Thursday, June 30, 2011

7 year itch?

We are happy to report that, despite the persistent efforts of our nemesis, and with the help of some bug repellent and Benadryl gel, we’ve been in Cameroon for a month now without contracting malaria!  And yes, though it’s hard to believe, we’re celebrating seven years of marriage here in Bafia.  Would we have guessed back then where we’d be today?  We certainly had high hopes for where the adventure would take us, but we probably would have said something along the lines of, as long as we’re together, we’ll be happy.  Here in Peace Corps Cameroon we’re “The Married Couple,” which people think is cool, and then they proceed to tell us about the other married couples they’ve met in the Peace Corps… all of whom are now divorced.  We’ve gotten our response down to, “we came together, we’ll leave together.”  We’ve definitely had our highs and lows over the years and, looking back, we’ve come through, sometimes struggled through, a lot together – mosquitos and giant spiders and linguistic challenges and cultural confusion have nothing on us!  Each time we just catch each other’s eye and shrug, knowing we’ve been through bigger (okay, that maybe was the hugest spider I’ve ever seen…), badder, harder.  We’re not sure what others come in expecting – if it’s to save or fix a relationship that’s not working, just like that more popular band-aid of reproducing, a mysterious illness causing explosive yuck at two in the morning when the electricity is out and your spouse has “hidden” your flashlight really isn’t going to do it.  If you’re newly-wed and haven’t been friends with your partner for years, and maybe haven’t really touched on any of the “better or worse” stuff yet, maybe hold off on moving to a developing nation.  Or if both people aren’t in this whole Peace Corps thing 100%, see above, it’s kind of enough to make one consider spousicide.   But we’re certain of how good we have it in each other, and this journey is not a fix for anything, but a chance for each of us to see the other rise to meet some crazy individual challenges and goals  (and to experience the “sickness and health” in a whole new way…), and be completely impressive doing it.

It really has been a rollercoaster ride though!  We picked our previous analogy better than we knew.  And not just day to day, but hour to hour.  Some moments we are cursing the cultural or linguistic challenges that make basic communication into a huge production, or the fact that the sudden and inexplicable lack of those little creature comforts you can sometimes take for granted – like electricity, or running water – makes EVERYTHING a challenge.  The next moment we’re talking with our host-mom and not grabbing the dictionary every other word, successfully navigating our way around town, being welcomed by a community host like long-lost family.  Sometimes it’s even more simple than that: warm beignets in the morning, spotting hornbills flying overhead, the perfect view of the mountains, a nice cold Top Pamplemousse, or the shared excitement of the water being back on!  We definitely aim to keep our updates upbeat, because we are happy to be here, and at least 80% of the time is great. 

Before joining the Peace Corps consider that 20% of the time, you may well hate your life and wonder what you are doing.  Getting up first thing in the morning for training is not going to be any better than getting up for work, and will probably be worse.  Peace Corps wants highly motivated and independent people to send out to build capacity in the developing world; Peace Corps Training believes you’re approximately sixteen years old and very irresponsible.  And also grounded.  If it’s raining, you can’t wash your clothes.  It sometimes rains for weeks, but your host family will still be unhappy that your clothes aren’t washed often enough.  (Bring a portable clothesline, and “clothes for a week,” is about 3 shirts, 3 undershirts, and 3 bottoms you can interchange – we packed way too many clothes.)  A lot of places, and Cameroon specifically, view women in terms of services they can provide for men (yes, services).  Peace Corps training for some reason likes to have different culture groups makes lists enumerating these kinds of important cultural things.  It can be disturbing and disheartening to see half the human population reduced to words like “materialistic,” “jealous,” “weak,” and “property,” and have that be what you’re greeted with when you walk in every day for a week.  (We’ve also met several Cameroonian men who are really good people and treat the women they work with as the competent people they are.)

