Akwi Mafor

Reunited

2011-05-17T14:53:00.029+01:00

It was dark when we arrived, around 8 o'clock at night. We'd been in transit for about 48 hours. Above us the night was filled with stars swollen by our proximity to the Equator. Around us crickets played their legs like violins. Beneath us craters in the red earth threatened to swallow our feet, twist our ankles. The car delivered us to the edge of the antiquated palace. Crumbling statues of lions and angels leered like gargoyles. I exited one side of the back seat, my mother the other. The only light around was from the headlights, shining in the opposite direction. A crowd of women descended on me, grabbing my hands, clutching my waist, kissing my face, placing babies in my arms. Small children brought me bouquets of flowers. I accepted them gratefully in the dark, and greeted each person by name as they stepped into the dim beams of light and illuminated their faces. These were my friends I hadn't seen in four years. These were the sounds I hadn't heard since I lived here. These were the children I taught when they were toddlers. This was the place where I became an adult. I was back in Cameroon. I was home again. I looked across the hood of the car at my mother, standing alone, watching these Pidgin-speaking shadows consume me. This was her first time in Africa. She looked terrified.

When my mother agreed to accompany me to Cameroon about six months earlier, I was happily surprised. She hadn't visited me at all when I lived there as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2005 to 2007, but the situation changed slightly since then. My sisters had moved out of the house. My dad had two 80-pound Boxers at home to keep him company. My mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and finally entered remission months later. Life for my family was decidedly different than it was four years ago. When we landed at the Douala airport, dirt floored and un-climatised, I thought that Cameroon had not changed that much, maybe time moved faster in America. I steeled myself for what was to come: the inevitable onslaught of beggars, bribes, and big men with attitudes. Those things were still there. But also there was Carine at the airport, resplendent and shrieking as she dove under the security rope in her blue silk dress made just for this occasion and locked me in a bear hug, shouting, “Auntie Lindsay, you are welcome!” Carine was my best friend in Cameroon, about a year younger than me, and the newest wife to the village chief, called the Fon, who was about 50 years her senior. Carine was a queen of Guneku, and she carried herself as such. She had three daughters, Wee-Mah, who was two years old when I met her, Hope-Mah, who was 18 months younger, and Lindsay, who was born in 2008 after I’d left Cameroon. So when we arrived in Guneku the next night after riding in a taxi, bush taxi, taxi again, and finally a private car, it felt like home. It felt like no time had passed at all. But there were the children, Wee-Mah and Hope-Mah, four years older, with mouths full of awkward adult teeth that their faces hadn’t caught up to yet. And there was Lindsay, Baby La they called her, who was only one month developed in Carine’s belly when I left. No, time had not forgotten us in America, and time had not forgotten Cameroon.

Wee-Mah, 8 in September.

Hope-Mah, 6 in June.

Baby Lindsay, 3 in July.

We ate that night—we ate until, they say—rice, achu, chicken, beef, njama-njama, fufu. All food painstakingly planted, grown, and prepared by Carine and the other village women. Wee-Mah huddled next to me in her mother’s parlor on the red sofa that had once been mine and whispered, “Auntie Lindsay, I hope you’ve brought me some nice thing.” I told her I had and she smiled, satisfied and excited, and shoved a spoonful of rice past those big teeth of hers. I thought to myself how lucky I was that these children had not developed a shyness for Auntie Whiteman during the years of my absence. Mom ate slowly on the other side of me, unsure of what was on her plate, listening as the women peppered me with greetings and questions, not fully understanding this version of English. We went to sleep that night in the house Carine built, a full structure with three bedrooms and an indoor bathroom. She had intended to build an addition to her two-room house that she shares with her three daughters, younger sister, and two nieces. She planned to do this over several years, but when I told her I would be coming to visit with my mother, she cleaned out her savings and built it in just a few months. This was a welcome beyond fufu and rice, much more than I expected or deserved. No one had slept in the new addition yet; she was saving the inaugural night for her friends from America. That first evening, Wee-Mah insisted on giving the tour. She showed my mother and I to our bedrooms, each with a bed the same size as the one she slept in every night with three other people. A panicked mosquito darted around, trapped inside the net hanging over my bed. Wee-Mah grabbed my hand and said, “Auntie Lindsay, Mama have arranged your rooms very well.” Wee-Mah was beyond right.

Mom and I took our cold showers that night in the light of a bushlamp, the perfumed smell of American shampoo mingling with the fresh rain beating dust off the banana leaves outside the paneless window frame. In the dark, their stems bowed under the weight of their enormous heads. Nondescript pigs snorted in the bush. Thousands of insects chirped a refrain they repeated every night. Mamis crouched around small fires here and there, dotting the landscape, turning fufu, frying greens, roasting groundnuts. Africa on the map is huge. Africa as the space around you, on your very first night, is immense. The dark unknown swallows everything but the white of your skin: the first night in Africa is overwhelming. For me, it was sliding back into a familiar routine. For Mom, it was new. It was exhausting. It was the fabled continent.

That was the only night Mom faltered. The next morning, under the high sun, after a hard sleep, we picked the flowers and seeds off of huckleberry leaves for the afternoon’s meal. Village women stopped by to greet, to welcome, to see if it was true that I came back after all these years. We gave coloring books and jump ropes to Wee-Mah, Hope-Mah, and Lindsay, and watched as they taught themselves how to jump. Wee-Mah, 7, and Hope-Mah, 5, quickly picked up how to maneuver the fancy American version of the jump ropes they use with their friends. These, with handles and a long, braided body, took a moment to master. Lindsay, nearly 3, followed every step of the way, imitating her sisters as best she could, holding the rope in her hands and jumping up and down, not realizing and not caring that the point was to jump over the rope. Village children came after a while to watch the princesses with their new gifts from far away. A boy named Blaise, about the same age as Lindsay, watched her timidly for a long time, then stepped out and started jumping as well, just like she was jumping. For a long time, Carine has been telling me how much Baby Lindsay and I are alike in personality, but I didn't really believe it, assuming it was mostly projected by the adults around her. That day when Lindsay spotted Blaise jumping, she stopped in her tracks and yelled, "You can't jump! You don't have a rope!" Blaise started crying and ran away, and I thought, for better or worse, Carine was right; Lindsay is a lot like me.

The coloring books were a massive hit as well, a point I didn’t (and still don’t) really understand, since I toted those with me when I arrived in 2005 and none of the kids paid them much attention. But this time, they devoured the books and crayons like pirahnas: by the third day, the fresh pack of 80 crayons were tiny nubs that the kids had to clutch precariously between their index fingers and thumbs. They gathered every night, about 15 to 20 kids, on the veranda of Carine’s house, shouting, “Auntie Lindsay, look at this!” “Oh, that’s very nice, but you have to color the background,” I’d say in an attempt to elongate the life of the three coloring books we brought. “Auntie Lindsay, come check!” they’d shout again, and I’d shimmy through the little bodies sprawled on the dusty cement to look at a completed sheet on the other side of the porch. “Auntie Lindsay, see!” they’d yell, and after about two hours of this, I’d say, “Take that one to your mother, I beg.” Take it to their mothers they did, and soon women stopped me on paths during the day and asked, “Please, should Felix (or Genio, or Walters, or whoever) come up for lessons tonight?” I smiled at the simple sweetness of these questions—that the women naturally assumed I would immediately resume my teaching responsibilities upon returning to the village—and said yes, they should come.

So we passed most of our evenings in village just like that, coloring, chatting, watching a Zambian game show on Carine’s small TV, tsking each time the Fon changed the satellite channel from another building in the palace. We went to sleep around 9 each night, and the next morning, we’d do laundry by hand, stroll the village, eat. With each new stroll, the same thing happened over and over. I had many names when I lived in Guneku: Lindsia, Rin-sing, Lindsoon, Sandrine, whatever they thought sounded vaguely like Lindsay, but mostly people called me Auntie Lindsay or Akwi Mafor, a name of honor the Fon gave me after initially arriving in village. So every time my mother and I took a walk, I’d hear one of these names muttered softly, as a question, then after a little deliberation on the part of the speaker to make sure it was really the same Whiteman, they’d shout, “Auntie Lindsay/Mafor/Rin-sing!” and they’d charge me. “You have come! Thank God!” They’d hug me, hold me back, look at me, exclaim, “You are fat, eh! That’s good!” and then hug me again. I’d hold their hands and say, “I’ve brought my mother. This is her.” They’d say, “Eh-eh! Your mother! Wondaful!” They’d hug her, “You are welcome!” and then turn back to me. “Your mother is looking younger than you are!” So Mom went to Africa and was called young. I went to Africa and was called fat. This might be funny, but to be honest, not at all too far from what I expected.

On the days when we weren’t strolling aimlessly, we visited with people and chatted with the Fon a bit, but not as much as I had anticipated. His health had not seemed to deteriorate as much as I had expected, but he didn’t beckon for me unceasingly, which led me to believe that he was, at least, a bit more tired than he was four years ago. When I saw him, he remembered who I was and still had grand plans, just like he did when I was his Mafor every day. He wanted to build things, see things, buy things, make things better, or at least better in his perception. More fountains, more cars, more schools. I smiled and agreed and gave him our gifts of sugar free Life Savers and Ben Gay. He accepted them with thanks and dismissed us after 20 minutes to go back to Carine’s house in a different part of the palace grounds.

This visit had several purposes: to spend time with my mother, to see my friend Carine, to visit with the Fon while I still could, and—probably the biggest reason we traveled this far—to see Wee-Mah, Hope-Mah, and Lindsay. In between our time visiting the schools, clinics, and churches in the area, we had some time to talk to Carine. That’s a misleading statement. We talked to Carine for hours a day, but to really talk to her, to learn more about her history and why she only completed school through the fifth grade, why she became the wife of an elderly Fon, how she has plans to make things better for herself and her girls... I was surprised to hear her open up this way. We scratched the surface on a lot of these topics when I was a volunteer, but over the past four years something shifted. Some sort of trust has been nurtured. Maybe it was that we both matured, maybe it was that we’d had such a long correspondence, maybe it was that she knew now that I was not going to disappear from her life like most white people do after leaving Africa. Whatever it was, we had solid time together to talk and joke and connect, and though she was always my dear friend in village, I can say now that she doesn’t need the “in village” addendum. She’s just a dear friend. Period. Without the context of cultural exchange, without the classification of the cultural divide. Even though Cameroon is still vastly the same as it was four years ago, and though most things were just as I expected, this arrival at a new level of a genuine relationship is something that surprised me.

Toward the end of our time in village, the night before we left, the Fon called my mother and I to his parlor to say goodbye. No grand blessing for safe travel, no photo shoot in his royal outfits, no pretense. He just wanted to say goodbye. We talked for a while about current events, his diabetes, his intention for Carine to return to school. He sat in a chair designated for him alone. We sat on one of his six worn plush couches shoved into the room. Behind him two polished giant tortoise shells stood guard. On the walls, photos of himself throughout his reign looked down on us. After a while, he told us that we should go and rest, and he said to my mother that I did great things for his village, and that he knows I will continue to help his people. I don’t know how great the work that I did as a 23-year-old girl was, but I thanked him anyway. He grasped my shoulder and said, “Safe journey, Akwi.” I said, “Good night, Mbeh.” My mother and I walked through the darkness back to Carine’s house and I thought to myself that that would be the last time I ever saw my Fon. I wiped a tear off my cheek and went back to my final night of coloring with the girls.

The next morning a car picked my mother and I up at 5 o’clock. It was still dark out, and it was the same driver who dropped us off weeks earlier on our arrival night. Not much time had passed, but Mom had adapted to this place with a quickness. She walked assuredly in the dark, knowing now to duck under a low doorframe at the edge of the palace, past the rows of cocoyams that she’d helped Carine plant days earlier. The queen and her daughters lit our way with bushlamps and guided us to our rickety transport, built for five passengers but stuffed with eight. I told Wee-Mah that I would see her again before she finished secondary school. Mom and I were heading to Limbe, a black sand beach town at the foot of Mt. Cameroon, for the last five days of the trip, and Carine would meet us down there in a few days. But this was goodbye for the girls. We hugged briefly, something Cameroonians only really do to greet, not to part, and we entered the cramped car. When I did this four years ago, Wee-Mah was 4. Hope-Mah was 2. Lindsay didn’t exist. And now here I was, back in the chilly morning air of Guneku, surrounded by the cassava-covered mountains, in my Chaco sandals and head wrap, dressed for a journey that would carry me away from this place, away from these girls. It seemed almost no time had passed at all. But here I was, and here they were. Almost 8, almost 6, almost 3 years old. How old would they be when I saw them again? How old would I be? I didn’t know and it scared me, brought tears to my eyes. I didn’t know—I don’t know—when I’ll be back, but I’m certain: time won’t forget them, and neither can I.

Limbe was a welcome respite. I love Cameroon, and I love Guneku more, but to be honest, this trip was a little trying at times, just because there was no break from Cameroon. When I was a volunteer, I had my own cocoon of a house to escape to. This trip was Cameroon in our faces 24/7. Eating, breathing, sleeping Cameroon. And it was great, it was beautiful, but that first night in Limbe, Mom and I ordered hamburgers, took hot showers, and cranked the air conditioning to frigid. We slept until 10 the next morning, and when I woke my hair was soft and wavy from drying in the cold air, not greasy and plastered to my head from a night spent in sticky humidity. We sat on the patio of our hotel, overlooking Ambas Bay, and had a lovely breakfast of baguette, eggs, and fresh grapefruit juice… with ice, despite the recent cholera outbreak in Limbe.

We passed days at the beach, Mom reading novels and me being pummeled by waves, the island of Malabo on the horizon in front of me, Little Mt. Cameroon behind me, and the velvet volcanic sand squishing between my toes. I floated and pretended that it was 2006, and this was my real life, not a vacation. I was lucky, so lucky, to have ended up in Cameroon. When Carine met us the day before we flew out, item number one on the agenda was going to the beach. She had never been in the ocean, or in any great body of water for that matter. The waves were huge that day, and for a long time she said that she was too scared to get in, even though she’d somehow managed to get her hands on a bathing suit. Finally, towards the end of the day, when I headed to the water for the last time, she decided it was now or never. And so we sat, my friend and I, at the edge of the Atlantic, waves rushing up around us, sometimes surprising us by tossing us sideways. She laughed and I laughed, and we watched our legs stretched out before us sink deeper into the sand with each retreating wave and before long we were both buried, hip-deep in Cameroon side by side. She took each wave to the chest with the grace of a queen, straightening her spine, never wetting her hair. I was smacked in the face a few times, water invading my nose, hair stringy with salt. She was lean, the shade of mocha. I was round and alabaster. We were different from each other. We were different than we were four years ago. We were joined by a myriad of unlikely circumstances. Somehow, our lives have crossed. She built me a house and named a child after me. I taught her about HIV and brought her to the ocean. It doesn’t seem like a fair trade. But here we are, years later, friends still and lucky, so lucky.

Cameroon 2005-2007

2010-07-31T14:16:00.005+01:00

Bienvenue à tous!

From October 1, 2005 through November 10, 2007, I served as a Health Education Volunteer with the US Peace Corps in the Anglophone Northwest Province of Cameroon. This blog is a detailed chronicle of that time. Please feel free to browse the archives below and contact me via e-mail with any questions or comments you may have!

If you have an inquiry about re-publishing excerpts or photos from this blog, please send your request to lindsaymiesko(at)gmail(dot)com.

We are together.

Drop in a Bucket

2010-07-30T21:13:00.008+01:00

I don't come here often anymore. Life in America is life as normal now. It feels funny to type that, because I used to say the same thing in Cameroon so often on this blog: "Not much to report because life here is normal now."

My life back in America has gone along pretty well since my return in 2007. I worked on a cancer study for a few years and earned a Master's degree in International Advocacy Journalism from Georgetown University by taking night classes. Many of the articles I wrote throughout the course of my graduate work were about West African immigrants, and the journeys they take to reach America, the hurdles they face after arrival. During my final semester, I quit my day job and took an internship at the White House, reading President Obama's mail all day long. I even had the privilege of finding and forwarding to him the Natoma Canfield letter, which ended up being instrumental in passing the health care reform bill. Now I work for USAID doing administrative work, which I hope will eventually lead to more travel. But all of that is neither here nor there.

I write here today because I just got off the phone with Carine. My dear friend, Carine from Guneku, Cameroon. We keep in touch pretty often, speaking about once a month. I send her parcels every few months, with photos and games, school supplies for the Home Economic Center we started, clothes for she and the girls. She sends me pictures, which often bring tears to my eyes. Wee-Mah is almost eight years old now, tall and skinny. She wears glasses and excels in school, often coming in first or second in her class. Hope-Mah is five now, losing her baby chub, and always looks wary about having her photo taken, so different from the ham she was for my camera. Baby Lindsay I have never met, she was born after my COS, but she looks like her father, the Fon of Guneku. Sometimes when Carine calls me, she says, "Ah-ah! That Lindsay just love to eat!" I say, "Lindsay and I have that in common." Wee-Mah and Hope-Mah who learned to walk and talk and sing and count in front of my eyes are still growing now that I'm gone. Even three years later, I still ache a little to think about the fact that I exist to them only in photos and phone calls now. I've become "Auntie Lindsay," the absent whiteman who sends Christmas presents, but I wonder if they still remember "Auntie Lindsay" who ate dinner with them every night, whose lap they were not shy about visiting, who was there everyday.

Today when Carine called me, it was 4 PM here in D.C. That makes it 9 PM there. I had a voicemail from the Fon: "This is the Fon. Fon of Guneku. Carine wants to talk to you. Call Carine." I thought someone died. They never leave voicemails. I called immediately. To my surprise, Carine was not bereaved but ecstatic. The large provincial hospital in Mbingo had visited villages around the Northwest, looking for regional community outreach workers. Carine applied, and out of everyone in Guneku, she was chosen. She had an eight-day training in Mbingo on public health topics, will work in Guneku, teaching about healthy habits and attitudes, will make a salary of about 6,000 CFA ($12) a month. She's elated. She was chosen, she told me, because she already had health sensitization experience from when she worked with me.

Twelve dollars is not a lot, but it's enough for food. Eight days is not long, but it's enough to learn. Community outreach does not sound important, but it's crucial. Carine is one person, but I made a difference to her.

Three years later, the work I did still matters. This is why Peace Corps is worthwhile.

Little Life

2008-04-21T21:12:00.016+01:00

My mom made me write this post. She said I should write so that “people know it doesn’t just end when it ends.” I kind of thought that was clear with the last five posts, but okay.

So my life right now is…
-living in a DC suburb.
-mastering the Metro.
-trying to get into grad school (for Journalism, not Public Health, like some of you might have heard… that phase lasted, like, 5 minutes).
-wondering why my car is making so many funny noises.
-trying to manage my salary that is only meager because I live in such an exorbitantly expensive city.
-Netflix.
-hanging out in my styled-by-Salvation-Army-and-Craigslist apartment.
-marveling at how fast I can kill a goldfish. (I’m on my fourth one right now, and fingers crossed, he’s hanging in there.)
-working. And working. And working.
-still not getting haircuts as often as I should.
-hanging out with my (much older than me) French club.
-wholly independent.
-volunteering with the SPCA as an adoption counselor and giving fools the boot when I think they don’t deserve a puppy.
-really, really, really enjoying Michaels, AC Moore, and JoAnn Fabrics way too much and being way too crafty again.
-wishing I could wear my Chacos when I have to wear sensible office shoes.
-going to the Cameroonian restaurant in Silver Spring.
-still catching up with friends all over the mid-Atlantic region on weekends.
-figuring things out.
-no, that’s a lie… I’m more often wondering what I have to do to force myself to figure things out, but not really doing it.

Regarding Cameroon…
-I miss it. A lot. I wish I could be there. A lot.
-I talk to Carine almost weekly. I’m very sad that I can’t see her through her pregnancy and the baby when it is born this summer. And I’m very sad every time she puts Hope-Mah on the phone and she says, “Auntie Lindsay, good afta-noooon,” in her almost 3-year-old voice. She only had a 2½-year-old voice when I left her.
-I accosted a woman at a gas station when I heard her accent. She was one pump over, talking on the phone, and I went up to her and (maniacally) asked her where she’s from. When she said, “Cameroon,” I said, “Oh! Me TOO!” She thought I was nuts, but then we talked about how much Paul Biya blows and then she hugged me and now we’re friends. Awesome.
-I go to Roger Miller, the Cameroonian restaurant here, way too much, but I love the people. When I walk in, they say, “Ah-ah! Mbengwi! C’est ma soeur Camerounaise!” That’s worth paying $10 for fufu.
-When I call my friend Elizabeth in Douala, she says, “When will you come home?” And when I say, “I have to be here to make money before I can return,” she says, “What money? Find the airfare and you will never need a franc again! Myself, all of Guneku, you know we’re ready to house you. Just come back and you will need no thing.” She’s serious. She has a plan about how, as soon as I pay off my student loans, I can go back there and, “Relaaax. Just enjoy yourselllf. Enjoy Gunekuuu… You know, Lindsay.” (Have I said how much I love her?)

Regarding America...
-I get frustrated. A lot.
-I get the urge to slash the tires of every pretentious, shiny, nauseatingly oversized monstrosity (I mean Hummers) that I see on the road. Imagine my reaction when I saw a stretch Hummer limo driving through Georgetown last week.
-I love seeing old friends.
-I love mocha frappuccinos.
-I hate drying my hair. So I don’t. Even though I should. Glossy-haired J. Crew wearers who try to make me feel inferior can suck it. So can the people at Patagonia who charge $30 for a t-shirt that says "Live Simply." Stupid. People who really live simply get their t-shirts within the price range of 50¢ to free. (Do you see how America makes me frustrated?)

Okay, I’m going to pause from the list because I’m starting to get onto a (bitter) tangent, and I don’t want things to seem like that, so let me explain myself. Reintegration encompasses a lot of different things. Some are more magnified than others on certain days, but for me, the experience has gone something like this:

- Initial joy.

I survived Peace Corps! I’m back in America! I didn’t lose an eye! (That was one of my irrational phobias in Cameroon.) I have a spring mattress! Hot showers! Chipotle! No haggling! I’m pretty again when I scrub the dirt off and put on some mascara!

This phase burns bright but fast, and then…

- Panic/Overwhelm.

I have LOANS to pay. Lots and lots of LOANS. And I have to buy a car. And I have to find a job. And I HAVE TO GET OUT OF MY PARENTS’ HOUSE NOW. I have to wear close-toed shoes. And I have to wear mascara because I have to be pretty because America says I have to and I WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO SURVIVE HERE. And all Peace Corps gave me was this lousy $6 grand before taxes. Which makes way for…

- Hatred of "The Man."

All Peace Corps gave me was this lousy $6 grand before taxes and I have to buy a car and find an apartment and pay my loans and get out of my parents’ house. Oh, and my loans are a lot higher now because Peace Corps told me not to consolidate before I left because they forgive 30% of Perkins loans. But when I got home, interest rates had jumped from 3% to 8% and I accrued $5,000 on my Stafford loans because I didn’t consolidate when interest was low and I just found out that my Perkins loan was only worth $900, which means the agency saved me $300 but cost me $5,000 and counting because I’m now stuck indefinitely with this shitty interest rate. And… neat. Peace Corps, you’re really neat. No, no. No thanks necessary for the 27 months I spent chewing on cow bones and bettering the image of America abroad.

