I’m in Yaoundé right now for two weeks of training, to prepare to train the new volunteers that will be arriving in June. Which means: Teaching is done! Exam proctoring is done! Report-card-filling is done! Done. Done. Done.  I can add one more “done” to the list because on Friday, we finally finished up the HIV/AIDS project I’d mentioned in my last post. Our twelve peer educators had already been trained, so all that was left was the sensitization/free testing event at the high school. I was worried not a lot of people would show up since it was the end of the year and students had mostly stopped coming to school, but the peer educators that we worked with did an amazing job of telling other students about the event and getting people excited to attend. A hundred and eighty-eight people got tested – the majority of them students between 15 and 24 years old, but even a few teachers got tested, too. The day was filled with lots of fun things, like:

HIV-AIDS-counselling-life-skills-themed skits:

Dancing:

Q&A quizzes about HIV/AIDS/STIs:

Games:

Condom demonstrations:

And, of course, the testing itself:

All-in-all, a success. A great way to conclude the school year, with lots more photo memories to take home with me when I leave… 2 months and 14 days from now.

I. :0(

The Boston Marathon bombing. Elementary school shootings. An AmeriCorps member being shot in the middle of the street while working on a volunteer project in New Orleans. An eight year-old being stabbed to death in her own neighborhood. It seems like every time I go on the internet or turn on a television, these are the only things I keep hearing about back home. Death, death, and more death. Of course, it’s understandable that we keep hearing and talking and debating about them. They are senseless acts of violence and they are tragic and scary, and they force us to realize things that we don’t want to realize about the people and world around us. That there is that capacity for evil and sadness and destruction; that sometimes, there is little or nothing we can do to prevent or stop it.

Around the same time all of these events were transpiring in the U.S., I found out one of my Terminale students had died from complications during her pregnancy. More death – though of the markedly less sensational kind. She was actually in my class, taking an exam, when she fell ill; I called some other students and the discipline master to escort her out of the classroom, and the principal drove up to the classroom in her car to take her to the hospital. That was right before spring break. I didn’t get a chance to follow up on how she was or what had happened until later, while passing through Ngaoundere during break and visiting a friend of hers, when I learned she had passed away. She’d been married eight months, and was pregnant with her first child. She would have been 21 this month. Out of a class of 70, she wasn’t a student I knew well or even particularly remarked—it’s sad to say, but before this happened, it probably would have taken me a few tries to even match her face to her name—but it was shocking. I had graded her exams. I had filled her report cards. I had taught her English. And just like that, she was gone. Her seat was empty. I would no longer grade her exams or fill her report cards or teach her English. Just like that.

A week or so later, the wife of a teacher at my school died from an asthma attack. Another week after that, the husband of the secretary at my school was killed by an aggressor, while driving his new motorcycle in town. In response to the latter two deaths, a list was circulated amongst the teachers and we each donated a dollar or two to show our support. Almost immediately thereafter, they were back at school, working and teaching, like nothing had ever happened. Maybe a “mes condoléances” was uttered, but otherwise, things were back to normal. Life moved on.

It’s true that somebody passing away from an asthma attack is many gradations and worlds and miles away from an eighteen year-old kid being shot by a stranger in the middle of a city street. To some extent, we can make sense of someone dying of a natural illness—even if it’s an illness that should be preventable or treatable, that shouldn’t kill someone out of the blue—but it’s harder to wrap our minds around murder. Even within the realm of murder, it’s easier to make sense of it in the context of motorcycle theft, than in the context of some guy opening fire on a classroom full of first graders for no apparent reason. While both constitute deplorable acts of violence, the former is fueled by poverty and greed and desperation. It’s something we can clearly see the motives behind; it’s something, at least, we can take certain precautions to try to avoid. It doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it understandable. Nobody set off a bomb at a public sporting event, or entered an elementary school with a gun and went on a violent shooting rampage. It’s reprehensible. It’s tragic and horrible. It’s not unfathomable.

I know this is my second blog post on the topic of death, and I also know I’m not really saying anything new that I haven’t said or that hasn’t been said before. But living in Cameroon, thousands of miles away from home—yet still being connected, in countless respects, to “home” through phones and email and television and Facebook and radio—has a way of putting things in strange perspective. All of the differences aside—between the deaths I’ve seen and heard about on the TV and on the internet, and those I’ve seen and heard about in my immediate proximity—what I’ve taken away from it all, once again, is the incredible resiliency of Cameroonian culture when it comes to death. I remember when I was in elementary school, and an older kid in my school died during break while visiting the beach with his family. He was playing on a log in the ocean, and a wave came and washed him under. A field was named after him at the school: “Jacob’s Field.” When students die in Africa, fields aren’t named after them. People grieve, they mourn, they move on. I can’t imagine somebody in the U.S. returning to work a week after his or her spouse was killed, and functioning with any reasonable level of sanity or professionalism. Here, it’s just part of life.

I recently read a blog post about how American media coverage tends to only focus on stories like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Sandy Hook shooting – both unthinkable events; both, incidentally, impacting primarily white victims. The blogger makes the observation that as a black woman, she felt numb seeing images of blond Sandy Hook children plastered across TV screens, imagining all of the countless black youth who have been murdered in the U.S., and the hundreds of Iraqi and Afghan kids killed by American forces, neither of which the world hears anything about. Not being a person of color myself, I’m clearly in no place to speak to what she is experiencing. But it’s something to think about. I don’t believe one tragedy can void or invalidate another; a young Cameroonian woman dying from lack of access to adequate prenatal care doesn’t make a young white kid whose last moments were spent hugging his dad at the finish line to a marathon any less significant or awful, and vice versa. They’re both horrible, and they both deserve talking about – but not just talking about. Of course, what exactly that entails, beyond the talking about, brings up a lot of other questions… None of which I have even the beginnings of answers to.

II. :0|

Enough talk about death. Some updates on life in Cameroon since my last post:

After returning from my short stay in Lara in my neighbors’ village, in the Extreme North, I continued south to Yaoundé, where I met up with the rest of the volunteers from my training group for our COS (“close of service”) conference, which always takes place a few months before volunteers actually COS. We stayed in a fancy hotel and attended sessions on resumé writing and careers in foreign service and adjusting to life-after-Peace-Corps and other end-of-Peace-Corps-life things like that. Most importantly, I learned my “official” (I put it in quotes because it hasn’t been confirmed in writing or anything like that, but it’s mostly certain) COS date: July 26^th. Meaning: LESS THAN THREE MONTHS until I’m back in the U.S.! It’s exciting and unbelievable and crazy and sad and scary and terrible and great, all at the same time. While some volunteers have taken vacations to Europe or gone home to visit family during their service, I’ve gone the full two years without having left the country. Partly because I didn’t have the money to do otherwise, but also because I wanted to fully profit from the 27 months I was given to experience Cameroonian life. (Now that I’ve done so—having fully experienced going-on 23 months of Cameroonian life—a few non-Cameroonian-life things I’m really looking forward to upon my return: wearing hoodies and jeans every day, having zero daily interactions with strangers revolving around the color of my skin, consuming endless quantities of fancy overpriced blended coffee drinks and vegetarian cuisine.)

After returning from COS conference, I resumed teaching, which is nearly over for the year (I joked about school being over in my last post, but now it’s actually true. Sixième finished taking their final exams yesterday, so I just have report-card-filling; and Terminale starts their exams tomorrow, while preparing for national exams in about a month or so). Despite the fact that school is basically over, I’m also working with a few staff members to wrap up an HIV/AIDS project at the high school (it was supposed to have been finished in mid-February, but the funding got seriously delayed and we had make a decision: either abandon the project completely, or try to do it in the time we have left. The administration still wanted to go forward, so we chose the latter option). So far, we’ve trained twelve peer educators at the high school, who will in turn train their classmates about safe sex, HIV/AIDS, STIs, and other life skills. Since it’s the end of the year, we won’t have much time for them to actually put their peer educating skills into practice, but they’re going to continue what they started next year. I was having my doubts about trying to do everything we’d planned in the limited time we have left, but seeing the positive reactions so far from students, staff and community members has made me glad for the decision we made. The final stage of the project will be a testing event at the school in mid-May, so here’s to hoping that’s a success!