We’ve found it really interesting to note that living in Cameroon is strangely like the United States about fifty years ago.  Dad goes to work in a suit every morning; Mom may work outside the home, but her primary responsibility (solely hers) is to keep house and raise the kids (if she can’t work and keep house to the expected standard, it’s her responsibility to hire a housekeeper); sons play sports; daughters set the table and distract the younger kids; everyone has dinner together, usually some form of starch and meat, around the TV.  This raises the question; is Cameroon like the US circa 1957 because Peace Corps (and other international development efforts) has been here for the last fifty years, or simply because it has been fifty years?  Will gender equality come to Cameroon in twenty years because that’s the natural progression of cultural development, and women are starting to be more educated and ask why domestic responsibilities are solely theirs? (Even if the woman is the sole income earner, she is still also solely responsible for household duties.)  Or will it have something, anything, to do with international efforts to increase the number of girls given access to education worldwide?  We don’t have the answers, though we suspect they are somewhere in the middle.  We do continue to believe that we’re here for a reason, and that if we can help one person make their own life a little bit better in some way, that’s something, and impacting one life to some benefit it worthwhile.  Only a month in, we can say ours already have been.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Bamenda!

Three weeks in Cameroon, and the Education trainees have learned where they will be posted – so, even though Kiyomi is a Small Enterprise Development trainee, WE know we’ll be living in the city of Bamenda!

Bamenda is in the Northwest region, it is the capital of the Anglophone part of the country, and it’s in the part of the country where most of the “traditional African” masks you may have seen in pictures or museums come from.  Bamenda is at a higher elevation, so is somewhat cooler than it is here in Bafia (though with the rains this week, it’s been almost chilly here sometimes, and we haven’t had enough sun to assure our laundry will dry, so we had to wash some clothes in buckets in the bathroom this week – between our travel clothesline and a fan in our room, we managed to dry them).  Jack and the ED trainees will be going on site-visit to the various posts (each to his or her own future home) next week (though our director is arranging for us to spend our anniversary together!), and then Kiyomi will be going the following week, when the rest of the SED trainees go on site-visit.  Please keep us in prayer in the two weeks when we’ll be traveling (bush taxis will be an adventure!) and apart.  No complaints, though!  Two weeks apart is way better than three months!

We made baguette pizzas for our host family last night.  They were a hit!  We’re thinking Guinness stew next time, from Kiyomi’s family recipe.  Highlights of the week: we’ve explored one of the markets, learned to insist on the real price, not the “white” price (our trainers, intending to reassure us, said that any kind of attention/harassment/annoyance we may run into is not because we’re Americans, but because we’re white – we didn’t try to explain the American phenomena of “multi-racial”), took a couple moto taxis into centreville and the supermarche, where we were able to find canned mushrooms and olive oil, taken beaucoup de bucket baths and spent a morning in the bathroom doing laundry in buckets!  This week has also been better than last for “hitting walls” – we just may be acculturating!  Doing battle with a few more African viruses this week, though just colds this time.  We’ll try to get some pictures up at some point, but “highspeed” is relative here.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

We’re still alive!

So, we’re still here, the internet connectivity has just not been great.  Our second week has been fine, we’re in good health, but both of us have been hitting walls this week – as have most of our stagemates.  We just reach our fill at times of speaking French, eating strange foods, bucket baths, etc.  Usually we’ve bounced back by the next day, but sometimes it’s a challenge.  We’re so glad to be going through training with a group of people who understand exactly how we feel, and there’s always someone who can commiserate and encourage.  There have been several current volunteers who have come into town to help in our training, and they all assure us that training is the hardest part of service.  We’re all ready to get to our posts, cook our own food, and have our own space!  Eight weeks to go…

Next week the Education trainees will find out where they will be posted and go on a site-visit, and the following week the Small Enterprise Development trainees will go, so we will be apart for those two weeks.  Our director has said he will arrange for us to be together for our anniversary though!  And we’re very excited to find our where we’ll be living for the next two years!

Bless the rains

We made it through our first week in Africa!  Here are some of the highlights:

Everyone in our staging group is really cool.  They’re mostly in their mid-twenties, though we have a few who are fresh out of college (graduating only two or three weeks ago) and a few who are closer to our age.  The flights were unremarkable, we slept a lot.