To be fair, this phase is really a combination of frustration with America, Peace Corps, and myself. America because, really, it's just too much. Peace Corps because yep, it is a government agency, and, yep, it sucks. And myself because prior to leaving, I was not aware enough of my situation to know that, BFD, it would only be $300. But in my case, as time went on, I came to resent Peace Corps more and more. During my COS medical exams, Nurse Ann screwed something up, so when I got home, PC/Washington called me and said I needed to re-do this exam. They gave me a voucher, but I was denied by all 57 doctors in Peace Corps’ insurance provider’s directory. And two of them turned out to be fertility specialists, which is not what I needed at all… No one at Peace Corps would talk to me about it, and the insurance company just kept referring me back to the directory, so as far as I’m concerned, if they want to do this test/take my body parts or secretions or whatever so they can close out my file, then they can come get it. A-holes.

So, hatred of the man lasts a little while, but in the meantime, the transition into missing your country settles in.

- Missing the Motherland.

Eventually things fall into place. I get a car—with some finagling finesse and by casually mentioning that I did just SERVE MY COUNTRY (whatever, it sounds good) for more than 2 years for no compensation, so I totally deserve a huge discount—and I find a job. It’s not necessarily a job I like, but it’s a job and it’s enough that I can live by myself. I settle. I get some furniture. (And am nearly struck by a police officer and have my windshield cracked on two separate occasions involving two separate pieces of furniture, but those stories are neither here nor there…) I sign up for Netflix. I get a birdfeeder and I have lovely Saturday mornings, taking long slow showers then lazing in my bathrobe for an hour, sipping orange juice out of my ceramic juice cup that I save just for Saturdays, watching Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal peck at the feeder, and I think, “How sweet, they mate for life.” Then I sob because I can’t ride a moto to Bamenda today. Does that transition seem irrational? Good, because it is. It happens and it happens often with no provocation and I don’t know why.

Flashbacks come a lot. I turn a combination lock on a box filled with death review folders at work and think about how I’d wake up and sit on my cold tile floor every morning in front of my trunk, spinning my combination locks to get out my laptop. I put on my Chacos and think about how the dirt that’s still stuck in the crevices was picked up on one of my hikes on the dusty roads behind my house. I think about the sun on my face. I think about how the mornings smelled. I think about how any time I sat down, Wee-Mah would stand between my legs and lean against my chest and stay there just like that for my entire visit. I think about the way the 4 o’clock sun looked coming in through my parlor curtains. I think about the sound of the vibration of my front window bars when my cat jumped through them to come inside. I think about how rough most women’s hands felt whenever they touched me because they were worn from a lifetime of farming. I think about feeling nauseous and overheated in taxis. I think about cold showers. I think about bad macaroni and cheese made with powdered milk. I think about everything. I miss everything. I regret not extending. I pray that the mediocrity of my middle-of-the-road office job doesn’t ever become comfortable.

- Normalcy.

After a while, the smoke begins to clear. Life isn’t always happy and it isn’t always exciting, but it is what it is. This is where I am now, and it’s taken nearly 5 months to get here, and I say it a lot: “It is what it is.” I have a schedule, and I’m used to getting up at 6:50 everyday, showering, eating my breakfast, getting in my car, going to work. Much of my life at this point is lived in memories; even when I’m with friends, I make many references to my time in Africa. I miss Cameroon actively everyday, but it’s not as sore as it used to be. I hate America, sometimes, often, but only parts. Parts like giant SUVs, Kaiser Permanente, George W. Bush. I hate that I feel less free here. If I wanted to run away and live in a cave, I couldn’t. I have bills to pay, so I have to work, and I have to do what I have to do, and I’m not the one deciding. I hate that it’s so hard to live simply here. I hate that it’s weird that I don’t have cable or internet (more so that I don’t want cable or internet). I hate that I can’t go out to dinner for less than $20. I hate that I can’t walk to work. I hate that I pass a thousand people each day and talk to none of them. I miss Cameroon. I miss being abroad.

I have fantasies of running away to Normandy, living in a one-room house on a hill with little rounded doorways and a small wood-burner in one corner and my straw bed in the other, and in the morning an old man in suspenders will knock on my door to bring me fresh cream and I’ll answer wearing a long-sleeve, high-neck cotton night gown, and I’ll sleepily say, “Grand merci, pa.” Wasn’t that like… The Sound of Music or something? If it wasn’t it was borne from it. The grass is always greener. I know that. I miss the best things about Cameroon and forget about the bad, just like when I was there I missed the best things about America.

I’m not quite sure what the next phase is. I think I may just sink deeper into normalcy. Make more friends, go back to school, find a different job, fall in love for real for once. Live my little life. I don’t think it’ll always be here. I’d like to ultimately get out of America again. The world to see, you know. But I thank God that I finally know it’s out there.

Anyway, the whole point of this is that it’s a slow process back into the “first world.” It’s a slow solitary journey into Peace Corps and then back out again. It takes a lot of time to figure out how to melange two very different parts of your life, and in some cases, how to merge the very different person you've become in Africa with your new/old life in America. It’s studded with some amazing and some wretched (mostly amazing) people along the way, but it is, primarily, a very personal path to travel. At least it’s been that way for me. I had to take care of me and be strong for me and I was. That’s a power and a confidence that no one can take. And even now in my little Netflix-petting-abandoned-puppies-talking-to-my-goldfish-working-on-a-cancer-study-Lean-Cuisine-for-one phase, I'm still okay. Because I have to be okay. Because I was okay in a situation often more trying than this. Because I have faith that good things are ahead. Because everything will be okay.

Mohamad Chakaki was a PCV in Wum, Northwest Province 2001-2003. He’s retroactively posting the journal he kept to a blog now. A while ago, he posted a quote that his mother had sent him, and I keep it on a Post-It in my office now:

Travel, you will find recompense for what you’ve left behind
Struggle, for the sweetness of life is in struggle
-Imam Shafi’i

Love

2008-02-26T21:26:00.013+01:00

There are certain things I love about having Cameroon in my life. Even though it hurts to have two homes because you're always missing something, I love getting phone calls at 3 a.m. because Carine can't/doesn't care to keep track of the time difference. I love Wee-Mah yanking the phone from her mother's hand to shout, "Auntie Lindsay, hear how I count to twenty! One, two, tree, foah..." I love going to Cameroonian restaurants in the D.C. area where I practically get high because I'm so ecstatic for the cramped atmosphere, the blaring Nigerian music videos, the French-speaking waitress from Yaoundé, the egussi and fufu corn, the other patrons wearing matching pagne. (Recently and coincidentally, one of those adjacent patrons happened to be my Cameroonian French professor from college who I haven't seen since before I left for Peace Corps.) I love that the Fon is in Boston presently and that he calls me sometimes to tell me about how he will meet Barack Obama and that I have to be there with him - wearing my traditional outfit, of course - so that "Obama should know you are a very special Mafor, eh." I love that Carine is pregnant! Oh, and I love that she plans to name the baby Lindsay.

And I just love more than I can say that I love a place and a people so much that I can beam all day just because of a simple meal or a short 10-minute phone call or speaking a word of Pidgin. I love a lot.

Hope

2008-02-15T23:49:00.012+01:00

Reintegration doesn't come easily. Car, job, apartment. Check, check, check. I still miss them. Photos of the girls and Carine smile down at me in my office. I look at them, at the dirt yards and mud brick walls behind them, and wonder how it can feel so much more like home now that I'm apart from it.

I feel like I should be there. Dust on my feet, sun on my face, cassava in my belly. I should be there.

Lately all I want to do is turn around and run back to Peace Corps, to do something good, to fix something broken in this world, to love somebody, to give a piece of my abundance away to someone who needs it. How can it only be a limited time in my life? I know now that it doesn't make sense. I know now that once you start you don't just stop. I feel it in my bones now that I'm back that even though Peace Corps only lasts for 800 days, once you have your eyes opened to the world, you have a moral obligation and the gift of realization to make better anything you can for the people who can't. It doesn't end. It becomes your life. It is mine. And I have the greatest pain and the greatest joy to be apart from it now and to know that I'll always have the burning in my heart. This path is winding and I may be wandering, but I know I'll be led back there, though I don't yet know from what obscure corner in the world. I know that there's more learning, more hardships, more love, and I take comfort in the fact that life is long but the destination is right and that every land can be the promised one if only we make it so.

Outer Loop

2008-01-31T22:52:00.000+01:00

We call this "The Kelli Face."

America's becoming normal again. That's good and bad, I guess.

I've been in Washington for about a month now. In that time, I've gotten a job as a Research Assistant at a corporation in Rockville, found an apartment (which I'm currently waiting to get approved for), seen my friends so many times I could vomit (kidding!), become comfortable driving on the beltway, developed an addiction to Cherry Coke Zero (and World Market and Ten Thousand Villages), and become an expert wood-fire builder. These things, as well as Safeway, Starbucks, and relying on radio stations more than my iPod have all become normalcy.

Cameroon is fading. It's unfortunate. Pidgin is slowly migrating out of my speech pattern. (Although my French is hanging in there because Margarita and I speak it to each other.) I've become so used to hot showers that I cannot fathom taking a cold one. I frequently find myself wanting to slam into somebody with my giant cart every time I enter a chaotic Costco. This from the girl who could placidly (okay, semi-placidly) sit on a 15-seat bush taxi with 30 other people for 10-hour stints. But by far the hardest thing is being away from Wee-Mah and Hope-Mah. It's particularly bad when I visit my friends or cousins who have kids around their ages. I miss them a lot more than I expected and try not to think about the fact that even though I was a big part of their lives for two of their most formative years, I may not see them again until they're teenagers. It's hard.

For the last six months of my service, my mom had a hard time getting a call through to me. I'm having the same problem now with Carine. I've only been able to get ahold of her twice since I've been home. Sometimes she calls me briefly, but it's mostly just to yell at me. Like last week when I was in the middle of Ikea:

Carine: "Sista Lin."

Me: "Yes."

Carine: "Why have you not called me up to this date? What is really wrong with you?"

Me: "I've been trying, eh, the thing is not passing."

Carine: "Okay, I have to go me. I am having no credit."

...I don't know who's dead or alive, who had babies, how the girls school is doing, or if the fon ever made it to America. (Last I heard, he was planning to come to Boston to stay with some of his children so that he could get help for his worsening diabetes.) And while it is kind of neat that I have an African queen who calls me sporadically just to give me a good tongue-lashing, I do wish that I had more of a tangible connection with the people who were my family for two years.

As time goes on, missing people is definitely the most difficult part of readjustment for me, but sometimes the transition is overwhelming. Transition can - and does - mean many different things to people in my position, but for me, it mostly means the head-on crash of my newly-acquired Cameroonian sense of time with my long-lost American work ethic. Sometimes I think that I should have never joined Peace Corps at all. If I hadn't, I would have a job and an apartment and be in grad school already. If I hadn't done that for the past two years, I wouldn't have to struggle like this now. I wouldn't have to be squashed under this sinking cement ceiling of pressure to get on with my life while time is pulled out from underneath me like a rug. Both things seem to want to put me on my ass, and they're succeeding. I think one of the bigger parts of the problem is that I don't really have a direction right now and I don't know exactly what the next step is, but everyone around me has a (conflicting) opinion about what I should do and which path I should choose right now and for the rest of my life, and they aren't shy about sharing it. But I seem to have always just stumbled upon the right things in my life, which, by luck, completely changed the course of things. Being a R.A., joining Peace Corps... (The latter of which would have never happened had the first not happened by complete accident.) So now, where's the new path that's going to pick me? ("Choose me. Love me." Grey's... anyone? No? Okay.) I'm waiting for it to show itself so that I can accidentally (and so characteristically) fall flat in the dirt, then look up and say, "Oh... well, there's something!" The American bull-in-a-china-shop in me just wants to force something to happen right now, but my faith in a fate that'll fit and my new Cameroonian slow-trickle hourglass wants to be patient. Sometimes I wish I'd extended.

I guess it's foolish to say that these things just happen to me, instead of me making them happen, and I do, obviously, have a hand in bringing them about, but these opportunities that present themselves to me, often pop up in ways that I don't have much control over. So maybe it is foolish to think that the next great adventure will just lay itself out in front of me and invite me to take a stroll, but I do have a certain amount of faith that everything will be okay. And fun and great and sometimes exciting... because that's what it has to be.

A few months ago, my friend Elizabeth (the well-educated doctor who was from Mbengwi but now lives in Douala) wrote me an e-mail. I had told her about my trip to South Africa and that I was now at home, looking for a job. She's been to South Africa, and to America several times, and she said, "After traveling to other places, I get one simple fact: We carry along with us the potential we need to be happy no matter where we are."

And while I don't know my next step or my dream future, I do know that I have behind me and always with me a love and a confidence that I had to go to the other side of the world to grow. ...And an African queen who cares enough to call and yell at me. It's a pretty precious consolation.

Splat

2008-01-01T05:41:00.000+01:00

I took the last of my malaria prophylaxes (yes, more than one) today. Does that mean Africa's supposed to be out of my system?

Things here are still going, going. This blog won't be going much longer, but I think that the readjustment phase is an important part of the whole Peace Corps picture, so I'll do a few more updates until I feel I've come full circle.

The holidays came and went. Whatever. I never have been a very big fan of Christmas, so that was more of the same. Maybe I'm just a brat, but I think a big part of it this year was because I missed my Cameroon family. There's something so much more inclusive about being stranded in Africa – being adopted by a village and being part of a network of people who are going through the same thing, who are alone and apart with you – than there is about being here, being a drudge on the conveyor belt, going through the motions of a traditional Christmas, not because you're into it, but just because it's what you do. Buy a bunch of stuff that no one will appreciate (or be a cheapskate, sure to be hated for a full calendar year if you don't), church on Christmas Eve (hold a candle and sing "Silent Night" or forever be a black-sheep heathen), receive a bunch of things you don't need on Christmas morning (smile and like it anyway or be a rotten ingrate), and it's over. I just never did like it. And while the 10+ obligatory plates of rice that I had to choke down every Christmas day in Cameroon were not something I looked forward to any means, there was something free and refreshing about not getting/giving gifts, but just being with people who are grateful for a day to visit each other. There were so few obligations, so few expectations besides just being there, at least for me, that the holiday was actually a holiday.

Sisters and Christmas.

Cousins and Christmas.

Anyway, beyond the holidays, I'm slowly moving toward my future. ...Actually it's more like one sharp lurch, then a prolonged halt... lurch, halt, lurch, halt. Back to America (lurch), no job, no car (halt). Finally bought a car (lurch), still in my parents' house (halt). Put out a bagillion resumes (squeak squeak squeeeeak), no job yet (halt). Moving to Washington this weekend (lurch), ...then what?! (halt, splat).

But I'm excited to go this weekend. I love my parents, but living in this house does not make me the same Lindsay that I have become over the last several years. Living in this house makes me the stunted adolescent version of Lindsay, in constant need of rigid direction. Coming home is stressful, in general. I'm already walking back into a situation where I have to find and buy a car, find a job, find a place to live, and figure out how to balance my $25,000 school loans and the rest of my bills. I know that all of those things are there. I don't need additional stress by being asked everyday, "Did you find a car? Did you call about insurance? What are you going to do about consolidating your loans? Did you send out resumes? You need to get a job, little girl, your money won't last forever." I know. I love, love, love my wonderful parents who always did what they could and what they thought was right for me, but I know. I'm a big girl. I survived in Africa. Alone. I know. My parents wanted to raise an independent girl. And they succeeded. Ashia for stubborn woman pikin.

I'm hoping that re-entry will start to get easier soon. I know it'll be better when I feel like I'm on my feet and independent again. But that's probably a few months off. In the meantime, I'm finally going to see most of my friends in the upcoming week, which I'm looking so forward to. So far I've only seen four of my friends, and only once or twice. I haven't had a lot of quality time yet or the chance to just chill the eff out and laaaaaugh and talk and be me again. I just hope that we're all the same me's we used to be. ...Or at least that we're new me's who are still compatible. Some of my relationships (gloriously) haven't shifted an inch. But with some people, that's just not the case, and I don't know if it's me or them who have changed. It's just frustrating that everything is, or has the potential to be, a hurdle right now, even things that used to be the most natural parts of my life. Nothing's easy. Halt. Splat.

Peace Corps Hangover

2007-12-12T02:31:00.000+01:00

Readjustment is turning out to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Even though I'm only about a week and a half deep, it's rough. I think it's mostly because I have a hard time sitting still, and haven't been without a job since I was 16. But now here I am, an RPCV, with no job, no income, no car. I've only been able to leave the house once in the past week. I'm a 25-year-old loser.

I'm trying hard not to feel that way, but there is a certain pang of uselessness to my current lifestyle. I can't even take the dog for walks in the woods because it's hunting season. So instead, it's me and a whole bunch of America's Next Top Model, which, you know, is cool... I love Tyra, but enough is enough. And 10 days of inactivity is more than enough.

I've applied to about 20 jobs, but that doesn't make me employed. I've organized, renamed, backed-up, and appropriately sorted the 3,000 photos I took while in Africa, but that doesn't make me productive. I've eaten Reese's Pieces, turkey sandwiches, and Special K Red Berries, but that doesn't make me happy. God help me, I miss Cameroon.

I was talking to Kelsey last night about this and she asked that, if I could, right now, get on a plane and fly to Bamenda right now, would I? Well, no, even though I miss it, I probably wouldn't, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I am happy, in general, to be in America again, even though I'm not happy with the current state of my life.

It's a strange time and it's a difficult compound of circumstances: to have this whole other section of my life, which was my entire life for a very long time, just vanished, swept away, and I'm supposed to forget about it and move on. (Except, of course, when I wax nostalgic in interviews about why it profoundly changed me.) I can't. That's not how it is, and it's not a trivial thing. I know it's life, and life moves forward and you have to leave things and people behind, but it's hard. It's hard because it's real. Africa is not some far off place filled with lions and HIV and poor starving children with flies on their eyes. It's Carine, never looking any less than regal in her tailored dresses. It's knocking down breakfast off of my papaya tree each morning. It's the women who plunk one of their children onto my lap in a crowded bush taxi without asking permission. It's Hope-Mah learning how to roll over, and crawl, and walk in front of me, then one day saying for the first time, "Auntie Lindsay, ashia." It's all of these things and more. And readjustment is hard because I had a life filled with all of these little things, a life that I had carved out and made for myself in a place that was lacking so many creature comforts and now... I'm in the land of plenty, but I have no life. Not yet.

I've been meaning to make a list, and now is the appropriate time, I guess, while I'm thinking about my Africa. Here are some of the things I miss already about my home-away-from-home.

1.) Fufu corn and njama-njama.
2.) Carine and the Fon.
3.) Talking Pidgin. (And French sometimes.)
4.) Being a Mafor.

5.) Songs that the kids made up with my name in them.

6.) Lots of public transportation. (Miserable though it may be.)
7.) Colin.
8.) Climbing hills.
9.) Good cheap bakery bread. (Not to be confused with the square bread.) ... (Or with Pee Bread.)
10.) Feeling like I accomplished something after cleaning the house/washing my clothes because it took all day long.
11.) The Case.12.) Bargaining.
13.) Being okay with not doing a lot (by American standards) because I was still doing as much as I could.
14.) Not having internet, cable, hot water, a plush bed, phone service, a refrigerator, an oven, or whatever else in my house. ...Seriously, how can you truly appreciate anything if you always have everything?
15.) Looking forward so much to market every 8 days! 16.) Shopping for fresh foods then spending all afternoon making my dinner.
17.) Bootleg CDs/DVDs. (All y'all still over there, we can work out a package-exchange plan, if you'd like.)
18.) My preschool class.19.) All (okay, like 99%) of the women in my village.
20.) My village in general for that matter.
21.) My pretty house that I worked so hard on.
22.) Shortwave BBC and tea in the morning.
23.) Reading by bushlamp.
24.) Smol Smol No Be Sick.
25.) Adam fruit. (!!!)
26.) Cheap sangria in 2-Liter bottles.
27.) Making my excellent Not-Spinach-and-No-Artichoke dip.
28.) Sleepovers in Bafut. 29.) Kids coming to greet/playing in my yard/generally loving me just because.

30.) Getting soaked washing my dishes in the rain.
31.) The immense excitement of having a new TV show on DVD passed on to me.
32.) Having my iPod be the most expensive and precious thing I owned.
33.) Building relationships over text message. (i.e.- Gaining so much happiness out of no more than 240 characters at a time.)
34.) Hiking mountains to get to a place where I had enough service to send/receive text messages.
35.) Afternoon naps under my tin roof during rainy season.
36.) My deaf neighbor's dog, Pelle, who was the only dog I ever saw come running because she was happy to see me, instead of constantly cowering around people because she was beaten so much. (A week before I left post, someone poisoned Pelle and she died.)
37.) Khokki corn.
38.) Being independent.
39.) Constantly learning, growing, and feeling like my life and my outlook was shifting for the better.
40.) Little kids with cute hair, before they have to shave it all off to go to government school.
41.) Limbe. ...Specifically going to the beach in Batoke for the first time on each trip, trekking on a path through the bush down a steep grade, buying mangoes from the man that lived in a shanty on the way, to get to the place where the shore suddenly spreads out in front of us, and men nap in their hollowed-out fishing boats until it's time to pull them into the water again. Yeah, I miss Limbe. 42.) Titus the Tailor and his sometimes completely wrong creations.
43.) Living in Chacos and flip-flops.
44.) Poisson brassée and baton de manioc.
45.) Getting together with other stir-crazy volunteers and finally having a lose-your-breath laugh for the first time in 3 months.

(Starring Ingrid, Stacy, Lindsey, Jenny, and Justin. imu!!!)

46.) Pagne everywhere.47.) Loud, overbearing, blunt people. Mostly just because I could be loud, overbearing, and blunt without having to feel bad about it.
48.) Lizards chirping in my ceiling.
49.) Benskin rides.

50.) The pleasure of receiving packages.
51.) Awesome/insightful/ridiculous phrases painted all over anything with wheels.
52.) My girls, Wee-Mah and Hope-Mah, who never failed to make the most wretched day somehow bright again.

"AFRICA: Not For Sissies?" (Holiday in South Africa)

2007-12-01T21:49:00.000+01:00

During my vacation in South Africa, I met a man named Joseph who wore a hat that read, "AFRICA: Not For Sissies." In Cameroon I would have agreed. In South Africa I did not. A sissy could fare just fine there. Shopping malls in every little town, KFCs on the corners, and superhighways linking them all, so that your pedicured little toes never have to step in any less than a Mercedes. Granted, I did not see the interior provinces, so I'm sure some parts are rough; there is Peace Corps in the country, though I'm still scratching my head as to why, and despite all of the mansions lining the most pristine of coastlines, South Africa still boasts the highest HIV rate in the world. (I say I don't understand why Peace Corps is there because, although some people do live in shanty villages, they're all under the jurisdiction of a government that can afford and realize impressive infrastructure, quite unlike most other African nations. So even though the need is present, it seems that it can be satisfied without the help of other countries' development organizations. But, who am I to say Tschetter should reconsider? After all, I've only been to the hoity-toity parts. ...But I mean, still... they're there.)

