July 1st, 2011
“What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although that pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.
Now Chris’s body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache.”
-Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Wow, July 1st. When I was a kid the adults in my family always told me that time would only pass more and more quickly the older I got and it turns out they were right. I have been in Cameroon a year already. Christmas feels like it just happened when in fact it was already half a year ago. My first year of teaching is over and I’m finally settling back into village life after two whirlwind trips to the US in the past 3 months.
Life, in fact, could hardly be more different than six months ago. I feel like I’m in an entirely different place. I was running into the first group already heading back to the States in June and it was so strange to feel like I’d hardly gotten to know them and now they’re already going back to their American lives. It seems like I just got here and was looking at them like the wise volunteers who already seemed to know so much more than I could imagine knowing about surviving in this strange place. Now that group of people is my group.
Yesterday I had this really funny experience. My colleague invited me to lunch to meet his older sister and nieces who live in Massachusetts. The younger daughter is 17 and the oldest is 21. They have been in the States for the last 8 years and the youngest girl has drastically more American habits than her older sister. When she speaks French it’s like hearing another volunteer speak it and when her aunt was calling her to come do something from the other room and she asked her mom, “What, is it like, if someone calls you, you have to go, you can’t say you’re busy?!” I had to laugh hysterically at this.
They were amazed that I had acclimated so well here and in fact while they were talking about how much things cost at Whole Foods, I felt more connected with the world of picking fruits and nuts from a tree. She served me pesto and broccoli and they were so surprised when I said I was growing broccoli and spinach and arugula in my garden. The youngest daughter said I am brave.
Since getting back to the village life has been easy like Sunday morning. In fact, I have absolutely nothing to do and it’s strange and blissful and also terrifying because I haven’t had absolutely nothing to do in like… 4 years. Grandma’s passing has settled in me much more calmly than I ever expected it to in the lifetime I dreaded it. She has graced me with serenity in her absence and I really feel her with me all the time, perhaps more so than ever while she was alive.
Claude and I are about to celebrate our first year together in just a couple of days and we just seem to get happier with each other everyday. It’s something I never imagined could be so simple. We have created balance and fairness in so many areas of our lives from the music we listen to the food we eat. Being from such different backgrounds, everything is a negotiation, and after a year of practice I’m happy to say that it just keeps getting easier to get along.
I’ve been trying to catch up on the myriad things I had longed to do from September-March like writing back friends who’ve sent things, reading and cooking more, visiting other volunteers, and doing my secondary project work. Unfortunately that last part has been a disappointment up until now. Since Bafia my hope has been to organize the women here. In fact, they already are organized, but to provide them with something that may be able to help them. Over time the patterns I seemed to notice indicated that they could be most helped with income generating projects. My community host has been on board to help me from the beginning so he says, but usually I guess he just talks a lot about it and doesn’t do much of anything to make it happen. Actually since I’ve been here he’s done things like not include me in meetings and gatherings and then asked me why I didn’t come as if I had some telepathic way of finding out it was happening. After going to talk about work a couple weeks ago and winding up having dinner and a beer with some others and he, work was merely mentioned. I went to his house a few days later and told his wife to send him over to see me or have him call me so we could discuss organizing and he never showed up. I finally called him and he told me he’d be here at 9 the next morning. I set my alarm (since now that it’s summer break I sleep in!), and, after a year of adapting, I made enough breakfast for everyone and Claude went out for baguettes and coffee. At 9:30 with the eggs already finished on the stove I called him again and he told me he’d be here in one minute. An hour later we decided to eat and shortly thereafter Claude watch him ride past on his motorcycle, not even seeming like he intended to stop.
I don’t know if I offended him in some way or he isn’t completely enthusiastic about my agenda which is fixated on women as well as certain behaviors that probably he’s involved in, like marrying a child and having kids with her. Either way, I’ve abandoned these high hopes of large gatherings of women or a large, ongoing project with them. I would still like to organize a few small opportunities for them to get information about different activities that could generate money for them but I’m basically convinced at this point that most of them will do nothing with it. Thus, my primary focus now is really on improving the scope of work of Girls’ Club next year and really trying to get the entire staff on board with the objectives of the group.
Outside of all that, though I don’t know if I can say I’ll ever really get used to the 24 hour analysis of every behavior, word, change in my body (the teenage girl from the States yesterday told me with disdain, “Everyone keeps telling me how much weight I’ve gained!”), and the calculation of every minute I spend inside or outside my house, I have finally started to adopt the attitude of not giving a shit about pleasing everyone or even what they think of me at all. I feel like I go out of my way to be generous to my direct neighbors. I am constantly giving them baguettes or other food when I‘m out. I baked them cornbread and printed out tons of pictures for them from the States. I give the kids candy, pencils, and sometimes toys. Yet, they still constantly leave garbage all over my yard or in my compost pile and stomp on my garden. One of the kids even dug up all my first tomato plants and moved them to his own hidden garden. This may sound cute in a way until Claude called the kid out on it and he responded, “What have you ever given me?” My impression is that is not the talk of a 7 year old but rather, most likely, the adults around him.
I try to be sociable but mostly I just feel like this alien from outer space with them. That’s not to say I feel like that with everyone in the village because I’ve finally actually started developing some solid friendships with people, but these neighbors in particular just seem to have no respect for me. I think in some ways the way I handled the problems with water and electricity were less than completely tactful and they still hold it against me. They also don’t like that I tend to step in when a child is screaming bloody murder on my stoop or directly outside my window. A few weeks ago when all the kids were taking a turn on one of the younger ones who’d stolen food after I’d already told them it was enough, I huffed outside ready to really shake some fear into the kids and felt totally embarrassed when their mother came hobbling out of the house, having obviously instructed them to beat him. She never looked at me or spoke a single word for minutes until I retreated in shame back into my house. I’ve finally just decided I need to live and let live. Now if I hear screaming, I just try to turn up my own music and I don’t so often open the shutters behind the house that looks into their compound, even if that means being constantly told that I’m always locked up inside.
Today the chief’s wife drug Claude around when she caught him walking to buy bread. She said she was afraid to walk alone at night but I think she actually just wanted to investigate our life because she’s incredibly nosy. She talked all about the two times that she told me the Chief wanted to see me, forgetting that I didn’t come because she never called in the evening to tell me to. She said I’m not social and don’t go out. All this she primarily thinks because she personally gets on my nerves and thus I avoid her. She is the type of person that has absolutely no qualms about asking all variety of personal questions, even in front of strangers, ranging from how much money do I make to what does my boyfriend do all day. She also loves to ask me to buy her a drink when she catches me out, something she’s done since the very first time I ever saw her. She has never once bought me a drink and she is married to the Chief! She constantly asks me to buy her a wig of real hair the next time I’m in the States as though there are myriad wig stores on the streets of America and they are practically giving away wigs of real human hair. She also stabbed her own friend in the back because I was always buying my phone credit from her and she came and tried to convince me to buy it from her sister instead. The lady is obsessed with her moderate celebrity or something and I can tell it just drives her crazy that it doesn’t impress me.
Next week is mid-service and pretty much my break is already half over. Before I know it the school loop will re-run, and I hope this year will run much more smoothly than the last. In the meantime, je suis la, I’m living life and taking a breather. Regardless of what the rest of the village seems to think, I think I deserve it and, whether I’m inside or outside, nothing I’m doing is all that much different from what they are.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
A New Beginning
“We were sitting at the kitchen table in our usual spots, my mother drinking her usual decaf tea with Sweet N’ Low, me with my usual mug of English Breakfast and sugar. Even though I hadn’t lived at home in four years, all it took was an oversized mug of microwaved tea and a couple of Reese’s peanut butter cups to make me feel like I’d never left.” - The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger
As I prepared myself for my first real vacation since being in Cameroon at the end of March, my mother began calling with updates from home regarding my grandmother’s failing health. In February while I was in the capitol for the GRE they found that her cancer had migrated into her lungs, what the chemo had successfully prevented the last 5 years. We knew this news was bad but they restarted her treatment and waited to see how it went.
She frequently felt lousy after her treatment and this time was no different, the family thought at first. It turns out she had contracted a serious infection that wound up placing her in the hospital a couple weeks later. As she had already had a treatment or two, her immune system was too weak to fight the infection and a month later she was still in the hospital. Her body, it seems, has gotten too tired. The very same day I planned to travel my mom called to add that, in addition to Shingles, a yeast infection, and the C-diff, she was having congestive heart failure and had barely eaten in weeks. Thus, two days later I was on a plane back to Ohio.
The day I arrived Grandma had been moved to a hospice facility. John and Adrienne picked me up from the airport and we went straight there. Her room felt peaceful and warm, like a nice hotel room that first night. It was so nice in some ways to be back with the family, despite the circumstances. Those first few days at the facility were the toughest because she seemed to be suffering a great deal, unable to swallow or even suck on a straw, moaning constantly, waking up every 2 hours. I hated to see her in that state but to our surprise, just a couple days later she was sitting up, eating a lot more, talking a lot more, and having less pain. She was pretty clear about not having any desire to die right now.
The family was under the impression from the beginning that if she’d just start eating again she could get strong enough to go back to chemo, since they discovered that the first few treatments had in fact been working.
Post continued May 22nd
It has been three weeks since I began the last post. Time feels completely nonexistent lately. I have been back in Cameroon all this time. I came back to the same flood of work I had left behind only now all the more confusing because it’s exam period and school is ending and it is more chaotic than ever and it‘s all coupled with the most grievous event of my life.
The whole village was happy to see me, greeting me with even greater smiles than when I’d first arrived. Many people stopped by to welcome me back. In some ways I have been comforted and other ways exhausted. Exhausted by the constant analysis of my every move. The constant knowledge of where I’ve been, why, and the barrage of questions. Last Saturday Grandma passed away. It was a very bittersweet weekend, for some reasons I won’t discuss here. Claude and I were going to a wedding that night. We had gone out for a walk and I’d actually left my cell phone at the house. I figured Mom had his number if she needed to reach me.
I came back to get ready for the wedding and saw two missed calls from her. Before I could even process anything she rang again and I answered. I could tell her voice seemed timid and searching. Trying to figure out where I was before she broke the news.
Though I’d known she was dying it came as a surprise. Having been present in the hospice for a month and watched numerous patients coming in and passing away we had picked up on a sort of evident process that seems to occur so that the family has enough time to organize and come to the bedside of their loved one before they’re gone. For mom the call came in the middle of the night and 3 hours later Grandma had already passed away. Mom wasn’t even there either because Grandpa hadn’t been feeling well and they had to take him back home.
In some ways I feel the world has shifted like the movement of the tectonic plates during an earthquake. How can life ever be quite the same again? My grandmother was a second parent to me. She never missed a major event in my life, she never faltered in support of my every ambition. She was a wonderful friend, mentor, listener, and she always made me laugh. Even in those last memories with her in the hospital I was deeply moved by her spirit of strength and resilience; always refusing pain medicine and talking as if at any moment she would be right back to her old self again.
