tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16974460339516364252024-03-05T04:18:07.682-05:00Heart of EarthThe Wandering Gaines' go to Africa!
We are going to Cameroon to serve in the Peace Corps June 2011 to August 2013.Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.comBlogger63125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-65388621510004367042014-06-29T21:49:00.001-04:002014-06-29T21:49:08.450-04:00How Not to Write About Africa<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-8942714242468162202014-06-26T10:13:00.001-04:002014-06-26T10:13:13.127-04:00PCVs May Finally Get Coverage<p> </p> <p>Sexual harassment and unwanted advances are a huge, daily problem for female volunteers in Cameroon. Being grabbed or having obscene things shouted as you walk by is inescapable and something you’re advised to “ignore,” “just deal with,” or “grow a thicker skin” about – the attitude, and sometime literal advice is, if you “can’t handle it,” you should “go home.” Gender discrimination in workplaces is also often a daily reality and struggle. Treating women like property or objects isn’t “culture,” it’s wrong. Further denying women choices about what happens after their choice has been taken away is also wrong.</p> <p><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/06/24/abortion_coverage_for_peace_corps_volunteers_who_are_raped_goes_to_a_full.html">http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/06/24/abortion_coverage_for_peace_corps_volunteers_who_are_raped_goes_to_a_full.html</a></p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-18573961126999954532014-03-15T09:43:00.001-04:002014-03-15T09:43:22.819-04:00Ambassador speaks Pidgin!<p> </p> <p>Well done, Ambassador Entwistle, for learning and speaking Pidgin on air!</p> <p>But shame on NPR for calling Pidgin “broken English.” Pidgin shares much of its lexicon with Standard English, but is a separate language in its own right, with its own grammatical structure and syntax. While it is a first language for many in West and Central Africa, it continues to be disparaged and its use discouraged in schools, disenfranchising many from more than a basic level of of literacy and education. Comments such as the one mentioned only serve to reinforce ideas of a hierarchy of language and the discrimination that attends such perspective.</p> <p><a title="http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/03/05/286257776/u-s-ambassador-speaks-pidgin-english-nigerians-love-it" href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/03/05/286257776/u-s-ambassador-speaks-pidgin-english-nigerians-love-it">http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/03/05/286257776/u-s-ambassador-speaks-pidgin-english-nigerians-love-it</a></p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-15559306072530334152013-12-31T18:14:00.000-05:002013-12-31T18:14:40.313-05:00An end of it<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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So I promised myself I’d finish this blog by the end of the
year, so here it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s been harder
than you might think.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d planned to
write a lovely little post about how amazing Paris was, how lucky I am to have
been able to visit that gorgeous city a second time in my life, and this time
accompanied by my most favorite person in the world; and then I’d write about
the beauty of Ireland, which really is every bit as lovely, and the people just
as friendly and welcoming, as every song or tourism commercial has ever
promised; or maybe I’d go all out and write first about the great history of
Dublin and the juxtaposition of a fully modern sense of place alongside the
history of an ancient and proud people, and the surrounding marks of their
fight to retain (and sometimes reclaim) their freedom and identity and the
right to simply be, and be peacefully, then follow that up with Cork!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hurling!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Cousins!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Green that even HD can’t
reproduce!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought I’d end with
something cute about homecomings and landing on our feet again and looking for
the next adventure.</div>
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But here you go instead, and like I said, harder than you
might think.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because our trip home <i>was
</i>amazing, and our friends and family have been wonderfully warm and generous and
welcoming; yet once the dust settled off our backpacks, more than just our
breath has caught up to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, it’s not
all bad, but how to assess and evaluate and put in place not just a year this
December 31<sup>st</sup>, not even two years, but rather what has come to feel
like an entire lifetime of joy and laughter and beauty and grief and regret and
struggle and what-have-we-accomplished and where-to-go-from-here…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They weren’t kidding about that roller
coaster we’d be on with Peace Corps.</div>
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It’s been interesting to come home, yes, because of the “reverse
culture shock” (I sometimes still get stuck gazing at the sheer variety of
options of everyday things – it’s best to have a list, know what brands you
like, or just get what’s on sale), because of the things that have changed (is everybody
a hipster now?), and things that haven’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Because of the knowing looks when I mention that my pagne has shrunk in
the wash (it did!), and questioning whether what I’ve put on is actually
appropriate to leave the house in (I often find I’m a tad overdressed, but
sometimes there are colors and patterns that just don’t get put together in
America).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I watch what I say - if I
mention Cameroon am I going to be thought of as one of those horrid people who
starts every sentence with, “When I was in Peace Corps…”? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When someone says they like my dress,
sometimes I smile and say, “Thank you, I had it made in Africa,” (no one knows
where Cameroon is anyway) even though they don’t know, couldn’t possibly know, that my
dress is one of the few things I feel is unequivocally lovely from my time <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">over there</i> right now, and sometimes
people will smile back with more admiration than they should and say, “Really?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I bet that was great!” and other times they
will smile in a less nice way and make a mock of it, “Well, lah-di-dah!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s made difficult because people who love you want to get
it, and think they do, and maybe they do understand in pieces – military members
who’ve been deployed knows what it is to be far away from the people they love –
but it’s a different story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We weren’t actively
being shot at; we didn’t have any logistical support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I don’t want to go back, but I am proud
of my service to my country – which I nevertheless hesitate to say, never
having entered an active combat zone (though, in entirely unrelated incidents,
there were guns, and I was otherwise injured, as I'm reminded anytime the weather changes), because some might say, for
being less a uniform, mine was a lesser service.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while people may be ready to accept <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">either</i> that it was awful (and it was,
and wasn’t), or that it was great (and it wasn’t… but it was), it’s very hard
for someone who wasn’t there to understand that it was both, in spades, in
conjunction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then there are those
well-meaning (?) individuals who smile and nod and say it sounds like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">life</i>, sounds like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anywhere in the world</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
those whose eyes glaze over if they think to ask what it was like, and those
who don’t ask at all, because everyone has plenty of stress and their own
hardships and tragedies, and you feel like a bit of a boor for thinking that
the worst time of their lives still includes access to American grocery stores
and hot showers, and where you’ve just been was at times so cheap, dirty and
ugly, with grasping and hateful and fearful moments (but not only that) – but of course, your
non-Third-World-living American friends <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don’t
know</i>, and it isn’t fair to expect them to. All suffering is suffering, as the man says.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We have been so grateful for those friends, though, who have
asked, and who do really want to know, and so keep asking and listening to our
often contradictory answers as we try to sort out for ourselves <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what it was like</i>, and what that means,
and how to reconcile it with the lives we had before, and our lives moving
forward, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what does that mean</i> for
us, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what do we think about it</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How could we even hope for someone else to
understand what we don’t yet ourselves?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And maybe four and a half months back in the country is a
bit soon to try and have it all neatly wrapped up and packed away - and only
three of mostly not living out of backpacks, looking for work (which is just
never fun for anyone), not getting work, and deciding we’ll move to where we
want to live anyway – but it’s the end of the year, and time to put away things
past so we can take up the new.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So be gentle and kind to yourself if you’re going home; be
patient with your friends who are coming back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yes, it’s America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, it’s
familiar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, it’s home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yes, it’s good and it’s amazing and it’s also
hard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that’s okay.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Happy New Year, goodbye, and good luck from your</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wandering Gaines’</div>
</div>
Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-70986955265465178482013-10-19T09:35:00.001-04:002013-10-19T09:47:14.478-04:00Central Africa’s Bushmeat Crisis<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>As a PCV in Cameroon, what you should know about Central Africa’s Bushmeat Crisis</b><br />
by Sean Denny<br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">(We weren't able to include some of the images and content from the original document, but feel free to <a href="mailto:heartofearth.gaines@gmail.com" target="_blank">e-mail us</a> for the full PDF.) </span></i><br />
<br />
<b>What is the Bushmeat Crisis?</b><br />The bushmeat trade is the commercialized killing, selling, and trafficking of wildlife for consumption. The trade in Cameroon is much larger than many people realize. For example, millions of pounds of bushmeat in Cameroon are not consumed in the rural areas where wildlife is hunted; instead, this wildlife is smuggled from rural villages and forests—often on logging trucks—to urban markets of all sizes, including those of Yaoundé and Douala. In fact, 90-100 tons of bushmeat arrives in Yaoundé every month for sale. And the numbers surrounding the entire Central African bushmeat trade are staggering. For example, it is thought that at least 2-3 billion pounds of wildlife is extracted from the forests of Central Africa each year for the bushmeat trade. Although a significant amount of this wildlife is consumed at the local level, bushmeat hunting in the last several decades has become increasingly commercialized, as well as increasingly illegal, which has resulted in a dangerously unsustainable commercialized trade.<br /><br />
In short, the bushmeat trade is one of the world’s largest and most intense threats to our planet’s wildlife, and the bushmeat trade of Central Africa is the largest of its kind in the world. Illegal bushmeat hunting in the region is nothing short of a disaster to conservation efforts. In due time, the bushmeat trade may spell the end of some of Cameroon’s—and Africa’s—most spectacular wildlife.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitUFcL8Xf3sMVcfNTpVLQ194zhA-b_08V6p_9u9FROECqaBRRLuaChNzTmJxDGQSda_oWBSC48xa5COpHyCRlg8qaK2gWx0b7DsBB0KQj-g1MdfbAk9LyFzKpOhUWlJ8qcJ_EoAvCvaejq/s1600-h/image%25255B2%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuC28EVLb1IlEA0hEKWUX4Rohpk1RiqCWx9B_-_Bmfh1GdZstzMIS8Wg-fJpa_rzSduHU4KPo2VEaO6Dk-7P_IXolxcSKuKgNvQcKZP08rnpi3V99qyJphIFME11FV0acEzZQWr3NBh1rf/?imgmax=800" height="162" style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="244" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieQmKvmf9kw3p-2iKz-70tIUgGmQ0u-g0pgzU1C8tbZCJ2yuHCaM_2K1zS3BVX2zKDWJIdr10PPtIJ9BWbc5suObFH17Q3E4zYTux1rv9A2yHGZ-xvXo5Kpp1LbWGI4WUvk9TM2nao6ez2/s1600-h/image%25255B5%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgShqzzLGofVmmx2gIpfib3T-6iQ_wzRmsuK1YuiU93j812VtK8IpSSuUVFcTy8bkrPcyP4gh6aqYexN4mC0MAktlTlxcLcgDtIzZ1ASCvZmpTYdy0CJP_sIe5pNfwDZqmvHe10BzBx066T/?imgmax=800" height="154" style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="244" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHaXsko-09K_wbKzySnwSUzJjV8aTIm7HyRyNn_p_-oEykWR6uAAbTTmtsF7WAYhyHsRx4lbADC-GkiROajtR4On8SqHhJoIgsA5RJBdjIrguoFxhyBfI2WZxq7hmWv-sopJcyCm2m118Q/s1600-h/image%25255B8%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijsNnri9aB9RVfQxR1V4SQiYYgHqrbw6m6DXMSVPU7kwEzRtY2YZyiVWMo3g5qs6mgbhB1t6yg5-BlMsYba-X6OC5QNP8a6bnK5PBiz9N38iSjx-gWpyEVvjput4FIcjUfCDAJzQiTcY8U/?imgmax=800" height="167" style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="244" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkzu8fJzuRXpnQT_17mvmNIebNJRGd6JfvkXpR8VkrGMxFuoyK8y-hLG_IHOX0o4bnqPMOUzJdgmgxe4jOeOSLZ0kaDjKIzAxdUGuPo7KuNKg4NlPt4aUaYa3r9tDi-aL5_T6iukjJ9h5t/s1600-h/image%25255B11%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsM6NbxB4DaT3F0dgY9fQxW5jYR7DzWecRV66x-VuOrkTc-27mozNNGyFGRZ3uS0t7FKNk_azbG5bcirUJKzPKculZjqVcS-9C5y_eTc2AkPFEDKV1w3b3gD7ePG8Wvocp2qRFTbrrZvse/?imgmax=800" height="164" style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="244" /></a> <span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>From top left, clockwise: A putty-nosed monkey for sale at a market in Batouri, East region; An African dwarf crocodile, killed for the bushmeat trade, Southwest region; Monkey stew and meat (including a monkey skull), East region; Smoked monkey bushmeat, Littoral region. Photographs: © Sean Denny.</i></span><br />
<br />
<b>It is well known among biologists that Cameroon is a marvel of biodiversity.</b> The country not only contains an unusually high number of animal and plant species, it also contains a large number of animal species that live nowhere else on Earth, or only in Cameroon and one of its neighboring countries. This means that unsustainable bushmeat hunting in Cameroon has the potential to wipe out entire species, particularly rare and endangered primates, of which there are many in Cameroon.<br />
<br />
<b>Animals in Cameroon most threatened by the bushmeat trade:</b><br />Monkeys (all species)<br />Chimpanzees<br />Gorillas<br />Forest Elephants<br />Bongos and Sitatungas (antelopes)<br />Forest Buffalo<br />Goliath Frogs - largest frog on Earth<br />Water Chevrotain (an antelope)<br />Pangolins (all species)<br />African Dwarf Crocodiles<br />Fruit Bats<br />
<br />
<b>Some Mammals of Cameroon</b><br />