Anyway, despite my constant stupefaction at the fact that the roads are paved, that bush taxis are not packed to the point of passengers' painful pins-and-needles, that they're not really "bush taxis" at all, that there's frozen yogurt, that you can wear a purse on your shoulder and not constantly be aware of the fact that someone could just yank it off your body like candy from a baby, that there are trash cans and that it's a crime to litter (what?!?!), it was still a lovely vacation. It's like a commercialized version of what you picture Africa to be like: safari, animals, women in traditional garbs for the sake of a rand. And people were calm. It was nice to let my guard down and enjoy the beauty (and the malls) of the place, but it's certainly not my Africa. People didn't bargain animatedly and get in heated arguments over fufu like they do in Cameroon. I was out of place, and as much as I've complained about how challenging West Africans can be, I miss their vivacity. So by the second week, when I met two Cameroonian men from Buea selling in a market in Stellenbosch, it easily became the highlight of the trip and I had no choice but to stay, speak Pidgin, and enjoy my people. I'm just now starting to realize that I became one of them, now that I'm apart from them; I'm homesick.

But for now, that is neither here nor there. What's here right now are a billion pictures of my fabulous trip:

Kruger National Park

We found this chameleon on the side of the road and then he changed colors to match my outfit. I like that in a man.

Aunt Jean, Margarita, me, and Penni on safari.

Our luxury bush cabins in the park.

Camp's dining area.

First ride every morning at 5.

Leopardshelled tortoise.

...Female for some reason...

Margarita, Aunt Jean, and I.
(I'm, like, way appropriately dressed for safari.)

Mon dieu! Les buffles!

Regardez-moi encore une fois.

Old pa.

The red hornbill that lived outside my cabin.

Going for a Guinness. Typical.

Tree shredded by an elephant.

Plus des buffles!

Bottlenecker.

Leopard...

...killed some baboons...

...took them up in a tree...

...and kept them there.

Rhino.

Bushbucks. Or kudus. Or impalas. Something.

I ate zebra for dinner in Cape Town later in the week. Seriously. It was steaky and delightful.

Our guide Morris.

Cape Town/The Boulders/Cape of Good Hope

A tour bus in Africa? Seriously?

Trip to a township preschool.
Cute. But not as cute as my Guneku daycare.
(In Cameroon to knock, people say "kwonk kwonk." Apparently in SA, they say "kgo kgo." Or something like that.)

Shanties on the road.

Shanties on canvas.

Kids swimming and sunbathing at Camps Bay.

Craft market. Where people take the time it took them to make something into consideration for the price, instead of just the quality of the materials. Weird.

The waterfront under a full moon.

Art in Alfred Mall above and below.

Table Mountain cable car.

Mandela in thread and Mandela in stone.

Football sign in downtown Cape Town.

Baboons on the road.

Baboon in a Dutchman's car.

Baboon on our car.
(He tried to get in, but we'd locked the doors.)

I know that now.

But they still kinda scare me.

Bienvenue to the bottom of Africa.

Birds on a ledge.

Cape of Good Hope.

Petting cheetahs at Spier, who were napping, not tranquilized.

My new friends from Buea, Felix and Thomas. They gave me ridiculously below-cost prices because I be na Kamerun woman.

Me with some penguins at The Boulders.

Quack.

Penguins are no good squashed.
Just like leopardshell tortoises.

What the hell else would you do with your empty Castrol can?

Knysna/Stellenbosch/Plettenburg Bay

Beach at Mossel Bay.

I like elephants.

And they like me.

Trunk kisses.

I also like parrots.

But I got way too close to this one.

How to get to anywhere from Knysna.

Sailboat. Pretty.

Hella ready to see some whales in the Indian Ocean.

No such luck.

Thumbs up for Tsitsikamma and goodbye to South Africa.

Home Again, Home Again

2007-11-15T19:07:00.000+01:00

I've been home for about 4 days now. It's been okay. Okay, I mean in terms of not freaking out. Great, in terms of seeing my family again. But I don't think I'm going into readjustment mode yet because I don't feel like I'm really home yet. I'm leaving on Sunday to go to South Africa for two weeks. (It was cheaper and easier for me to fly from America to South Africa than from Cameroon to South Africa. Plus this way I don't have to tote my stuff all over the continent.) After that, I'll be looking for a job and a car and an apartment, so then... I'll be home for real.

I talked to my friend Rebecca on the phone yesterday. She was a PCV in Cameroon with me, but left back in March due to extenuating circumstances and a broken collarbone, so she's already been through the readjustment. She said the first month was okay because she was happy to see everyone, and then she had her crisis. Freakouts at Wal-Mart, irrational anger at the culture, and whatnot. When we were hanging up, she snorted and said, "Have fun with readjustment." By my calculations, if I run the same schedule as Rebecca, I should hit rage and fury right around Christmas. Looking forward to it.

It is kind of strange being here. I mean, it's not like it's not home. And I did come back once to visit about 15 months ago. But still. I got a new phone and I didn't have to argue for the price. I don't have to have a death hold on my purse when I go out with the zipper always positioned towards the front instead of behind where people might sneak their hands in. It took me 10 minutes pick out a toothbrush because there were so many. And people here don't greet. Is it so crazy to say hello when you pass someone on the sidewalk? America is weird.

In a way, I don't feel like I should be here yet, like Peace Corps was way too short. I keep having dreams about still being there, about getting ready to leave and knowing that I should leave but not being able to. Other volunteers, ex-boyfriends, Cameroonians all pop up, and in some way, whether emotionally or physically, hinder my leaving, and tell me that I have more to do before I can go. The place, the people, and the work are still very much on my mind and very much a part of me, but it's over. All of the sudden, the cord was cut, and that life is finished, and I'm supposed to be back to turkey sandwiches and Grey's Anatomy like it never happened at all. I adopted a whole new life and worked like hell to make it home for two years, and then I'm just supposed to go back to normal? It's hard and strange and difficult to describe.

I took Lucy for a walk today and it started to snow. It's been about 3 years since I've seen snow. I ran for the camera to document the moment. It could be a long winter.

"On va partir or weti na?"

2007-11-11T00:42:00.000+01:00

I’m stuck in Pittsburgh airport right now. And God help me, I’m enjoying myself.

I graduated from Peace Corps on Thursday. They gave me the coveted COS pin and gonged me out. Kim (my APCD) said things that were much too nice and I cried, like the fool that I am. It’s the first time that I cried in public about leaving Africa. And it’s really strange that I’m officially now an RPCV. After a year and a half application process and more than two years there, all of the sudden it’s over, and I succeeded. I did it. I completed it, and with nothing but praise from my superiors. I’m sad and proud and don’t really know how I feel yet. There are too many things going on, too much rushing for me to feel much yet.

I left the Case last night at 7 after a frenzied day of trying to pack and make things weigh what they were supposed to weigh. In the end, I left everything behind except for those that were irreplaceable. So, all my clothes, toiletries, underwear… all gone. And my stuff was still overweight. I had to pay an extra 12,000 which, evens out to a little less than $25, so it wasn’t bad. I should have packed more, but, on va faire comment?

All of my flights but the last has gone smoothly. Yaoundé to Brussels, Brussels to New York, New York to Pittsburgh. Yaoundé was calm this time, not like the last time I tried to fly out. (Remember a little over a year ago when, in 5 hours, I couldn’t get to the check-in desk and got pushed down twice?) Even New York, where I only had about an hour between my flights and had to go through customs and claim and re-check my bags, everything was efficient, if not exactly pleasant. A little valium, a little chicken tikka tikka, and things aren’t too bad.

Then I got to Pittsburgh. Just when I thought I’d left transportational incompetencies behind in Africa, along came Pittsburgh. You see, the flight for Johnstown is booked. It’s supposed to be there. And the flight information is everywhere it’s supposed to be, all over the airport. Only someone forgot to tell the man who gets the planes that there’s supposed to be a plane going.

So now I’m here waiting. But it’s really not so bad. It could have been my flight out of Brussels that was delayed and then I’d have had to reschedule everything. But it was my very last flight, the one back to Johnstown, so it’s not such a big deal. It's actually kind of nice waiting here in Pittsburgh. There’s wireless internet. And a giant, clean waiting room. And restaurants. And carpet. Shoot, do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen carpet? They announced that the flight was going to be delayed for three hours and the other (ten) passengers started yelling at the ladies working here. So I started laughing at the passengers. I mean, come on, you’re waiting to get on plane, on which you’ll have your own seat, and in the meantime you have to wait in a place with free internet and flush toilets? Poor you. And most of the time flights actually leave on time. Try living in a place where nothing is ever on time. Ever. And while you’re waiting on a dirty, crowded 5-to-a-3-person bench with some pa’s smelly armpit in your face, kids are begging money or trying to sell you fake Dior sunglasses or stealing your purse.

It’s good to be me right now. Despite the fact that I’ve been traveling for 29 hours and have an indefinite number of hours left, despite the fact that I am wearing Chacos and capris when it’s 40° out and look like an idiot, despite the fact that I keep saying, “Oui, non? On part na or weti?” and inappropriately picking my nose even though I keep reminding myself not to, I am the only one in this place who has some sort of contentment about just being here.

Africa is good for the soul. Or at least it’s been for mine.

Tresse Moi

2007-11-09T18:43:00.000+01:00

My flight leaves Cameroon in 5 hours. I'm leaving for the airport in 15 minutes. I needed my hair braided so it'll stay out of my face for the next 36 hours and no one here can braid, so I ran to the bar across the street and asked the barmaid if she'd do it. She dropped her rag and tressed me on the spot. This is the kind of thing I'll miss about Cameroon.

Mi Casa en el Medio de la Calle

2007-11-04T19:47:00.000+01:00

In all of these two years, I've kept my house off of this blog. For a while I was going to put photos of it up, and then people attacked my house, so that deterred me some. But now that I'm out of the house, there's no reason to not show off all of my hard work/how a PCV in Cameroon lives. When I moved in, all of the walls were either gray concrete or whitewashed. Those of you who know me know I couldn't live like that, so I painted everything (everything) with my bare hands. I couldn't find a roller in Cameroon, so I had to use a brush. It took four months, but the end result was a house I loved and a home I'm sad to leave.

Outside my house.
Colin stands guard, and that flimsy tree branch in the front yard is what held up my power line, which was a composite of several other power lines knotted together. But it worked, so ça va.

Parlor before.
(Yes, the house came with plastic lawn chairs. Those are a hot home accessory here!)

Parlor after.

My big beautiful burgundy couch.

I wanted a brown couch, but on the day that I ordered it, I was wearing a burgundy tank top. I told the carpenter to buy upholstery fabric that was "plain brown, plain like this!" and I pointed to my shirt, meaning I didn't want ugly flower print, but he interpreted it as brown like this red. Hence, burgundy velvet couch.

Parlor again.

Kitchen before.

Kitchen after.

Those hanging baskets are the baskets that the mamis in the market use to sort groundnuts. I hung them up with dog chains. Aren't I creative? And that fridge never worked.

Crazy MTN-yellow kitchen.

I got this line out of a Twista song, not out of the Bible. Seriously. But I did this mofo freehand. Holla.

That big blue thing is my Peace Corps water filter.

Pretty foyer.

That scarf on the mirror is from China. (Thanks, Emhead!)

...not a destination.

Hallway. And my dartboard with no darts.

My bedroom before.

And after.

I love words.

My comfy bed with two foam mattresses.

Katie made me that Cameroon flag pillowcase!

Guest bedroom #1.

With doves, because, come on... PEACE Corps.

Bathroom before.

Blue after I was through with it.

I keep that chair in the bathroom because sometimes I like to sit when I take my hot bucket baths.

My little hobbit doors that were only 5'8" high.

Okay for me, bad for boy visitors.

Guest bedroom #2.

The carpenters had a really hard time making that dresser.

Ça n'existe pas ici.

...And some of my way fun artwork that will be hanging in my house in America.

So there it is. My beloved abode. Aren't you sad you didn't come visit?!

The Last Days

2007-11-03T23:38:00.000+01:00

Sunday, 28 October 2007
I left Yaoundé this morning. I was in town over the weekend to take the GRE on Saturday morning. It went okay. Mostly I’m just glad to be done with it. Last night I was up late (too late, like until 2:30) playing beer pong with some other volunteers, because, really, what else would we do with a ping-pong table at the Case? I had to get up at 6 this morning to go back to post.

I was actually pretty sad to leave Yaoundé this time. I only have 5 whole days left at post, 12 left in the country, so today was the last time I’ll see other people from my stage, since I’m COSing alone next week. Ingrid almost made me cry like she always does when I leave her, that bitch, but I am glad that so many of them were around. There were 8 other people from my stage at the Case this weekend for various reasons, so at least I got to say goodbye at all. Another girl from our stage was in Yaoundé but she was at the hospital because she has cerebral malaria. That’s what happens when you get regular malaria and it decides to travel to your brain and make you go crazy. It’s pretty serious, like serious enough for them to be medevac-ing her tomorrow, but hopefully it’s early enough that she’ll recover.

Anyway, so I had to leave the Case at 7 this morning, and make my very last trip back to Bamenda from Yaoundé. I left with two other volunteers who were traveling to Bafoussam, because it’s quicker for me to get an early bus to Bafoussam then catch a bush taxi to Bamenda, rather than take a bus from Yaoundé to Bamenda. So we went to Tongolo to get a bus, and Tongolo, as usual, was hellish. I didn’t have any bags because I left all my stuff at the Case, since I’ll be back in a week, but the other two had bags in the boot of the taxi. Chargeurs from various agences, took it upon themselves to open the trunk, grab the bags, and run away with them, as they usually do, so the other two had to jump out of the taxi and run after their things. While I was standing waiting, a man in a personal car with 3 spots open came up and asked if we’d ride to Bafoussam with him. Lucky. When they got their bags back, we went with him, and a few minutes into the trip, I found out he was, in fact, going all the way to Bamenda. Very lucky.

So, voitures personnelles are by far my preferred way to travel in this country. But this car was something. It had a DVD player. We watched music videos on the way back. So imagine my surprise when the car started smoking about 30 minutes outside of Bafoussam. Actually I wasn’t surprised at all: it’s very fitting for one of my last road trips in Cameroon. Just when you think things are perfect, Africa reminds you that you’re still in Africa. So we waited for about an hour for this man to fix his car. He pulled off the steering panel and was, literally, ripping wires apart. His alarm system had malfunctioned and interfered with the horn which interfered with the starter. Or something. Just when we had hailed another car and I thought I was doomed to a bush taxi ride back to Bamenda, the man got his car working and drove us the rest of the way. Again, lucky.

The other two dropped in Bafoussam and I continued on alone with the guy to Bamenda. It was nice to be able to enjoy my last trip into the city in a comfortable car. The drive from Yaoundé to the Northwest Province is really pretty amazing. It gets increasingly hilly and chilly as you move further west, and when you finally reach the Northwest, careening too quickly to be safe on curvy mountain roads, Bamenda suddenly appears, spread out in a valley below, surrounded by green mountains and waterfalls. It really is beautiful. And it really is weird that today was the last time. The last time to see my Peace Corps friends, and the last time to see that view of my city. That’s the word I hear most when people describe the fact that they’ll leave this place soon: weird. And that’s how it is that I’ve had so many “last times” today: weird.

Monday, 29 October 2007
Today is my sister’s birthday. She’s 18 today. She was 15 when I left. I’ve been here for more than 2 years and it’s already almost over. Weird.

I taught my last class today at the home economic center. All of the ladies were there with the girls and they presented me with a caba that they had worked on together. That makes 3 cabas so far that I’ve been gifted and I know for a fact that I have more coming. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them all. But I accepted the one this morning gratefully because it really is sweet that they did that for me.

The teachers in the school know that I’m leaving on Saturday, but the girls don’t know yet. It’s a pretty closely-guarded secret. Only about 7 people in village know. That’s mainly Carine and the fon’s doing because robberies systematically happen when people know you’re traveling. They assume that you have money in your house that you’ve saved to travel with along with your plane tickets and valuables packed together, so it’d be easy for them to steal; they wouldn’t have to search all over the house for things. Plus it’s the season for robberies, so that ups the probability. Of course, none of that is the case with me. My money is in the bank, my plane tickets are being held by Peace Corps until the day I fly out, and I’ve already moved all of my valuables down to Yaoundé except for my laptop. But still, my departure date is a secret so that nobody disturbs me. I’m not having a big send-off and this blog won’t be posted until after I’ve left village.

But people still know that my leaving is coming soon. I said I’d be here for two years, and people can count. Some are begging me gifts. Some are insisting that I give a send-off for myself. Like, I pay for my own send-off. I’m pretty sure they just want free meat. It’s not going to happen. More people will probably know that I’m leaving soon after today. Alli, a new SED volunteer who went to post in August, is coming to my house today. She lives in Bali, a town nearby, so she’s coming to take some of my things, including my cat. When people see a load of stuff leaving with her, I’m sure they’ll know I’m leaving soon too. But they don’t know the date, and whenever people ask, I lie and tell them December. Carine told me to do it, and I can’t say no to an African queen.

Tuesday, 30 October 2007
Alli and I had to transport Colin back to Bali today. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The cat decided (15 minutes before we were set to leave) to go outside, then to not come when I called him. I called him for nearly 2 hours before discovering that he had crawled into the ceiling. So I had to go up after him. Then I had to shove him in a basket, wrap the basket in electrical tape so it wouldn’t come open, strap him on the back of a motorcycle and take the hour-long ride into Bamenda. The whole situation was rather unpleasant for both of us.

When we finally got to Bamenda, Alli, Colin-screaming-in-a-basket, and I had to get a car to Bali. The ride to Bali isn’t particularly bad. It’s 20 minutes from Bamenda and all paved to Alli’s house. But we just wanted to get the cat to her house quickly, so instead of cramming in a share taxi, we decided to depot a car. In Bamenda, it costs 1500 francs to hire a car for an hour. It just always does. But this driver, right off the bat, was a prick. He put another person in the front seat, even though we had rented the whole car, saying, “This not a passenger. This my mother.” The woman was maybe 10 years older than him, and I didn’t like her either. They kept talking about us in the patois, like I’m a stupid whiteman and wouldn’t catch on. She was most definitely a paying customer, and he was just trying to make more money. We paid for the whole hour, so we were going to get to Alli’s, drop the cat, then have the guy take us back to Bamenda. Half way to Bali, we said this again, and the guy said he wouldn’t take us back to Bamenda, that the hire rate was only for around town. He’s full of crap because I’ve gone to Bafut and freaking Akofunguba (for those of you who know where/how Akofunguba is) for that rate. We spent the next 10 minutes to Alli’s house arguing with him, and having him threaten to turn the car around and go back to Bamenda if we didn’t pay him 1500 for the 20-minute ride to Bali. Finally we agreed to pay and the conversation finished with Alli saying he’ll get bad juju and me saying, “I will pay you, eh, but know that I am not happy with you. You are a wicked man. I really hope you think 500 francs is worth your soul. I leave you up to God.”

I can’t wait to have my own car. Or at least public transportation that isn’t manipulative, overcrowded and/or generally sucky.

Wednesday, 31 October 2007
I had to say goodbye to Colin this morning. The fon gave me that cat the day after I got to post two years ago. He was with me for my entire service. Today was the last time I’ll ever see him. (Probably.)

I left Alli’s house and went to Bamenda to take care of some errands. Today was the last day that I’ll spend in Bamenda. I closed my bank account. I went to pick up my quilt from Titus, my tailor, that I had made out of all my old dresses that I’ve gotten made during my time here. That quilt’s been a year in the making. He surprised me with a set of cosmetic bags that he made for me as a going-away gift. I hired a car for an hour (this driver was great and understood that 1 hour meant 1 hour) and went around Bamenda, taking all the pictures that I’ve been meaning to take for the past two years but never got around to. I went to New Life supermarket and said goodbye to my friend Jane who works there. She didn’t know before today that I’m leaving. She told me that it wasn’t right for me to leave, took a deep breath, and said, “Do you hear? A deep breath like that means a person cannot talk. When they cannot talk they are truly bereaved. You heard my breath? That means I am truly sad to say goodbye.” I took my last ride back home to Mbengwi. I stopped at the hospital on the way home to see the fon. He’s been ill. He’s been ill a lot lately.

I came home and cried. It’s a lot of goodbyes in one day. It was a lot of goodbyes when I left home. This is different. This is ambiguous. This is permanent when it comes to some people. It’s uncertain when I’ll be back here, hopefully someday I will, but it is certain that I will never see some of these people again.

Only two days left. After two years of counting days, here at two days I wish there was a pause button.

Messy Sonac Street in Bamenda.

Woman working on a traditional outfit in New Food Market.

"Master-P's Funeral Services: Experts in coffins." Love it.
Incidentally, the only vehicles in the country with sirens and loudspeakers on the outside are hearses. Sometimes they play La Cucaracha. I'm pretty sure that guarantees entry to heaven.

Thursday, 1 November 2007
I can’t believe it’s Thursday already. I can’t believe it’s November already. I’m nervous all the time. I didn’t expect it to be like this. I’m completely conflicted in every direction. I can’t be happy about going home because I’m not happy about leaving here. I can’t be sad about leaving because I’m not sad to be going home. I can’t be both places at once. I can’t be American and African. I can’t have it all, and that’s life. Shut up and deal with it. But it’s just not easy. I didn’t expect it to be like this. I didn’t expect that this place had gotten in to the extent that it has. I’ve lived it, but I always thought I was somehow separate from it. So why is it so hard? Maybe I never was separate. Maybe that’s what living here has done. Maybe I really have been affected. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Today was pretty quiet. (Ergo, lots of time for a crazy breakdown. See above.) I was just in the house because Carine is still in Mbengwi at the hospital with the fon. Hopefully they’ll be back by tomorrow because we were planning a sleepover at my house with Wee-Mah and Hope-Mah for my last night here. We’ll see. Anyway, I was just here. Madame Asangha and Mami Samgoh (She insists she never be called madame because, “You can also call a pig madame. Am I a pig?” Whatever. I don’t argue.) came down to my house to have one final meeting about the girls’ school. I gave them some things that I would have left for them anyway. Mami Samgoh did a dance when I gave her a calculator and Pepto-Bismol: “Hah! Bismuth! It’s fine!” I’m glad to please.

Tomorrow I’m just closing up, then Saturday morning I leave. This whole thing is weird. I feel like I just got here. I feel like someone abbreviated my time or that I’m not really leaving yet, like this is all some misunderstanding and I’ll be told to unpack and forget about it at any moment. It’s weird. Did I say it was weird? It’s weird.

Friday, 2 November 2007
Packing, packing, packing. I don’t have a lot of stuff. But it’s more than I should have. Annoying. It’s turned out to be a trunk, a giant suitcase, and 3 market bags. I need to downgrade to a giant suitcase and a hiking pack before I go home in a week.

So tonight is my last night in the house. Carine begged/forced the fon to leave the hospital today so she could come back to see me off. I had dinner with her, the fon, and the girls and then she came down to help me pack up my house. She waited until after dark and then began carrying load after load up the hill to her house at the palace, including my couch on her head. She did waited until after dark, as people here usually do to move, so that no one would see what she was acquiring/deduce that I was leaving. I watched the house that I’ve worked so hard on for the last two years, the house whose every inch I painted with a brush by myself be deconstructed in an evening. My home, and I might never see it again. I certainly will never see it the way it was while I lived in it for the past two years. Anyway, Carine and I decided everybody that I should gift, and then divided everything up. It ended up being about 10 people. She’ll give them all of the things tomorrow after I leave.

