Now accepting visitors!

I would love to have some visitors! Here are a few articles to pump you up!

A recent terrible CNN article - Don't read this wildly inaccurate article that only talks about two cities. Go down to the comments section and read the comment by Jack for a better picture of the country.

A flowery Washington Post article - Read this one, especially if you are studying for the SAT or the GRE and need to brush up on vocab. Perhaps the writer had a stack of flash cards next to the computer? The comments are also a bit more intelligent.

But really, come for a visit!

I promise this face and home-made key lime pie on arrival.

The food is great and plentiful. If you love mayonnaise, you will love this country! Mayonnaise sandwiches, mayo on your avocado salad, mayo on your spaghetti omelette! That brings me to another local delicacy - the spaghetti omelette. This dish will tempt even the most delicate palate with the crunch of spaghetti, the heat of the piment, the spiciness of the red onion.

A trip to Bertoua guarantees you the best poisson braise in country with gingery condiment vert. Ndole (a type of greens) is available all over and is generally served with plantains or manioc (a.k.a. cassava or yucca). The traditional dish of the anglophone regions is fufu-corn and djama-djama (more greens with something that always reminds me of more solid grits). The goal of every Cameroonian 'mama' is to get you 'bien gros' or nicely fat.

The people are generally friendly and very welcoming to tourists. One of the most common questions I get here is whether or not I like it. The next one is how do I like the food, followed by a quiz of what kind of Cameroonian food I've tried. You could even say that the people here are so welcoming that they don't want you to leave, hence all the marriage proposals.

Travel is getting easier within the country with new roads connecting the capital cities; I'm told that two years ago, it took more than 12 hours to get from Yaounde to Bertoua. Now it takes six. Despite how expensive flights are, once you arrive, the living is inexpensive. It costs me $8 to get from the capital to my town and $1.25 to get from Dimako to Bertoua. An average breakfast of beans, beignets and bouilli costs about $0.50. You would be hard-pressed to put away a breakfast that costs more than a dollar.

In spite of the dearth of pictures, it's also beautiful here. Every road is lined by eight-foot-tall "daisies," giant trees, tiny villages and goats galore.

The wildlife is supposed to be unparalleled. Just in the East, we have the Lobeke Preserve and the Dja Preserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Another wildlife possibility here is goat watching, as many a Peace Corps Volunteer will tell you. I recently had an integration success that just warmed the cockles of my heart; while many people can't pronounce my first name, the goats have clearly  been practicing their English pronunciaton every night. When I leave the house, I get greeted by name, "Beeeeeeeeeeeeeethh!! Beeeeeeeettthhhhh!!!!"

As a former French colony, Cameroonians enjoy exceptional vacation policies. I will have my summer break from the end of May to the beginning of September and get special time off to take around visitors, who can spread the word of Cameroon back home.

What I've been up to

Nothing much. The end.

Sadly, this is not too far from the truth. I finally got back to Dimako the first full week of January just in time to teach. I delayed my return till the last minute not because I didn't want to go to post, but because my house isn't ready.

I've been looking for a house almost since I got to post in August. I finally found one in late November and got it approved. Peace Corps paid 6 months rent in advance, so that they had the money to finish up the house. It needed the bathroom to be finished up, a couple light fixtures installed, a wall around the compound and a roof for the latrine. The money should have been a gracious plenty for all of that to get done and only the wall would take a long time, but today is January 26th and I still am not in my house. 

I've been living in my postmate's house for the past two weeks. It's been very relaxing to be in a house with a fridge/freezer, a stove and furniture. It's really made me want to get my house done even more, but in the two weeks plus that I've been back, the only progress that's been made is a really big pit to drain my shower room, glass being added to one window and finding out that the house needs to be rewired.

My postmate, Jon, and I have a pretty good relationship, but I'm worried that when he gets back from his travels (he's been gone almost this whole time), I'm going to wear out my welcome. I would just really like to move and be done with it.