The Cross River gorilla is among the rarest animals on Earth, with only 200-300 invdividuals alive today. This animal is only found in small portions of the Southwest and Northwest regions of Cameroon, as well as the Cross River State of Nigeria.<br /><br />
Drills are consistently ranked as one of the most endangered primates in Africa, and their numbers are still declining. Mandrill (Rafiki from the Lion King) populations are also declining rapidly as a result of bushmeat hunting. Each of these species is found in only three countries, yet Cameroon contains them both.<br />The western lowland gorilla is listed as critically endangered. In addition to bushmeat hunting, Ebola outbreaks are seriously threatening the long-term survival of this iconic species.<br /><br />
Forest elephants (a separate species from savannah elephants) are being mercilessly slaughtered across Central Africa. In the last 10 years, 62% of all forest elephants on Earth were killed for their ivory or meat. In another 10 years, the species could be gone.<br />
<br />
<i>The excerpt below is from a document published by The Bushmeat Crisis Task Force. The excerpt provides further information about the bushmeat trade and It also mentions why large-bodied species are especially threatened by bushmeat hunting.</i><br />
<br />
“Deforestation still threatens habitat in tropical forests. But when the equivalent of 4 million cattle in wildlife—many of which are endangered species—are hunted and eaten each year in Central Africa, tropical forests face a more immediate threat, known as the “empty forest syndrome.” It turns out we can “defauna” a forest quicker than we can “deforest” it. Tropical forests, in contrast to tropical savannas, are particularly susceptible to over-hunting because they harbor less wildlife—by at least an order of magnitude. Hunting intensity is increasing as demand for meat increases with human population, as new, more lethal, hunting technologies such as wire snares and firearms are widely adopted, and as roads and vehicles open once isolated forests and significantly reduce hunters’ transportation costs. Hunters consider all wildlife fair game; and they prefer large animals such as apes, elephants and large antelopes because they generate the highest returns on investment. They will continue to take the more profitable large animals whenever they can, regardless of their scarcity, even when other smaller wildlife are sufficiently abundant to make hunting returns economically viable. ”<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgubAlRgVJhNHOLGyReMKA_DfVKtryaBfnuRSS_5KcqDu7nFHrZTSnO6KBPAJOHjtJ5d3T57p0I4w2DATgacFCpRLgvbqHOXAdhtybT3BlQ0JoIJ7Ieft4hXuAUxOax09YtTbSV4hyphenhyphenQzPqx/s1600-h/image%25255B15%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMB9xi_lX9x5o3PsvSqQ58bZ-ZxZTiJrgAwB3VSA8aybVfNrxlJxK63p6MsYogNqDXMXNOXRm8oDE6yYn_L4n-7NZwE7NkFPI_9nz5C_8heOGsC3O_x83uSr1HEQiA1g-aoBSQiUpdY-EQ/?imgmax=800" height="315" style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="516" /></a><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Logging companies in Cameroon are creating new road networks in once-remote forested areas, giving hunters unprecedented access to some of Cameroon’s last remaining healthy forests and their large-bodied wildlife. The trucks in this photo are coming from the forests surrounding Lobéké National Park. Lobéké is one of Cameroon’s most remote protected areas, but it is increasingly suffering from large-scale poaching. Photograph: © Sean Denny.</span></i><br />
<br />
<b>Steps YOU can take to avoid participating in the bushmeat trade during your service in Cameroon:</b><br />
1. Never eat endangered or near-endangered species. These include all monkey species, chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, African dwarf crocodiles, pangolins (they look like a bizarre, scaly anteater and are called “katabeef” in pidgin), forest buffalo, goliath frogs, and any antelope/deer species (because you don’t know what type of antelope you’re eating—it might be an endangered species)... OR, even better, choose to not eat any kind of bushmeat.<br />
2. Never eat bushmeat being sold in an urban setting, including small towns and bus stops along roads. Eating bushmeat in an urban setting directly supports commercial bushmeat hunting.<br />
3. Never buy any animal or animal part, including animal skulls and skins. Doing<br />so only increases incentives for hunters to kill and sell more wild animals. Even if you see a live endangered animal for sale, never buy it. You can take action by calling LAGA or the Limbé Wildlife Center (see below).<br />
4. Never keep a wild animal as a pet, especially a monkey. Primate pets are almost always orphans whose parents were killed for the bushmeat trade. Many PCVs may like the idea of having a pet monkey, but keeping monkeys as pets sets an unfortunate example, as people may view a PCV’s enjoyment of keeping an orphaned pet as support for the killing of animal parents. Although this obviously is not true, it is easy for Cameroonians to misinterpret our motivations and attitudes, and it is very likely to happen in this case, regardless of what you say.<br />
5. Never go bushmeat hunting.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilaEU0Di8u7Rnh6Se5nIhA4kMM-R5we0zPXBiMT6IU3r7Gp0Oe6dVgCwUpdy6sxv5kfKyGjhoSUN-8o8XnXKO7DLTmpCUcLeEmFZqOBfXIeLEQyQi7fTHXuDQSCT89CMT1xjD6lfy1fQ7b/s1600-h/image%25255B21%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoK_KdRGv2SmbcYLoudfN4op3xI-aC8X42Je97suaJEP_EOc_QblBIRe3c8ksjLQnkfzf2bMIHy7R2McLazcSseY7aoElKbjtJgAAIg4ZR745oxRhsrwo2O7TAK91wpbFHE5mgiBzlDRDi/?imgmax=800" height="307" style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="516" /></a><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">A blue duiker and flat-headed kusimanse for sale at a market in the Southwest region.Photograph: © Sean Denny</span></i><br />
<br /><b>Bushmeat and livelihoods An Important Topic</b><br />When learning about the bushmeat trade, it is necessary to be aware of the fact that bushmeat is an important source of protein for millions of impoverished people living in the rain forests of Central Africa. Additionally, hunting and selling bushmeat can be a valuable source of income in economies offering few other alternatives. To ignore these realities would undermine the complexity of the bushmeat crisis and it would fail to address the issue in its entirety. From a development and humanitarian point of view, not all bushmeat should be considered bad. For example, cane rats, rat moles, porcupines, snakes, and snails (and fish!) are good and reliable sources of protein, as well as the abundant blue duiker antelope (frutambo). These animals reproduce quickly enough to withstand hunting pressures. But there are species that do not reproduce quickly enough (for example by having long pregnancies and long maturation periods) nor live at high enough numbers for their populations to survive the demand. These are the species being pushed to either global extinction or localized extinction in Cameroon.<br /><br />
While legal subsistence hunting may be justified, illegal and commercial bushmeat hunting must be stopped—or, in the case of commercialization, at least severely reduced in villages while fully stopped in all urban settings, including the smallest of towns. This is necessary when one considers both the unsustainable nature of the trade and the welfare of human beings that rely on bushmeat for food. Bushmeat is a resource that is being depleted at an alarming rate. Its depletion will result in a much reduced food supply in the coming years for hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Cameroonians. Moreover, tropical rain forests rely on fruit-eating animals to disperse and germinate seeds, which allows these forests to regenerate.<br />
<br />
Cameroonian forests need their wildlife, especially fruit-eating animals such as primates, elephants, antelopes, hornbills, and fruit bats. Furthermore, many Cameroonians are heavily dependent on Cameroon’s forests for ecosystem services (i.e. the production of clean water, food, fuelwood, building materials, tools, medicine, etc.). Therefore, not only are wild animals in Central Africa valuable for their major contributions to African and global biodiversity, they also have crucial ecological roles in productive forests and are currently a vital food resource for many poor, rural-dwelling Africans.<br /><br />
Lastly, all PCVs come to Cameroon with the intentions of improving the lives of the poor and to promote sustainable solutions to poverty. The sustained health of natural ecosystems is crucial to the livelihoods of almost all impoverished people, who are often deeply reliant on ecosystem services for subsistence living. It is therefore in all of our interests to promote the health of Cameroon’s wildlife and ecosystems. An easy way for a PCV to start this process is by removing him or herself from the bushmeat trade (see above), educating others about the unsustainable nature of the trade, and safely alerting authorities to illegal activities threatening the survival of Cameroon’s wildlife.<br />
<br />
<b>Wildlife Crime: The Bigger Picture</b><br />Wildlife Crime is a grave problem throughout all of Africa, and indeed throughout the entire world. A great deal of wildlife crime in Africa is of course connected to the bushmeat trade, but wildlife crime goes further to include the poaching, capturing, and trafficking of animals and animal parts for ivory, traditional medicine, pelts/skins, trophies, pets, artwork, and souvenirs. A large part of the wildlife trade, particularly the ivory trade, is driven by China’s immense and growing demand for wild animals and their parts. Buyers of illegally obtained wildlife, however, are found throughout the entire world. The chain, of course, starts in countries that contain the sought after wildlife, such as the country of Cameroon.<br /><br />
Wildlife crime is rampant in Cameroon. Cameroonian foresters and park rangers will often turn a blind eye to wildlife crime—or become active in it—if the right amount of money is promised. In fact, it is not uncommon for park rangers and government officials in many African countries to be involved in poaching activities and other acts of wildlife crime. Corruption itself may be the single greatest threat to our planet’s wildlife. Wildlife laws are rarely enforced in underdeveloped nations even though these countries often harbor the most threatened of species. Today, a huge number of customs and port authorities—and other government officials—are bribed to ensure their complicity in the illegal wildlife trade. In fact, reveling in their triumph over authorities, traffickers and dealers will sometimes boast about the success of their global undetected trading networks.<br /><br />
Indeed, poachers, traffickers, and dealers of wildlife are disturbingly successful. The international wildlife trade is now the third most profitable form of organized crime in the world (after narcotics and human trafficking). An equally concerning fact is that the money generated from the trade frequently goes to funding rebel or government militias in Africa. In fact, one of the largest events in wildlife crime in decades was recently perpetrated by a notorious Sudanese militia, the Janjaweed. During January and February of 2012, the Janjaweed killed three-hundred and fifty plus elephants in Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park. <br />
This atrocious event in more detail below.<br /><br />
Sadly, wildlife crime is growing and the technology used by poachers is becoming increasingly sophisticated and lethal. Poachers are now using helicopters to map out the movements of large animals (such as elephants and rhinoceroses) in national parks. Military weapons, including machine guns, mortars, and grenades, are being used to kill both wildlife and park rangers. In many parts of Africa, it seems that a war has broken out over the continent’s wildlife.<br /><br />
Despite rapid and expansive urbanization in Africa, and the concomitant destruction of its natural habitats, wildlife crime is the most significant and immediate threat to Africa’s wildlife. As a PCV in Cameroon, it is important to be educated about these destructive activities. The following page discusses how you can report wildlife crime if you come across such activities during your Peace Corps service in Cameroon.<br /><br /><b>Reporting Wildlife Crime in Cameroon: The Choice is up to You</b><br />At some point during your service in Cameroon, you are likely to come across an act of serious wildlife crime. If you wish, you can report the case to the Last Great Ape Organization (LAGA), an NGO in Cameroon that partners with the Cameroonian government to take action against wildlife crime OR you can report the case to the Limbé Wildlife Center, a rescue center for orphaned wildlife. Below are some good examples of cases that you can report to LAGA and/or the Limbé Wildlife Center (LWC).<br /><br />
Cases of primates being illegally hunted or sold or illegally kept in captivity. Contact the LWC or LAGA if you see a live or dead endangered primate for sale, or an endangered primate being kept as a pet. You can also contact these organizations if you have any other substantial knowledge regarding the hunting and selling of endangered primates. Endangered primates include chimpanzees, gorillas, drills, mandrills, and other lesser-known species, such as colobus monkeys and the rare De Brazza’s monkey. If you give the LWC or LAGA a detailed description of a particular primate, they can help you determine the species. Note: A protected wild animal is being illegally kept in captivity if it is being kept anywhere outside of an established wildlife/rescue center.<br />
<br />
Cases of other wildlife being illegally hunted, sold, or kept in captivity. See the end of this document to learn which animals are illegal to kill, sell, or posses in Cameroon.<br />
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Cases related to elephant poaching and/or the selling of ivory. If you have knowledge of elephant poaching activities or the selling of ivory, call LAGA. Additionally, if someone offers you the opportunity to purchase ivory (this has happened to PCVs before), call LAGA and report the case.*<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhewG11iEfXmT2cOPb4TPP7BAf61iz9_nkXedboaQcC96Lycs8augZ0B3b20aN5QusLxM0bT2UZZFQDv7lD3tK7zqQxLx6F2ft2EkFoI7c2qob7aBY1AsKRi1B5g3_uNdTrEtmzV-NnjXi3/s1600-h/image%25255B24%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn-wh4LTMNcGwfL0Vymax6D89fLjNRifkVMgpjijyTE4sTXA4jM0hKAdLI0IcGEdqy0XnnD4eiSy3iy6rml3IMdQmxs0IRZfnBUFkfhDJlifpoR2cT2n06U8wOaXEH-7KbK2MyeWgVhR0X/?imgmax=800" height="197" style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="244" /></a><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Left: A male chimpanzee illegally kept captive in a village in the Southwest region of Cameroon. Photograph: © LWC</span></i><br />
*It is important to know that both LAGA and the LWC will never expose your identity if you report a case. Always keep in mind, however, that the safety of an animal should never be prioritized above your own. Therefore, you are encouraged to alert LAGA and the LWC to wildlife crime at your discretion. For clarification on this issue, you are welcome to call either of these organizations.<br />
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Contact Information<br /> </div>
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The Last Great Ape Organization (LAGA)<br />Vallee Nlongkak, Yaoundé<br />Email: <a href="mailto:ofir@laga-enforcement.org">ofir@laga-enforcement.org</a><br />Tel: 99.65.18.03</div>
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The Limbé Wildlife Center<br />(email is preferable)<br />Email: <a href="mailto:info@limbewildlife.org">info@limbewildlife.org</a><br />Tel: 99.98.25.03</div>
<br /><b>The Massacre at Bouba Ndjida, Cameroon</b><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWaClL5YZTd07bVZWnSXncBNHJubwvkUa8jlONvlSLYFWQduDgMOiJ8JYdiTc3ZMl1NRvnEKyk_TbrK-Q9Zla_d5W9W27I6BkcFETgIOu4F_qa1-bxW6_RQxMrmRujLJ87kNK2gnA2A2Ci/s1600-h/image%25255B27%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPSAxMz7WkfEJbNqwJxMITTg2iqN5oe21IgMNxI6CJBiH5UOouSXWT71OUkxXkSWC99U3JJ71IMBrkibhmPkrsx8Ex3YAIxLpJlPe1Zk5hu92g8hLbDrplRkDmoJ2rRk24BQm1IVWgt2MV/?imgmax=800" height="181" style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="244" /></a><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photograph: © WWF Cameroon</span></i><br />
