Help me help you help me help you help me help Cameroon.

Hi! Life has gotten in the way and I haven’t been very good about updating my blog lately – aside from some sporadic drawings of life in Cameroon. Some day I will update it again! I promise.

Buuuut in the mean time, I have a favor to ask of my dear friends and family whom I love very dearly, and whom I will love even more if you can help me with this one thing! (Just kidding. I love you all infinitely already, and you can’t beat infinity.)

Anyway, in case you’ve missed my incessant and shameless begging for money on Facebook, I’m currently trying to raise $1500 to have a shipment of 20 computers donated to a community center in Garoua. The regional inspector of English in Garoua owns and operates a language center, and he and I are currently working to expand it to include a technology laboratory, as well. The goal is to provide children and adults with access to computers and internet at a reduced rate, just enough to cover the costs of maintaining the center.

Some incredible amazing human being started us off with an anonymous $500 donation, so we’re currently trying to raise the remaining $1000. Anything you can donate will help! Seriously. Just go here, select “Peace Corps Cameroon” from the drop-down menu, and write “Sterling Thomason” in the “on behalf of” box. Thank you!!!!! (Merci! Useko!)

Noy jangul?

There’s a reason Peace Corps makes us wear giant ridiculous-looking moto helmets.

Snapshots of my life in Cameroon.

The beginning of every conversation in Nassarao… Except not in Fulfulde.

Christmas in July… Except it’s not July.

Merry Christmas Eve! Although it’s hard to believe it’s Christmas when it’s 90 degrees outside and I live in a Muslim village. Because it’s the holiday season, I’m officially on “congé” from school, so I’m enjoying a little break from déranging students and déranging computer labs.

My congé started slightly earlier than that of the other teachers at my school, because I had to travel to Limbé (a coastal city in southwest Cameroon) for IST, or In-Service Training, which all volunteers undergo after their first three months of service at post. Every year the location changes, and my stage (French for training group, pronounced like the a in “talk” and not like “take”) was lucky enough to get the beach!

The southwest is one of two Anglophone regions in Cameroon, and it’s hard to believe it’s even part of the same country as the north. The language is different (to be fair, I encountered almost as many Francophones as I did Anglophones, but what was more remarkable was the almost total lack of Fulfulde that surrounded me; instead of hearing “nassara” hollered everywhere, now it was “white woman!” or “white man!”), the climate is different (I forgot that humidity existed, but quickly remembered how much I hate it), and even the culture is different (for the first time since we entered the Christmas season, I saw things like Christmas lights!)

Rather than going into too much detail about Limbé—it was the beach, it was great, training sessions were (mostly) helpful but long, especially when the beach was just outside our backdoor, blah blah blah—I will post this picture to illustrate how delightful Limbé was:

And this, from the primate center in Limbé, because who doesn’t love monkeys?!

The trip to and from Limbé consisted of typical traveling-in-Cameroon-conditions. Which is to say, I began with a moto ride to the bus station in Garoua around 6:00am on the 8th, crammed uncomfortably into a bus with many other uncomfortable crammed traveling people, and arrived in Ngaoundere about 4 hours later, where I met up with some other volunteers and stayed the night at the Peace Corps transit house (I was supposed to continue traveling that evening, but there was an issue with some of the train reservations, so a few of us had to wait until the next day to leave). At 6pm on the 9th, we took the train from Ngaoundere to Yaoundé, which is in theory a 12 hour ride, but is rarely in actuality a 12 hour ride. We stopped for several hours in the middle of the night for various derailings and waiting-for-other-trains-to-arrive kinds of situations, until we finally arrived in Yaoundé around noon on the 10th. We then spent a night in the transit house in Yaoundé, and the next day continued to Limbé, which was about a 7 hour bus ride. This leg of the journey went relatively flawlessly (I think that’s an oxymoron, but it seems appropriate for the circumstances), with the highlight of the trip being when a kitten mysteriously showed up in our bus after we stopped for various passengers to pee on the side of the road:

…And the lowlight being when we had nearly arrived in Limbé and were inexplicably stopped by some uniform-wearing men (not out-of-the-ordinary, but made all the more frustrating by the fact that we were SO CLOSE) who demanded to see the driver’s paperwork for an unnecessarily long amount of time. We boiled in the can-of-sardines-sitting-in-the-sun-like car for about 20 minutes, during which one volunteer voiced all of our thoughts when she loudly declared, “This is the worst place in the world!” We were just about to unpack ourselves from the van when the driver returned and we continued on our way, and all our troubles were forgotten when we arrived, threw our bags down, and ran to the beach.

All I can say is that after Cameroon, I will never take a Greyhound bus for granted again.