We were met at the airport by our Country Director, who is really nice, and got us through customs and baggage claims and to our hotel quickly.  Yaounde was pretty, but not like any Western capital city you’ve even seen (Yaounde is the cultural capital of Cameroon, Douala is the economic capital).  There were lots of single-story tin-roofed buildings, homes and shops, spread out, with the occasional larger cement brick “high-rise,” between lots of trees and foliage.  We have had so much crammed in to our first days here: language assessment, vaccinations, health and safety briefings, cross-cultural training.  It’s been a lot to process.  We also had a dinner at the Country Director’s home and got to meet the Ambassador and his wife, which was pretty cool.

Now we are in Bafia, which is prettier and more lush that Yaounde.  We’re in the rainy season here, and we get some good downpours every other day or so, with occasional showers in between.  If we can get pictures up, we will.  To Western eyes, it looks more rural than urban.  Most of the roads are red dirt, and there are plants and animals everywhere!  The food is really good, most everything is seasoned with a red pepper sauce called piment.  Pineapples are in season right now, and we’ve had some with lunch almost every day.  So are bananas, which are a different variety than we had in the States, and are a bit sweeter.  We also ate carp the other day – very tasty!  Keep that in mind if you get the opportunity to eat the invasive Aisian carp in the Midwest!

We are living together in the same homestay!  We’re so happy about that, and our host family is probably the best of our group.  Two parents, one younger brother, one little nephew, and two children (one a baby) live here, and now us.  Our family has been so welcoming, eternally patient, and accommodating of us.  We were greeted with cold water and a fan in our room (the fan makes all the difference, and paired with a cool shower/bucket bath in the evening, we don’t even miss air conditioning).  We go to training all day, and spend the evenings talking with our host parents (again with their great patience as we stutter and stammer our way through French – but we’re having actual conversations!), or playing with the kids.  Our host parents are our age, so we don’t call them Mom or Dad like some of the others in our group do in their families.  Some of our stagemates’ (fellow trainees) time is pretty scheduled, but we come and go as we please, and if we need some alone time, we’re able to find it.  They don’t like the way we do laundry – we don’t scrub vigorously enough, and our Dr. Bronner’s bar soap was deemed cute but inappropriate for actually cleaning anything – but today, our host-mom said we’d done a good job of washing our sheets (when she was gone), so we guess we don’t do too badly…  We’re sure there are many other things that we do strangely, or with questionable ability, but they’ve let those things slide.

Things we wish we’d brought, for those of you who were interested in sending care packages: Hand Sanitzer!  This is a serious need, not just a crazy Western germophobe thing.  The water goes out every other day or so here, along with the electricty, and we’re pretty limited on options to keep our hands clean throughout the day.  Also, more tiny washcloth-sized microfiber towels (like those found at REI), because when we can, or invent the means to, wash our hands, there’s no way to dry them.  Portability is key.  Lastly, hot chocolate, Tazo Passion tea, and echinacea tea would be nice!

So, things we’ve learned so far, for future volunteers: Really, don’t worry about clothes.  Bring enough for a week or so.  Go ahead and bring your white/light colored things.  Hand washing is so much more effective than a machine at getting the dirt out.  A deodorant stone is a sound investment for avoiding pit stains on your shirts while staying funk-free.  About a quarter of us have been dealing with (we think) bacterial dysentery (yes, really), which sucks enormously (Kiyomi has gone through the entire supply of rehydration salts issued in her medkit), but it passes in about a week (no pun intended), and then you’re still here, living in one of the most gorgeous places on our planet!  Bring powdered Gatorade, or some equivalent.  Also bring a light (flashlight or headlamp), because the electricity goes out pretty frequently.  Also, take naps.  Our whole group has been surprised by how tired we are pretty much all the time, even after our normal amount of sleep, but this is kind of a huge thing, your body needs time to adjust to a whole new environment, and Peace Corps gives you so much new information, all while you’re trying to communicate in a new language – naps are good.

So, we’re here!  Safe and sound and happy and mostly healthy, with nine and a half weeks of training to go.  It feels like months since we said goodbye and got on a plane.  We should know where we’ll be posted in early July!  In the meantime we’ll be working to get to our required French proficiency and just taking in all in.