Highly intelligent, social, emotional, and immensely powerful, elephants are surely among the most magnificent creatures on Earth. Yet the future of elephants in Africa is disturbingly bleak. This elephant (above) was one of three-hundred and fifty plus elephants that were slaughtered in January and February of 2012 inside Bouba Ndjida National Park, located in the North region of Cameroon along the country’s border with Chad. This massacre was one of—if not the—worst poaching events in the world in decades. It was perpetrated by the Janjaweed, a Sudanese militia that fights on horseback, mostly in Darfur.<br /><br />
In early 2012, the Janjaweed road on horseback from Sudan, through the Central African Republic and Chad, and into Bouba Ndjida National Park, where they used machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and other powerful weapons to kill hundreds of elephants. Chainsaws were used to cut off the elephants’ faces (below), which allowed the Janjaweed to quickly obtain the elephants’ tusks. (Many elephant poachers now use chainsaws for this purpose.) The Janjaweed have been selling elephant tusks for decades now to fund their warfare activities in Sudan. Sadly, organized elephant killings conducted with military tactics and weaponry are becoming increasingly common in Africa. It is important to remember, however, that many elephants in Cameroon are not murdered by highly organized foreign militias, but instead by Cameroonian poachers. For example, in June 2012, three men from the Cameroonian military were caught poaching elephants inside Campo Ma’an National Park, located in the country’s South region.<br /><br />For more information on the Bushmeat Crisis and Wildlife Crime, visit the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force at <a href="http://www.bushmeat.org/">www.bushmeat.org</a> and the Last Great Ape Organization at <a href="http://www.laga-enforecement.org/">www.laga-enforecement.org</a>. You are also welcome to email Sean Denny at <a href="mailto:sean.m.denny@gmail.com">sean.m.denny@gmail.com</a>.<br />
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Below lists just some of the species that are protected by law in Cameroon. Unfortunately, despite the fact that these species are officially protected, some have already become extinct within Cameroon, such as the cheetah and black rhinoceros.<br />Mammals<br />-Lion<br />-Leopard<br />-Cheetah<br />-Caracal<br />-Zorilla (also known as the striped pole cat)<br />-African wild dog<br />-Gorilla<br />-Chimpanzee<br />-Drill<br />-Mandrill<br />-Guereza (also know as the Eastern black-and-white colobus)<br />-Preuss’s red colobus<br />-Preuss’s monkey<br />-De Brazza’s monkey<br />-L’Hoest’s monkey<br />-Agile Mangabey<br />-Angwantibo<br />-Bosman’s potto<br />-Cross River Allen’s galago<br />-Aardvark<br />-Giant ground pangolin<br />-African manatee<br />-Beecroft’s flying squirrel<br />-African savannah elephant<br />-African forest elephant<br />-Black rhinoceros<br />-Giraffe<br />-Red-fronted gazelle<br />-Yellow-backed duiker<br />-Mountain reedbuck<br />-Hippopotamus<br />-Topi<br />-Water chevrotain<br />-Eland<br />-Bongo<br />-Forest buffalo<br />-Roan antelope<br />-Hartebeest<br />-Sitatunga<br />-Bushbuck<br />-Defassa waterbuck<br />-Giant forest hog<br />-Bush pig<br />-Warthog<br />-African civet<br />-Genet (all species)<br />-Serval<br />-Chawless otter<br />-Bay duiker<br />-Peter’s and Harvey’s duiker<br />-Spotted hyena<br />-Striped hyena<br />-All other monkey species in Cameroon<br />Reptiles<br />-Long-snouted crocodile<br />-Nile crocodile<br />-African dwarf crocodile<br />-Green turtle<br />-Olive ridley turtle<br />-Leatherback turtle<br />-African spurred tortoise<br />-Eisentrau chameleon<br />-Pfeffer’s chameleon<br />-Four-horned chameleon<br />-Mount Lefo chameleon<br />-African rock python<br />-Royal python<br />-Muller’s sand boa<br />-Burrowing python<br />-Egyptian cobra<br />-Spitting cobra<br />-Black mamba<br />-Black cobra<br />-Green cobra<br />-Burrowing cobra<br />-Nile monitor lizard<br />-African savannah monitor lizard<br />-Bell’s hinged tortoise<br />-Common tortoise<br />-Elegant turtle<br />-Senegal turtle<br />-African turtle<br />Amphibians<br />-Goliath frog<br />Birds<br />-African gray parrot<br />-Ostrich<br />-Brown parrot<br />-Red-fronted parrot<br />-Senegal parrot<br />-Cameroon mountain pigeon<br />-Bannerman’s turaco<br />-Yellow-casqued wattled hornbill<br />-Grey-necked rock fowl<br />-Mount Kupe bush shrike<br />-Cameroon mountain francolin<br />-Lesser flamingo<br />-Greater flamingo<br />-Cameroon montane greenbul<br />-Dja river warbler<br />-Nubian bustard<br />-White stork<br />-Black stork<br />-Saddle-billed stork<br />-Crowned crane<br />-Secretary bird<br />-Green turaco<br />-Yellow-billed turaco<br />-Almost all birds of prey found in the northern half of the country. Eagles, hawks, falcons, and vultures are all birds of prey.</div>
Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-62505374858048010712013-09-09T15:32:00.001-04:002013-09-09T15:32:48.982-04:00Then we flew to Barcelona<p>Spain is a place we’ve always sworn to visit “one day.” We love the wine, we love the food, we love the occasional Anthony Bourdain visits shown on television. We’ve always wanted to go, and figured we’d get there “eventually.” When our plans to leave Cameroon in June collapsed colossally and two of our dearest, most beloved friends invited us to join them on their way home via Barcelona, we took it for granted that this would be our silver lining. During the hardest days as our time in Cameroon came to a close, we would sing “Barcelona!” to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. <p>We landed at nearly midnight, found our tragically dirty luggage (giant camping backpack behind, standard sized backpack up front, and, oh, yeah, duffle bags, etc., over each shoulder), and hobbled to the taxi stand. After collapsing in bed in our little efficiency apartment, we woke to find ourselves in a land of sunshine and joy. Glorious, dignified old apartment buildings stretched upward on every street, offering comfortable shade, while balcony windows dripped with verdure. Occasionally a fine cooling mist would drift down on us as apartment dwellers nurtured their mini gardens above. We walked seven or eight miles every day, reveling in the freedom to do so, marveling when cars and busses and even the occasional motorcycle stopped at the edges of crosswalks and waited patiently for us to pass by. Barcelona is by far the most walking and biking friendly city we’ve been in. We ate asparagus and strawberries and cherries and bibb lettuce and all the things that were something other than the slightly over-ripe Roma tomatoes, onions, and garlic we’d had in everything for two years. We laughed, overcome by the absolute joy, and at the absurdity of being so overjoyed at the taste of a perfectly ripened strawberry, and tried not to drool over the delicious abundance and possibility down every aisle of the Mercat de La Boqueria. <p>We needed the time to reintroduce ourselves to Western culture. Daily the conversation would ensue: <p>Friend 1, ‘Do you think there’s a bathroom?” <p>Friend 2, doubtfully, ‘Mmm… probably…?” <p>Friend 3, ‘I’ll go check.’ <p>Friend 3 absents and, after a brief interval, returns. <p>Friends 1, 2 and 4 look on expectantly. <p>Friend 3, ‘There was a bathroom!’ <p>Friend 1, ‘How was it? Was it clean?’ <p>Friend 2, ‘Was there toilet paper?’ <p>Friend 4, ‘Was there water?’ <p>Friend 3, “Yes, yes, and yes.’ <p>All sit and grin like lunatics at the greatness of such an unexpected convenience. <p>We also needed to begin the readjustment process to shopping (as in, simply buying basic necessities). We needed new toothbrushes and walked into a supermarket. We made a beeline through rows upon rows of random things to the toiletries aisle. Apparently, one does not simply purchase a toothbrush. What kind of toothbrush did we want? What kind of toothbrush best represented each of us as a unique individual? There were toothbrushes of every color on the spectrum. There were flat headed ones, round headed ones, bristles that changed color, handle with or without grips, ridged ones, spiny ones, rubberized ones, vibrating ones, weird grippy things on the backs of the heads, inexplicable pointy things that flipped out from the handle. Are we still looking at toothbrushes?? After a moment of panic Kiyomi grabbed the two immediately in her direct field of vision and asked Jack, “Red or green?” Decision made. Crisis averted. All around reintegration success! We bought toothbrushes. <p>In Sagrada Familia we found a place that met, and perhaps even surpassed the majesty of Istandbul’s Blue Mosque. In simple human terms, the structure was first imagined by Gaudi in the 1880s, and is finally set for completion in 2026, following the design and instructions left behind in a feat that has transcended time, war, politics, religion, secularization, generations. When we first visited the basilica, we ran into a four hour line in the sun to purchase tickets, so we just walked around the outside. The Nativity façade at the back of the church (from the current tourist entry) shows the birth of Christ as the ultimate culmination of nature. Visions of the natural world – vines, animals, doves flying between abstractions of fruit and flowers, giant turtles or tortoises supporting the whole thing on their armored backs - climb the building, which stretches up, it seems, as far as the eye can see, culminating in a giant, richly green Tree of Life, reminiscent of an archetypal Christmas tree. In the midst of all the edenic (yeah, I made up a word) glory sits the artfully sculpted holy family in traditional stance. By contrast, the Passion façade is almost austere, with human figures rendered in spare abstraction meant to be reminiscent of skeletons (like the Deathly Hallows in Hermione’s telling of the story in the Harry Potter movie) gathered around a crucifixion. We, of course, bought tickets online to go inside the next day. Inside, it is as though Gaudi was the inspiration for every depiction of elfin architecture ever filmed. Stained glass colors the light green and red as you walk between support pillars designed to resemble massive tree trucks, drawing the eye up and up and up to a ceiling carved in leaf design and windows that let in a gentle, dappled sunlight. It makes you feel small and insignificant in the very best way; the way of spaces that are truly magical, that are holy, that are reverence itself. Each of us, with our varying degrees of traditional faith, varying degrees of question and doubt and trust and unknowing, found ourselves, in our own space, in our own time, pausing, deeply moved, feeling a sense of connection, of mystery, of some great unknown peacefulness. <p>Our week went too quickly, and, as at every stop on our way home, we found ourselves promising, “next time…” and “when we come back…” <p>Paris was waiting.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-53088878314647236092013-08-19T20:21:00.001-04:002013-08-19T20:21:19.842-04:00And we landed in Istanbul<p>Which is far too wonderful for how little we’ve been told about how it should be top ten on anyone’s bucket list of places to visit (are those still a thing?).</p> <p>We got off the plane with a ten hour layover ahead of us and plans to take the Turkish Airlines-provided tour of the city and lunch. After quite a bit of wandering around (it seemed like every line would lead through a security check with no guarantee we were getting where we wanted to be, or that we could come back) and five very kind, very patient members of airport staff maintaining that, tour or no, if we wanted to enter into their country, we would, in fact, need a visa, we made it to the Starbucks (hey, we’re still Americans) on the other side of the immigration check (incidentally, thanks to our confusion, we were able to direct three other families to the lines they needed to be in). We got our bearings, only to learn we’d just missed the tour, but we met up with a few other returning volunteers and set out to explore on our own.</p> <p>We took the tram to the Grand Bazaar. The city we saw fly by us was clean, warm, bright, an intriguing mix of pastel skyscrapers and the pregnant domes of neighborhood mosques. Nobody stared at us. No one seemed to find the group of us, obvious tourists, the least bit interesting – we reveled in our anonymity. The Grand Bazaar was both of those things, and it was easy to imagine the city centuries ago as a center of world trade, culture, education. We saw only a small bit of what was there, but we easily could have spent the entire day exploring if we weren’t all so hungry by that point. We came out of the Bazaar and crossed the street, considering the pictures of meals posted outside of various eateries, when an older man introduced himself in flawless English as the owner of the tea shop across the street. He placed our food orders for us in Turkish and then led us back to a little sun dappled avenue, shaded by grape vines, lined by low tables, peopled by old men engaged in an older dice game while sipping hot tea. We were sure we’d stumbled into some antechamber of paradise.</p> <p>The proprietor brought us all hot tea in small curved glasses and moments later, our food was delivered from across the street. We could not have been more content than in those moments, but when the meal was done, we wanted to make sure we saw more of the city in our dwindling hours there.</p> <p>And we were rewarded for our effort. We walked to the Sultanahmet (Blue) Mosque (which really is blue), and directly across a wide park, the Hagia Sophia. With its towering minarets and nine enormous domes, the mosque is an impressive building just to look at, more impressive when you consider it’s four hundred years old; but inside is where you really experience the majesty of it. We were asked to remove our shoes and checked to be sure we were appropriately dressed (no exposed legs or shoulders for women or men; but there are robes and wraps available so everyone can go in). Our voices dropped to whispers instinctively when we walked in. Our eyes were immediately drawn up by the at times ornate, and at times perfect simplicity of the dominantly blue tile work. The main dome swooping gracefully overhead felt protective. Blue, our impromptu guide told us, is the color of good fortune. This, we felt, standing there in socks and borrowed wraps, was reverent, was worshipful, and put one in mind of the majesty of the Divine. We couldn’t think of a church that could compare.</p> <p>Due to time, we were unfortunately not able to go inside the Hagia Sophia, but we promised ourselves, “next time.” Yet, having always wanted to visit, and never (not <em>really</em>) expecting to get there, standing in front of the ancient basilica dedicated to the Holy Wisdom of God and modern day repository of culture and knowledge was a privilege.</p> <p>From there, our clock was running out, but we and our fellow sojourners squeezed in a toast, after climbing up, and up, and up (and up again!) to the terrace at the top of a restaurant (the waiter smiling to himself the whole way… he knew what he was giving us), where we sat in a perfect, warm breeze and sipped some of the local brew, and took in a view of the Blue Mosque to our right and the Hagia Sophia to our left, and beyond that, the Sea of Marmara, and beyond that… oh, only Asia.