http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/22/world/africa/cameroon-election-outcome/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
While we are strictly apolitical while serving as volunteers, we are happy to say that the election results were announced last night without incident. Thanks for all the prayers!
Hey Friends and Family! We got to keep the house in the Ntarinkon Quarter after someone from the main office in Yaounde came to check out the situation personally. We move in this weekend, and are so glad to finally be getting settled. It’s been a whirlwind of buying some essential furniture and houseware items and getting familiarized with our respective offices. We both have a half-time schedule right now, three days a week and four hours a day – we can’t complain! The rest of our time during these first months is spent getting to know our way around our city, getting to know our neighbors and starting the process of integrating into our community. We have an offer of cooking lessons from one of our neighbors that we can’t wait to take up!
For the month of October we’ll be on Stand-fast, which means we stay put in our town, no traveling to neighboring towns for any reason, because of the election. The national election takes place on the 9th. The campaign season lasts about a week here – for the last week we’ve seen flyers and people have been driving around town with loud speakers. Then everyone gets to vote for one of the candidates, and then we hope to have results in a week or two. Most Cameroonians seem to be like most Americans when it comes to voting – as long as their day to day lives aren’t disrupted, they aren’t terribly concerned about the outcome. But, just as in the States civic responsibility has been on the rise in recent years, part of our job here as volunteers is going to be to build civic awareness and encourage volunteerism at the local level. But for now, we stand fast. Luckily we love Bamenda and don’t mind staying put here, though it’s postponed some hiking trips.
We’ve been seeing status updates on Facebook about the weather turning cooler, people dragging out sweaters and looking forward to hot cider! Here in the Northwest, the days alternate between sunny and beautiful, or rainy and cool enough for sweaters, soup and hot chocolate – in other words, perfect for the two of us. “Fall” here means we’re going into dry season, though, which we’re told means beautiful, sunny days alternating with just plain hot – conditions we’re also okay with, since the rain sometimes prevents going to the market, or leaving the house at all. And we’ve been told a big benefit of dry season means laundry dries in a morning, instead of taking a day or two! Sometimes it’s those little things that can make all the difference…
Wow, guys, we’re overwhelmed! We got your package today – thank you so much! We’re so grateful and so touched, we loved looking through the pictures, reading your notes, and are looking forward to enjoying all the goodies in the months ahead! Thanks for sending us a little bit of the best part of working at CMU over the years. We’ll be thinking of you guys every time we take a look around the house!
Kiyomi and Jack
So we may have spoke too soon in the last post. We’re now being told that the house we signed a lease on is not okay, for various reasons of greater and lesser merit. Planning to talk to Peace Corps about it and try to get something resolved soon! We appreciate your prayers.
Week one in Bamenda! Today our niece turns three, and we’re on the other side of the world. When we get back to the States, we’ll only be vague shadows in her memory. We miss our families most during these life events: birthdays, holidays, our swearing-in ceremony. Even so, we feel an incredible contentment now that we’ve arrived at our post, and are more certain than ever that we are exactly where we’re supposed to be.
If you know us on Facebook, you may have seen that the house found for us when we got here was not what it should have been. It didn’t meet Peace Corps standards, and was not a place we saw any way that we could make into a home for the next two years. We know some of you are thinking, we’re in the Peace Corps, we should be living in a grass hut somewhere and thankful for the privilege! Peace Corps provides housing comparable to that the community a volunteer will work with – and certain things, like enough windows for adequate light and ventilation, no holes in the walls, no vermin, and a safe/secure area, are required. The first house we saw had none of that and less. So we were here in the middle of Africa with no place to live. Fortunately, Brittany, the volunteer Kiyomi stayed with during her site visit, opened her home again to us until we get settled – and extended the invitation to “as long as needed,” after our housing became an issue. We have been so blessed by her generosity and friendship!
So, housing crisis part two: Brittany has been in the process of finding new accommodations as well, and was told by her landlord on our third day here that he had found a new tenant for September. So, now there were three of us with no place to go. Our bosses in the main office seemed not to be interested in this little problem, even though it is technically their responsibility to assure that we have adequate housing. Luckily enough for us, there’s a new office manager here in Bamenda, who heard of our difficulties, and within a day and a half had four potential places for all three of us to look at. So after a day of looking at these options, we and Brittany found brand new, neighboring houses – bright, airy, beautiful little palaces, one at the top of a little hill, and the other about three houses down, at the bottom of the hill – that are incredibly nice by American standards. After another day and a half of getting Peace Corps to talk to the landlord and make the rent arrangements, we signed our leases and filed the paperwork today! Thank you for all those prayers, because we have been having blessings upon blessings!