Of course, with every positive experience, there’s usually something less positive you have to surmount in the process. In this case… petty theft. Some back story: For our project, we give a 500 CFA ($1) per diem to the peer educators and staff for travel to-and-from meetings. Because change is always a huge pain to acquire, I’d asked a friend of mine who works at the Total station by my house to change out about 10,000 CFA for 500 CFA bills, and was keeping the money in my house until I would need it. When I went to get the money one day, I realized it was missing. I searched everywhere, believing I had to be going crazy, and finally accepted, for the sake of my own sanity, that I must have misplaced it – I knew the few people who had been in my house recently, and was certain they couldn’t have taken it. Besides, nothing else was missing, including a larger sum of money kept in another drawer right next to the 500 CFAs. I replaced the money and wrote it off as negligence on my part.

Fast forward about a week. I went to the bank and withdrew about 200,000 CFA (~$400). I usually don’t keep such large amounts of money around my house, but I needed funds on hand for various project expenses, and the bank isn’t always open when I need them (plus, the ATM machine is far-from-reliable enough to count on at such times). So, one Friday morning, I divided the money into two envelopes—500 CFA bills in one, and everything else in the other—put them in a drawer in my bedside table underneath some books and papers and other things, and left for school. This was around 7am. I came back from school at 12pm, and everything seemed normal: gate locked, door locked, my stuff untouched (including my computer, camera, and other money sitting in my living room right when you walk in). Then, about an hour later, I went into my room to get some money to go into town and buy project supplies. And… Both envelopes were gone. Vanished. In their place, I found the following note:

I immediately called Peace Corps, who took me to the gendarmes to explain what happened, and gave me the option of filing a formal complaint. After some consideration, I decided not to. The only person I’ve ever given a key to was Ila (Ismaila, the “other person like a spirit” from the note), who lives in my compound; whenever I travel, I leave a key with him so he can feed my cat. I’m 99.99% certain he wasn’t the one behind the break-in, even though he’s the most obvious suspect; my guess is one of his friends must have stolen the key from him and made a copy. Whoever it was, it was clearly someone who knew me, and who felt at least moderately bad about what they’d done. I didn’t really want to spend the last three months of my service subjecting people around me to gendarme interrogations, when nothing would most likely come of it, anyway. Plus, in a weird way, I’d almost rather not know what friend of mine has been breaking into my house and stealing my money; I’d prefer to leave Cameroon in a state of ignorance, as stupid as that seems. I changed the locks to my house and added a padlock, so it shouldn’t happen again. The worst part of it all is just knowing that somebody had been in my house, going through my things, on at least two (and probably more) occasions, and I had no idea. The night after it happened, I slept with all of the lights on in my house, just so I’d know right away if somebody entered… Fortunately, the paranoia has worn off a little by now. At least enough to sleep with the lights off.

III. :0)

As I mentioned in the sort-of-happy-sort-of-sad-face section, it’s the end of the school year! For the last day with 6eme, I brought my camera and at the end of class took pictures of my students to take home as a souvenir:

After class, knowing I still had my camera with me, a few students approached me asking to take some pictures of us together. I told them I didn’t mind taking the pictures, but they would have to give me 100 CFA (20 cents) for each one they wanted printed. They quickly agreed. As other 6eme students caught wind of what was happening, I soon had a mass of excited picture-takers around me. I ended up giving my camera to the class prefect and lining everybody up, to avoid the disorderly chaos that was already on the verge of developing, then going down the line and snapping photos one-by-one in an oddly celebrity-style photo shoot, like this:

At one point, some thoughtful students decided I’d been standing in the sun too long and helped me out by providing a bit of shade:

Over forty students ended up giving me money to print their photos, which I was surprised by. We got some funny group shots, too:

A final parting thought to ponder: I’ve mentioned before that in my 6eme class, I teach students as young as 11 and as old as 17, sitting side-by-side on benches together. Just to illustrate the ridiculousness of that point:

Who would believe these two kids…

…are in the same grade as this kid?

Before break started, my attendance trickled down, as expected, to almost nothing, as most other teachers abandoned teaching completely to fill report cards, and I confused my students by showing up to class every day, anyway. The Wednesday before break, I taught a lesson to seven out of seventy of my Terminale students; the following day, I combined both of my sixième classes—around 130 students total—and fewer than twenty students were present. During the same week, door-to-door sales of poorly written instructional pamphlets commenced with full force, as official exams draws closer and closer. Three times, my classes were interrupted by men parading around study guides for English, history and civics, barging into my classes to sell them to my students for the equivalent of 20 cents each – a practice that is totally normal in Cameroon and even welcomed by the administration. Whenever this happens, something about the acquisition of said educational pamphlets makes even the most scholastically-disinterested of my sixième students go wild with excitement, and any attempt at holding their attention is seriously lost when they have fancy new study guides to flip through at their desks.

Upon the commencement of Spring Break, my neighbors (Haoua’s family, who lives in the concession across from me) invited me to attend their grandfather’s funeral in Lara, their village in the Extreme North, about three hours away from Garoua. Unfortunately, the dates coincided with “COS (Close of Service) Conference,” which all volunteers are required by Peace Corps to attend in Yaoundé a few months before finishing our service. A week before the funeral, however, there was another ceremony planned to name the new djaouro (a traditional chief of a quarter). The funeral was for the old djaouro, who died last year, and his son (Haoua’s maternal uncle) was chosen as the new djaouro. Because I didn’t have to be in Yaoundé until the second week of Spring Break, I was able to travel with my neighbors for the djaouro-naming ceremony.

Coincidentally, the last and only other time I’d traveled to the Extreme North was also in March, during Spring Break last year. Since that time, construction began on a main stretch of road leading from the North to the Extreme North, resulting in the route being way, way, wayyy dustier than it was before. A significant portion of the ride consisted of people fighting back and forth in the bus: “Close your window, the dust! Open your window, I can’t breathe! Close your window! Open your window!” Close your window!” accompanied by the subsequent and disgruntled opening-and-closing of bus windows, as we drove blindly into a giant dirt cloud and suffocated sweatily on stale air. Otherwise, the voyage was a typical Cameroonian voyage – waiting for hours at the bus agency before loading all of our luggage onto the top of the bus, cramming five-to-a-row (plus children-on-laps, which don’t count in the five) in meant-to-be-four-to-a-row seats, and listening to roadside child vendors serenade us with offers like “Gâteau! Gâteau! Vingt-cinq! Vingt-cinq!” from outside the windows.

My neighbors belong to the Moondong ethnic group (Mundong? I’m guessing it’s spelled with a u, but it’s phonetically pronounced “Moondong,” so I’ll just keep writing it that way because I like how it looks… If they had umlauts in Africa, I’d say “Mündong”). Because of this, everybody in their village speaks primarily the Moondong language, with some Fulfulde and French. (I was told a lot more people knew French than they actually let on, but their conversations with each other were almost always in Moondong or Fulfulde; I was usually the weird quiet person randomly interjecting questions about the meanings of various words, while everybody else carried on normal, animated conversations.)

Lara, itself, is a larger village encompassing smaller villagettes (not a word, but shouldn’t it be? I guess you could say “quarters”), one of which being not-unconfusingly called “Lera.” The mother of my neighbors’ family is from Lera, while the father is from Lara proper, about a fifteen minute moto ride away. Because it was the mother’s brother who was being named djaouro, we stayed in Lera, with another uncle and his family. Although there is electricity and running water in Lara, Lera is a poorer section of the village without electricity or running water, and all of the houses that I saw—including the house where we stayed—consisted of traditional Northern Cameroonian mud huts with straw roofs. The bathrooms, too, consisted of traditional Northern Cameroonian latrines with mud walls and holes in the ground – the latrine-ness of which was not a problem, but the walls of the particular latrine where I was staying barely reached my shoulders, and, as is typical of latrines, there was no door to prevent any unsuspecting person of barging in at any unsuspecting moment (a horrifying scenario, which fortunately was never realized):

Most of my time in Lera consisted of sitting on woven plastic mats and eating way more food than I would ever personally choose to eat, if I wasn’t being forcefully compelled by everyone around me to do so. Most meal-time conversations went like this:

— “Eat!”
—    “…I’m eating!”
—    “Eat! You’re eating too slow!”
—    “…I’m eating!”
—    “Eat!”
—    “I’m eating! I literally have food in my mouth right now!”