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-35759795120703842662013-07-23T07:46:00.001-04:002013-07-23T07:46:11.315-04:00Heading for Re-Entry<p>After two long years we finally left Cameroon and are on our way home. The day was full of packing, repacking, throwing stuff in “up for grabs” for the volunteers we were leaving behind, cursing the accumulation of two years of stuff and using our mad Tetris skills to fit it all into two camping backpacks, two Camel-Baks, and one medium duffle bag. We had many final meals and final drinks and final hugs and tearful goodbyes and were drained by the time we stumbled into the airport – the taxi driver tried to change the price on us at the last minute and insist that it wasn’t normal practice to drive us up to the terminal building, just for good measure. After having our passports checked no fewer than five times, a couple meltdowns, and having a bottle of water purchased inside half of the “security checks” confiscated, we boarded the plane. <p>We flew for about forty five minutes and landed in Douala, where we waited for passengers to deplane, the plane to be cleaned around us, a crew change, and more passengers to board for an interminable hour. Fellow passengers treated the plane like any other mode of transport, leaning out of their seats to flag flight attendants like vendors who crowd every bus or bush taxi at every check point, village, or bend in the road, with commands of, “give me this,” or “bring me that.” The boy next to Kiyomi, though he was of narrow build, tried to take up not only his own, but also her seat, legs splayed wide under the arm rest and elbow and shoulder angled in above it. Finally sometime between three and four in the morning we left Cameroon air space and landed a few hours later in Istanbul. <p>A note on airplane food: it is amazing. The first bite of spinach nearly brought tears to our eyes.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-65523732724321840442013-07-23T06:05:00.001-04:002013-07-23T06:05:21.500-04:00So many, so good, so true, so long…<p> </p> <p> </p> <p><a title="http://whatshouldpcvscallme.tumblr.com/" href="http://whatshouldpcvscallme.tumblr.com/">http://whatshouldpcvscallme.tumblr.com/</a></p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-10925498157810513552013-07-06T16:47:00.001-04:002013-07-06T16:47:58.407-04:00Home:Coming!<p>We are leaving Cameroon July 19th.</p> <p>It was a rather long and arduous process to get that date settled over the late spring. Much more difficult than it should have been. And while it’s a few weeks later than what we would have preferred, we’ve made the best of it.</p> <p>Our journey home will take us though a week in Spain with good friends we’ve made here, a few days in France visiting an old friend, and then for two weeks in Dublin with Kiyomi’s mom and her partner (plans made in April a year ago and looked forward to ever since!).</p> <p>Finally, we’ll be back in the States on August 15th, and it’s about time! Two years without ever visiting home may not sound like such a long time, but two years of being foreign, alien, permanently outside and other, is at the very least exhausting. And while it’s been good and bad and hard and fun and worth it and so not worth it, we have the feeling it may take a little time to put better words to all of this.</p> <p>Our last week in town will be a bit more busy than we expected. We’d been told to close our house and had made some plans to try to sell some of our larger furniture to other volunteers a month ago, when Peace Corps offered us a huge relief by deciding to keep our house. Then with less than two weeks left in town, and it being largely impossible to make arrangements to sell anything at this point, Peace Corps told us last week that they’d changed their minds again and won’t be keeping our house. But they are keeping another house and will take our furnishings for that one, though we suspect Peace Corps moving our house will really involve a lot of us hauling furniture and boxes (thanks to the packages we’ve received over the years, we have boxes to pack things up in! And our Air Force upbringing makes us old pros at moving house). It wouldn’t be quite so bad if we weren’t also trying to do all the other things involved with leaving a place – saying goodbye to friends, visiting favorite places a last time, last minute souvenir shopping, writing our final Volunteer Reports and Descriptions of Service, making purchases for our travel, closing our bank accounts, getting signatures to say everything is properly in order, rechecking and editing our resumes, putting out feelers for new jobs, an apartment, and on.</p> <p>But, as this is written on July 5th, in 9 days and counting, come what may this will all be done, and we’ll be going through our final medical evaluations in Yaounde to leave here at the end of that week.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-70600393505212340392013-03-22T16:54:00.001-04:002013-03-22T16:54:52.221-04:00…it’s a street in a strange world…<p>We haven’t made a secret of the fact that our Peace Corps service has not been what we anticipated; we prepared, unintentionally and unwittingly, for one experience and have had quite a different one. Still, we would join Peace Corps again. We would even come to Cameroon again.</p> <p>If you’re considering it, don’t join Peace Corps for the work. It can be useful if you don’t have a lot of work experience, and (we’ve read) employers do recognize that they’re getting certain benefits, like the willingness to take risks, tackle challenges, and make due with limited/no resources or budget, when they hire RPCVs. But don’t come only, or even primarily for “the hardest job you’ll ever love” – because if you’ve had a few years in the work force doing something you find at all rewarding or engaging, this won’t be it. Working in Cameroon is hard, disheartening, discouraging, sometimes utterly defeating when you’re doing it right, and you have to be willing (able?) to squeeze every ounce of satisfaction out of the tiniest victories (Started only an hour late! Half the people expected showed up! Counterpart did what they said they would do!), or the very basic knowledge that at least you did everything you could when nothing works out. The benefits are much more of the Goals 2 and 3 variety. We have long been proponents of study abroad and international travel as an essential piece of any education. We are in a global world now, and it just keeps getting smaller – resources we take for granted are not going to last forever, and the habitable landscape is dwindling – that means we have to figure out how to tolerate each other on just a basic level, let alone the enormous benefits of increased innovation, new perspectives, appreciation of beauty and depth of understanding to be gained by even a small experience of another culture. If you missed out on study abroad in college, Peace Corps is much harder, dirtier and longer, but definitely a good path to pursuing your global education.</p> <p>Our time in Cameroon has taught us a lot. Both anthropology majors in school, we’d been warned against ethnocentrism and cultural relativism for years, but it’s been an education of a different sort to try to understand a fundamentally and completely different mindset. Things we’ve taken for granted, like, “everyone wants their children to be better off than they were,” or “le’s all pitch in and work hard for a common goal,” just don’t at all translate. But we’ve learned to just say, “okay” to both the mind-boggling and the merely confusing. Sometimes understanding isn’t enough, and sometimes it isn’t possible, and things are still going to be exactly as they’re going to be in that moment. And that’s…okay. We’ve mentioned before the gained understanding of just how complex issues in the developing world (at least this corner of it) really are – it’s actually not a simple issue of lack of ideas, passionate individuals, cultural sensitivity, or resources. It’s a million and one little things, alongside enormous social and political challenges that are not going to be solved in two years, or twenty, or maybe more. And as we’ve said before, these things aren’t going to be answered from the outside in – the best and most sustainable answers, we believe, are going to come from the Cameroonian people when and how they are ready to do it.</p> <p>On a personal level, we feel that we’ve grown, maybe matured a bit, certainly mellowed. Once you can accept, “okay,” and stop fighting what doesn’t make sense, not much is really going to ruffle you very easily. Cell phone companies, watch out! Because forty-five minutes on hold has got nothing on anything in Peace Corps. Beyond that, it’s been an incredible time to reflect on what matters, to gain some distance and perspective on issues from our “past lives,” and focus in on what we want in our future. Running water is a must; hot, if possible; electricity we could mostly do without as long as we can charge stuff now and again. Plus, we’ve made some amazing friends who will be part of our lives forever.</p> <p>If you’re thinking about coming, think in terms of personal growth and international perspective, not work opportunities. Be prepared for periods of symptoms strongly resembling clinical depressing for at least a few months out of the twenty-seven – no, there’s nothing wrong with your thyroid, you’re just sleeping for eleven hours because your brain needs a break. (Seriously, though, if you think you may be sick or really do struggle to get through the day, call the medical office.) We think Cameroon is better suited as a post for people who are very extroverted and enjoy small talk over drinks with strangers. Comfort with heavy alcohol consumption around you is a must, and “taking” beers is pretty important to socializing in this culture. If you’re female, you will be sexually harassed, and it can get pretty intense pretty fast – fair warning. You might get more out of the work here if you haven’t had a lot of work experience yet and are looking to build your resume – otherwise, be very comfortable setting boundaries around not being “whiteman window dressing.” In fact, being very comfortable setting boundaries is important – here and in life. Pick that skill up. It’ll be easier here if you have a flexible definition of personal space (the music you play on your iPod… that’s all you get), possibly grew up on a farm/can tolerate roosters, and really can just go with the flow – by which we mean, you’re not someone who cares about having a plan, how long meetings run, waiting for vehicles to be pushed out of four feet of mud every five hundred yards, being asked for everything you own, or nobody calling you by your name after two years. If you don’t think that’s you, consider saying no to a posting in Cameroon. Chances are good your placement officer will be calling you again in a few weeks with another post to consider.</p> <p>And that’s all for now! Next up, find out when we’re coming home!</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-47915122722152336852013-03-09T08:43:00.001-05:002013-03-09T08:43:23.820-05:00Hello World! It’s been a while<p>We are in our last few months in Cameroon now, and it’s strange. We’re trying to make notes of “The Last Time That…” For example, the last time we’ll eat fufu and njama njama is yet to come, but sure to be nostalgic – or will we even realize that it is the last time? (Not to worry, we have ideas for how to make it with an American twist when we get home, and we’ll post recipes once they’ve been suitable tested on our family.) Our last visit to Azam Hotel for pizza has probably already happened. The last time we traveled to Limbe has already come and gone, and this week we made reservations for our last trip to Kribi.</p> <p>Everywhere we went on our Great Gaines and Losses Farewell Tour that launched this blog and our Peace Corps adventure, we were able to talk about, “when we get back.” Even in our other travels to the Caribbean and Central American and even Europe, we’ve always thought in terms of “one day we’ll be back,” there’s always another visit on the horizon in our minds, another chance to experience our favorite things or get in those experiences we missed the first time through. Yet somehow, coming to Africa it seems is psychologically a further trip to make, a greater distance that leads us to suspect, while we fully intend to see other parts of this great continent, we won’t be coming back to Cameroon. So we’re trying to soak up every favorite part of this experience that we can, to make sure we visit our favorite chop houses and views and places “one last time,” and to make sure that there isn’t anything we’ll regret “if only we’d made time for…” Our “six-ish more months” has now dwindled by half, so we’re doing our best with figuring out how to say goodbye to the place that’s been our home for two years.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-92207811462913226292012-11-18T08:03:00.001-05:002012-11-18T08:03:47.802-05:00Thankfully…<p>We love Thanksgiving, and that our country has the tradition of beginning the important mid-winter festivities with a time of drawing near to our dearest and giving thanks for the blessings of the year past before we start naming our wishes for the year ahead. We greet the season with bittersweet feelings as we’re so far from the home we love, but though we left behind (and look forward to seeing in the future!) family and friends, we’re so blessed to be surrounded by dear friends made over the last year and a half. We have many things we are thankful for this year, and good friends here in Cameroon are just the start!</p> <p>We’re grateful for the thoughts and prayers, e-mails and IMs and texts, letters and packages and visitors we’ve had from home this year!* We definitely have dealt with our share of what’s been termed “culture fatigue” (which we think is a more apt description of our experience than the more commonly used “culture shock” – no stunned surprise here, but we do get awfully tired of being foreigners sometimes!), and every little bit of home has made the other side of the world feel so much less far away for us. We’re grateful for the people who have kept us close in spite of the distance, those who supported us as we began this journey even as they count down with us the days till we come back.</p> <p>We’re grateful for technology! Our cellphones and internet key have been invaluable to us for keeping in touch and up to date. Movies, music and podcasts have all helped us pass time enjoyably and feel connected to our culture.</p> <p>We’re grateful for the babies, newly born or on the way this year, who we can’t wait to meet!</p> <p>We’re grateful for the little comforts we’re able to find here in Bamenda (lots of tea!) and the bounty supplied of things we mentioned missing (we have enough coffee to last us almost through the end of our service)!</p> <p>We’re grateful for the time to discover great books as we wait for travel or meetings or officials, and for the opportunity(!) to be forced to slow down a bit.</p> <p>We’re grateful for the colleagues we’ve met and worked with over the year, who’ve shared their visions of what they’d like their little corner of Cameroon to look like one day, and allowed us to help in our small ways to build it.</p> <p>We’re grateful for the things that didn’t work, and the lessons learned there about giving all we can and letting go of the outcome - which is really out of our hands anyway!</p> <p>We’re grateful for the time together that’s brought us closer than ever (eight years married now! - so much for the dire warnings of pending divorce we got last year). We’ve been afforded such great freedom to enjoy each other’s company and pursue opportunities to work and serve alongside each other, and to share in the fun, victories, struggles and frustrations of each other’s work in a whole new way.</p> <p>We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to see more of the country, especially our region this year, and to have revisited some favorite spots (we got to the beach four times this year)! And we’re grateful for the safety we had through all the back and forth.</p> <p>We’re grateful for the reelection of our president, and the direction, development and opportunity we believe that represents for our country, and to be citizens of a place where free and fair elections are assured even without international oversight committees and organizations.</p> <p>We’re grateful that July’s accident was so relatively minor. Every year volunteers worldwide die in vehicle and traffic accidents, and things could so easily have gone so much worse.</p> <p>We’re grateful that we’re two-thirds through our service and are in the home stretch! Maybe we can’t quite say yet that we’ve made it, but we’ve made it this far!