Update from Across the Seas #2

I can’t believe it’s been a little over a week since I’ve been here. It feels like months. I want to say we’ve just been going so fast that everything has flown by, but living as a Cameroon is slow: turtle pace slow. You amble anywhere you want to go. Everyone is always late, its expected here. Everything runs at a comfortable place. Even us Americans. So it can’t be that. Perhaps the whole early mornings thing. Cameroon has accomplished what my mother and uncle have been trying to do for years! I finally wake up early. 6 at the latest Monday through Saturday. I get to sleep in till almost 7:30 on Sundays! But that’s only if we’re not going to morning mass, which apparently I’ll be going to this week.

I’ll back up a bit.

Last I wrote, I was in the capital, Yaounde, at orientation. We received shots, survival French, and a few basic first aide and safety classes. We met our Country Program Director and had dinner with the American Ambassador, took care of long stay visas and paperwork. In our group are three different programs for Cameroon: Youth Development, a new program working toward empowering women and basically motivating youth, Agro/Forestry, a program trying to encourage sustainable farming and crops to promote capacity building in communities, and us: Health, a program dedicated to mostly Health awareness and education and basically doing whatever we can to make our communities healthier. When we get to post, we spend the first three months evaluating what our community needs and how we can facilitate a program where the community makes it happen and is able to sustain it. Often, we do more than one project; sometimes we fail, sometimes we don’t. We work with health professionals, youth groups, women community associations, municipal workers and governments, and basically scrounge around for whatever help we may get. But before this happens, before we even get assigned our post, we go through training, called PST (Everything in the Peace Corps has acronyms. A person who has completed training is a PCV, while we are currently PCT’s).

While we were in Yaounde, all 54 of our group were together, doing the same trainings, living and working together. For PST, they’ve separated us. Agro and YD peeps are in Bafia, a big town 2.5 hours north of Yaounde. The Sante’s (us) are in Bokito, a little tiny village about half an hour outside of Bafia. We go into Bafia every week for team meetings, internet, and, for right now, electricity (more on that later).

We are all staying with host families, going to PST from 8-5 everyday where we learn Technical Skills, French, PC Protocol and Procedure, Safety and First Aide, and we receive guidance on how complete our Post Assignments and Projects.

My family is…. Well… Cameroonian. There’s no better way to describe it. I live in a small (by American standards) 5 bedroom home built of concrete bricks with a aluminum ceiling. We have an outdoor kitchen where we cook over an open fire and a “bathroom” where we take our bucket baths. Our toilet is a latrine, and a fancy one at that. About 100 yards from the house, they built a small aluminum shack with a concrete floor. In the middle of the floor is a hole, for, shall we say waste. On top of this hole is an elaborate, beautiful mosaic throne on which to sit. It’s hilarious. A work of art really, dotting with pieces of broken blue tile and perfectly resembling an artistic toilet bowl. It’s exhilarating just to sit on it. Although, I will admit, the African food is not exactly promoting bowel movement….

We don’t have electricity. We should; apparently; however, since we’ve gotten here “a transformer has been blown” and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of electricity. Many of my PST mates’ families have gotten generators and those living outside the city sometimes have electricity, but for now, those of us in the village charge up once or twice a week when we go to Bafia.

Back to my family. Family here in Cameroon is a loose term. Basically the term applies to anyone with whom you share something in common with at the moment. For example, my family calls my classmates my brothers and sisters. They refer to me as their sister. Their friends are often their brothers and sisters. Therefore, it’s a bit tough to discern who is actually related to who in our house, but I think I’ve figured it out. At the top of the tree is Mama Blangine, mother of at least two, and maybe three of the girls who live in the house: Fifi, Francine, and maybe Nellie. Also here are Francine’s three kids, two boys (3 and 6) and a 3 month old baby girl. Then there are also Sandrine and Esther who are, I believe, cousins. It’s a very interesting dynamic and hierarchy. Those closer to Mama have higher priority, while the boys and Sandrine and Esther often eat last, left to pick on whatever’s left. Interestingly, when I asked Esther her birthday the other day, she said she had no idea. I’m not sure she knows how old she is either. I’m not sure how common this is, but some of my PST-mates have similar experiences in their house. In addition to the people who live in the house with us, there are 5+ people who drop by on a regular basis who I’m pretty sure are related in some way, 2 of which I know are other daughters.