To be so many miles away and grasp that she’s really gone is tough. To help myself get some finality and to support the rest of the family I will go back to the US again in a week to attend her memorial service. With cancer everyday is a gift. You are really just fighting against time. We always knew that. We stayed positive, especially Grandma did, and we tried to come to terms with what seemed the inevitable end of her story. Yet, even after 5 years of familiarizing yourself with the idea, and even after seeing her so at peace in those last weeks, you can never prepare yourself for how deeply and sharply you will miss the person.
The people here deal so commonly with death that they seem to, in some ways, to have developed a certain indifference to it. Every weekend most of the people of my village are attending a funeral or assisting a family who’s lost someone by sitting with them through their grief. Sometimes I feel alone because, though they offer their sincere condolences and comforting words, how can they really fully understand the depth of my loss when their families are so large and so often parents play such a distant role in their childrens’ lives? I know in reality that loss is loss and everyone in the world has a different definition of what family is but in the end, it always is the most important thing to most people in life anywhere in the world.
Being thrown back into school has been frustrating. The Cameroonian system feels to me like putting a newly walking baby at the bottom of a mountain and then telling them to climb up. The expectations are so outrageous that it’s discouraging even for me. I have been so busy with writing lesson plans, writing tests, grading, averaging, and filling out report cards since September that I’ve had very little time or energy for much of anything else at all. I have a hard time getting the villagers to understand this. Many of them comment on me not being constantly outside, socializing with everyone and walking all over the place. I think having a job with scheduled hours makes it harder for us to relate.
The other day for a couple of seconds sitting in my living room, I could hear birds outside and I had to cry. I know that I always talk about how peaceful it is here, and that is true, but not necessarily in a literal sense. Life here is centered around a culture without cars. Therefore, people live far more congested than generally in the States. On a daily basis there are very few moments of actual peace and quiet in my life here. In the morning I can hear babies crying, dishes being washed by my neighbors outside, kids running around getting ready for school. In the afternoon it’s still babies’ crying, people walking past talking loudly, motorcycles and big trucks that, on the dirt road, make my whole house shake until I can hear the window panes rattling, and before too long, the barrage of students broken free from school and noisier than ever. At night there are… you guessed it, babies crying!, the neighbors sitting around having dinner or chatting, everyone getting their baths, fighting and screaming, or doing their final daily chores. Often when I want to sleep I can hear the music all the way from the market, a good half mile or more away, like when you’re next to some teenage bonehead’s bass, and then the straggling drunks that roll home talking much more loudly than usual at wee morning hours. If it’s raining it’s louder than ever because the rain pounds on the tin roof with such vigor. Last week there was an evangelical church in town that sent a guy out all over the village with a megaphone, enticing people to come to what seemed to be an almost- all night- long service involving loud preaching and lots of dancing and drums.
This is everyday in a nutshell. I usually try to fall asleep by around 10 and by 6 or sometimes earlier, the rooster has already crowed again to wake up and repeat. I have so very little free time and yet feel so much pressure. Sometimes I can’t distinguish what of my frustrations are probably felt by every single Peace Corps Volunteer and what must be individual to my experience. On an at least weekly basis people ask me when I’m going to invite them out (A.K.A. when am I going to buy them a drink), when I’m going to invite them to my house, when am I going here or there and so on. People seem to have this unalterable impression that I have an endless stream of money, despite how many times I have explained that I don’t probably even make as much as many of the Cameroonian teachers do and happen to be buried under the traditional American Shitpile of Debt. Though they never see me out except on occasion having a beer or two, they don’t see me traveling all over the place or always having new things. My house is pretty simple and the only things that aren’t I didn’t even pay for but acquired. My house isn’t even paid for by me personally.
This week I’ve done nothing but the last of the year’s calculating, ranking, and preparing for class counsel. Somehow people offer their support but then seem to expect you to snap right back to normal. Friday is my birthday, which I happened to casually mention to a couple of my colleagues who informed me that this means I have to buy a bottle of expensive whiskey and they are going to come to my house to drink it. Later one of them even tried to embellish a little more about how usually people invite their friends over and prepare chicken and all kinds of things. Now I seem almost obligated to have them over, in fact they are literally just telling me they’re coming and since one of them is an administrator at the school it would be a bit taboo to refuse them. So, by the time I have a second to finally take a breath and process that Grandma is really gone, I will be packing a suitcase to fly home and really say the most painful goodbye of my life.
Alas! This is why you haven’t heard from me in a couple of months but, I’m still here. Life is more bizarre than ever but there is also a lot of hope for bright things ahead. So, we keep on moving. And talk about life really moving and a shaking, Grandma’s memorial service is exactly one year from the day I arrived on Cameroonian soil. All I know for sure is that Grandma always supported every ambition I ever had, as crazy as a lot of mine are. For whatever reason I always believed I had to do this whole Peace Corps thing before I could really get on with my life, my future, my family, so here I am. One thing I do believe, as frustrating as all the commotion and noise can often be for someone so accustomed to a healthy amount of ‘me-time’, it will probably be what gets me through this period more than anything else ever could.
As I prepared myself for my first real vacation since being in Cameroon at the end of March, my mother began calling with updates from home regarding my grandmother’s failing health. In February while I was in the capitol for the GRE they found that her cancer had migrated into her lungs, what the chemo had successfully prevented the last 5 years. We knew this news was bad but they restarted her treatment and waited to see how it went.
She frequently felt lousy after her treatment and this time was no different, the family thought at first. It turns out she had contracted a serious infection that wound up placing her in the hospital a couple weeks later. As she had already had a treatment or two, her immune system was too weak to fight the infection and a month later she was still in the hospital. Her body, it seems, has gotten too tired. The very same day I planned to travel my mom called to add that, in addition to Shingles, a yeast infection, and the C-diff, she was having congestive heart failure and had barely eaten in weeks. Thus, two days later I was on a plane back to Ohio.
The day I arrived Grandma had been moved to a hospice facility. John and Adrienne picked me up from the airport and we went straight there. Her room felt peaceful and warm, like a nice hotel room that first night. It was so nice in some ways to be back with the family, despite the circumstances. Those first few days at the facility were the toughest because she seemed to be suffering a great deal, unable to swallow or even suck on a straw, moaning constantly, waking up every 2 hours. I hated to see her in that state but to our surprise, just a couple days later she was sitting up, eating a lot more, talking a lot more, and having less pain. She was pretty clear about not having any desire to die right now.
The family was under the impression from the beginning that if she’d just start eating again she could get strong enough to go back to chemo, since they discovered that the first few treatments had in fact been working.
Post continued May 22nd
It has been three weeks since I began the last post. Time feels completely nonexistent lately. I have been back in Cameroon all this time. I came back to the same flood of work I had left behind only now all the more confusing because it’s exam period and school is ending and it is more chaotic than ever and it‘s all coupled with the most grievous event of my life.
The whole village was happy to see me, greeting me with even greater smiles than when I’d first arrived. Many people stopped by to welcome me back. In some ways I have been comforted and other ways exhausted. Exhausted by the constant analysis of my every move. The constant knowledge of where I’ve been, why, and the barrage of questions. Last Saturday Grandma passed away. It was a very bittersweet weekend, for some reasons I won’t discuss here. Claude and I were going to a wedding that night. We had gone out for a walk and I’d actually left my cell phone at the house. I figured Mom had his number if she needed to reach me.
I came back to get ready for the wedding and saw two missed calls from her. Before I could even process anything she rang again and I answered. I could tell her voice seemed timid and searching. Trying to figure out where I was before she broke the news.
Though I’d known she was dying it came as a surprise. Having been present in the hospice for a month and watched numerous patients coming in and passing away we had picked up on a sort of evident process that seems to occur so that the family has enough time to organize and come to the bedside of their loved one before they’re gone. For mom the call came in the middle of the night and 3 hours later Grandma had already passed away. Mom wasn’t even there either because Grandpa hadn’t been feeling well and they had to take him back home.
In some ways I feel the world has shifted like the movement of the tectonic plates during an earthquake. How can life ever be quite the same again? My grandmother was a second parent to me. She never missed a major event in my life, she never faltered in support of my every ambition. She was a wonderful friend, mentor, listener, and she always made me laugh. Even in those last memories with her in the hospital I was deeply moved by her spirit of strength and resilience; always refusing pain medicine and talking as if at any moment she would be right back to her old self again.
To be so many miles away and grasp that she’s really gone is tough. To help myself get some finality and to support the rest of the family I will go back to the US again in a week to attend her memorial service. With cancer everyday is a gift. You are really just fighting against time. We always knew that. We stayed positive, especially Grandma did, and we tried to come to terms with what seemed the inevitable end of her story. Yet, even after 5 years of familiarizing yourself with the idea, and even after seeing her so at peace in those last weeks, you can never prepare yourself for how deeply and sharply you will miss the person.
The people here deal so commonly with death that they seem to, in some ways, to have developed a certain indifference to it. Every weekend most of the people of my village are attending a funeral or assisting a family who’s lost someone by sitting with them through their grief. Sometimes I feel alone because, though they offer their sincere condolences and comforting words, how can they really fully understand the depth of my loss when their families are so large and so often parents play such a distant role in their childrens’ lives? I know in reality that loss is loss and everyone in the world has a different definition of what family is but in the end, it always is the most important thing to most people in life anywhere in the world.
Being thrown back into school has been frustrating. The Cameroonian system feels to me like putting a newly walking baby at the bottom of a mountain and then telling them to climb up. The expectations are so outrageous that it’s discouraging even for me. I have been so busy with writing lesson plans, writing tests, grading, averaging, and filling out report cards since September that I’ve had very little time or energy for much of anything else at all. I have a hard time getting the villagers to understand this. Many of them comment on me not being constantly outside, socializing with everyone and walking all over the place. I think having a job with scheduled hours makes it harder for us to relate.
The other day for a couple of seconds sitting in my living room, I could hear birds outside and I had to cry. I know that I always talk about how peaceful it is here, and that is true, but not necessarily in a literal sense. Life here is centered around a culture without cars. Therefore, people live far more congested than generally in the States. On a daily basis there are very few moments of actual peace and quiet in my life here. In the morning I can hear babies crying, dishes being washed by my neighbors outside, kids running around getting ready for school. In the afternoon it’s still babies’ crying, people walking past talking loudly, motorcycles and big trucks that, on the dirt road, make my whole house shake until I can hear the window panes rattling, and before too long, the barrage of students broken free from school and noisier than ever. At night there are… you guessed it, babies crying!, the neighbors sitting around having dinner or chatting, everyone getting their baths, fighting and screaming, or doing their final daily chores. Often when I want to sleep I can hear the music all the way from the market, a good half mile or more away, like when you’re next to some teenage bonehead’s bass, and then the straggling drunks that roll home talking much more loudly than usual at wee morning hours. If it’s raining it’s louder than ever because the rain pounds on the tin roof with such vigor. Last week there was an evangelical church in town that sent a guy out all over the village with a megaphone, enticing people to come to what seemed to be an almost- all night- long service involving loud preaching and lots of dancing and drums.
