It’s incredibly hard to believe that I’m in the midst of my eighth week here, although it seems like the time has simultaneously dragged on and flown by. The days go by very slowly (you really realize how many hours there are in the day), but the weeks go by quickly. This week, we had 21 hours of language spread out over 4.5 days – lots and lots of French and Pidgin (Fulfulde for the people going to the North, Adamawa, and some going to the East). My mentor, Sam, a second year health volunteer (who’s actually about to COS – end her service) came to Bokito to help train us, instructing us on family planning and other relevant health topics, in addition to imparting nuggets of information about life as a PCV in Cameroon. We learned that women who have a child in their teenage years are considered ideal marriage partners, as the man and his family already know that the woman is fertile/capable of having healthy children. Thus, women often want to have children/won’t want their sexual partner to use protection for this exact reason. Although I’ve loved all of our PCV trainers so far, none of them have been from the Grand South (all have been either from the North or Adamawa regions), which although is nice for those going to those regions, doesn’t necessarily offer the best cultural insight into life as a health volunteer in the Grand South. Although Sam didn’t have too many cultural insights into the Grand South, she did mention that when she visited another volunteer in the West region, she went to the most famous sorcerer in the region, a crab sorcerer. The crab sorcerer uses a live crab and various other things to foretell the future, determine someone’s ailment, and offer other sage insights. His technique is to put the crab in a giant marmit (huge cooking pot – think the size that you would wash a small child in) with other sticks, roots, leaves, and anything else he deems important, and based on what the crab does (behavior, directionality, etc), the sorcerer makes his predictions – fascinating, really.
Speaking of the Grand South, I got in touch with several of the other PCVs in my cluster – all volunteers are part of some cluster or another in their region, to support cohesion, and have a support network. My cluster is located in Mamfe, and consists of education, CED (community economic development), LIFE (can’t remember what this acronym stands for, but it’s something to do with fusing agfo and CED), and now health volunteers with Julia and I joining. All of the others just swore in in August, so we’re part of a relatively new cluster. My cluster mates usually get together at least once a week to get together and make dinner/ hang out, and it’s reassuring that I’m going into a tight-knit group that has already bonded – but this also makes it a bit intimidating, too, as I’ve noticed that although I get along with the other PCVs, nothing compares to the bonds/experiences/inside jokes shared among people of the same staj. Mamfe is about 1.5-hour trip away from Kembong in the rainy season, meaning that it’ll probably be faster during the dry season (the season that is almost upon us). Also, chances are that although I’ll be speaking Pidgin, I’ll also be learning one of the local tribal languages – if not for day to day life/work purposes, to greet the chiefs in the village (the NW and SW have huge chiefdom cultures). I’ll also have to learn more of the customs when I arrive (for example, a woman crossing her legs in front of a man in the SW or NW is the equivalent of a sexual invitation…as if the derang-y (gross/bothersome) men on market day needed any more encouragement…ha). One of the other PCVs in my cluster recently visited Kembong, and these are some soundbytes that she said about it (pretty much verbatim):
- Kembong’s technically a town as opposed to a village. It’s pretty large and really nice and cute. It has an Express Union, which is pretty advanced.
- My house is directly behind the Express Union (meaning that I think my house is pretty centrally located in town, since that’s where Express Union’s tend to be). There’s a little restaurant next door with good food (and she didn’t get sick after eating the food – another plus!)
- House has one bedroom, kitchen, bathroom with a shower but no sink, and a living room/salon area. It also has a little porch. In her words, it’s really cute and the perfect size for a PCV, and in a great location, too.
- Unfortunately, the house is completely empty (no previous PCV to sell/give me any of the furnishings), so I’ll have to completely buy everything and decorate from scratch – not that daunting of a thought.
- The health center looks very modern and like they have their stuff together.
- One of my counterparts is amazing (she’s a nurse midwife), very welcoming and the PCV thinks that the staff will treat me well.
- The chiefs are also very enthusiastic to work with me as well.
- The post itself is a bit remote (there are only three main roads to get into the village, and only one of them works in the rainy season). However, there is a weekly market, and if I need anything, the 1.5-hour trip to Mamfe (my banking city) doesn’t sound too bad.
- Some of the cluster mates will meet Julia and I in Bamenda (the capital of the NW region, which is only a 3-4 hour trip from Mamfe) to help us move our stuff, open bank accounts, and buy things for our posts before our community hosts (different person than our counterpart, but a person in the village who was hand-selected to help facilitate our integration and getting our projects off the ground) come to pick us up and take us to post. So although moving to our posts by ourselves is still a daunting undertaking, it’s much less so knowing that we’ll have lots of help.
