so this is home for the next two years

Bon annee, happy new year!

Sorry this is so late. I thought I had posted it about a month and a half ago. Will write newer updates soon.

Christmas au village.

My Christmas was both wonderful and humbling and definitely different from the materialistic, commercial and hyped up American Christmas we are used to in the states. This holiday for me started in the marche around 8am Christmas eve day. I decided to accept the invitation to go to my counterpart’s house and knew I needed to bring a gift so another volunteer recommended bringing a chicken and yes this means bringing a live chicken. So I asked my neighbor if she would help me. She met me in the market where we went to the animal section and started picking up and inspecting several different chickens, after charlotte told me which one was nice and plump and we argued the price down, I stopped on my way home to eat some beans and beignets. The woman in the hut tied the bag so the chicken wouldn’t escape while I ate; it wasn’t tied tight, so I didn’t think anything of it. I Got home, showered, changed and when I came out of the bathroom the bag was no longer moving or making noise. He suffocated. Not only do I feel horrible for killing the poor thing, a slow torturous death, I was also convinced I ruined Christmas and was ready to pack my bags, go to Yaoundé to go back to the states so I could eat lobster stew with my family instead of a dead smelly chicken. Once my little homesick freak-out was over, I Left the dead guy on charlottes porch (which they later cooked and ate) and went to the same woman who sold me the first to buy another. So 6,300 cfa later accompanied by horrible guilt, feelings of incredible stupidity and frustration because I couldn’t get a car and people wouldn’t stop deranging me at the gare routier, I made it to Michel’s house (my counterpart) where they were really excited to get the chicken which we ended up eating on Christmas day (I was fed the gizzard-this is an honor- but thought I was going to puke, a little too chewy for my taste).

Michel took me on a petit tour of his quartier (neighborhood but it is in the bush so it doesn’t really feel like a neighborhood). We went up the road from his concession (the land that belongs to his family. his fathers wives and all the extended family each get a piece of it and when Michel’s father passed he moved back to bayangam to take care of the concession, this is tradition) to see this giant house up the road. Well 3 giant houses. By a guy that doesn’t even live here year round. This is a big problem here in Cameroon. People with lots of money leave their villages to live in the big cities but come back only to build monstrosities (kind of like the African version of a mcmansion) that they visit maybe 3 times a year. It’s really sad when there are people who have nothing and they just come and build a house and do nothing for their towns. Anyway, Michel showed me a house that he wants me to move into, which is beautiful, overlooking a huge corn field, but also unfinished, in the middle of no where and thus will never pass Peace Corps approval. And then we started drinking. Michel’s moto broke down at our first stop so I was escorted back to the house while michel waited for someone to help him repair the moto. I ended up spending most of the day hanging out in the traditional (outdoor) kitchen next to the fire trying to keep warm; it was so cold. We ate pork and baton de manioc (this long paste like stick that is cooked in a banana leaf and smells like dirty feet) and poisson braiser (grilled fish), drank and drank and drank. They do not have electricity or running water so they splurged for the holiday and rented a generator to have electricity for the evening, we hooked up a radio for music, which of course worked on and off the whole night. We sat around a big bonfire, sang and danced under the full moon. Christmas day, I went to church with the family, not a great idea since the service was 3 hours and in patois (the local language), but I figured it would get me out of being drunk before 10 am, and I have never had Christmas and not gone to church. It is a catholic church but was interesting because it was so much more lively than mass in the US, lots of singing and dancing. and after (kind of like a fellowship hour), they all ate nkui (which is this traditional dish that you have to slurp up and cannot eat with a spoon or fork because it is so slippery and rubbery) and fufu (corn couscous) out of giant marmites. the kids had their pictures taken, dressed in their Sunday best, in front of booths with photos kind of like the ones you see in Chinese restaurants. When church activities finished up, we hiked back from bangou, which is the neighboring town, ate another large meal with 3 types of carbohydrates, meat, fish, and piment (hot sauce)-delicious. And then made the rounds, to the fetes in bayangam. It is tradition on Christmas and new years here that you travel around to different friends houses to celebrate. At each stop you eat and drink, the whole town is there. There is so much eating and drinking that I am amazed I was able to walk. One house we went to had a school of kids in the front yard with plates waiting to be served. There was music blasting, and when we walked inside, benches were set up around a room, every seat was filled and there was a giant table in the middle covered with food and drink. When I went home later that night I stopped in at my neighbors to say merry Christmas and charlotte insisted that I eat more. It’s also amazing how hospitable people are here. Honestly, Christmas here wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Being that I had a family to spend it with, but also that fact that it’s sunny and warm and everything I experienced was so new for me, it felt like another day in Cameroon. I was surprised (but not surprised when you think about poverty levels here) to see that there is not really any decorating or gift giving ( although there were some beautiful hand cut paper ornaments that Michel’s kids made and hung at their house). I also did not hear a single Christmas song or hymn. Anyway it was a great holiday and as much as I missed Christmas at home I had a very memorable experience here.

