This is a personal account and does not express the views of the US Peace Corps

Monday, January 16, 2012

First Meetings


Hello! Sorry for the delay of this post, partly due to lack of electricy/internet, and partly due to poor health (feeling much better, thank you!), I now present you with this weeks’ tales!

This past week has been extremely enlightening for me. I got a chance to really work for the first time. Alice, the volunteer that I replaced, worked with a group of women called “Meres Communitaire” (mothers of the community). I’m not sure if she founded the group or just pointed it into a different direction. Regardless, I inherited this group from her. They meet once a month to discuss a different health topic and then spend that month doing one-on-one, non-formal education with people in their neighborhood. The idea is that they can pass this information on while shelling peanuts together in front of their house. It’s a method to relay basic health information to the community and also to have a point person for someone to go to if they have basic questions without having to go to the hospital (there aren’t any private doctor offices here) or the traditional medicine men (I’ve met a few, they are great, and sometimes surprisingly well informed. One, in fact, practices according to a French textbook called “Plants for Health”- that’s roughly translated- this is ironic considering that A: most people can’t read at all, B: few people speak French let alone read it, C: he has this book in the first place-book stores are hard to come by, D: he practices a “traditional” art using information from a modern textbook).

So I went to the meeting a little blind, not quite sure what to expect or what was expected of me. Needless to say, I screwed that part up quite a bit. Unbeknownst to me, I was supposed to text everyone in the group the night before reminding them of the meeting, and I was supposed to have a presentation ready and be ready to actually lead the meeting. An hour and a half after the meeting was supposed to have started, there was me with one other member (my very good friend). After I had figured out about the texting part and sent everyone a text, about half the members showed up, about 3 hours after the meeting was supposed to have started. Please note, late start times are not unusual for Cameroonians. Time means very little to them, as it probably does in many agricultural-focused societies. There’s a bunch of theories I have surrounding this issue, but I’ll go into that on a later post.

Peace Corps greatest advice in training: fake it till you make it. So that’s what I did, and, by the way, I feel I did an amazing job of this, considering inside I was dying of self-consciousness. I got up and led the meeting. I had my friend translate into Kapsiki for me. I told them that I was using this meeting to introduce myself, and meet them, rather than for instruction on a topic. We had a question and answer session about their last topic (diarrhea in children, signs, symptoms and treatments, and when to go to the hospital) and that was it. And it went well! People were happy at the end of it. I felt good about it! Or well as good as I could feel, considering. And it’s a project to start on, to make my own. For next month, I’ll be presenting on basic childhood nutrition: food groups, amounts of food, ect.

The next day, I had my first veteran’s group meeting. This is also a club that Alice belonged to, but I feel like her role in this group was really just for fun. They play soccer sometimes on Saturdays and it’s a group of pretty prestigious men and women from the community. Unfortunately, my first meeting with them, was their first meeting of the year, meaning they elected a new board, reread and redid their constitution, made and changed rules and fees, ect. It ended up being almost 5 hours long. Comedic break of the day, I was nominated to be their secretary. I’m literally laughing just thinking about it. Those of you who know me know my chicken scratch handwriting. I have never, ever met anyone with worse handwriting than mine, excluding children below the age of 6. In addition, they choose the person least fluent in French in the whole room! (this was a group of well-educated, fairly well off people who had all attended school, and were therefore well-versed in French) I laughed and gracefully declined, but it felt good to be included and thought of.

It felt great to be out and about and seeing the kinds of projects that I could and would be doing. This week, I met with the principal of one of the schools and we talked about some possibilities there. I went “into the bush” with one of friends at the hospital and helped with vaccinations. Work just got going this week. I’m feeling more and more hopeful and seeing more and more possibilities for future projects. I keep saying future because, according to Peace Corps policy, the first three months are for us to assimilate and integrate, starting nothing new, just assessing our community and getting involved. After In-Service Training in March (at which point we will learn about funding opportunities and other project-oriented information) we may start projects in our community. So for now, I’m just scoping out the lay of the land and trying to pick up where Alice left off.

