Literacy, but more than that

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.
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.
And we were called an answer to prayer.  Again.  And again.  And again.
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.
Knowledge certainly isn’t shared for free.  With women.  Who are poor.
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.
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.

So that’s it.  If nothing else.  And really, what else could we want?

Why We Travel

Pico Iyer 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." 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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!" 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. 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. 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.) 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. 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. 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. 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." 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." 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. 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. 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. 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."

Women’s Day

Today was International Women’s Day.  This is a big deal in Cameroon.  All across the country, women wore their dresses made of special women’s day fabric.  There was a parade (“march-past”) in the morning like the one on Youth Day, followed by celebratory lunches.  Women eat and drink and laugh with their friends and, for the day, forget about housework and childcare.  This is her day.

A coworker explained that Women’s Day was never a big deal until Chantal Biya decided that it was important for women to be recognized, and now it is celebrated annually.  And there was a certain lightness in the air today, a certain grace extended in the constant call and response of, “Happy Women’s Day!”

Still, one woman we know of demanded why she should celebrate.  Every other day of the year she’s a slave, she said, so why should she be appeased with one day to let loose, when tomorrow a woman’s husband can beat or kill her if his breakfast isn’t hot?

The coworker asked if we celebrate in the United States, and we told him no.  Because, though still in some ways imperfectly, women in the States can expect far greater measures of equality than are dreamt of here.  Our marriage, unusual at home, is astonishing here.  We both work, and we both cook and clean and do the laundry and the shopping.  We both get a vote, and decisions are only reached with consensus.  Yes, some men still only speak to Jack, but they watch the women in their lives who watch with open admiration when, instead of piling things on Kiyomi’s head if her arms are full, Jack takes half the load.

Over the last couple weeks, and from this day on, for the immediate future, we’re wearing yellow ribbons as part of an initiative to support more women on councils in the Northwest.  The goal is modest enough, with an aim at just 30% of councilors being women, while women make up 52% of the population.  We were encouraged to see yellow ribbons all over town today!

And we hope we’re doing our part, too, as we continue to have upwards of twenty students at our twice-weekly literacy class!  We’re just about to wrap up vowels, and already see women who came in a month ago hesitant even to pick up a pen, now sounding out words and filling in missing letters, and asking for longer class periods.