We also had our own little Christmas party with the volunteers in the west, “Christmas at Quinn’s” we cooked a big meal, our host, who is obsessed with Christmas, made stockings for everyone, and we taught the kids in the street how to sing jingle bells. It was a ton of fun. Unfortunately everyone that drank the homemade eggnog that day ended up with food poisoning. Lesson learned; don’t eat raw eggs in Africa

A Hot Commodity in Cameroon.

It’s a strange thing to say this and I do not mean it in a derogatory sense it is just how some towns are here, that white people are a very rare thing, something like a local celebrity. It is also tied to the unfortunately deep roots and effects of colonialism in Africa that people get excited when they see white people coming to their tiny village. This is something that peace corps tries not to facilitate, that is why we are working with Cameroonians to develop sustainable projects with Cameroonian community leaders. If only Cameroonians can understand that the development of their own country lies in their hands and not the hands of anyone else, they will be able to do great things. With that said, the volunteers in the west were invited to meet the staff of a health center where another volunteer works. Since We are encouraged to do cross collaboration projects with other volunteers, my friend’s supervisor decided to organize what started off as just a lunch and meeting to see the center and meet the staff, but turned into a full blown celebration with all the town notables, a feast, speeches, singing and dancing. He picked us up in bafoussam in the center’s van and we were off to the health center in a little village on top of a big hill. On the way we drove through and ended up stopping and were given an impromptu tour of an amazing tea plantation. We were late to our own party for this, but when we arrived fashionably (1 and a half hours) late, there were traditional dancers and singers and almost the whole town in the road there to greet us. As the 6 or 7 of us piled out of the van, we had to go down a line of maybe 20 people to shake hands and greet the town. We were escorted into the health center and were instructed to sit at a table in the front in a line facing an audience of maybe 30 people. The supervisor introduced us and then the town sang a traditional welcome song for us. Then they looked at us and said “now it’s your turn.” Not knowing a traditional American welcome song or any songs for that matter that we all knew the words to, we quickly decided on Rudolph the red nose reindeer (it was only 2 weeks after Christmas). We had to stand and most of us got maybe all of two words out the whole song, Dave, the kid whose village it was, was the only one who carried the song to the end. We were all crying we were laughing so hard and the audience stood and started clapping and cheering us on which just made us laugh even harder. It was absolutely wild, we were incredibly embarrassed but they all told us they loved it. The day went on, Dave gave a speech and various other members of the town gave speeches. Then we danced and danced some more, ate and drank, had a photo shoot and were on our way home. It was a wonderful day but of coarse was not complete until we stopped on our way home to pay our respects to the chef of the village and have a drink with him. Life in Cameroon sometimes just feels like a big party.

What do you mean it’s funerai season?

Well, this is a little hard to explain because I am not quite sure if I understand it completely myself yet. But I will do my best. So right now is the dry season. With this means that there is no water and thus there is not much work to do on the farm (remember the majority of Cameroonians are farmers) which means people have a lot of time to have funerais. Also because of dry season, the earth is dry (duh) and thus there is a ton of dust. When I say a ton of dust I mean ridiculous amounts of it. You are still dirty even after you scrub with a hard bristle brush; I have even found it in my belly button. Aside from being dirty all the time, there are allergies and cold nights, and with that people get sick. So that is why it is funerai season. There are different types of funerals here. There is the doi, which is actually very sad (but still with lots of singing and eating) for someone who has just passed away. Then there is the internment, which comes the morning after the doi, when the person is buried (usually on the family compound, often right next to the house). And there is the funerai which is essentially a huge party in memorial of someone who has been dead for some time, maybe 10 years maybe 30 years, it all depends, but there is tons of eating and dancing and singing and celebrating.

I have been to one internment, 2 dois, and many funerais and have several more to go to in the next month or so.

Are you working or are you on vacation?