This is everyday in a nutshell. I usually try to fall asleep by around 10 and by 6 or sometimes earlier, the rooster has already crowed again to wake up and repeat. I have so very little free time and yet feel so much pressure. Sometimes I can’t distinguish what of my frustrations are probably felt by every single Peace Corps Volunteer and what must be individual to my experience. On an at least weekly basis people ask me when I’m going to invite them out (A.K.A. when am I going to buy them a drink), when I’m going to invite them to my house, when am I going here or there and so on. People seem to have this unalterable impression that I have an endless stream of money, despite how many times I have explained that I don’t probably even make as much as many of the Cameroonian teachers do and happen to be buried under the traditional American Shitpile of Debt. Though they never see me out except on occasion having a beer or two, they don’t see me traveling all over the place or always having new things. My house is pretty simple and the only things that aren’t I didn’t even pay for but acquired. My house isn’t even paid for by me personally.
This week I’ve done nothing but the last of the year’s calculating, ranking, and preparing for class counsel. Somehow people offer their support but then seem to expect you to snap right back to normal. Friday is my birthday, which I happened to casually mention to a couple of my colleagues who informed me that this means I have to buy a bottle of expensive whiskey and they are going to come to my house to drink it. Later one of them even tried to embellish a little more about how usually people invite their friends over and prepare chicken and all kinds of things. Now I seem almost obligated to have them over, in fact they are literally just telling me they’re coming and since one of them is an administrator at the school it would be a bit taboo to refuse them. So, by the time I have a second to finally take a breath and process that Grandma is really gone, I will be packing a suitcase to fly home and really say the most painful goodbye of my life.
Alas! This is why you haven’t heard from me in a couple of months but, I’m still here. Life is more bizarre than ever but there is also a lot of hope for bright things ahead. So, we keep on moving. And talk about life really moving and a shaking, Grandma’s memorial service is exactly one year from the day I arrived on Cameroonian soil. All I know for sure is that Grandma always supported every ambition I ever had, as crazy as a lot of mine are. For whatever reason I always believed I had to do this whole Peace Corps thing before I could really get on with my life, my future, my family, so here I am. One thing I do believe, as frustrating as all the commotion and noise can often be for someone so accustomed to a healthy amount of ‘me-time’, it will probably be what gets me through this period more than anything else ever could.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The New Rich
“It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.” -Walden Henry David Thoreau
I would be lying if I said that I had lost all track of time lately or had forgotten to write. In fact, my internet access has even been more constant than before since we managed to locate a tiny portion of the house where we can manage the faintest connection. The truth is life has just begun to feel a bit routine here and so the inspiration to write, though it is here all around me all the time, has somewhat dissipated.
Life is still chill and without too many problems. I took the GRE in February in Yaounde which was way harder than I’d imagined and was quite discouraging, especially reading an entire study book in the months prior as well as cramming with a few other girls in the Volunteer house for 3 consecutive days before the test. The good news is that everyone else also found it difficult. We’ll see in just a couple of weeks whether I actually stand a chance of being accepted to my first choice graduate program or not- fingers crossed!
Since the test I have been trying to really fixate on my secondary projects in the village. We are expected to do something called PACA (Paticipatory Assessment for Community Action) to establish the needs, resources, and motivators of the community for our projects to be sustainable. Unfortunately we didn’t receive any useful training on that during Pre-Service and therefore my own research and planning of it feels a bit like Alice’s rabbit hole. On the other hand, my Girls’ Club has become quite a hit and I am now working on having a summer camp with a small group to teach AIDS prevention and things like Family Planning and Life Skills. More and more I feel that working with the younger population of the community may be more valuable than with the adults.
I have been dealing with a rather frustrating problem in my house since before going to Kribi in December. My landlord’s son installed my power when I first moved in and my “divisionary” electric meter has been in his wife’s house behind my own. At first my bills were somewhat reasonable but then he started bringing me totals of 3 times what the other volunteers pay, and that was before I even had a refrigerator. When my Program Director called him to explain our policies he simply rearranged the charges so that the total was the same but that now it was coming from my water bill rather than my electric. I refused to pay and my boss had to come and work it out with us.
In January I wound up paying him a remaining balance, still much higher than I should’ve had to, but at last we signed a contract with him stating that the electric company themselves would come and install a meter on my house and that after January 31st I would no longer pay any bills that were not from the company. I also discovered during this same meeting that I have been paying the water bill for his entire compound as well.
At the beginning of February he came again with another outrageous bill, after having refused to take my offer for the remaining balance which was actually owed. With that I talked to my Program Director and he agreed that I could move. I found a house that was absolutely BEAUTIFUL, in fact, probably too much so. We thought that the guy was going to let me rent but, in typical Cameroonian fashion, he was just saving face. Cameroonians have a highly annoying cultural tendency to say they will tell you tomorrow or they need to do something with someone before giving you a response, yet never, in the end giving you one. Their way of avoiding the potential discomfort of saying “No’ outright.
Finally the electric company came yesterday and discovered things were not correctly installed and called him a “bandit international”. Already his kid came again today to do something with the power, which I refused.
Though I admittedly spent about a week dreaming of my new life in the (probably most) impressive house in the village, without dozens of children screaming and wailing nearly every second of the day, I have come back down to Earth now. In fact, I am reading Walden at the moment and it makes me realize how much less we really need than we convince ourselves that we do. Thus the reason we are perceived as rich by most of the world. Sure, the majority of us may be “making ends meet”, living “paycheck to paycheck” or just “scraping by” each month, but in most cases it is probably because we have consumed relative to our income to the point where there is hardly any breathing room. In reality, if people lived in a less superfluous way than we are accustomed to we would probably have thousands of dollars stashed away in bank accounts for a ’rainy day’.
When I first got here there was an ongoing list of things I just had to have in my head at all times. New sofa, refrigerator, guest bed, a variety of more luxurious food items that can only be purchased in the city, including highly priced olive oil. I saw certain other volunteers’ houses and felt pangs of envy because they chanced to fall into homes that were akin really to those we are used to whereas mine has wooden doors and windows and concrete floors, no kitchen sink, and a filthy paint job.
After 7 months in my village it’s easier to differentiate the needs from the indulgences. Now my 170 CFA per month (around $300) salary does actually feel quite rich. After accumulating all the must haves like my stove, bed , a kitchen table, and buckets and bidons for water storage, I have been able to budget to easily have around 40 CFA ($80) left at the end of the month, money a whole family here could probably live off.
After months of sitting on only my wooden or plastic chairs, or, worst of all, in my bed which is essentially a piece of foam already smashed down to practically nothing allowing the body only the sensation of the 2x4s supporting it below, I acquired Christine’s love seat, sofa, and coffee table. Now I feel almost ashamed of the luxury.
Finally I realize that I don’t necessarily have to drink coffee every morning, and on my days off a warm mug of it in my hand while reading a book on the veranda is one of the most exotic and enjoyable experiences I can have. When I allow myself to steal 300 CFA (less than a dollar) out of the week’s budget for a bar of Mambo chocolate, I carefully stash it away until just the right moment in which I break off each piece one by one and let the sultry richness of it melt on my tongue. A few times a month I buy Claude and I bottles of Top soda or a box of wine with dinner and it feels like New Years Eve.
We are programmed to believe that success is always obtaining more. A newer car, a better house, nicer clothes. I think success is a lot simpler than that. Being far from home and thinking back to all the complicated drama that so often exists in the world of excess makes me wish only for the simple joy of a belly full of good, natural food, the warm company of someone you love, the familiarity of a place you’ve made yours on the planet, and peace and contentedness of the present moment. I wish that could be the new idea of luxury in our country of constantly chasing our tails; always pursuing that which is just beyond our reach.
I would be lying if I said that I had lost all track of time lately or had forgotten to write. In fact, my internet access has even been more constant than before since we managed to locate a tiny portion of the house where we can manage the faintest connection. The truth is life has just begun to feel a bit routine here and so the inspiration to write, though it is here all around me all the time, has somewhat dissipated.
Life is still chill and without too many problems. I took the GRE in February in Yaounde which was way harder than I’d imagined and was quite discouraging, especially reading an entire study book in the months prior as well as cramming with a few other girls in the Volunteer house for 3 consecutive days before the test. The good news is that everyone else also found it difficult. We’ll see in just a couple of weeks whether I actually stand a chance of being accepted to my first choice graduate program or not- fingers crossed!
Since the test I have been trying to really fixate on my secondary projects in the village. We are expected to do something called PACA (Paticipatory Assessment for Community Action) to establish the needs, resources, and motivators of the community for our projects to be sustainable. Unfortunately we didn’t receive any useful training on that during Pre-Service and therefore my own research and planning of it feels a bit like Alice’s rabbit hole. On the other hand, my Girls’ Club has become quite a hit and I am now working on having a summer camp with a small group to teach AIDS prevention and things like Family Planning and Life Skills. More and more I feel that working with the younger population of the community may be more valuable than with the adults.
I have been dealing with a rather frustrating problem in my house since before going to Kribi in December. My landlord’s son installed my power when I first moved in and my “divisionary” electric meter has been in his wife’s house behind my own. At first my bills were somewhat reasonable but then he started bringing me totals of 3 times what the other volunteers pay, and that was before I even had a refrigerator. When my Program Director called him to explain our policies he simply rearranged the charges so that the total was the same but that now it was coming from my water bill rather than my electric. I refused to pay and my boss had to come and work it out with us.
In January I wound up paying him a remaining balance, still much higher than I should’ve had to, but at last we signed a contract with him stating that the electric company themselves would come and install a meter on my house and that after January 31st I would no longer pay any bills that were not from the company. I also discovered during this same meeting that I have been paying the water bill for his entire compound as well.
At the beginning of February he came again with another outrageous bill, after having refused to take my offer for the remaining balance which was actually owed. With that I talked to my Program Director and he agreed that I could move. I found a house that was absolutely BEAUTIFUL, in fact, probably too much so. We thought that the guy was going to let me rent but, in typical Cameroonian fashion, he was just saving face. Cameroonians have a highly annoying cultural tendency to say they will tell you tomorrow or they need to do something with someone before giving you a response, yet never, in the end giving you one. Their way of avoiding the potential discomfort of saying “No’ outright.
Finally the electric company came yesterday and discovered things were not correctly installed and called him a “bandit international”. Already his kid came again today to do something with the power, which I refused.
Though I admittedly spent about a week dreaming of my new life in the (probably most) impressive house in the village, without dozens of children screaming and wailing nearly every second of the day, I have come back down to Earth now. In fact, I am reading Walden at the moment and it makes me realize how much less we really need than we convince ourselves that we do. Thus the reason we are perceived as rich by most of the world. Sure, the majority of us may be “making ends meet”, living “paycheck to paycheck” or just “scraping by” each month, but in most cases it is probably because we have consumed relative to our income to the point where there is hardly any breathing room. In reality, if people lived in a less superfluous way than we are accustomed to we would probably have thousands of dollars stashed away in bank accounts for a ’rainy day’.