In the meantime, I've been teaching my 2 classes (having recently dropped one, because we got yet another English teacher at my school), watching a lot of movies, reading, and being so bored that I exercise twice a day. It's getting unhealthy. No one should be that bored, but when your laundry is all clean and so is the house and everything is organized and your papers are graded and your letters all answered, what else can you do?!

I think that I'm getting deeper into crazy-cat-ladydom. I spend a good amount of my time just watching George. He found a mouse outside and brought it in to play with and I thought it was really cute that he was batting around the tiny mouse corpse and then swallowed it whole. Do you see what I mean?!

Hopefully, I'll be moving soon, so I can get back into gardening and less into cat-watching. If anyone has any small entertainment ideas, send them my way! I've got stuff for quilting (Thanks, Jackie!), so maybe when I come back, I'll have a bad-ass pagne quilt and my sanity! I've rediscovered that I'm very good at solitaire and napping.

Kribi - Part 2 or... Shiny Shiny All the Time Most Handsome Boy Demonkiller

This is the part where my vacation takes a turn for the fancy.

A few months ago in Bertoua, we had a few security problems (no permanent damage to anyone), but our Safety and Security Coordinator decided that it might be good if the volunteers in the East met the Governor. I missed out on it, but they had dinner a few times and apparently made a very favorable impression - such a good impression that he offered us the use of his beach house in Kribi.

"Beach house" might be a bit misleading..."Governor's mansion" might be more appropriate. There were 5 or 6 bedrooms all with their own a/c units and their own bathrooms. There were leather sofas, a balcony, a tower with an art museum, two kitchens and what amounted to a private beach.

It was paradise. We were a two-minute walk from the beach and the only other people who used it were fishermen. The water was clear and the beach was clean. I feel relaxed just thinking about it.

One night we even got to enjoy poisson braise caught at our own beach! I split a weird flounder-y looking fish with another girl. Delicious!

We went to the Lobe falls on our last afternoon. It's one of the few places in the world where freshwater falls go into saltwater. It was pretty tourist-y (and by that I mean the beers were expensive and there were people there selling jewelry, etc. The roads were still bad and poorly marked and there was no information anywhere).

The Beasts from the East

We left Kribi after a few days and headed to Limbe via Douala. Douala is easily my least favorite place in Cameroon. This includes Bafia, where I was constantly devoured by moumoutes. Douala is like every negative stereotype of New York plus 100% humidity and temperatures in the 90s all the time. It's noisy and dirty and smelly and the people are also noisy and dirty and smelly. I would be happy to never go back to Douala ever.

We hired a private car to take the five of us to Limbe, where we met up with a few more people at Arne's Cafe in the Limbe Wildlife Centre. I had a chocolate banana MILKSHAKE for lunch! It was magical. There was real ice and real dairy in it! Almost as good as Powell's.

We went to the botanical gardens our next day there and managed to get so lost tramping around next to a river that we apparently left the botanical gardens and may have climbed a fence to get back in... I felt very lucky to be wearing a caba, instead of something limiting my movements (I also felt very lucky to not get stuck on top and then have friends take pictures of me before offering to help. coughMattandQuinncough). The botanical gardens were lovely and we finished that trek off with drinks at a hotel bar overlooking the ocean - black sand beaches, volcanic rock, mist-covered mountains...and an oil rig. If you closed your left eye, the view was perfect.

Limbe Botanical Gardens - photo courtesy of Sarah Keene

The next day was my birthday - the big 25! We decided to take it easy on ourselves and went out to a resort called Seme Beach outside of town. Seme Beach is the Zephyrhills of Cameroon. It also boasts untouched black sand beaches, really nice lounge chairs, life guards, a saltwater pool, ice, and showers.

We spent a lot of time floating, exfoliating and being adults. We definitely didn't get into mud fights or paint our faces with mud and pretend it was war paint or make mud facial hair to have people guess who it was...