A sort of belated sort of Thanksgiving-themed post. Sort of.

I realized that the majority of my blog posts tend to focus on such chaotic themes as malfunctioning computer labs, confusing exchanges in Fulfulde, frustrating teaching incidents, and outrageous episodes involving neighborhood children. I don’t mean to give the impression that the entirety of my interactions in Cameroon can be summarized by a series of mildly-comical cultural clashes; these just tend to be the anecdotes that stick out most in my mind—and that I think are the funniest slash most interesting to share—when I sit down to write. But, lest you think everything is screaming children and communication blunders here in Cameroon, I have compiled a list (because what would a blog post be without a numbered list?!) of good/nice/heartwarming/lots-of-very-warm-and-fuzzy-adjectives things that I have observed/witnessed/experienced during my half-a-year thus far in Cameroon:

1. The first is a picture, which is a bit hard to read, but it’s of an English exam that I gave at the end of the second sequence. At the bottom of the page, one of my 5e students wrote, in very elaborate, swirly letters: “Thank you for the exam.” Sometimes, I leave class with my head spinning from hour upon hour of irritating accusations like “Il a volé mon Bic!” (“He stole my pen!”) and “Elle me dérange!” (“She’s bothering me!”) being hurled at inappropriate volumes across the room, while I attempt to dispense my lesson to a room of unlistening ears. But then my students do nice things like thank me for an exam, and I remember why I wanted to teach, in the first place.

2. Inadvertent hitchhiking: I’m not sure if I’ve outlined the transportation situation in Garoua, but it’s basically the inverse of most cities in the United States, as far as frequency and means are concerned. Which is to say, motos comprise the overwhelming majority of vehicles, with the occasional car thrown in to mix things up; and the majority of the population relies on moto taxis and taxis to get around, with a few private vehicle owners thrown in to mix things up. So, anytime I want to go anywhere, I look for someone wearing a green or yellow vest (which signals that he is a moto taxi driver, and not just a guy with a moto), flag him down, tell him my destination and agree on a price, and he takes me there. (I say “he” and “guy,” because I have yet to see a female moto taxi driver, and because even a woman with a moto in general is a rare sight.) Sometimes it’s easy to find a moto, but other times—such as every couple months, when the police camp out on the road and demand registration papers from all passing vehicles, which most passing vehicles are unable to produce—it’s a bit more difficult. On numerous occasions, I’ve been waiting, roadside, for a moto, when someone passes by on or in a vehicle and kindly offers me a ride, refusing to accept any money in return, just to be nice.

3. “Just pour te saluer”: In Cameroon, phone service is set up differently than in the U.S.; rather than selecting a single provider and signing a monthly contract, you buy a SIM card and then purchase minutes as-you-go from roadside “call boxes,” which are everywhere. The two main providers here are MTN and Orange (with a third, Camtel, being used occasionally, mostly by businesses). As is the case in the U.S., it’s cheaper to make calls from MTN-to-MTN, or from Orange-to-Orange, etc. Because of this fact—and because of the fact that “réseau,” or service, isn’t always very reliable— people often have two or even three phone numbers (my cell phone, for example, like many cell phones here, is dual-SIM, so I have both an Orange number and an MTN number).

All of this is to say that making phone calls in Cameroon is, relatively speaking, very expensive; gone are the days of hour-long phone calls and entire conversations carried out via text. Instead—at least in my experience—phone calls rarely exceed a few minutes in length. Yet, despite the brevity of phone exchanges (or, perhaps, because of it) a lot is said in a little bit of time. Every day, at least a couple of Cameroonian friends call me just to say hi. Each conversation lasts less than a minute, but it’s just a nice gesture – to show me that they’re thinking of me.

4. Neighborly love: Along the lines of phoning just to say hello, it’s also common for neighbors to drop by your house, in person, just to say hello. One morning, I was in the middle of doing dishes in my yard, when a friend about my age, who is in his final year at the lycée, stopped by with his ten-or-so-year-old sister. In order to be hospitable, I put the dishes aside and sat down in order to talk with them. This small attempt at hospitability backfired, however, when his sister, seeing the stack of neglected dishes beside me, offered to wash them. I laughed and declined her very generous and thoroughly unnecessary offer, but she insisted—and continued to insist, despite my protestations otherwise—until, finally, I conceded and let her (“let her” seems like the wrong wording for a favor someone does for you, but that’s pretty much what happened) wash them for me. Just to be nice.

