September 10th, 2010
“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: “I’ll go take a hot bath.”” -The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
I survived my two weeks of serious down time and already my first week of school! Life is going pretty well thus far, though there have certainly been challenges and frustrations. Lack of communication continues to irritate the shit out of me, but I am at least beginning to expect it. Last weekend I went to the market in the neighboring village with my friend Christine and then we went on a mini-hike up a mountain and were rewarded with great views and a beer at a cozy little spot we found with nice people!
I finally have electricity and a table to eat on as well as one to cut vegetables! My house is beginning to resemble a home! Even the red mud that seems to be permanently layering the floor/my feet/everything seems to have dissipated a tad. Last week I threw on my dirtiest clothes and scrubbed the walls of my kitchen and bathroom with a scrub brush to remove its thick coat of dirt. It also removed much of the paint, unfortunately, which caked the entire floor and my entire body in white dust meaning I will most likely die in a few years from lead poisoning. My toilet still isn’t installed, (though- fingers crossed- they are coming to do so in the morning) but at least my aim in the latrine has finally been perfected! I now know exactly how to place my feet so I do not pee all over myself but I can’t say I am going to miss that hole in the ground one bit (figuratively and literally)!
My bathroom also means the prospect of running water in my house which is probably the biggest challenge of life for me here. When you turn the taps in your kitchen, or bathroom sink, or the shower today, please remember that you are lucky as all hell because not only does water unquestionably arrive immediately, but it is safe, clean, and by God, there is even a knob to make it hot instantly! Quelle luxe!
The nearly constant string of visitors I’ve had has made me into a bit of a recluse as I have hesitated to open my shutters some days to possibly deter spontaneous drop- ins. Literally, the other day I lay down after getting home from work and 3 different people stopped by within about 10 minutes. This would probably excite me if they weren’t all awful conversationalists! Most of the time they just stand awkwardly looking off in the distance, not saying anything at all unless I ask questions or start absently talking about the rain or any random thing that comes to mind to distract from the silence. This must be an American necessity- filling that gap of noiselessness, but damn! It’s one I kind of appreciate! It’s one thing to stand around not talking to someone you already know but when it’s a practical stranger stopping by it’s just freaking uncomfortable!
The first week of school was nothing at all like the first week of school in the U.S. Over half of the kids do not even bother to come at all and it seemed fairly optional for me as well. I went, however, and actually taught most of the days, though primarily very basic review things such as “My name is Ms. Caldwell. What is your name?” and the alphabet. I gave an assessment to my classes that I based on the syllabus of the lowest grade in the school and none of the levels did very well on it. Nonetheless, they seem to like me so far and their behavior the first week was far better than that of the students in Bafia. One of my classes is supposed to have 89 students so we will see if they are so easy to manage once all of them are actually present.
I guess the whole concept of making learning fun is kind of new-age or something. Here school is work. It is all about copying notes from the board, drawing perfectly straight lines in your notebook, going unnoticed by not bothering anyone until test time and then regurgitating all those notes you copied. If you fail to make yourself invisible enough you may be forced to kneel on the concrete floor, a form of corporal punishment (supposedly outlawed) which I have already seen this week. I taught for 5 hours yesterday but the time actually flew by because we played Twenty Questions and Hangman, went over the alphabet, discussed grammar points and the kids were engaged,, laughing, participating and they may’ve even been enjoying themselves; I know I definitely was! I hope that I will earn the students’ respect by being strict and serious when necessary but also being fun, cutting them some slack when appropriate, and showing them that school can be enjoyable and without even noticing, they’re actually learning something in the process! When we discussed classroom rules this week, I told them they were not children so they should not behave like children. That, if they do I will treat them as such and otherwise they will be treated like adults. I really do love teaching, I simply hope that in the end I will not face confrontation from the administration because my kids are not learning in their way or at their pace or something of that sort.
Aside from my total comfort in the classroom, there are still some days here I wonder what in the hell I was thinking dreaming all my life of signing up to come to a third world country to help people! Ha! I must be insane! For instance, Wednesday the mason came to pour concrete in the bathroom (finally). Prior to him coming I waited a week before bumping into my landlord in town and asking him about the unfinished and, of late, untouched work to which he acted shocked that it hadn’t already been completed. The technician then came the next day only to inform me that he couldn’t do his work until the mason came and poured concrete first. The following day the mason came, without notifying me, only to find that I was at school. He came the next day again and discovered there were no bags of cement so he couldn’t do the work then either.
That afternoon was our first General Assembly meeting at school, which went well. While there I saw the sous-chef who is also President of the lycee. I told him about the various excuses everyday for the work not getting finished and on his way home from school he organized for them to come that very night. That was the same day I had about a thousand visitors right when I was trying to unwind and all the million kids that live in the house directly behind me came back from the city and were hollering and going wild all over the place. Two teenagers dropped by with my cabinet for my stove and as they were walking out two of my students were dropping by to say hello while about 3 other dudes were walking in and out doing god knows what in my bathroom. Suddenly I needed to get the hell out of dodge and jetted out the front door to go buy tomatoes. Once I’d done that I felt like I should just keep walking to clear my head. It was a beautiful walk- peaceful and forested. I ran into a bunch of students coming home from a soccer match and talked with one of them as we strolled along. I was feeling much better and happy with myself for getting out of that funk, but then suddenly realized I had wandered awfully far and actually didn’t recognize a thing and had no idea where I was. The student I had been talking with arrived to his house and I asked him where to go; he said the intersection I was looking for was just a little further on so I kept walking as the group of students began to disintegrate.
An older boy approached me and started to flirt. We chatted casually a bit as the students marched behind giggling as he was getting shot down. Suddenly it occurred to me I needed to turn the hell around and go back the way I‘d come! He turned to walk back with me and then looked up at an ominous cloud-covered sky and beckoned toward the bar next to where we were standing, encouraging me that we could not walk in a downpour. He was right after all so I went with him and sure enough the rain came just a moment later, drenching the already soggy ground for at least 45 minutes. To my surprise the guy got a phone call and said he had to go but that he was leaving me in the hands of his friend, who happened to be a much more courteous young man (the same age as me, actually) named Frederic who waited out the rain and had a beer on me, and then bought a flashlight so he could walk me all the way to my house only to turn right back around and go home.
Ah, at least I was in my own home and it was quiet and empty. The electricity was out so by candlelight I began to reheat the lentil soup I’d prepared the day before. I was sitting in my room and heard something so I walked out to see what it might be and noticed there was an awfully bright glow coming from the kitchen. I walked in to find that somehow there seemed to be flames coming out of both burners and even the back of the stove, and hopping around on top of it as well, shooting up the back of the new cabinet I’d just arranged a few hours before. My heart pounding and in shock, I quickly glanced around the kitchen and saw that, luckily, there was a half-full bucket of water still on the floor. I doused the entire stove and was panicked when the fire merely flickered a second and kept burning. Suddenly it occurred to me to shut off the gas which immediately ended the mysterious catastrophe. I stood there panting in a puddle of water that was already snaking a trail into my living room and creating gobs of mud everywhere my shoes had dropped dirt from my long lost wandering adventure. Once I caught my breath I began to laugh hysterically; perhaps it was the only way to keep from crying from the day I’d just had and from the sight of my poor, formerly delicious lentil soup and because all the sudden I really felt like a foreigner. And I guess really I just had to laugh because altogether it was, after all, exactly what I signed up for…
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Patientiez
September 2, 2010
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.” - A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
It’s been about three months since I left the US. According to Critical Periods in the Life of a Peace Corps Volunteer I should be experiencing “fright, frustration with self, loneliness, weight/health changes, homesickness, and uselessness“. I can’t really claim to be feeling any of those things but I am certainly feeling other emotions which point to my extended time away from home.