When I first got here there was an ongoing list of things I just had to have in my head at all times. New sofa, refrigerator, guest bed, a variety of more luxurious food items that can only be purchased in the city, including highly priced olive oil. I saw certain other volunteers’ houses and felt pangs of envy because they chanced to fall into homes that were akin really to those we are used to whereas mine has wooden doors and windows and concrete floors, no kitchen sink, and a filthy paint job.
After 7 months in my village it’s easier to differentiate the needs from the indulgences. Now my 170 CFA per month (around $300) salary does actually feel quite rich. After accumulating all the must haves like my stove, bed , a kitchen table, and buckets and bidons for water storage, I have been able to budget to easily have around 40 CFA ($80) left at the end of the month, money a whole family here could probably live off.
After months of sitting on only my wooden or plastic chairs, or, worst of all, in my bed which is essentially a piece of foam already smashed down to practically nothing allowing the body only the sensation of the 2x4s supporting it below, I acquired Christine’s love seat, sofa, and coffee table. Now I feel almost ashamed of the luxury.
Finally I realize that I don’t necessarily have to drink coffee every morning, and on my days off a warm mug of it in my hand while reading a book on the veranda is one of the most exotic and enjoyable experiences I can have. When I allow myself to steal 300 CFA (less than a dollar) out of the week’s budget for a bar of Mambo chocolate, I carefully stash it away until just the right moment in which I break off each piece one by one and let the sultry richness of it melt on my tongue. A few times a month I buy Claude and I bottles of Top soda or a box of wine with dinner and it feels like New Years Eve.
We are programmed to believe that success is always obtaining more. A newer car, a better house, nicer clothes. I think success is a lot simpler than that. Being far from home and thinking back to all the complicated drama that so often exists in the world of excess makes me wish only for the simple joy of a belly full of good, natural food, the warm company of someone you love, the familiarity of a place you’ve made yours on the planet, and peace and contentedness of the present moment. I wish that could be the new idea of luxury in our country of constantly chasing our tails; always pursuing that which is just beyond our reach.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Not in Kansas Anymore
After 8 months in country and already more than 5 months in the village, there are times when it’s easy to forget that I’m even in Africa. Apart from the immediate surroundings, which I’ve adjusted to as anyone does a new environment after some time, and the fact that I am pretty much the only person with white skin that I come in contact with most days of the week, the nuts and bolts of life here seem perfectly natural. And, though people do talk of it, allude to it in offhanded ways, the suffering that is all around me is hardly evident in their friendly greetings, their seeming joy and carefree natures.
Yesterday, however, I was reminded of the realities which I myself escape by my myriad medical examinations, vaccinations, check-ins, extensive education of threats and preventions, and unlimited supplies and care that comes courtesy of the U.S. government to each and every Peace Corps volunteer. While walking to pick up report cards from the office a student in my youngest class stopped to inform me that one of their classmates had died. Though I don’t know all of my students by name, (especially the girls, who are obliged to shave their heads making them difficult to distinguish), as soon as he spoke her name I could see her wide eyes and bright smile shining from the back row of the classroom. I went to say a few words to the class quickly and was surprised to see that things seemed to be carrying on as they would on any typical school day. I mentioned it to some of the staff as I tried to share the initial confused shock and grief that is so unfamiliar to me.
I got little to no reaction from anyone and felt angry when the Discipline Master, who Claude later explained to me should normally be responsible for organizing the students and informing the school of the loss of a comrade, came to ask me to help them plan the Fashion Show for the Youth Holiday next week. Shortly thereafter and 2 hours before school had even terminated they brought out a sound system and started blasting music on the campus. By then my 5ieme class, Olive’s class, was to begin. I went and offered a few words of condolence, asked some details of the cause of her death, and requested that a few students guide me to where she lived so I could greet the parents, offer my support, and ask permission to come to the burial.
A virtual troop of students started walking with me and, deep in reflection, I was practically at her doorstep before I turned and realized that we had accumulated in such a way. I asked the students to stay behind, envisioning that a family who had lost their child less than 24 hours before would be in such a delicate state that a mass of students was wildly inconsiderate and could be a horrible reflection on me in the village. I insisted that 2 students join me and the rest wait, but upon arriving I realized that a crowd was already gathered there. One of my older students greeted me and stood to lead me to what I thought and hoped would be Olive’s parents. To my surprise it was her little lifeless body wrapped in a bed sheet, laid out on the family’s kitchen table under a chalkboard with equations written on it. Apparently all the students, knowing their own culture better than I, disregarded my demands and were all behind me in the room before I knew it. I am not sure whether the students or my gesture, or the two things combined with their grief led all the women assembled there to move into the room with us and begin singing and crying with such emotion it could have vibrated the house. They approached the table and I understood they were telling Olive that her friends and teacher had come from school; they shook her little body as if to wake her and cried harder when their pleas were answered by her silence. Her mother stroked her face and called to her, “Tata Olive”.
My students, who while walking in the road seemed to bear a cold indifference to the loss of their classmate, now began crying, some even sobbing, as well. Even the boys had looks of fear and confusion on their faces and I felt at home suddenly among their pain. Finally, there was the intense sorrow I had expected to find since the moment I heard the news. Finally, the commonality of our humanity was before me; pain, a reaction to death I could make sense of.
We stayed there like that for an undetermined amount of time. I felt a combination of confused, awkward, sad, and somehow more mature than just a few hours earlier as I wanted to reach out to the young girls who were clearly examining the mysterious finality of death for the very first time in their short lives.
Walking back from her house the girls were very somber. They too, I am certain, had grown older in a matter of minutes. I was happy to have Claude here when I got home to turn over the whole thing with him. I kept seeing her face all last night, in the classroom, and then on that table. Her body looking just as healthy as in the class last week. I found her homework on my desk, her words written there by her hands not a week before. And now she’s dead and I can’t quite make sense of why. When you ask people here the cause of someone’s death they always just say, “an illness”. Apparently Olive fell sick over the weekend and by Monday night she was no more.
It is here where true poverty rears its head. Poverty that prevents a family from providing their child with medical care. Poverty that prevents them from understanding why or how their child is gone. Poverty that allows for the possibility of other deaths, because we cannot even learn if what killed her was actually preventable to begin with. In the face of so many unanswered questions, it is simple to comprehend why many people here explain away death by saying that it is simply God’s design, or even more say that it is sorcery, that someone cursed that person and that is why they have AIDS or whatever it may be.
I take a lot of time to try incorporating basic sanitation education, nutrition, and general health in my lessons. A couple Saturdays ago when I was trying to explain so and so “died of” to one of my classes I tried to make them understand that in our context it is always important to know how someone died because you can gather statistics and possibly change the habits of the entire culture if there are seen to be lots of deaths from a particular cause. A student responded that life is just as long as God wills it. I asked him why then do people live longer in my country, does God love us more than he does them? That seemed to sink in.
Yesterday, however, I was reminded of the realities which I myself escape by my myriad medical examinations, vaccinations, check-ins, extensive education of threats and preventions, and unlimited supplies and care that comes courtesy of the U.S. government to each and every Peace Corps volunteer. While walking to pick up report cards from the office a student in my youngest class stopped to inform me that one of their classmates had died. Though I don’t know all of my students by name, (especially the girls, who are obliged to shave their heads making them difficult to distinguish), as soon as he spoke her name I could see her wide eyes and bright smile shining from the back row of the classroom. I went to say a few words to the class quickly and was surprised to see that things seemed to be carrying on as they would on any typical school day. I mentioned it to some of the staff as I tried to share the initial confused shock and grief that is so unfamiliar to me.
I got little to no reaction from anyone and felt angry when the Discipline Master, who Claude later explained to me should normally be responsible for organizing the students and informing the school of the loss of a comrade, came to ask me to help them plan the Fashion Show for the Youth Holiday next week. Shortly thereafter and 2 hours before school had even terminated they brought out a sound system and started blasting music on the campus. By then my 5ieme class, Olive’s class, was to begin. I went and offered a few words of condolence, asked some details of the cause of her death, and requested that a few students guide me to where she lived so I could greet the parents, offer my support, and ask permission to come to the burial.
A virtual troop of students started walking with me and, deep in reflection, I was practically at her doorstep before I turned and realized that we had accumulated in such a way. I asked the students to stay behind, envisioning that a family who had lost their child less than 24 hours before would be in such a delicate state that a mass of students was wildly inconsiderate and could be a horrible reflection on me in the village. I insisted that 2 students join me and the rest wait, but upon arriving I realized that a crowd was already gathered there. One of my older students greeted me and stood to lead me to what I thought and hoped would be Olive’s parents. To my surprise it was her little lifeless body wrapped in a bed sheet, laid out on the family’s kitchen table under a chalkboard with equations written on it. Apparently all the students, knowing their own culture better than I, disregarded my demands and were all behind me in the room before I knew it. I am not sure whether the students or my gesture, or the two things combined with their grief led all the women assembled there to move into the room with us and begin singing and crying with such emotion it could have vibrated the house. They approached the table and I understood they were telling Olive that her friends and teacher had come from school; they shook her little body as if to wake her and cried harder when their pleas were answered by her silence. Her mother stroked her face and called to her, “Tata Olive”.
My students, who while walking in the road seemed to bear a cold indifference to the loss of their classmate, now began crying, some even sobbing, as well. Even the boys had looks of fear and confusion on their faces and I felt at home suddenly among their pain. Finally, there was the intense sorrow I had expected to find since the moment I heard the news. Finally, the commonality of our humanity was before me; pain, a reaction to death I could make sense of.
We stayed there like that for an undetermined amount of time. I felt a combination of confused, awkward, sad, and somehow more mature than just a few hours earlier as I wanted to reach out to the young girls who were clearly examining the mysterious finality of death for the very first time in their short lives.
Walking back from her house the girls were very somber. They too, I am certain, had grown older in a matter of minutes. I was happy to have Claude here when I got home to turn over the whole thing with him. I kept seeing her face all last night, in the classroom, and then on that table. Her body looking just as healthy as in the class last week. I found her homework on my desk, her words written there by her hands not a week before. And now she’s dead and I can’t quite make sense of why. When you ask people here the cause of someone’s death they always just say, “an illness”. Apparently Olive fell sick over the weekend and by Monday night she was no more.
It is here where true poverty rears its head. Poverty that prevents a family from providing their child with medical care. Poverty that prevents them from understanding why or how their child is gone. Poverty that allows for the possibility of other deaths, because we cannot even learn if what killed her was actually preventable to begin with. In the face of so many unanswered questions, it is simple to comprehend why many people here explain away death by saying that it is simply God’s design, or even more say that it is sorcery, that someone cursed that person and that is why they have AIDS or whatever it may be.
I take a lot of time to try incorporating basic sanitation education, nutrition, and general health in my lessons. A couple Saturdays ago when I was trying to explain so and so “died of” to one of my classes I tried to make them understand that in our context it is always important to know how someone died because you can gather statistics and possibly change the habits of the entire culture if there are seen to be lots of deaths from a particular cause. A student responded that life is just as long as God wills it. I asked him why then do people live longer in my country, does God love us more than he does them? That seemed to sink in.