Zen by Yaounde

 
We live in Cameroon. And it sucks. But it’s good.
I’m on an interminable bus ride, trying to meditate. Make productive use of the time, I figure. Turn a frustration, or at the very least a waste of time, into something useful, beneficial even. I try to take in the verdant landscape, the subtle grace and strength of the mama we zip past with a huge sack on her back, the simple elegance of the mud brick homes. I will achieve zen by Yaoundé. I outline the entire article I will write about this, turning a bus ride, a necessary evil, into a meditation that will make all more peaceful and productive.
We stop and are surrounded in seconds. It’s the third or fourth stop of the day. “Sheeps! Sheeps!” a woman screams through the windows, previously closed against dust, now shoved open, arms and sometimes half-bodies pressing in on us, dangling bags of plantain chips, peanuts, cut fruit, things I can’t name. I breathe, undisturbed. Shake my head, “Non, merci.”
A sway-backed girl is watching through the window, her mouth undulating vigorously around a sucker, obviously one of many from the shape of her teeth and the pinky-orange scum clinging to their surface. She waves her wares and we shake our heads no. Still she stays. Then, like a hit and run, her hand is through the window, swiping down my husband’s arm, and gone again. She stands, staring at us, giggling. I am indignant at the rudeness.
Deranging is my favorite frenglish word. It captures so exactly what it means: harassment stemming from a basic lack of regard and respect for another person. The shouting and lip smacking and hissing I generally can ignore, but breaching the barrier of physical touch still gets my Irish up, and I don’t mean potatoes.
I give her a dirty look, grumble, “How rude,” and breathe. I will be unmoved. The bus sits. We’ll be going soon though, I’m certain. The sway-backed girl giggles and drags her friend over, pointing as though we are the first volunteers ever to appear on a bus through this town. As though our fair skin somehow makes us a spectacle.
Landscape. Subtle grace. Elegance. Breathe.
Giggling, she weaves her hand through the window and swipes her fingers down his arm again, quickly as though snatching away something precious, something she knows she shouldn’t take.
“Notice: Our volunteers may be cute, but they will bite! Please do not put hands inside the enclosure.”
I can feel my temper flood up in me like water in a glass. “Touche pas!” I shout.
She and her friend giggle hysterically, and still the bus sits.
“It’s not rudeness,” I can hear David saying in PST, “they just want to know you.” No, it is rudeness. We’re not zoo animals.
Determined not to be bothered anymore, I glower at the back of the seat in front of me.
A boy walks up to see what the commotion is, waves his wares at us, then looks me in the eye and addresses my husband. “I’ll trade you, this one for yours,” he gestures at the sway-backed girl. Deux, deux cents.
I try to murder him with only my gaze and my mind. He doesn’t even shift his weight back from the window.
The sway-backed girl somehow extends her bust and hips even further from her waist. Still, the bus sits.
“It’s a bad trade,” my husband says.
The girls giggle maniacally.
“No, it’s good,” the boy says, “I like her.”
“Bad for me,” my husband clarifies.
“No, one for one,” the boy explains the math. “It’s good.” The sway-backed girl twirls her sucker, like there’s only the details to work out now, like there’s some possibility of me getting off the bus and she taking my place.
Finally, the bus inches forward.
“No, she’s too good for you,” my husband calls as we pull away. In what sounds to me like flawless French.
The woman seated in front of us laughs and nods.
He is relaxed, laughing, unperturbed, and throws an arm easily across my hunched shoulders. “That was fun,” he says, giving me a squeeze. There are so many reasons why I love him.
“I hate this place,” I mutter, beginning to consider the possibility as the little town fades into the horizon and memory, that I might have over-reacted.
At this rate, I will not reach enlightenment on a bus.
He smiles and everything shifts a little toward its proper place. “Nah,” he assures me, “it’s good.”
I breathe and somehow, it is.

Our hearts are in the work…

Wait, that was our last job!  But, here’s a bit of the work of Peace Corps in Cameroon.  At least our part of it.

Our literary class, kicked off earlier this month, has been great!  We have about ten students who are very motivated and enthusiastic about the opportunity to improve their reading and writing skills.  And we are very motivated and enthusiastic about this opportunity to really invest something of value in the lives of these women and men.  We had at first thought to limit our class to women, since girls are usually the ones forced to leave school after basic education if parents can no longer afford fees for all of their children, or if extra help is needed at home.  Women, we felt, had less opportunity to gain literacy, and as primary child care providers, also provided a point of entry to introduce the value of reading and writing to families.  If kids see Mom leaving twice a week to learn to read and write, that makes it pretty important.  And if Mom comes home and reads to her kids later, even better!  But then we had two young men come into our classroom, and couldn’t think of turning them away from our “women’s literacy class.”  So, then and there, we became an Adult Literacy Class.  Having the chance twice a week to share something we love with people who just drink up everything we offer – and stay even after our time is officially over – keeps us really energized when our office jobs are not so busy.

Currently that isn’t a problem.  Jack is continuing to teach computer literary at the Delegation for Basic Education, training inspectors for the primary school, and acting in the role of inspector himself as well.  He’s also been working on updating operating systems and looking into the One Laptop Per Child program, which has some pilot programs already here in the Northwest, but not currently in Bamenda.  Jack is also on the ICT (information communication technology) Committee and is working to increase the use of ICT in other Peace Corps sectors here.

Kiyomi’s sector has recently changed from Small Enterprise Development (SED – “sed”) to Community Economic Development (CED – “sed”), and she’ll be working on the CED Steering Committee to develop the new project plan for Cameroon.  She finished an organizational assessment with her NGO in the fall and is working on a series of staff-led workshops to address the areas of weakness identified by the staff in the assessment.

