And we landed in Istanbul

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?).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 really) 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.

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.

Heading for Re-Entry

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.

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.

A note on airplane food: it is amazing. The first bite of spinach nearly brought tears to our eyes.

So many, so good, so true, so long…

 

 

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Home:Coming!

We are leaving Cameroon July 19th.

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.

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!).

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.

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.

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.

…it’s a street in a strange world…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And that’s all for now!  Next up, find out when we’re coming home!

Hello World! It’s been a while

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.

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.

Thankfully…

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!

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.

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.

We’re grateful for the babies, newly born or on the way this year, who we can’t wait to meet!

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)!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Happy Thanksgiving

 

*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.