So, she and the girls are staying with me tonight for my last night in the house. It’s not much of a slumber party. They pretty much just came down and went to bed, but it’s still nice not to be alone for my final night here. Tomorrow I have to get up at 5, finish packing everything, go get my blessing for safe travel, and then say goodbye. Weird.

My landlord also came down from Yaoundé, she said to help me move out, but I think it’s just because she wanted to make sure I didn’t give away anything that she already had dibs on. She’ll ride back to Yaoundé with me tomorrow. Whatever.

I feel like I should have something more to say on my final night in the house. But I don’t. Just going through the motions. Motions that will take me right out of here and back to America. Weird.

Saturday, 3 November 2007
I left village this morning. I left it for good. A day as big as this, and my reaction is… nothing.

Carine woke me up at 5. I finished packing and headed up to the palace. The fon washed my legs so that “any bad thoughts people have about me should end at my feet,” gave me the blessing for safe travel, and threw food on the ground to the ancestors on my behalf. Then I went down to the house, got my things, put them on a bike (the driver and I rode on the bike with the things all the way to Bamenda), said goodbye to Carine and the girls, and left. Wee-Mah cried when I told her she wouldn’t see me again. That was the closest I came to crying, but it wasn’t bad.

It wasn’t nearly as messy as I thought it would be. I thought I’d be weepy, but there was far too much organized function, too much hurry and schedule for me to be too sad. Plus I had an impending hellish bus ride down to Yaoundé looming over me. I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of like somebody died, and it hasn’t really hit me yet. It’s been coming in waves over the last few months, and I’m sure it will continue to come, but today, I’m okay. Or maybe I’m just numb, overwhelmed by the weight of the change in my life right now and the amount of stuff I have to do in the next week.

Actually, truth be told, it’s kind of freeing to be out of my house. To be moving. To not be worried that my house is being broken into at this moment. Maybe it is, but it’s not my concern anymore. Right now my only concern is finishing my final reports and getting all of my stuff into two bags. I’ll fly out of here on Friday night and (hopefully) be back in Johnstown on Saturday night. But, just like my leaving, I’m not really feeling too much about coming home right now either. It’s kind of just how it is and I’m going through the motions.

But it’s over. It’s over. I may not ever see them again. I may not ever take a bush taxi again. It’s over. Two years just started yesterday. Weird.

How to Live in Cameroon

2007-10-25T21:34:00.009+01:00

Living in Cameroon is not one big thing, it's a lot of little things, a lot of small habits that you have to make and break to function in daily life. Here are somethings that I've learned in the past two+ years, most of which are things I won't need in America.

How to tell if an egg is rotten:
Bad eggs will float, but if you’re too lazy to test every egg (like me), then when you try to crack it open, it’ll likely have a thicker skin under the shell that you’ll have to puncture with your thumb. But if you’re too stubborn to believe that just because it has a skin means it’s bad (because sometimes they’re still okay to eat, relatively speaking), then when you open it, if it smells like wet rank dog, is black, and has chunks inside of it, it’s bad. Throw it out and open a window because your kitchen will now be stank for days. Dommage.

How to get the kids to stop calling you “white man”:
-Teach at the schools. The kids learn a lot faster that your name isn’t WhiteMan if they have to say, “Good morning, Miss Lindsay,” everyday.
-If it’s an adult and you feel like getting into a conversation, call the person BlackMan, and when they react with horror and offense, explain that it’s the same effing thing that they were just doing. Otherwise…
-Don’t respond to WhiteMan, especially to the adults. When they learn that they shouldn’t be calling you WhiteMan, they’ll start punishing the kids for calling you that too.
-If the kid is obviously doing it to be a smartass and is within your reach, smack him. It’s okay.

How to bake a brownies on a gas cooker:
Find a recipe (pretty much any will do) and don't worry if you're short on some things that are "imperative" like baking powder. I mean, it's nice, but whatever. Let's be honest, you're so desperate for chocolate, you'd lick the bottom of an old Pa's slipper if he said he stepped in a Hershey bar earlier in the morning. You're in Africa. Don't be picky. So, get your batter together as best you can. Next, set your biggest marmite on your gas cooker, and put 3 empty tomato paste cans inside. Some people say you need sand to make a dutch oven. I say those people are dumb. You need no such hassle, and where the heck would you find sand anyway? After you set up your cans, place a smaller marmite inside on top of the cans. This pot should be small enough so that you can put the lid onto the larger pot. (The basic principle of an oven is that heat surrounds an elevated item. Go with that.) Now dump your batter in the small pot, put the lid on, and set the flame on low. There's no set time for this, so just keep an eye on it and stick a toothpick in every once in a while. When it comes out clean, mange away, my friend!

How to barter:
One: Don’t be a stupid whiteman. Know what things are worth. People will know if you don’t know what you’re talking about and they’ll take advantage of it.
Two: Decide how much you really want it, and the maximum that you are willing to pay for the item.
Three: Look at the item with disgust, suck your teeth a lot, and point out everything wrong with it. If there’s more than one of what you want, be sure to pick the dirtiest one you can find.
Four: Reduce your maximum price by 75% and start there.
Five: Pull the “I’m not a tourist, I live here” card and speak nothing but Pidgin with some patois interspersed. Never speak proper grammar.
Six: Joke with the vendor, if you can. Suggest ridiculous prices like 732 francs. (There’s no coin smaller than a 5-franc piece.) But resist the urge to conversate with the vendor beyond, “How are you?” If you ask how his kids are or how his health is, you’ll inevitably have to listen to how much he is struggling and how terribly impoverished he is, even though he’s wearing nicer shoes than you. He just wants your money.
Seven: Try to buy more than one thing at a time. It’s easier to get 5 pairs of shoes worth 800 apiece for 2500 altogether than it is to get one for 500.
Eight: Walk away if the vendor’s being stubborn. Either this’ll be the last straw and he’ll call you back and give it to you at your price or you’ll find the same cheap Chinese-made piece of junk you were just looking at on another pous-pous 5 feet up the road.

How to do laundry:
You'll need: two buckets, a flat surface, a bar of soap, a scrub brush if you're filthy, and hopefully water. Put your clothes in one bucket, then piece by piece, take them out, rub the bar soap on them, then mash them on your flat surface until you're satisfied. Then rinse them, wring them, and hang them on the line or lay them on the lawn to dry. If you're good, one load of laundry (about 10 or 15 items) should take you about an hour. Ta da!

How to deal with beggars:
Ignore. This will deter most beggars, but if they’re in your face, you can try saying, “Way, ashia, sista. Money no dey. Way. Sorry.” If this doesn’t work, it’s okay to say, “Ah-ah. Why are you really disturbing me? Get away, na. Go you.” You could also just throw 100 francs at the problem, though that just guarantees that they’ll beg again the next time they see you. It’s easier to just say no. Also, it’s important to not feel guilty. Lots of people beg not because they need the money, but just because you’ll give it. In any case, it’s better to give your hard-earned 20¢ to a public-aid organization that might spend it on something worthwhile, rather than a whiskey sachet. Teach a man to fish, no?

How to be prepared for spontaneous week-long power outages:
Keep your iPod, phone, and camera charged. Keep your bushlamps full of kerosene. Keep candles aplenty in your cupboard. Keep some especially addictive-like-crack books on reserve. Keep thinking about the serotonin high you’ll have when your electricity finally does come back.

How to …go… in a pit latrine:
First, recognize and embrace the fact that squatting is an art form. It’s not something that you can just do. It takes practice. Everyone pees on their feet the first few times. Eventually you’ll find the right balance (literally) between positioning your feet and dangling your backside. Next, be aware of the hole. Correct aim is also an art form, but not necessarily imperative. Most good pit latrines are slanted towards the hole, so gravity will make up for your sloppiness. Finally, always always always carry your own supply of toilet paper (hello, Charmin-To-Go!), otherwise you’ll also have to perfect the art of drip-drying and using your left hand for what God intended.

How to ride on a motorcycle with three other people and a pig:
The road into my village is treacherous in the rainy season. You have to de-bike and walk for some stretches so that you're not thrown off.

When you’re boarding and it’s time to shift, shift well because once you’re moving, you won’t be able to adjust your position without tipping the whole bike. Also, choose a direction to look in at the very beginning because you won’t be able to move your head again until you get off. Finally, once you’ve begun your journey, try to ignore the feeling you have that the bike is so precarious that you’re going to crash. You probably will, so better not to dwell. Hey, at least you have three other people and a pig to cushion your fall.

How to not be pick-pocketed:
Be aware of your surroundings, keep your hand on your bag, don't carry too much money, look as mean as possible, make friends with vendors so they'll look out for you while you're dallying in their shops, and be ready to smack a mofo and yell, "Na thief that!" at the top of your lungs at any moment.

How to deal with a colony of slugs living in your bathroom:
-Accept peaceful co-existence has a natural function of life in Africa.
-Name them after some of your friends from home, then every bathtime/number-two, you can say “what’s up” to Rashaad or Jeannette.
-Remind yourself that, hey, at least they’re not leeches.

How to eat fufu:

Hope-Mah and Benadine working on making water fufu. The whole process (after the cassava is planted, harvested, and carried from the farm) takes days, so you best clean your plate and say thank you!

Everything with your fingers and never with your left hand. Grab a chunk, form it into a small ball, about half the size of a golf ball. Put a little indentation in the middle with your thumb, then dip it into the soup. Chances are the soup has okra in it, and therefore the consistency of snot, so get as much as you can on your little ball-o-fufu and then snap your wrist around to get the snot string to break. Then eat it. If it’s good, enjoy it. If it’s not, pretend to enjoy it. You have to. It’s also helpful to keep children nearby, and when you get your fill or you’re gagging at the thought of taking another bite, give the plate to them. But this should only be employed after you have finished about 90% of your meal. Better to eat yourself sick than to be rude.

How to get out of an 8-hour church service:
-“I am having malaria. (cough, cough) Way, yes, I go rest me now.”
-“I am having a serious meeting at this time.”
-“I am traveling, eh. I go go me for Bafut.”
-“I no be fit for sitting like that all day. My buttocks are paining me.”
-To the Catholics: “I am going to Presbyterian church today.” To the Presbyterians: “I am going to Catholic church today.” To the Full Gospels: “You people are not normal, eh.”
-“I be na pagan. Yes, I like me that Satan.”
-“I am coming. I am to follow.” (Then just never go.)

How to take a hot bath:
No, no you fools, the answer is not: "turn on the spigot in the bathtub." The correct answer is that there are two methods to accomplish a hot bath: home and bush. Both involve buckets. For the home method: heat a pot of water and dump it into a bucket. Then fill another bucket with cold water. Now fetch a cup to dump the water over your head and bathe away, mixing the two buckets as needed. For the bush method: water will probably be slight, so conserve water by dunking your head in the bucket to rinse your hair (see above) rather than dumping it over your head. As a side note: if water in general is slim, be sure to conserve as much bathwater as you can to flush your toilet.

How to buy meat:
Vendors will set up the head and other body parts in front of their stands to indicate what kind of animal they're selling, so if you want cow meat, go for the cow head. Ask what day they slaughtered, because nothing is refrigerated and if it's a week old, you stand a good chance of making your GI cry. (They don't make a kill on a schedule. They wait until all of the body from the last one is sold before they kill a new one. Meat is sometimes a day, sometimes a week old.) Now select the part you want, and try to say, "No white part!" but you'll still probably get some fat and tendons because they eat every part and consider it "fine meat." Stay away from spine meat, because it's gross. And don't worry about the meat being covered in flies because it's always covered in flies. As long as you cook it to death (so to speak) all the parasites and bacteria will die anyway, so ça va. Appetit-oh!

How to not go crazy:
STOP TAKING MEFLOQUINE.

How to remove a dead rodent from your house:

You wake up in the morning, stumble toward the kitchen, and inadvertently step on a rodent carcass that your cat has lovingly deposited on your parlor floor during the night. What to do? First, take mental stock of your surroundings. BBC is in French, it’s 8 a.m. when it should still be 3 a.m., and an old mami is screaming “Mee-ah-kah!” in your front window. Clearly, you are not in America. Ergo, acting like an American girl will do you no good. Flailing, gagging, and screaming will not get this decaying rat out of your house any faster. You need real action. First, grab your bush broom and twist it until it is in a tight bundle. Next, carefully separate the bundle down the middle and snap it down on the rat. When it closes, it should pinch the rat in the bristles. Carry it vertically outside and chuck it behind the latrines. When you give it a good toss, be careful not to draw your arm back over your head; the rat may fall out of the broom and land in your hair. Then you really will flail and scream.

How to be pretty:
Go to the market. Buy the brightest, gaudiest pagne you can find, preferably with some message on it about Women’s Day or Teacher’s Day or Brasseries’ Day, whatever. Take it to the tailor. Special order the giantest caba you can. The bigger the sleeves and the fatter it makes you look, the better. When it’s finished, wear it and strut (“make nyanga,” if you will), and soak up all the compliments.

(That's my mami!)

How to handle everything:
One day at a time. Look forward to small things. Laugh whenever possible, especially at yourself. Scream, complain, and cry when you need to then get over it. It’s really not so bad. It’s just life.

How to be happy:
Appreciate your good friends with cute kids and the thousand random acts of kindness that are extended to you everyday.

Decisions and Consequences

2007-10-23T08:47:00.000+01:00

Juliet listing "decisions I will have to make in future."

It’s getting towards the holidays, so it’s thievery season here. Everyday I hear about somebody having their purse stolen, or a primary school student who was caught stealing cell phones and beaten “very well,” or bandits on the Mbengwi-Bamenda road who held a car up at gun point and took all the passengers’ money and cargo, or riots in Bamenda. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7048141.stm)

Yesterday, on my way to teach at the home economic center, I heard about someone being shot in Ngong quarter, below the Guneku palace during the night. Of course the whole village was all a tizzy. The man, as the story goes, was a terrible thief in Bamenda, and last week the police were searching for him. So, late Sunday night, he tried to flee to his home village, Nyen. You have to pass through Guneku to get to Nyen, and the police happened to catch up with him while he was crossing Guneku and shot him dead. By Monday morning, a large crowd had congregated around the body, postponing going to the farm or school, all exclaiming, “A thief! Shot dead! The better!” Most of the time, the dead are dressed up and laid out with care. Most of the time, people gather around the dead to mourn. Yesterday, this man was left lying in the dirt where he had fallen hours earlier. Yesterday, people gathered to express that they thought he got what he deserved. Plus it’s a small town and like in any small town, the occupants are always hungry for some gossip and excitement. A slain thief is big news. Of course people came out to watch.

Several of my girls (11 of them, actually) were late to class because they were down the hill looking at the body. I didn’t go down. I don’t have much interest in milling around a fugitive’s corpse. But, if the man was going to be shot in our village any time, this one was pretty opportune. Yesterday, our Life Skills lesson was about knowing how to identify good and bad decisions and dealing with consequences. “Do you think that man made good decisions in his life?” I asked the girls. “No, madame,” they answered. “And what was his consequence for bad decisions?” I continued. “Death, madame,” they said together. After a thoughtful pause, Anita added: “And hell, madame.” Ashia for that thief.

Classes at the center are going well; the girls are responding a lot more. I don’t know if that’s because they’ve become used to me or if all my badgering about being more assertive is finally sinking in, but they’ve opened up. It’s nice that I was able to get to this point with them, but it’s still sad that I have to leave soon.

It’s something that I’m dealing with slowly. Even as the date of my departure draws nearer, it still hasn’t completely sunken in yet. To be honest, I’m as much apprehensive about returning as I am excited. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends and family, but it’s hard to imagine that I might not be back in Africa for several years.

I’m kind of worried about having to live in America again. Life before Peace Corps was ignorant, small. I didn’t know what the rest of the world was like, what the mentality for living in a developing country is, what it means to be one of the “haves” in a world of “have-nots.” It’s easy living in America when you just don’t know. You don’t think about the fact that when your clothes are dirty you shove them in the machine and an hour later they’re clean and dry and smell April fresh, just the same as the people here don’t think about the fact that there’s any other way than to put all of their clothes into a bucket, to spend hours scrubbing them by hand, and to wait days for them to dry.

Each country, each level of income has specific functions and ways of working day to day. Each group, each section of the world has an order to life. I’ve changed my order from there to here. I know how to do things here. I’ve adapted to function here. I’m kind of afraid that I’ll be ruined for the rest of my life, that I’ll never again be able to do a load of laundry in a machine without thinking about the fact that normal people do it in a bucket, that I’ll never again be blissfully unaware, that troubles affecting whole peoples around the world will never be distant to me again. And beyond that, I’m afraid that I’ll never be able to sit still again. I want to go home and be in America. For a bit. But as of right now, I don’t really want to stay. Not when the rest of the world is still out there.

Things’ll work out. They have for thousands of RPCVs before and they will for me too. I mean, I lived there before, I can do it again. It's not like it isn't home. But only one of two things can happen: I’ll revert or I’ll change, and I don’t think that reverting is an option. At least I hope it's not. I hope it's not possible to just go back to the way I was, to being ignorant, to being the kind of person who only says "oh, that's terrible" about the things they see on CNN in passing, to being a person who doesn't give a shit, after having been here for two years. It’s my own fault: did I think that I could move to Cameroon, live alone an obscure village, and come out the other end unchanged? That was my decision, this is my consequence. But it wasn’t a bad decision, and it’s not a bad consequence. I would much rather be aware than not. I would much rather have come and have grown, and be who I am now with all the encumbrances of knowing how indulged I am just because of where I was born, and more than that, of knowing that America isn’t it, of knowing that our very ethnocentric country is only a small fraction of the world, of knowing that although we have the big guns, we aren’t all there is, of knowing simply that there’s more, not necessarily better or worse, just that there is more. But despite this knowledge, or maybe because of it, I expect that coming back will still be difficult, that I may end up lying in the dirt (snow?) in a messy mélange of confusion, exultation, African-homesickness, lack of direction... Feel free to come and stare, tell me I got what I deserved.

My four students who were actually on time for class yesterday.

Murky

2007-10-16T08:29:00.002+01:00

The fon has fishponds in his palace. Four rectangular, murky pools that house little sunfish, who only come to the surface to be fed. The fish are generally hidden from sight, as the ponds are so cloudy, little more than glorified mud puddles. But by God, they’re there, fishponds next to the crumbling statues and fountains that create a muddy mess on the palace grounds because there’s no drainage system. A show at the veneer is what counts, and that’s what this palace has.

Children have freedom here. Guidance with a switch when they do something wrong, and they can tag along to the farms if they’re big enough to be useful, but for the most part, they’re free. During the week, there’s a daycare center at the palace, if the children’s parents have money for fees. On the weekend there’s no daycare, no school, so if the children don’t go to the farms, they’re left with other children to watch after them.

I went to Bamenda on Saturday. I had errands to run. I went to the tailor. I bought vegetables in the market. I picked up yogurt at the supermarche. I got back around five, showered the road dust off of me. I fed my cat. I made dinner. My mami came into the compound then and called into my kitchen. A little girl that lives in the palace had died that morning, right after I'd left for town. She fell into a fishpond and drowned.

As I ran to the palace, I thought it was Hope-Mah. I tried to take a shortcut through the bush but didn’t concentrate on my direction and got disoriented, ended up two quartiers over from where I meant to be. When I got to the palace, it was crowded. Carine had clearly been crying all day, but it had been Myra who drowned, the daughter of Vera who lives just next to Carine. But everyone thought Hope-Mah had died because Carine was the one who found Myra in the pond, and so she was the one to start the crydie.

Vera taught at the daycare center with me. Her father was the Fon of Babanke who was killed by his own villagers after I first arrived at post. She had gone to the farm on Saturday morning and left her babies, Myra, who was 2 and a half, and Blessing, who was just born in July, in the compound that she shares with two grandmothers and her husband, Charles. Charles is a prince in my palace, and the grandmothers are widows of the father of the current Fon of Guneku.

Kids here run around to each other’s houses. It’s normal. As a woman, if you’re in the house, inadvertently you’re watching someone else’s children (or trusting that someone else is watching yours) because the kids wander around to the nearby compounds to play with each other. Living on the palace grounds, just cattycorner to Carine, Myra wandered over to play with Wee-Mah and Hope-Mah, just as they were always wandering over to her house. Carine happened to be in that morning, because she wanted to prepare food for the weekend before heading to the farm. Wee-Mah, Hope-Mah, Myra, and another boy who’s about 7 years old went up to the palace field to play. “The field” is not really a field, as it’s where all of the elaborate statues, fountains, and fishponds are, but there’s still enough yard area to play. The field is just above Carine’s house, and though it’s blocked from sight by the other buildings of the palace compound, it’s still within shouting distance.

I’m a little foggy on what happened next, but Wee-Mah and Hope-Mah came back to the house. Myra didn’t but she was with the other boy, so it wasn’t unusual. A while later, Carine went up to the field and found Myra floating in the fishpond. She pulled her out and ran down to the junction, caught a bike, and took the 10-minute ride into Mbengwi to the health clinic. She expressed the urgency with which she did this by saying, “Just dirty like that, I ran with her. I still had on my clothes from working in the house.” When I asked her how long Myra had been in the water when she found her, Carine said, “Only a short time. Maybe just 10 minutes like that.”

At the clinic, when the doctors told her Myra was dead, Carine fell down and wailed and cried as people here do when others die, so the rumors began to spread that it was her daughter. (Hope-Mah is about the same age as Myra.) Carine came back to village and began the crydie. She sent someone to run to the farm to tell Vera. Into the night, people were arriving, most still thinking that it was Hope-Mah who had died.

People here die all the time. Most don’t really affect me too much. But this is the first child that I’ve known of dying, and it happens to be one I see everyday. Fifteen hours before she died, I climbed up onto a small ledge to retrieve Myra because she had gone up but couldn’t get down, telling her, “Don’t mind, eh. Don’t mind. Don’t cry. You’re a good girl.” She was about to cry because Charles was standing below yelling at her to get down but she couldn’t figure out how.

This is the first crydie I cried at. Some kind of tradition here has it that first-born children who are so young should be buried right away, so they didn’t take Myra to mortuary. Carine lent Vera her kitchen table, they draped a white cloth over it, and laid Myra out in Vera’s dirt-floored living room. Dead people always look strange, like wax-figure versions of themselves. Myra looked like a plastic baby doll lying on a plastic table. When I walked in, Vera started wailing again, grabbed me and said, “Auntie Lindsay! Way! This Myra! They came to collect me at the farm and said Myra is already dead! I don’t know what to do-oh!” All of the other women started crying too. A woman that lives near me, Margaret, started wailing at Myra’s body, “Myra, this Auntie Lindsay! Auntie Lindsay have come! Auntie Lindsay who teach you French! Auntie Lindsay have come!”