Dropping by to say hello, of course, goes both ways; the neighbors who live across from me (Haoua’s family) are some of my favorite people I’ve met since being in Cameroon, and they have become somewhat like a second (or third, if you include my host family in Bafia) family, here in Nassarao. If I go even two nights without visiting them, the next time I show up at their house, they ask me where I “disappeared” to and tell me not to do so again. And every night, when it’s time for me to go home, they insist on accompanying me to my door, waiting outside my gate until I close and lock it behind me, to make sure I arrive safely – even though the entire walk home takes somewhere around thirty seconds. Just to be nice.

This is only a small selection of the numerous examples that I could write about re: why I’m fortunate to call Cameroon my home for the next year-and-eight-months. Every time something frustrating happens—such as a mass of children pounding on and scaling my gate at seven in the morning, yelling “Ouvre la porte!” for hours on end, without pause—something else wonderful happens to counteract it—such as those same children coming over to my house with chalk and books in hand (two books, to be exact: an elementary school French textbook, and an old Peace Corps bike maintenance handbook that a previous volunteer left behind, neither of which the children understand a word of) for me to write out math problems and read to them.

And so it is that my life in Cameroon—a strange jumbled mass of encounters, events, and everyday and not-so-everyday occurrences—is also, in turn, my blog.

Saturday / Sunday / Monday

1. Saturday:

Last week, the daughter of the founder of my school invited me to her family’s home for a Saturday lunch with a visiting American. I was given no details on who this American was, or why s/he was in Cameroon, or why s/he would want to lunch with me beyond the fact of our shared nationality, but I asked none of these questions, and politely accepted the invitation. So, come Saturday afternoon, I took a moto into town and arrived at the agreed-upon house, at the agreed-upon time, and called the daughter-of-the-founder to inform her I was outside her door. Her response: the lunch with the American was canceled, because the entire family + the American had all traveled to a neighboring town called Lagdo for the weekend. Désolée.

Having taken a moto into town for nothing, I decided to profit somewhat from the situation and walk to the market. As I commenced walking, however, I noticed that there was something odd about my shoe; looking down, I saw that the little strip of rubber between my toes that normally ensures the flip flop remains attached to my foot had broken off and was no longer serving such a function. I attempted, several times, to reattach said strip of rubber to the base of the shoe, but alas, to no avail. And so it was that I found myself, one-shoed, on the side of the street, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of Africa, contemplating my options.

As I assessed the situation, a small child ran up beside me, took the shoe from my hand, and began searching for scraps of plastic in a nearby pile of garbage (there are no “garbage cans” in Garoua, which means the street itself serves as sort of a garbage can) to tie to the shoe in order to render it wearable. Meanwhile, a crowd of Cameroonians selling tea and beignets a short distance behind us—who had been watching the entire me-struggling-with-my-shoe spectacle from the start, and who had been the ones to kindly send the small child over to help me—signaled me to their tea-and-beignet stand. I sort of hobbled toward them, one-shoed, and they gestured for me to sit down on a bench, handed some coins to the small child, and sent him away with my shoe to repair it. All of this happened in rapid Fulfulde, interspersed with uncontrollable laughter at the spectacle that was the-nassara-wearing-one-shoe.

While the child was away shoe-repairing (or soliciting the shoe-repairing) I was interrogated in Fulfulde-and-a-little-bit-of-French by two teenage girls (both named Aissatou) who were delighted at the novelty of the one-shoed white person sitting beside them. Perhaps “interrogated” isn’t the right word, as it implies some kind of exchange between us. It was more like they yelled back and forth very excitedly (the only words of which I caught were “nassara” and “France” and “Etats-Unis,” repeated at rapid intervals) while simultaneously snapping photos of me with their phones to send to their friends. At one point, they handed the phone to me to talk to said friend(s), but fortunately, the phone credit ran out before I could. After about ten minutes of this, the child returned, I was reunited with my flip flop, I said goodbye to the Aissatous (who generously refused to let me pay them for the shoe repair), and I went along my merry way, two-shoed and very far from the day I had envisioned when I set out in the morning.

2. Sunday:

Ever since moving into my house in Nassarao, and up until Sunday, I had been waging a small battle against a small weed jungle that had been establishing itself in my not-so-small yard. Or, rather, the small weed jungle had been waging a small battle against me, because preparing lessons and frequenting tea-and-beignet stands with excitable teenage girls and visiting neighbors and just generally trying to manage life here in Cameroon had taken precedence over such inconsequential tasks as yard beautification (the result of which being that whenever any Cameroonian came over to my house, the first thing he or she would remark would always be something along the lines of, “Your yard is a mess! Call me and I will come remove your weeds for you!”)