And so on. For the first two days, every single meal consisted of “gumbo sec” (in Fulfulde: baskojé; in English: dried okra) with chunks of meat and millet, eaten with our hands out of a communal bowl like this:

We also drank way more sugary drinks than I would ever ordinarily drink if I wasn’t being forcefully compelled by everyone around me to drink, including sugary bouille, sugary tea, and sugary warm Fantas and Cokes. The awkward part was that whenever we arrived at somebody’s house, the people we were visiting had the tendency to do things like split a single Fanta between four people, and then give me an entire bottle for myself. Of course, they were only doing this to be welcoming and nice, but special treatment of any kind is always really uncomfortable – especially when that special treatment consists of mass ingestion of carbonated sugary beverages, my refusal of which to drink would be considered an insult to their kind and generous generosity.

The djaouro-naming-ceremony itself wasn’t very long; there were speeches in Moondong that I didn’t understand, followed by dancing and traditional-robing of the new djaouro, and a mass exodus to various houses to continue to eat a lot of food:

The following day, I traveled into Lara with Haoua, Habiba and Wasala to visit the Lara-side-of-the-family. My neighbors’ father had stayed back in Garoua, but he’d told his kids to visit his family members in Lara – the African conception of family members, meaning uncles of brothers of grandfathers of friends of sisters… and so on. When we arrived, our first destination was the lamido (the highest kind of traditional chef, above the djaouro and another type of traditional chief, the lawan), their father’s younger brother. As we descended the moto and began to approach the building, we were informed by a group of men sitting outside that Haoua, Habiba and I needed to remove our shoes; we did so, then proceeded to walk about fifty excruciating feet, barefoot, on scalding hot sand, only to arrive alongside the group of men and be told that we could not speak with them – only Wasala, being male, could. After a few minutes of talking, Wasala was informed that the lamido wasn’t there, and that we would have to come back later. We trekked back across the burning sand, put our shoes on, and motoed away, incredulous at the ridiculousness that had just happened.

We visited various other family members and carried out various variations of the same activities: sitting on mats, eating beignets, drinking tea, etc. The most notable variation of said activities occurred toward the end of our visit, when we arrived at an uncle’s house who was either drunk or crazy or both (hey, in French, that rhymes! “soûl ou fou ou tous les deux”). He didn’t pause to take a single breath during his entire thirty minute interaction with me, during which he locked his gaze only on me, informing me that: “Whites like to know the TRUE STORIES about what happened, so I’m going to tell you the TRUE STORY of how none of my nieces and nephews acknowledge I’m their uncle until they need something, but I’m their REAL UNCLE, I have the SAME MOTHER and SAME FATHER as their father, but nobody in the family comes to visit me, even though their father and I have the SAME MOTHER and SAME FATHER, it’s because I’m POOR, but I’m not really POOR because I have NINE KIDS five girls and four boys and in Africa that means I am RICH and I served in the military for THIRTY-ONE YEARS and was named CAPTAIN and and and and I know you whites like to know the TRUE STORY, and my grandkids are going to tell you LIES which is why I need to tell you the REAL STORY RIGHT NOW so you can tell it to the REST OF THE WHITES so they know the TRUTH about what happened AND AND AND—” The entire time I had to avoid eye contact with Haoua, Habiba and Wasala, to stop myself from bursting into uncontrollable laughter. I guess he was right about at least one thing – now I’m telling his story, just like he said I would do.

Upon our return to Lera, the newly-appointed djaouro had told me he wanted to chat with me about “lots of things,” so Haoua and I showed up at his house that evening to do so; he wasn’t there, and his wife told us we should wait for him to arrive. However, Haoua insisted that we return to her other uncle’s house (the place where we were sleeping), because she was afraid of evil spirits that were going to appear that night in preparation for the funeral. Evidently, the funeral is a secret ceremony that women aren’t supposed to know the details about; for that reason, it’s forbidden to film it, and women must have special permission to attend (according to the crazy uncle who was telling me the REAL STORY, if you’re caught filming the ceremony you’ll be killed, but I kind of doubt his word about most things… Besides, many Cameroonians had advised me to secretly photograph the ceremony if I had been able to attend, which is advice they probably wouldn’t have given if me being killed was any kind of conceivable possibility). Anyway, the “secret ceremony” supposedly involves spirits coming out to reclaim the deceased person’s body, or something to that effect, but none of the women are allowed to know exactly what happens.

So, because of the spirit-danger, she deemed it more advisable that we retreat to her other uncle’s house and visit her uncle-the-djaouro the next morning. Back at the other house, her uncle showed me a video on his cell phone (there’s no electricity in Lera, but there’s a generator somewhere where people charge their phones) of a traditional circumcision ceremony, which occurs in Lara every seven to nine years. All of the boys in the village five years old and older are taken into the wilderness and kept away from their families for three months; if they want to come into the village, they have to cover themselves in leaves so they look like trees and their families can’t recognize them. In the video he showed me, they had completed their three months and were being initiated as men. They were all dressed in their tree outfits and dancing with sticks; when I asked what the sticks were for, the uncle informed me they were to beat girls with. I asked, not sure I was understanding correctly: “…To beat what girls with?” and he responded: “Any girl. All of the girls must hide, because if the boys find them during this ceremony, they must beat them with sticks.” Sometime while we were watching this video, a bull, who had previously been tied to a fence post at the house, somehow got loose and head-butted the uncle’s two year child old face-forward into the sand; the child burst into tears, adults swooped in, the bull was quickly tied up, and no damage was done, but the incident was nevertheless alarming. Almost as alarming as young, costumed boys wildly beating young girls as a ceremonial demonstration of their manhood.

Later that evening, the djaouro showed up and offered to accompany me back to the cheferie (if I was with him, the evil spirits couldn’t get me). I accepted, expecting us to sit outside with his wife and the other people who were at the house; instead, arriving at his compound, he chose a secluded corner and laid out a mat for us to sit on, then proceeded to reveal what it was he wanted to talk about: it was his life’s goal to have a mixed-race baby (he used the word “métis,” which Cameroonians often use to mean half-white-half-black, but which in the dictionary translates to “half-caste”). And he wanted me to help him with this. When I declined his request, he responded, “I know you whites don’t like polygamy, but what if it is God’s will for you to end up in a polygamous relationship?” Things only got weirder after that – he continued to try to convince me to “save his village” by having a child with him, because a mixed-race child would bring wealth and prosperity to the community.

Of course, I’ve only highlighted a few of the stranger interactions that I had during my time in the village – generally, everybody was overwhelmingly kind and welcoming and hospitable, and I was incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience “village life” for a few days. At the end of my visit, Haoua’s/Habiba’s/Wasala’s maternal grandmother—who spoke only about three words of French, which is about two words more than I knew in Moondong—wished me a “bonne journée” and retreated into a room to retrieve something. When she returned, she held out her hand and gestured for me to take what she was holding: 100 CFA (20 U.S. cents). I looked uncertainly to Haoua, who motioned insistently for me to take it, explaining that her grandmother was giving me money to buy water for my voyage. It was a simple gesture, but she may as well have been giving me 1,000 CFA or 2,000 CFA or 10,000 CFA, because I know how much 100 CFA means to her and to her village. I could do nothing, of course, but thank her profusely and take the money – which was worth a lot more than just 20 cents.

First, some background on what happened with the project: Many months ago, I was contacted by the World Computer Exchange (WCE), an American organization that donates (rather, sells at a very reduced price to cover operating costs) refurbished computers to developing countries around the world. I decided to get involved in a shipment of computers set to go out of Cameroon, raising the funds for 10 computers for my counterpart’s language center in Garoua. We raised the money really fast! And then waited… and waited… and waited. And nothing happened. As it turns out, all of the other people initially interested in the shipment weren’t able to raise enough money and backed out. I had two options at this point: get a refund and buy the computers (at a higher price) in-country, or contact other volunteers and see if they wanted to organize a Peace Corps shipment. I sent out an email to the listserv to gauge PCV interest in filling a 200-computer container, and the response was great, so I decided to go ahead with that. What’s better than 10 computers to give computers to kids in Cameroon? …TWO HUNDRED computers to give computers to many more kids in Cameroon.