A Cameroonian Christmas
Well, somehow Christmas and New Year’s have come and gone along with my much needed and much appreciated break from teaching. Already I’ve been back in the thick of it for nearly two weeks and feel less patient with the job than I was for the first part of the year. Luckily I’m told that the first trimester is the longest because there are so many holidays for the rest of the year. I also apparently neglected to notice that the 2nd trimester had already begun before the break began meaning that next week is already time to test students again.
The break was certainly interesting and mostly good. Kribi was beautiful but we didn’t have all that much time to enjoy that aspect of it. It was great seeing the whole group again. It’s amazing how just a few months together in training really did bring us close and to see everyone again after seeing mostly Cameroonian faces everyday was more enjoyable than I’d even anticipated. I, however, was one of the few if not only lucky individuals who did not encounter any major issues while there. Over half of the group was incredibly sick with a myriad of maladies and most of the people who were not ill wound up being robbed at gun and machete-point at the beachfront bar we spent most nights in. Had I not been feeling a little sick to my stomach myself that evening I too would’ve most likely been involved.
We had negotiated to take a free personal day after the seminar had finished but with all the bad vibes floating around I decided to head out on time and meet Claude in Yaounde. I was disappointed to get a rather cold reception from fellow volunteers when I brought him into the volunteer house, especially considering that I had just been asked in Kribi to speak about my experience dating him and how it effects my relationships with the other Americans.
I suppose in some ways I can understand that a lot of people view the volunteer house as a space to be completely American and escape the natives for a day or so, but Claude isn’t like some traditional Cameroonian elder or something; in fact, I have more in common with him than I do with most of the other volunteers. When we left the house I was angry but Claude took it in stride. He said that not everyone joins the Peace Corps for the same reasons and I realized that he’s right. I signed up to be here because I really believe in the idea that human beings all over the world don’t differ all that much from one another. When I am with Claude I hardly even think about our many differences because most of them seem pretty peripheral to our true selves. I spent Christmas with his family and I couldn’t have felt more at home if I was with my own family. They discussed, joked, bickered and appreciated one another the same way any American family might.
I felt a little left behind when all the others were talking about their big travel plans to Mt. Cameroon and other tourist spots but in the end I really enjoyed the break and I think in the long run being with Claude will get me a much more intimate look into Cameroon than probably most anyone else. Plus, I still have nearly 20 months here and I don’ t need to be in a huge hurry to see everything I possibly can. To me, the holidays are far more about the company you share than where you happen to land and I am glad I made that decision. I also got to see my host family and many of the other people I got to know during our time in Bafia. They were really appreciative that I thought of them, especially those who had not heard from their volunteers since they went to post.
Another perk of being in Bafia again was getting to load up my internet key for a couple of days and Skype with Katie on Christmas morning and a bit with my family in West Union that night. Unfortunately we lost our connection before our traditional 12 Days of Christmas singing but it was great to be somewhat a part of the celebration just the same. Since my mom discovered that the phone company doesn’t actually have the international calling package they misleading sold her a month ago she is going to help me pay for internet at the house soon. Hopefully the connection will be decent enough to Skype some more because it is really amazing! Claude got so excited that he picked up the laptop and ran off with it, giving Katie a tour of his house!
I came back to discover that my closest American friend here has flown the coop and gone back to the US for good. Since being here I haven’t spent too much time with really any of the other volunteers aside from her since getting to other villages is pretty much an unavoidable pain in the neck so the reality that she is no longer here is still setting in. At least there are plenty of other people in the area so I can still catch up with them if I feel the need to. I spent the first day back in my classes going over a new list of class rules that I assembled during the break based on my ‘on -the- ground internship’ known as the first trimester. Unfortunately I don’t know if I can ever fully undo the damage that I did by coming in to class being so carefree and lighthearted. Probably the worst mistake I’ve made in country is not heeding the advice to start hard and get softer rather than the other way around. It’s funny, I’ve been watching The Wire the past couple of weeks and there is a guy who gets a teaching job at an inner-city Baltimore middle school in one of the seasons. It’s unbelievable how much his job in the classroom is like mine.
I decided that I wasn’t punishing anyone harshly enough for them to take me all that seriously before. Sending them out required always more distraction from class to ensure they would actually go to the Discipline Master; forcing them to put their nose to the chalkboard, though they don’t enjoy it, didn’t seem to do the trick. I have concluded that once kids are exposed to harsher forms of punishment it is extremely difficult to have much effect on them when you are trying softer approaches. One day I forced a few students to kneel, asking them if they preferred the Cameroonian method, even though it is actually outlawed. It didn’t matter anyway because I felt horrible that I compromised my own principles out of frustration and vowed to never do it again.
Finally I designed a plan to force the worst behaved students to stay after school with me for an hour on Tuesdays. Last week I made 3 kids pick up trash on the campus, whining and complaining all the while but eventually seeming proud of their work. Yesterday I had accumulated about 30 delinquents, though, and without someone to help me the only thing to do was to form a sort of detention. Since the whole concept is new to them I couldn’t get them to shut up or do work until finally the Discipline Master happened upon us. I was so frustrated and angry and he could tell so he too became angry with how the kids were disrespecting me. He called on one of them to explain why he was there and come to the front of the room. He picked up a 2x4 that was on the floor and hit the kid on the butt. He was about to continue beating him but I stepped in and explained that the reason they were there was because I didn’t like beating.
The entire day all the kids who I’d arranged to have after school followed me around complaining that they wanted to do their punishment during school hours rather than after school because there was a traditional dance in the village center that only happens every 2 years. In fact, my youngest class who I am with the last 2 hours of the day got in a lot of trouble because of a (rather clever) stunt they pulled when they rearranged the whole classroom to wash the floor before my class so that I would have to send them home early. When I stopped the Discipline Master he looked at me and said that sometimes you need to be savage to get your point across. I looked at everyone in the classroom and said, “Is that what you prefer? If everyone comes up and takes their 5 beatings you can all go to your party.” Everyone refused and when the Discipline Master left a series of them raised their hands to ask for forgiveness and I didn’t have another problem for the rest of the hour with them.
Some days I feel like teaching English to a bunch of Francophone village kids who barely even know French is pointless. Especially since they don’t seem to get over half the material no matter what. But, since coming back from the holidays, I have noticed some improvements. The things I’ve worked the hardest to drill in seem to have finally stuck and I feel proud of their work and my own. This week and last I had decent turnout for Girls’ Club even though now it is only my own students who come. They have started to open up to me more and are asking questions. Last week I talked to them about feminine hygiene and today we had a mini-sex education lesson. Next week a fellow volunteer is coming to do a yoga class with us.
Our time in Kribi really inspired me to begin some income-generating projects with the women of the village but I’ve put everything aside from my primary responsibilities on hold until after I take the GRE in February. I have been studying everyday and being reminded of how much I hate/suck at math. I only hope I can perform well enough on the other parts of it to outweigh how poorly I’m almost certain I’ll do on that section. It’s hard to believe that it’s already time to be doing something like that to get prepared to go back to a life in the US. It’s funny, some days I dream of being back there where I can wash dishes in a kitchen sink and take a shower without a bucket and a cup but at the same time I know that when I do get back it’s going to be a major adjustment and in the end I’m going to damn sure miss it here. Ever since my first time on this continent it’s been under my skin. It’s a place that just changes you in ways you can’t explain. Maybe it is that being back closer to the way humans were designed to be, farther from all the technology and instant gratification. Where, when I think of my loved ones I’m forced to sit down and actually write them a letter instead of just sending them a text message or a face book chat. Where I have to appreciate every single drop of water that falls from the sky, every positive interaction with someone, where every indication of minute progress in any sense is a blissful reward. In fact, I think on the whole I was far more stressed out and miserable when I was suffering through making payments on time, rushing from meetings, sitting in traffic jams, and attempting to balance the scales of social and professional life without losing my mind, even despite coming home to a host of modern luxuries designed to make life easier and better.
The break was certainly interesting and mostly good. Kribi was beautiful but we didn’t have all that much time to enjoy that aspect of it. It was great seeing the whole group again. It’s amazing how just a few months together in training really did bring us close and to see everyone again after seeing mostly Cameroonian faces everyday was more enjoyable than I’d even anticipated. I, however, was one of the few if not only lucky individuals who did not encounter any major issues while there. Over half of the group was incredibly sick with a myriad of maladies and most of the people who were not ill wound up being robbed at gun and machete-point at the beachfront bar we spent most nights in. Had I not been feeling a little sick to my stomach myself that evening I too would’ve most likely been involved.
We had negotiated to take a free personal day after the seminar had finished but with all the bad vibes floating around I decided to head out on time and meet Claude in Yaounde. I was disappointed to get a rather cold reception from fellow volunteers when I brought him into the volunteer house, especially considering that I had just been asked in Kribi to speak about my experience dating him and how it effects my relationships with the other Americans.
I suppose in some ways I can understand that a lot of people view the volunteer house as a space to be completely American and escape the natives for a day or so, but Claude isn’t like some traditional Cameroonian elder or something; in fact, I have more in common with him than I do with most of the other volunteers. When we left the house I was angry but Claude took it in stride. He said that not everyone joins the Peace Corps for the same reasons and I realized that he’s right. I signed up to be here because I really believe in the idea that human beings all over the world don’t differ all that much from one another. When I am with Claude I hardly even think about our many differences because most of them seem pretty peripheral to our true selves. I spent Christmas with his family and I couldn’t have felt more at home if I was with my own family. They discussed, joked, bickered and appreciated one another the same way any American family might.
I felt a little left behind when all the others were talking about their big travel plans to Mt. Cameroon and other tourist spots but in the end I really enjoyed the break and I think in the long run being with Claude will get me a much more intimate look into Cameroon than probably most anyone else. Plus, I still have nearly 20 months here and I don’ t need to be in a huge hurry to see everything I possibly can. To me, the holidays are far more about the company you share than where you happen to land and I am glad I made that decision. I also got to see my host family and many of the other people I got to know during our time in Bafia. They were really appreciative that I thought of them, especially those who had not heard from their volunteers since they went to post.
Another perk of being in Bafia again was getting to load up my internet key for a couple of days and Skype with Katie on Christmas morning and a bit with my family in West Union that night. Unfortunately we lost our connection before our traditional 12 Days of Christmas singing but it was great to be somewhat a part of the celebration just the same. Since my mom discovered that the phone company doesn’t actually have the international calling package they misleading sold her a month ago she is going to help me pay for internet at the house soon. Hopefully the connection will be decent enough to Skype some more because it is really amazing! Claude got so excited that he picked up the laptop and ran off with it, giving Katie a tour of his house!
