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.
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.
Some of you have been asking about sending packages. Our address again is:
I Jack Gaines/ Kiyomi Appleton Gaines
Peace Corps Trainee
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 215
Yaoundé, Cameroon
Padded envelopes work well, and it’s recommended to send things air mail (ground can take over two years) and insured, to ensure it gets to us.
Our wish list is:
Hand sanitizer
Tea (especially echinacea and Tazo Passion)
Hot chocolate packets
Wash cloths
Travel sewing kit
Pictures of our friends and family! (that would be you)
Chocolate chip cookies (store-bought; homemade are better, but they probably wouldn’t make it without preservatives)
Oreos
Snickers
Peanut/Almond M&Ms
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
Mystery paperbacks (take that as you will, as actual mystery novels, or just surprise ones)
Magazines
Calcium supplements
And always, thank you for all the love and prayers we constantly feel coming our way!
But in this one, nobody dies.
We made it through our two weeks apart – thanks for all the prayers, guys! Our future home, Bamenda, is just perfect for us, and we can’t wait to get settled there! For now, we’ve officially made it to the half-way point in our training. So what does training look like, you may wonder. Here’s our typical day in Bafia.
We get up between 6 and 6:30, get dressed, and usually our host-mom has beignets and Ovaltine (or some variation on that theme) waiting for us for breakfast. No Little Orphan Annie decoder rings here though! Between 7:30 and 7:45 we’re out the door and walk to our separate training facilities by 8. Throughout the day we have sessions in language (French and Wes Cos Pidgin now), technical training (general info on small enterprise development or teaching, respectively; Jack starts teaching in both English and French this week), cross-culture training, medical/safety info, and vaccinations. At 10 we get a twenty minute coffee break, then more sessions until 12:20, when we break for lunch. Local women sell traditional dishes at each of our locations every day, or there are other places within walking distance in our neighborhood where we can get egg (sliced hard boiled egg and mayo, not a bad egg salad substitute) or avocado-salad sandwiches (one of our stagemates pointed out that these sandwiches are,technically, still African food). After lunch we have sessions until three, when we have another fifteen minute pause before our final session, and we finish most days at 4:30. After that we usually return home to drop off our bags, and then meet up with the other trainees at a little boutique, which is sort of like a convenience store with tables and chairs out front instead of a parking lot, where we can enjoy a soda or beer or a snack (or all of the above) and have a little downtime before we all return home for our seven o’ clock curfew. We usually spend a little time in our room on study/prep for the next day, and then join our host family for dinner prep or getting the table set, and then eat together, usually between 8-9, and join them for a little of their favorite French-dubbed telenovellas (predictable plotlines and simple language make it decent language comprehension practice). By 9 we’re getting showers or bucket baths, then finishing up work for the next day, and bed. Saturdays we have a half day of training, and then start laundry (it’s kind of an undertaking), or we go into town for grocery or toiletry items we may need, or just to get a change of scenery, and do homework, and Sundays are filled with laundry, sweeping out our room and lots more homework (approximately sixteen years old, remember?).
So that’s our daily grind here. Not too terrible, but not terribly exciting either. We’re looking forward to telling you about life at our post in a few short weeks! Our site visits came just in time, when everyone was about burnt out on our training schedule and in need of a reminder of why we’re all here. We both feel refreshed and motivated to push through the next month and a bit – the goal is in sight, and it sure is a pretty sight! An informal poll of our stagemates says the number one thing we’re all looking forward to is cooking our own food, followed closely by not living in someone else’s space! 39 days and counting!