Hundreds of emails back-and-forth with other PCVs and the WCE then ensued, until all of the volunteers involved (20 of us, including me) finalized our order (205 desktops, 69 laptops, and a collection of printers/scanners/solar lamps/other assorted things) and raised the necessary funds to pay WCE and anticipated port-clearing and transport costs. Which is where things got more complicated… In Cameroon, there’s no way to know actual port costs until a shipment arrives in country, at which point you begin the entire process of customs-clearing. By speaking to a few people, we were able to estimate that costs would come out to about 5000 CFA (~$10) per computer, and budgeted this much in anticipation. However, the stipulation on this amount was that it would require us to apply for exoneration of normal customs duties, since our computers were for schools and community centers and not personal profit; this process, also, could not be carried out until the computers were actually en route to Cameroon.

In order to begin the whole process, we were informed that we would need a designated consignee, who would receive the container when it arrives in Douala; the consignee, in turn, would hire a clearing agent who would help navigate the (way more complicated and frustrating than we realized) process. Brian, a volunteer in Tombel, in the southwest region, agreed for his organization—a small university in his town receiving about 50 of the 274 computers—to act as consignee. Once this was determined, and the computers were actually shipped, we had about a month before the computers’ arrival to prepare to clear them from the port. We met with various customs agents, drafted exoneration letters, and generally threw ourselves blindly into the crazy mess known as receiving a shipment of donated computers.

Port costs are broken into two main categories: clearing costs, which are relatively non-negotiable in the sense that you can’t apply to have them reduced or waived (but are still negotiable in the sense that a skilful clearing agent can find tricky ways around them and/or bribe his or her way out of them) and then customs duties. After drafting our exoneration letter, we submitted it to the Director of Customs and waited for a response; when the response finally came, we found out we had been granted 50% exoneration (the way I just described this process sounded pretty simple and straightforward and streamlined, but it was more like the most opposite situation you could imagine: showing up at the same office every day and being told to go to another office, and then going to another office and being told to come back the next day, and then coming back the next day and… you get the point). Unfortunately, we found out that 50% exoneration still meant we’d be paying about 1.5 million CFA (~$3000) in duties alone, plus another 1.5 million in port fees. This came out to almost 12,000 CFA (~$24 per computer) which was unpleasantly higher than we’d expected. When we spoke to the people at customs about our problem, to see if it would be possible to appeal the decision, we were informed that the reason we were only granted 50% exoneration—and not 60%, or 70%, or 80%—was that the letter was submitted to the Director of Customs, and not the Minister of Finance. Only the Minister of Finance can approve exoneration of more than 50% (ironically, our letter was originally addressed to the Minister of Finance, but when the consignee delivered it to customs, he was told to change the addressee to the Director of Customs).

We had a dilemma. Either we accept the 50% exoneration, or we try going directly through the Minister to ask for more exoneration. If we chose the second route, we risked paying demurrage costs at the port, which accumulated after the eleventh day. In a terrifying race against time, we decided to take our chances; if we could get 300,000 or 400,000 or 500,000 CFA knocked off the price, it was worth a few thousand in demurrage. In order to expedite the process—which can take days or weeks, which we didn’t have—we asked the Peace Corps country director to write a letter of support for our request, and she in turn approached the American Ambassador, who also kindly wrote a letter of support. We drafted a new request letter signed by the director of the university, and called his assistant in Tombel to take a 2 hour bus ride to Douala, to send the official university stamp on another bus going to Yaounde, so that we could stamp the letter. (Stamps are a really big deal in Cameroon; nothing is official unless it’s adorned with an official-looking ink stamp, which, incidentally, can be bought for approximately $12 from a random guy on the street. More on that later.)

Around this time, I had to go to Kribi to help out with in-service training for the volunteers that started a year after me, so Brian waited for the stamp to arrive and submitted the documents to Peace Corps, who delivered them to the Ambassador to deliver to the Minister of Finance, while I was gone. When I returned a few days later, I followed up with the Peace Corps to see if there was any news from the Minister. After a couple days of no news, we realized there had been some confusion; Peace Corps thought the Embassy was following up, and the Embassy thought the Peace Corps was following up. Upon this realization, the country director’s assistant—who was amazing and helpful through all of this, as was the rest of Peace Corps staff—took me to customs and we were able to track down the letter we needed stating the 50% exoneration. Unfortunately, we found out that the Minister refused our request for increased exoneration. Apparently, none of the supporting letters and documents—including the one we sent for the stamp for—were received with the Ambassador’s letter; because the Ambassador’s letter didn’t state that we’d already received 50% exoneration but were simply seeking more, the Minister of Finance passed the letter along, not understanding why we were submitting a second request for something we’d already been granted. We met with another customs employee, who contradicted what the previous customs employees told us, stating that whether you submit the letter to the Director of Customs or the Minister of Finance, there is no difference, and it would not be worth our time to continue pursuing such a route. At this point we’d already accrued several days of demurrage fees, and decided to focus on just getting the computers out of the port. We couldn’t continue the process until after Christmas, since all government offices would be closed (yet, we would be charged demurrage for weekends and holidays, even though nobody was working).

Unable to go back to Garoua in the foreseeable future, I spent Christmas in Bafang, another volunteer’s post in the west, where I distracted myself from the impending doom of the computers by eating delicious food, watching a lot of Modern Family, playing with week-old kittens, and looking at pretty waterfalls:

The day after Christmas, I traveled to the port, which is located in Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, in the littoral region. For several days, Brian and I ran around with his counterpart, the director of the university, in a convoluted maze of administrative confusingness (all while carrying millions of CFA on us and hoping not to get mugged). Because Brian lives only 2 hours away from Douala, it was cheaper to travel there and back every day than to find somewhere to stay in Douala. So, each morning we left around 6am, we took a bus ride into Douala, spent the day rushing from office to office and accomplishing very little, and then got back to his place somewhere between 8 and 11pm. Most of it was painfully boring (sitting in a single room for 7 hours, staring at a wall, waiting for a single document that was necessary before we could continue with anything else), some moments were terrifying (after waiting for said 7 hours, going into the office as it was about to close for the day and finding our letter granting us the 50% exoneration in the “reject” pile, because it was addressed to the Peace Corps, on behalf of the consignee, instead of to the consignee directly; thankfully we were able to get it moved into the “accepted” pile, saving us about a week of what would have been totally wasted time applying for a new mandate, and hundreds of thousands of CFA in the process), others were ridiculous (needing, and once again not having, the university stamp for an important time-sensitive document, and rush-ordering it from a stamp vendor on the street a 3 minute walk away) and some were just lucky (finding out customs duties were almost 400,00 lower than the estimate we’d been given, making up for the 100,000 in demurrage and various hundreds of thousands in various miscellaneous expenses we’d accrued).

After all of this, we got the computers out and into Tombel by early Saturday morning, at which point Brian’s counterpart mobilized some local guys to help unload the container. While unloading the pallets into the university—which isn’t a “university” as you might picture it in an American sense, so much as a small two-story building with holes in the walls and a less-than-solid door—we caught the unloaders sneakily throwing small items, like solar lamps and batteries, through holes in the wall with the intent of stealing them later. We kicked out the guy who we caught in the act of wall-hole-throwing, and didn’t have any more problems afterward, but were still somewhat concerned for the security situation. We tried to get the gendarmes to send someone to keep watch over the building, but they didn’t have any extra personnel on hand, so Brian, his counterpart, his counterpart’s assistant and I decided to keep watch on the building ourselves, spending Saturday night in the building. On Sunday morning, we bought out a 30-seater coaster bus and I traveled with about 80 of the computers to Yaounde, where I stored and sorted them at the Peace Corps office to be distributed to some of the volunteers. Brian, meanwhile, stayed back, continuing to keep guard in Tombel until everyone came to pick up their stuff.