After the veteran’s club meeting, I came home to find that my power had gone out. It was in fact out in the whole town. No big deal I thought. I pulled out my headlamp, and proceeded life as usual, thinking the power would be back in the morning. But it wasn’t. I was out for almost a week. My computer was dead before the power shut off. My kindle died day 3, as did my phone. My ipod died day 4. For the first time in Africa, I was experiencing a no-technology life. I had gone for a long time in Bokito without power. But we could always hop over to Bafia and charge up for the day. It was an interesting, enlightening, and in some ways empowering experience. I don’t really think that I’ve ever been that disconnected: not even having a phone, or at least not in a very long time. Come on, I’m coming to Africa directly from MIT where every corner of campus is wired with high speed wireless and everyone has a smart phone attached to their hands at all times. It’s a different life here.

And at night, it was absolutely amazing.

 It was completely silent.

I mean no crickets, no electric hum, no music playing somewhere down the street; completely quiet. Every once in a while a donkey bray can be heard, or the puppies getting hungry in the middle of the night, but other than that: nothing. Just astounding. The stars too, just gorgeous. If the moon hadn’t been so bright, I bet you could have seen just about any star. I’m in the mountains in the middle of the desert, I am so lucky. When the weather gets a little warmer, I’m going to sleep outside and just stare at the millions of stars that can be seen from my backyard. There’s never a cloud to block them out, no light pollution to blot them out, they are crystal clear and bright.

So yeah, that’s my week in a nutshell. It’s been an interesting one. As always, full of new experiences. I learned how to make a new dish with one of my friends: it’s called Briulle. It’s like a porridge that you drink, very high calorie, a breakfast food. I make a mean Bruille. Anyways, like is good. Missing you all back home, enjoying life here. Salutations from Mogode!  

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Ho-ho-holidays


Happy New Years everyone! I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays as much as I did. I’ve been stalling in writing this update because I just don’t think my holidays were Africa-enough to be post worthy. However, I’ll bore you with some of the details.

Holidays here seem to all be spent the same way: with tons of food. There doesn’t seem to be any differentiating factor for the most part. There’s no trees with presents under them, or Christmas lights, or tales of Santa or Baby Jesus leaving presents for good boys and girls. In fact, it was a little anti climactic. For weeks, everyone I was meeting was already wishing me a Merry Christmas and asking how I was going to spend the holiday. It didn’t matter to them if I was Christian or not, they just wanted to make sure I was celebrating. My Christian neighbors went to mass for about 4 hours on Sunday morning, while Alice (who was visiting for Christmas) and I went over to a friend’s house (she’s muslim) where she had cooked up breakfast. We just hung out, helped crack peanuts and chilled for a few hours, waiting for people to get out of mass, but in that short period of 2.5 hours we were served food and drink 3 different times. It just keeps coming in these African homes, kind of ironic considering malnutrition is such a big problem.

Anyways, after being served an early lunch, we left our friend’s house to go over to another friend’s house and celebrate Christmas with them. This involved them, in their nicest pagne (clothes) serving heaping plates of fried chicken, croquets, fried sweet potatoes, soda, and candy. An interesting fact about Christmas and New Years here: apparently there is a tradition very similar to trick or treating. Kids go around to different houses saying “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year” and the owner of the house gives them a small candy. Music was playing in town and everyone seemed in high spirits. But, apart from the massive amounts of food everyone had prepared (there was chicken and beef in many households, an uncommon sight) it seemed just like a very festive day.

Our first week here, there was a “traditional fete” (honestly even asking them to explain what is was or why they had it, that’s the only information we could get out of them) for the end of harvest. It had something to do with marriage where people who just got married danced on the outer ring of a huge group of people dancing in the middle with flags. It was this huge deal; the whole town was up on this hilltop, dancing with flags on poles, singing their hearts out, as the sun went down in the valley behind them. I guess I kind of expected something like similar for Christmas for all the hype it was getting. But alas, no such dance.