Now onto the epic bus ride! We arrived at the bus depot a bit before 8, waited in line for some time to get tickets. We got our tickets, hugged everyone goodbye, and loaded our stuff onto the bus. The bus was already almost full, but the driver wasn't there and the bus wasn't on, so we knew that departure wasn't imminent. Cameroonians were still getting on and off all the time, so we knew we weren't in a hurry...BUT the ticket guy had said it was leaving now.*

We hadn't eaten breakfast and we were planning on the good old-fashioned spaghetti omelette with mayo, but the bus was leaving! We raced to a boutique, bought some Creamz4Fun! (they taste like those elf cookies), some roasted peanuts and some plantain chips off a kid's head and got our seats...and proceeded to wait for an hour and a half.

This is a pretty normal travel experience here, but the thing is that you have to remember Murphy's Law. The first time you decide that you have plenty of time and you need to head to the latrine for a while - that will be the time that the bus leaves. The woman sitting next to Sarah had to run to catch the bus for the very same reason.

We had our refreshments - now for the entertainment! Back to Douala! On our way, we stopped and picked up 10ish people. They were standing in the aisles or sitting on little stools they'd brought with them. This got a lot of people's panties in a twist. We were on a VIP bus, which is supposed to mean A/C, tv and no stopping. You pay about 1000CFA more, but you get there hours before the other options and here we were stopping! There was an angry buzz in the air and it reached a dull roar, when we stopped before a checkpoint to kick off all the aisle people, passed through the checkpoint and then waited for those people to find motos to bring them back to the bus. A lady called the agence.

We stopped in Douala at their bus yard to refuel and then had to head to the agence itself to talk to the bossman. Our driver stopped at the agence for a millisecond and then we were off! ...or stuck in Douala's notorious traffic. We ended up having to circle back to the agence and drive around town with the boss for a while. Our driver was publicly fired right there in Douala, but drove us all the way to Yaounde.

At the last checkpoint before Yaounde, we stopped and picked up one person - a salesman by the name of Shiny Shiny All the Time Most Handsome Boy Demonkiller. He sold various products - toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, bath oils and mentholatum (I think it's like tiger balm). which he started pushing as a muscle cream and ended up pushing as a cream that would make you cry a lot for cry-die's (funerals).

Shiny Shiny, etc. found out we were American and told us all about his plans to get an American visa and find an American wife to cook for him all the time. He (of course) asked us if we were married. She and I are both married, but our husbands live in the US. When we explained that we were living apart, he exclaimed, "But who is cooking for him?!" We explained that sometimes men cook and that if he wants to marry an American he had better learn. He did not believe us, but he took notes for the book he's writing on love and relationships.

Sarah and I also spent a good amount of time being suspected of being spies. A woman sitting behind us shushed someone who was complaining about the aisle people, because "there are ears everywhere....like the FBI." We had someone who was very subtly turned around in his seat to listen to our conversation. He was anglophone, so to have a private conversation, we had to pretend to be auctioneers. It was vastly entertaining, but I think I might have to introduce some people to the "ob" language to pass the time.



*Cultural note: Time does not flow the same way here as it does in the U.S. of A. When someone says "J'arrive!" (I'm arriving!), they could be at your door, but the more likely scenario is that they are making their lunch, have to eat it, clean the dishes, clean their house and their shoes, find a moto and come over. "J'arrive!" usually means "You will wait for half an hour!" It's to the point that I usually tell someone that I am already at the meeting place, when I haven't left my house yet, so I only wait for 10 minutes instead of 30.

Kribi - Part 1

Two weeks ago Wednesday I got to Yaounde to get some blood tests done to see if there was anything wrong with me that could make me sick all the time.

I'm healthy! There's nothing wrong with me, except anemia, but I imagine the week of shrimp in Kribi plus beans galore here have cured me off all my ills!