Despite all of the chaotic craziness, in the end, things mostly worked out; and it was amazing to see all of the computers being unloaded from their pallets, and to know that they would be going to schools and hospitals and cultural centers and teacher training colleges, many of which wouldn’t have had computers otherwise. There’s a great quote that a previous volunteer wrote on a wall in the Peace Corps transit house in Yaounde, which goes: “Peace Corps Cameroon – where nothing works, but it all works out.” Nothing could be truer.

Anyway, lest I unfairly sullied the Cameroonian postal system’s otherwise saintly reputation, I thought I should set the record straight. Incidentally, while also on the subject of setting-the-record-straight, I have a horrible confession to make: I am watching a French-dubbed Mexican soap opera on Cameroonian national TV while I type this. Current plot line: Evil old woman (I forgot her name) kills also-evil-accomplice’s (Rogilio’s) daughter’s (Ora’s) ex-husband (Adrian), but accomplice’s mistress (I also forgot her name) witnesses what happens and secretly saves not-actually-dead-Adrian’s life. Meanwhile, Adrian’s young son (Esteban) runs away from home to escape narcissistic, profiteering step-mother (Nelly) and winds up on the streets, where he narrowly escapes being trafficked by a pair of really creepy men, thanks to Adrian, who returns as “Santiago” (Adrian’s made-up identical twin brother) and saves Esteban in a dramatic gun-filled showdown in an abandoned warehouse. Nobody knows it’s actually Adrian because he wears a fake moustache and frowns a lot, which real Adrian would never do. That was actually the plotline from a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve already dedicated way too long to this explanation, so, let’s just gracefully move ahead and pretend this paragraph didn’t happen…

As we near the end of October, I’m already mid-way into the second of five sequences at school. Things are mostly going well, with the normal difficulties and issues that I suppose come inevitably with teaching everywhere. Or, at least, ‘inevitably’ in the sense that difficulties and issues are unavoidable, everywhere, generally speaking… The specifics can’t really be so easily transposed onto an American setting. Example: Zero of my 130-or-so sixième students—and about 5 of my 65-or-so Terminale students—own a French-English dictionary. So I bought a set of 5 dictionaries that I cart to school every day to allow students to use for reading and writing activities—while far from sufficient, at least it’s something—and this seems to be working well in Terminale. In sixième, however, doing so basically entails me circling madly around the room (not really circling, so much as painstakingly weaving my way to the back of the class through a single narrow, inaccessible aisle between two rows of desks) and yelling at students to work, while they fight wildly over said dictionaries. After class, groups of students eagerly approach me to borrow my dictionaries for the evening to read at home. On the one hand, it’s wonderful to see my students excited about learning; on the other, it’s upsetting that this is the reality of school in Cameroon. In the U.S., having a dictionary (or, for that matter, having access to online translation services from one’s personal computer) is a given; having all of one’s textbooks is a given. But in Cameroon, where students are routinely kicked out of class and sent home for not having paid their school fees, buying books isn’t exactly at the top of people’s lists of priorities. Buying books can’t be at the top of people’s lists of priorities.

One aspect of teaching that continually strikes to me is the surprising ways in which cultural differences manifest themselves in a school setting – not just the obvious differences, like disciplinary norms (‘discipline’ generally consisting of misbehaving students being whacked with a long stick, kicked out of class, and made to perform manual labor) or the school structure itself (based on the French system in which students stay in the same classroom all day and teachers come and go) but things that, back in the US, were so engrained in me that I never would have even imagined they could be so vastly different elsewhere. The first of these things isn’t really confined to school, because I witness it everywhere: interrupting. I think Americans—or at least the Americans in my friends/family circle—have a fairly low tolerance for interrupting. I was taught at an extremely young age, for example, that repeatedly yelling “Mom! Mom! Mommmm!” while my mom was in the midst of a conversation with somebody else, for example, was about the least effective and advisable way I could ever possibly go about getting whatever it was that I wanted. Yet, here, I see kids exhibiting this very behavior all the time (with the Fulfulde alternative for “Mom! Mom! Mommmm!” – “Dada! Dada! Dadaaaa!”) and the astounding thing to me is that the parents actually respond, after like five or ten repetitions. Which is why it’s not surprising that I see this same conduct replicated in the classroom; if I don’t pick a student to answer a question, he or she snaps his/her fingers, stands up, and shouts “Madame! Madame! Madame!”, repeatedly, until I call on him/her (which, of course, is never, as I’ve explained, approximately 50,000 times, that I will never call on somebody who exhibits such obnoxiousness). And, slowly, my students seem to be catching onto this; kind of like how they’re catching on, slowly, to the fact that for their crazy, time-obsessed nassara teacher, 7:30 does not mean 7:35, or 7:40, or 8:00; it means 7:30, and arriving at any other time for my class that starts at 7:30 will mean punishment (no, not of the stick hitting variety). It’s funny to see small clusters of sixième students sprinting past me, frantically, to enter the classroom, as they glimpse me approaching from across the schoolyard.

But back to interrupting – see how I just interrupted myself with that ‘being late’ tangent/anecdote (tanecdote)? It’s not just my own students who interrupt; the worst offenders are students from other classes, who, for whatever reason, have no class because their teacher didn’t show up that day, or that hour, or that year; so they decide to come to my class and lean into my windows and loudly distract my students, instead, until I chase them away (more like make an irritated shooing gesture and loudly say “Goodbye!” to which they laugh, to which I irritatedly stomp over to the door/window and they run away cackling). Or, they arrive at my doorway, mid-lesson, and make me stop whatever I’m explaining so that they can deliver some message/pen/notebook to some student in my class, which for some reason cannot wait until class is over. A few days ago, while I was teaching sixième, an older student whom I had never seen before showed up at the door; he wanted something, but he was mumbling a lot and I was too distracted by keeping my own students under control to exactly follow what he was saying; I told him that was in the middle of class and that he could talk to me later. When class was over, he was waiting for me outside of the room. He told me that he lives far from school and doesn’t have money to pay for the moto ride each way; can I pay for his daily transportation to and from school? I was so caught off guard by the simultaneous inappropriateness of his request—interrupting the class of a teacher he had never talked to before, ever, to ask for money, solely on the basis (I can only assume) of the fact that I’m white and therefore must be rich—and yet, also, the sadness of it. It’s true that many students walk over an hour to school and back, each way, every day; school buses don’t exactly circulate around here. And these, of course, are the hardships of the lucky kids – those who are fortunate enough to be going to school.

But the biggest and most striking difference to me is even less tangible than social norms like interrupting, or being late – it’s in students’ basic way of thinking. ‘Critical thinking’ is a skill that is not taught in Cameroonian schools; education is based on recitations, definitions, things you can commit to memory. It’s for this reason—and, I believe, also, due to the fact that English is taught based on an ‘immersion only’ model, starting in sixième, which, in my opinion, does not work—that in Terminale, a student may be able to conjugate a verb in the past perfect tense on the board, and may be able to tell me that it’s in the past perfect tense, but when I ask said student what that sentence means in French, he/she has no idea. At all. The other day, in Terminale, I wrote a warm up exercise on the board (which we’d already done several times before) with the instructions “Exercise: Correct the errors in the sentences,” and an example to illustrate what I wanted the students to do (basically a simplified version of D.O.L). After a minute or so, a student raised his hand and said to me, “Madame… We don’t understand what you want us to do. What is this? Grammar? Vocabulary? You need to tell us which it is.” A few days later, a similar incident happened when I was teaching narrative essay writing. I had just finished a lengthy explanation (in both English and French) about how the first paragraph of an essay is where you introduce the subject you will be talking about in the body of the essay. A student raised her hand and said to me: “Madame, I don’t understand… In our previous classes we were told the first paragraph is called the introduction… You are saying it called the ‘first paragraph.’ Where is the introduction?”

In sixième—students freshly out of primary school—this lack of emphasis on critical thinking skills is even more pronounced. This week, we read a dialogue between a vendor and a customer at the market. During the following class, I gave the students a list of simple market vocabulary words and phrases they could use, and gave them instructions (in French – which, to be fair, is their second [or third] language, after Fulfulde and their patois) to work in partners and write their own conversations at the market. Some students responded by writing out a haphazard list of various, unrelated French words and their English definitions; others, by copying word-for-word the conversation we had read in class the previous day, not even changing “potatoes” to “apples,” or “expensive” to “cheap,” or making any of the other small changes I was hoping they would make to show that they understood, sort of, what I was asking of them.

