6 Month Update

Dear Friends and Family,

Last week marked the 6 month anniversary of my time in Cameroon, so I figured I’d take the time to reach out give a brief update of what I’ve been up to.

For those of you who don’t know, I do try to keep a regular blog of my activities and observations at sgreenman.blogspot.com. If you feel so inclined, more details of my going-ons can be found there.

6 months ago, I and 52 other strangers arrived in Cameroon. Our first impression was a green fertile land that smelled like burning trash. The city, Yaounde, was dirty but exciting. However, we didn’t get to see much of it as our Pre-Service Training started right away. For the next three months, we spent most of our days learning about Cameroon, its people, its languages (French and English, officially) and how we could live here. Lessons included learning how to wash our clothes by hand, how to cook over a fire, how to argue over prices at market. We lived with host families, which was sometimes a blessing and other times extremely hard. Peace Corps Cameroon welcomed our group with open arms and then split us up into our programs. My program, Community Health had training in a small town called Bokito, about 30 minutes outside of Bafia, where the other 30 trainees and 2 other programs (Agroforesty and Youth Development) were held.

We had some great times. For Thanksgiving, we killed and prepared our own chickens for our feast. We helped host an AIDS celebration that taught hundreds of kids about HIV/AIDS and transmission. We had a community group project with which we learned how to teach Cameroonians. Our weekends were spent with our host families or hanging out with the other trainees.

We had some bad times. We witnessed and helped in a serious car accident. Our first trainee left only a week into the program (he was a health trainee). We went weeks without electricity. I got malaria, typhoid, and bacterial dysentery.

At the end of those three months, I could speak French (relatively well- keep in mind, that’s Cameroonian French. Any person from France would laugh me off a bridge if they ever heard me speak). I made amazing friends who are now my support network. I grew as a volunteer and person. And I started developing some pretty awesome immunities to the outrageous number of germs we’re exposed to on a pretty regular basis.

 Then, the newly sworn in volunteers all parted ways and headed to post. I live in the Extreme North of Cameroon, in a small town on the Nigerian border called Mogode. Its up in the deserty Mandara Mountains. The peaks here are volcanic finger-like projections reaching for the sky. It’s hot, and dry. Water is hard to find and water-borne diseases are rampant. There is work to be done here.

The first three months at post, I spent most of my time at the local Health Center, evaluating what my post community’s needs are. I picked up some projects that my predecessor left me and have been pretty busy. Most days find me “en brusse” (in the bush) with my Counterpart, weighing babies while he vaccinates them. I’ve been helping him create sensibilisations for the mothers who come (just a short presentation on a health topic while they’re waiting). I inherited a woman’s peer education group and have worked with them on understanding and preventing malnutrition and malaria in children. They are developing into a sustainable group that will hopefully benefit many local villages. I’ve started getting involved in a group of villagers who want to learn French. They’re putting together their own classes. I’m going to help work with the teachers and put together their lesson plans with them.

At home, I raised three puppies that were born to my inherited dog the day before I arrived. I’ve slowly started to make my house my own, sewing my own curtains and sheets, collecting pictures and things for my walls. I’ve explored in the kitchen a lot. It’s a different experience, cooking here. It’s not like I can just walk to the grocery store and buy all my ingredients. Fresh vegetables I get from the regional capital about once every 3 weeks. The rest of the time, I get creative and cook some pretty crazy things with whatever I can find locally. I have two chickens. The hen has started laying eggs while the rooster has done nothing but managed to drive me insane. He will be eaten shortly. I had a couple tomato plants, but the puppies and the chickens together dug them up and killed them. I’ve started a pretty unsuccessful compost pile (instead of breaking down, the organic material just dries up). I’ve also started learning the local languages: Fulfulde and Kapsiki. So far I’ve got introductions, numbers, and hellos down. That’s about it. But I’m learning-“petite a petite”. My French is also slowly improving-slowly being the key word there, as very few people actually speak French in my village.

At the 6-month mark of our service, all of the volunteers were called down to Bamenda for In-Service Training (IST) to check in and learn about how to plan and execute projects at our post. Of the 53 who arrived in country, only 43 made it to IST.  It was sad to be there without so many of the friends who had started out with us, but those of us who were still in the game are pretty committed to making this work. I took the opportunity while down south to take a little vacation time and travel around. I saw the two great beaches of Cameroon and have now visited 9 of the 10 regions (I have yet to visit the East). I saw gorillas and chimps. I ate crabs and Foo Foo Jamma Jamma Khati Khati (huckleberry leaves with chicken-not my favorite) and crickets. I met a good number of the two hundred volunteers who are here in country.

Bottom line: The last 6 months of my life have been filled with new and exciting experiences and people. I learned, seen, and eaten things I never imagined that I would. I’ve had ups and downs, wanting to go home one day and the next, never imagining being happy anywhere else. I’ve been sicker than I’ve ever been in my life and have taken more antibiotics in the last 6 months than my entire life before September. I’ve met locals and made some friendships that will last my lifetime. I’ve been proposed to at least 300 times. I’ve been iced 6. I’ve carried water on my head and treated blisters on my hands from washing my clothes. Overall, I think I’m doing a great job. I’m having fun. I’m living life.

Thank you for all your support and love. Not a day goes by that I don’t receive an email from a loved one (although, I don’t always get them everyday). People call or write me and tell me how they’ve been reading my blog and offer a comment or suggestion about this or that. Packages and letters come my way from so many different people. Thank you guys. This is not easy for any volunteer. It’s not easy to leave everything you know and throw yourself into a bubble of strangeness for the sake of helping people that you’ve never met. But the support and love that I feel from my friends and family back home helps me get up in the morning when I need it and keeps a smile on my face when I go to bed. This work that’s being done over here, it can be partially credited to you. There’s no way I could stick this out without help from over there. So pat yourselves on the back. Good job. And thank you.

I hope these six months have found you and your family well. Thank you for everything and I hope to talk to you soon!

Sincerely, with hugs from Cameroon,

Suzie (or, as they call me in village, Massi)