Housing crisis, final part: our houses are still being built, so while Brittany has been assured hers will be ready for move-in by the 1st, we’ve been given a date of “maybe by September 15th, but no later than October 1st.” Thankfully our new friend is the kind you hold tight to and never let go of, and has further extended her invitation for us to move into her new house with her, and when ours is ready, we can simply move our things down the hill. She assures us we’re great houseguests. We promised to do our best to continue to be! So, almost home sweet home.
We’ve been finding our way around our new town, and still are stopped short by the incredible beauty of this place. In the mornings, the distant mountains are just a purple haze, and by noon, that fog has lifted to reveal the most vibrant green, with mists rising up off the trees, only to be broken occasionally by rocky outcrops with perfect white waterfalls streaming down from them. This is the view in literally every direction. We feel like we’ve been set in a city that’s grown up in the middle of some forgotten part of Eden. The people even, overall, seem nicer here. It’s been fun exploring the markets, seeing where we’ll buy our housewares and furniture once our house is finished, and the market mamas are always kindly indulgent and amused by our attempts to speak Pidgin.
Cooking together again has been so wonderful for us too! It’s something we’ve almost always done together in our relationship, and whenever we’ve not been able to for whatever reason (enforced traditional gender roles, for example), we find ourselves feeling somewhat off. Brittany has given us free reign in her kitchen though, so with the fresh produce available every day but Sunday, we’ve been feasting quite well.
We don’t know exactly what shape our work will take yet - although Jack made his first local contact for a secondary IT education project already – and we don’t quite have a place to live yet, but we feel more at home here – right exactly where we’re supposed to be with life - than we’ve ever felt anywhere else since we’ve been together.
So we’re back to the ten day count down! We were looking back over our training calendar as we completed evaluations of the program, and just couldn’t believe how much has happened in nine weeks. We’re passable in Pidgin, reasonably communicative in French, have made some friends we’ll still be calling in twenty years, and have gotten the hang of going about the business of life in a developing West African nation. Not bad for just shy of three months’ work.
This week we’ll be wrapping up training – final advice for what we should do during our first few months at post – closing the model school, and cramming as much more language training in as we can take. We have our swearing-in clothes made now – everything tailored to a perfect fit. I know we haven’t been the best at pictures - the connection is slow when it’s up here - but we’ll get some pictures of our swearing-in and other various scenes of Cameroon posted once we get to Bamenda.
Fun times await, kids! We’re so excited about not being “homeless” anymore, having our own space, cooking our own food, getting to know our neighbors and community… and we know that a whole new adventure awaits. Peace Corps publications readily acknowledge that training has little to do with actually preparing the trainee for living and working in their post community (wait, what?? No, seriously, it’s in official written materials), so here we are, having adjusted admirably to the training environment, we’ve passed the initiation, you might say – yay! But setting up house in a new place is something we were both literally raised to. We visited Bamenda separately, and we’re looking forward to showing each other the different places we each found.
In the meantime, here’s a Top Ten list for you. In no particular order…
Things We’ve Learned in Training
1. Chickens, left to their own devices, fly and roost in trees. Also, now that we don’t eat it so often as to take it for granted (chicken is something of a delicacy here), we realize it’s really, truly delicious. And chasing chicken, or watching others do so, really is great stress relief.
2. The fact that that little bird or gecko is an African bird or gecko really does make it cooler.
3. You can fit two grown adults, one stuffed backpacker’s pack and a guitar on a motorcycle (in fact, you’d be amazed at what can be transported by motorcycle).
4. Cameroon’s lack of development has a lot to do with a lot of things that have nothing to do with colonialism, or the first world at all. Question to ponder: when we call it neglect and others call it parenting, what’s a development worker to do?
5. Hand-washing, with soap, is key. If this simple truth could be transmitted and adopted, training and the health of trainees would be vastly improved. So would the long-term health of local families.
6. Peanut butter makes life better.
7. Antelope tastes like cow.
8. One in forty Americans is an idiot who should never be given a passport. The rest of you, though, start filling out that paperwork!
9. People are always going to behave exactly like people.
10. No matter where we go, when everything else is strange, our God is still God.
And some music for the road… it’s funny because it’s true.