Another example: on the last exam I gave, I included a matching section, with two columns of adjectives, and the instructions to match each adjective to its opposite, like this: [minus the sloppy formatting, which I feel the neurotic need to explain that in the actual test, my columns were perfectly lined up and my words perfectly spaced... Yes, I'm fully aware nobody cares about this fact but me]

Adjectives (5 marks)

Match each adjective with its opposite.

Example: Fat d.                a. Short
1. Small                                   b. Mean
2. Tall                                      c. Big
3. Happy                                 d. Thin
4.  Old                                      e. Young
5.  Nice                                     f. Sad

Mind you, I had given this exact exercise, with these same words, just in a different order, on three separate occasions, in class, to prepare students for the exam. I also verbally explained what I expected, in both English and French, as I administered it. And while many students successfully completed the section, it was also clear that an equal number had no idea what I was asking them to do. Some students wrote the French definitions of the words; others, a series of unintelligible letters that corresponded to nothing in the question; others, lines connecting one side of words to the other. For the same test, I created two different versions – changing the orders of questions and subject/verb combinations, to cut down on cheating. While I was correcting the exams, I caught two students in each class who had obviously cheated, as the answers they wrote corresponded to the questions posed on the other version of the test (for example, the question read “Conjugate in the present simple tense: She, to write,” and the student answered the question for the other version: “He talks”). Naturally, I gave these students zeroes; and for the next week, every day, one of the cheaters-in-question followed me around after class asking for a retake, insisting that he didn’t cheat, even though it was so obvious that he did. I still don’t think he has any idea how I know he cheated, despite the fact that I explained to him, several times, that the questions he answered were not the questions on his test.

I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to make fun of my students, or to imply that they’re less intelligent than American students, or anything like that – I have a lot of incredibly bright, thoughtful, clever students, many of whom scored 18s, 19s and even 20s out of 20 on my sequence exam (other teachers probably wouldn’t consider this a positive thing, saying I made my exam too easy, or something; following the French system, 10 out of 20 is a passing grade, and most students are expected to hover around this number. It’s not unheard of for the highest grade in a class to be a 14, or a 12, or, sometimes, even a 7 – another cultural difference. I don’t like to see my students fail; I can’t help but think that if over half my class is getting over half of the test questions wrong, there’s something seriously wrong with my teaching). Anyway, it’s not a question of intelligence at all. It’s just that critical thinking is something that, from a very young age, seems to be totally absent from the Cameroonian curriculum. It’s easy to become frustrated when something that seems so glaringly obvious to me just isn’t clicking with my students; but I have to remind myself that I grew up in a very tiny, privileged corner of a very big, not-so-privileged world, and I can’t fault my students for not immediately understanding something that they’ve never been introduced to in their lives.

One last thing—and this is more specific to English, and not to critical thinking in general—but it’s interesting teaching Terminale and seeing the unexpected habits that students have picked up from their previous English classes. For example, for the diagnostic test that I administered on the first day of class, there was a section on the active and passive voice, wherein students were asked to change sentences from the active voice into the passive voice. When we were correcting on the board, I asked a student who had correctly answered one of the questions to write the response. He wrote: Someone gave me this vase –> That vase was given to me by somebody. I explained that his answer was correct, but that he didn’t need to change “this” to “that,” because in doing so he changed the vase to which the speaker was referring. The class looked confused; several students raised their hands, and one student, looking very doubtful, informed me: “But… Madame. We were taught in our previous class that when changing the active to the passive voice, you change ‘this’ to ‘that.’” Many others nodded in agreement.

Things like this happen all the time, and I’m always caught off guard; I start to doubt my own knowledge of the English language. It doesn’t help that British English (…kind of) is taught in schools here, and not American English; students often speak with peculiarities that would seem unquestionably odd to say in the U.S., but that appear to be accepted as standard here, so who am I to tell them that they’re wrong? After all, it’s a Cameroonian English test they’re going to take at the end of the year; it’s my job to prepare them to pass the test, not to speak perfect American English. Yet, at the same time, it’s pretty widely agreed upon that ‘teaching to the test’ is far from the most effective way of conveying knowledge about anything, to anybody; and with only 4 hours of class a week, it’s hard to strike the right balance between creating engaging lessons that stretch students’ thinking, on the one hand, and preparing them for a very specific, formulaic standardized test on the other.

Because I promised in my last post (and by “I promised,” I mean a single person asked me to upload more pictures of Citta, and I accepted this as indisputable, overwhelming proof of what I already sensed and needed minimal confirmation to be totally certain of: that all of my friends who are reading this blog right now—yes, all two of you; hi Mom, hi Tammy—are as obsessed with her as I am) here are some more pictures:

Favorite pastime: green bean hunting.

Also, some other recent photos, to encourage the impression that I have a life outside of being weird about my cat:

Horse race in Garoua I went to a couple of months ago

Neighbor kids

More neighbor kids

A list of names of neighbor kids who came over to my house to color. I’m #9 – “Istelin.” “Sefini” means “C’est fini” – “It’s finished / That’s all.”

With some neighbors who recently moved to Maroua

With a neighbor who was recently accepted to the army, and will also be moving away

All henna’d up for the Fete du Mouton / Feast of the Sheep. (More like Feast of the Goat, sheep are way too expensive.)

Floating henna hands.

Feet, too!

Part of the essay portion of the diagnostic test I gave my Terminale students… As many friends pointed out when I posted this on Facebook, “No pressure, right?”

The point of all of this is to say that my lack-of-computer situation has been a major reason for my lack-of-blog-updates situation. Another reason has been various things keeping me variously busy in the past couple of months, such as:

• In August I traveled to Kribi (a beach town in the Littoral region) for the first annual National Girls Empowerment Forum—a two-day seminar organized by some youth development volunteers—with my counterpart and the proviseur of the Lycée de Nassarao. The forum was great and helpful and informative and all good things that a girls’ empowerment forum should be, and my counterparts and I are now in the beginning stages of planning an HIV/AIDS project targeting girls at the Lycée de Nassarao.

• We finally finished up our cholera sensitization/cleanup project! Which is a relief, because I no longer have a million CFA worth of project funds in my bank account… There’s something strangely unsettling about being a millionaire (especially with someone else’s money), even if said million translates to roughly $2,000. The end to the project couldn’t have happened at a better time, since immediately after we finished up, the North region experienced crazy flooding:

The entrance to my quarter

Just outside my quarter

Apart from the already devastating consequences of destroying people’s homes and crops and bringing mud walls crumbling to the ground, floods have the additional side-effect of exacerbating pre-existing sanitation and water-related problems, resulting in influxes of cholera and other diseases. Hopefully, the little we were able to do with our project in Tchakamidari and Boula-Ibbire will help in preventing—or at least in mitigating, slightly—a cholera epidemic to follow.

Cholera sensitization

Another cholera sensitization

Hey, another.

• Things are finally happening with the computers. The original organizations that were supposed to be involved in the shipment backed out, so I ended up contacting other volunteers throughout Cameroon, and together we’ve organized a shipment of around 270 computers to be distributed to organizations and schools around the country. Fundraising is almost finished and the shipment is set to go out in mid-October, so right now we’re just working on last minute logistical details like applying for port fee exoneration and figuring out transportation issues. I’ll keep you guys updated and promise to send pictures once the computers actually arrive. :0)

• School is back! This year, as I mentioned in another post, I’m teaching at the Lycée de Nassarao (the local high school in my neighborhood) instead of commuting into town every day to teach at a private school. No informatique this year, just English, which is a welcome change; so far I’ve been teaching two sections of 6eme (the first year of high school, students being somewhere between like 9 and 16 years old), 6 hours each for a total of 12 hours—technically 10 hours, since 60 minute classes are 50 minutes this year—per week. Each of my classes has about 65 students, which is actually on the small end for public schools in Cameroon.

