28 Days

We have 28 days left in Bafia.  Bafia, as some volunteers have pointed out, is really not bad.  It’s pretty, as we said when we first got here, there are good markets, our host family is nice, and we have running water and electricity now and again (sometimes even at the same time!).  We’re so glad to get to live for two years here in Cameroon – if any place qualifies as a contender for “Garden of Eden” status, Cameroon does – and we’re just ready to be “home”!

So we’re trying not to spend too much time living in the future in Bamenda, and make the most of our time here in Bafia.  Our stage has bought our swearing-in pagne (traditional fabric – only not so traditional, it’s Peace Corps 50th Anniversary pagne), and we’ll be getting clothes made in the coming days.  Everyone’s working hard on language acquisition (learning a third language in a second language is not as easy as you might think), and we’ll be wrapping up technical training and model school and the next three and a bit weeks.  We finally broke down and got an American movie from another trainee last night and it did us a world of good!  Jack has been playing “Don’t Stop Believing” once a day (really, how can a person not be in a good mood after that? Though it does make us want chicken wings with Steven and Denise!), and we’ve instituted tuna melt brunch on Sundays after laundry (two sunburns each from laundry days so far – but still no malaria).

Kiyomi and the other SED trainees visited Bangou, a town in the West region, this week.  It was great opportunity to see a microfinance institution, but the main event of the day was meeting the local chief, enjoying a delicious lunch in his compound, and learning a bit about the Bamileke people (still an anthro student at heart!).  There’s a monument on the site of the old slave market in Bangou that stands as a perpetual memorial and apology from the people there to those who were sold and forced to leave their home in sorrow.  The Bamileke believe partings should always be happy; the monument is a means of making amends to the souls of those who were sold into slavery, and assures that their descendants can be happy and prosperous in the United States.  Because of the history between our two countries, the chief said he and his people see Americans as the grandchildren of Cameroon.

Another highlight this week was when the proprietor at one of our regular boutiques (it’s owned by a family, but the person who usually takes care of us is a boy of not more than 11, who’s been tending bar for at least thirty years) decided to have chicken for dinner.  Probably half of our stage spent at least half an hour chasing a furious rooster all around the property, through corn fields, up the road and back (you can post your guesses as to what hilarious and clever thing Jack said at this point in the comments).  This is Peace Corps approved stress relief – last week in our session on stress management, one of the recommendations, along with prayer/meditation, exercise, talking with friends, and journaling, was “chase a goat.”  Most of the goats are tied up here, and so can’t be chased very far.  We think a chicken was a good stand in. 

Last night we had an object lesson in integration.  Peace Corps recently issued us mountain bikes.  We keep them chained on the front porch during the day when we’re not using them, and move them into the kitchen after dinner for overnight.  We moved our bikes to the back step, for ease of transferring them to the kitchen after dinner, went to eat, and when we went to get our bikes, they were gone. Our host family sprang into action, grabbed flashlights (actually our flashlights), and ran out into the rain, with several neighbors joining in the search for our bikes, while we called Peace Corps.  Within forty minutes our bikes were found (hidden very close by; two mountain bikes chained together are pretty heavy) and returned to us.  An interesting cultural note was the most shocking part of it to the Cameroonians who helped us was that it happened while it was raining (you don’t go out when it’s raining here).  Without our friends and neighbors, we wouldn’t have got our bikes back, and would have spent the day with our training director at the police station filing a report.  In Cameroon, people say, “nous sommes ensemble” – we are together – and last night we found that to be true once again.