just sort of dropped off, like the way people imagined the world did when they thought it was flat. I had a lot of hopes for how it would all shake out-- perfect husband hopefully debuting around age 27, great job after school allowing me to do pretty much everything I hoped to in going to school for so long to begin with, and at 30-- babies! I have allowed myself so little flexibility in this plan that I almost constantly have this feeling of someone frowning at me if I even just THINK about making a tiny adjustment. Retrospectively I guess I can say that I was raised primarily by 3 very strong women who instilled a lot of very specific ideas in my head about how my life should go in order to pass muster with them. Now one of those women has already passed away and my mother has really let go quite a lot and begun encouraging me to make my own choices. Yet, somehow I still feel this strong pull for approval, for support in every way. At 26 I'm still not sure I have any better idea of what I'm doing than I did at 16. I wonder at this point if we ever quite figure it out. Without planning it, though, the reality is that my plan has bumped a tad off course. Not in a bad way at all, in a very positive one, actually. As it turns out, I am in love, in a time in my life when I had put my guard down and absolutely least expected it and with a person who, being literally from another world, is not the easiest to be so organized and programmed out with. I have been waiting to announce it because we have to get the Peace Corps' permission to follow through with our plans, but I also don't want everybody I know to feel completely shocked or think this was a totally abrupt decision for us. So, Claude and I hope to get married. And quite soon, actually! Hopefully around January. Obviously this puts a bit of a monkey wrench in all my best laid plans for what's next. And actually, no part of me is even discouraged about continuing on the path that I'd hoped to. As far as grad school, I have been working already on applications and the pressure is on to get them wrapped up before visiting home in December so I can ship everything off by then. Even the total bureaucracy that our marriage is forced to take on from the Cameroonian side to the Peace Corps to the Embassy, all feels like it's own little part of our interesting story. What's really beginning to pull my away from the burning desire to do everything the way I always pictured it is the realization that when you are always looking so far ahead, and feeling that push into the future from behind, sometimes I think you forget to notice the present and appreciate all the pushing you did in your past to go to it. After nearly a year and a half in Cameroon, the idea of how difficult adjusting to life back home might be is not lost on me. After all, after spending only 4 months in Senegal I was a wreck for nearly a year upon my return. After being here so long sometimes I notice things about my own noticing of things that makes me laugh. Like, for example, sometimes I think to myself while walking around the village- "Wow! What a clean child! How on earth did that kid stay so clean!?" Or, "Sheesh, that family has a baby bouncer! How chic!" The thing is, I used to see the kids here in their utterly filthy clothes, playing with cars they made out of sardine cans and flip flops cut into wheels and I felt so sorry for them. I felt this gnawing need to cure poverty, to fix everything, and I guess I thought fixing everything meant wearing your Sunday best and having really nice toys! Sometimes I imagine all those ads for Save the Children and all those other charities where the kids are painted in this sad, awful light of hopelessness and instead I think -- hey, that looks just like my neighbors! I mean, it's not that their situation isn't sad or that I no longer comprehend why it's sad. In fact, I think I comprehend better than ever WHAT is actually sad about it. And, on the other side of that coin, what is actually sad about American life that actually is quite present in life here. Some days I yearn for nothing more than grocery store aisles (lame, right, but when I was home with Grandma and was able to sneak out of hospice for a couple of hours, I literally poured over every aisle in Kroger!), iced coffee from a drive-thru window while riding around with the car windows down, nights out with friends, time in laughing and being together with family. I miss those things as basically a constant but the thing is, I know it's there and I know that at some point, be it near or not too terribly far, I am going to reenter that world whether I like it or not and probably be utterly consumed by it and even more probably at some point be very much detached again from this world that seems at present so familiar. Lately I just keep asking myself, will I really be ready for that in another 10 months? It's funny. So much of life gets under your skin here. Like my electric bill for about $16 when it should be about $3. Or the neighbor kids that are even at this very moment, crying hysterically. The kids in the classroom that seem impossible to silence regardless of the ultimatum or punishment presented to them and who sometimes make you just want to scream out "I DON'T KNOW WHY I'M EVEN HERE!" Even the expectations of total perfection from Peace Corps and the community. The trying to fit in someplace where you will always inevitably stand out. The gas tank running out right in the middle of cooking dinner. I could go on and on. So many things that you wish away nearly everyday of service. You just imagine that bright day in the future when you will hop on a plane and leave all those crying babies and aggravations someplace under a blanket of clouds. The thing is, those frustrations melt away the moment you step off the plane. Even going back to the States to deal with Grandma I realized how I was going back to a place that hadn't, in essence, changed a nip, and yet I feel I have changed in every way. How can you reconcile that and will I really be ready to in just 10 more months... or less if grad school is really going to be my next move... and not to mention with a new husband who is learning the language and trying to catch up on the formal education that is so hard to come by here. All of this is neither here nor there because I really have no idea which path I will choose and there are a lot of unknowns yet that will play into that decision-making process. But, a couple things I do know- now is a good time to open my eyes a bit wider and really see where I am, what I'm experiencing right this minute and to finally put down the heavy load I've made myself carry of such a continuum of personal expectations.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find out what it means to me