I am working, I promise. It’s just a little slow. Peace corps is not your typical 9-5 which is actually pretty fantastic. But also, like I said there is not much happening now because it is dry season, I have had several meetings and am doing as much as I can to make contacts in the community to make work happen. I have a women’s farming gic (community initiative group) that I am working with already. We have had several meetings about the basics of agroforestry and they have already made their first tree nursery. My first meeting with the environmental club at the lycee (high school) is this coming week. I had my first class teaching English at the handicap center last night. I will also be working closely with this center’s director on a commercial plantation project. I have presented to 18 gics in baham at a regional meeting and am waiting on responses from them. And I am working on meeting and scheduling many more meetings and formations with various groups in my three village post. I have had a few failures, which is par for the course. My counterpart and I scheduled a water pump demonstration (the manual treadle pumps that look like Stairmasters, I think they may have had a similar one at the cooper Hewitt design for the other 90% this summer) with a gic this past Sunday, we had a whole crew of people come to the town to do the presentation and when we arrived at the gic’s office, it was locked and empty and the president of the group was no where to be found. Fortunately, we were in the company of seasoned volunteers who understand that this happens quite often here in Cameroon. People will show up 2 or 3 hours late to a meeting or not show at all, in this particular case, they had changed the date of the meeting and failed to contact us. So instead of feeling frustrated and defeated we relocated and took the pump out at a busy section of the main road to show people, and within minutes had a crowd of maybe 20 people. This facilitated us scheduling another pump demo for a different group for next week. Pretty sure this is what Peace Corps means when they say you have to be flexible.



Sometimes you just have to pretend no one is home.

There’s something strangely comical yet irritating about Cameroonians and how many of them have no concept of appropriate timing. The other day I set up a meeting with the landlord of my house. He said he would come over at 4 to talk and to sign the lease for my house. Surprise surprise, he never showed. Well the next morning around 6 30 or 7, I was in the middle of a very strange dream about be a goat, when I woke up to banging on my door and someone yelling my name in the front yard. It was my landlord, he had no idea that maybe he should have called first, but was very nice as I was standing in my pajamas half asleep trying to speak in French with him.
I have a bunch of little kids that like to come by my house now. I much prefer the little ones to the older high school boys that just ask me for money (I think they are slowly getting the hint that I don’t want them at my house). The little ones come to the front door or stand in the entrance to my yard and yell my name until I come out, then they run away. It’s really cute. My favorite is a little boy, amen, who lives across the street. He is two and pretends to be scared of me. He yells my name or comes over and then when I respond he puts his face in his hands with a giant smile, runs and sometimes falls over in the road. Sat on the porch the other day trying to sort through seeds for my gic and all the kids came by. I gave them paper and pens to draw with while they sat with me. It keeps them occupied instead of going into the house and touching all my stuff. I got some girls in trouble I think, they were hanging out on my porch when they were supposed to be home doing chores. Their mom came to find them and didn’t seem too happy with me. I just had two pieces of raffia furniture made for my porch so I can spend more time sitting outside instead of in the house.

Escapades with animals.

My Cat got vaccinated. It was quite an event. The vet came to my house and my neighbor and I Ran around the house like a crazies trying to get the cat to sit still; he even tried to jump out of a closed window hitting his head pretty hard on the glass. Finally once I corner him to hold him down while the vet vaccinated him, he shat all over me. good times. Now all Cameroonians that come to my house, the cat thinks are the vet and he hisses and goes crazy.

There is a Mouton (an incredibly filthy dirty sheep) and a goat that looks like a deer that frequent my yard. They are such characters, possibly the subject of a future children’s book. They stand in my yard and stare at me. They like to run around and head butt each other. The mouton has started eating my compost. He gets in the pit which is about three feet deep and eats everything I throw in there; including a Lipton tea bag which he had hanging out of his mouth for an entire day. This morning we had a staring contest while I was sitting on my porch eating breakfast, when this happens he just looks at me and then after maybe 2 minutes squats and starts peeing.

I saw a monkey and it wasn’t dead. This was huge. There are supposedly no monkeys left in the west (people have hunted all of them) and until that day I had only seen dead ones being sold on the side of the road, bush meat. It was pretty big; light colored and ran across the paved road.

I was attacked by a giant duck. My counterpart has a giant goose duck that they call the guardian who romes their yard. He is quite the character and He also hates me. I know this because he chases me every time I am at my counterpart’s house. The last time I was over, I was chatting with Michel’s wife in the backyard trying to help with some cooking and all of a sudden I felt something biting my leg. Everyone started screaming and he bit me again and they basically grabbed him by the neck and threw him across the yard. They were all horrified and worried that I was in terrible pain, it hurt, but all I could do was laugh.