The burial was to happen as soon as possible. They only wanted to wait for Vera’s mother to come in so she could see the body. She was at the farm all day that day, so they sent someone to inform her, but she didn’t show up on Saturday, even though people from Bome, Carine’s home village, continued to arrive all night long, because news was still spreading that it was Hope-Mah who had died. On Sunday, we sat at Vera’s house again, people filtering in and out, waiting for her mother to arrive. Every few minutes, someone would get up and dust off Myra’s face with her school uniform that was folded next to her body. By noon, people were starting to get anxious. Relatives who lived in Douala had managed to arrive by Sunday morning, but Vera’s mother who lived less than an hour away still had not. Vera was even weary of waiting: “Way. I wan fo bury this pikin.” Carine ran to the mother’s village to see what the problem was, but when she reached the house, the mother had already left. Carine returned, expecting to meet the mother at Vera’s when she got back, but the mother still was not, so they decided they couldn’t wait any longer and finally buried Myra Sunday afternoon. The mother showed up about three hours later, saying that she didn’t have money for transport and that she had waited for her own sister to come before traveling out.

I almost made it through my entire service without having to experience a child’s death. It really is more difficult than I expected it would be, than all of the other deaths I’ve encountered here, probably because it was a child, and more than that, a healthy child. This could have been prevented, but once again, I’m learning that cultural differences run much deeper than they seem. I asked what the fon is going to do about this. Would he drain the ponds? Would he put up a fence? They told me that the ponds are not to blame; children also drown in bathwater. I have the attitude that this could have been prevented. They have the attitude that it was Myra’s destined time and manner of death.

It’s hard not to be slightly frustrated, not only with them, but with myself as well. Carine is the only staunch supporter of everything I do here, so if I had taught even one CPR class, then she’s the one person who would have absolutely been there, and she happened to be the one who found Myra. But still, if Myra had already been in the water for 10 minutes, then it was too late anyway… which brings us back to the importance of a fence in a place where people don’t obsessively watch their children. But those things, those what-ifs would drive me crazy if I let them. They’d drive the people here crazy too, which is partly what makes their grieving and acceptance rituals so beautiful. They acknowledge death as an inevitable part of life and move on. It’s necessary in a place where death happens so often and so suddenly, but I have to wonder: when is it too much? In the death of a 2-year-old healthy girl that could have been prevented, is blind acceptance helpful? Blame isn’t always a bad thing when it effects positive change, and in this case, it might be better than just saying, “It was meant to be,” and handing it over to God. Blame might get a fence built and keep this from happening again.

The crydie will go on for days and eventually taper off. Yesterday morning before my class at the home-economic center, I stopped at Carine’s house. She was clearly exhausted, after having cooked late into the night for all of the people at the crydie. She was sitting behind her house with Hope-Mah washing clothes. Hope-Mah knows something has happened, but doesn’t really understand. She’s a generally happy baby, and was trying to help her mother wash, laughing when she said, “Myra-oh! Myra-oh!” Carine said, “Never you call that name again, you hear? Myra is no more. Never you call her again.” Hope-Mah laughed again and said, “Myra have fall in the fishpond and drank water and died.” Carine responded, “Yes, never you go near that place again, or you will die too. You hear?” “Yes, mama,” Hope-Mah answered.

Maybe lessons are stronger than a fence. Maybe that's my lesson.

Celebri-teer

2007-10-08T09:34:00.000+01:00

I’ve been in this country for nearly 750 days. I have a completely unremarkable schedule. I do completely unremarkable things. I dress in a completely unremarkable way. …Or maybe it is remarkable how much I’ve managed to drab myself down. I might as well be in grayscale 99% of the time.

My mannerisms, my attitude, my whole life here have been shaped, in large part, to deter attention. There is, of course, a line between welcome and unwelcome attention. In my village, I don’t receive much unwelcome attention because everyone knows me, so they just greet and continue on their way. But if I leave village, like even if I just stroll to the next village over, most of the attention I get is unwelcome. Naturally, there are degrees of unwelcome attention. Usually it’s just annoying; people will stop in their tracks when they see me coming and just stand and stare at me as I walk towards them, past them, away from them. They don’t respond when I say hello, they just stare. A lot of the time, I have to keep myself from stopping and saying, “What?! What are you staring at?!” I don’t want to say that I forget I’m white, but… I’m just used to life here, so I’m not always aware of what the hell is so different about me. On the other hand, the most excruciating attention comes from men, of course. This end of the spectrum has the tendency to make me irrationally angry because men (not all men, just the rank, drunk, smelling-like-rotten-cigarettes, schmoozing, a-hole men) who have disgusting cases of Big-Man-Syndrome feel that they are entitled to mass amounts of my time. When I refuse to give them any at all, then they become irrationally angry. It’s all a really healthy cycle.

The warped level of celebrity that Peace Corps Volunteers have to endure is one of the more strenuous aspects of the job. The fishbowl doesn’t seem like a big deal until you’re trapped inside. And I’d imagine that it’s not such a big deal in other parts of the world. I’m sure that I wouldn’t be bothered as much if I were serving in Bulgaria because, you know, it’s a white country. But when you finally are the sore thumb for 2 years, it gets tiresome.

For instance, I visit the market in Mbengwi to buy tomatoes once or twice a week. I have done this nearly every week for the past two years. That means I have done this roughly 156 times. I buy from the same mami who sits across the path from another mami who sells vegetables. The mami across the way has a child who sees me come and go each week like this. This child has seen me wear the exact same kind of clothes and perform the exact same activity approximately 156 times over the past two years and still (still!) each time, she sings, “Whiteman, whiteman, whiteman! Whiteman is a long nose!” over and over and over. I’m like freaking Pavlov’s dogs by now, ready to throw tomatoes in a rage every time I hear that song.

To be fair, this could probably be remedied by me spending time with the mami and the child, but she’s not in my village. She’s just a kid that sits near my tomato stand. I come, get what I need, and go. Still, you see my point. Attention. Annoying, annoying attention. Hence, my current lifestyle. My necklines go all the way up to my neck. All of my skirts fall well below the knee. My hair is always up. I don’t wear makeup. Actually, it’s funny the way this has changed my perception of other whites that I see, volunteer or not. I’m not conservative by any means in America, but here, if I see a white girl wearing a short skirt (i.e.- anywhere above the knee) I automatically think (sorry) she’s a slut, or at least that she looks like a slut. Teenage and twenty-something Cameroonian girls wear skirts that short and I don’t think that, but something about bare white thighs… just seems more naked than bare black thighs. So, if I can be conditioned to think like that, then of course men here think like that. For that reason, I have no sympathy for white girls who dress provocatively then whine that they get harassed. Not to invoke the main defense of date-rapists, but: they’re asking for it.

But I am habitually not cute here. In fact, I try to look like a schoolmarm, especially when I’m alone (not with other Americans) anywhere in the country, which is most of the time. However, despite my efforts, attention is always just going to be something that comes with the territory. I’ve gotten used to it, for the most part, because, for the most part, I’m in my teeny-tiny little village where people have at last become bored with staring at me. They don’t come and stand in my yard and watch for the two hours that it takes me to do my laundry, pointing at me and whispering to each other. I am a novelty no more. It’s nice.

But when I go out, that element is still there. Every time I go to the internet café, without fail, I have to give someone the death glare and snap, “You have some problem?!” because he feels it’s okay to stand behind me and read my e-mail. And every once in a while, someone in my village will stop me and say, “My junior brother said he saw a photo of myself and some white that you placed on internet.” Way. I don’t like it when people from village read my blog. No, let me amend that. I don’t like it when people who are in village or in Mbengwi read my blog. If they’re from village, but have moved out, then it’s no trouble and I’m happy to relay the state of their home. (Ngong Market is very much alive and kicking every 8 days.) But people who are here know me personally, so if they misconstrue or become offended by things I write, then I have to deal with it personally. Or they think I’m making money off the blog (which I am not), so if they see a photo of someone they know, they demand compensation. No, ashia. Money no dey.

Beyond the annoyance of it, it's just another level of privacy being invaded. But, having a blog is kind of like wearing a short skirt: you do it knowing it'll draw attention. I guess I can't really cry when I get it. Does this make me an internet slut?

Road Trip

2007-09-25T10:50:00.000+01:00

Eight people plus children, pigs, chickens, and cargo all in this car? Heck yes!

I have a bruise the size of a banana on my left hip and an inch-long gash on my left knee. My shoulders are in desperate need of a deep-tissue massage and my right leg is still tingling. I was fine two hours ago. Then I got in a share taxi to make the hour-long trip back to Mbengwi from Bamenda.

The transportation system here really is something to marvel at. Cameroon would be a completely different experience if I had my own car. Some of my greatest moments of frustration happen during travel. It’s been two years of overcrowded, smelly, often painful rides and I’m used to it, of course I have to be, but if my mood is just right (read: wrong), if the driver is enough of an ass, and if the car breaks down more than twice in a trip, it can be still maddening. But I think it’s a necessary part of Peace Corps; you can't "live at the level of the people" if you don't travel like the people. And anyway, everyone's a lot more likely to buy your “I’m not a rich white man” spiel if you’re jammed in the car just like they are. Most white men here tool around the country in shiny climatised SUVs. Not me. I dey fo bush taxi.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of experiencing real third-world travel, maybe it’d be helpful to describe what it takes for me to get to, say, Yaoundé.

Step One: (0 francs) My day will typically start at 6. I get up, grab my bag, lock up my house, and off I go. I trek for about 10 minutes to get to the junction in my village where I wait for a motorcycle.

Step Two: (300 francs) On a good day, there’ll be a bike already there waiting for a passenger, but sometimes I have to wait for up to a half hour for one to come by who’s willing to carry me. When one does come, the driver will strap my pack on the back and I’ll climb on. Sometimes I’m the only one on the bike, sometimes there’s another passenger with his own cargo as well. Believe it or not, this is the most pleasant leg of my trip.

Jeremy and one of my favorite bike drivers, Subway.
(His real name is Valentine. They love their aliases.)

Step Three: (700 francs) 15 to 20 minutes later, we arrive in Mbengwi central where I have to get a car to Bamenda. These cars are all Toyota Corollas manufactured sometime in the mid-80s. Small little buggers made to hold five people: one driver, one passenger in front, and three in the back. Instead, seven to eight people is standard here: the driver, four in the back, and two in the front passenger seat. Sometimes they add a deuxième chauffeur if they feel like it, which is another person in the driver’s seat. Usually this part of the trip isn’t too bad, but there are a lot of incidentals that can affect it. For instance, if the driver has not removed the interior handles on the back doors, the ride can be torturous, especially if you’re stuck sitting next to the door (and therefore on said handle) and if all four people in the backseat ova fat small. Those extra three inches make a big difference. The road to Bamenda isn’t nice right now, in fact the appropriate term for it is painful. There is, quite literally, not one smooth stretch on the 25-kilometer dirt road. Foot-deep crevices, constant potholes, and tire-puncturing dips punctuate the trip. I can’t say how often I’ve offended an old mami when we’ve hit a bump and I’ve muttered, “Goddammit!” when I was catapulted, skull-first into an exposed metal rod lining the car ceiling. Sometimes the kids who live near the road will fill the holes with grass and then beg money from passing cars for their hard work. After about an hour, sometimes more, and after four gendarme stops, sometimes more, I arrive in Bamenda.

Road to Mbengwi.
Scenic, not comfortable.

Step Four: (150 francs) Once I get to town, I have to find a taxi, either to the bus station or to the road where I can catch a bush taxi. These cars are not necessarily nicer than the share taxis coming out of the bush, but they only put three people in the backseat. (Two in the front passenger seat is still standard.) In these taxis, however, the drivers have usually pimped their rides with glowing blue neon dome lights, fake flowers, stickers saying things like “Holy Ghost Fire di Rule World,” stuffed animals hanging from the rearview mirrors, and blaring Makossa music. The nice thing about inter-city taxis here, though, is that you state your price (which never exceeds 300 francs), and that’s it. You have to share that taxi with other people, unless you depot the whole car, but still, you pay for getting from point A to point B, not for the amount of time you spend in the car, so if it takes an hour, you pay the same price as if it had taken 10 minutes.

Step Five: Option A: (5000 francs) If I go to an agence, I get on a big bus. You get your own seat on this (still cramped and not generally comfortable, but your own, nonetheless) but it takes a long time to leave. The bus may be sold out by 8 a.m., but they won’t leave until 10:30. Also, the bus stops along the way. A lot. At every single market because people here feel like they have to look at the pineapples of every single vendor en route to make sure that they get the best one. Or one from each. Whatever. In any case, they always buy too much and eventually end up asking me to hold them because they don’t have enough room to stash them under their seats. No, lady. I wouldn’t hold your kid, I won’t hold your pineapples. And because there’re so many passengers, there are lots of little stops. In America, if I wanted to go from NYC to, say, Churchville, outside of Philly, I would take a bus from NYC to Philly, then find my own way to double back to Churchville. But here, they stop at every little village where people want to get off along the way. (Just scream, "Chauffeur, je descende ici!" and he'll slam on the breaks and send the other passengers sailing into the seats in front of them.) This entails stopping the bus and opening the storage underneath or untarping the stuff stowed above to unload the person’s things. Then the bus will start again, and, I’m not kidding, two minutes later, someone else will want to go down again. It adds hours to the trip. The bus usually ends up getting into Yaoundé around 5 p.m. By that time, I’ve been traveling for 11 hours, and the trip could be done in 5 if I had my own car. This makes me cranky.

People selling food swarm the cars at every stop.

Step Five: Option B: (1500 francs, then 150 francs, then 3000 francs) So, lately, instead, I’ve been taking les voitures personnelles. This is pretty much glorified hitchhiking, but it gets me there quicker, so ça va… To do this, from Bamenda, I have to find a bush taxi to Bafoussam. This is a rickety old van, usually with four rows. Each row is made to hold four people, so naturally, they won’t leave until each row is stuffed with five. (There is also a cargo shelf behind the driver’s seat that they use to seat up to five extra people that they pick on the way.) Usually, I’ll arrive in Bafoussam by 9 a.m. depending on whether or not there have been more than the normal six or seven gendarme stops between Bamenda and Baf. When I get to Bafoussam, the bush taxi drops at a place they call Auberge (though I have yet to actually see an auberge in the alley where nous descendons) at the bottom of a steep hill. So, I strap on my pack and climb this hill, where I catch yet another taxi to get to the other side of town to the place where I can start trying to thumb a ride. Well, I’m not actually the one to thumb the ride; when I get there, about 10 outstandingly aggressive men will throng me, pawing at my bag and screaming, “Personnelle?! Personnelle?!” If they get my bag, they will therefore be responsible for finding me a car, and will get the few hundred francs that the driver will give them as a tip. So they hold my bag and for the next little while, I stand on the side of the road, watching as they run after every private car screaming, “Yaoundé?! Yaoundé?!” Eventually, after anywhere from 5 minutes to a half hour, they find me a car. These cars are nice because they don’t overload. They’re people who have their own cars and are traveling to Yaoundé or Douala or wherever and just want to ease their gas prices. So, they put three in the back and only one in the front passenger seat. It makes for a more comfortable journey, but then I’m also obligated to make small talk in French and sometimes it backfires; I’ve had men buy me sticks of soya bound like bouquets from road-side vendors and try to give me free rides in exchange for dates. Non, merci, j’ai un énorme mari méchant. Il peut vous tuer. In any case, the voiture personnelle usually gets me into Yaoundé by 1 or 2 in the afternoon, depending on whether we stopped at a market and how many gendarme stops there were on the way (private cars are stopped much less than public transport). As far as I’m concerned, having to swat away some harmless flirting and the potential risk of rape and disembowelment that comes with riding with four Cameroonian male strangers is well worth several fewer hours on the road.

Some girls waiting for the bush taxi to reload.
Note the plywood ceiling. They pack 5-5 in each of these rows. (Children like these don't count as passengers; they'd be sitting on others' laps.) And one old man peed his pants in the taxi on this trip. Not pleasant.

Quick stop on a nice highway in Cameroon.
Seriously. Nice highway.

Step Six: (200 francs) At last, I arrive in Yaoundé, and I have to get one last taxi to get to the Peace Corps office. Depending on where I drop in town, it can take between 15 and 45 minutes. By this time, I'm tired, dirty, and pretty damn prickly. But, hey, if ready accessibility to cheese and internet isn’t worth 12 hours on the road, what is?

Despite all of this, I don’t completely dread the days when I have to travel. It’s funny how your mentality can change. I get frustrated, yes, when the bus I’m on breaks down four (four!) times in one trip and I have to disembark in the middle of nowhere and try to flag down another bus with standing room. It’s happened. It’s annoying. But for the most part, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that if I’m traveling, it’s going to take all day. It just is. And at least I have goat meat and oranges to look forward to on the way.

However, sometime, six or eight months from now, I’ll be alone in my car (“my car" ...just the words make me salivate) on the beltway, listening to a hip-hop station (again, salivating), soaking up my air-conditioning and one of you will have the misfortune (Aunt Jean, ashia) of getting a phone call from me. I will be bitching and moaning that I have been stuck in traffic for (holy God) 45 minutes. Please say something to me along the lines of, “At least you don’t have an old pa’s smelly armpit in your face right now.” I will thank you and sink back into my frozen mocha. It’s not goat meat, but it’s still good.

Sarah Trice on the bus to Yaoundé with some lunch that we picked up on the side of the road.

More bus lunch.
That’s baton de manioc, plums, plantains, fish, and cow meat.

People really do ride on the cars if there’s not enough room in the cars.

Loading a car and a bush taxi in Lomie, East Province.
They pack the cars ridiculously there. Like, eight in the backseat, not four, which means, yes, people sit on you.

We fit five people in the back seat on this trip. We’re, like, SO integrated.

One of the fon’s cars.
The tires got jacked, so now he takes public transport too.

A drawing that one of my students did for the school newsletter. Boys here dream of being Benskin-Boys when they grow up. No astronauts or firemen in Cameroon.

Andy, me, and Lee in a taxi on the way to a funeral last October. There’s another person on Lee’s left who’s not in the photo, and Andy was on my lap. I liked it.

The car I took back to Mbengwi from Bamenda last week.
At this point, we were still waiting for two more passengers to show up with whatever things/animals/whathaveyou they’d be carrying.

“Way! Car don flop! Come, we go!”

Some of my bread ladies at Mbengwi Car Park in Bamenda.
I love them; they keep the men from bugging me.

Me, Stacy, and Ally in the back of a bush taxi.
The seats were broken, so our reclined position wasn’t an option.

But it was a nice perk.

Hard Times Never Last

2007-09-19T09:09:00.000+01:00

GWA's sewing class for orphan girls with some of our new supplies.
(I've never needed a tan so badly in my life.)

Ashia for work-oh!

Again, a great big THANK YOU to everyone who donated to our Peace Corps Partnership project! Nearly four months after I submitted the original proposal, we finally received our money on Monday.

This is what 719,000 francs looks like.

719,000 francs is approximately $1,500. When I submitted the project, $1,500 translated to 733,000 francs, but the value of the dollar went down over the months, so our original budget had to be reduced by 14,000. We ended up buying some second-hand sewing machines to cut corners, but it’s not a big deal. It’s still a very suitable amount of money for the project.

Although the money is just now coming in, the school has been operating for about 2 months. We’ve mostly been teaching practicals (“This is what the stitch is called and this is what it would look like…”), HIV education, and Life Skills. I’m in charge of Life Skills, because quite clearly, artsy though I may be, I’m not really capable of teaching any kind of tailoring skills. Life Skills covers things like healthy communication, how to say no (specifically to A-hole boys), planning for the future… things like that.

But now that we finally have machines and supplies, things are really ready to take off. We bought everything on Monday, and when I arrived at class on Tuesday morning, the girls stood up and sang a “Thank You to Miss Lindsay” song that they’d been working on for the past 3 weeks while I was in Yaoundé. Then while Madame Nduh was teaching crocheting with our brand-new hooks and yarn, she insisted that we sing the American national anthem in honor of our donors. She only knew the words to the first two lines. I had to sing the rest, but she hummed with me as loud as she could. “Do you people really know Washington?” she asked the class. “You should know it because we are really in America now with these American gifts.” They’re very grateful.

And now that there’s money to make a signboard, they decided on a name. Cameroonians are huge on acronyms. Fons Against AIDS –NGO is FAANGO. Northwest Farmers Organization is NOWEFOR. Northwest Motor Taxi Drivers Organization is NOWEMOTAXDROR. Seriously. So I was kind of hoping to convince the ladies to come up with a name whose acronym would be LINDSAY. But instead they decided on The Home Economic Center for Orphan and Needy Girls of Guneku-Mbengwi Area (HECONGGMA). …Eh, at least I got a song with my name in it.

Madame Nduh and Madame Asangha double-checking our new purchases. ...And Charles, a guy in the palace who just likes to get in my pictures.

We bought four machines in total and this one broke on the way back from Bamenda because of all the rough bumps on the deteriorated road to Mbengwi.

This is why I love Anglophone: it’s perfectly normal to name your sewing-supply shop “Hard Times Never Last."
(We spent 390,500 francs in one hour at this shop. The average Cameroonian makes about $2,400 or 1,150,000 francs per year, which pretty much means that the owner’s hard times are definitely over for now.)

The building where we're holding our classes.

Our classroom.

Predencia working on her stitching.

One of our babies getting into the new things.
(Nearly half of the girls in class are single teenage mothers.)

Carine and Madame Nduh explaining how to crochet.

The girls get to work making baby caps that they can sell in the market.

Madame Nduh shows the girls how to make a proper round.

The girls with the projects they'd been working on in the months before we received our generous donation. Thank you!

Beginning of the End

2007-09-06T15:42:00.000+01:00

This is my August.
Ain't she purdy?

I am addicted to the calendar. It’s never been any sort of secret. I relish waking up in the morning and drawing an indelible X through the day before. This habit is not Cameroon-specific. I was like that in America too. I’m never without my planner. It’s not a countdown to anything really; I’m not waiting around to die, but it’s nice to be able to put away a day. Here, though, of course it’s a countdown. I’m not in a particular rush to put Africa behind me, but my time here is temporary, so it’s always been a countdown. And, to be fair, a countup. (Today, for instance, is my 706th day in Cameroon.)

Anyway, my point is, I generally always know where I am in time. So imagine my surprise when, at my COS Conference last week, I actually felt a pang of regret and apprehension that I have a mere 60-something days left. I have too much work and not enough time, too much left to see and not enough time, too much more to learn and not enough time. I’m sad to go, yes, but I think I’ll be ready when it’s time. I don’t really have a choice. It’s just kind of strange that all of the sudden, this sense of finality has settled on me and I didn’t see it coming.

Of course, that apprehension is also paired with the fact that I don’t have a job or a grad program waiting for me when I get home. That’s what the COS Conference is for really: preparation and buffering. So we did the usual things concerning how to write a resume, how to search for a job, how to take the Foreign Service Exam if we wish (and I may). Expected. And we talked about closing our service and what reverse-culture-shock is like. I’ve heard that it’s harder to transition back to America than it is to adapt to Africa in the first place. I can see that. I like my caba and fufu and clicking when I speak. Expressions come to me more easily in Pidgin than they do in American English. Surviving here (thriving here, Liz?) has stopped being something I do and become something I am. It’s going to be hard to be back. It’s going to be hard to not be here.

But I’ve also come a long way, and it’s not something I realized until I could see the end of it. One thing that’s particularly telling is the fact that two years ago, when I arrived in Philadelphia for staging, there were 29 people in my group. At COS Conference, there were 18. We’ve lost 11 people for various reasons: homesickness, boyfriend/husband-sickness, insanity, illness, family problems, stupidity, intentional excessive clandoing. I mean, good for me, I guess, that I was able to hack it for the full two years. And I’m coming out the other end with lots of intangible skills that I can market (so says the resume teacher guy), including my fluency in Pidgin and Intermediate-High level in French. I’m very happy about the fact that I've retained my French despite being posted in an Anglophone area. That’s all something. You know... even though I don’t have anyplace to market those things to yet, but everything’ll fall into place. Everything will work itself out. Everything will be okay. It always is.