And, it's back to school already and somehow refreshing to feel a part of this school culture. A culture that must be at least somewhat existant in every country as formal education becomes the international norm. This period where life settles down and gets more serious and regulated, not just for the kids but for everybody. It's so comforting to find familiarity in seeing the same little ones toter off to primary school in their often filthy dirty farm clothes with giddy, determined looks on their faces, often joyously greeting me in French, English, or Ghomala and sometimes just staring at me in astonishment and wonder while tripping over their own feet. To meander down the hill while the morning fog is burning out of the valley and the layers and layers of mountain ranges begin to slide into view one by one while casually chatting with last year's students. It's so marvelous to be back and to have a sense of ease and calm. To feel less pressured to do it all and more confident about doing my piece well. I have started this year an entirely different specimen. I have just learned that I've been approved for the small grant I applied for to run my Girls' Club this year which is going to allow us to do so much more and dig so much deeper than what I did with them last year. I spent half the summer putting together a comprehensive program that begins with self-esteem building through a myriad of life skills like good communication and relationships, preventing early pregnancy and HIV, and being a leader, role model, and professional in the future. Our first meeting is Sunday and is the most enthusiastic I've been about anything at all since Peace Corps service began. It truly feels like my biggest chance to make a lasting impact and I can't wait to get going. I've been working with the village women more and more and now that I have a key to the community center and women stopping me all the time telling me they want to come to the next formation I feel quite official. School is still school and it's as challenging and frustrating as they warn you it will be and then some. This year is definitely easier than last year because at least I knew what to expect and went to the school administration to specify my desires way ahead of time. This means that as far as my classes go, I have 2 different levels this year rather than the 4 I was covering last year, my classes are Monday-Wednesday, all finishing by 1 in the afternoon, and I chose the levels I had the least issue with before. Unfortunately this kind of bit me in the ass because as it turns out I inadvertently chose the 2 largest classes of the school this year. Logically I could not have imagined this scenario. Last year I had 1 5e class of 62 students and I made the most progress with them than any other class primarily because I had them 5 hours per week. I requested to take them on again because though I wanted to stay with the same kids in the next level, I knew they were going to get mixed in with the other class which was quite notoriously the worst of the school last year. I avoided the 3e class because that was the biggest class at school last year with 85 kids and I knew a lot of kids might be repeating because it's an exam year. As it happens, I walked into both 3e classes today to find them remotely empty as compared to last year whereas my 5es are both classes of 83. The other class is that of the oldest students from last year who I have gotten to move up with. This year they will take another important national exam and it's nice to work with them again. It's been interesting to have some of the kids who are repeating who didn't have me last year because my students seem to