</p> <p>We’re grateful for this challenging, stretching, growing period that we couldn’t have found anywhere else, for the opportunity to explore our faith anew and lean into God’s sustaining and sufficient grace, and to remember the wonder again that even here, on the other side of the world, where everything is different, God is still God.</p> <p>Happy Thanksgiving</p> <p> </p> <p>*If anything has gone unanswered, please let us know! Mail is reasonably reliable, but things have occasionally been misplaced for months until we knew to ask around for them.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-16610258946151159572012-11-14T10:07:00.001-05:002012-11-14T17:12:54.503-05:00On the Ring Road<p>So we’ve been traveling quite a bit this fall season, and it’s been the perfect time for it too! Last year it just seemed strange to go through Halloween and Thanksgiving when it was clearly still June outside. The Ring Road took us to new heights in the mountainous North-West Region, and with that came much cooler temperatures, which was just what our Northeastern blood called for!</p> <p>We have been working with an NGO called PICTRA-Cam (Promoting ICT in the Rural Area in Cameroon) on a series of regional teacher training seminars. Jack, of course, has been teaching on computer basics and Kiyomi has been teaching time management. The time management sessions have at times felt a bit ironic, since things still move on Cameroon time, and what with waiting for officials to show up and sanction and officially open the seminar, things don’t actually get rolling until two or three hours late – and then roll right into the importance of timeliness! But, as they say here, c’est Cameroon!</p> <p>We’ve now been to the furthest points accessible on the Ring Road by car, and that was an adventure! Several times we were asked to get out and wait while our vehicles were pushed out of mud pits that pass for roads. This was sometimes problematic because the bystanders aren’t just willing to help push a stranded vehicle and send you on your way – they are only to happy to watch and laugh until the right sum is offered in return for their assistance. We were stuck behind another stuck vehicle for a while at one point because, people said, the driver was greedy and wouldn’t pay beyond a certain price. We thought it was interesting that the driver was considered greedy, and not those extorting him…</p> <p>Anyway, eventually we did get through all the muck and mire and made it to our various destinations. The North-West is a gloriously beautiful place, and we got to see first hand why this area is called the Grassfields Region, with its rolling hills of grasses and wild flowers. For the most part, each trip went something like this: get up early, travel on rough roads in beat up old vehicles all day, arrive in town and run here and there trying to track down the delegate – who must be officially greeted before anything else can happen – find a place to stay, argue with our NGO colleague that certain things, like running water, locks on the doors, really are necessary, find another place to stay, remind our counterpart about the necessity for dinner, find someplace to eat, fall onto a damp, thin mattress atop a pallet of thin wooden slats and hope for sleep. Get up early the next morning, rush through breakfast, rush to the hall, rush to get everything set up, sit for two-three hours while people file in and wait for the officials to show up – they’ve all been told we’re starting at eight, and it’s considered very gracious for them to show up by ten or ten-thirty, and then what with the singing of the anthem (always beautifully done, in full harmony) and the word of prayer, and the word from this one and that one, we’re lucky to get rolling before noon – which is, lunch time! The teachers always protest that they only want a fifteen minute break, and always take an hour and a half. Somehow we get through, and even manage to get somewhat back on schedule, until the guy presenting on the internet gets up, wastes most of his time talking theory (this is a practical seminar), and he always begs just five more minutes, and takes another hour. Then we go for dinner, have another restless night, and get up early to do it all again. You would think that the second day, since we don’t have to wait for officials, we would start on time, but no, inexplicably, this is not the case. Then we pile back into our vehicle and get back to Bamenda very late, though our colleague always sees us as close to our door as possible. Through all this are constant power struggles with the delegation over giving us food and providing the use of a hall, chairs, electricity – all to be loaned at exorbitant cost, to be assessed later. Our group was able to eat, on our own, for between 3,000-4,000 francs CFA, while the delegations routinely charged, for the same food, between 50,000-60,000 francs CFA. But just saying the food wasn’t desired wasn’t enough, instead our colleague put himself through all kinds of verbal gymnastics and avoidance strategies so as not to offend when he declined to be robbed. If you ever forget that Cameroon is one of the most corrupt nations in the world, you will be quickly reminded.</p> <p>Generally we found the teachers to be bored-to-moderately-engaged, usually with questions intended to try to trip up the presenters (which failed), or long soliloquies about why integrating ICT wouldn’t work or be useful to themselves (it’s a national requirement), and that they needed free laptops – at which point the entire hall would erupt in homecoming game victory cheering.</p> <p>Our first stop together was Oku, which claims to be the highest occupied point in West Africa, and begs the question, what made people settle so high up before motor vehicles? Oku was settled by people fleeing indigenous slave trading groups in the valleys, when they found a place so far up in the mountains, near the mouth of a spring, where they could be safe to live out their lives – and their descendants are still there. Oku is also known in the region for having the best honey around, so of course we brought some back to Bamenda with us. In Oku the delegate refused to have the teachers pay for registration, claiming he hadn’t received an official notice, though he’d repeatedly been in contact with our colleague. It was finally settled that registration would be paid per school, rather than per teacher, which ended up not covering expenses.</p> <p>Our next stop was Ndu. Ndu was colder than Oku, though apparently not as high in elevation, and is supposed to be the coldest town in Cameroon. It’s chilly temperature and frequent rainfall make for a good environment for growing tea and the tea fields along the way into town are a beautiful bright green. In Ndu we found the teachers to be highly engaged and interested, with thoughtful questions and considered responses. We also liked Ndu because we stayed in the nicest family owned hotel – the bed was comfortable, there was no mold or ancient filth on the walls, and while there wasn’t hot running water, the proprietress kindly heated water for us over a fire. We were also able to get hot and caffeinated drinks at any time – a vast improvement to the more readily available beer or syrupy soda beverages.</p> <p>From there we went to Nkambe, which was still cold, but lower enough in elevation that hot beverages became unavailable. Nkambe was possibly the worst hotel we have ever stayed in, and several times found ourselves laughing hysterically because what else could we do? The room was tiny; there were hooks beside the bed that Jack put our coats on, and then found that he couldn’t turn around because there wasn’t enough room between the bed and the wall for his legs. The walls were coated in some kind of brown spotty, drippy filth and the ceiling spotted with black mold. Our first room had no lock, just a flimsy sliding latch put in with two small nails, and the door knob came off in our hands when we tried to leave. The second room had a deadbolt we used to pull open the door, since the doorknob in that room was absent as well. In some rooms there were panes of glass missing from the windows, sheets with visible body fluid stains, and none of the bathrooms had been washed in recent memory. We asked to have our bathroom cleaned, which was done readily enough, but the managers felt it was sound business practice to turn off the water every day and only let it run for a few hours at night, so the entire hall constantly smelled like a latrine. That night, our lightbulb fell out of the socket onto the bed. We missed lunch that day and didn’t eat for about thirteen hours, and were followed by the local <em>fou </em>(village idiot really – not nearly as funny as depicted in the media), who repeatedly muttered incomprehensible things and threw his hat at the two of us, while largely ignoring the Cameroonians with us. He followed us back to our hotel and stood leering from the darkness while we ate our meal, and Kiyomi yelled at him that he was being racist and to go away, which, after shaking the bush behind her chair, he did. Our seminar got pushed from the hall that had been reserved for us through proper channels by ELECAM, the oversight organization charged with guaranteeing free and fair elections in Cameroon, who claimed that hall through other-than-proper channels, and said their needs were more important than educating 100+ teachers in computer usage, as is required of them by the national syllabus. But we were able to secure another space and continue on with the seminar. We got to spend a good part of our second day with a fellow volunteer, newishly arrived, and got to talk about home and commiserate about being expatriots. We were followed again by the <em>fou</em>, who this time informed us that we were monkeys and should go back to our own country. So, yeah, there was that.</p> <p>Most lately we went to Wum, our last visit up on the Ring Road. Wum is slightly lower in elevation that Bamenda, and, we thought, considerably warmer. The delegate there denied being informed of our coming, knew nothing about any ICT seminar, but somehow the teachers knew when and where to come, and what registration would cost. The room provided for the seminar had no electricity, so another hall had to be found. By the time all was said and done, the seminar was starting so late that Kiyomi decided to forgo presenting on time management – the irony was too great, and she suggested it was perhaps better this time to simply practice better time management ourselves than to preach it. Our colleague still suggested that if Kiyomi wasn’t going to present the topic, perhaps someone else could, but reason won the hour. The hotel was nicer than Nkambe, though we still had to ask for the toilet to be cleaned, because it hadn’t. Ever. Wum gave us the thinnest mattress we’ve yet experienced in this country though. On our way back to Bamenda we got to stop at the scenic overlook at Menchum falls, which follows the confluence of the Menchum and Mezam rivers. We all jumped out of the bus and took pictures, and nobody in the vehicle with us minded the stop – many of them had never been to look at the waterfall before either and were glad of the opportunity.</p> <p>So now we’re finished with the Ring Road. The rest of the seminars will be close enough to Bamenda that we can go and return in a single day, and sleep in our own bed! As with so much that we do here, the results of our effort may appear less than promising, but we’ve heard so many stories of past volunteers having an impact and being remembered by people today that we choose to believe our work will do the same. If one teacher learned one thing and shares it with their students, that’s a win. PICTRA-Cam’s long range goal is to set up solar powered computer labs around the region to give access to computers and the internet to teachers and students so, for our colleague, this is just the beginning.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-85904236126865053852012-09-23T06:05:00.001-04:002012-09-23T06:05:02.263-04:00Answers to Your Questions<p>So we’ve had some follow up questions to some of our posts and thought we’d take this time to try to answer them. <p>What happened in July? <p>Other than some cryptic references to a “traffic accident,” we apparently weren’t very clear. While crossing the street on a Sunday afternoon to go to the market before a friend came to visit, Kiyomi was hit by a motorcycle. Clearly she’s okay. Jack was just a step ahead. The oncoming car had slowed for us to cross, but - typical of motorcycle taxis here - the bike swerved around the car without looking to see why it might be stopping, and slammed into Kiyomi. She was thrown to the ground, literally stunned for a moment. The passenger on the bike found another bike, while the rider sat and muttered something about whiteman not knowing how to cross the street. Kiyomi informed him that since he’d just hit her, he really ought to apologize. An old pa, who’d seen the whole thing, yelled at the okada boy to “get off that bike and make sure she’s okay!” The guy then came and made many apologies and bought Kiyomi a bottle of water while she and Jack made sure everything still moved in the appropriate and expected way. We continued on with our shopping after a few more moments to catch our breath. By the time we got home, though, Kiyomi was limping and couldn’t make much use of her right arm, which had taken much of the force of the fall. <p>We learned later that, had we gotten information about the driver, we could have made a complaint with the police and tried to have his license revoked. But drivers here are so reckless and dangerous, it never occurred to us that there might be some legal guidance around their behavior, let alone penalties. <p>Kiyomi could not use her arm for a month, and Peace Corps recommended physical therapy, but since Kiyomi’s dad was visiting at that time, she decided to delay until he left, and now she only has occasional twinges of discomfort in her elbow. <p>Two days later, in the hours before sunrise, we had clothes stolen off our front porch, where they’d been left to dry. We’d left clothes on our porch to dry overnight the entire preceding year and never had any issue, but now we only dry clothes outside if we’re home, and otherwise, our office has turned into a laundry room. We made complaints with the police and gendarmes with the help of our amazing regional office manager, and they each sent someone out to wander around the yard and nod. The police even had someone in custody at one time, but nothing more has ever been said of the matter, and we have to assume our things are gone for good. <p>Needless to say, it was an incredibly demotivating time, and we really wanted someone to talk us into staying. But even that realization was good for us, even though no one ever did talk us into it. <p>Do you regret “Peace Corpsing”? <p>No. We would do it again. We discuss sometimes whether, knowing what we do now, we would have been so quick to accept the assignment to Cameroon (Mexico is our most favorite place in the world, perhaps somewhere in Latin America would have been nice…), but we will never wonder what would have happened, and where we would be in life now, if we had stayed in Pittsburgh – and we always would have wondered, and regretted, if we hadn’t joined Peace Corps. We both believe strongly in the benefits of overseas travel and think no education is complete without it. Even less than ideal experiences are importantly shaping to a global mindset and an inclusive worldview – and whether you like it or not, we are part of a global community now, and if you’re a Christian, you don’t get the luxury of not liking it, you’re obliged to take an interest in the world. So we’re here, not liking this part of the world all the time, certainly, but we would do it again. Peace Corps gives you the opportunity not only to visit a place, but to live like a local and experience a different way of life. Part of our frustrations, we’ve speculated, may be due to an overly strong emphasis on the development part of our job – from our own American work ethic, to the subtle and not-so-subtle judgment, real and imagined, of other volunteers – whereas the reality is that the development work is only a part of why we’re here. Peace Corps has three goals, and sustainable training and capacity building is one of them – the others