While my family is really quite wonderful, there have been some major challenges. Sickness is rampant in my house. Mama Blangine is really sick. The day I got here, she went to the hospital. I don’t really understand what is wrong, but today she left for the district hospital in Yaounde. On the way, she was robbed. My sisters say she’ll still get treatment, but it just is so freaking sad.

On another, slightly funnier note, possession in Cameroon isn’t heard of. People don’t understand owning something or having private things. If someone has something you need, you take it and if you have something they need, they take it. There is much sharing of money and space and things. Needless to say, this doesn’t go over well with our American possessive culture. The families that we stay with did go through orientation and PC has gone through many hoops to make sure our possessions are as safe as possible; nonetheless, there have been a few minor instances of things not being returned until I go and ask for them. My host sister asked to borrow my phone and I found out today that she has used about 2000 credit points on my phone…. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do about it, but let’s just say I’m going to be more careful.

My room is marvelous. I have a large bed (the only bed size in Cameroon) covered by a beautiful mosquito net that makes it look very princessy, while at the same time keeps the bed 10 degrees warmer in an already squelching heat.

My family has already taught me many things, Cameroonian style. I do the dishes and wash the floor on a regular basis, Cameroonian style (involving old rags, gross soap and not nearly enough water). I am learning to cook Cameroonian style. I did my laundry Cameroonian style (involving detergent, two buckets, a bar of soap, tons of muscle, and pounding my clothes against a concrete slab for a few hours).

The food here is pretty good, but very starchy. There’s a lot of cassava, plaintains, rice, and, surprisingly, spaghetti. Almost every night, there is a fish “stew” which we put over our starch. One night my family tricked my into eating fish head and eye, it was all cut up. Very interesting taste, I certainly won’t be doing it again. They do eat some strange things, one is called macabo, which is a sweet potato that looks like cassava but isn’t. They also eat the leaves of the cassava plant, in a spinach kind of way, but often with fish in it. They also eat “wheats” called Fufu and CousCous (more like grits than cous cous) which are eaten with your hands and often mixed with cassava leaf or beans (there are tons of beans here). My host sister is a great cook and I’m learning a lot from here.

My days I spend at school, trying to learn French as quickly as possible, which isn’t quick enough for me. We have school Mon-Sat with an average of 3 hours of language a day. The teachers are great, and no one at home speaks English, so I’m pretty immersed in French. However, at my level, that is mostly just realizing how much I don’t know. I’m getting there though. In one week, I’ve progressed to sentences and even a little past tense. Hopefully I’ll be moving up to an intermediate level soon, although we’ll see.

So this will be my life for the next three months, until December 3^rd, when we get sworn in as volunteers. I’ll be living with this family, going to school, learning French and skills, and preparing for my time as a volunteer. Around week 5, we’ll get our post assignments, based on our language level, our preferences, and what we hope to get out of our service. A lot of people are requesting to be put in different areas of Cameroon: in the north, where its warm and deserty with a large muslim population, in the west, which is pretty developed and you’re almost guaranteed to have water and electricity, in the east, where you’ll be in the rainforest and might get to work with pygmies, or in the south, where you could be close to the beaches or the lakes or some gorgeous landscape. There are 10 provinces in Cameroon, each very different, with different languages, cultures, needs, and people. There are over 200 tribes and languages spoken in Cameroon and each is very different. Basically, someone placed in the north of Cameroon, is having a completely different experience from someone in the South. I didn’t ask for a location preference, but requested my counterpart to be a midwife, one whom I can learn from and work with. So we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping to be in a francophone region (Cameroon has 2 Anglophone regions) but again, it’s up to our awesome boss, Sylvie, to place us where she’ll feel we’ll do the best work.

After we get our assignments, we spend a week at post, exploring and meeting people. After that, we’ll come back to Bokito to finish up training before beginning our awesome journey.

So that’s a huge update, I hope I did everything justice. J Basically, I’m working hard, having fun, glad to be here and missing home all at once. The people I’m working with and getting to know are amazing and I am so blessed to have this time with them. The things I miss most from home (not people, things) are cheese, particularly mac and cheese (Cameroonians don’t make cheese!!! I’m going to try to make some when I start at post), chocolate, tomato juice and American music.

Bokito is gorgeous and I will send photos as soon as I can, although this internet speed can’t support it right now. Just hang in there. There are pictures to come. J Miss you all tons, more than you can imagine. XOXO