be far ahead of them. These kids are much older and discipline is something I can control on more of a casual basis so far. The changes I recognize in myself in just a year are quite dramatic. Standing in front of 160 intently staring eyes last year I felt like more of a peer than a professional. Sure, I had just spent almost 3 years giving highly wonky presentations to oftentimes far more intellectual individuals than myself, but this audience was an entirely different ball game. TEENAGERS! Somehow the latent adolescent desires to be accepted and liked as one of them came burning back to life. I remember Claude saying to me as I attempted to fly out the door in my Reefs one morning, "Non, non, non; You cannot wear those to school; no one will respect you". This year is all about the respect. No more ignoring all that very wonderful advice from our trainers about starting firm and getting softer. These first few weeks of school are crucial for striking as much fear into the hearts and minds of Cameroonian children as is humanly possible without physical abuse. Not only that, but having SOME clue about where I'm starting with these students in terms of language ability takes a HUGE load off stress wise. It made putting together the academic program a ton easier and it makes lesson planning far easier. Now I'm trying to equip the students with as much vocabulary as I can jam into their already overwhelmed brains so when I speak to them in nothing but English all year I won't get mummified stares and chaos in return. Other than all of that everything is just moving along. I have been kind of wrapped up in lesson planning, grant writing, and statement of purpose avoidance these last couple weeks but I'm trying to make an effort to kick it at least a few times a week with the neighbors. Today I indulged in that pasttime with my favorite baby buddy Joel, who is already 9 months old and is growing like a weed and is the happiest and most amazing baby I know. His little delighted smile whenever he sees me melts my everything away and I go into this entire world of baby-mania when I'm with him. Now he's at this age where he's beginning to get cuddly and when he wears himself out from continuously darting his head and eyes about being curious about everything all the time he briefly rests his head on my chest and I feel the strongest desire to be a mom that I ever have. The Cameroonians would love nothing more than that! I few weeks ago I was sick and Diane hinted that I was pregnant and I could tell the thought of it made her feel more connected to me. It's an equalizer here, being a mom. It's what makes sense to them. Being a professional, being an independent, decisive, opinonated woman, that all seems like planning life out while life itself is passing you by. Like a popular song here says, "Life is beautiful; you most not complicate it." God, at 26, unmarried and no children on the horizon in the next few years- what the hell am I even living for! There's always so much more to say about life here, life in general, and just everything but it's past 10 and I plan on getting up at 5:30. Respect comes with getting to school BEFORE your students! I have a better internet connection now thanks to my ever attentive mother. Thus, I promise to write more and hopefully to add some pictures soon! Oh! Post script: You may be wondering about the name of the blog changing! Basically, I named my blog before I came to Cameroon and "Tubab" is a Senegalese term for a foreigner. Now that I've spent over a year here I figure it's time for a more culturally appropriate title- "Dok" means white in Ghomala and is the term villagers call me relentlessly in the street.