Where all of the PCVs in Cameroon are now.

(There I am, au Nord-Ouest.)

Where I'll be toute suite.

Way, Johnstown.

Some of the girls matching at our COS dinner.
Something was really funny, apparently.
(Stacy, Sarah, me, Ally, Ingrid)

The Peace Corps Land Cruisers we're generally only blessed with riding in in the beginning during training and at the end during official COS stuff.

We finished early one afternoon during the conference, so we visited the gorilla sanctuary outside of Yaoundé.

"Without gorillas, what hope is there for man?"
Indeed.

Jasmine. Free gorillas like her are bushmeat here. Sad.

Big hands.

"Make peace idey for ground."
May peace prevail on Earth.

Gone Malarial

2007-08-25T14:32:00.000+01:00

That pig's not dead, it's sleeping.

I swear!

August is the rainiest time of the year here. It’s also the most malarial time. And it’s a time when death occurs en masse.

In the past week, it has rained 7 out of 7 days. There have been 6 funerals in my little village. And I fell ill on the day that my house was struck by lightning.

My house being struck by lightning is not surprising. I live under a tin roof on a hill. These things happen. But it left me without electricity and with nothing to do for the next two nights but hunch over my medical manual clutching my bushlamp, making self-diagnoses. Typhoid… maybe. Dengue fever… warmer. Brucellosis… I don’t even know what that is, but dear God, I did have a yogurt yesterday. Malaria… yes, probably malaria. Cerebral malaria? …I’m going to die in Cameroon. I knew I shouldn’t have watched so much House, M.D. For 45 minutes, I had a minor panic attack while desperately trying to lance my own finger to make a thick and thin slide. I couldn’t do it in stage, I couldn’t do it the last time I thought I had malaria, and again this time, try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to put enough force behind the prick to break skin. Three days passed and my fever melted into a lightheaded haze and sore throat.

It’s the flu. Calm down, crazy. My electricity eventually came back. I eventually stopped hugging my knees while rocking on the floor and nursing visions of my own African cry-die. (“Way! Sista Lindsia, you di do how?! Way!”)

But it’s not quite the same for the natives. The changing temperature (it’s seriously chilly this time of year) and the spike in the mosquito population is leaving lots of people, well… dead. Several cry-dies each day, a burial almost everyday, an obligation to be bereaved indefinitely… It seems exhausting to be the living right now.

In addition to people, livestock are also feeling the effects of the season. African Swine Fever (I’m sure it has a technical name, but that’s what it’s called around here) is going around. Carine’s two sows just birthed 6 piglets each last week. This week the mothers stopped eating because they became sick. She was forced to sell the two pigs to a butcher who could use them for meat before they died. The money she made from both sick pigs is what she could have made by selling one healthy pig, and on top of all that, the piglets are dying now too because they lost their mothers 5 weeks early. This is a big deal. Those pigs were this year’s school fees for Wee-Mah, Hope-Mah, and Carine’s sister, Benadine, whom she supports. The money’s died. It’s rough. It’s not grave, because Carine is resourceful and she’s a planner. She’ll be able to make ends meet eventually because she’s a hard worker, but not everybody is like her. Most people don’t have back-up plans, other than making their kids skip a year of school because they don’t have the fees.

People here like to tell me they’re suffering a lot. A lot. Life in the Northwest is generally pretty good, better than in a lot of other parts of Cameroon, because the people here have a strong work ethic and the province is moderately developed. But this month, I believe them. Despite the fact that all the crops are in, and we’re rolling in field corn and fufu, I believe them. It is hard when your life depends on the whims of the season and the disease that comes with it. It’s hard when you see it happening, you know it’s coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It’s hard, and maybe we’re helpless, but it’s just how it is. I believe the word “ashia” was born in an August.

The Other Half

2007-08-17T09:07:00.000+01:00

Thaddeus with his twin boys, Hope and Love saluting like gendarmes, in their village home.

As a volunteer at the village level, it’s sometimes hard to see the multi-dimensional aspect of the Cameroonian class system. I visit friends with dirt floors, I ride on overcrowded public transportation, I buy my meat from men who prop the heads up in front of their butcher tables to display what animal they’re selling. I do not, generally, associate with the other part of this society. The own-my-own car, shop-in-the-supermarket, internet-in-my-house, visit-Europe-and-America-every-few-years part. Not because I don’t want to, but because they’re not really accessible. That’s mostly because I live in the village and these people relocate to the cities. And probably also because I am not nearly as well dressed as they are.

But every time I do come across it, when I’m invited to lunch at someone’s house or I visit the daughter of a mami in my village who lives in Douala or Yaoundé, I’m always a little taken aback. The last time I visited my landlord and his wife in Yaoundé, I brought their young sons a deck of Uno cards. The boys humored me and played for no more 10 minutes before they abandoned the game and sprawled themselves out on the parlor rug to play their new PlayStation Spider Man2 game on the hi-def TV. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a flat screen in America. Where the heck am I?

There’s a hike that I like to take on the road behind my compound, and when I go, I pass a beautiful large house. Yellow bricks, shuttered windows, stone-mortared gutters around the house to direct rainy season run-off from the mountains away from the foundation. Really, beautiful. But nobody’s ever in the house because here, if you’re a successful man and you move away to have a job in a city, you still have to build a village house to come home to. Typically, the men make extremely elaborate village houses, because… well, they’re men, and why not make as big a house as possible to demonstrate to your village buddies that you are as big a man as possible? Anyway, I’ve never seen anyone in this house. Last Sunday, when I came out of church, a well dressed (well dressed) woman with two little boys in suits and ties flanking her sides, introduced herself to me as Elizabeth and invited me to have lunch at their house on Wednesday. They were from Douala, she said, they were home for a week, and they were staying at the house on the first hill to Nyang. Oh, that house. I accepted because it’s polite, it’s a real live lunch “invitation,” and heck yeah, I wanted to see the inside of that house.

Wednesday after teaching my morning classes, I went to a shop at the junction and bought some Coke to take to lunch. When I showed up, Elizabeth hugged me and said, “Oh, you bought Coke for me? I also bought Coke for you!” I greeted her husband, Thaddeus, and they led me down a cleanly tiled hall past a kitchen with a gas range, oven, fridge, and freezer into the parlor. I sat on a cushy sofa that had clearly been imported from Europe. The furniture they make in Cameroon, while kind of padded, is just not like what was in this house. I was so stunned, so in awe of the big TV in the corner, of the framed photos on the end tables, of the lack of a proud display of calendars dating back to 1987, that it almost seemed appropriate when Elizabeth said, “Lindsay, can I bring you a martini?” She served it with ice, and amoebas be damned, I savored every drop of that martini then crunched on the cubes.

She served lots of cold Coke, salad, unlimited meat, pumpkin, and eggplant purée for lunch. We sat at a wooden dining room table, not a plastic lawn table. We discussed Thaddeus’ career as a petroleum engineer, the time that he’s spent abroad, studying in England, working on an oil platform in the North Sea and Elizabeth’s career as a medical doctor, how she’s now directing the TB education for health providers campaign in the Littoral Province. Her 3-year-old twin boys, Hope and Love, who she waited to have until she was close to 40, picked vegetables out of their salads that they didn’t want to eat.

The whole thing was just so normal and so not all at the same time. I could have easily been in America with the conversation and the cuisine, the house and the soft lighting. (Did I mention the four bedrooms each with their own bathroom with a European-flush toilet?) Very bizarre and very comforting all at the same time. And very indicative of the chasm between the classes here.

There are certain women in this country that I’ve met who I’ve longed to be friends with. The kind of women who I meet and think, “Oh, can I hang out with you? Please? Please?” I don’t say that out loud, of course, that’d just be weird. I meet these women in the cities, usually working in an office. The thing about living at the village level, while charming and quiet, comfortable and welcoming, is that the people who can get out usually do. They have to leave to find a career, to make money. So they do. I have great friends in village and I wouldn’t trade the experience I’ve had, but the exchanges that I have with professional women are completely different than the ones that I have with women who have never left. I don’t think it’s because they’re smarter; I think it’s just because they’ve been out and seen more of the world.

Having exchanges with women like this is a rarity, and when it happens, I realize just how starved I am for a cultural exchange on a deeper level. The exchanges that I have with women in the village are less extensive, more of me learning how to pound fufu and then having them ask me if there’s really HIV in America. These exchanges are necessary and simple and beautiful, but I’ve had two years’ worth and now I feel like it benefits the Cameroonian more than myself, which is fine; it’s why I’m here. But when I discuss with the women who have gotten out, I actually feel like I’m learning again, like I’m being exposed to a new culture, even though it’s just other side of the same coin. Elizabeth was able to tell me about her colleagues, about the workings of the government, about the changes she’s witnessed in corruption during her career, about the differences she observes between Francophone and Anglophone attitudes. Oh, sing it again, I’ll listen forever. I usually know when I’m having an in-depth conversation because I feel patronizing if I speak with my Special English accent and I start using phrases like, “patriarchal overtones.” Do you know how good it feels to wax multisyllabic after 24 months of saying things like, “You get na small thing that?”

I don’t think that these conversations are any more valuable than the ones that I have with the women who farm in the bush all day, just different. But I do wonder if this is what development work is like on the grander scale, dealing with agencies that have articulate leaders rather than individuals who speak only broken Pidgin at best. Grassroots is certainly less complicated, but is it as effective? Fewer people are reached per worker, per dollar, for sure, but really, can you say which half of the society sustains it? If the majority of the people living here understand one of the 250 native languages spoken in Cameroon better than they ever will French or English, then do you help more people by dealing with large corporations who distribute money (maybe, maybe not depending on whether they’re corrupt) to a mass amount of people or by distributing information one person at a time? I don’t know. And I also don’t know if people like Elizabeth and Thaddeus are inspirations for what people in Cameroon can achieve if they work hard and have the right family and money behind them, or examples of the class separations that will always be in place. There will always be rich and poor. There will always be developed and developing nations. The poor people and developing nations alike will always be trying to play catch-up.

Nevertheless, it’s still refreshing to have a grown-up conversation about the state of Cameroon, and what Cameroon looks like to a person who is looking down from the top instead of up from the bottom. It’s still interesting to hear their opinions about the future of the country and what it needs to succeed. It’s still nice to talk to people who know far more than I do and who can teach me something new. And that was still a damn good martini. Damn good.

Sunny-Side Something

2007-08-13T21:05:00.000+01:00

If we need 2-by-4's, we go find a tree and make 'em.

Y'all first-worlders are lazy.

Disclaimer: This is going to sound like a poor-me-in-the-African-bush post. It is. But only for a while. Hang in there.

Things here can suck. A lot. And Cameroon has a habit of kicking you when you're down. Then stomping its jelly shoes on your face. And puncturing a lung with its walking stick. If you're lucky, it'll finish up by sitting on your chest and making you open your mouth so it can spit palm wine backwash on/in you. ...But that's only on the really special days.

Like today, for instance.

I got up a little earlier than usual, about 6:30, and did my laundry (yes, in buckets with bar soap, pounding it on a rock, in case you forgot) because it looked like the first sunny day in a week. By 11:00 it was raining, and my laundry will soon be growing the gray beard of mold that is so characteristic of Northwest rainy season. But still, that's par for the course, and it's nothing that would phase me here, if only it wasn't the foundation for my crap house that I'd be building all day.

So then, I decided to watch a movie on the new little DVD player that Liz and Jeremy brought me. (What better way to cure a rainy day than with Matthew McConaughey?) My little gadget should have been safe and sound because I recently purchased a 20,000 franc voltage regulator to keep the surges under control. (Those surges have claimed both my laptop and iPod in the past 6 months. Yes, I had a cry-die for each.) But then came the surge from hell. Seriously, had to be from hell to overpower my 1500-watt regulator. The cord made a defeated little hiss, blew out a puff of smoke, oozed a little oil, and died. Ashia-ya. That DVD player lasted me a week and a half. Opened jars of mayonnaise last for up to a year without being refrigerated. I'm serious. Still good.

Anyway, I have different reactions at different times to different things that happen here. I can accidentally spill water and cry. Or I can be thrown off the back of a motorcycle, cut my leg on a rock, and have to limp to the nearest village, and it's all gravy.

So when my DVD player succumbed to Cameroon, it really was a crap shoot as to what I would do. First I slept for a little while, because nothing's real if I can take a nap. I haven't been living in West-Central Africa eating boiled groundnuts and pounded cassava for two years if I'm sleeping. There's still a Panera at the end of the street and my toenails are painted and I don't have clicks as part of my regular vocabulary. But I do, and when I woke up, I was in a manic rage. I had to do something, anything to respond to what Cameroon is constantly doing to me, even if nobody's around. I took it out on my power cords. I collected all of the cord corpses, long fried and dead and went at them with the sharpest option on my Leatherman that I could find. God help me, I was going to see what was wrong, and God help the man who I would ask to fix these things because I was mad and he was going to give me what I wanted. Of course I couldn't pry open the cords. Is that even possible? Of course I did slice my thumb open. Awesome. Did I expect any less?

I had to go. I could not be in my house for a second longer with my lifeless machinery and my bloody thumb, mocking me for trying to enjoy anything more advanced than a shortwave radio and a Sudoku puzzle. I threw my things in a backpack, grabbed my broken umbrella (the handle jabs into my palm), and walked. I meant to take a motorcycle, but it was pouring, so I had to walk, mud slinging from my heels up onto my calves. When I reached the car park, I packed in, as usual, with four people in the back seat, but this time, I was stuck next to a Francophone woman who insisted on playing with (pulling) my hair and an old mami who said, "Aysh!" over and over again because--clearly--she must be more crowded and uncomfortable than the rest of us. The road to Bamenda has been deteriorating continually throughout rainy season, and this was the first time this year that I thought the road might make me sick.

I was sweaty, cranky, and nauseous by the time I reached Bamenda, which, of course, meant that I was in the right frame of mind to haggle with vendors. Problem was, I couldn't find a vendor. No one sold the cable I needed. Which means I'm back to the BBC, Sudoku, and GRE for Dummies as my main sources of entertainment. And what usually happens when Cameroon deals the last and hardest kick to the gut happened again today. I accepted it. I felt calm. I felt normal. I felt numb. Because when it comes down to it, that's what living in Africa has given to me. Maybe it's patience. Maybe it's peace. Maybe I've just been beaten into submission. I fight for a while because I'm so freaking frustrated, but soon I sink back into passivity. What else can I do? You can't change the tides.

But I promised that this was not a poor-me-in-the-African bush post, not entirely anyway. Usually after I have a fight with Cameroon, I settle back into the comfort of enjoying small quirks of the culture. I have that to look forward to for the next week at least. And so, on a happier note, here are some of my favorite cultural quirks:

Instead of saying, "Friends don't let friends drive drunk," we tell people, "Making a friend happy by sharing a drink is a social responsibility."

We put our babies to sleep in boxes.
(That says "Made in Cameroon". So cute.)

We drink giant beers like water.
(Justin gets really excited for this too.)

We revel in our knock-offs.

We support the girls.

We make our toilets talk.
("Bear in mind: Use me well, keep me clean, I'll never tell anybody what I have seen. Thanks.")

We sit on top of mountains for hours on end because... shoot, why not?

We make food in containers larger than our children.

We make our own fun.
It's necessary.

"We Can Fit Less People In Our Minivan": The Hesses Do Africa

2007-08-07T09:49:00.001+01:00

Liz and Jeremy Hess, friends from Shippensburg days, visited me at the end of July. It was okay.

...Ha, I'm kidding. It was great! America time is always great and when it's with Americans whom I actually knew (and liked) when I was in America, then it's really freaking great. Lucky me, I keep low-maintenance friends (you know, for the most part, but I won't name names...) so the Hess duo did just fine in Cameroon, even with deranging men, chickens in bush taxis, mowing the lawn with a machete, and the like.

It's always nice to try and see the country you've been living in, loving, and loathing through fresh eyes. With about 100 days left in my Peace Corps service, mine are not so new anymore, though the Mister and Missus helped a little. Here's some of what Cameroon looks like to the camera lens of someone fresh off the boat:

Ugly Douala. Ugly to everyone, not just me.

Girls in Guneku strolling with their babies.

Yes, four in the back seat is normal and comfortable.

Liz and I in pagne heaven.

Greetings from Cameroon.
Bags in my tailor, Titus', shop.

Carine harvesting palm nuts.

Carine, Hope-Mah, and I on a stroll to Njindom.

Beautiful waterways in the Northwest.
(Ignore the white man getting schisto in the middle of the stream.)

The Fulani boy we found drumming at the top of a mountain during our hike to Chup.

Vera, me, Liz, and brand-new baby Blessing.
Vera wanted to dash us the baby. Seriously.

Village boy in front of his house.

Bamenda's Cow Street reflected in a broken mirror.

"Boy, hold your staff like you are proud!"

Fulani woman's pots in Ntaya.

Farimatou loves crazy white tourists who make her snap.

I wanted to add more photos, but Africa just ate my jump drive. WAWA. In any case, Liz and Jeremy finally found out that I wasn't exaggerating about how eccentric my fon is, how packed the cars are, or how gross water fufu is. It's good to have people to concur, helps me feel like I'm not going crazy after spending nearly 700 days in Africa.

Clap For Yourselves: "Well Done! clap-clap-clapclapclap-clap"

2007-08-01T09:10:00.000+01:00

GOOD NEWS and THANK YOU to all! The Peace Corps Partnership money has been flopped and will get to me and the girls' school as soon as Washington processes the paperwork!

So to all of you who donated: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU and GRAND MERCI! I cannot explain how grateful I or the women of GWA are! Your dollars will help young Cameroonian orphan girls gain a marketable skill and improve their lives, and for that... well, my words alone are just not sufficient thanks.

Sorry this blog has been slow to move lately. Cameroonian internet has not been at it's finest lately (as if I could describe the prior state as fine). Things here, including my spirits, have picked up, and everything is good. Two of my friends from college, Liz and Jeremy, have been visiting for the past two weeks and I'm working on a photo post of their trip, but, you know... internet in Cameroon... But for those of you who just can't wait, here's a preview:

Yes, that's Mr. and Mrs. Hess and myself, dressed up in the fon's garbs for a royal-looking photo. (With the fon, Hope-Mah, and Wee-Mah.) ... (And yes, Liz and Jeremy had to climb up and sit on the eagle.)

No, my name is not "A-Queer-Mofo."
Like Jeremy's hat?

Pig in a trunk.

Cameroon: "Bonjour." Liz: "Ça va!"
Liz had a hard time with the sugarcane.

More photos and details to come and again to all of you who donated: THANK YOU!!!

Shoulder

2007-07-12T13:37:00.000+01:00

A blind man plays his accordion for francs at the train station in Makak, Center Province.

Some days here are harder than others. Some days here last for weeks. Some days here I think I might break soon. But somehow tomorrow comes.

This past week has been one of the roughest that I've had in a very long time. Personal and professional drama has been mounting. When it rains, it pours, I guess.

On the professional front, my Peace Corps Partnership Program has only raised $320, so far, out of the $1,500 that we need. I was hoping to have all of the money raised by the beginning of July. Now I'm hoping for it all to be there by the end of August, just so that, even if I can't see the project come to fruition, I can at least leave my village with the supplies they've been counting on for their girls' school. My COS Conference is in August, and if all of the money doesn't come by then, Peace Corps will close the account and we won't see any of it, because they don't approve applications submitted by volunteers in their final three months of service and they don't send any fraction of the money, only the total amount that was requested. If you haven't donated already, or if you could manage a little more, myself, my village, and the orphan teenage girls who are counting on this school would greatly appreciate whatever you can give! (Click here to donate!)

On the personal front, people have been coming and going. Mostly going. And to say that it's upsetting would be an understatement.

A lot of the time, I credit Africa with making me grow up. I can travel within the country alone. I can handle men who proposition me for sex in a latrine. I can haggle with people who want to charge me three times what an item is worth. I can scare off teenage boys trying to break into my house. All of these seem like big things. All of these seem like the bulk of my life here, because they make a lot of noise, they attract a lot of attention. But really, all of these rest on delicate strings, woven into a net, keeping my life afloat. Simple, quiet things like family, friends. When the strings snap, everything they were supporting starts to tumble. Or at least I would expect it to.

In the past week, I've seen things start to fall. I've felt like the bottom dropped out. I've been blindsided. But I've also been supported. I've been loved. And I've been grateful. For all of my friends, for all of my people, for myself, who have and give me the strength to weave the holes again and shoulder me back up to where I need to be. Otherwise, how could I possibly have the courage to step on a man's foot and tell him to, "Shut off!" when he accosts me in a dirty pit latrine?

Welcome to the Jungle

2007-07-06T22:15:00.000+01:00

Kids in the East watching the bush taxi go by.

One of the perks of living in a developing country for two years is the accessibility that you're granted to the deepest, darkest corners of the country. There are some things that you'll just never experience via ordinary tourism. Maybe Peace Corps volunteers get braver because we've been here so long or maybe we just get stupider about being wary of transportation/bugs/disease/whathaveyou, because... you know... we're haven't died yet, so what the hell?

I traveled with Stacy and Ally last week to visit our friend Ingrid at her post in Ngoyla. Ngoyla's a small village deep in the East Province, just adjacent to the Dja Reserve. Ingrid's is one of the more isolated posts in the country; if you look at a map of Cameroon, Ngoyla is the end of the road. It takes three to four days to get there from my post in the Northwest. Hack forty kilometers further into the jungle and you'll hit the Congo. But really, who wants to do that?

Cameroon is nicknamed Afrique en Miniature for a reason. It's one of the only countries in Africa to host desert, savannah, rainforest, and humid highlands. Where I live in the Northwest Province, it's typically cold (relatively speaking) and the bugs ne me derangent pas so much because the weather's just not really conducive. And though we're rich in farmland, we're not so rich in natural habitat. But because a lot of the East Province is such dense forest, it's a lot easier to come across a monkey or something African like that. Of course, nothing that can potentially make a buck is left alone in Cameroon for long and the bushmeat, logging, and mining industries are doing a good job of raping the landscape in the province. I suppose it's good that we got to experience it now, because the area will be dramatically different in 20 years. But then again, so will the rest of Cameroon.

In the meantime, here's the East Province now now so:

Passengers of our bush taxi pulling the barge over so that we can cross the river and continue on the road to Ngoyla.

Our driver kept stopping to pick up bushmeat being sold on the side of the road. This guy bled onto Stacy's shoes.

Our hotel in Lomie, sleeping horizontally:
This is what you get when you request a room for 3.

Gombo sauce and fufu corn on our first night in Ngoyla.

Doesn't matter that we live in Africa, we still braid each other's hair and talk about boys when we're together.

Stacy m'a tressée.

Boys playing in the front yard.

A primate the villagers caught in the forest and tied up.
He lost his right hand and a chunk of his skull in the process.

I got a monkey friend.
Ingrid said he'd probably be eaten soon. Ashia.

Monkey pox is cute!

He loves gum fruit.

So do Ingrid and Stacy.