You mean you re not dying in Africa?

Someone the other day asked me how my health was, probably expecting me to say I had ebola or malaria or something horrible like that. Fortunately for me (and I think it is the same for most of my friends), my response was well I feel great. No complaints, and I have accepted the fact (it’s really not a big deal just a fact of life here, we talk about it all the time) that I Haven’t had a solid poop in maybe since I arrived here. The only other thing which was not fun was getting chiggers. The littlest toe on my right foot started hurting one day and at first I thought it was an ingrown toenail then it started getting swollen and black and I thought that maybe I had stubbed it and it was broken. It was throbbing in the middle of the night, I couldn’t wear shoes and it hurt to walk. Well it turned out to be chiggers. There were two places on one toe that had been infested. These bugs bite you and burrow under your skin, they sit there until they are removed and lay eggs in your skin. Well, let me tell you, I had maybe 100 egg sacks in my toe. And after I had a friend kindly do the dirty job of digging them out, I had a hole that was deep enough to go to china. They are absolutely disgusting and I hope that I never get them again.

Are you an herbivore or a carnivore?

Some have asked about the whole vegetarianism issue over here. Well, there are many volunteers that arrive here and become vegetarians and then there are those that become meat eaters. I am one of the latter. I think I could get by not eating meat, but I am not getting protein in any other way so I often find that I crave meat. It is also very true that you shouldn’t turn down meat when offered, you seriously can offend people. So far I find that goat is delicious, and surprisingly so is rabbit. I love eating meat on a stick we call them brochettes or soya. Also in the meat realm or just realm of eating weird things, I had fried crickets the other day (which are very tasty, kind of like potato chips), and was fed what they call rey, either a manta rey, sting rey, or some type of skate, that was dried and smoked and put in a yellow sauce made from tree bark, but kind of tastes like dirt, that is traditionally eaten at funerais and by notables. I only eat meat out or when it is fed to me. I do not prepare it myself, for two reasons, One I don’t know how and two I would have to kill the animal myself.



Transportation woes.

Every time I ride on a moto here I feel like I should have the song wipe out playing in the background. I have officially fallen off three motos and had handful of close calls. The first time it made no sense how or why this could have happened we were going so slow and there were no bumps in the road, but somehow all of a sudden we were falling on the ground. Fortunately I was not hurt, just really dirty. The second my leg got burned, it’s fine now but has been an interesting conversation piece with every Cameroonian I have met since it happened. This is one thing that is kind of funny about many Cameroonians. They will point out and ask you how you got any, cut, bruise or blister on your body. I started to till my front yard for a garden and ended up with terrible blisters on my hands. Every single person asked me how it happened and when I said I was working they were very surprised. The third time, we went all of five feet and the driver fell, I literally flew off. I also only fall of motos when I ride with my friend danny another volunteer close by. We are cursed.

The great cultural divide. (a few things I have noticed about culture here).

People like to Announce and state the obvious. Tu est la. When someone comes into your house, they say, you are here. No shit.

Bon annee. People continue to say this even though it is now February. I think that it will just continue until it starts all over again.

Soccer is the national sport. Right now is the cup du monde. The Africa cup. Everyone follows it here and Cameroon will be playing on Saturday night in the final against Egypt- GO LIONS! I love watching soccer games with Cameroonians they get so excited and make the best noises. people take the games very seriously, much like how the US is with baseball and how crazy red sox and Yankees fans can be. I have also started playing soccer one day a week with the nuns and some of the girls at the catholique mission. They are good!

It’s so different here, than when I was in Europe and tried not to let people know I was American. People here are very happy to hear you are American. It is best to make sure they do not think you are French. They hate the French.

I was directly asked for a visa to the states the other day, I am sure the first of many times this will happen.

Cameroonians love to dance. I am pretty sure they all practice in front of mirrors for hours at home. Even in clubs they stand in front of mirrors and will watch themselves dance.

A game that people have started playing with me is kind of like guess who. They will approach me and ask where I know them from. This is the most difficult and annoying game ever. I meet so many people and I can’t remember everyone!

I have had many people tell me that I argue like a Bamileke (the people of the west). They are very sharp businessmen and are always out to make a buck or two. But also, I have learned that I have to argue and barter prices, its what everyone does here. Sometimes it is overwhelming, but if you are nice and somewhat persistent you can usually get a good deal.

I guess that is about it for the moment. I have so much more to write about, but not the time at this second. I just received all of the Christmas cards that were sent to me, I guess better late never! Hope all is well stateside and I will write again soon!