Paranoia paranoia

“Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who indeed knows why there can be comfort in a world of desolation? Now God be thanked that there is a beloved one who can lift up the heart in suffering, that one can play with a child in the face of such misery. Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal. Aye, even the name of a river that runs no more. Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Who knows what keeps us living and struggling, while all things break about us? Who knows why the warm flesh of a child is such comfort, when one’s own child is lost and cannot be recovered? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.” -Cry the Beloved Country

Forgive me for being a slacker (still) after all these years. Again two months have passed and I have neglected to write a single word to tell anyone about my movements on a far away continent. The truth is, I haven’t been slacking quite as much as in the past, I’ve been working quite a lot and living quite enthusiastically, which sometimes doesn’t permit a good run at writing.

It’s hard to believe that in 2 weeks my long break will be finished and I’ll be back before a classroom of obnoxious hooligans, but in some ways I’m rather looking forward to it. Since July I have been somewhat all over the place and the pieces of time I’ve spent at home have been more focused on relaxing, planning next school year’s activities, and really spending time with people in the village. Mid-service was fun, I got to see a lot of volunteers I haven’t heard from all year and relax a bit in the Yaounde house. Afterwards was back to village to plan a regional meeting I hosted and then a training on tofu making the next day in my village, both of which were a success!

Getting across the halfway point threshold has birthed a whole new energy and tolerance for everything I’m here to do. It’s also inspired a lot more focus in lieu of frustration. I guess development work in general has this effect. It took the entire first year to really get my feet wet, stop cursing, and try seeing what the hell needed doing and how to do it. Now with just a year left, I feel more willing to step away from my own world to make things happen knowing that soon enough I will get to step back into it for good. This means sitting idly with my neighbors even when all they’re doing is passing the time, talking in mother tongue and watching the kids play. It means buying more villagers a beer when the whim hits rather than begrudging their request.

Early this month we took a weekend in the East with the Gym teacher from the high school and a group of kids who attended a sports camp for three days. Unfortunately most of the East I got to see was from the bus windows but the trip as a whole was really an adventure and it was fun to be a part of it. Claude wound up running into a friend he grew up next door to and hasn’t seen in 11 years and he helped show us around including renting a moto to tour around a bit with. Since being back I’ve helped run two summer camps that were a great hit and really felt meaningful. They provided great preparation for my work with Girls’ Club this year and I can’t wait to get started.

This is the first time Claude and I have been apart for a while and it’s good to have some time to reflect and process things. In the coming weeks I will hold the second formation for village women, which is far less intimidating than the first. I ran into the school supervisor yesterday and he informed me he’s already back working so I will go Monday and try getting my classes put together. I have much different standards this year than the last and do not wish to be surprised with teaching classes that I will loathe.

Spending a lot of time recently with other volunteers, all in efforts toward work, has been really gratifying. It’s surprising how much being able to deeply discuss all the myriad craziness that is life in Peace Corps has a cathartic effect. It even helps to steer the ship back to shore, to remind you of why you did this in the first place and inspires you to push through the muck. Regardless, there are still days of great questioning and frustration. Luckily for me I’m just someone that never lets myself off easily in anything, I believe in finishing the fight at all costs, so, it never crosses my mind to throw in the towel in moments of fluster. Yet, sometimes I wonder if I’m not a complete lunatic for desiring to leave the sunshine of Los Angeles to come collect my water from a well, or walk through mud puddles in the market. To spend my little money in attempts to satisfy the high expectations of strangers. To risk life and limb in so many ways you don’t even put together until a year of living it and hear so many many stories and witness so many horrible things that you sometimes pray for it to end as quickly as possible. Lately my fears have risen. Maybe it’s turning 26 or being in love for the first time, or perhaps it simply really is due to the build up of testimonies of horror. I myself have witnessed 2 motorcyle accidents right before my eyes, a boy recently struck by a car lying on the side of the road in his bloodsoaked t-shirt. A student passing away, another passing into a state of unconscious consciousness for an extended time, stories of young people from village dying in motorcycle accidents- one just at the market. Other volunteers talk of what they’ve seen, children struck by motos, one killed by a volunteer’s bus. Stories of illness that kills quickly and unbiased. Even stories of sorcery inflicted on others in ways indescribable and nauseating. There is fear of witnessing violent acts like that of mob justice or domestic abuse. The other day several volunteers and I declared how absolutely afraid we are alone in our homes at night. So used to 911 and a virtual army just a few seconds away after a phone call, the thought of having almost no reprieve is horrifying in and of itself. Not to mention being a particular target for offense. Having to be on constant guard is a sentiment that didn’t even escape me when I was visiting the States last. In fact, it was hard to believe that I could sit on my front porch and perhaps no one driving by would even notice me there.

Yet, through it all, behind the blackness of the paranoia and anxiety, there is this sliver of hope at breaking through something. Making a tiny crack in the shell of all this chaos to bring a little more order. A hope that you will happen to survive amid the unpredictability to bring forth a little change.