are: living here, experiencing the place, the food, the people, the shopping, the cooking, the handwashing, the <i>life</i>; and telling other Americans about it. Which isn’t to say that we’re not busy. Our part-time work with our host organizations has left time available for other work in the community, and we find ourselves running into scheduling issues and needing to tell people we can’t take up another work effort right now. <p>If you don’t like it, why do you stay? <p>We’re not sure. We do know that we didn’t want to be talked out of leaving, but into staying. We know that we could Early Terminate our service at any time. If we wanted an excuse, we could be sent home at the first indication of pregnancy. But we haven’t done those things, even though in moments of frustration we’ve both declared ourselves ready to call Yaounde and get on the next flight out. Usually at that time the other will recommend seeing how things stand the next day before making that call, and we always decide to stay. We also know that if for some reason we were to be administratively separated, we would fight it at every step. We want to come home, we miss our friends and family and way of life. But we don’t want to leave just yet. Call us romantics, call us idealists, call us fools – we are creatures of resurgent hope. <p>We remember having a dumpling feast with our ESL students in Pittsburgh, learning about Japan, Kazakhstan, and two different areas of China, the discovery that all three places have very similar ways of making and enjoying dumplings. Our world was expanded and improved by the friendship of those people, even though it was a relatively short time and relatively small things that we enjoyed together. So we hope for the small things here. <p>Have your opinions of Africa changed? <p>Yes and no. Everything we are taught in the States about “Africa” is wrong in Cameroon. We can’t speak to the rest of the continent – it could swallow the US three times over and still have room. We know that geopolitically the African continent has been sorely wronged by the Western world throughout history, and believe that all promised aid and debt relief should be provided in the most expedient way. But people can feed a family without difficulty on $2 a day here; and the kids running around in ratty clothing are doing so because they’re running around on red clay and their moms don’t want them to ruin their good clothes; and the babies with no pants are toilet training; and people are more likely to be sick with the effects of obesity, to suffer diabetes and heart disease, than to die of starvation. The problems here seem to stem, not from endemic poverty, but from an over abundance of free aid that’s undermined the agency, independence, creativity and mastery of an entire nation. So we think the best thing that could be done for Cameroon is to leave it alone. To back out and stop international funding, once amounts already promised have been met. Let Cameroon learn the value of its own people, identify its own solutions in context, develop its resources and set its own path to full modernization. Send people to provide training, but stop throwing money at the problems here, stop handing over fully developed projects deemed necessary by the international community, stop building infrastructure – instead, teach, and let Cameroon make those decisions about what is needed for Cameroon. Hand in hand with that is to also stop sending missionaries to live on American salaries. This reinforces the idea of “rich whiteman” who lives in a big house on a hill with no real connection to the daily lives of the people they’re supposed to serve. While well-meaning, the influx of funds and lack of haggling makes it much more difficult for those of us who are living on the local economy, and the wholesale funding of efforts and provision of material goods is both counter to good development standards and counter to Christian ideals. <p>What are you working on now? <p>We have been busy recently! Kiyomi continues to work on staff development training with ACMS, and recently began work with another NGO, HEDECS, where she’ll be supporting development of several programs and coordinating a review of the strategic plan and restructuring of the board. Jack has got the computer lab at the Delegation up and running and has two colleagues trained to continue with it. He’s also been “freelancing” as an IT consultant to various organizations. Together we’ve started working with another NGO and the Delegation, and two other volunteers (the new married couple here) on a series of traveling teacher training seminars that take us around the North West Region. We’ve also begun collaborating with another volunteer and a local landowner on the development of an ecotourism business outside of Bamenda. That’s all kept us pretty engaged, but we hope to be able to also help with the development of a local library soon, and Kiyomi has had interest from some women’s groups in entrepreneurship and business classes. We expect that will see us at least to the end of the year, and after New Year we hope to do some more travel around the country as we head into our last six months here. Regrettably, we had to give up the literacy class for the time being. Over the summer while we were away from it, it transitioned into a reading practice class (certainly still an important effort) with only a few students, that did not warrant three volunteers, and other opportunities needed that time.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-36519162420634177192012-09-23T04:54:00.001-04:002012-09-23T04:54:02.705-04:00Visitors<p>So Kiyomi’s dad came to visit in August, and we all had a nice time. It is great to feel that we’re still connected to the lives we left back home, and that the world, for all its vastness, is not so big that we can’t get around it to have a bit of that life here. It did lead us to a bit of compare-and-contrast with when Kiyomi’s mom and partner visited. We hope our insights will be helpful. <p>Have visitors come after your one year mark at post. Mom and Curt came in April, and there were things we just didn’t know. People with access to private cars, for example; but also, how to hire a private car, or where to direct it once we had it. We toured a nearby monastery with Dad, an outing we just didn’t know how to arrange before. Also, we didn’t know where to go hiking until this summer. <p>Go to Kribi if you want to go to the beach. In fact, go to Hotel du Phar, walk to the fish market, stall number 6, eat your fill of delicious, fresh seafood prepared four feet from your table with a view of the water. Go to the marina and order lasagna or brick oven pizza. Frolic in the waves on the hotel’s private beach. Wrap up the evening with a beverage on the oceanside deck. <p>Don’t go to Limbe. The botanical gardens are nice for a stroll, and the Wildlife Centre, or “zoo,” is not comparable to any American zoo, though all the primates are rescued or born there. You can do both in a day. Downbeach, Limbe’s fish market, has fish, but no other seafood to speak of, and a view of what might be a pretty beach if every inch of it wasn’t covered in trash. You’ll be lucky to find hot water in a room unless you go to one of the resorts on the outskirts of town. Same for a swimmable beach. Getting there by taxi will cost you dearly, and so will eating all your meals at the resort. <p>If you do decide to go to Limbe, several volunteers have recommended Madison Park for a beach camping experience, but you’re well away from town, so bring food. <p>Go hiking! At least in the northwest, you can take a taxi, or walk out to the base of any of the foothills and spend your day hiking in some gorgeous scenery. Just go through the fields until you hit a cow path, and the mountains are yours. <p>Three weeks seems like a good amount of time to visit. Travel anywhere is going to take a full day, and two weeks (or less) is going to make for a rushed trip. Three weeks gives you time to get to post, travel a bit, and hang out for a bit. <p>Don’t try to do too much. We know some people really like to get up with the sun, go all day, and into the night, in order to “get their money’s worth,” but visiting family aren’t likely to be used to Cameroon travel, so go easy on them. Take a day to rest and reflect here and there. Let’s face it, most of our friends and relations had never heard of Cameroon before we came here – and guess what they came here to see? Let them get a taste of the normal pace of your day to day life. They won’t be bored, they’re in Africa! <p>Do take them up on the offer to be pack mules! It’s like getting a care package with a loved one inside. Hugs AND Hershey’s kisses! <p>Tell the truth. That’s what we try to do on this blog, but we know there’s a temptation to gloss over things in e-mails and calls home – or you’re just so happy to be talking to someone back home, that it makes you forget every struggle. But part of our “mission” here as Peace Corps Volunteers is to share our experience with our communities back in the States. Travel is a great thing, seeing how other people live is so important to making informed and intelligent decisions on things as wide ranging as what restaurant to have dinner at, to whether mahogany furniture <i>is</i> in fact such a good thing, to how you vote or urge your representatives. As Christians, we believe God gave us, as a species, stewardship over this savage garden we find ourselves in, and seeing and experiencing it is essential to knowing what that entails. But not everyone can travel, and certainly no one can travel everywhere, and visitors are only here a short time, so it’s important to be real and be honest about the good as well as the bad. <p>Eat everything. Well, mostly. Don’t eat bushmeat. It’s not sustainable, it exposes humans to all kind of viruses we have no defense against, it leads to habitat degradation, we could go on. But do drag your guests out to sample as much sustainable local fare as you can. Bring them to eat your favorite dishes, and bring them to try the stuff you’ve had the opportunity to discover you don’t like as well. The more educated and varied your palate, the more nutrition you get, the more options you have to answer the question, “what is food?” <p>Have guests. We know it won’t be possible for everyone, but do encourage your friends and family to visit if they can. Having someone from your past life see where you are now is the best way to recharge your batteries, open your eyes again to the place surrounding you, and not feel like such an alien. They won’t understand - how could they? – but they’ll have a better idea than any amount of e-mail, phone calls or letters home can convey, and just as we as volunteers are stretched and challenged, our guests will be too.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-67429411747342097452012-08-01T16:47:00.001-04:002012-08-01T16:47:06.305-04:00A year later<p>One year ago we were about to launch what has been an interesting journey to the other side of the world. It’s hard to believe, the time has gone so fast. We’ve picked up some French, learned how to get around and get things done Cameroon-style, and, we hope, started to have an impact with the skills and knowledge we’ve shared with our host organizations. It seems like it really does take a year to find your stride in a place so different from home. We’ve just recently started exploring Ntarinkon market, rather than going to Bamenda Main Market, and found a really good place for soya just a short walk from our house, and started hiking the surrounding foothills. There’s some sense of regret that we missed out on these things while we were figuring out how to buy furniture and bed sheets, and arguing with our landlord, and trying to sort out just what exactly it is we’re supposed to be doing here! But at the same time, we know we’ve just reached a different stage in our cross-cultural adjustment.</p> <p>We really wanted a nice classy restaurant to celebrate our anniversary, we found we are both still pretty healthy at our mid-service check-ups, we hosted site visit for one of the incoming trainees, Kiyomi was hit and moderately (not quite so bad as “seriously,” right?) injured in a traffic accident, and our laundry was stolen. It’s been an eventful few months. But a year in also seems like the right time to do the whole reflective retrospective bit. <p>Some themes that have emerged: <p>While we like some things in Cameroon and some people in Cameroon, we don’t really like living in Cameroon. After growing up as military children, we figured we had this living in new places for two years thing down. But military family members aren’t sent to the third world. We’ve learned, we’ve adapted, we’ve found our stride (and lost it again… and found it again! And…darn thing is slippery and small and hides…), but we really don’t like living in the third world. Maybe that seems obvious – developing nations are developing exactly because nobody wants to live in an undeveloped nation – but it was a revelation. We have found things and places and people we like, we have been moderately happy (or at least maintained no more than, as Freud is wonderfully misquoted, an ordinary level of unhappiness). But the idea that we can be <i>really</i> happy <i>anywhere</i>, because we’re flexible and open-minded and adventurous, and also, by the way, we’re trying to do the deeply rewarding work of making our world a better place…yeah, not so much. <p>One of the reasons we don’t like living in Cameroon is that it’s hard to work here. The process goes something like this: While chatting with a colleague a Great Idea emerges, you are really excited about it and so is your colleague, you begin planning to Implement the Great Idea, and find at your next meeting that your colleague (who shows up late) has not done any of his/her share of the work, excuses ensue or it is strongly implied that actually you were the one who was supposed to take care of X things. You agree to split the remaining duties, calls to your colleague confirm that (in slightly annoyed tones), yes, everything is taken care of, and at your next meeting you discover that, in fact, nothing has been done. Your colleague helpfully suggests ways you can continue to do the work on your own. The Day of the Great Idea arrives and anything still left to your colleague has not been done, no one actually shows up, or those in attendance complain that they’ve come to take part in the Great Idea (the one you’ve busted your hump to Implement to bring Benefit and Improvement to their community), and you haven’t even provided them with food and beer and “gadgets” (pens, notepads, T-shirts, key-chains; what we would call “chachkies” or “give-aways”) and laptops or money, so why are you wasting their time? <p>We’ve discovered that it’s a real challenge to provide all the motivation not only for yourself, but for everyone involved, by yourself. And it’s even more challenging after being hit/seeing your spouse hit by a motorcycle, and then having laundry stolen off your front porch, to stay motivated. <p>Not all poverty is created equal. Cameroon is a country rich in natural resources, a population filled with apathy, and a government sitting on considerable wealth. People are hungry because there are no roads to get abundant food from one part of the country to another. People are poorly educated because teachers are government employees and can go months, or even years, without collecting a paycheck. We know people who are forced to ask family to support them, or subsidize themselves by selling market goods or doing other side work in order to feed themselves while they wait for their actual paychecks to eventually arrive – with no promise of when that might actually be. It puts into perspective the continual problem of teachers not showing up for classes. But in general, people here (at least where we have traveled) are not hungry, and are poor only when compared to the West, where cost of living is also considerably higher. There’s a great priority placed on accumulation of material goods as well. Like in America, people may have a new car and large television and host elaborate parties at the expense of being able to pay their bills, but the level of consumerism here hasn’t yet experienced the backlash and resurgence