After a few days spent in Yaounde going to labs and eating American food at Route 66 and drinking really delicious mojitos (with real ice!) at Hilton Happy Hour, I headed off to IST (inter-service training) at Kribi.

Kribi is one of two big beach resort towns in Cameroon. It's known for its seafood, white sand beaches and derangey people. I may be immune to a lot of deranging coming from the East, but I didn't find Kribi too bad in that respect. It's like anywhere where there are a lot of tourists - There are especially nice people, because they know a lot of their income depends on tourists and there are people who resent tourists and as a consequence, behave like turds.

The beaches are beautiful - white sand and big black rocks jutting out of the water. It was ripe for a Little Mermaid reenactment. The waves were big and the water was warm enough for swimming and cool enough to be refreshing. I am definitely a Kribi kid.

We spent the days doing sessions and the afternoons swimming and the rest of our time eating and freezing to death under the air conditioning. It was great!

The seafood was incredible! A few of us went to the fish market and I had delicious poisson braise. It was so good that I actually had a dream about it. The dream goes as follows: A fish mama walks up with a platter of fish flopping all around. I look up and say, "Now that's a fresh fish!"

I ended the week on a high note with some food poisoning and a quick trip to Yaounde to make sure that there was still not anything seriously wrong with me (Nothing a Bastos smoothie couldn't fix).

To be continued....

MY WORST NIGHTMARE

So during IST, while I was busy choosing which end to put over the toilet, I made a vow to myself:

I will go at least a month without getting sick.

I am determined.

After my first ever brush with food poisoning, I went for almost 3 weeks of perfect blissful health. I went out, I slept, I ate - life went on and I began to take my good health for granted again. What a privilege!

Then it happened. This morning I was getting up to brush my teeth and I had this weird awful cramp just under my rib cage and at my lower back. It was telling me something and that something was "Get thee to a toilet! On the double!"

I went and I felt better and I ascribed the incident to mystery shits and moved on with my life. I moved on to a very fancy breakfast of blue cheese and croissants (Thank you, Walid! You spoil us rotten!) and enjoyed it immensely.

I was ready to go out and take on the police station to make my report and then it happened again. Terrible cramps that made me go pale and race for the toilet.

Nothing happened.

I swear I spend more of my life thinking about my bowel movements than anything else. I don't think about my work or anything else nearly as much. I can tell you down to the half hour when I had my last movement.

To cut an already long story short, I made it through the day and my meeting with the police commissioner without "joining the club" and was feeling very proud of myself for not heading to the toilet for the past 5.5 hours, until I found out a potential cause for my torment...

Cheese. The greatest love of my life.

Have you seen the movie French Kiss with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline? She's eating all these gorgeous cheeses and talking about how there are more than 300 national cheeses. Then it hits her.

LACTOSE INTOLERANCE!!!!!!

And apparently it doesn't always go away. Ice cream and milk are fine, but I might have to say goodbye to cheeses for all time. I'm not ready for it to end. I need more time!

I'm hoping that with time we'll get back together. It'll be a joyful reunion.

And no one will shit.

Jungle Justice

I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "street justice;" I'm also sure you're familiar with hyperbole and alliteration and how wonderful they are. I don't technically live in the jungle, but Dimako is surrounded by it/ Call it literary license.

Friday I thoroughly regretted not having a camera on me. As I'm sure you're well aware based on this blog and my France one, I am not a photographer. After one of my favorite French classes ever, I even had the perfect excuse: If you experience life through a lense, you are not truly experiencing life, but observing it.

Anyway, one Friday I had just finished proctoring my first two-hour exam and was waiting on the bell to head over for my second one. I was planning on using the time to grade my exams, but the students were cleaning the teachers' lounge as a punishment*, so I was forced to wait outside and be sociable.

After some time spacing out in a fever-induced haze, I noticed the hubbub across the street at the gendarmerie (police station). There were a couple of people outside holding chickens and the cops were talking to them.

Apparently two former students of the Lycee Technique had been caught stealing chickens.