While most volunteers hire neighborhood kids to attend to such things as weeding and laundry and other types of menial houseworky chores, I can’t get over the mental weirdness of having hired help. So instead, I let my house fall into mild disarray during the week, and await the weekends when I have a bit of time to put things back into an acceptable state. Such was the case on Sunday, when I found myself with some free time in the afternoon and decided to go about uprooting the weed jungle. Shortly after I began working, however, I heard someone knocking at my gate; it was Yasmine, one of the neighborhood kids whose family I’m friends with, so I left her in. Not two minutes later, there was more knocking at the gate; this time, the kids who live next door. Because I had already let Yasmine in, I couldn’t very well say no to them, so I let them in, as well. Not two minutes later, more knocking at my gate; and so on. Before I knew it, half the neighborhood children were in my yard attacking weeds and ripping apart trash bags and fighting wildly over such objects as discarded razor heads and old margarine tubs and used plastic bags. One child discovered the packaging to a Timbuk2 bag I recently ordered, tore out a head hole and some arm holes, slipped it over his clothes as a makeshift shirt, and proceeded to run around my yard, literally wearing my mail.

While arguably out of control, at least the children were clothed, which is more than I can say about what happened a few weeks ago, the last time I invited—or rather, allowed—a large mass of children into my yard. A group of five or six boys discovered an outdoor shower in one of the unused extra buildings outside my house, and before I knew what was happening, they had stripped off their clothes, turned on the water, and were bathing in my yard, while I yelled frantically in a mixture of French and broken Fulfulde for them to put their clothes on and leave. When my attempts fell on deaf ears, I ran next door to try to explain what was happening to their mother, who speaks no French, and who was sitting toplessly in her yard washing dishes. She calmly responded by miming the gesture of hitting them. When she realized I wasn’t about to beat her naked children, she reluctantly came next door and chased them out of the shower for me.

3. Monday:

I mentioned in a previous post that there were currently three functioning computers at my school. At the time, it seemed dramatic and undesirable and terrible and many adjectives like that, but now, the prospect of three functioning computers seems almost reasonable – or at least not so unreasonable. As of last week, there were between 1 and 2 usable computers at my school: one computer that worked like a normal computer should; one computer that worked about half the time (and the other half of the time it just inexplicably refused to turn on); and a third computer that was so overrun with viruses it was essentially unusable, with a total of one functioning program, called “Puzzle Generator,” the sole function of which appeared to be the generating of crossword puzzles.

As of yesterday, that number has dwindled down to zero. I discovered this fact when I arrived in the computer lab with a group of fifteen-or-so students in tow (1/4 of the 6e Dounia Andal class, which I divide into groups to render computer labbing somewhat feasible, while leaving the other 3/4 in the classroom to be supervised by the discipline master). I found that the one previously functioning computer had been inexplicably dissembled and wouldn’t turn on, and that the computer-that-turns-on-half-the-time was having one of its not-turning-on days. Considering the lesson I had planned had nothing to do with puzzle generating, that ruled out the virus-infected computer, as well. So, zero-for-three on ordinateurs, we retreated to the classroom, where I taught the class all about types of computers, parts of computers, and what you can do with computers – all without actually touching a computer.

Can you give me the cane? I want to hit Jane.

Some more excerpts from my beloved English textbook:

1. Practise these dialogues with your teacher, then in pairs.

A: Is Jane late?
B: No, she isn’t.

A: I hate snakes.
B: I hate snakes too.

A: Can you give me the cane? I want to hit Jane.
B: Yes, here you are.

A: Don’t rub the tooth paste on your face.
B: I’m sorry, I did not mean it.

2. Study the phrases.
Fly in low altitude. The mountain range is fifty miles away and the storm centre is in a higher altitude. Calm down. Turn off two of the engines to save fuel … Don’t parachute! You’ll land in a tree. Line up quickly. The principal is coming!

The first is ostensibly an exercise in articulating the /ei/ sound, but I am certain there are a million and one better dialogues the editors could have chosen than a strange jumble of sentences alternating between the polite request for materials with which to hit poor Jane, and the unintentional smearing of “tooth paste” on one’s face. The second is a lesson in imperatives, which appears to depict two unfolding scenarios: one in which a plane is about to crash, and another in which students are lining up outside of their school compound. It’s the link between the two stories, however, that remains unclear.

One serious, one funny and one frightening thing.

1. Serious:

In the US, my efforts at preparing a meal basically consisted of putting some vegetables in a pot and bringing the water to a boil. In Cameroon, where my “kitchen” consists of a small propane-powered stovetop propped up on a shelf in my living room (a modern implement compared to the three-stone outdoor fires the majority of my neighbors use) my cooking habits still haven’t evolved much. However, most Cameroonian women and girls don’t have the option (or, more accurately, the luxury) of culinary (or, more generally, domestic) ignorance like I do. Instead, every day, they are expected to spend hours slaving over a fire, mixing and chopping and heating elaborate dishes for their families of six or eight or eleven.