of simple living going on the States. <p>Things are way better back home than we knew. Being on hold for forty minutes with the cable company is small potatoes – once you get that appointment for someone to come out between 8AM and 7PM, you’re pretty well guaranteed someone will be showing up that day. If you take a taxi, you get that whole taxi to yourself; in other means of public transportation, you always get your own seat, and for long trips, usually with a seatbelt! If you have to wait in line somewhere, at least there is a line to wait in, and not an oppressive crush of humanity on every side of you, pressing toward the front with no order or civility. In a restaurant you’re guaranteed (except in very rare cases) that everything on the menu is available for your order. You won’t wait thirty minutes for someone to take your order, you won’t wait an hour or more for it to come out, you won’t find your waitress asleep when you want the bill. And if she’s surly at any point, you may be able to get something comped if you call the manager, instead of that being standard demeanor. Plus, there’s pizza, and ice cream, and Mexican food, and turkey sandwiches, and sausage, and… <p>A smile and kind word (without a marriage proposal or request to be brought to “your country,” without even knowing what country that is) can change the tenor of an entire day. It’s sad but true to say that sometimes whether our morning taxi driver is in a friendly mood sets the tone for our whole day. On the other hand, after about six incidents of “hell-lo-ooo,” “whitemanwhiteman,” or “hey, baby,” paired with lots of hissing and lip smacking, that also sets a certain tone for the day, and we dream about walking down the street and being invisible again. But it does remind us to try to smile and say hello to the non-derangey people, and maybe make their day better too. <p>On expectations, we really didn’t think we had any. But, of course, it’s impossible not to. We expected: <p>To learn about an awesome and very different culture <p>To make great host country national (HCN) friends who would share their rich heritage and traditions with us while being interested in learning about ours <p>To bike to work on a sparsely populated dirt road every day <p>To work with organizations that had some idea of what they wanted collaboration on work-wise <p>To glimpse large African fauna now and again and debate how close they were and relative risks of an encounter <p>To be too busy attending cultural events and learning to make indigenous dishes to possibly have time for movies or computer games from home <p>To actually speak French <p>To have a favorite coffee/tea/local hot beverage place to hang out with our HCN friends <p>To live in a family compound with people who would become like a second family to us <p>To live in something strongly resembling a mud brick house <p>Things we didn’t expect: <p>Trash everywhere, also human waste everywhere with people routinely dropping off on the side of the road even in a city to urinate and/or defecate <p>People constantly asking us for money, our belongings, marriage, free passage to anywhere but here, etc. while being dressed better than we are <p>Strange assertions about the US, such as: there is no poverty, our president is from Africa, Rhianna and Jessica Simpson are sisters, there are no black people, everyone has servants, there are no trees – everything is paved, anyone can bring anyone they want to into the country – the only reason we won’t take someone to our country is obviously due to some grave personality flaw, etc. <p>Level of general drunkenness <p>General lack of motivation to do any work – another volunteer was decried as a horrible task master for insisting on at least four hour workdays <p>Napping in the workplace and surliness if interrupted <p>So many volunteers close by <p>So much traffic and pollution <p>Being told with surprising regularity what women don’t know about or can’t do (often things Kiyomi is well informed about and does) <p>The Big Man culture that prioritizes so much that we detest in our own culture: toady-ism, favoritism, consumerism, chauvinism, insert most any other unpleasant “-ism” here <p>Constant verbal harassment when walking down the street <p>“Corruption at every level” really is just that <p>Pretty consistent water and electricity with constant drips and power surges <p>Access to cheese and peanut butter but at extraordinary cost <p>Obsession with all things “Western,” while also adhering to “our culture” (a phrase most often brought out around topics such as women’s equality, girls’ education, homosexuality, and why these things are bad) <p>The number of men unwittingly wearing women’s clothing <p>A level of “Christian-speak” sans Christian activity that makes American Christian hypocrisy look like a small problem <p>To be fair, it isn’t everyone or all the time that we find frustrating or discouraging. We frequently meet kind and generous people who are eager to help us on our way and want us to have a good experience of their country. We’ll never forget the older gentleman who, seeing us looking a bit lost after coming into Yaounde a bit late and through a different agence than usual, said, “My children, where are you going?” We told him, and he told us exactly what to say to the francophone taxi drivers, and how much we should pay. He had us repeat it back to him to be sure we wouldn’t send ourselves to some different part of town than we intended. Then there were the farmers who saw us across a ravine, well off the path we meant to hike, who yelled to the herdsmen grazing their cattle nearby, who came and found us and took us to the trail we wanted, and walked it with us until we were past all the forks that might lead us astray. Recently nearly everyone has been apologetic on behalf of the motorcycle taxi that hit Kiyomi, almost as though it was a reflection on them personally that this happened, and very forgiving of her very rude use of the left hand! One mami gave Kiyomi a package of cookies along with her well-wishes when we passed by her boutique. <p>So, is there a wrap-up thought? We don’t really know at this point – we have another year though to figure it out. For now we’re just looking forward to an impending family visit and, really, when you live in the developing world, family is a very good thing indeed!</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-4073352181813327652012-05-26T07:09:00.001-04:002012-05-26T07:09:34.220-04:00Social Media Activism<p>Malawi: Social Media Activism Takes Root <p>Interesting article on how social media is shaping change in Africa. <p><a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/201204130303.html">http://allafrica.com/stories/201204130303.html</a></p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-83827415643256585302012-05-16T06:02:00.001-04:002012-05-16T06:02:11.723-04:00Epilepsy Myths…<p>Epilepsy Myths Promote Stigma, Prevent Care in Cameroon</p> <p>An article written by our friend, journalist Comfort Mussa.</p> <p><a title="http://www.globalpressinstitute.org/global-news/africa/cameroon/epilepsy-myths-promote-stigma-prevent-care-cameroon" href="http://www.globalpressinstitute.org/global-news/africa/cameroon/epilepsy-myths-promote-stigma-prevent-care-cameroon">http://www.globalpressinstitute.org/global-news/africa/cameroon/epilepsy-myths-promote-stigma-prevent-care-cameroon</a></p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-74523448732130506332012-05-12T16:56:00.001-04:002012-05-12T16:56:15.508-04:00Our tailor<p>Claudia* is our age, early to mid thirties. She is strikingly pretty, petite and slender with a ready smile and a sparkle in her dark eyes. She lives in and works from two rooms in a neat little duplex in a shared compound, off a dirt road on a hill and down a dirt path between planted crops. The compound shares water. She puts her stove under a table during work hours, and puts her work under the table when she cooks for her small family. She has two little girls, Joyful and Grace, 4 and 18 months. Joyful is exactly as her name would imply, seeming to find utter delight in every breath she takes, constantly laughing and making her sister laugh too. Grace toddles around, sharing her discoveries of the world with her sister and her mother. Claudia does not send Joyful, with Grace tied on her little back, to run errands, or send the girls away until their needed for work. She’s attentive and loving, and they thrive in the utter confidence of her care. Joyful goes to nursery school, and Claudia always says customers can come by at any time, except when she goes to pick Joyful up from school. They are delightfully under foot and ready to share their fascination and enjoyment and games with customers who come to drop off or pick up orders. Claudia sews beautifully, creating unique, made-to-order clothing from the fabrics we bring her. We try things on in the bedroom, sometimes asking for the fit to be adjusted here or there. Some volunteers say she is a little expensive. The little girls love each other and are growing up as sisters, but they don’t have the same parents. Joyful is Claudia’s granddaughter. Joyful’s mother is in Claudia’s village, going to school. Her father acknowledges that she is his child, but he’s young too, and his family does not recognize his daughter. And children - feeding, clothing, housing, schooling – are the sole responsibility of the mother in this culture. Fathers give gifts, and it’s nice when they do, but not required. Now we’ve seen many men carrying babies, holding the hands of small children, in complete adoration of their children, but it’s accepted and even expected here that men will have different families in different villages, and they can just as easily say that those children are not their responsibility. Claudia makes sure her oldest daughter and her granddaughter go to school. Claudia is our age.</p> <p>*<em>Names changed.</em></p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-72812794659767424092012-05-01T10:31:00.001-04:002012-05-01T10:31:01.257-04:00The Updated Recommended Packing List<p>A year later, here’s what we brought and wish we’d brought, with a few things taken off the list that we didn’t need. Happy packing to the new volunteers! <p><br>3 tank tops<br>3 T-shirts<br>7 shirts<br>1 sweater<br>3 skirts<br>4 pants (1 capri)<br>bathing suit and rash guard (diving shirt)<br>jacket/sweatshirt<br>belt<br>assorted underthings and socks<br>hat<br>sunglasses<br>umbrella<br>headlamp<br>travel towel<br>hammock<br>camp mirror<br>iPod<br>insect repellent<br>Benadryl gel<br>toothbrush and paste<br>shampoo<br>soap<br>deodorant<br>moisturizer<br>Japanese washcloth<br>razor and replacement blades<br>mask and snorkel<br>shoe polish kit<br>dress shoes<br>flip flops<br>Vibram five fingers<br>neti pot<br>Gatorade powder<br>kitchen knife<br>pour over coffee basket and filter<br>assorted spices<br>vitamins and prescriptions for three months<br>sandwich size Ziplock bags<br>journal<br>mini travel sized bible<br>laptop<br>flash drive<br>external hard drive<br>Peace Corps Volunteer paperwork and handbooks<br>chapstick<br>bobby pins and hair ties<br>measuring cup<br>measuring spoons<br>travel Scrabble, Uno, and a deck of cards<br>underwater camera housing<br>camera<br>sunscreen<br>extra soap, shampoo, sunscreen, toothbrushes and make-up (3 months worth)<br>passport/money belt<br>can opener<br>hair cutting scissors<br>speakers<br>duct tape<br>straight razor and strop<br>shaving brush and cup <br>combination padlock<br>hand sanitizer<br>wash cloths<br>travel sewing kit<br>favorite junk food<br>tea/hot chocolate<br>calendar<br>crossword/sudoku books<br>ear plugs<br>hashi (also known as chopsticks)<br>sleep mask</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-39193142187368197192012-04-27T08:18:00.001-04:002012-04-27T08:18:25.494-04:00Fifty Years of Service<p> </p> <p>At our swearing-in, our Country Director asked the question, then as we celebrated Peace Corps’ fiftieth anniversary, and this year move into the fiftieth year of Peace Corps presence in Cameroon, have we succeeded?<br>This is an important question to consider. In any organization, any action plan must include measurable outcomes; how will we know when we’ve reached our goal?<br>She said that during celebrations worldwide, there were reports of people saying how much Peace Corps Volunteers of the past had affected their lives for the better. She went on to describe the three goals of Peace Corps: to provide technical training to host country nationals at the invitation of their government; to share American culture with host country nationals; and to share host country culture with Americans.<br>There are common jokes here that “it’s all about goals two and three,” and that drinking a 33, a popular beer here, constitutes 33% of our job.<br>She then wished us all well on our journeys to our posts.</p> <p>Did you notice what was missing there?</p> <p>We’ve read descriptions of Cameroon from explorers of the past, from sixty years ago, one hundred and twenty years ago, and we recognize the descriptions, because if we hadn’t known what years these accounts had been written in, we’d have though they were describing circumstances here today. What does it say that after fifty years of Peace Corps presence, not to mention the numerous other development workers sent in from around the world annually, descriptions of Cameroon are exactly the same as they were one hundred years ago? Have we succeeded?<br>Missionaries have, after a fashion. Everywhere you turn in the Anglophone region you hear a variety of God-talk, and find strange snippets of misspelled misquotes from the Bible on the back of most taxis. The Francophone region is slightly more secular, but still most everyone attends one church or another, or a mosque, and you find the same snippets of biblical sounding phrases in French.<br>The country still has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, and has been rated the most corrupt nation in the world. Single motherhood and thirty-something grandmothers are common enough to not bear mention. Mistreatment of women and girls is frequent. Alcoholism is rampant. Officials often require financial “motivation” to do their jobs or assure that paperwork doesn’t go missing. Even in picking up a package from the post office, one may be required to give a “gift” of money or something from the package to the postmaster in order to have the package released (we are very grateful for the arrangements made by our regional office manager to avoid this). And that’s just the social ills.<br>Have we succeeded?<br>That doesn’t even get into cholera outbreaks and routine illness due to such simple things as a failure to wash hands; constant threat of malaria; starvation in the north because the roads haven’t been paved or maintained; drought; lack of nutrition; limited access to health resources; lack of education across the board.</p> <p>Have we succeeded?</p> <p>Have we?<br><br>During a National Peace Corps Association event before coming into Peace Corps service, we were told that Sargent Shriver said in an essay about Peace Corps that the ideal situation would be for Peace Corps Volunteers to be in and out of a developing nation within one decade. That our objective, as with any kind of development or aid work, should be to work ourselves out of a job. Granted, ideals are about what would happen in a perfect world, which none of us live in. And after living and working in Cameroon with Peace Corps, we’ve learned that any timeline must be the “worst case scenario” timeline, then doubled. But isn’t five times longer than anticipated a bit excessive? Is staying in Cameroon for another decade, two, five, really going to make the difference, when after one hundred years descriptions of the place remain unchanged? Is that the best use of tax-payer dollars? Of the time, effort, resources, skills of the volunteers who have believed in the mission and vision of Peace Corps, and left our homes, families and lives behind to follow it? Are we making a difference? Have we succeeded? </p> <p>We still believe in Peace Corps, the vision of world peace through understanding. The mission of sharing knowledge to equip people to find their own solutions to the problems they face. We still believe in the ability of a few passionate, motivated individuals to change the world. But perhaps Cameroon is simply not ready to receive the training and skills that Peace Corps is prepared to offer, when motivation and commitment to make change is so sorely lacking. Is it perhaps time to start thinking about an exit strategy? And come back when the most common request is not for money and resources, but for the training to achieve things for Cameroon, by Cameroonians, without the need to rely on continual support from the West.