First Impressions

I know I've been saying for a couple posts that I would put up my first impressions of Cameroon, but I keep on forgetting or coming up with more exciting things to say!

En route to Cameroon, I was constantly cold (thin-blooded Floridian) and when I finally stepped off the plane in Cameroon 6 days late, I was finally warm. I took off my 5lb sweater and let my skin soak up the humidity.

I made my way to Passport Control, clutching my diplomatic passport and attempted to make my way to the right booth. The diplomatic line was closed, so I was stuck at the end of the line marked Autres Passeports/Others Passports (not a typo on my part).

I got my bags with the help of my Program Manager and a couple of PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers. By the way, this organization uses entirely too many acronyms). We hopped into the official Range Rover and left the airport, passing people holding things up for sale. Being from Florida, the land of Disney, my natural assumption was that these must be last-minute souvenirs for tourists.

Boy, was I ever wrong. They were holding up boa constrictors, still filled with meat. They were not souvenirs; they were for welcome home dinners.

In Yaounde, I saw people wearing pagne (think traditional African clothes) of all styles and colors, women balancing plates of bananas, avocadoes, mangoes, pineapples and peanuts on their heads, and houseplants from the US that were 2 stories high.

My first meals reminded me of the kebabs from Metz- sauce blanche and everything!

My second day I was driven from Yaounde to Bafia (where I am now) and I would love to tell you a tall tale about a herd of elephants causing a traffic jam, but I'm afraid the most exciting wildlife I saw were some bright yellow birds that are actually the weaver birds from the Disney Channel original movie "The Color of Friendship." I almost peed my pants in excitement, when someone pointed out their nests in the tree that shades our table at the bar.

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General update: You know how in my last post I talked about the moutemoutes and how they love me so much and that the bugspray is only like piment (the local hot sauce) for them? Well, those suckers not only made my legs look like something off National Geographic and my toenail polish look truly absurd, ....

They gave me a staph infection. Now I'm on two different antibiotics and I think that I'm going to have to be on a third for another infection that's brewing. Vie de merde. BUT I do know how to make yogurt and it doesn't need to be refrigerated, so there we go! Evidently, staph infections are pretty common here, but they're checking up on me all the time. My hope is that I am getting through all my medical nonsense here, so I won't have to deal with any of it later.

Man's Best Friend

You may think that this is going to be a discussion of the differences in the treatment of animals between the States and Cameroon, but you would be wrong.

This is about critters.

I have recently been going through this "everything deserves to live and has a place in the CIRCLE OF LIFE AND IT MOVES US ALL" phase. I can tell you now that it's over. Maybe it's that it doesn't really work in Africa.

Right now, my skin is a battlefield. Picture WWI. Mustard gas. Barbed wire. Pus. Blood. The dead and dying. (I may be taking this a little far, when I don't have my camera to upload the poorly lit and fuzzily frightening picture I took of my ankle last night)

There are these things called moute-moutes and they might look like slightly-bigger gnats, but they are not. Darwin would love them. They eat everything - bananas, pineapples and especially me. When they bite you, it stings a little and you look down and there's a spot of blood on your ankle, hand, elbow, foot, whatever. Then you know that you have a giant raised red itchy bug bite with a liquid filled raised head that sometimes gets bigger than a pencil eraser.

There are also of course mosquitos and ants.

And then yesterday, I found out about blister beetles. This is not something I pulled from Harry Potter. They are real. They land on you and inject ACID into your skin, which then peels up like you have been BURNED BY ACID, because you have. I think I might have gotten one.

Right now, there's a mark a little smaller than a deck of cards on my leg that is a really angry red color and is fevery and now my ankle is swelling...just after I got over have swollen ankles and feet from the heat.

Also, last night went to the bathroom. Dropped trou and got ready to do my business and a massive roach raced between my legs to hang out on the doorway, so I was effectively trapped.

I can deal with spiders. I can deal with moutemoutes. I can even deal with blister beetles, but there is something about a roach that I just cannot deal with. I attempted to kill it using my heavy-duty hiking boots, but pas de chance (no luck); it disappeared into the night.

(More happy things to follow. I'll try to get a picture of me with a million bananas soon)

Tu as bien dormi?

So in Cameroon, there is a particular order that you do all your greetings in. It starts out with "Hello. How are you?" ("Bonjour, ca va?" in the morning or "Bonsoir, ca va?") any time after noon. Then they ask you if you slept well.

My answer on Tuesday morning was "Pas trop!" (Not so much!)

So Monday night, I popped a couple of benadryl to try to get my sleep schedule on Cameroon time, because as my host mother said, "my clock is still in the US." It seemed to be effective...until around 3am, when I woke up with a start, because something was rustling on my Poptarts wrapper.

Now, I don't know about you, but I am pretty paranoid, when it comes to potential critters in my sleeping space. I not-so-stealthily got up and turned on the light. I approached the desk wtih caution. I saw something brownish-grey shoot across the room! Cue adrenaline rush. I spent the next half hour tidying my room and hunting the mouse/frog/boogeyman with varying degrees of success (My room got tidy. The Creature remained at large).

After another half hour of counting sheep, I was finally settling down to my midsummer's nap, when something FELL ON ME inside my mosquito net. It may have been the Creature. It may have been a cafar (a cockroach). It may have been a bobby pin...

The world may never know.

(PS First impressions of Cameroon/Bafia/Yaounde/etc coming soon!)