There’s little else to update on. As the second year strolls in it’s no longer just a curiosity to examine the future after Peace Corps. My recent inquiries into grad schools left me surprised that there’s a rush to start applying already for next fall and to submit before the end of the year. I should also add that Claude and I are talking about marriage, which is very exciting and terrifying at the same time as I envision a complicated year of travel arrangements and visa hoops to jump through. But, contrary to what I’d imagined before getting here, there’s rarely a dull moment in this life.

Memorials and Anniversaries

July 1st, 2011

“What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although that pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.
Now Chris’s body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache.”
-Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Wow, July 1st. When I was a kid the adults in my family always told me that time would only pass more and more quickly the older I got and it turns out they were right. I have been in Cameroon a year already. Christmas feels like it just happened when in fact it was already half a year ago. My first year of teaching is over and I’m finally settling back into village life after two whirlwind trips to the US in the past 3 months.

Life, in fact, could hardly be more different than six months ago. I feel like I’m in an entirely different place. I was running into the first group already heading back to the States in June and it was so strange to feel like I’d hardly gotten to know them and now they’re already going back to their American lives. It seems like I just got here and was looking at them like the wise volunteers who already seemed to know so much more than I could imagine knowing about surviving in this strange place. Now that group of people is my group.

Yesterday I had this really funny experience. My colleague invited me to lunch to meet his older sister and nieces who live in Massachusetts. The younger daughter is 17 and the oldest is 21. They have been in the States for the last 8 years and the youngest girl has drastically more American habits than her older sister. When she speaks French it’s like hearing another volunteer speak it and when her aunt was calling her to come do something from the other room and she asked her mom, “What, is it like, if someone calls you, you have to go, you can’t say you’re busy?!” I had to laugh hysterically at this.

They were amazed that I had acclimated so well here and in fact while they were talking about how much things cost at Whole Foods, I felt more connected with the world of picking fruits and nuts from a tree. She served me pesto and broccoli and they were so surprised when I said I was growing broccoli and spinach and arugula in my garden. The youngest daughter said I am brave.

Since getting back to the village life has been easy like Sunday morning. In fact, I have absolutely nothing to do and it’s strange and blissful and also terrifying because I haven’t had absolutely nothing to do in like… 4 years. Grandma’s passing has settled in me much more calmly than I ever expected it to in the lifetime I dreaded it. She has graced me with serenity in her absence and I really feel her with me all the time, perhaps more so than ever while she was alive.

Claude and I are about to celebrate our first year together in just a couple of days and we just seem to get happier with each other everyday. It’s something I never imagined could be so simple. We have created balance and fairness in so many areas of our lives from the music we listen to the food we eat. Being from such different backgrounds, everything is a negotiation, and after a year of practice I’m happy to say that it just keeps getting easier to get along.

I’ve been trying to catch up on the myriad things I had longed to do from September-March like writing back friends who’ve sent things, reading and cooking more, visiting other volunteers, and doing my secondary project work. Unfortunately that last part has been a disappointment up until now. Since Bafia my hope has been to organize the women here. In fact, they already are organized, but to provide them with something that may be able to help them. Over time the patterns I seemed to notice indicated that they could be most helped with income generating projects. My community host has been on board to help me from the beginning so he says, but usually I guess he just talks a lot about it and doesn’t do much of anything to make it happen. Actually since I’ve been here he’s done things like not include me in meetings and gatherings and then asked me why I didn’t come as if I had some telepathic way of finding out it was happening. After going to talk about work a couple weeks ago and winding up having dinner and a beer with some others and he, work was merely mentioned. I went to his house a few days later and told his wife to send him over to see me or have him call me so we could discuss organizing and he never showed up. I finally called him and he told me he’d be here at 9 the next morning. I set my alarm (since now that it’s summer break I sleep in!), and, after a year of adapting, I made enough breakfast for everyone and Claude went out for baguettes and coffee. At 9:30 with the eggs already finished on the stove I called him again and he told me he’d be here in one minute. An hour later we decided to eat and shortly thereafter Claude watch him ride past on his motorcycle, not even seeming like he intended to stop.