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-83746563203953105502012-04-03T08:47:00.001-04:002012-04-03T08:47:45.119-04:00Peace Corps Oscars<p> </p> <p>Best movies to watch about Peace Corps that aren’t about Peace Corps.</p> <p> </p> <p>1. Beauty and the Beast – Belle is a PCV, and we don’t know what medieval France was like, but we do know that the opening sequence was set in Cameroon.</p> <p>2. Run Fatboy Run – because it’s not just about you, it’s about telling that guy who is cooler than you could ever hope to be, who starts sentences with things like, “Back when I was a Navy Seal…” and “When I was a professional paragliding instructor to Bono…” or “I’m considering a couple offers for the movie rights,” that, “Well, you know, back when I lived in Africa… no big deal…” (we kid!) Actually, that wall he hits is a real thing, and it comes up often, and you’ve just gotta push through. And anything starring Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is a real treat!</p> <p>3. Batman – the new ones, not that cartoony mess certain directors made of our favorite superhero – fighting corruption, injustice, and evil in it’s many forms… You can see the parallels, right?</p> <p>4. The Quiet Gardener or Blood Diamond – because instead of sitting at home feeling riddled with guilt, you can sit at home and feel not so bad, because, well, you’re <em>trying</em> to do <em>something</em>. (But make sure to follow this up with Run Fatboy Run, or Beauty and the Beast, because they’re still depressing…)</p> <p>5. Zombie Movies – Just think of your Peace Corps experience as preparation for the zombie apocalypse. Going out after dark is risky. Bars on the windows and a metal door are good things – again, bolt the door after dark. Running water and electricity are luxuries. Machetes (cutlass in NW Cameroon) are ubiquitous gardening tools that double as security/beheading devices. Attend wounds immediately – any open wound is a avenue for infection. Know where your water comes from – dysentery will slow you down. Remember that nearly everything you learn in Peace Corps, even the hard lessons, will aid you in the inevitable trials to come…</p> <p>6. The Men Who Stare at Goats – other than the fact that PCVs have Jedi Powers, it’s a raucous ride through foreign climes wherein one is expected to use abilities one may or may not actually have. And it sort of captures the absurdity of it all. AND you can enjoy that slight feeling of superiority every time Ewan McGregor calls Mahmoud, “Mohammed,” because you can tell the difference with your PCV powers of integration.</p> <p>7. The Family Stone, Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums – don’t feel bad about running away to the other side of the world! There are families way more dysfunctional than yours… And anything that makes you laugh when you are feeling homesick is a good thing.</p> <p>8. The Adventures of Tin Tin – racing around the world, setting wrongs right, holding up your drunkest and dearest friends…. like you do. Plus, the voice of Simon Pegg again.</p> <p>9. The Chronicles of Narnia – because, really, it isn’t all about you. It’s the opportunity to bring grace into a stranger’s life, to be their answered prayer, to hold to what you believe you’re meant to be doing with your life, even against all odds. And when isn’t it a good time for Liam Neeson’s fatherly rumble to set all things right?</p> <p>10. Jurassic Park – whether you still see this film as an action/adventure, or you’ve seen it so many times that it’s become comedy, no matter where you find yourself in the world, you can rest assured that you are safe from velociraptor attack, even if your computer system goes down and you live in an area bearing a striking resemblance to Isla Nublar. And, come on – it’s Jurassic Park – one of the most quotable movies of all time (see Jack for examples)! And PCVs love movie quotes!</p> <p> </p> <p>What Not to Watch – okay, so some of these are a little unavoidable but view at your own risk.</p> <p>World War II movies – nothing, no matter how much you think it sucks, will ever make anything clad in a Nazi uniform the bearer of a warm and fuzzy.</p> <p>No Reservations, Chocolat, other films about Beautiful Food – why torment yourself with things you have approximately one year, five months, nine days and seventeen hours (but who’s counting?) before you can even think about tasting again?</p> <p>Black Swan or Dorian Gray – you’re already going to have days when you think you might be going crazy… So… just don’t.</p> <p>Hotel Rwanda – I know you’re in Africa, or someplace equally exotic, and Rwanda is in Africa and/or equally exotic too, but this one goes with the WWII movies, not the African message movies. Watch Madagascar instead.</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-22903149613605472532012-03-22T15:20:00.001-04:002012-03-22T15:20:16.663-04:00Literacy, but more than that<p>Last week marked the midpoint of our literacy class this spring and we’ll be starting up again in the fall. For both of us, the ability to read and write is fundamental to any sustainable development, and opens doors beyond what we can possibly do in two years’ time. It’s something we’re both passionate about, and is probably the most rewarding part of our week. Our students are motivated and enthusiastic and work hard, and what more could a teacher ask for? Our literacy class has been a constant source of motivation and encouragement for us, too, knowing that even if things are moving slowly in our offices, or stalled, or not moving in the direction we’d prefer, we’re helping people to learn what’s maybe the most valuable skill in the modern world. We sometimes worry we’re a little selfish about it, and wonder if our students are getting as much out of the class as we are.<br>So we handed out notebooks last week for our students to write short essays on whatever they wanted, or to just write our spelling words, depending on their level. And this week we read them.<br>And we were called an answer to prayer. Again. And again. And again.<br>Because in Cameroon, knowledge is power in a sense that we don’t have back home. People aren’t very willing to share what they know, because they might lose their edge, their advantage, and then maybe they get a little less out of it, and maybe they have a little less at the end of the day. Shifting this perspective to one of, what benefits the community, benefits everyone in the community, is a challenge volunteers constantly face.<br>Knowledge certainly isn’t shared for free. With women. Who are poor.<br>We are an answer to prayer, they wrote, because there was no money for school fees. Or Dad drank the money for school fees. Or Mom needed help at home. Or Dad didn’t believe in educating girls. Or she got married. Or she was forced to marry. Or had a child. Or had to work. Or was sold to “live as a wife” without the, granted limited, protections of marriage.<br>But all she ever wanted was the chance to go to school. So she prayed. And God sent us here, they wrote, each one certain, sent us just for her.</p> <p>So that’s it. If nothing else. And really, what else could we want?</p> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1697446033951636425.post-51750311188874186602012-03-12T10:08:00.001-04:002012-03-12T10:08:54.723-04:00Why We Travel<table border="0" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p>Pico Iyer <p>We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what." <p>I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that's "moral" since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail," and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship -- both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion -- of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind. <p>Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of "Wild Orchids" (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week's wages toeat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis. <p>If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald's would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator -- or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it's fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the "tourist" and the "traveler," perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, "Nothing here is the way it is at home," while a traveler is one who grumbles, "Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo -- or Cuzco or Kathmandu." It's all very much the same. <p>But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you've landed on a different planet -- and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they're being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel). <p>We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow's headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology. <p>And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon -- an anti-Federal Express, if you like -- in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers. <p>But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import -- and export -- dreams with tenderness. <p>By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more -- not least by seeing it through a distant admirer's eyes -- they help you bring newly appreciative -- distant -- eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new "traditional" dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second -- and perhaps more important -- thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe. <p>Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we'd otherwise seldom have cause to visit. <p>On the most basic level, when I'm in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine. <p>We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity -- and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the "gentlemen in the parlour," and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home). <p>Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious -- to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves -- and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, "A man never goes so far as when he doesn't know where he is going." <p>There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year -- or at least 45 hours -- and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I'm not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I'm simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense. <p>So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can "place" me -- no one can fix me in my rsum --I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance. <p>This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families -- to become better Buddhists -- I have to question my own too-ready judgments. "The ideal travel book," Christopher Isherwood once said, "should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you're in search of something." And it's the best kind of something, I would add, if it's one that you can never quite find. <p>I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love. <p>For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning -- from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament -- and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder. <p>And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us. <p>We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I'll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream. <p>That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you've abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity. <p>That whole complex interaction -- not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?) -- is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire. <p>All, in that sense, believed in "being moved" as one of the points of taking trips, and "being transported" by private as well as public means; all saw that "ecstasy" ("ex-stasis") tells us that our highest moments come when we're not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he'd ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. "To write well about a thing," he said, "I've got to like it!" <p>At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O'Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It's not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world. <p>In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald's outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And -- most crucial of all -- the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas -- and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald's outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another. <p>The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents' inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic -- the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million -- it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.) <p>Besides, even those who don't move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you're traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you're often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room -- through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing -- not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing. <p>All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville's colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he'd never visited, it's an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing. <p>In Mary Morris's "House Arrest," a thinly disguised account of Castro's Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, "All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author's imagination." On Page 172, however, we read, "La isla, of course, does exist. Don't let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn't. But it does." No wonder the travel-writer narrator -- a fictional construct (or not)? -- confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. "Erewhon," after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler's great travel novel, is just "nowhere" rearranged. <p>Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is -- and has to be -- an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really there and what's only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin's books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul's recent book, "A Way in the World," was published as a non-fictional "series" in England and a "novel" in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux's half-invented memoir, "My Other Life," were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as "Fact and Fiction." <p>And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that "traveling is a fool's paradise," and the other who "traveled a good deal in Concord"). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us." <p>So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also -- Emerson and Thoreau remind us -- have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center. <p>And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen's great "The Snow Leopard"), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack's "Island of the Color-Blind," which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side. <p>So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, "There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor." Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end. <p><i>About the writer: Pico Iyer is a contributing editor of Salon Travel & Food. His new book is "The Global Soul." He is also the author of "Video Night in Kathmandu," "The Lady and the Monk," "Falling off the Map," "Cuba and the Night" and "Tropical Classical."</i></p></td></tr> <tr> <td> </td></tr></tbody></table> Jack and Kiyomihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05274844429287108569noreply@blogger.com1