I came back to discover that my closest American friend here has flown the coop and gone back to the US for good. Since being here I haven’t spent too much time with really any of the other volunteers aside from her since getting to other villages is pretty much an unavoidable pain in the neck so the reality that she is no longer here is still setting in. At least there are plenty of other people in the area so I can still catch up with them if I feel the need to. I spent the first day back in my classes going over a new list of class rules that I assembled during the break based on my ‘on -the- ground internship’ known as the first trimester. Unfortunately I don’t know if I can ever fully undo the damage that I did by coming in to class being so carefree and lighthearted. Probably the worst mistake I’ve made in country is not heeding the advice to start hard and get softer rather than the other way around. It’s funny, I’ve been watching The Wire the past couple of weeks and there is a guy who gets a teaching job at an inner-city Baltimore middle school in one of the seasons. It’s unbelievable how much his job in the classroom is like mine.
I decided that I wasn’t punishing anyone harshly enough for them to take me all that seriously before. Sending them out required always more distraction from class to ensure they would actually go to the Discipline Master; forcing them to put their nose to the chalkboard, though they don’t enjoy it, didn’t seem to do the trick. I have concluded that once kids are exposed to harsher forms of punishment it is extremely difficult to have much effect on them when you are trying softer approaches. One day I forced a few students to kneel, asking them if they preferred the Cameroonian method, even though it is actually outlawed. It didn’t matter anyway because I felt horrible that I compromised my own principles out of frustration and vowed to never do it again.
Finally I designed a plan to force the worst behaved students to stay after school with me for an hour on Tuesdays. Last week I made 3 kids pick up trash on the campus, whining and complaining all the while but eventually seeming proud of their work. Yesterday I had accumulated about 30 delinquents, though, and without someone to help me the only thing to do was to form a sort of detention. Since the whole concept is new to them I couldn’t get them to shut up or do work until finally the Discipline Master happened upon us. I was so frustrated and angry and he could tell so he too became angry with how the kids were disrespecting me. He called on one of them to explain why he was there and come to the front of the room. He picked up a 2x4 that was on the floor and hit the kid on the butt. He was about to continue beating him but I stepped in and explained that the reason they were there was because I didn’t like beating.
The entire day all the kids who I’d arranged to have after school followed me around complaining that they wanted to do their punishment during school hours rather than after school because there was a traditional dance in the village center that only happens every 2 years. In fact, my youngest class who I am with the last 2 hours of the day got in a lot of trouble because of a (rather clever) stunt they pulled when they rearranged the whole classroom to wash the floor before my class so that I would have to send them home early. When I stopped the Discipline Master he looked at me and said that sometimes you need to be savage to get your point across. I looked at everyone in the classroom and said, “Is that what you prefer? If everyone comes up and takes their 5 beatings you can all go to your party.” Everyone refused and when the Discipline Master left a series of them raised their hands to ask for forgiveness and I didn’t have another problem for the rest of the hour with them.
Some days I feel like teaching English to a bunch of Francophone village kids who barely even know French is pointless. Especially since they don’t seem to get over half the material no matter what. But, since coming back from the holidays, I have noticed some improvements. The things I’ve worked the hardest to drill in seem to have finally stuck and I feel proud of their work and my own. This week and last I had decent turnout for Girls’ Club even though now it is only my own students who come. They have started to open up to me more and are asking questions. Last week I talked to them about feminine hygiene and today we had a mini-sex education lesson. Next week a fellow volunteer is coming to do a yoga class with us.
Our time in Kribi really inspired me to begin some income-generating projects with the women of the village but I’ve put everything aside from my primary responsibilities on hold until after I take the GRE in February. I have been studying everyday and being reminded of how much I hate/suck at math. I only hope I can perform well enough on the other parts of it to outweigh how poorly I’m almost certain I’ll do on that section. It’s hard to believe that it’s already time to be doing something like that to get prepared to go back to a life in the US. It’s funny, some days I dream of being back there where I can wash dishes in a kitchen sink and take a shower without a bucket and a cup but at the same time I know that when I do get back it’s going to be a major adjustment and in the end I’m going to damn sure miss it here. Ever since my first time on this continent it’s been under my skin. It’s a place that just changes you in ways you can’t explain. Maybe it is that being back closer to the way humans were designed to be, farther from all the technology and instant gratification. Where, when I think of my loved ones I’m forced to sit down and actually write them a letter instead of just sending them a text message or a face book chat. Where I have to appreciate every single drop of water that falls from the sky, every positive interaction with someone, where every indication of minute progress in any sense is a blissful reward. In fact, I think on the whole I was far more stressed out and miserable when I was suffering through making payments on time, rushing from meetings, sitting in traffic jams, and attempting to balance the scales of social and professional life without losing my mind, even despite coming home to a host of modern luxuries designed to make life easier and better.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Whistle While You Work
10 December 2010
“I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.” - Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
At last I am free to break from the pressure of the suffocating workload I have been becoming accustomed to and come up for a few breaths of fresh air. I’m not sure what I anticipated when I volunteered for the Peace Corps, I certainly imagined there would be difficulties. I think I envisioned they would be of a different sort, however. I thought I would be learning to live without electricity, suffering through too many quiet hours to myself, boredom like I’d never known before. I guess I believed that the students would be mesmerized by my presence and so appreciative that they’d behave somehow differently than children normally do.
We have passed the six month point and some days I can hardly believe it. Home feels like such a familiar place in my mind but the thought of going back there at some point a year from now seems strange. Walking into the world of technology, skyscrapers, paved roads, running water, filled with so many apathetic individualists seems overwhelming. The world of restaurants, movie theaters, rollercoasters, and so many luxuries my students can’t even wrap their minds around.
Contrary to what I’d pictured, the real challenges have been far simpler such as the insane amount of work that teachers have here. When I first got here I did not understand why more students didn’t dream of becoming teachers as so many youngsters do back home but now I understand that it is hardly a glamorous and rarely a rewarding job to have in this country.
The first several weeks of classes in September I spent poring over the insanely dense national syllabus and combining it with the teaching program designed from the painfully lousy textbook to create a more logical schedule that I can also work thematically into a program for development. The past few weeks I have been teaching AIDS prevention and nutrition in my classes, for example. I plan to also teach about politics and democracy, sanitation and disease prevention, budgeting and saving, the environment, human rights and more. With this kind of agenda before me my impact feels far deeper than if I just taught English grammar 15 hours a week.
Due to the horrendous amount of bureaucratic work that is associated with the end of each sequence (half a trimester), we began testing about 4 weeks into school. That means I have to write tests for all 4 of my levels, then correct all 278 of them, most of which have some incomprehensible composition I must try to make sense of and evaluate fairly. Once the tests are corrected we have to average all the students’ grades, fill out several forms associated and then sign out the report cards while on the campus and fill in each one by hand with the students rote grade, the weight of the class in their studies, the weighted average, and then a remark based on their score. I was given the work of class master at my school even though Peace Corps encouraged us to refuse to do it because it doesn’t correspond well with our trainings out of town and is a lot of work we weren’t really trained to do. Given, though, that there are 13 teachers at my school and 13 classes, it would seem rather bizarre to exclude myself from a responsibility that every other teacher has, and it would also mean doubling someone else’s work. Thus, yesterday, for the second time in 3 months, I spent 6 hours in my living room calculating averages for all the subjects for my class of 54, giving them once again a remark based on their overall work, calculating the class average as a whole, and then ranking each student in the class. All things we have been using computers to accomplish in the States since before I was even in Kindergarten. Thank God I complained so much and threw a mini fit when I was originally assigned the biggest class in all the lycee.
So, this morning I will finally take my report cards into school, do a few minor corrections and walk back home in the mindset of my 3 week vacation being underway. On Sunday we head out for Kribi, a tourist hotspot on the beach that promises to be beautiful, at least somewhat relaxing, and to serve up delicious seafood. On the way home I will meet up with Claude in Yaounde, recover my package filled with much longed-for spices and clothes from the PC headquarters where I will perhaps use the uber luxurious washing machine and take a hot shower, then travel with Claude to visit friends and my host family in Bafia, where I had my training. The thought of all the free time I have to enjoy my surroundings for the first time really since arriving here is utterly blissful, and I’m very excited to have some quality time with my boyfriend where I’m not running off to work or too busy grading homework and planning lessons to pay much attention to him.
Other than the workload I have found that the biggest challenges are in dealing with things like seeing my neighbor beat her 2 young children mercilessly with a tree branch while they fall to the ground in their attempt to run away screaming. Yesterday a girl was beat at school, something I had not yet come across here. I initially thought I should just ignore it but to my own surprise I went right into the Discipline Master’s office and asked him what was going on. I told him right away that I didn’t approve of it and that it was illegal but that was really my first reaction from the shock and anger I was feeling. I headed toward the Principal’s office immediately to take it up with him but he was out and that allowed me a few minutes in the teacher’s lounge to blow off steam before I again approached the Discipline Master and spoke to him rationally about my concerns.
Our conversation was frustrating. At first I was trying to give him courtesy and respect by allowing him to finish his thoughts, but then I noticed that each time I tried to speak he had more to say. It occurred to me that my allowing him to silence me wasn’t going to get me anywhere so I finally insisted he let me finish. I know I made no impact on him whatsoever with my little speech on how even a child who may have stolen money from her parents has rights and how the Cameroonian government outlawed corporal punishment for good reasons. He even gave me a little tap on the butt to demonstrate where they hit the kids reminding me as well how inappropriate it is for a grown man to be hitting a little girl in the same way.
Despite all that, I did understand where he was coming from to some extent and I tried to rationalize that it is not a frequent thing at my school so at least they seem to be reserving it as the harshest form of punishment. Perhaps if some of the seriously delinquent children that I went to school with had gotten a red buttocks every now and then at school they would’ve straightened up a bit. He said a student that is too wayward needs a serious wake up call so as not to become later a threat to society.
Many of the kids here are essentially raising themselves. Their parents are in the bigger cities and come back here only occasionally. In the light of all that it stands to reason that the school stepping in to align children better and fill the gap their parents leave in their absence makes sense. In a land free of law suits, rampant accusations of pedophilia, and where people look at everyone’s children as their own, it is difficult to form a solid argument against their case. It still gives me a bad taste in my mouth but hell, my grandmother was beat, my mother and father, and they turned out alright. I certainly feel that the beatings are too brute, especially when given by an angry parent, even so emotionally charged that the parent seems out of control. In that way I cannot stomach it. Yet, after the event yesterday and my conversation with him, I actually did feel calmer, I did see his point of view. That doesn’t mean I condone it or like it but I accept that not everything here can be as progressive as things back home and in a country where government is another word for corruption, where people find democracy to be a joke, it’s also a joke when you come out preaching to them about what is illegal.
My lungs have been seriously suffering in the last month and a half as the rainy season came to an abrupt halt and the dry season has started kicking up dust reminiscent of the Grapes of Wrath. I was happy to hear that Christine is suffering the very same symptoms that I went to the clinic for; the dust must be responsible.
I spent Thanksgiving with she and Claude at her house, we had a meatless meatloaf (way more delicious than it may sound), lumpy mashed potatoes (anyone wanna send me a potato masher?), and banana bread. Now that I have a loaf pan and a good understanding of the Dutch oven I have been baking loads of cornbread and banana bread for all the neighbors who’ve given me loads of things since I’ve been here.