I am feeling frustration, but not toward myself. I have been in my house nearly a week. When I visited in July the sous-chef told me the people staying here were working everyday on it and were going to install a toilet and lights before I arrived. Unsurprisingly none of that had happened by the time I got here. I spent a week and a day with the sous-chef and started to think he wasn’t in a huge hurry to get me into my house. Every morning as we drank coffee I drilled him with a dozen questions regarding the progress of the house, coordinating with the school, setting up my language courses, and information on how to get around town. As my interrogations became more routine I became acutely aware of my own cultural obsession with organization and planning as well as their lack thereof.
As I am sitting here, 2 weeks after my arrival to post, there are 2 boys crawling around in my ceiling installing my electricity and though they‘ve dug the floor up in my ‘bathroom‘ and installed a lot of pipes, my toilet is sitting upside-down in my living room at the moment. At least it has felt more like Peace Corps since leaving our chic quartier in Bafia. I’ve spent most nights crouched over my gas stove on the floor with a flashlight in my mouth and have resorted to peeing in a bucket at night rather than bothering to go out in the yard. Luckily I like camping because life pretty much feels like that at the moment.
Water is a huge aggravation and something I will hopefully never again take for granted in my life. The village just got ‘l’eau de robinet’ (tap water) prior to my arrival but unfortunately it is available only at the discretion of the water company and they frequently decide to cut it off for days at a time. Plus, with the work underway at present on the house my running water has been rendered inaccessible, period. My kind neighbor Victorine has offered her barrell of rain water, which is currently dry, or her underground water storage container, which is absolutely filthy, but, better than nothing. Sadly, impure water is probably the number one cause of health problems on the continent and it seems so needless because they are easily avoidable maladies with boiling, filtering, or treating the water before consumption. I have not yet understood why people don’t bother to practice these sanitation habits because at least in the case of Cameroon I don’t think lack of education is to blame. Hopefully at the very least I can serve as a reminder of these easy fixers.
Village life is startlingly more different than life in Bafia than I‘d anticipated. More than likely we were sheltered from a great many realities there, however, because of living in such a more posh area of town. For instance, here people have a very limited sense of privacy. The neighbors will look right in the windows if the shutters are open, or even open them themselves if they are not locked. If the doors are open people just walk in, needing only to utter “konk-konk” while doing so rather than actually knocking and awaiting the invitation. Victorine’s 3 small children are seemingly home alone most of the day most days since I’ve been here while she goes out working in her field and they have all taken to coming to my house and staring at me doing no matter what through the bars of my window for most of the afternoon. They also love to just walk right in if the door is open, though I am trying to steer them away from this habit. We were told we may begin to feel like zoo animals but I had to laugh yesterday when it occurred to me what an accurate analogy that is as I glanced at their 3 little faces staring at me in such wonder as if I was the very first person they‘ve ever seen.
Last week when the sous-chef suddenly informed me we were going to the school I began to follow him out wearing Claude’s soccer shorts and thinking nothing of it when he informed me that I could not do such a thing. I responded in my usual stubborn way at first but he insisted and I was forced to go and change clothes. All the more frustrating that he himself was wearing wind pants and a t-shirt but stated that a woman dressed in such a way would be said to be out in public naked.
A few days ago I walked down the street to pay for my phone credit and bumped into some young guys in the military who said they wanted to buy me a drink, a very common practice to welcome me to the town. Peace Corps encourages us to integrate as much as possible so turning down invitations such as this seems in poor taste. They were all very nice and interesting to speak with. Afterward they offered me a lift back to my house which was about a 5 minute walk up the street. I had them drop me at the sous-chef’s because I needed to buy something anyway and as I got out of the car an older lady I recognized from the compound was saying something to the guys in Patois (mother tongue). When I walked past her she seemed annoyed and angry with me and was mumbling something so I inquired what the problem was. She responded, “Ce n’est pas bien. Tu es la pour le travail, n’est pas?” “That isn’t good. You’re here for work, aren‘t you?” and then seemingly went on to discuss how disgusted with me she was with all the old women at the bar at that particular moment for several minutes.
When I got home I shed several frustrated tears. Despite that my mother is probably reading this and agreeing whole-heartedly with that old bag, it is actually a lot more complicated than it seems. First of all, it was the middle of the day and the whole interaction was perfectly harmless. Of course they turned out to all basically want to date me because it is seemingly impossible to have a platonic relationship with someone of the opposite sex on this continent, but I made it very clear that I was not available in that sense. Overall they were friendly and I accepted the offer of a ride because that is a much less risky gesture than in the States. The old woman apparently saw this car with mostly men and assumed I was whoring around town. The fact that she, who I don’t even know in any way except having maybe greeted her a handful of times, had such a strong opinion that even on a Sunday I should’ve been working instead of being in any situation involving a group of guys was infuriating and made me realize how great it is living in a culture where it is perfectly acceptable to tell someone to mind their own damned business!
My response to her was a light-hearted “Je peux pas travailler chaque jour!” “I can’t work everyday!” but I later informed the sous-chef of the whole story because it had so irritated me. The whole thing was so innocent and casual that for someone I don’t even know to have so much to say about it was maddening! Fortunately the sous-chef sided with me completely on the issue and said it was totally inappropriate for villagers to be concerned about what I’m doing in my personal life. As I described the woman to him he finally said that she is crazy and doesn’t even talk at all to one of his wives because she is so opinionated and has problems with everyone. This made me feel somewhat better but in the back of my mind I felt that she probably did at the very least represent the old fashioned views of some of the people of the community.
Additionally the day after moving into my new house the chef’s (the real chef) wife stopped by and mentioned that I should be staying at my house because it wasn’t good for me to stay so long with the sous-chef and that I would start to cause problems with his wives. This frustrated me as well considering there was certainly no one who wanted me out of his house in a timely fashion more than me and how could I cause so many problems for women who are already sharing a man in the first place when I myself would never agree to such a thing and have a boyfriend of my own! I would add that I am also way too young for the sous-chef and find the very thought of an intimate relationship with him nauseating but it turns out that one of his wives is 2 years younger than me and he married her at 15!
One day on the way into Bafoussam we happened to share a taxi with a very nice man who works at my school. He and the sous-chef started talking about his daughter who had just passed the probatoire, equivalent to becoming a Senior in high school. The sous-chef said she was ripe for marrying now and implied she should marry him. The father of the girl said no way, that he would have to divorce all his other wives first for such a thing to be possible. The sous-chef couldn’t believe he would turn down the proposal of such a prominent figure for his daughter. Finally they arrived on the topic of her being a more suitable match for the sous-chef’s son, an idea they settled on amicably. This entire conversation was a both amusing and sad; a young girl’s future being discussed completely in her absence and without any consideration of how she herself might actually feel about it.