I don’t know if I offended him in some way or he isn’t completely enthusiastic about my agenda which is fixated on women as well as certain behaviors that probably he’s involved in, like marrying a child and having kids with her. Either way, I’ve abandoned these high hopes of large gatherings of women or a large, ongoing project with them. I would still like to organize a few small opportunities for them to get information about different activities that could generate money for them but I’m basically convinced at this point that most of them will do nothing with it. Thus, my primary focus now is really on improving the scope of work of Girls’ Club next year and really trying to get the entire staff on board with the objectives of the group.

Outside of all that, though I don’t know if I can say I’ll ever really get used to the 24 hour analysis of every behavior, word, change in my body (the teenage girl from the States yesterday told me with disdain, “Everyone keeps telling me how much weight I’ve gained!”), and the calculation of every minute I spend inside or outside my house, I have finally started to adopt the attitude of not giving a shit about pleasing everyone or even what they think of me at all. I feel like I go out of my way to be generous to my direct neighbors. I am constantly giving them baguettes or other food when I‘m out. I baked them cornbread and printed out tons of pictures for them from the States. I give the kids candy, pencils, and sometimes toys. Yet, they still constantly leave garbage all over my yard or in my compost pile and stomp on my garden. One of the kids even dug up all my first tomato plants and moved them to his own hidden garden. This may sound cute in a way until Claude called the kid out on it and he responded, “What have you ever given me?” My impression is that is not the talk of a 7 year old but rather, most likely, the adults around him.

I try to be sociable but mostly I just feel like this alien from outer space with them. That’s not to say I feel like that with everyone in the village because I’ve finally actually started developing some solid friendships with people, but these neighbors in particular just seem to have no respect for me. I think in some ways the way I handled the problems with water and electricity were less than completely tactful and they still hold it against me. They also don’t like that I tend to step in when a child is screaming bloody murder on my stoop or directly outside my window. A few weeks ago when all the kids were taking a turn on one of the younger ones who’d stolen food after I’d already told them it was enough, I huffed outside ready to really shake some fear into the kids and felt totally embarrassed when their mother came hobbling out of the house, having obviously instructed them to beat him. She never looked at me or spoke a single word for minutes until I retreated in shame back into my house. I’ve finally just decided I need to live and let live. Now if I hear screaming, I just try to turn up my own music and I don’t so often open the shutters behind the house that looks into their compound, even if that means being constantly told that I’m always locked up inside.

Today the chief’s wife drug Claude around when she caught him walking to buy bread. She said she was afraid to walk alone at night but I think she actually just wanted to investigate our life because she’s incredibly nosy. She talked all about the two times that she told me the Chief wanted to see me, forgetting that I didn’t come because she never called in the evening to tell me to. She said I’m not social and don’t go out. All this she primarily thinks because she personally gets on my nerves and thus I avoid her. She is the type of person that has absolutely no qualms about asking all variety of personal questions, even in front of strangers, ranging from how much money do I make to what does my boyfriend do all day. She also loves to ask me to buy her a drink when she catches me out, something she’s done since the very first time I ever saw her. She has never once bought me a drink and she is married to the Chief! She constantly asks me to buy her a wig of real hair the next time I’m in the States as though there are myriad wig stores on the streets of America and they are practically giving away wigs of real human hair. She also stabbed her own friend in the back because I was always buying my phone credit from her and she came and tried to convince me to buy it from her sister instead. The lady is obsessed with her moderate celebrity or something and I can tell it just drives her crazy that it doesn’t impress me.

Next week is mid-service and pretty much my break is already half over. Before I know it the school loop will re-run, and I hope this year will run much more smoothly than the last. In the meantime, je suis la, I’m living life and taking a breather. Regardless of what the rest of the village seems to think, I think I deserve it and, whether I’m inside or outside, nothing I’m doing is all that much different from what they are.