One of my good friends, Haoua, who lives in the concession across from mine, is a student at the technical high school in Nassarao. When I first met her, I was told she was about twenty, and I believed this up until a few days ago, when she showed me her birth certificate and we both found out she will be seventeen in January (she, like her siblings, had forgotten when she was born; birthdays, and age in general, have very little significance in North Cameroon, where girls often marry at fifteen, and students often finish high school in their mid-twenties).

At sixteen-almost-seventeen, I was embarking upon my senior year of high school and preparing to go off to college. At sixteen-almost-seventeen, Haoua is at least four or five years away from graduating. As the only girl living at home in her family, she has all of the domestic responsibilities of a married woman, even though she is not yet married (although, as she explained to me, the responsibilities will only increase once she is married). Every day, after finishing school at 3:30pm (or, on non-school days, after working in the fields until a similar time), she walks home and immediately starts preparing the evening’s dinner, which takes her until around 6 or 7pm, at which point she eats with her family, studies, goes to sleep, and sets her alarm for 3am to wake up and study again. She and her friends have a system worked out wherein they “beep” one other (“beeping” is when you call someone but hang up before the person answers, so you don’t use any phone credit) to make sure they are awake in the morning – or rather, in the middle of the night, because 3am is hardly the morning.

Haoua’s family isn’t even as traditional as many families, as far as gender-based labor division goes. In other households, the father literally sits on a mat and waits to be served his meal; when he finishes eating his meal, he sits on his mat and waits for his plates to be taken away; when his plates are taken away, he sits on his mat and waits for his bouille to be served; …etc.

It’s hard to tread the line between cultural respectfulness and wanting to change something that is fundamentally and glaringly unjust within a society. I guess that’s the point of the Peace Corps; finding that balance. If Cameroon weren’t a “country in development,” they wouldn’t be sending volunteers here. Still, it’s frustrating, day-in and day-out, to see people you know and care about—human beings—treated as anything less than that.

2. Funny:

The other day in sixième English, I instructed my students to write a paragraph in the past simple tense, using the vocabulary words from the day’s lesson. I told them that if they didn’t know how to say something in English, to ask me, and I would tell them (in Cameroonian classrooms, I’m lucky if the students even own the textbook; expecting them to own French-English dictionaries would be just plain delusional). In such a scenario, I then write the words on the board for the students to copy, because otherwise, my American pronunciation + their level of English = the words that end up in their notebooks bear very little resemblance to the words that came out of my mouth.

Most of the class, being in sixième, wrote a string of loosely-or-not-even-loosely related sentences centering on such themes as doing their homework, talking to their grandparents, and going to the market. One student, however, had something else entirely in mind. With a very serious look of intensity on his face, he approached me at the board and inquired as to how to say “tomber amoureuse” in English. When I wrote “to fall in love” on the board, he scribbled the phrase into his notebook, quickly looked around, and gestured frantically for me to erase the words from the board before his classmates saw. He then returned to his desk, where he proceeded to compose his assignment with the same serious look of intensity on his face.

When he had finally finished writing, he approached me again at the front of the room and insisted on waiting until none of his classmates were within a ten foot radius of us before revealing his paragraph to me: a page-long love letter written about a classmate, ending with true-to-middle-school-style gigantic bubble letters spelling out the phrase “I LOVE HER.” It was so funny and adorable that I didn’t even mind his total disregard of every single one of the assignment guidelines.

3. Frightening:

This will be a short point, but I feel I would be remiss not to at least touch upon the special place that Hannah Montana holds within Cameroonian society. In the United States, Hannah Montana’s popularity is rather exclusively confined to the thirteen-and-under-tween-girl subset. Here in Cameroon, however, such is not the case; while her popularity still peaks within the thirteen-and-under-tween-girl subset, she is regarded more widely, within the population-at-large, as a respectable musician, often referenced alongside the likes of Michael Jackson or Rihanna.

Another strange phenomenon that accompanies this cultural embrace of a Disney pop star is the propagation of a series of shiny and puffy and sparkly Hannah Montana stickers that I have seen affixed to the notebooks and cell phones and motorcycles of everyone from eleven year-old girls (whom I imagine to be the manufacturers’ intended audience) to teenage boys and grown men. There’s something delightful about finding myself mid-conversation with a thirty-some-year-old man with a wife and children, only to suddenly realize that the telephone in his hand is adorned with a bright pink and grinning Hannah Montana decal.