After eating with our friends, Alice and I headed out to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening with the other volunteers in our cluster in Mokolo, the biggest town nearby, home of 3 volunteers, and about 2 hours away by moto. I won’t bore with too many details, but that turned into a very American party, except for the Cameroonian food that our friend brought over. We later ended up at a Cameroonian dance club. That was interesting. The music over here has a beat similar to latin music, but doesn’t quite fit the bill for salsa. So, needless to say, I’ve looked to locals to check out how to dance to it. They have this thing called mirror dancing. It’s absolutely hilarious. They’ll stand in front of a mirror, plant their feet, and stare intensely at themselves as they barely move their body and wave their arms robotically as if they were juggling massive cantaloupes around their stomach. It’s an interesting sight.

The day after Christmas, while suffering the after effects of too much to eat and drink, I headed to Maroua, the capital city. I spent the last week there, shopping for my house, meeting new volunteers passing through, and meeting up with my fellow training mates.

I spent the last few nights of Hannukah there as well. In order to make for lack of Jew-ness at post, we made a menorah the night that I got there. It was made out of plastic bottle with mosquito coils for the candles. I’m so proud of that that little menorah! It’s a one use thing though, once the coils get down to the plastic, it kind of curls up in strange shapes. Anyways, on the ninth night of Hannukah (we bent the rules a little bit) a fellow jew from another region was able to join me, so we had a little Hannukah party with latke’s and jungle juice. It was nice to feel like I was staying close to my roots, which are so foreign there, in a place that was so different from home. Goal number 2 of Peace Corps: teach Cameroonians about our American culture. Granted there weren’t any Cameroonians at the Hannukah party, but still, it’s a step in the right direction

New Years was spent All-American style. We had a party at the Case (the Peace Corps hostel in Maroua). There was music, dancing, beer pong (Beirut for the Bostonites- PS almost got thrown out of a game for saying Beirut instead of beer pong), flip cup, a bonfire, and TIRAMISU! It was a great time. There were about 50 people there, most of them volunteers, many people whom I hadn’t met before. The countdown was, again, a little anticlimactic. We had no ball to drop and no official countdown, so someone basically just started counting down arbitrarily to their watch sometime around midnight. I had a great time. I stayed up till about 3 am, which, considering my bedtime here has been no later than 9:30 most nights, is a huge deal.

All around, the holiday season was a success. I’m now back at post, back at work with my assessment and vaccinations, refreshed and inspired. Today, my big accomplishments were two loads of laundry (each takes hours) and I made tomato soup and bread!!!!! Let me tell you, bread is a big deal here. It’s not like we have ovens. So, in order to bake something, you need to create an oven. What most people do, is they take a big pot with a lid and fill the bottom with sand. Then they place the thing that they are baking inside another pot that fits in the first pot without touching the sides. It’s really hard to control the temperature (close to impossible) but as long as its not a soufflĂ© or something equally complicated, its do-able. So I tried making some foccacia tonight. Didn’t exactly work out. The bread didn’t rise, nor did the dough taste that great (I don’t have any sort of spices yet), however, it did bake really well; it was a delicious. As my inside pot, I just used a small bowl, so it’s a strange shaped loaf of bread, but it was so exciting. I had my first taste of my own bread tonight. I have high hopes for the next batch, but for now I’m happy. Once I get the cheese down, that’ll mean grilled cheeses in my future… oo maybe with tomato soup…. Ooo and pickles!! I’m getting so excited just thinking about it.

But I digress. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Pics!


Members of the new Extreme North Stage.

I made beef jerkey! It was too salty to eat, so i gave it to my dog, but it's a start

My attempt at decorating my new home.

The cute little puppies!

My Christmas day Family

Hannukah: our amazingly crafty menorah

Let's light the....mosquito coil?