From one extreme to the other

Week one in Bamenda!  Today our niece turns three, and we’re on the other side of the world.  When we get back to the States, we’ll only be vague shadows in her memory.  We miss our families most during these life events: birthdays, holidays, our swearing-in ceremony.  Even so, we feel an incredible contentment now that we’ve arrived at our post, and are more certain than ever that we are exactly where we’re supposed to be.

If you know us on Facebook, you may have seen that the house found for us when we got here was not what it should have been.  It didn’t meet Peace Corps standards, and was not a place we saw any way that we could make into a home for the next two years.  We know some of you are thinking, we’re in the Peace Corps, we should be living in a grass hut somewhere and thankful for the privilege!  Peace Corps provides housing comparable to that the community a volunteer will work with – and certain things, like enough windows for adequate light and ventilation, no holes in the walls, no vermin, and a safe/secure area, are required.  The first house we saw had none of that and less.  So we were here in the middle of Africa with no place to live.  Fortunately, Brittany, the volunteer Kiyomi stayed with during her site visit, opened her home again to us until we get settled – and extended the invitation to “as long as needed,” after our housing became an issue.  We have been so blessed by her generosity and friendship!

So, housing crisis part two: Brittany has been in the process of finding new accommodations as well, and was told by her landlord on our third day here that he had found a new tenant for September.  So, now there were three of us with no place to go.  Our bosses in the main office seemed not to be interested in this little problem, even though it is technically their responsibility to assure that we have adequate housing.  Luckily enough for us, there’s a new office manager here in Bamenda, who heard of our difficulties, and within a day and a half had four potential places for all three of us to look at.  So after a day of looking at these options, we and Brittany found brand new, neighboring houses – bright, airy, beautiful little palaces, one at the top of a little hill, and the other about three houses down, at the bottom of the hill – that are incredibly nice by American standards.  After another day and a half of getting Peace Corps to talk to the landlord and make the rent arrangements, we signed our leases and filed the paperwork today!  Thank you for all those prayers, because we have been having blessings upon blessings!

Housing crisis, final part: our houses are still being built, so while Brittany has been assured hers will be ready for move-in by the 1st, we’ve been given a date of “maybe by September 15th, but no later than October 1st.”  Thankfully our new friend is the kind you hold tight to and never let go of, and has further extended her invitation for us to move into her new house with her, and when ours is ready, we can simply move our things down the hill.  She assures us we’re great houseguests.  We promised to do our best to continue to be!  So, almost home sweet home.

We’ve been finding our way around our new town, and still are stopped short by the incredible beauty of this place. In the mornings, the distant mountains are just a purple haze, and by noon, that fog has lifted to reveal the most vibrant green, with mists rising up off the trees, only to be broken occasionally by rocky outcrops with perfect white waterfalls streaming down from them.  This is the view in literally every direction.  We feel like we’ve been set in a city that’s grown up in the middle of some forgotten part of Eden.  The people even, overall, seem nicer here.  It’s been fun exploring the markets, seeing where we’ll buy our housewares and furniture once our house is finished, and the market mamas are always kindly indulgent and amused by our attempts to speak Pidgin.

Cooking together again has been so wonderful for us too!  It’s something we’ve almost always done together in our relationship, and whenever we’ve not been able to for whatever reason (enforced traditional gender roles, for example), we find ourselves feeling somewhat off.  Brittany has given us free reign in her kitchen though, so with the fresh produce available every day but Sunday, we’ve been feasting quite well.

We don’t know exactly what shape our work will take yet - although Jack made his first local contact for a secondary IT education project already – and we don’t quite have a place to live yet, but we feel more at home here – right exactly where we’re supposed to be with life - than we’ve ever felt anywhere else since we’ve been together.