I have so many other things I could add but, it’s simply too much and I should really heat up my bath water and get my day started so I can be on time to meet Christine at the bank this afternoon. Happy holidays back home! 2011- wow! Didn’t I just graduate high school??!!
“I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.” - Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
At last I am free to break from the pressure of the suffocating workload I have been becoming accustomed to and come up for a few breaths of fresh air. I’m not sure what I anticipated when I volunteered for the Peace Corps, I certainly imagined there would be difficulties. I think I envisioned they would be of a different sort, however. I thought I would be learning to live without electricity, suffering through too many quiet hours to myself, boredom like I’d never known before. I guess I believed that the students would be mesmerized by my presence and so appreciative that they’d behave somehow differently than children normally do.
We have passed the six month point and some days I can hardly believe it. Home feels like such a familiar place in my mind but the thought of going back there at some point a year from now seems strange. Walking into the world of technology, skyscrapers, paved roads, running water, filled with so many apathetic individualists seems overwhelming. The world of restaurants, movie theaters, rollercoasters, and so many luxuries my students can’t even wrap their minds around.
Contrary to what I’d pictured, the real challenges have been far simpler such as the insane amount of work that teachers have here. When I first got here I did not understand why more students didn’t dream of becoming teachers as so many youngsters do back home but now I understand that it is hardly a glamorous and rarely a rewarding job to have in this country.
The first several weeks of classes in September I spent poring over the insanely dense national syllabus and combining it with the teaching program designed from the painfully lousy textbook to create a more logical schedule that I can also work thematically into a program for development. The past few weeks I have been teaching AIDS prevention and nutrition in my classes, for example. I plan to also teach about politics and democracy, sanitation and disease prevention, budgeting and saving, the environment, human rights and more. With this kind of agenda before me my impact feels far deeper than if I just taught English grammar 15 hours a week.
Due to the horrendous amount of bureaucratic work that is associated with the end of each sequence (half a trimester), we began testing about 4 weeks into school. That means I have to write tests for all 4 of my levels, then correct all 278 of them, most of which have some incomprehensible composition I must try to make sense of and evaluate fairly. Once the tests are corrected we have to average all the students’ grades, fill out several forms associated and then sign out the report cards while on the campus and fill in each one by hand with the students rote grade, the weight of the class in their studies, the weighted average, and then a remark based on their score. I was given the work of class master at my school even though Peace Corps encouraged us to refuse to do it because it doesn’t correspond well with our trainings out of town and is a lot of work we weren’t really trained to do. Given, though, that there are 13 teachers at my school and 13 classes, it would seem rather bizarre to exclude myself from a responsibility that every other teacher has, and it would also mean doubling someone else’s work. Thus, yesterday, for the second time in 3 months, I spent 6 hours in my living room calculating averages for all the subjects for my class of 54, giving them once again a remark based on their overall work, calculating the class average as a whole, and then ranking each student in the class. All things we have been using computers to accomplish in the States since before I was even in Kindergarten. Thank God I complained so much and threw a mini fit when I was originally assigned the biggest class in all the lycee.
So, this morning I will finally take my report cards into school, do a few minor corrections and walk back home in the mindset of my 3 week vacation being underway. On Sunday we head out for Kribi, a tourist hotspot on the beach that promises to be beautiful, at least somewhat relaxing, and to serve up delicious seafood. On the way home I will meet up with Claude in Yaounde, recover my package filled with much longed-for spices and clothes from the PC headquarters where I will perhaps use the uber luxurious washing machine and take a hot shower, then travel with Claude to visit friends and my host family in Bafia, where I had my training. The thought of all the free time I have to enjoy my surroundings for the first time really since arriving here is utterly blissful, and I’m very excited to have some quality time with my boyfriend where I’m not running off to work or too busy grading homework and planning lessons to pay much attention to him.
Other than the workload I have found that the biggest challenges are in dealing with things like seeing my neighbor beat her 2 young children mercilessly with a tree branch while they fall to the ground in their attempt to run away screaming. Yesterday a girl was beat at school, something I had not yet come across here. I initially thought I should just ignore it but to my own surprise I went right into the Discipline Master’s office and asked him what was going on. I told him right away that I didn’t approve of it and that it was illegal but that was really my first reaction from the shock and anger I was feeling. I headed toward the Principal’s office immediately to take it up with him but he was out and that allowed me a few minutes in the teacher’s lounge to blow off steam before I again approached the Discipline Master and spoke to him rationally about my concerns.
Our conversation was frustrating. At first I was trying to give him courtesy and respect by allowing him to finish his thoughts, but then I noticed that each time I tried to speak he had more to say. It occurred to me that my allowing him to silence me wasn’t going to get me anywhere so I finally insisted he let me finish. I know I made no impact on him whatsoever with my little speech on how even a child who may have stolen money from her parents has rights and how the Cameroonian government outlawed corporal punishment for good reasons. He even gave me a little tap on the butt to demonstrate where they hit the kids reminding me as well how inappropriate it is for a grown man to be hitting a little girl in the same way.
Despite all that, I did understand where he was coming from to some extent and I tried to rationalize that it is not a frequent thing at my school so at least they seem to be reserving it as the harshest form of punishment. Perhaps if some of the seriously delinquent children that I went to school with had gotten a red buttocks every now and then at school they would’ve straightened up a bit. He said a student that is too wayward needs a serious wake up call so as not to become later a threat to society.
Many of the kids here are essentially raising themselves. Their parents are in the bigger cities and come back here only occasionally. In the light of all that it stands to reason that the school stepping in to align children better and fill the gap their parents leave in their absence makes sense. In a land free of law suits, rampant accusations of pedophilia, and where people look at everyone’s children as their own, it is difficult to form a solid argument against their case. It still gives me a bad taste in my mouth but hell, my grandmother was beat, my mother and father, and they turned out alright. I certainly feel that the beatings are too brute, especially when given by an angry parent, even so emotionally charged that the parent seems out of control. In that way I cannot stomach it. Yet, after the event yesterday and my conversation with him, I actually did feel calmer, I did see his point of view. That doesn’t mean I condone it or like it but I accept that not everything here can be as progressive as things back home and in a country where government is another word for corruption, where people find democracy to be a joke, it’s also a joke when you come out preaching to them about what is illegal.
My lungs have been seriously suffering in the last month and a half as the rainy season came to an abrupt halt and the dry season has started kicking up dust reminiscent of the Grapes of Wrath. I was happy to hear that Christine is suffering the very same symptoms that I went to the clinic for; the dust must be responsible.
I spent Thanksgiving with she and Claude at her house, we had a meatless meatloaf (way more delicious than it may sound), lumpy mashed potatoes (anyone wanna send me a potato masher?), and banana bread. Now that I have a loaf pan and a good understanding of the Dutch oven I have been baking loads of cornbread and banana bread for all the neighbors who’ve given me loads of things since I’ve been here.
I have so many other things I could add but, it’s simply too much and I should really heat up my bath water and get my day started so I can be on time to meet Christine at the bank this afternoon. Happy holidays back home! 2011- wow! Didn’t I just graduate high school??!!
Thursday, November 25, 2010
The Flux Capacitor
November 11
“In the Huerfano you live at the mercy of the sky. Dry Creek’s been dry for two weeks, and the spring box didn’t refill last night. The wildflowers fade and curl, and when the hot wind blows, dust flies up in the meadows.” - A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture: Huerfano, Roberta Price
It is difficult to believe that the holidays are already just around the bend, especially when I walk outside everyday and see absolutely no signs to remind me of them. After 2 ‘winters’ in Los Angeles I have become accustomed to hanging around in short-sleeves right before Christmas but there was still Jingle Bells playing in the Beverly Center in October. It’s fascinating to be living on a school schedule again and it seems to make life move much faster than countless hours spent at a desk in my office. Not to mention how much busier I have become lately.
In addition to teaching my 4 levels 3 days a week I have started a Girls’ Club at the Lycee. That eliminated one of my free days completely since it’s right in the afternoon and breaks my time into highly inconvenient pieces. I was also approached by some women in the community regarding an organization they’ve been attempting to engineer with the other ladies of the village. We’ve gotten together several times now to toss thoughts and ideas around with whichever women come to the meetings. I also started offering Saturday classes 2 times a month to all my students so I spend 4 hours almost every other weekend letting those who come tell me what they’re struggling with. It’s really become the day I enjoy teaching the most because my classes are a bit smaller, there’s no faculty around, the kids are less over-excited and more at ease, I feel like I’m really listening and helping them more genuinely, and the environment is more personal.
Teaching has been getting easier, finally. After attending a seminar for English teachers in the region I feel more like I’m on the right track and fear less that I’m failing my students. I have stopped worrying so much if I speak French to them and feel like they understand far more because of that decision. I finally feel like they get me a little better and I notice that I’m finding my rhythm with them and kicking them out less frequently. They seem to have noticed that I accept far less than I did in the beginning of the year and respect me for it.
At the seminar I spoke with a national inspector who told me that the national syllabus is the most important guideline for my classes, which is what I had thought initially until the staff at my school told me that the textbook was the priority. I explained that I was skeptical of that considering that not all of the schools in the country use the same textbook, but they insisted. I was feeling so frustrated and trapped in the idea of having to teach from a text that is lousy to begin with. Using it as the guide gave me very little freedom to teach the way I want to teach. Luckily, because of what the inspector told me I have now found a good balance using the textbook and my own syllabus that I wrote when first getting into the village.
Unfortunately, in a few weeks I will be forced to coordinate with the other English teachers at the school to write the tests for the class levels that we share. This means that I am unsure of how my students will perform considering that I will not be permitted to design a test that reflects exactly what I’ve taught. To prevent all my students’ grades from dropping considerably I have been giving lots of homework and I will give points to those who attend the Saturday classes as well. Unfortunately this also means I have an insane amount of homework myself in grading them! Reading an essay in elementary level 2nd language English is much harder than it seems. Props to all my French teachers over the years for that!
When I’m not running off to do something work related someplace or to a language lesson, I often walk out my front door and stand on the side of the road waiting for a raggedy old station wagon to come bumping along, squeeze me in (literally), and go into the regional capital or to the village next to mine to stock up on goodies. Bahouan is one of the smallest and least known villages in the region and doesn’t appear on the map. The market is only every 8 days and there really isn’t too much to offer aside from the usual stuff I can get at the local shops anyhow. Therefore when I get low on certain things, need to go to the bank, or just want to chow on something more exotic than the typical veggies I find here, I spend the majority of my day off getting toted around, negotiating prices, and wandering all over the place acquiring stuff.
Cameroon is known to be a bread basket in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, before coming here I read that if they ever closed their borders or had a natural disaster like a drought, many people in the neighboring countries would run the risk of starving. Now that I’m in my own house and have my gas stove, (automatically lighting, thank Heaven!) I have gone back to my vegetarian diet. It’s been a lot easier than I anticipated and even all the teachers at the school are not at all surprised when I don’t completely load my plate with chicken at our staff meetings.
