Although this past month has arguably been the hardest of my service so far (even the beginning adjustment period of living with a host family that only spoke French doesn’t compare to the rollercoaster of the past month – due in no small part, I suspect, to the fact that although I’ve got some semblance of a routine, the routine doesn’t feel entirely natural just yet), there have been lots of shining moments where I’ve felt that there’s no place on earth that I’d rather be, or that I’m meant to be more. And that is what keeps me going, along with the prospect that despite the hard periods in the emotional rollercoaster, it will get better. Additionally, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about myself, life in general, conducting public health work at the very grassroots level, and being a globally minded citizen, and that knowledge is well worth the moments of hardship.
Continuing with the theme of my last few posts on imparting little nuggets of cultural knowledge from Cameroon, and cross-cultural education/comparisons, the people in Kembong are not shy about talking about bodily functions – what I mean by this is the fact that Kembong people, regardless of age, most often use the words ‘piss’ and ‘shit’ to describe the obvious. More than once, little girls that come to visit me have whispered in my ear, “Aunty, I have to go piss,” as she waits for my approval – not sure why – to march off my veranda and squat in the trench across from my house. A similar situation happened when one of the girls brought her baby brother over, and after pooping in his pants, all the children loudly chorused ‘ewww, Baby Obeni just shit himself.’ Not exactly the type of language that I’m accustomed to hearing from children, and thought that it was interesting.
Additionally, another amusing cross-cultural experience occurred when Thecla, Richard (another volunteer assisting with the national immunization days – a four-day event to vaccinate children from 0-10 against polio) and I went out to the villages to vaccinate children. One of the overseeing nurses, Paulette, not my favorite person in the entire world, as she’s kind of abrasive, insisted that we do health talks in addition to the following activities: trekking all over the towns included in the Kembong health district, going door-to-door in search of all these children, practically prying their mouths open with a crowbar (not literally, of course) to drop the two drops of sweet vaccine onto their tongues (I tried the vaccine, and got my finger marked to show solidarity with the kids, and to not lie when I told them that it was sweet) while many of them wail and scream bloody murder, while some just plain hide from us, then proceed to wrestle their pinky into our grasp so that we can mark that they’ve been vaccinated, all while keeping track of how many kids we’ve vaccinated, trying to determine their ages (many don’t know, or can’t remember their birthdays, so we had to guess based on their year in school), and then have to remember the number of houses that we’ve gone to, whether the houses are open, closed, need to be revisited, or unoccupied, and mark all of this information in a type of code on the door and on our sheets of paper – all this done while in the blistering heat of the dry season. Now I’m certainly dedicated to the promotion of public health throughout the world, but I ask, as a human being, would you and someone you know want to give a full out health talk (after not having received any guidance of what exactly they wanted you to give said health talks on, not to mention the audience, etc) when you were busy doing all of the aforementioned activities with an already skeleton crew in the blistering heat? If you answered ‘yes, of course,’ I would have to call you out on being a dirty liar. Anyway, Paulette breezes up on her moto as Thecla, Richard and I are quite literally sweating pounds off, and demands that we give health talks in addition to all our other activities – keep in mind that we only have four days to vaccinate the target child population in the four surrounding villages, all of which are nowhere near to be nicely arranged on any sort of logical grid or street formation. Additionally, I’d be willing to bet big bucks that the people have absolutely not clue one what on earth the nurse, being Paulette, wants them to say when she shows up, demanding to know of them whether or not they’ve received a ‘health talk’ – unless we physically uttered the words ‘health talk’ over and over again in our pursuits of talking to them about hygiene, or whichever topic on earth she has in her mind that we give a health talk on, I can almost guarantee that they wouldn’t associate our brief health recommendations with her asking the question of whether or not they’ve received a health talk. Furthermore, she decided to follow up with one mother whose child we had just vaccinated, demanding to know what we had told her – naturally, the woman didn’t associate our hygiene recommendations with Paulette’s question of whether or not we’d given the health talk, so she responded in the negative to her question. Paulette then reamed us out for not giving the health talk properly – keep in mind that we are standing in the blistering heat being lectured by someone who has been coolly breezing around on a moto the entire day and without even a sheen of sweat on her brow – we, on the other hand, are practically taking a shower in our own sweat at this point. So, being the snarky individuals that they are, Thecla and Richard decided that, by god, if Paulette wanted a proper health talk, that they were going to give her one. For every house that we went to next, Thecla decided to tell the children in Pidgin the equivalent of ‘if you shit, and then you go to eat, but don’t wash your hands, you’ll die.’ Apart from finding the hilarity in the situation as she’s uttering this lie stone-faced to the children, I called her out on the blatant lie that she was telling these impressionable children. She reasonably countered that the children already know it to be a lie since they shit every day, don’t wash their hands, and then eat, and they haven’t died yet. Touché. After giving a moderately successful hand-washing demonstration with soap to 15 children gathered, I had to concede that she did have a point, particularly since there really wasn’t the time or materials to prepare a proper health talk. All in all, Thecla and I vaccinated over 400 children ourselves in the four-day period, not included the other teams that were part of the vaccination team.