Today was National Youth Day.  Youth Day is the modernization of Empire Day, from back when Anglophone Cameroon was part of the British Cameroons.  Somewhere around 1962, Cameroon decided that the youth of the country represented the future of the country, and what better replacement for Empire Day than a celebration of the youth of the newly formed nation?  Technically “youth” is defined here as people ages 14-25, but presidential “youth” initiatives have included people up to age 40 or 45, and Youth Day celebrates all individuals in school, from nursery school up to technical training college.  We got to sit in the grandstand with the governor (who was on time today) and watched a parade of all the schools in the area.  The nursery schools were by far our favorite – knee-high children in school uniforms marching with their full souls in it, as only toddlers can do, knees up to their bellybuttons and arms swinging over their heads.  The theme for this year is, “Youth and participation in the major accomplishments policy for an emerging Cameroon.”  We don’t know what it means either.  A generation full of so much energy and joy and adorableness as those nursery kids though, we figure, has to have good things in the years ahead of them.

How to Create a Pleasant Cross Cultural Exchange

Hey Baby!  Are you married?  I like your looks!  Hey White!  I love you!  Marry me!  Whiteman!  I want to be your second wife!  You are beautiful!  Take me to your country!
If asked what country that might be, guesses will follow, usually starting with Sweden...  People also don’t seem to understand, or believe, that the US government doesn’t just hand out entry visas to traveling Americans to distribute to random strangers.
These and other such phrases are the greetings one may be met with on any given day while shopping for tomatoes, or a broom, or hunting down lightbulbs.  A favorite exchange was when Kiyomi replied, “No, you don’t,” to a profession of love from a random okada (motorcycle taxi driver), and without missing a beat the guy next to him called out, “I love your money!”  They don’t understand, or don’t believe, that Peace Corps Volunteers don’t make a lot.
So what to do about such harassment, you may wonder.  Well, the answer is, wear something weird.  You may think we stand out enough being white and American, but oh, no, my friend, the answer is to look stranger still.  We are indebted to Buff and Vibram Five-Fingers.  The Buffs, first of all, help enormously with the air pollution during dry season.  Secondly, importantly, though, with face half-covered and strange toe-shoes, suddenly we look a lot less marriageable.  Cameroonians tend to look at shoes as a sign of status – if you’re wearing flipflops, you’re probably not anything too special, and dress shoes indicate you’ve probably got money, and being white while wearing anything makes you fair game.  But wearing toe-shoes… what kind of strange person covers their face and wears such strange shoes, and what does it mean?  Is this someone worth paying respect to or not?  Some people just laugh.  Some stare in wonderment.  Others are brave enough to ask, “Are those your feet?”
In any event, no one professes love, or asks for marriage, or to be brought to our country. Instead of the above, we hear, “Hey, madam – my brother – I love your shoes!”
Mutually pleasant cross-cultural exchange accomplished.

Bush Taxi

The bush taxi seems to be a universal phenomenon, experienced by all Peace Corps Volunteers, but completely foreign to our home.  Our wild and completely unscientific guess is that there are around 2000 taxis in Bamenda alone, with the air quality that goes along with no emissions standards.  Public transportation is how we get around.  Peace Corps used to give volunteers cars (or at least, allowed us to drive them), but determined that was too life threatening.  Then, not long ago, they gave us motorcycles here in Cameroon, but then that, too, was deemed too risky.  Now we get helmets, with strict instructions to wear them or be sent home (and most volunteers usually do – we are among those who always do, no matter what, we’ve learned well from our family members who ride – hey, watch for motorcycles on the road!), and quickly learn from other volunteers how to use the public transit system – and the word “system” is used rather loosely here.

Many of the main roads in major cities are paved, but by no means all.  In the villages, the dirt roads often become impassable during the rainy season – that means no getting in and no getting out, even in an emergency.  People are often forced to take motos (motorcycle taxis) down slick mud roads in the rain because taxi drivers won’t risk their cars getting stuck.