Last night I had a nightmare that school was starting and I showed up 100% unprepared. Not knowing my schedule, not knowing my lessons, and with no clue what to do. As it turns out this wasn’t far from the reality. School starts Monday and so far the only contact I’ve had with school administrators is that which I’ve initiated myself. I was given 4 levels to teach, which is going to be a shit-ton of work. So far I have only 3 of the textbooks, student edition- not the teacher‘s, and have not even seen my actual work schedule. Today I called the discipline master to see about getting a copy of the Schemes of Work which outline broadly the schedule for which material should be presented to the students. He is out of town and said I would get all of that on Monday. I could even show up at 10 am Monday- the first day of school. I cannot get over the absolute lack of preparedness and total calmness about it. The entire student body will be there and that is the day I will find out what times I will be required to come to work and what I will be expected to do. It makes no sense to me and I find it incredibly frustrating. Each time I’ve pressured the staff to give me information it is almost as if they are laughing about my concern over it. They are perfectly content to begin preparations for the year after it has already begun.
I made a new friend the other day just walking down the street. Her name is Linda and unfortunately she lives in the capital and has already gone back. I laughed when she too implied that I didn’t need to stress too much about the first week of classes because that is the week of introductions. A WEEK!? Of introductions!? “Hi, I’m Miss. Caldwell from America and this is English class”; that introduction takes about a minute and then we could actually have class! Now I see why the people in this ‘bilingual’ country do not actually speak English!
Nonetheless, I guess I should try not to worry more than they are worrying. The longer I’m here, the more aware I become with my own “American-ness”. It is pretty fascinating, actually, to see how very different a whole cultural mentality can make a country. It’s like, people don’t connect their being behind with their being totally chill about every single thing. But alas, c’est la vie ici and I guess I’m stuck with it for the next 2 years!
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.” - A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
It’s been about three months since I left the US. According to Critical Periods in the Life of a Peace Corps Volunteer I should be experiencing “fright, frustration with self, loneliness, weight/health changes, homesickness, and uselessness“. I can’t really claim to be feeling any of those things but I am certainly feeling other emotions which point to my extended time away from home.
I am feeling frustration, but not toward myself. I have been in my house nearly a week. When I visited in July the sous-chef told me the people staying here were working everyday on it and were going to install a toilet and lights before I arrived. Unsurprisingly none of that had happened by the time I got here. I spent a week and a day with the sous-chef and started to think he wasn’t in a huge hurry to get me into my house. Every morning as we drank coffee I drilled him with a dozen questions regarding the progress of the house, coordinating with the school, setting up my language courses, and information on how to get around town. As my interrogations became more routine I became acutely aware of my own cultural obsession with organization and planning as well as their lack thereof.
As I am sitting here, 2 weeks after my arrival to post, there are 2 boys crawling around in my ceiling installing my electricity and though they‘ve dug the floor up in my ‘bathroom‘ and installed a lot of pipes, my toilet is sitting upside-down in my living room at the moment. At least it has felt more like Peace Corps since leaving our chic quartier in Bafia. I’ve spent most nights crouched over my gas stove on the floor with a flashlight in my mouth and have resorted to peeing in a bucket at night rather than bothering to go out in the yard. Luckily I like camping because life pretty much feels like that at the moment.
Water is a huge aggravation and something I will hopefully never again take for granted in my life. The village just got ‘l’eau de robinet’ (tap water) prior to my arrival but unfortunately it is available only at the discretion of the water company and they frequently decide to cut it off for days at a time. Plus, with the work underway at present on the house my running water has been rendered inaccessible, period. My kind neighbor Victorine has offered her barrell of rain water, which is currently dry, or her underground water storage container, which is absolutely filthy, but, better than nothing. Sadly, impure water is probably the number one cause of health problems on the continent and it seems so needless because they are easily avoidable maladies with boiling, filtering, or treating the water before consumption. I have not yet understood why people don’t bother to practice these sanitation habits because at least in the case of Cameroon I don’t think lack of education is to blame. Hopefully at the very least I can serve as a reminder of these easy fixers.
Village life is startlingly more different than life in Bafia than I‘d anticipated. More than likely we were sheltered from a great many realities there, however, because of living in such a more posh area of town. For instance, here people have a very limited sense of privacy. The neighbors will look right in the windows if the shutters are open, or even open them themselves if they are not locked. If the doors are open people just walk in, needing only to utter “konk-konk” while doing so rather than actually knocking and awaiting the invitation. Victorine’s 3 small children are seemingly home alone most of the day most days since I’ve been here while she goes out working in her field and they have all taken to coming to my house and staring at me doing no matter what through the bars of my window for most of the afternoon. They also love to just walk right in if the door is open, though I am trying to steer them away from this habit. We were told we may begin to feel like zoo animals but I had to laugh yesterday when it occurred to me what an accurate analogy that is as I glanced at their 3 little faces staring at me in such wonder as if I was the very first person they‘ve ever seen.
Last week when the sous-chef suddenly informed me we were going to the school I began to follow him out wearing Claude’s soccer shorts and thinking nothing of it when he informed me that I could not do such a thing. I responded in my usual stubborn way at first but he insisted and I was forced to go and change clothes. All the more frustrating that he himself was wearing wind pants and a t-shirt but stated that a woman dressed in such a way would be said to be out in public naked.
A few days ago I walked down the street to pay for my phone credit and bumped into some young guys in the military who said they wanted to buy me a drink, a very common practice to welcome me to the town. Peace Corps encourages us to integrate as much as possible so turning down invitations such as this seems in poor taste. They were all very nice and interesting to speak with. Afterward they offered me a lift back to my house which was about a 5 minute walk up the street. I had them drop me at the sous-chef’s because I needed to buy something anyway and as I got out of the car an older lady I recognized from the compound was saying something to the guys in Patois (mother tongue). When I walked past her she seemed annoyed and angry with me and was mumbling something so I inquired what the problem was. She responded, “Ce n’est pas bien. Tu es la pour le travail, n’est pas?” “That isn’t good. You’re here for work, aren‘t you?” and then seemingly went on to discuss how disgusted with me she was with all the old women at the bar at that particular moment for several minutes.
When I got home I shed several frustrated tears. Despite that my mother is probably reading this and agreeing whole-heartedly with that old bag, it is actually a lot more complicated than it seems. First of all, it was the middle of the day and the whole interaction was perfectly harmless. Of course they turned out to all basically want to date me because it is seemingly impossible to have a platonic relationship with someone of the opposite sex on this continent, but I made it very clear that I was not available in that sense. Overall they were friendly and I accepted the offer of a ride because that is a much less risky gesture than in the States. The old woman apparently saw this car with mostly men and assumed I was whoring around town. The fact that she, who I don’t even know in any way except having maybe greeted her a handful of times, had such a strong opinion that even on a Sunday I should’ve been working instead of being in any situation involving a group of guys was infuriating and made me realize how great it is living in a culture where it is perfectly acceptable to tell someone to mind their own damned business!
My response to her was a light-hearted “Je peux pas travailler chaque jour!” “I can’t work everyday!” but I later informed the sous-chef of the whole story because it had so irritated me. The whole thing was so innocent and casual that for someone I don’t even know to have so much to say about it was maddening! Fortunately the sous-chef sided with me completely on the issue and said it was totally inappropriate for villagers to be concerned about what I’m doing in my personal life. As I described the woman to him he finally said that she is crazy and doesn’t even talk at all to one of his wives because she is so opinionated and has problems with everyone. This made me feel somewhat better but in the back of my mind I felt that she probably did at the very least represent the old fashioned views of some of the people of the community.
Additionally the day after moving into my new house the chef’s (the real chef) wife stopped by and mentioned that I should be staying at my house because it wasn’t good for me to stay so long with the sous-chef and that I would start to cause problems with his wives. This frustrated me as well considering there was certainly no one who wanted me out of his house in a timely fashion more than me and how could I cause so many problems for women who are already sharing a man in the first place when I myself would never agree to such a thing and have a boyfriend of my own! I would add that I am also way too young for the sous-chef and find the very thought of an intimate relationship with him nauseating but it turns out that one of his wives is 2 years younger than me and he married her at 15!