Another event over the past week was Felix Tanyi’s visit. I had to cancel a trip to visit the nearby waterfalls near Dylan’s village due to the fact that I wasn’t entirely sure that during my absence Felix wouldn’t volunteer me for at least five more projects that I’d have not the time, nor inclination to do. Surprisingly, the visit went better than I expected – him conceding that I had valid points on his brainchild of a project (namely, there’s no possible way that I would be helping him move forward on a half-baked project idea that might very well have more negative unforeseen consequences than actually serving to help the people; although I suspect his hesitancy in moving forward was due more to the fact that Kathleen was more moved to think seriously about throwing money in support of a half-baked project venture), and not volunteering me for any projects on which I had no desire to participate due to the lack of public health relevance. However, although these interactions were infinitely more positive than our first meeting, I am still going to proceed with caution, especially as I again got the definite feeling that he still views me as his volunteer. Furthermore, I got a weird, slightly creepy vibe from him when he was telling me about how he was basically in love with one of my predecessor volunteers with whom he worked – not that he ‘loved,’ but was ‘in love’ with one of the volunteers. Now I know that this may just be me overanalyzing the semantics of the situation, but after he told me that his wife had been jealous of his ‘relationship’ with the volunteer, I’m not so sure. Needless to say, I’m probably reading too much into the situation, but regardless, I’m going to be a little guarded in our interactions, and not hesitate to politely, but firmly assert myself as the situation calls for it. However, we did have a very nice conversation about his travels in the United States, his work in Kembong, his feelings about international aid and development, etc, and I enjoyed these interactions, and respect that he has a great deal of knowledge and is a very dedicated, driven individual that genuinely cares about the community and doing things right with his NGO.
On another note, I seriously started doing my community needs assessment this week (for those that may have forgotten, every PCV is required to complete a community needs assessment on their community – it’s actually pretty detailed – and we’ll be presenting our findings at our IST conference in February, in addition to giving the results to the necessary stakeholders in our communities). Unfortunately, my appointment with Etum Arricum (a men’s group in Kembong that’s comprised of farmers) landed the day after I was diagnosed with malaria (the second time in less than a month), so I wasn’t feeling the greatest as I queried the men on everything from which crops they plant (yams, cocoa yams, cocoa, plantains, banana, etc) and then, to their thoughts on environmentalism (basically nonexistent in that they weren’t really concerned with environmental sustainability – due in no small part, I suspect, to the fact that there really isn’t the concept of environmentalism/environmental protection here – apart from the government’s haphazard efforts in the past decade or so to preserve what’s left of the elephant and animal population, and I suspect that either the people don’t know, or really don’t care why the government would try and preserve the animals when its own people are malnourished and dealing with lots of other, more pressing problems). The meeting itself was very informative, and I’m looking forward to meeting with more groups of people.
I’ve also learned a lot more information about Kembong through my chats with Besong, who, on a side note, told me that my persistent fever was due to the fact that I was thinking about Caleb, and he was thinking about me, making me hot, thereby giving me the fever…he then proceeded to tell me (he was half-joking, half-serious) that I should tell Caleb to stop thinking of me, thereby, voila, solving all my fever/health issues. Through our conversations, I’ve learned that the Kembong indigents used to have slaves that they would either acquire through slave traders passing through the area, or themselves capture from the Northwest region – the region in which the slaves all came from, apparently. Even after slavery was abolished, slavery continued in Kembong at least until as late as the 1950s. He told me that his father had slaves, and that in order to keep the slaves quarantined, as to not mix with the indigent Kembongians, they were relegated to live in certain quarters of town (remember that Kembong itself is divided into 17 quarters). When I asked him if he knew some descendents from former slaves, he replied ‘ of course, it’s all those same people living in those quarters – no native Kembong person is going to live in those quarters nowadays because they know and remember the slave legacy and don’t want to be associated with that’ – very interesting stuff. He also echoed a belief that I’ve heard from other Kembongians that witches and wizards that practice black magic in the community can transform themselves into animal forms, such as owls, bats, elephants, buffaloes, and even hippos. After seeing another type of juju dancer dressed in all palm fronds, complete with other people banging with wooden sticks on long bamboo logs – all part of a death ceremony, it’s clear that I have still a lot to learn about the traditions in the community. I’m looking forward to continuing to learn more about the local beliefs, traditions, and whatnot as I continue with my community needs assessment. I’ll hopefully post snippets of it here once I’m finished.
On a different note, since I’ve been not feeling 100% for about a month, I’ve become very familiar with the common phrase of ‘Aunty Val, don’t be sick-o!’ As a side note, practically everything has an ‘o’ added onto the end, such as ‘have you seen my beautiful baby-o.’ Slightly off topic, but I’m feeling marginally better – probably due in small part to the knowledge that all the test results came back negative (meaning I don’t have malaria again, or typhoid, and my liver and kidney function is apparently normal, indicating the my two bouts of malaria haven’t caused permanent damage). Additionally, PC Cameroon just “won” first place for malarial infections among PC countries worldwide…womp womp. There’s a decent chance that if I do contract malaria again (I’m literally doing absolutely everything by the book with taking my prophlaxis, using my mosquito net, etc), that I may be sent home due to the fact that getting malaria multiple times for a person with no sort of immunity is dangerous. Welp, cross that bridge when we come to it! On the note of semantics/linguistics, calling someone a ‘tomato’ means that you think they look very fresh and nice. For example, the previous line about the baby is a lyric from a popular song, and the next is ‘have you seen my tomato baby-o.’ It makes me smile every time. According to Pauline, at her wedding reception this weekend (just to remind everyone, I will be the one resembling the human version of the popular “My Little Pony” toy, crossed with ‘80’s prom princess), she will be changing the lyrics to the song and instead singing ‘have you seen my beautiful Peace Corps-o’ – oh boy. It should definitely be a fun experience, and look forward to pictures!
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