Traveling between places is even more exciting, year-round.  This is not an exaggeration or a joke.

Imagine a car designed to hold five people (four comfortably) carrying nine, one of whom is a small toddler, bobbing along on its mother’s knees.  Someone is sitting on the gearshift and emergency break.  The driver leans out the window to make space for the front passengers, and drives from that position.  Exhaust billows into the cab of the vehicle.  The car barrels along, taking switchback turns on a mountain side between 60-70 miles (miles, not kilometers) an hour – you can see this if the speedometer is working at all, but the driver never glances at his dials.  When approaching blind turns, the driver doesn’t slow, but honks.  The car is old, thirty, maybe forty years old.  It’s running, but there’s no telling how well it’s been maintained, and the drivers run their vehicles hard.  If the breaks don’t engage, you will plummet off the side of the mountain.  The emergency break is hidden under a pillow, under a large woman squeezed shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, against the driver and two or three other people in the front of the car. No one is going to reach it in an emergency.  When speeding head-on toward another vehicle, or a person crossing the road, he doesn’t slow or swerve, but honks, engaging in a game of chicken – and it’s your life he’s put down on the line.  Frequent use is made of the “oh, shoot” handles (hey, this is a family blog), the back of the seat in front of our, or the arm of the person beside you.  At the last second someone swerves, slows, speeds up, and the vehicle passes the threat by.  The terror, wild speeds taken around curves, and constant billowing exhaust makes you nauseous, but clearly painted along the top of the windows are strict instructions; “No Smoking,” and “No Vomiting.”

You reach your destination exhausted, trembling and nauseated by the adrenaline and toxic fumes.  You pray from the moment you get in the car until you get out of it again.  Then you pray again, thanking God that you survived.  Then you pray again, that you make it back home.  The Cameroonians with you are entirely placid the entire trip.  Maybe they don’t know what danger their lives are in, or have just been desensitized to it by traveling this way since they were the size of the little child bouncing along on someone’s lap, or maybe they do recognize the danger and fall into a state of intentional unawareness.  There are no air bags.  There are no seatbelts, except for the driver’s seat, and it’s anything but comforting when he occasionally reached back and straps it on.  That’s just an average trip in the dry season.

Recently, the car finally slowed when coming into town.  The driver stopped to let a woman out, and got out to help her get her bags from the back.  Ordinarily the driver would now crawl along for a time, honking at bystanders until he found another passenger.  This time, the break gave out.  The car began to roll forward.  The driver jumped back into the car and immediately sped off like we were being pursued.  The hatch was still open, and we shouted to him, but he kept going.  We reached behind us to hold onto our backpacks.  Predictably a suitcase fell out onto the road.  We shouted to the driver again.  He kept going.  In fact, no one responded at all for several minutes, and then, slowly, a woman in the front seat seemed to wake out of a stupor, looked back, then began shouting at the driver to stop.  He continued on, stopped moments (moments!) later and let her out, and then drove away.  She started walking back toward her bag.  Then, inexplicably, the driver stopped, and then started barreling back up the road in reverse.  We passed the woman who lost her bag.  Just as we were coming up on the fallen suitcase, it was hit by a motorcycle and belongings scattered over the road.  The woman screamed and began to sob.  The driver stopped and got out, tossed a bottle of something that’s landed near the back tire into the car.  The woman began to gather her things off the road with the help of bystanders and the driver.  The first woman who was let out, back before the break gave way, pulled up on the back of a moto and claimed the rest of her bags, that the driver had taken off with.  We pulled out packs up into our laps.  The suitcase was returned to the back of the car.  The hatch closed.  The woman returned to her seat, but the driver yelled at her to sit in the back.  This was her own fault, he said, because she touched the break.  She screamed back that she didn’t touch anything.  They yelled back and forth for the rest of the trip.  We continued like that to our destination.

Embassy staff recently asked some volunteers how we get around.  Public transport?  Oh.  They aren’t allowed to use public transport.  It’s too dangerous.