The cops marched the thieves across the street with the chicken corpses tied around their necks. They were paraded through the school, so the students could jeer at them and hopefully learn not to steal.

All the teachers just nodded and said, "La honte, c'est utile." (Shame! It's useful.)

I have definitely found that to be true in my attempts at classroom management. When I catch my students cheating, I march them to the front of the classroom (in front of 60 or so of their classmates) and point and call them cheaters. I tell the whole class the consequence for their actions - a 0 for the sequence and an hour with their nose on the wall. It seems very effective thus far; none of the same students cheated this sequence that cheated during the last one.

Side note: I've been rereading and rewatching the Harry Potter books/movies. In the first movie, when the troll gets let into the castle, all the students are panicking and screaming and Dumbledore yells, "SILENCE!!!" All the students calm down and be quiet immediately. I would love it, if that happened in my classes. Instead, I am forced to teach my idiomatic phrases with the conditional.

Example: If the students take crazy pills, they will be crazy. If the students hadn't taken crazy pills, they wouldn't have told their teacher, "I love you."

It made it even better that the students in question were 20 15-year-old girls.

*Students here have to do manual labor as punishment - using machetes to cut the grass, working in the school garden, cleaning the offices and classrooms, etc.

Infections I've had in Africa

mystery cheesy-looking arm thing: 1
yeast infections: 6 (Thank you, doxycycline!)
staph infections: 2
e.coli: 1
malaria: 1
ringworm: 4
mystery shits: too many to count

I just want to let it be known that I am a very healthy person:

I eat my veggies.
I exercise.
I sleep 8 hours every night.
I get enough sunlight.
I drink so much water it’s ridiculous.
I get enough protein.

I even take a multivitamin!

And still – I’m sick all the time here. In the past month, I have been almost constantly sick. I had malaria and then I was super anemic, because of either the palu or the antibiotics (could do the research, but don’t care enough to find out). As soon as I was getting done with anemia (a week of beans, beans, all the time followed by at least 5 days of beef for lunch), I get e.coli. E. coli was unpleasant, but not the worst, but it made me dehydrated and grumpy and the antibiotics were hell in a handbasket. I had a weird taste in my mouth all the time and felt like puking or passing out fairly regularly.

The day that I finished the antibiotics, I noticed a few bug bites on my arm looked weird. PCMO later told me it was staph. It was really gross-looking (picture shiny pus-filled bread mold on your arm). It hurt all the time. It even hurt, when the breeze from the fan touched it. That too went away after a week of antimicrobial soap, boiled, bleached and filtered water; and scrubbing with a truly evil (and properly sterilized) kitchen sponge.

I was feeling a little down in the mouth this past week, because my house situation has not improved and I think that walking around in a semi-perpetual funk caused me to literally walk under a black cloud and get soaking wet and get a cold.

Today I went to school and thought about staying to grade my exams there, but I decided that swatting at mosquitoes sounded too exhausting, so I came home and hid under my mosquito net. And here I stay, pajamas and blanket on with a low-grade fever and used tissues all around me.

And I know that this too shall pass…

But geez Louise! I am sick of being sick all the time!

Dr. Mendhi told my concerned parents (this is when I had malaria) that when I come back, I will never be sick again, because my immune system will be just that good. I think right now it’s in bootcamp and it sucks. It’s sore all the time. It doesn’t want to do it anymore. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Have you ever been in an exercise class and the instructor starts counting down “5…4…3…2.. just 10 more!” I hate that! Tell me when we are actually almost done! Don’t start counting down, until we really only have 5 to go!

I don’t know if in this metaphor, Cameroon is that evil perky instructor/liar or what. What I keep on hoping is that I am just getting all my sick for these two years done in the first 6 months, so that I can just settle in and relax and enjoy my good health for the last 21 months.

Immune system, I appreciate your fine work – keep it up, you can do it, only 21 more months to go.