Lots of different animals in the East.
...Like snails the size of your hand...

...Bone-eating ants...

...And fowls. Before.

During.

And after.

Dinner.

Ingrid and Ally carry water because they're bush women.
I paid them one-one-hundred for this.

Ingrid and I in her front yard at sunset.

Cameroon moon.

Ngoyla road.

Le Transporteur on the barge crossing the river to go back.

Holla at Cameroon.

Logging in the Southern Cameroons.

Justin and I SO excited for the 4th of July!

(Maybe I'm just excited to have a cold bottle of pink wine. Classy.)

God bless America... or whatever Third World country these weenies were canned in.

"Corruption only dey small small fo big man who komot fo Texas. Yi di suck SOTÉ. Viva America!"

...And back to the Northwest where we love our Asian taxi decals.
I especially love the stuffed kitty on dude's shoulder. Butch.

I Beg Fo Some Small Franc-dem.

2007-06-13T11:50:00.000+01:00

The Peace Corps Partnership Program application that I'm working on with GWA was approved last week, which means that now you can donate!

Go to this website: http://www.peacecorps.gov/contribute and click on "Volunteer Projects" then scroll down to CAMEROON and L. Miesko. You can click on the project title ("Home Economics Class") for a short description of the program and then click on "Contribute to this project!" to do so. Please don't think that I'm only looking for sizeable contributions. The final project cost, $1,508, is not that much, so any little bit helps. $5, $2, I'll take it all! I'm cheap like that!

A more complete project description follows below.

INDICATORS OF SUCCESS

Participants Acquiring New Knowledge or Skills
Who/how many? The home economics class will be offered to 20 orphaned girls in the Guneku-Mbengwi community who cannot afford to attend the local government secondary schools.
What skills? The project will provide sewing skills, as well as health information regarding cleanliness in the home, sanitary cooking measures, avoiding HIV and other STIs and money management. This project is being proposed to the community and implemented by the Guneku Women’s Association (GWA), an organization of prominent and successful women. The class will provide the girls with both a marketable skill (sewing) and pertinent health information presented by strong Cameroonian women. As a result, the project will reduce the risk of prostitution, unwanted pregnancies, and HIV/AIDS within the community.
How will you know? Each girl will complete one clothing item as a final project. They will also be tested by the individual teachers who lecture them on HIV/AIDS, STIs, and other health topics, as well as complete an impact evaluation survey.

Improved Capacity to Define and Meet Goals and Objectives
What changes? The girls will be expected to learn marketable basic sewing skills as well as health and life-skills that will directly impact their attitude regarding the future, goal-setting, and what defines high-risk behavior regarding HIV/AIDS. In addition, because they will be acquiring an income-generating skill (sewing), they will be lectured on money management and responsibility by members of the GWA who specialize in this area.
How will you know? As part of the impact evaluation survey, the girls will answer questions regarding their attitude about the future and setting goals. They will also have to demonstrate the ability to successfully complete the tasks that they’ve been learning (i.e.- sewing, health-related topics, etc.).

Presence of Linkages with Similar Groups or Networks
How many? Approximately 20 frequent contacts within the village and 200 satellite donors and volunteers, all of whom are members of the GWA.
What kind? Professional Cameroonian women.
How will you know? This project has been conceived and will be implemented by the GWA. Thus, they will always be responsible contacts for the project.

Improved Decision Making
What changes? The 20 orphaned girls who are chosen for the class will be taught by members of the Guneku Women’s Association. The group is made up of some of the most successful career women from the village of Guneku now living both in the community and elsewhere in Cameroon. By having strong female role models from their own community as their teachers, the girls will learn not only the tangible skills transferred to them, but also how to respect themselves and plan for an obtainable and successful future. In addition, the class will be comprised entirely of females, so they will not be intimidated or overpowered by male classmates.
How will you know? In addition to completing exit surveys when they complete the course, the girls will continually participate in hands-on activities and dialogues about how their behavior and attitudes regarding their self-esteem and self-worth impact their futures. The responses from these discussions will be reported at the end of the class.

Potential For Sustainability
Please indicate how this will be measured. Because this class has been initiated and will be run primarily by members of the GWA, who are permanent residents of the village of Guneku, this project has the potential for long-term sustainability. After this class finishes in October 2007, the GWA will continue to host approximately 2 classes per year, each consisting of 20 girls. This class is intended to be the first step in a proposed home economics center that the GWA plans to open and run full-time by early 2009. Therefore, this class will serve as a trial and subsequent guideline for other classes in the center. It will also introduce the larger project to the Mbengwi community as a whole so that future fundraising for the center will be successful.

PROPOSAL TIMELINE

July 1, 2007
· All materials are purchased and stored at the Guneku Palace.
· Community meetings are held and announcements are made to promote the class.
July 15, 2007
· Applications are due and girls interested in attending the class are interviewed and selected by members of the Guneku Women’s Association and Peace Corps volunteer Lindsay Miesko.
July 30, 2007
· Pre-tests on sewing aptitude and knowledge of health-related topics (specifically HIV/AIDS) are given.
· Sewing and health classes begin and are held 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. They will continue through the end of October.
September 3, 2007
· Begin incorporating money-management lectures into sewing and health classes.
October 19, 2007
· Final sewing projects and tests/essays about HIV/AIDS and planning for the future are due from students.
· Impact evaluation survey completed by both teachers and students.
October 31, 2007
· Teachers complete grades and evaluations.

Approximately how long will your proposed project last?
Months: 4 Weeks: 0 Days: 0

PROJECT BUDGET

Partnership Contribution:USD $1508.23 LCU 733,000 fCFA
Community Contribution: USD $1543.21 LCU 750,000 fCFA
Total Project Cost: USD $3,051.44 LCU 1,483,000 fCFA

Currency Exchange Rate: 486 fCFA = 1 US Dollar

Partnership Contribution

4 Manual Sewing Machines 320,000/$658.44

1 Inner-Seam Machine 70,000/$144.03
1 Button-Hole Maker 30,000/$61.73
1 Electric Iron 10,000/$20.58
1 Charcoal Iron 3,000/$6.17
10 Simple Scissors 15,000/$30.86
2 Sewing Scissors 10,000/$20.58
10 Meters of Fabric 16,000/$32.92
1 Packet of Sewing Needles(Hand) 100/$0.21
2 Packets of Sewing Needles(Machine) 6,000/$12.35
1 Packet of Sewing Needles(Stitch) 1,000/$2.06
30 Crochet Needles 15,000/$30.86
60 Pairs of Knitting Needles 36,000/$74.07
5 Measuring Tapes 1,000/$2.06
10 Packets of Thread (Sewing) 10,000/$20.58
10 Packets of Thread(Needlework) 20,000/$41.15
1 Signboard 16,000/$32.92
3 Working Tables 15,000/$30.86
6 Benches 24,000/$49.38
1 Chalkboard 7,000/$14.40
2 Packs of Chalk 1,400/$2.88
10 Pattern Papers 2,500/$5.15
1 Ironing Board 4,000/$8.23
10 Cartons of Yarn (Crochet) 50,000/$102.88
10 Cartons of Wool(Knitting) 50,000/$102.88
TOTAL PARTNERSHIP CONTRIBUTION 733,000/$1,508.23

Community Contribution
Teaching Labor (3 teachers for 3 months) 720,000/$1481.48
Teaching Space (1 rooms for 3 months) 30,000/$61.73
TOTAL COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTION 750,000/$1,543.21

Total Project Costs
Partnership Contribution 49.4% 733,000/$1,508.23
Community Contribution 50.6% 750,000/$1,543.21
TOTAL PROJECT COST 100% 1,483,000/$3,051.44

PROPOSAL NARRATIVES

Executive Summary
The home economics class will be offered to 20 orphaned girls in the Guneku-Mbengwi community who cannot afford to attend the local government secondary schools. The project will provide sewing skills, as well as health information regarding cleanliness in the home, sanitary cooking measures, and avoiding HIV and other STIs. In addition, because this class will transfer and income-generating skill (sewing), the girls will also be lectured on money management and responsibility.

This project is being proposed to the community and implemented by the Guneku Women’s Association (GWA), an organization of prominent and successful women. The class will provide the girls with both a marketable skill (sewing) and pertinent health information presented by strong Cameroonian women. As a result, the project will reduce the risk of prostitution, unwanted pregnancies, and HIV/AIDS within the community.

This class is intended to be the first step in a proposed home economics center that the GWA plans to open and run full-time by early 2009. Therefore, this class will serve as a trial and subsequent guideline for other classes in the center. It will also introduce the larger project to the Mbengwi community as a whole so that future fundraising for the center will be successful.

Background Information
The Guneku Women’s Association was started in July 2006. It is a collection of some of the most successful career women from the village of Guneku now living both in the community and elsewhere in Cameroon. There are more than 200 members to date, 53 of which are living in Guneku. The group as a whole meets once a year in Guneku, but chapter meetings (Douala chapter, Kumba chapter, Yaoundé chapter, etc.) meet once a month. Since its inception, the GWA has identified more than 50 orphans within the village and has started a program called “Orphan Help,” in which they sponsor these children in primary school. They have also established a scholarship fund for non-orphan students within Guneku. In the years to come, they plan to open and operate a home economics center in Guneku which will provide secondary school-age orphan girls who cannot afford to attend school with both trade and life skills.

Community Need
Within the village of Guneku, there are a vast number of orphans, the majority of which are female. This is based partly on the fact that boys are considered more valuable than females in the Northwest Province of Cameroon. Additionally, because families tend to be so large, there is rarely enough money to send each child to school. Therefore, the family will decide which child is “smart enough” to attend school. Typically, a male will be chosen over a female. The situation is further aggravated when the child is orphaned and forced to live with extended family. In this case, the orphan is rarely given a priority as far as family finances are concerned.

This sewing class will be offered exclusively to orphaned girls in the community who would otherwise not be attending school. The class will provide both a marketable skill (dressmaking/tailoring) as well as life skills, because members of the GWA, who by profession run the gamut from teachers to nurses, will teach the classes. This class is intended to be the first step in a proposed home economics center that the GWA plans to open and run full-time by early 2009. Therefore, this class will serve as a trial and subsequent guideline for other classes in the center. It will also introduce the larger project to the Mbengwi community as a whole so that future fundraising for the center will be successful.

Community Initiation and Direction
This class was proposed to Lindsay Miesko (PCV Health, Guneku-Mbengwi) by the Guneku Women’s Association in April 2007. They had already been discussing and had conceived the idea of opening a home economics center for orphaned girls in Guneku, and approached Miesko solely for the purpose of directing them towards avenues of funding. The GWA is fully prepared to start, advertise, and run the class on all levels.

The women of the community will be responsible for advertising, interviewing potential students, and teaching.

Project Sustainability
Because the GWA has initiated this project, it is expected to be very sustainable long after the PCV leaves. In addition to the girls learning a marketable skill and life skills, which will be valuable long into their futures, the GWA will learn by doing how to efficiently operate the class and, hopefully, subsequent home economics center.

The project should be financially sustainable because the GWA are prepared to solicit and donate as needed. In addition, they have been put in contact with other funding agencies and have learned how to apply to grants, etc., should the need for a large sum of money arise again in the future.

Because the main resource that is needed is manpower, the GWA is prepared to fulfill this need from within their own organization. The group can provide primary school-level teachers, secondary school-level teachers, nurses, seamstresses, etc. as teachers and mentors to students.

Community Contribution
The GWA is prepared to offer all of the teaching manpower, as well as 25% of the financial contributions.

Project Implementation
The project will begin with the announcement of the classes and entries of the applications of interested girls. This will be completed by the secretary of the GWA in Guneku. Following, we will conduct interviews of all the applicants, and judge them based on perceived need, family financial standing, maturity, education level, and attitude regarding the importance of education in their lives. This will be carried out by the president, vice president, secretary, and the PCV. Once the 20 girls have been chosen, we will give pre-tests to determine both their skill level in sewing as well as knowledge in the health arena, specifically HIV/AIDS. This will be performed by members of the GWA who will act as teachers and advisors. When the classes begin, they will meet 5 times each week, with each session lasting about 5 hours. The classes will be taught by members of the GWA on a rotating schedule. After the completion of the class, the girls will submit a clothing item as a final project and will complete a written test/essay about HIV/AIDS and planning for their futures. They will also complete an impact evaluation survey. They will be evaluated on their clothing item and test/essay by the GWA teachers and the survey will be collected and evaluated by the PCV.

Simple Favors

2007-06-06T08:43:00.000+01:00

Baby Favor and family.

Favor's church reception.

Big men eat separately, natch.

Palm oil with plantains. Yum.

People’s sense of hospitality here is something that is unrivaled by America. That’s both good and bad, depending on the circumstance.

In the past month, two of my friends have had babies, one a son and one a daughter. Each has named her child Favor. (When I went to see one of the babies the day after it was born, I picked it up and said, “Favor-FAVE!” Nobody got the joke, naturally, because we have no VH1 or Flavor of Love. Whatever. I make myself laugh.) Anyway, on Sunday, Favor-boy was presented in church, and as is customary, afterward we all had to eat. The church provided food for the whole congregation in honor of the new baby, and then Favor’s family provided food to the whole congregation as a thank you for acknowledging the baby. That’s two meals in the space of 30 minutes. Way.

Still, it’s nice. It’s nice that the whole parish acts as a family. And it’s nice that they accept me. Sometimes I don’t realize how integrated I am here because I deal with people (adults) here primarily on a one-on-one or small group basis, so they greet me individually, we discuss individually. But when there are big gatherings within the village, I generally don’t get deranged. People feed me, they chat with me, and that’s it. I don’t get the, “So who are you, why are you here, will you give me some money, and why is your hair like that?” anymore. It’s nice.

But there are also times when the hospitality is just a bit too much. It’s still sweet, of course, but sometimes it’s frustrating. For instance, on Sunday morning after church, I tapped the shoulder of Madame Asanga, one of the women in GWA who I’m working with to develop the sewing classes. I told her that, since I’d just returned from Yaoundé, I’d like to meet with her so that she could look over the finalized version of the proposal. She agreed, but was confused. “It’s the proposal for the home economics class that we’ve been working on, remember? They’re sending it off to Washington this week?” I reminded her again. She just said, “Oh, that seems very good. Yes, we can discuss on Tuesday.” I was a little taken aback by the fact that she was so nonchalant about it. Had I really spent the last month taking meetings and working on an application that she had nearly forgotten about after only a week? I let it go, deciding that there was nothing that I could do to make her understand the gravity of the project, other than continue working. On Tuesday morning, she collected me at the church so that we could go to her house and discuss. While walking to her compound, she said that she had consulted Madame Nduh and Madame Asanga to ask if they could sit in on our meeting, but they had said they were busy. Hold up… yep, this woman was not Madame Asanga. I had mistaken a woman I don’t know for the woman who I had been working with for the past month. No wonder she had no idea what I was talking about. But by this time, I couldn’t just admit that I had thought she was someone else, and I couldn’t very well get out of the fact that I was supposed to go and speak with this woman. So, I was stuck, for the next two hours, sitting at her house, eating the hard-boiled eggs that she served me, and ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the 30+ years worth of family photos that she stacked on my lap. We perused the proposal that I had in tow for about 10 minutes, and I played off wanting to discuss it with her by pretending that I had mistakenly understood that she was a member of GWA. (A plausible excuse, as this woman is a church elder, and could very easily be involved with the group, had she not refused membership because she’s too busy with her church duties.)

Instead of saying to me on Sunday morning, "What the heck are you talking about? I don't know about any proposal," and saving me two hours of meeting time, this woman accommodated me. So there're both sides of the coin. On one hand, it's a little frustrating that people here won't correct me when I'm wrong because I'm a guest and it would be considered rude by Cameroonian standards. But it's also comforting to know that I'm surrounded by a level of kindness that allows doors to open to me simply because I request it, even if I don't have a good reason. It's some kind of favor.

A Small Bird

2007-06-01T09:16:00.000+01:00

Guneku Day-Care Class 1 & 2 graduates

It's the end of the school year all over the world. I've been both looking forward to and dreading this time because: one, I'll only have to interact with my teenagers on a small group basis, not 70 at a time, thank God, and two, all of my activities revolve around the schools, so what will I do with myself? Luckily, this Home Economics project with GWA has popped up, so that'll occupy me. I just spent the last week in Yaoundé working on Peace Corps Partnership paperwork for that, which'll be sent off to Washington next week. Hopefully it'll be approved by mid-June and then I'll post the information, so you all can start donating! (We need to raise about $1,400. Totally doable.)

In the meantime, the closing of the school year brings fetes until... Most notably, the Guneku Day-Care graduation. It was 2 hours of big-man speeches (in the dialect, I had no idea what was said) and then the kids said their rhymes, most of which don't actually rhyme. For instance: "A small bird sat in a tall tree singing a nice song. Tweet, tweet, tweet tweet tweet, TWEET!" They flap their arms and scream the tweets. It's all very sweet. Oh, and then there's the classic: "Fatty pig, fatty pig, digging in the dirt. Digging, digging all day long, when will you stop to rest?" The kids also stood up and recited some of the French that I've been teaching them all year. For some reason, the class as a whole (save for one boy named Edwin) chronically forgets the number 7. I don't know why, but they count from 1 to 10 and always forget 7. I'm pretty sure that classifies me as a crap teacher.

When I go back to teach at the day-care again in the fall, my Class 2 (the class with Wee-Mah and all of the kids in most of these photos) will have moved on to preschool, which is taught at a different center. It's very sad, but at least I'll get a new crop of kids who don't know any French. That way, I never actually have to learn more French. Give some, take some.

You have no idea how long this photo took or how many times I had to hear, "Cletus, look at the camera or I go beat you, eh!"

The day-care teachers, Angeline, Alice, and Vera,
trying to wrangle the kids for the photo.

Pikin don snap so.

Vera, very pregnant, and about to pop out her newest student in July.

Why yes, we do give glasses of wine to 3-year-olds here.
(But only for celebrations and holidays.)

Edwin is happy to graduate.

Wee-Mah is not.

Class 2 a dit, "Au revoir, Madame!"

Twenty-Five

2007-05-27T12:54:00.000+01:00

I turned 25 yesterday. Someone asked me how it feels to be this old. I said it feels like 24, but more wrinkly. But there's no better place to get wrinkly than the Hilton!

It was Sarah's birthday too.
This is how happy we are to not be eating fufu.

Some kind of fete. I'm pretty sure it was for my birthday.
Thank you, Paul Biya.

Looks like a party.

I found a boy to kiss.

Not a bad birthday.

"Proof You Exist"

2007-05-22T08:40:00.000+01:00

Did I say I needed a beach?

I went to Limbe with this guy I kinda know (ha), Matt, last week, and it was a nice little escape from post/reality, as usual. Matt’s a volunteer posted in the Extreme North province and had just flown into Douala from a vacation to Italy, so we met for a short jaunt to nearby Limbe. His readjustment, my diversion. Lucky.

This was likely my last trip to Limbe (or at most, next to last, since Liz and Jeremy are visiting soon), and it’s just the latest in a series of reminders that have cropped up: Peace Corps is almost over. I’m under the six-month mark now. Weird. I feel like I’ve entered into this gray area, a kind of purgatory, similar to the state that I was in for the last six weeks in America before I came here. (“You’re not really here because you’re so set on being there.”) There’s still a lot going on in my village, but I’m not really privy to it because I’ve become oblivious, floating somewhere off to the left in my own little bubble, slowly coasting back towards America. I guess I’m doing it to myself. I haven’t been giving a good amount of time to my relationships with Cameroonians lately because, well, they’re almost over, for the most part.

I’ll be sad to go (especially given some recent developments) but, I’m still ready. Well… almost ready. First I have a good amount of traveling to do; there’s still a lot of the country that I haven’t seen. But that’s more like vacation than Peace Corps, right? Does that count? Maybe it should. It feels like just as much work as actually being at post because, even though I get to go out and be with fun people and see new things, traveling is just so freaking difficult here. For instance, on the way back from Limbe, the bus I was on got stopped and delayed a good 12 times. One of the delays was an hour and a half long because gendarmes checked the IDs of every person on the bus, and one man’s was expired, so they held the whole bus for that long. Another delay took an hour because in Bafoussam, some woman learning how to drive ran into the back of the bus. So then the whole bus had to get out, stand in a crowd, and yell, “Way! Way! Yu don spoil bus fo back, na! Way!” For an hour. I think that’s the equivalent of a Cameroonian insurance dispute. The woman just said she didn’t have any money to pay for the repairs (though she was driving a new Toyota) and finally the bus driver gave up and we continued on our way. I didn’t get back to Bamenda until almost 9 o’clock.

Understandably, I am a cranky traveler in Cameroon. (When I’m on the road, not when I get there. When I get there, it’s fabulous, like Limbe was last week. Tu me manques beaucoup!)

Beeeeeeach. Sigh.

Matt could totally take a gorilla.

Baboons at Limbe's Wildlife Center.

Right before we became the laughingstocks of the car park.
(Nothing funnier than some white men running after a bus they’re supposed to be on.)

Miss You, Family!

2007-05-16T16:05:00.000+01:00

I’ve been out of the United States for almost two years now, and I’ve had to miss a lot of what’s happened at home. Weddings, deaths, babies, break-ups, breakdowns, degrees, parties. People started wearing gold and skinny jeans again. WTF? But I just love it when I get a line from home, and I can see that some things never change. Thank God.

My mom’s reaction to something my Uncle Don and Uncle Dick are talking about. HA!

(That’s my dad in the foreground.)

(Thanks for the pics, Aunt Luanne!)

Free Life

2007-05-11T00:38:00.000+01:00

GWA ladies: Madames Mary and Ordelia.

Go figure that whenever I’m bored and have no motivation to find work, finding it is actually what ameliorates the situation. Ain’t duality a bitch.

About a month ago, the Guneku Women’s Association (GWA, pronounced GUH-wuh, I love that.) asked me to help them with a project. They want to start a home economics center for orphan girls in the community who can’t afford to go to school, so that they can acquire some marketable skill, or at least learn how to clean themselves. (That was really the proposal that was given to me. I’m not kidding.) Basically, they just wanted me to hook them up with some funding organizations. That’s what I’m working on right now.

We’re dealing with two different means of funding at the moment. One is the American Embassy’s Self-Help Program, in which the embassy awards a grant for a tangible, community-benefiting project. We’re applying to that one in the hopes of building the actual center, but the next time that the embassy will award the grant is in September 2008. I’ll be long gone by then, but I can help them get the application in before I go. The other is the Peace Corps Partnership Program, which provides an avenue for private donors to give money to projects that Peace Corps volunteers are carrying out in their communities. We’re developing that one for a sewing class project that will hopefully start in June or July. When I say “private donor,” yes, that means you all at home. More information about how and where online to donate will be coming shortly, after GWA and I finish the application and get it approved.

I’m excited about this project, mostly because I’ll get to crochet with a bunch of teenage girls. But at the same time, after 18 months of watching the projects that I put all of my energy into crumble and fall, I’m a little jaded. Who knows if this’ll really go anywhere? But it’s easier to throw myself into this one because it’s not my baby. This is GWA’s idea and project. I’m making it very clear from the starting blocks that I’m only going to be an advisor, so that when I go, the people who pushed it up and developed it will still be here.