I also recently agreed to pick up 4 hours of Terminale (the last year of high school, students being somewhere between like 17 and 26 years old… It’s hard to really know since most students have fake birth certificates). I haven’t actually started teaching Tle yet because there was supposed to be another teacher to teach Tle (as well as 1ere), but she never showed up (a typical phenomenon in Cameroon, especially with English teachers… Teachers get assigned to schools by the government, but for whatever reason decide not to go, leaving classes without instructors for the whole year). I’m thoroughly unprepared to teach Tle—having only previously taught 6e and 5e, and jumping in during the 5^th week of the sequence—but I’m kind of looking forward to it. It will be a drastic contrast, anyway, to the chanting of days of the week and colors and numbers at children and tweens.

Seemingly every day, I hear about the cousin of the friend of somebody passing away, or the child of the mother of somebody else being buried. It’s not that death is mentioned in such a casual way as to be flippant, but it also doesn’t carry nearly the world-bursting gravity as it does in the US, where we do our best to shelter ourselves from the reality of our mortality. Several months back, I was at my neighbors’ house when another neighbor’s toddler was killed in an automobile accident. My neighbor’s seven and nine year old children, Ilou and Modi, came running home to tell their mother about it (in Fulfulde), who then explained, calmly, to me what had happened (in French). Later, I saw a few people digging a hole to bury the body, and that was practically the last I’d heard of it. If it had been the US, ambulances and police would have surrounded the scene; roadside vigils would have been erected; life as we knew it would have been shattered, for a second, before we managed to piece it back together. In Cameroon, this is life as we know it.

Just last week, I was at a friend’s house, and my friend casually asked me if she’d told me that her brother’s two year-old had recently died. I clarified, asking: “I thought you said it was your sister’s two year-old? “Yes, she died too, but I’m talking about a month later.” Or, last night, when I was at my neighbors’ house; we had just finished dinner and were in the middle of discussing corruption in Cameroon (Modi had recently come home from a friend’s house, whose mother is a nurse; his friend had given him a soy snack that had arrived in boxes at the hospital in Nassarao for distribution to children to fight malnutrition. As is often the case with aid received in Cameroon, rather than distribute them, the nurse decided to keep all of the boxes for herself; Modi’s family wouldn’t even have known about them if the nurse’s son hadn’t stolen one to give to him… But I’m getting off-topic).

At around 8:00pm, my neighbor announced that she had to go into town for the night because her cousin had passed away. I asked—as I always do, mostly for lack of a better response—when people tell me that somebody has died: “C’était quoi, la maladie ?” (“It was what, illness?”) And, as people usually reply when I pose such a question, she said: “On ne sait pas.” (“Nobody knows.”) Apparently, the woman kept losing weight and nobody had any idea why; the night before, she’d stayed up with her children until 10pm without any discernible signs that something was wrong. The next morning, when by 8am she still hadn’t come out of her room, somebody went to check on her and found her dead.

Later last night, as Haoua (whom I’ve often mentioned) was walking me home, we’d almost reached my door when she suddenly stopped walking to inform me: “Oh… I didn’t want to tell you in front of Habiba [her older sister] but Djibrilla’s [her boyfriend’s] dad died yesterday.” Evidently, he had been sick and nobody knew why; just as he seemed to be getting better, he passed away. The strangest part about the whole thing was that Haoua didn’t want to tell me in front of her sister; when I asked why, she couldn’t really explain, saying: “Je ne voulais pas sembler comme je vente…” (“I didn’t want to seem like I’m bragging/being prideful…”) I’m not sure if that’s actually what she meant to say, or if she just couldn’t find the right word in French to express what she meant in Fulfulde. In any case, I’m often surprised with the things that are considered “shameful” and that family members keep from each other. They drink from a shared water cup and eat with their hands from a communal plate every night, but things that I would never expect to be “private” (or even “shameful”) are shrouded in secrecy.

Even outside of illness, death is everywhere. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Ila told me that his mother’s neighbor had just been arrested and put in jail for killing her husband; her husband had wanted to take a second wife (polygamy is common and legal in Cameroon) and she didn’t want him to, so she poisoned him. Translating the story for me as his mother recounted it in Fulfulde, Ila calmly pointed out to me the house to me where the woman had lived, across the dirt road from their concession.

Then, of course, there are motorcycle aggressions. Just last week, an “aggresseur” attacked a moto driver (who was taken to the hospital but later died) outside my neighborhood and was attempting to leave with his motorcycle; the community managed to stop him before he could get away, but, knowing that if he went to jail he’d just pay his way out, they decided to burn him instead. My neighbour, coming from the place where the burning had taken place, said you could still see the remains where it had happened. A few months earlier, another moto driver was killed just at the entrance to my quarter; people who work at the nearby Total station found him in the morning because they heard his cell phone, ringing nonstop, from the bush where he was hidden; it was his wife, whom he’d married just a week prior, trying to get a hold of him because he never came  home.

Sometimes, when I hear these kinds of events happening, I find myself idealizing the US, where death, while still present, is kept at a distance. Then, in the midst of everything, I read about things like the Café Racer shooting in Seattle; or, just two months later, the movie theatre shooting in Colorado. I don’t know which is better: living in carefully-constructed denial of a reality that’s too inconceivable to consciously acknowledge, and risking having your whole world suddenly collapse when such a reality forces its way in; or accepting, with a stoic sort of resignation, that life isn’t certain.

On another note (because this post has taken on an unpleasantly depressing tone, and I think I’m for the living-in-carefully-constructed-denial camp) last Friday commenced the beginning of Ramadan fasting, which most of my neighbors, being Muslim, are now carrying out. During Ramadan, you can’t consume any food or beverage (even water) during daylight hours, so most families wake up at 4am to eat/drink and then go back to sleep before waking up again at their normal time and carrying out their normal daily activities. At 6:30pm, everyone “breaks their fast” by drinking water and bouille (a corn-and-peanut broth) and eating white-bean beignets, before dinner. I’ve decided to fast with my neighbors for the first few days of Ramadan (minus the waking-up-at-4am-to-eat-part), but I don’t know think I’ll go the whole month.

On still another note, Citta has gotten SO BIG. Every time I buy cat food for her, the employees at Angle Sur comment: “Wow… Your cat must eat a lot, huh?” To which I can do nothing but smile and say “oui.” But in case you’re wondering how she’s doing these days:

Also, a few other neighbor pictures, because I haven’t updated my Shutterfly in approximately 4757599 years:

And the cleanup itself on Saturday:

Directly after the cleanup, I rushed home to grab my bags, say goodbye to Citta (whom Ila, my friend who lives in one of the unconnected-to-my-house rooms in my concession agreed to feed/litter-box-clean in my absence) motoed to the bus station, bussed to Ngaounderé, and caught the train, which, uncharacteristically, both departed and arrived perfectly on schedule. I was seated next to a friendly, older Quebecois woman (an education volunteer living in the Extreme North and working through a British organization—or, I guess, “organisation,” to be British about it—called VSO) who told me a little about Canada and talked in a fun Canadian French-and-English accent. It was a refreshing alternative to the bus ride to Ngaounderé, during which I sat next to a camo-wearing military guy with The Most Enormous Rifle In The World casually propped between his legs.

The stay in Yaoundé itself was ordinary, other than the normal weirdness that always ensues upon arrival in Yaoundé: the appearance of two-story buildings, expensive restaurants, yellow-taxi-covered streets, hookah bars, brightly-lit awnings, foreigners of various ethnicities and nationalities, and Western-style grocery stores—coupled with a Peace Corps transit house filled with other volunteers and near-constant internet and a washing machine and hot showers—makes things feel still not-quite-like-home, but also not-quite-like-Cameroon. Even though I live on the outskirts of a regional capital (not “en brousse,” sans running water and electricity, like some volunteers) Yaoundé is still another world from Garoua, entirely. And while I enjoy my trips to the capital as the closest I will come to a “vacation” in the U.S. or Europe—where, in another life, one of my favorite pastimes used to be wandering around unfamiliar cities, getting lost in the people and buildings and craziness of it all—I’ve found that in Cameroon, unknown places and big crowds have the opposite effect. Even with a few other white faces in my midst, it’s hard to imagine any semblance of anonymity. (Maybe I’ve just become “villageoise,” as Cameroonians like to teasingly call their seemingly less-sophisticated friends as an insult…) Then again, novelties like real ice cream cones and pizza with actual cheese on top quickly make up for any qualms I may have about big-city-life.