I can find all sorts of vegetables here; some incredibly familiar and some totally new. Most days I’ve got tomatoes, onions, leeks, basil, celery, snap peas, carrots, and green peppers in the house. It’s a treat if I go into Bandjoan and buy romaine lettuce for a salad but soon I hope to be eating some from my own yard! I’ve found beets a couple of times but think they must be out of season now. There is eggplant, zucchini, cabbage, potatoes, avocados, guava, pineapple, okra, bananas and plantains.
New things include “batons” of manioc; I am not sure exactly what part of the plant they even are but they are incredibly unappetizing in appearance. In fact, I was absolutely disgusted by them when I first arrived here. They come wrapped in banana leaves and are gummy in texture. They are a clear, whitish color with a grainy appearance and really have no taste at all but somehow I have taken a liking to them and snack on them frequently when I get home from school. There is also something they call prunes which is nothing like a prune but more like a tiny avocado but hard. If you fry them in a bit of water and oil they soften and then you eat the skin and the green or white insides around the pit. Another thing I was not too fond of until after a few samples and now really enjoy. There are what the people here call ‘potate’ which is essentially a sweet potato but with a drier and unique sweet flavor.
I am still eating as well as I was in Los Angeles and since my mom sent me the best cookbook for a vegetarian ever (which I recommend to everyone- even carnivores) “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” I cook several times a week. I’ve been eating all sorts of delicious things like homemade minestrone, bean burgers with a side of sweet potato fries, couscous topped with fresh tomato sauce and eggs poached in red wine, vegetable pancakes, cabbage leaves stuffed with lentils and rice, Louisiana style gumbo, breakfast burritos with homemade tortillas and salsa, and pasta with panfried squash and tomato sauce!
Some days it feels as though coming to Africa is what makes time travel possible (rather than Doc‘s invention). A world where you can still find cassette tapes, where McDonald’s and Wal-Mart have not come barging in with hamburgers and low-low prices, on the way to work I pass kids who can’t be older than 3 walking alone down the street, during the day I hear the little boy who lives behind me chopping wood to put on the fire they use to prepare dinner. It’s a world less controlled by politicians and more natural.
At school I have finally adjusted to being allowed to touch my students somewhat without a law suit waiting to happen. Sometimes when I reach out to put my hand on an arm or to demonstrate something, they flea my reach in fear that I’m going to hit them like the rest of the staff. I definitely don’t hit them at all or even use muscle in any way, but I have gotten more used to taking the delinquents by an arm and pulling them to the front of the class to put their noses against the chalkboard.
There are chickens grazing on the side of the road constantly and I can tell the store-owner just up the street that I’ll pay him for my bread tomorrow. When I sit in my language teacher’s little office with his ratty old books I stare into his yard at a well that looks like it should be on Little House on the Prairie with stone sides and a hanging bucket. At night I often find myself working or cooking next to a little gas lantern or a candlelight. When the water is cut off in the house I am vigilant about putting all my empty buckets outside in case of rain and if I hear the water come on I am forced to hop out of bed in the middle of the night and retrieve all the buckets from the yard to fill them as quickly as possible before the opportunity for water is lost again.
I am finally reading the book my friend Bret sent me about the Huerfano Valley in Colorado. It was a commune established by people rejecting the war and the draft and all American politics in the 60s. It’s fascinating how much their little makeshift lives on a mountainside in Colorado 40 some years ago are strikingly similar to mine here. It feels almost strange the marriage of technology and lack of development here. I can hardly ever walk into the bathroom and flush my toilet when I want to but here I am, sitting on my laptop and at the school I can get on the internet and communicate instantly just like I’ve been doing since I was 9 years old. My family calls my cell phone every weekend, and even my students have cell phones.
“In the Huerfano you live at the mercy of the sky. Dry Creek’s been dry for two weeks, and the spring box didn’t refill last night. The wildflowers fade and curl, and when the hot wind blows, dust flies up in the meadows.” - A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture: Huerfano, Roberta Price
It is difficult to believe that the holidays are already just around the bend, especially when I walk outside everyday and see absolutely no signs to remind me of them. After 2 ‘winters’ in Los Angeles I have become accustomed to hanging around in short-sleeves right before Christmas but there was still Jingle Bells playing in the Beverly Center in October. It’s fascinating to be living on a school schedule again and it seems to make life move much faster than countless hours spent at a desk in my office. Not to mention how much busier I have become lately.
In addition to teaching my 4 levels 3 days a week I have started a Girls’ Club at the Lycee. That eliminated one of my free days completely since it’s right in the afternoon and breaks my time into highly inconvenient pieces. I was also approached by some women in the community regarding an organization they’ve been attempting to engineer with the other ladies of the village. We’ve gotten together several times now to toss thoughts and ideas around with whichever women come to the meetings. I also started offering Saturday classes 2 times a month to all my students so I spend 4 hours almost every other weekend letting those who come tell me what they’re struggling with. It’s really become the day I enjoy teaching the most because my classes are a bit smaller, there’s no faculty around, the kids are less over-excited and more at ease, I feel like I’m really listening and helping them more genuinely, and the environment is more personal.
Teaching has been getting easier, finally. After attending a seminar for English teachers in the region I feel more like I’m on the right track and fear less that I’m failing my students. I have stopped worrying so much if I speak French to them and feel like they understand far more because of that decision. I finally feel like they get me a little better and I notice that I’m finding my rhythm with them and kicking them out less frequently. They seem to have noticed that I accept far less than I did in the beginning of the year and respect me for it.
At the seminar I spoke with a national inspector who told me that the national syllabus is the most important guideline for my classes, which is what I had thought initially until the staff at my school told me that the textbook was the priority. I explained that I was skeptical of that considering that not all of the schools in the country use the same textbook, but they insisted. I was feeling so frustrated and trapped in the idea of having to teach from a text that is lousy to begin with. Using it as the guide gave me very little freedom to teach the way I want to teach. Luckily, because of what the inspector told me I have now found a good balance using the textbook and my own syllabus that I wrote when first getting into the village.
Unfortunately, in a few weeks I will be forced to coordinate with the other English teachers at the school to write the tests for the class levels that we share. This means that I am unsure of how my students will perform considering that I will not be permitted to design a test that reflects exactly what I’ve taught. To prevent all my students’ grades from dropping considerably I have been giving lots of homework and I will give points to those who attend the Saturday classes as well. Unfortunately this also means I have an insane amount of homework myself in grading them! Reading an essay in elementary level 2nd language English is much harder than it seems. Props to all my French teachers over the years for that!
When I’m not running off to do something work related someplace or to a language lesson, I often walk out my front door and stand on the side of the road waiting for a raggedy old station wagon to come bumping along, squeeze me in (literally), and go into the regional capital or to the village next to mine to stock up on goodies. Bahouan is one of the smallest and least known villages in the region and doesn’t appear on the map. The market is only every 8 days and there really isn’t too much to offer aside from the usual stuff I can get at the local shops anyhow. Therefore when I get low on certain things, need to go to the bank, or just want to chow on something more exotic than the typical veggies I find here, I spend the majority of my day off getting toted around, negotiating prices, and wandering all over the place acquiring stuff.
Cameroon is known to be a bread basket in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, before coming here I read that if they ever closed their borders or had a natural disaster like a drought, many people in the neighboring countries would run the risk of starving. Now that I’m in my own house and have my gas stove, (automatically lighting, thank Heaven!) I have gone back to my vegetarian diet. It’s been a lot easier than I anticipated and even all the teachers at the school are not at all surprised when I don’t completely load my plate with chicken at our staff meetings.
I can find all sorts of vegetables here; some incredibly familiar and some totally new. Most days I’ve got tomatoes, onions, leeks, basil, celery, snap peas, carrots, and green peppers in the house. It’s a treat if I go into Bandjoan and buy romaine lettuce for a salad but soon I hope to be eating some from my own yard! I’ve found beets a couple of times but think they must be out of season now. There is eggplant, zucchini, cabbage, potatoes, avocados, guava, pineapple, okra, bananas and plantains.
New things include “batons” of manioc; I am not sure exactly what part of the plant they even are but they are incredibly unappetizing in appearance. In fact, I was absolutely disgusted by them when I first arrived here. They come wrapped in banana leaves and are gummy in texture. They are a clear, whitish color with a grainy appearance and really have no taste at all but somehow I have taken a liking to them and snack on them frequently when I get home from school. There is also something they call prunes which is nothing like a prune but more like a tiny avocado but hard. If you fry them in a bit of water and oil they soften and then you eat the skin and the green or white insides around the pit. Another thing I was not too fond of until after a few samples and now really enjoy. There are what the people here call ‘potate’ which is essentially a sweet potato but with a drier and unique sweet flavor.
I am still eating as well as I was in Los Angeles and since my mom sent me the best cookbook for a vegetarian ever (which I recommend to everyone- even carnivores) “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” I cook several times a week. I’ve been eating all sorts of delicious things like homemade minestrone, bean burgers with a side of sweet potato fries, couscous topped with fresh tomato sauce and eggs poached in red wine, vegetable pancakes, cabbage leaves stuffed with lentils and rice, Louisiana style gumbo, breakfast burritos with homemade tortillas and salsa, and pasta with panfried squash and tomato sauce!
Some days it feels as though coming to Africa is what makes time travel possible (rather than Doc‘s invention). A world where you can still find cassette tapes, where McDonald’s and Wal-Mart have not come barging in with hamburgers and low-low prices, on the way to work I pass kids who can’t be older than 3 walking alone down the street, during the day I hear the little boy who lives behind me chopping wood to put on the fire they use to prepare dinner. It’s a world less controlled by politicians and more natural.
At school I have finally adjusted to being allowed to touch my students somewhat without a law suit waiting to happen. Sometimes when I reach out to put my hand on an arm or to demonstrate something, they flea my reach in fear that I’m going to hit them like the rest of the staff. I definitely don’t hit them at all or even use muscle in any way, but I have gotten more used to taking the delinquents by an arm and pulling them to the front of the class to put their noses against the chalkboard.
There are chickens grazing on the side of the road constantly and I can tell the store-owner just up the street that I’ll pay him for my bread tomorrow. When I sit in my language teacher’s little office with his ratty old books I stare into his yard at a well that looks like it should be on Little House on the Prairie with stone sides and a hanging bucket. At night I often find myself working or cooking next to a little gas lantern or a candlelight. When the water is cut off in the house I am vigilant about putting all my empty buckets outside in case of rain and if I hear the water come on I am forced to hop out of bed in the middle of the night and retrieve all the buckets from the yard to fill them as quickly as possible before the opportunity for water is lost again.
I am finally reading the book my friend Bret sent me about the Huerfano Valley in Colorado. It was a commune established by people rejecting the war and the draft and all American politics in the 60s. It’s fascinating how much their little makeshift lives on a mountainside in Colorado 40 some years ago are strikingly similar to mine here. It feels almost strange the marriage of technology and lack of development here. I can hardly ever walk into the bathroom and flush my toilet when I want to but here I am, sitting on my laptop and at the school I can get on the internet and communicate instantly just like I’ve been doing since I was 9 years old. My family calls my cell phone every weekend, and even my students have cell phones.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)