One day on the way into Bafoussam we happened to share a taxi with a very nice man who works at my school. He and the sous-chef started talking about his daughter who had just passed the probatoire, equivalent to becoming a Senior in high school. The sous-chef said she was ripe for marrying now and implied she should marry him. The father of the girl said no way, that he would have to divorce all his other wives first for such a thing to be possible. The sous-chef couldn’t believe he would turn down the proposal of such a prominent figure for his daughter. Finally they arrived on the topic of her being a more suitable match for the sous-chef’s son, an idea they settled on amicably. This entire conversation was a both amusing and sad; a young girl’s future being discussed completely in her absence and without any consideration of how she herself might actually feel about it.
Last night I had a nightmare that school was starting and I showed up 100% unprepared. Not knowing my schedule, not knowing my lessons, and with no clue what to do. As it turns out this wasn’t far from the reality. School starts Monday and so far the only contact I’ve had with school administrators is that which I’ve initiated myself. I was given 4 levels to teach, which is going to be a shit-ton of work. So far I have only 3 of the textbooks, student edition- not the teacher‘s, and have not even seen my actual work schedule. Today I called the discipline master to see about getting a copy of the Schemes of Work which outline broadly the schedule for which material should be presented to the students. He is out of town and said I would get all of that on Monday. I could even show up at 10 am Monday- the first day of school. I cannot get over the absolute lack of preparedness and total calmness about it. The entire student body will be there and that is the day I will find out what times I will be required to come to work and what I will be expected to do. It makes no sense to me and I find it incredibly frustrating. Each time I’ve pressured the staff to give me information it is almost as if they are laughing about my concern over it. They are perfectly content to begin preparations for the year after it has already begun.
I made a new friend the other day just walking down the street. Her name is Linda and unfortunately she lives in the capital and has already gone back. I laughed when she too implied that I didn’t need to stress too much about the first week of classes because that is the week of introductions. A WEEK!? Of introductions!? “Hi, I’m Miss. Caldwell from America and this is English class”; that introduction takes about a minute and then we could actually have class! Now I see why the people in this ‘bilingual’ country do not actually speak English!
Nonetheless, I guess I should try not to worry more than they are worrying. The longer I’m here, the more aware I become with my own “American-ness”. It is pretty fascinating, actually, to see how very different a whole cultural mentality can make a country. It’s like, people don’t connect their being behind with their being totally chill about every single thing. But alas, c’est la vie ici and I guess I’m stuck with it for the next 2 years!
Friday, August 27, 2010
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!
“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!
Monday, August 9, 2010
The case of the stolen panties
However, life in Bafia will soon be no more because the week after this we will swear in as volunteers and I will officially never have a curfew again in my life! It is an exciting feeling to be set free in Cameroon at last and to feel again like an adult, yet, at the same instant a little intimidating. After being looked after and taken care of for the last 3 months in our homestay families it is overwhelming to think of how much work it will be to take care of just myself in this country!
There are so many responsibilities of day-to-day life that are substantially more challenging than the same activities in the States, plus the general pressure of teaching 15 hours a week in a difficult setting as well as thinking about my secondary project within the community and being active and well integrated there.
First of all, I’m moving into a house with absolutely no furniture. Furnishing a house in the States is somewhat of a hassle but here it is at least tenfold. I will have to go about negotiating from what is likely an even more than usually elevated price for every item I purchase which means I will need to do a bit of research before setting out in order to know what I should expect to pay. It’s never fun to get home and realize that when you thought you were bargaining you wound up still paying the white man price. Additionally there is the consideration of transporting all of these purchases to said house. I expect that my community host Wambo will be a tremendous aid in this whole process and so I am not sweating it too much but it will be nice to feel settled in sooner rather than later.
Once that happens I will need to worry about feeding myself. Luckily I have been posted in one of the most productive regions of the country and the country is the breadbasket of Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, I read before coming here that if Cameroon closed its borders or experienced a catastrophe that destroyed crops it would potentially starve a number of the neighboring countries. So, the market is chocked full of goodies like almost any kind of bean, nuts, an array of vegetables including carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, yams, okra, eggplant and more, and fruit like avocados, the most delicious pineapples I’ve ever tasted, mangoes, bananas, plantains, grapefruit, papaya and so on! You can also find pasta, bread, and fresh herbs. The only things that are difficult to come by are cheese and fresh milk but you can opt for the powdered sort if you really crave it and La Vache Qui Rit if you’re willing to settle for something that is mysteriously not cheese…
So, cooking should be just as much of an adventure as it had been for me the last year in Los Angeles but I am initially daunted by the thought of needing to discover where and when to find all these ingredients and what’s worse, lighting the gas stoves here scares the shit out of me! Many times I have attempted it in my home and chickened out. I have only done it successfully twice and I felt that I came close to setting my hand on fire both times! Hopefully I can find one of those long lighters we have in the States and put myself at ease.
Other than that, the idea of starting over in a new community is both exciting and fatiguing. There will be the initial integration steps all over again but perhaps multiplied many times by the fact that this time I will not be one of 42 other Americans in the village. I will have to train everyone all over again that my name is not “La Blanche” but Lindsay. I will have to deal with the initial phase of being with people most likely every waking minute of everyday for the first few weeks or months, foregoing the ever-so-comfortable “me” time and space we Americans hold so dear. I will need to try explaining to everyone I meet why I don’t need to eat at every social occasion or drink for every staff meeting and I’m certain I will have to make exceptions and accommodations in this regard in order to please. I will have to start over again in explaining my ‘religion’ to nearly everyone while avoiding the lack thereof truth and implying that I am somehow kind of Buddhist because that’s the religion I feel the most attuned to in general and which seems to be far more acceptable/ easy to grasp than Agnosticism or Atheism.
Yet, in all this starting over there are also new possibilities and opportunities that make it worthwhile and thrilling. I have spent the last 3 months preparing for this departure and have readied myself emotionally for it for practically as long as I can remember. I will finally be living my dream and hopefully touching lives at the same time. I will actually get to know my students and hopefully feel they’ve actually learned something from me unlike in Model School. I will be able to make new friends and become intimately familiar with a place and a people that very few Americans ever have and if all goes well I will throughout my time here find a way to bring something to their lives to improve it someway, somehow.
Since another week has passed I will give a quick wrap-up before closing. Monday I finished teaching around noon and had the rest of the day free so my friend Christine and I decided to take a bike ride out to the river where I had gone last week again. This time I had remembered to blanket myself in bug repellent and so when we got there we stopped to have a drink and unwind a little. We made some friends there who were enjoying playing around with Christine’s binoculars which she has all the time because she is an avid birdwatcher. I tried the “I’m married” trick for the first time on some men who were beginning to flirt and was amazed at how effective it was! Instead of driving me nuts asking for my number or something they just asked if my husband was a really jealous man.
The last time we had gone to the river a man had told my friend Andrew that he had just seen a hippopotamus and this shocked me so I asked a lot of questions about it of our new friends. They assured us that there are many in the water and that you could see them just about anytime.
When we finished our drinks we left our bikes unlocked and wandered down with our new friends onto the ferry to see if we could catch a glimpse of such a prehistoric- seeming mammoth animal as a hippo! Before we knew it the ferry was taking off and we looked at our new friends in shock because we had not intended to actually leave the dock! They told us not to worry, we were coming right back and there wasn’t too much we could do at that point but relax and look for hippos. Unfortunately this story would be better if we’d seen one, which we did not, but nonetheless, it was a beautiful ride on the ferry and the bikes and it was nice to feel like we could escape Bafia a bit.
