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.

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