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 soufflé 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!