Tuesday one of the Host Country National teachers observed my class of troisiemes, a grade above the quatrieme class I’ve been primarily working with. They were being seriously rotten that day and I was in the process of making them all stand as a punishment when she walked in and they immediately shut up completely. After class she told me that I am not intimidating enough and my voice too high which is apparently true because whatever she’s doing is obviously working better! One of the Americans even got a note from one of his students that said he was a very good teacher and should try speaking French more because he is good at it but that he doesn’t beat them enough. I think there are certain adjustments we American teachers will never make and perhaps as a result certain classroom behaviors we may just have to deal with.
Wednesday we had Girls’ Club and I spent two hours showing four girls at a time how to create their own email addresses before proceeding to the computer lab for another hour with them. Unfortunately when we got there only one computer had working internet so my efforts were in vain. I even used my laptop to work with one girl to set up her account but after we had done all the work and it said, “Felicitations Allison!” it wouldn’t let us sign back in. But alas, c’est la vie en Afrique and hopefully they will know now how to do it themselves if they get the chance.
I had washed my laundry that morning and hung it out on the line to dry while I was gone for the day. My host mother had been ill and so the children were the only ones home that day. When I got back I realized that it seemed like some of my things were missing from the line. I mentioned it casually to my host father, unable to really remember what it might have been but pretty certain they were underwear. He launched into a full-fledged investigation of the matter, all in front of Claude. He called in every kid in the neighborhood who had swung by the house that afternoon and had them all recount the details of their interactions with my panties. Then he told my host mother about it and questioned the teenaged girls in the neighboring houses. Finally he said he wished to take the matter to the police which I declined politely through a bit of laughter and assured him that even if the panties were found I would just let the thief keep them at this point. Overall, a hilarious incident that is still being discussed in the household with the utmost of sobriety.
Thursday I was back with my favorite brutish class and we played some review games to close out summer school and prepare for their exams yesterday. We each had to proctor 2 tests which was annoying because they weren’t for our classes or the tests we had prepared and so the kids were mostly angry with us because we couldn’t help them at all with instructions and if the teacher hadn’t written they could use a calculator we had to forbid it. Nonetheless, the exams finished and only about ¼ of my class actually failed which, believe it or not, is really not so bad. The teachers are thrilled to be finished with Model School as well as hoping that real school will be easier…
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| The quatrieme nightmare class on our last day |
After grading tests Claude and I went to see my host mom in the hospital because she has typhoid. It was a reminder of my days in the clinic in Ouakam and always eye-opening to see health care in Africa. Afterward we stopped by the home of a very sweet woman I pass everyday on my way to school as she tends to her beautiful flowers. She always has a huge smile on and greets me more warmly than anyone in the community so we had promised to come by and see pictures of her kids, 2 of whom married Peace Corps volunteers and now live in the States. She fed us some delicious Sanga, a dish made with corn, spices, and greens, and sent us off with some peanuts freshly harvested from her field as well as the advice that I can not forget her son Claude when I leave and we are a good couple and should be married.
This morning the running club had a race for anyone in the community to participate in and they had a great turn out of over 50 people. It was fun seeing so many kids come out for it, even though many of them were running in chuck taylors or even flip flops! The boy who won third place was a tiny kid in jelly shoes and Claude’s brother took first! I was the only American female who ran so I was pretty far behind most everyone but ran with a couple students which was nice. Then this afternoon we got together with our girls’ club to practice our song for the cultural party this week and they are all very excited to perform.
In a little bit Claude and I are going into town to buy my host sister a present for her 4th birthday this week. Tonight is our curfew free night so we will most likely chill at Martin’s bar and may decide to go do some dancing in the late hours at the night club. Tomorrow I will play Sunday soccer with my other friend Martin and then Claude and I have plans to take a picnic lunch and go on a real hike nearby. I am very excited about this!
As things wind down in training there should be a lot of exciting things happening this week so stay tuned!
Sunday, August 1, 2010
All About Sports
I blinked and it is already the weekend again. This week is the last week of Model School already and training is over in 2.5 weeks. It is exciting to think that in less than a month I will be living in my new house, cooking for myself again and not living under the strict regulations of trainee life.
It has been another good week here in Bafia, though. Monday I had a new class which was a bit frustrating considering that the school is almost finished and going into a class you don't know is like starting all over but alas, I survived. After school Claude took me exploring on it wound up being one of the best memories I've made in Cameroon so far. Last week on one of our walks we'd gone down to a little stream for a little privacy and just as we were getting settled on the perfect sitting log I realized I was being eaten alive by these little irritating insects called moot moots. We were forced to leave immediately and I walked home like an antzy child, rubbing my legs together to scratch the horrendous itching I was experiencing. This time when he told me where we were headed, I coated myself in bug spray and put on my jeans!
When we got to the river there was an elderly woman bathing who said she didn't mind if we passed. The water was about knee deep and I was nervous as I rolled up my pantlegs and stuck my toes in so Claude carried me piggyback while oh so gingerly tiptoeing across a log hidden under the water's surface. I closed my eyes and buried my face in his shirt because I was certain we were going to end up in the river with my purse in tow. Even he breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the other side. He then led us up through several isolated plantations on a hillside and when we got to the top we could see all of Bafia off in the distance and beautiful, lush hills that seem to be infinite in the other direction. It was the closest thing I've done to a real hike since being in Cameroon and it was blissful to feel the sense of being someplace less traveled.
Tuesday I finished Model School and had the rest of the day free so my friends Jeneca and Andrew and I hopped on our bikes and rode about 45 minutes away down a dirt road where the children shouted, "Chinois" to us because apparently they haven't had much contact with whites. In certain parts of the country the government has brought in a great many Chinese laborers for things like road construction and so sometimes foreigners in general are thought to be Chinese.
Oftentimes in this country when I find that the view takes my breath away I think to myself that wow, I really am in Sub-Saharan Africa and speeding down dirt roads in dense growth like forest in the middle of nowhere was one of those moments! We rode all the way to where the river becomes very wide and you have to await the ferry to cross. Unfortunately on this particular day I had once again forgotten my bug spray so my excitement for our ride began to wane as the flies biting me pretty much forced all my energy into self-loathing after I'd spent the whole week caring for the unappealing peppering of bites from the week before.
When I got home the neighbor boys were hanging out at my house. They are a brood of 4 or 5 brothers who like to violently wrestle for fun, but man are they cute! (See photo from last post) I brought out the frisbee Mom sent and we made a game of me throwing it as far as I could and them all racing for it. It was hilarious watching them run as fast as they could and then pile on top of each other!
Wednesday morning was my day off from teaching so I went running and then Claude actually came over to help me wash my clothes. Yeah, I have found like the most domestic African in... well Africa! Then we went to fetch water, a chore I have come to loathe. The containers we must use are impossible to carry comfortably. Not only do they weigh a ton but the handle gives you blisters and you must change hands every few steps or your arm will tire easily. Most of the time women or children carry them on their heads and I am often stopped on the way home and told that it will be easier if I do the same. I always smile politely and respond that I am not Cameroonian.
After the chores Wednesday a friend of mine from the bar we frequent showed up, as promised, to teach our girls' club some martial arts moves. He did an awesome job of giving us some very useful self defense moves and kept the girls giggling. Afterward we chose the song they will sing for our cultural night at the close of Model School.