The most noteworthy (but not actually noteworthy) part of the week was the dental checkup, which took place in a Seventh Day Adventist dental office. The building was nice and vaguely reminiscent of dentist offices back in the U.S., in a bland, ugly-floral-paintings-hanging-on-sterile-windowless-walls dentist office kind of way. My appointment commenced with a teeth cleaning, carried out by an extremely extraverted hygienist who serenaded me with Christian songs while aggressively attacking my teeth with various pointy tools. I was then sent over to have my mouth x-rayed, the resulting x-rays of which were hardly glanced upon by the dentist, who instead poked each of my teeth with his scalpel, counted them, and declared, one-by-one, “No cavity! …No cavity! …No cavity!” The power went out twice before the end of my appointment, which wasn’t especially catastrophic in the context of a dental cleaning, but, I imagine, could be somewhat more of a hindrance in the middle of, say, a root canal.

Aside from a few fortuitous surprises (such as receiving chewable children’s animal-shaped multivitamins from PCMO [“Peace Corps Medical Office”] upon my filling of a request form for “vitamins”), other medical interactions were boringly routine and mundane. Pee in a cup. Poop in a cup. Have arm pricked with needle. Fill out generic questionnaire. Some of these visits occurred at the Peace Corps office, but for lab tests, we had to go about fifteen minutes away to a third-party medical lab. So, one free afternoon, I taxied to the corresponding part of town, located the medical lab, had my five-minute-long appointment, and was waiting for a cab to go back to the Peace Corps house (i.e., submitting myself to the constant-stream-of-rejection that is hailing a cab in Cameroon: you stick out your arm and when a car rolls to a stop you shout out your destination and your price; if the driver accepts, he honks his horn and you get in. If he doesn’t accept [which is more often the case] he shakes his head and keeps driving, and you stand awkwardly with the pretended indifference of a teenage boy who just asked his crush to the prom and was heartlessly rejected). I had just experienced such a series of rejections when a woman approached me, asking if I’d like to share a drink with her and her brother. It being the middle of the day, and seeing no immediate danger in accepting such an offer, I proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon with my new friends, Marlene and André, who subsequently took me to Marlene’s mother-in-law’s house to introduce me to Marlene’s baby, “Khloe.” As in: Khloe Kardashian. As in: she named her child after none-other-than the American reality TV icon Khloe Kardashian. Standalone proof that the spread of American pop culture will be the undoing of all humanity.

Unfortunately, also while in Yaoundé, I got news from my neighbor back at post that she didn’t pass the “CAP,” the national exam required at the end of the fourth year of technical high school in order to continue onto the next year. This disappointment was compounded by the news I received before I left, that her brother has been excluded from school for being, at twenty, too old for 3eme. In Cameroon, it’s common for students to finish school at 22, 23, 24 years of age—or older—due to various factors, mostly centering on: 1) starting school late, and 2) not passing required national exams. The government, however, places restrictions on how old a student can be in order to frequent a particular grade – the result being that most students end up attending school with fake birth certificates. So, while in the U.S., overeager sixteen year-olds are waving fake IDs at bouncers and bartenders in the hopes of entering 21+ clubs and bars, in Cameroon, stubbly-faced twenty five year-olds are passing themselves off as teenagers in pursuit of their high school diplomas. My neighbor, for example, has a second birth certificate that says he’s 15, but he didn’t use it this year because he wanted to be eligible to apply for jobs that require you to be 18 or older. So, next year, he’ll just search for a new school and enroll with his second birth certificate.

Things like this are rampant in Cameroon (which, a few years back, held the honor of the #1 spot on Transparency International’s list of the most corrupt countries in the world). It’s not unheard of for students who can’t pass the national exam to forego the entire process completely, sending someone else in his or her place to take the test instead. While technically illegal, a lot of things in Cameroon are technically illegal – and that doesn’t stop them from happening all the time.

None of this is to say, of course, that no progress is made at all. As of last year, Cameroon has risen to 134th most transparent out of 182 countries – making it only the 48th most corrupt country in the world. Just slightly more corrupt than Maldives (a small island country located at the southwestern tip of India, the location of which my having had to Google serves as embarrassing testament to my geographic ignorance) and Pakistan. Who’s to say things don’t change for the better?

None of which, in any way, is to say I wish to be anywhere else but where I am right now. I love Cameroon and love being here. It’s just that after the initial shock and excitement of OMG-I’m-in-Africa wears off, and everything starts to fade to day-to-day and month-to-month normality, and things like seeing chickens tied upside-down by their feet to the handlebars of passing motorcycles—or people crammed four (or, as I once saw and still do not understand the logistics of, six) to a seat onto a single passing motorcycle—cease to be noteworthy, it’s sometimes easy to idealize the good parts of home and forget the not-so-good. Customer service jobs, missed buses, I’m-so-cold-I-can’t-feel-my-feet weather.

Of course, not everything becomes mundane and normal and unremarkable. I still experience more than my fair share of what-the-hell-is-going-on moments, all the time, every day. The stranger who sits down on the public bench beside me, strikes up a conversation, and proceeds to show me pictures of people I don’t know, on his camera, for 25 MINUTES, in search of a photo of a white person he met, once, two years ago, whom he is certain I must know. The call box guy I buy phone credit from, who, subsequently, without my knowing, steals my phone number and then calls me TWENTY-ONE TIMES  throughout the next night. The neighborhood children who, without fail, every time I arrive at my gate, form a small mass around the door and attempt to push their way into my yard, while I simultaneously fumble to shut said door as quickly as possible without slamming tiny fingers in the hinge. The same neighborhood children who, without fail, follow me around, in June, wishing me a Happy New Year and insisting it was they who delivered the kitten to my house, in the hope that I will give them candy or pay them, like I paid the neighborhood child who actually brought over my kitten.

My most recent what-the-hell moment transpired two mornings ago, when I received this surprise ALL CAPS TEXT MESSAGE (translated from French, like the texts in my last post – and, strangely, continuing last post’s theme) from a mystery phone number:

HELLO MY DEAR STERLING I COUNT THE DAYS DURING WHICH I HAVEN’T SEEN YOU LIKE AN ETERNITY. YOU MAY WONDER PERHAPS WHO COULD WRITE ME SOMETHING OF THIS SORT, IT’S JUST SOMEONE FOR WHOM YOU HAVE A GREAT VALUE. YOUR SECRET ADMIRER

And, then, a day later, this:

I BOW BEFORE YOUR MAJESTIC BEAUTY TO BEG YOU TO ACCEPT MY HUMBLE <GOOD EVENING> MY PRINCESS. YOUR SECRET ADMIRER…

It’s so over-the-top-can’t-possibly-be-real kind of absurd that I wondered, at first, if maybe another volunteer or someone else I knew was playing a strange joke on me… So, after the second text, I had a Cameroonian friend of mine call the number to see who would answer. It turns out, I think, that it’s a guy who recently helped me to buy envelopes outside the post office. I ran into him later the same day at a bar, where I was sitting alone, deleting old message on my phone, waiting for a friend to arrive, when he asked me for my number – which I stupidly gave, in a stupid attempt to make our conversation end more quickly.

I know giving your number to a strange envelope vendor in a bar probably isn’t the objectively best way of handling any situation, in any context. It’s not like I run around giving my number to strangers. I would never give out my number to a stranger like that in the U.S. And I shouldn’t have here, either. But, sometimes, when people go out of their way to help me—giving me a free lift on their moto when I can’t find a moto taxi, helping me to locate something in the market when I don’t know where to look—and then they ask for my number, it’s just easier to say yes. I figure, after all, what’s the harm. Most of the time, it’s in a nice I-want-to-be-your-friend (and not a creepy I-want-to-be-your-husband) kind of way… And, after all, everyone’s a stranger before you know them. I’ve met some of my best friends—male and female—in Cameroon this way.

That said, I’ve learned my lesson, once and for all, about being a little more discriminate in my divulging of contact information to people I don’t know well. At least, in the end, it makes for a funny story. It’s like I’m back in middle school… Except for back in middle school, I had no secret admirers. Nor have I ever, at any point in my life, had a secret admirer… At least not a secret admirer who wrote me anonymous love notes signed “Your Secret Admirer.”