After spending an awful day dealing with food poisoning on Tuesday, Wednesday was like a sweet gift, as I got a package from home, got to Skype with Caleb, we all got our swearing in pagne (fabric), from which we’ll each have individual outfits made (out of the same fabric) for our swearing in ceremony, and getting red grapefruit, my absolute favorite fruit here (which is weird, considering that I don’t even like grapefruit in the States) – all in all, an awesome day. The rest of the week passed uneventfully, but enjoyably, as we learned about HIV/AIDS, did a TDA exercise with our families regarding HIV/AIDS – I learned a lot of interesting things about what my family thinks of the disease, prevention/transmission, and people living with HIV/AIDS within the community. We also had a talk about ethics in our future dealings at post. Cameroon is widely acknowledged as one of the most corrupt countries in the world – in fact, Cameroon is the only country in the world to have held the “honor” of being named ‘most corrupt country in the world’ two years in a row. President Paul Biya’s alleged response to this title was the if he had known this would be the case, he would have bribed the necessary parties at Transparency International (the organization that names the titles), so that Cameroon wouldn’t be on the list – insert face palm here. We also had to give a 10-minute presentation on a health topic (in French) in front of the other health stagiares and language trainers in preparation for our IEP (again, no idea what this acronym means), but it’s a presentation in French (has to be at least 15-20 minutes long and follow the guidelines of an informative/good presentation) and has to be on a cross-cultural topic, intended to educate the audience on an issue. My topic is family planning in Cameroon – something I’m not super interested in, but for which I have to vocabulary necessary to complete a presentation and not sound like a complete bumbling idiot. The preliminary presentation went very well, and I’m not worried about the IEP on Thursday.
On Saturday, after our second cross-cultural open doors (various scenarios set up for us, and we had to navigate the scenarios in French; dealing with a landlord, e.g.) to celebrate Halloween, we had a huge party with all the stagiares in Bafia. After an afternoon in search of spaghetti omelets (yep, exactly what it sounds like: cooked spaghetti mixed in with two eggs, onions, peppers, and tomatoes in an omelet) and street meat (brochettes of grilled beef or goat meat that go for 100 CFA a piece – roughly 25 cents), we headed back to the training center to use internet before heading to Joe’s house for a celebratory meal of pizza (not quite American style, but I’ll definitely take it), hamburgers, fried potatoes, and fruit salad. From there, we headed to the hotel to continue our Halloween celebrations. We rented hotel rooms and a conference room on the hotel grounds, had no curfew, and got lots of different juices and drinks for our American fete (celebration). Even without water (the water had been cut that day) and sporadic electricity, we had a great time! People got pretty creative with their costumes, especially given the lack of materials available: we had several Peace Corpses (heh we’re clearly a witty bunch), several dignitaries (I was Princess Di, and President Obama made an appearance, along with a Cameroonian chief), and many others. After calling it a night, I went up to the hotel room and out of the corner of my eye, spied something big and black flit past my line of vision: a gigantic bat was in my room. With the lights on and me whimpering like a scared child, the bat became frenzied and was flitting all over the room at high speeds. I proceeded to throw a blanket over myself and quickly unlock the door, leaving it open in the hopes that the bat would fly out, all while simultaneously whimpering and swearing. After leaving the door unlocked, the power promptly went out, leaving me in pitch black with the whereabouts of the bat unknown. Gaah! After a couple minutes, the power came back on and several hotel staff members came to investigate the room. No bat, but the bat had left us a poop present on the sheets and pillows. After explaining to the hotel staff that no, I would prefer to sleep on clean sheets, not the ones the bat pooped all over (this was after I explained what the bat was, after not knowing the word for it in French), we worked together to change the sheets: all in all, an eventful end to the day. Upon returning to my home stay, the adventure didn’t end, as Pentecostal church was in full swing at 9:30 a.m. I intelligently decided to hang out in my room, and even over the movie coming from my headphones, I heard a woman screaming, and the preacher yelling ‘stop! Get out of her body, stop!’ several times. After the women let out several more yelps – it didn’t sound like she was in danger, and they stopped after several minutes (I didn’t intervene because there were at least 25 people in attendance, and there’s no doubt in my mind that if my mother got significantly shaken/super upset about little kids throwing rocks at us, she probably wouldn’t be okay with a woman being harmed in her living room…) Needless to say, I’m reasonably certain that this was some sort of exorcism/trance, given the context and what was said before and after. The church was a full 4.5 hours long, and I can’t say I was upset when it ended/everyone cleared out of the living room.
These next few weeks will be pretty busy with lots of wrapping up technical training (learning how to plant and prepare soy, particularly into tofu, potentially as a future income generating activity within my community), and other tech and language sessions, leading up to us heading to Yaoundé and swearing in on November 20th – yay!
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