The rest of the week was pretty average. Played our usual soccer match on Thursday and I taught my favorite and everyone else's least favorite class on Thursday and Friday. They seemed happy to see me and I felt it went pretty smoothly even though I had to send out two students, one of which was in trouble for saying, "Je n'aime pas les blanches" ("I don't like whites"). I feel I've made an impression on them to some extent. We did an AIDS lesson Friday and they behaved like angels.
Yesterday I went to the less posh side of town than where I live to meet Claude's last remaining grandmother. She doesn't see well but was elated to have us there and said to her niece in her mother tongue while Claude had walked off that if she doesn't live to see tomorrow she will know in Heaven that he and are together because he has never brought a girl to meet her before.
It has been another good week here in Bafia, though. Monday I had a new class which was a bit frustrating considering that the school is almost finished and going into a class you don't know is like starting all over but alas, I survived. After school Claude took me exploring on it wound up being one of the best memories I've made in Cameroon so far. Last week on one of our walks we'd gone down to a little stream for a little privacy and just as we were getting settled on the perfect sitting log I realized I was being eaten alive by these little irritating insects called moot moots. We were forced to leave immediately and I walked home like an antzy child, rubbing my legs together to scratch the horrendous itching I was experiencing. This time when he told me where we were headed, I coated myself in bug spray and put on my jeans!
When we got to the river there was an elderly woman bathing who said she didn't mind if we passed. The water was about knee deep and I was nervous as I rolled up my pantlegs and stuck my toes in so Claude carried me piggyback while oh so gingerly tiptoeing across a log hidden under the water's surface. I closed my eyes and buried my face in his shirt because I was certain we were going to end up in the river with my purse in tow. Even he breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the other side. He then led us up through several isolated plantations on a hillside and when we got to the top we could see all of Bafia off in the distance and beautiful, lush hills that seem to be infinite in the other direction. It was the closest thing I've done to a real hike since being in Cameroon and it was blissful to feel the sense of being someplace less traveled.
Tuesday I finished Model School and had the rest of the day free so my friends Jeneca and Andrew and I hopped on our bikes and rode about 45 minutes away down a dirt road where the children shouted, "Chinois" to us because apparently they haven't had much contact with whites. In certain parts of the country the government has brought in a great many Chinese laborers for things like road construction and so sometimes foreigners in general are thought to be Chinese.
Oftentimes in this country when I find that the view takes my breath away I think to myself that wow, I really am in Sub-Saharan Africa and speeding down dirt roads in dense growth like forest in the middle of nowhere was one of those moments! We rode all the way to where the river becomes very wide and you have to await the ferry to cross. Unfortunately on this particular day I had once again forgotten my bug spray so my excitement for our ride began to wane as the flies biting me pretty much forced all my energy into self-loathing after I'd spent the whole week caring for the unappealing peppering of bites from the week before.
When I got home the neighbor boys were hanging out at my house. They are a brood of 4 or 5 brothers who like to violently wrestle for fun, but man are they cute! (See photo from last post) I brought out the frisbee Mom sent and we made a game of me throwing it as far as I could and them all racing for it. It was hilarious watching them run as fast as they could and then pile on top of each other!
Wednesday morning was my day off from teaching so I went running and then Claude actually came over to help me wash my clothes. Yeah, I have found like the most domestic African in... well Africa! Then we went to fetch water, a chore I have come to loathe. The containers we must use are impossible to carry comfortably. Not only do they weigh a ton but the handle gives you blisters and you must change hands every few steps or your arm will tire easily. Most of the time women or children carry them on their heads and I am often stopped on the way home and told that it will be easier if I do the same. I always smile politely and respond that I am not Cameroonian.
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| Girls' Club getting their martial arts on |
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| A bidon used to carry water |
After the chores Wednesday a friend of mine from the bar we frequent showed up, as promised, to teach our girls' club some martial arts moves. He did an awesome job of giving us some very useful self defense moves and kept the girls giggling. Afterward we chose the song they will sing for our cultural night at the close of Model School.
The rest of the week was pretty average. Played our usual soccer match on Thursday and I taught my favorite and everyone else's least favorite class on Thursday and Friday. They seemed happy to see me and I felt it went pretty smoothly even though I had to send out two students, one of which was in trouble for saying, "Je n'aime pas les blanches" ("I don't like whites"). I feel I've made an impression on them to some extent. We did an AIDS lesson Friday and they behaved like angels.
Yesterday I went to the less posh side of town than where I live to meet Claude's last remaining grandmother. She doesn't see well but was elated to have us there and said to her niece in her mother tongue while Claude had walked off that if she doesn't live to see tomorrow she will know in Heaven that he and are together because he has never brought a girl to meet her before.
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| Claude with his Grandma & Aunt |
We also got some rather sad news this week. Coincidentally in the photo I of Claude and I in last week's post you can see a brief glimpse of a young man who officiated the basketball match we'd gone to see. Unbelievably while looking through the photos a couple days later Claude informed me that the man was dead. Monday morning, the day after we'd seen him, he went to the clinic to change the bandage he had on his hand after a moto accident he was in. They found that his hand had been infected with gangrene and had gone septic and before they could do anything about it he had dropped dead. It was a shocking and sad reminder that we are not in Kansas anymore and that life is short in general but that life is even shorter for the people on this continent.
On a lighter last note, I forgot to give a special shout out to my awesome friend from LA Bret Rea last week for being the first one to send me something from my Amazon wishlist! I cannot wait to chill at post and learn about the lives of individuals living in a hippie commune in the mountains of Colorado! If anyone else wants to try sending something, it seems Bret was able to send direct shipping from the website so you can try that too if you'd like. However, I also recommend half.com for much too low priced used copies! Thanks again, Bret!
Sunday, July 25, 2010
And the way to be happy is to make someone happy...
My biggest frustration thus far has been the limits of the language teaching methodology we are expected to use here and the fact that I can literally observe my students getting nowhere because of it. When I was taught ESL education at OU I learned to teach English without needing to use the native language of the learners at all. This is how ESL is taught, primarily because of the growing demand for English teachers worldwide and the fact that such demands could not be met if teachers needed to speak the native language in order to teach. In Cameroon we are expected to use the Communication Method and that means every word I use in class and every word the students use in class is supposed to be English, even when that means clarifying things or worse, that the kids just won't understand me.
My class of quatriemes are now notoriously the worst class in all of Model School and some of the teachers who had them after me last week gave up completely and called in the Discipline Master for help. I, on the other hand, tried another approach and had a heart-to-heart with the class... in French. Our theme that day was stories and when I wrote the definition of the word and that also of 'characters' and they all stared at me blankly and said, "Madame, we don't understand the words you are using", I felt at my wit's end and told them I was going to tell them a story! They said, "En Francais, Madame?!", surprised that I was speaking their language in class. I told them yes, in French because I felt it was incredibly important that they heard me and understood me well. I told them the story of a girl I went with a week or so ago, the sister of my friend, to see the results of her national test to get out of high school. It was the kind of story with which they are all extremely familiar. Here your entire schooling success, the possibilities presented for your future, rest solely on the passing or failing of 3 tests throughout your high school career. We have actually been given samples of these tests and the questions are vague, subjective, and hardly comprehensive at all in consideration of all they are expected to acquire in the seven year span they cover. One English test we were shown had a text about a girl who had turned to prostitution out of desperation and one of the comprehension questions was, "Do you think Mary's mother loved her?"