For the time being, the women that I’m planning with are very enthusiastic; it always starts out that way. And this is a good idea. It could be very beneficial for very many people in the community, but if they don’t keep up with it, then it’ll fail like many of the organizations here do. Cameroon is called the country of grand ambitions. I don’t know who said that first, but now it’s on a pagne. Women walk around with cabas emblazoned with “Le Cameroun des grands ambitions.” Well, très bonne, you got it on some fabric, but does it translate into real life? People have a habit here of starting NGOs. They get an idea, so they put it out there and call it an organization, but as soon as the work is too challenging or money stops coming in, they run and the organization dies. It happens a lot.

Right now, I think that this could work. The women seem committed enough. They’re very passionate about telling me that these girls need to be saved from a “free life.” I thought that was a good thing, but apparently here, a free life means that you have no work and no ties, so you’re likely to prostitute yourself to get whatever small pocket money you can. It’s a problem, to be sure, but likewise, if we produce 25 seamstresses a year, where are they going to go? Guneku barely has a need for the two tailors that are in the village right now, let alone 25 more.

But I guess I could go in circles forever, finding faults in everything. I really need to be more optimistic. The fon has a knack for that. Being optimistic, I mean. He’s seen his NGO die. He’s lost all his money. He’s been thieved by some of his closest confidants. And yet, when he walked by the meeting I was having with two of the GWA women the other day, he said, “Thank God, Mafor. You will really see something before you leave because you are working with good people. It is better to work with two clever women than a thousand foolish men.” Amen to that.

One Too Many Days to Be Lucky

2007-05-07T11:54:00.000+01:00

Pikin dem. Begging. Normal.

It’s been a while since I posted. There’s probably a good reason for that. Nothing’s happening. I’m bored. I’ve hit a wall. I’m ready for something new. Work is dwindling, but I don’t have the motivation right now to go out and find more, because it seems like it doesn’t really matter. I’m not being replaced when I leave Cameroon in 195 days (out of the 778 days total that I will have spent here) … (yes, I’m bored enough to number the days), so really… what the hell?

I suppose at this point, I should try to water things down and make my situation look as rosy as possible, but I’m tired of old Cameroon. There’s nothing really exciting here. I’ve been to the coronations, I’ve seen the funerals, I’ve pounded the ground with the jujus, I’ve eaten more water fufu than any person should, I’ve been imbued with mimbo to the point of nausea, and now… enough is enough.

My village has already set their sights on my departure, in much the same way as I have, though they’re more concerned with it so that they can call dibs on my stuff. Pretty much everything in my house has already been sold or claimed. It’s nice in a way; it makes my exodus seem impossibly near. But it gets annoying too because people that I’ve only greeted in passing are trying to wring things out of me. It doesn’t take much to push me to the point of snippy, so that’s probably the best way to describe me as of late. I try not to, but it’s hard, not necessarily to have your value as a person reduced to only as much as you can give materially, but also to be polite when it’s just so satisfying (admittedly in a very wrong way) to be rude. After someone has just knocked on my door and spoiled my mid-afternoon nap, only to say, “Aftanoon! I hear that you will soon go you and I want to ask, eh, you will dash me weti na? …Or you will just carry me with you,” I stand there, trying to do my best and bite my tongue and not state as point-blankly as possible, “No, you crazy bat, I’m not leaving you a thing. Nothing. No. Thing. I barely know you. And guess what? I like it that way. Now get off my porch.” Usually I just ask them what my name is (my real name, not my village name). Most of the time they can’t answer, and so I tell them they shouldn’t beg from strangers. …But it never really works out in real life as smoothly as it does in my head. Nothing ever does.

There are many things about Peace Corps that lots of volunteers don’t like. Some people think it’s too long, some think it’s too short. Some think that everybody should have postmates, some are glad that the nearest American is three days away. I tend to subscribe to different trains of thought depending on the day and depending on which American I’m interacting with. Every day really is up and down. I know that when all is said and done and when my two years here are reduced to a day in retrospect, I’ll think differently about it than I do right now. The swamp is always more beautiful when you’re standing on the bank, rather than wading in the muck of it. Maybe I’ll think it was perfect. Maybe I’ll think it was too short. Maybe I’ll think I wasted it. There are a lot of maybes surrounding my Peace Corps service. There have been since the very beginning. Maybe I’ll pass medical. Maybe I’ll get sent somewhere. Maybe I’ll like Africa. Maybe I’ll quit. Everything has been rather uncertain. But, certainly—good days and bad, hard times and not, boring or exciting, lonely or overly ensemble—I have changed, I have grown, I have risen. And I suppose, that in itself is worth days like this, when I’d rather be out... somewhere in the world, with someone, you know, having a life. Way.

(I'll get over it, I just need a beach.)

Knock-Door

2007-04-25T10:38:00.000+01:00

People here get together a lot. People here get together in my compound a lot. Especially lately. It can be bothersome, but for the most part, it’s nothing that a few Valium and a sense of humor can’t cure.

Most of the time they get together because something bad has happened. Somebody’s dead, somebody’s sick, somebody’s missing, somebody’s been robbed. Ashia. But this week, thankfully, somebody’s getting married. …Well, maybe. One of the daughters of the mami in my compound, Stella, is planning to get married next year. But first, they have to have the knock-door. That means that Stella’s whole family has to come back to village so that the would-be groom can ask every single one of them for permission to wed their daughter/sister/aunt/niece/cousin/whatever Stella is to them. (“Knock-door” is Pidgin and comes from the tradition that the girl’s suitor has to go and knock on every one of her relatives’ doors.) I’m told that the girl’s relatives cannot flat-out refuse to allow her to marry the boy, but they can refuse to give their approval if they think that the bride price is not suitable.

Yes, this week, in my compound, the other item on the agenda is the bride price. Both families (Stella’s and her boyfriend’s) were up all night on Saturday (enter: Valium) discussing what the groom’s family should pay to the bride’s. I’m not sure what amount was settled on in this case, but prices can range from a few thousand francs to cattle to millions of francs depending on what the bride is “worth.” Her worth is determined by several factors, including education, beauty, personal history, family status, age, etc. (For the record, Stella is 28. Two thumbs up for a Cameroonian waiting until her 20’s to get married!)

I’m actually kind of sad that I won’t be here to see the wedding next year. I’ve been in this compound long enough that all of the family members know me by now and try to include me in things, though I refuse some of them, like staying up all night to dispute Stella’s worth. It just seems kind of awkward to say, “No, this girl should only go for 50,000 francs!” while she’s sitting right there. What must it be like to hear that your whole person and the rest of your life are only worth $100 to somebody else? Anyway, I was kind of hoping that they’d have the wedding earlier so that I could have a shot at being a bridesmaid and therefore have to don requisite heinous lavender taffeta dress.

…But if ever there was a reason to fly back to Cameroon, I think taffeta is it.

Yu Don Put 'Em Fo Sikin: How to Dress in Cameroon

2007-04-16T23:19:00.000+01:00

White man yi dey.
(Yes, I have one of those t-shirts too. Yes, I am wearing it when I get back to America.)

Ingrid and I glowing (sweating) in humid Yaoundé.

I'm in charge of the volunteer newsletter here in Cameroon called The Laughing Cow. Usually it's a lot of fun. Sometimes it's an extra-lot of fun. ...Like after 4 bottles of champagne when you can convince the boys staying with you in the Yaoundé transit house to play "Who Wore It Better?" so that you can print it in an unofficial U.S. government publication. Someday, someone's going to run for office and I'll have ruined their chances. Sorry in advance.

And now, without further delay, je prèsente: "Who Wore It Better?"

CASE ONE: Ally Packer vs. Matt Harvey

51.39% of the 4 people at the Case said Ally wore it best.

48.61% said Matt wore it like Tom Selleck in a dress.

Matt says: "This is surprisingly comfortable!"

CASE TWO: Christine Deloff vs. Brian Palladino

82% said the cat wore it best.

18% said, "What'd Brian do to his arm?"

Christine says: "I'm bringing sketchy back."

CASE THREE: Ingrid Martens vs. Nate Spence

76% said that Nate has the muscles that are key for pulling off a muumuu.

24% said, "I wish Ingrid would stick her finger in my mouth."

Ingrid says: "I'll do that. For five CFA."

Go Come, Na.

2007-04-13T18:52:00.000+01:00

I have a rough life. Give me a little ashia.

A few weeks ago, I had to go to Limbe. Then this past week, I had to go to Kribi. Ashia for me. …But I really did have to do work. The HWS PCVs a year behind me were having their IST conference in Kribi, and I gave a presentation on challenges and coping. (Both of which, we all know, I happen to be an expert on after 19 months in Cameroon.) It went okay. Whatever. I’m not really a très bonne public speaker, but it was a free trip to the beach, plus I got to meet some new people.

I’m not sure if I can accurately describe what a rare thrill it is to meet new people (Americans) here. There are about 100 volunteers in the country. I probably see about 10 of them regularly, and (no offense guys)… I get sick of it. We all do. Speaking to different people from different places who have different opinions is something so taken for granted at home, so key to growth. There’s just only so much time that you can spend with certain people, and when it comes to some, I’ve hit my limit.

Before I graduated from college, my R.A. staff and I were talking about “life after,” and I said something along the lines of, “Good luck to you all, because I’ll probably never see most of you again.” That offended a lot of them. (Jeannette, sorry again. I know you’re sensitive, and now you have to put up with Jersey on top of that… Ashia.) I never really understood why it was so wrong of me to say that. People come and go all the time, and I knew that most of them would go. Most of the people you meet in your life do go. Very few come and stay. I feel like it’s the same thing here in Peace Corps: "Nice to know you, but yes, honestly, we were made to be temporary." I still don’t know why it’s so offensive. Does it make me phony to enjoy the relationships in the meantime when I know that upon returning to America, I’ll probably never speak to most of them again? Maybe. But everyone does the same thing. Of course, that doesn't mean that I won’t be happy to see them at a reunion or if I run into them in a supermarket (ohh… freezer section… I just drooled a little), but it’ll never be like it is now. I won’t know where they’ll be living, who they’ll be married to, whether they have kids. Unless, of course, myspace.com continues to flare in popularity, but even then it won’t be interpersonal communication so much as online stalking. And I’m really okay with that. Maybe I am a bad person. Maybe I'm just waiting to see who'll still be there when the smoke clears. All of that is not to say that I won't make a genuine effort to maintain relationships with some of the people here, but for the most part... such is life.

Anyway, I got off on a tangent. Yes, I met new people, ate lots of fish, slept really well in super-frigid air conditioning, and swam in the slightly-scummy Kribi waters. Limbe’s better. Plus the few days there were a good gauge of how far I've come. I didn't really realize that I had grown or gotten any more used to Cameroon in the past year, until I talked to some of the newer PCVs. Only seven more months here. Abbah.

Fishing boats near the fish market in Kribi, where one of the fish mamis charged us 5000 francs for a plate of fried plantains. Crazy bitch.

20 PCVs + 2 bottles of rum + 1 Sanyo keyboard player = Karaoke, Cameroon-style

Matt, Ingrid, and Sarah knee-deep in spiked Foster Clark's.

Ingrid and Lindsay heart Kribi.

I'm bringing classy back:
My super-hot fake Burberry hat that I got for mil franc at a gare. (The mami sitting next to me on the bush taxi, wearing white plastic sunglasses, told me that to be in style, I had to flip it up a little in the back, but ONLY in the back. She did it for me and then said, "Ça c’est bien, ça!" I aim to please. ...And to be en vogue au Cameroun.)

(Lindsay) Jo Versus the Volcano

2007-04-05T09:25:00.000+01:00

I won. But the volcano put up one hell of a fight.

I climbed Mount Cameroon on March 27, 28, and 29. (I would have posted sooner, but electricity no dey fo Mbengwi.) It’s the highest mountain in West Africa, and I believe the sixth highest on the African continent. 4,095 meters (about 13,000 feet) of pure volcanic fury, just begging to be conquered. …Or something like that. I didn’t really conquer it so much as inch my way up, savoring the altitude and views as only a pace like mine could allow. So, I didn’t go fast, but I did finish, and that’s all that really matters to me. It was something that I wanted to do for me while I was here, and despite what naysayers (all the way up the mountain) said about my inadequacy and supposed inability, I did. Pip pip, top notch.

I went with a group of nine other volunteers. Eight of us had our own porters and we hired two guides, making a total of 20 of us trekking up into the clouds. It was a 3-day, 40-kilometer hike, traversing through rainforests, savannahs, and lava fields. Mount Cameroon is an active volcano; the most recent eruption was in 2000. The crater lakes that we passed still reek of sulfur and emit little puffs of steam every few minutes. (Our guides said that they know when the volcano will erupt because they have small tremors in Buea for three days beforehand.)

(I hope that comes out clearly.) The red lines are the path that we took, and the blue dots are where we camped for the night. 7 kilometers on day one to Hut 2. 21 kilometers on day two to reach the summit and then continue to Mann's Spring. 12 kilometers on day three to reach the village of Bokwango and finish. ...Then a 150-franc taxi ride back to Buea, capital of the Southwest Province. Far and away, the first day was the most difficult for me because the incline was so steep and I had to go up small small. But for a lot of people, the last day was the worst because by that time, they were walking on injuries.

This was probably the most spectacular thing that I’ve done since I’ve been in Cameroon, in terms of sheer environmental diversity and beauty. I could go on about it, but I took so many pictures, that I’ll just let them do the talking.

Buea's "peace, prosperity, performance" statue.
Fitting for the hike.

Miss Trice getting ready to climb a mountain as only she can.

DAY ONE

The mountain in the background doesn't look that big, but it is.
You can't see the summit from there.

Some of the porters relaxing in the rainforest during the first break on the way to Hut 1.

After we passed Hut 1, the landscape turned into a foggy savannah and the temperature dropped dramatically.

Our two guides, Charles and Samuel, in the savannah.
Incidentally, they've both been hiking the mountain for about 15 years. They estimate that they reach the summit 200 times a year, making it about 3,000 times each that they've climbed Mount Cameroon. Once is good for me.

Ingrid and I at the Magic Tree, 2,100 meters up. I forget why it's magic. Something about a goddess of the mountain. She probably looks just like Ingrid. ...Or me. Either way, totally hot.

Some of the girls cozying up for our first night on the mountain at Hut 2. It was really cold; we all slept in pants, sweaters, coats, hats, and gloves. And I wore my long-johns, Mom. Again, totally hot.

Some porters making garre fufu, or something equally delicious.
...Something.

DAY TWO

Beginning of day two. You still can't see the summit at this point. Have to go over that ridge, then over another one before you can see it.

Lindsey's saying something really profound here.

Grasslands near the summit. Pretty.

Ingrid and I at the top.
(That's for you, Rebecca, because you said we wouldn't make it. Kisses.)

The view from the summit.
It was really windy, really cold, and really clear. I'm told that we could see Nigeria, Equitorial Guinea, and Douala, but I didn't really know what I was looking at.

All of us going back down the mountain. The ground at this point was loose, sandy lava-gravel. It was a few inches deep, very easy to slide and fall, and very fun to "ski" in. Ally ganked her knee up doing that. Ashia.

Eventually the ground got harder and we were climbing over larger formations of lava, left over from the 1922 eruption. Also easy to twist your ankle on.

Hiking makes Ingrid thoughtful.

Hiking makes me dirty.

In the late afternoon, we reached the crater lakes, produced during the most recent eruption.

Very beautiful, but tricky to traverse because it was all loose stones a few inches deep.

Looks like a desert, but it's just all the hills covered in ash.

Hike 'em so, until...

DAY THREE

The bush houses we stayed in at Mann's Spring.

The lava flow from 2000, which reaches all the way to Limbe.

...And eventually, we made it back to the rainforest.

One of our porters, looking always his finest, even though he just climbed up and down a mountain.

Kate and I in front of a big tree in the rainforest. Love that fog.

Three days, 40 kilometers, and five giant blisters later, these boots are done walking.

Everybody needs a little Limbe after a lot of mountain.

Cry-Die (Woah Woah.)

2007-03-21T11:37:00.000+01:00

My landlord’s wife woke me up yesterday when she called me at 6:30 in the morning. She asked where Mami was. I told her that she had spent the night in Mbengwi town, working on her farm, that she would be back in the evening. We hung up and I went back to sleep. Fifteen minutes later, a motorcycle pulled up. Someone was yelling, wailing, woah-woah-ing. In my mid-waking stupor, I thought it was a madman. After 10 minutes, I got up and went outside. The compound was already lined with people sobbing, men on one side, women on the other, like a middle school dance. The motorcycle had carried Mami back from Mbengwi. In the small patch of grass at the center of my compound, she was on her hands and knees pounding on the ground, yelling in Meta. When she saw me, she crawled toward me, sobbing, “That my son. That my son for Mbingo. That my son doctor.” I bent down and put my hand on her shoulder and said, “Ashia, my mother. Way, ashia, ashia, I’m sorry.” She said, “Thank you,” and crawled away. Over the past day and a half, people have come and gone out of the compound, but the women didn’t just come up to give condolences, they came up screaming and wailing. When they arrived in the middle of the compound, they fell on the grass and pounded the ground. Everyone cried with them, and would finally pick the newcomer up. Then things would calm, people would sob quietly until the next person came in, crying and yelling. She would fall on the ground, everyone would cry and fall with her, then eventually pick her up. (Talk about a metaphor.) This will continue day and night, for about another five days, until they bury her son behind our compound.

Cry-dies are something that I usually just pass, or hear in the distance. But I can’t really avoid this one because it’s in my front yard. Mami’s son, a man who worked for the monastery in Mbengwi, has been sick for some time. He was in a hospital in Yaoundé for the past two months or so. They moved him to the hospital in Mbingo (a town in the Northwest Province) about two weeks ago. They said he was improving, then he died sometime during the night on Monday.

Times of grief here are interesting, at least for me, because for the majority of the time, people here remain stoic regardless of the circumstance. I have only seen a grown Cameroonian cry once outside of the context of death. When they lose someone, however, it’s no holds barred. They scream, they cry, they sing low, mournful “woah woah” refrains for hours on end. And they collapse in the dirt. I think that part of it is especially telling of their expression of grief because, for the most part, they’re such clean people. If I sit on a stone on the ground or on the church steps, everyone will say, “Aye! You will dirty yourself!” I don’t much care; it brushes off, but they think it’s crass. Even 3-year-old Wee-Mah will say, “Auntie Lindsay, Hope-Mah will dirty you, na!” if I pick her little sister up off the ground.

This being my first full-on cry-die, it’s interesting and also slightly trying. Yes, watching 50 people mourn in my front yard is moving, but it becomes less moving and more tiresome as the days wear on and I’m kept awake all night. Plus, I have no idea how to respond to everything and it seems like everything I do is wrong. If I were truly integrated, I would be weeping and crawling on the ground with them, but, one: I’m not moved to that level, and two: I think it might seem like I was just making fun if I gave up my composure like that. I don’t know if I can greet people when I come into the compound, whether they’re crying or not. They only respond quietly, and certainly don’t go out of their way to greet me when I come in like they usually do. Do you not greet during times of sorrow? I brought sugar cane and kola back with me after a hike yesterday for everyone. They accepted it quietly, and didn’t shake my hand and say, “Thank you!” like they usually do. Do you not give food in times of sorrow? So for the most part, I just stay in my house when I’m here and go about my life as usual. But that seems like I’m just ignoring everything and not giving due gravity to the situation. I don’t really know how to respond, and I’m afraid that I’m losing a few points with these people.

So like any normal 20-something, when confronted with a circumstance difficult and potentially daunting, I’m running. Yesterday I ran for four hours and took a 5-mile hike up into the mountains. This weekend, I’ll run again, before the body gets here. But in all fairness, I had these plans before the man died. So really, I’m not fleeing, but I’m not fighting the current pulling me away. Yes, I feel guilty about that. No, the guilt will not override my urge to avoid certain levels of discomfort. Ashia.

Some Fulani men I met on my hike yesterday.
...Nothing to do with the cry-die.
I just like the pictures.

A Man of the People

2007-03-16T10:57:00.000+01:00

Holla.

(Carine and I ready to head to the new Fon of Mbemi’s coronation.)

I spent Thursday at a coronation ceremony. (Admit it, you were busy doing the same.)

Mbemi is one of the villages just adjacent to mine. The Fon of Mbemi died two weeks ago on the same day as his first wife. She was the first wife he married, but the last of his four wives to die. They all died within the past year.

Nobody says HIV, but everybody knows. Polygamy isn’t bad in theory, as long as all of the wives are virgins when they’re married and the husband stays faithful to his wives. But of course that’s not always realistic. The HIV/AIDS rates in Cameroon and the Northwest Province are 12% and 11.5%, respectively, so of course new infections happen all the time. Even to fons, untouchable though they may be.

So a new fon had to be crowned, and because the Fon of Mbemi produced only daughters, a male successor had to be chosen from elsewhere in the family line. The job has fallen to a brother named Humphrey. He’s 25 years old, and has only completed Form 1 of secondary school. He tried to refuse the position, but was not allowed. “You can’t run from tradition,” Carine explained to me. But it’s understandable that this kid is frightened. That’s like me being made queen of Johnstown at my age. No, thank you. It took me 6 months just to get my new Chacos to fit right, no way could I rule a whole town. And beyond the immense responsibility that he has just had shoveled upon him, it’s just a bizarre transition. One day, you’re just another guy hanging around and the next day, nobody can call you by your first name, nobody can shake your hand, nobody can sit in the same chair as you, nobody can see you eat. A man of the people, yet completely isolated.

The name of the successor is kept hidden until the time of the fon’s death, so this kid had no idea that this was his fate until about two weeks ago. Since the prior fon died, Humphrey stayed hidden in another palace (happened to be the Palace of Guneku this time) until the day of his crowning, as is customary. It’s common for family members to be jealous of the fon-to-be and to try to poison him in an effort to pass the title along to another. So they keep him hidden until he’s officially fon.

Humphrey doesn’t have a wife yet, and he has to choose one soon because the villagers want him to finish secondary school, but won’t pay for him to do so until he has a wife, so that there’ll be less of a chance that he sleeps around. (Euphemistically dubbed “misbehaving” by the villagers.) In case you’re wondering, just like he could not refuse to become Fon, the girl (or girls) he chooses to marry cannot refuse to become his wife (wives) or they’ll likely be disowned by their families and left without a job or place to live.

Despite all of the apparent downers surrounding the situation, the coronation was still treated as a time of great jubilation. Practically everyone who owns a shotgun in the tri-village area brought it so they could fire off a few celebratory rounds. Plus it was an excuse for me to wear my traditional outfit. Plus they fed me njama-njama. …So it can’t be all bad, right? After we left the coronation, Carine and I stopped at the bar at the Guneku junction and I bought her a Coke. “So it is really a wonderful day!” she exclaimed. “You only need that somebody buy you a drink for it to be a wonderful day?” I asked her. She looked at me like I was crazy and said, “What more can you ask?” A wonderful day indeed.

Local fons at the coronation.
(The new Fon of Mbemi is the younger guy in the middle
with the cheetah skin hanging from his neck.
The Fon of Guneku is the fon in the foreground on the right.)

Old mamis bowing as the fons pass.

Ain’t a party without drums!

My first plate of fufu corn and njama-njama of the new year. Love it.

Palm wine + Guns = Fun for all!

The Fon of Bome (Carine’s father) and I
in our almost-matching sunshades.
Bling.