I asked them what they thought the girl saw when she went to get her results. They guessed she had not been successful. I told them they were right and asked them why they thought that might be. They said she must not have worked hard enough. I explained to them that according to the national syllabus they should all be able to speak English in my class so by their standards they were also not working hard enough. I asked what they thought would happen when it was their turn to take the same test. They said they too may fail. This is all too common. The students who fail must repeat the whole year over again as many times as it takes; many of them just drop out. It's hard for them to see the point at all in the first place when there is so much unemployment and corruption anyway. After this my class was more attentive than ever and they we have still hit bumps in the road some of the worst behaved students in the beginning are now some of the most active.
That night I had an epiphany. I had told them I wanted us to work together for them to learn and that they have to tell me when they don't understand things; I needed to come down to their level more. The next day I came in and changed my definition of characters from: "the people or animals who are the subjects of a story", to: "Who". They caught on easily and did group work to outline all the different parts of some African folktales I'd found.
Friday I had the group of older students again and I was actually impressed by my own creativity. Having been inspired to higher standards after the student stopping me after class last week I made dice for our class boardgame out of tape and wrote an entire murder mystery set in a neighboring town and made them use the grammar lesson from that morning to solve the crime. I feel very lucky because I really enjoy teaching and not of the trainees do; I would hate to think I was going to spend the next 2 years of my life doing something I didn't feel that way about.
Wednesday is club day and our girls' club had specifically requested to play sports that day. We arranged to get some balls and it was fun to see how much the girls enjoyed it when for once, as boys approached to join our soccer match, we would shout to them, "Est-ce que tu es une fille??!" ("Are you a girl??") and then quickly made them leave the field. It's amazing how many boys want to be in our club! After sports we did a self esteem building activity with the girls. This week I'm hoping a friend of mine from the local hangout is going to come introduce the girls to a few martial arts techniques.
Thursday is our sports day in Peace Corps and I have become a regular on the PC soccer field. I am thrilled to be playing and to have so many people to do so with all of the time. My Cameroonian friend Martin even invited me into a new soccer club on Sunday mornings that I played in today. I was the only woman on the field that was not being a goalie and I think as a result they took it easier than usual but they complimented me after the match and told me I have to come back next Sunday.
At the risk of sounding redundent or predictable, I have met someone here. In a somewhat humorous coincidence he is the host brother of one of the other trainees. We have been spending a solid portion of our time with one another. Most of the time we just meet after my classes and walk all around town together to places I haven't seen yet, just talking, joking, laughing, learning about one another. We have an insane amount in common in terms of our beliefs and characters for two people from very different worlds. He usually winds up at my house after walking me home in time for curfew and then we sit on the front porch, holding babies who are usually crawling all over us like monkeys and watching the sunset. Often he comes in to eat dinner because my host mother insists on it and it is rude to refuse, sometimes we play cards with the family. Regardless of what we are doing, we are always totally at ease with one another. It's not something I ever would've envisioned happening with another African really, and particularly not at such an early stage in my Peace Corps life, but he does make me extremely happy for now and I feel that for once in my life I should just try not to analyze it much farther beyond that.
There's something heartily romantic about the simplicity of things here. There's no need to go out someplace and spend money having a date, we just walk and we learn one another. It doesn't hurt either that he's extremely easy on the eyes.
After watching a terrential downpour from the bar at Martin's house I met Claude to go watch a quickly organized Peace Corps basketball team get totally licked by a far superior and clearly more invested Cameroonian team. After we dropped in on one of the Americans of the slew of them who was diagnosed with typhoid this week, as well as worms and some kind of gastrointestinal bacteria, then stopped by to say hello to Claude's family briefly and headed off to someplace private where we could just relax and be together. Now I am writing this and it is already night because I left the post many times throughout the day so I'm going to call it a wrap! Hope everyone at home is doing well!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Bouncing back from shit is resiliency...
Yesterday was our beloved and incredibly useful "Resiliency Training" where we learned all the healthy ways to cope with stress, disappointments, and really all negative emotions that I learned in 8th grade Quest class. Our group has decided that the best way to cope with these things is to open a big, stinky box of Deal With It! There is Deal With It Body Spray and Deal With It Smoothie- all very useful indeed!
I realized a few days ago that I have not yet given a real account of what my life is like here on a daily basis so today is a good day for that! So, to begin, I typically set my alarm for 6:30 to 6:15 but I don't believe I have ever once actually slept until it went off. With the little ones in the house, roosters crowing outside, and almost always someone washing, sweeping, or cooking something it is difficult to sleep later. In fact, the whole culture here begins in the morning. People frequently call or visit each other before I am even out of bed! What a contrast to the typical roll into work at 1 pm schedule I was living in LaLa Land!
After my bucket bath the time it takes me to get ready is shortened significantly by the fact that I didn't bring a hairdryer (something that will probably cause me to freeze at post). I then sit down for my breakfast of usually an 'omelette' with green beans, tomatoes, and sometimes spaghetti, or occasionally crepes but always with a cup of Nescafe. Mmm... (I am always trying to figure out why people in the countries where coffee is grown always drink Nescafe).
I usually leave around 7:30, walking down the dirt road from my house or through the cornfield trail, depending on where the day's activities begin. On the way I undoubtedly greet a half dozen people or more, unless it happens to be raining in which case it is only the overly ambitious Americans who are going anywhere at all.
Now that there is Model School we teach until noon when we have lunch. Sometimes we eat what some of the host mothers have prepared but it's a pretty hearty lunch so I have been trying to avoid it. Lately I swing into my friend Desiree's bar, where you can find Americans at pretty much any moment of the day that we are not in a session or past curfew (which unfortunately is 7pm). Desiree has become a good friend but initially he wanted me to be his second wife. He could hardly believe it when I explained to him that unfortunately in America women can have as many husbands as they wanted but a man could only have one wife. It took him about 3 weeks before he apparently asked some of the other trainees and told me I had lied to him. So, he now gets where I stand and is just a buddy. In fact, I feel safe around him because he doesn't let anyone bother me and seems to always keep a special look out for that sort of thing.
After our sessions on safety, cross-culture, technical training, language, and medical issues have completed for the day we usually have a beer at Desiree's and then it's already time to rush through the cornfield to get home before 7. At home I usually socialize with the family, play with the kids, and when Terrence was here I played a lot of cards and soccer. I normally fall onto my foam mattress under my mosquito net before 10 and if I'm lucky not every dog in the neighborhood is howling at the same time and I can fall right to sleep, but that's a rarity.
This week we began teaching at Model School and "BE QUIET!" falls under 'most commonly shouted phrase'. You are easily driven to this when you have 40 pre-adolescents in a classroom without windows and with very thin walls. I taught my first 8 hours and I'm very pleased with how it went. We are also required to lead one club and my friends Claire, Liz & I are managing the Girls' Club. We had a good turn out and I'm excited to see what we can get accomplished.
I spent most of the week with the dreaded quatrieme class, equivalent to about 7th graders though the range of ages is very diverse. All the other teachers want to kick this class out of the school but I grew quite fond of them. By Wednesday students were helping me to gather my things and carrying them all the way to the Teachers' lounge for me after class.
I tried to avoid punishing anyone too severely. There are very strict guidelines in the school for tardiness and most of the time when kids are late by even just a couple of minutes they winding up missing the whole first bell and doing manual labor on the school grounds. Something we've all had to adjust to here is the sight of students being given machetes at school. It's difficult to tell so far how effective the manual labor punishment is but it is good to know at least that officially corporal punishment is forbidden by law. From what I've heard it is still pretty common and there's a strong possibility I will see it once I get to my village but at least the mentality and law has shifted away from it a bit.
It was fun seeing how a real classroom environment will feel but it is definitely a lot of work. One of the technical trainers wrote after observing me, "Avoid shouting; by the end of the day you may lose your voice!". So, if anyone wants to send me a gavel or dunce cap, or maybe has some wonderful memories of how your teacher used to control the noise level in your classes, feel free to pass along that wisdom!
It was nice to observe my class with another teacher on Thursday after having them Monday through Wednesday and to see them actually using vocabulary I'd taught them. Yesterday I had the Premiere class who were a treat after having the younger kids. Here the French system makes it so that the lower class numbers are actually older kids so Premieres are like Juniors in high school.
I try to keep in mind how it felt to be a student myself and that makes me want to have as little boring blackboard copying as possible. Yesterday after I introduced prefixes and suffixes, we did some group work and played some games. They seemed to be really enjoying it and so was I. After class a boy came up and said (in his most planned English), "Madame, I really loved your class, it was very interesting; I want you to be the teacher all the time." When I said thank-you, I will be back next Friday he countered, "No, you must come Monday!" It made my day! Hopefully I can live up to their expectations next week!
Today has been very busy. I received the biggest box of all the Trainees the other day because my mom is the greatest mom ever! Among its contents were my running shoes and clothes which I put to use for the first time this morning. It felt good to start running again and I was impressed it was easier than expected. Apparently I have stayed in decent shape in spite of eating potatoes, plantains, and rice nearly everyday and not being able to hike yet!
I came home to help my host mother peel potatoes and clean my room, including a thorough t-shirt floor mopping! I am going to see the seamstress in a little while to have a dress made exactly how I ask and exactly my size for $4! Maybe I will never come home! This evening we are going on a little bike ride and I'm helping my friend Claude with English.
The weeks fly by here and before I know it I will be at post. I am nervous and excited for having some independence and my own home for the very first time! Judging by how things are going so far, I think life will be just fine in Bahouan!
I realized a few days ago that I have not yet given a real account of what my life is like here on a daily basis so today is a good day for that! So, to begin, I typically set my alarm for 6:30 to 6:15 but I don't believe I have ever once actually slept until it went off. With the little ones in the house, roosters crowing outside, and almost always someone washing, sweeping, or cooking something it is difficult to sleep later. In fact, the whole culture here begins in the morning. People frequently call or visit each other before I am even out of bed! What a contrast to the typical roll into work at 1 pm schedule I was living in LaLa Land!
After my bucket bath the time it takes me to get ready is shortened significantly by the fact that I didn't bring a hairdryer (something that will probably cause me to freeze at post). I then sit down for my breakfast of usually an 'omelette' with green beans, tomatoes, and sometimes spaghetti, or occasionally crepes but always with a cup of Nescafe. Mmm... (I am always trying to figure out why people in the countries where coffee is grown always drink Nescafe).
I usually leave around 7:30, walking down the dirt road from my house or through the cornfield trail, depending on where the day's activities begin. On the way I undoubtedly greet a half dozen people or more, unless it happens to be raining in which case it is only the overly ambitious Americans who are going anywhere at all.
Now that there is Model School we teach until noon when we have lunch. Sometimes we eat what some of the host mothers have prepared but it's a pretty hearty lunch so I have been trying to avoid it. Lately I swing into my friend Desiree's bar, where you can find Americans at pretty much any moment of the day that we are not in a session or past curfew (which unfortunately is 7pm). Desiree has become a good friend but initially he wanted me to be his second wife. He could hardly believe it when I explained to him that unfortunately in America women can have as many husbands as they wanted but a man could only have one wife. It took him about 3 weeks before he apparently asked some of the other trainees and told me I had lied to him. So, he now gets where I stand and is just a buddy. In fact, I feel safe around him because he doesn't let anyone bother me and seems to always keep a special look out for that sort of thing.
After our sessions on safety, cross-culture, technical training, language, and medical issues have completed for the day we usually have a beer at Desiree's and then it's already time to rush through the cornfield to get home before 7. At home I usually socialize with the family, play with the kids, and when Terrence was here I played a lot of cards and soccer. I normally fall onto my foam mattress under my mosquito net before 10 and if I'm lucky not every dog in the neighborhood is howling at the same time and I can fall right to sleep, but that's a rarity.
This week we began teaching at Model School and "BE QUIET!" falls under 'most commonly shouted phrase'. You are easily driven to this when you have 40 pre-adolescents in a classroom without windows and with very thin walls. I taught my first 8 hours and I'm very pleased with how it went. We are also required to lead one club and my friends Claire, Liz & I are managing the Girls' Club. We had a good turn out and I'm excited to see what we can get accomplished.
I spent most of the week with the dreaded quatrieme class, equivalent to about 7th graders though the range of ages is very diverse. All the other teachers want to kick this class out of the school but I grew quite fond of them. By Wednesday students were helping me to gather my things and carrying them all the way to the Teachers' lounge for me after class.
I tried to avoid punishing anyone too severely. There are very strict guidelines in the school for tardiness and most of the time when kids are late by even just a couple of minutes they winding up missing the whole first bell and doing manual labor on the school grounds. Something we've all had to adjust to here is the sight of students being given machetes at school. It's difficult to tell so far how effective the manual labor punishment is but it is good to know at least that officially corporal punishment is forbidden by law. From what I've heard it is still pretty common and there's a strong possibility I will see it once I get to my village but at least the mentality and law has shifted away from it a bit.
It was fun seeing how a real classroom environment will feel but it is definitely a lot of work. One of the technical trainers wrote after observing me, "Avoid shouting; by the end of the day you may lose your voice!". So, if anyone wants to send me a gavel or dunce cap, or maybe has some wonderful memories of how your teacher used to control the noise level in your classes, feel free to pass along that wisdom!
It was nice to observe my class with another teacher on Thursday after having them Monday through Wednesday and to see them actually using vocabulary I'd taught them. Yesterday I had the Premiere class who were a treat after having the younger kids. Here the French system makes it so that the lower class numbers are actually older kids so Premieres are like Juniors in high school.
I try to keep in mind how it felt to be a student myself and that makes me want to have as little boring blackboard copying as possible. Yesterday after I introduced prefixes and suffixes, we did some group work and played some games. They seemed to be really enjoying it and so was I. After class a boy came up and said (in his most planned English), "Madame, I really loved your class, it was very interesting; I want you to be the teacher all the time." When I said thank-you, I will be back next Friday he countered, "No, you must come Monday!" It made my day! Hopefully I can live up to their expectations next week!
Today has been very busy. I received the biggest box of all the Trainees the other day because my mom is the greatest mom ever! Among its contents were my running shoes and clothes which I put to use for the first time this morning. It felt good to start running again and I was impressed it was easier than expected. Apparently I have stayed in decent shape in spite of eating potatoes, plantains, and rice nearly everyday and not being able to hike yet!
I came home to help my host mother peel potatoes and clean my room, including a thorough t-shirt floor mopping! I am going to see the seamstress in a little while to have a dress made exactly how I ask and exactly my size for $4! Maybe I will never come home! This evening we are going on a little bike ride and I'm helping my friend Claude with English.
The weeks fly by here and before I know it I will be at post. I am nervous and excited for having some independence and my own home for the very first time! Judging by how things are going so far, I think life will be just fine in Bahouan!
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