Kar balaye?

For the record – today is September 5th, 2010. I will only have internet access maybe once a month when I go to the city, so I am trying to blog multiple times and will post them all at the same time when I have internet.

As of yesterday I have officially been in country for three months...and as of tomorrow I will have been at post for two weeks. I have spent most of my time in village setting up my house, figuring out how to feed myself, planning lessons, meeting people, collecting rain in buckets, and attempting to learn Mandara. I have also read over a thousand pages and watched an entire season of the Office. I am usually in bed by eight (especially when the power goes out, which happens pretty regularly when it rains, and it's been raining almost every day), which means I am usually up by four or five. I am loving living alone, and my house is wonderful, even though I get the occasional cockroach and my yard is full of lizards (I counted six at one time, just in my latrine...) during the day, and full of bats at night. You know how it takes awhile to get used to the sounds a house makes the first few weeks after you start living there (Kyle and I thought someone was breaking into our apartment pretty much every night our first couple weeks in LA)? Imagine lying in bed alone in your house in Africa, in total darkness because the power is out, with lizards running across your ceiling (my house has a tin roof, but underneath that is a wood ceiling, and they like to hang out in the space between) and bats flying past your window screeching. I have found that a lot of Peace Corps is choosing your battles, particularly when it comes to being afraid or disgusted. I can CHOOSE to lie in bed awake and terrified, listening to all these weird noises and imagining them to be something horrifying...or I can choose to believe that they are lizards and bats (which they usually are), choose not to be afraid of them, and go back to sleep. Usually I am capable of this.

My village is really wonderful – small, “traditional” (a PC term that I will someday unpack...here it means that most people don't speak French and haven't gone to school, live in large family compounds (multiple wives for a husband; flocks of children, chickens, and goats running around), sit on mats on the floor, wear boubous and pagne exclusively (no Western-style clothes, like in the South and bigger cities), etc.) and quiet...although also very friendly. I am in a funny position of knowing only a handful of people, but having EVERYONE know me...Last week I was at my village's market, standing next to my friend Claire (a PC volunteer in a nearby village; she is also white, but that is pretty much the extent of how similar we look) and a man I didn't recognize came up to us and said “Rose! Rose! Which one of you is Rose?” and I said “Oh, it's me.” And he shook my hand, then stopped and said “What? You don't remember me?” This happens a lot. Also, while most people here are very welcoming and seem genuinely glad to see me, I seem to have a bit of a terrifying effect on children under the age of two, who have never seen a white person before. On multiple occasions when I have stopped to say hello to people, their toddlers look up at me, their eyes get huge, and then they begin to scream in terror, burst into tears and run in the opposite direction. Their parents think this is HILARIOUS.

I have been making friends with the neighbor kids across the street...they call me alternately “Hose” and “Ross”, and are tirelessly (and so far somewhat fruitlessly) trying to teach me Mandara. They know only a few words of French and a few of Fulfulde...and I know approximately three words in Mandara, so it is quite a battle. They are very patient, though, and we make lots of hand gestures and laugh. I am pretty pumped about learning Mandara, and am in the process of finding someone (preferably over the age of 12...who also speaks French) who can give me more formal lessons. It is an Afro-Asiatic language with maybe 40,000 speakers in northern Cameroon and southern Nigeria, and a pretty exciting consonant inventory – this morning my neighbor taught me a word with a voiced implosive bilabial stop. Yeah. You're jealous. Those things are RARE. It also has tones, like Chinese, although only three of them. I have never learned a tonal language before and am pretty intimidated...but am going to take things one at a time. Also, just for the record, although my Bachelor's in linguistics is very useful here, it did not make me such a master linguist that I was able to independently document the entire phonetic inventory of Mandara (pharyngeals, bilabial implosives and all), recognize three separate tones, identify the language family, calculate the number of speakers, etc. etc. in my first two weeks here – no, my wonderful father found me a really nice overview of the language (created by a linguist from Kyoto in the late 1960's, I believe – can't find the full citation right now), and so I've been using that as a baseline to process what I hear from my neighbors. I always feel successful when I go back to the word list and find that I have accurately elicited and transcribed a word in the same way.

School starts tomorrow, so naturally instead of planning my lessons I have decided to spend my evening writing a rambling blog post about my village, the Mandara language, and now the Cameroonian educational system. So you understand what I am talking about when I talk about my classes, here is a basic overview of how a Cameroonian high school (lycee) works...at least in the Francophone regions (Anglophone has an entirely separate system, that I will not get into right now...):

The grades:

Sixieme (6th)
Cinquieme (5th)
Quatrieme (4th)
Troisieme (3rd)
Seconde (2nd)
Premiere (1st)
Terminale (Last)

Grades are opposite the American system, so the 6th graders (sixiemes) are the youngest, while the terminales are the oldest. 6eme is the equivalent of 6th grade in America, with terminale being about the equivalent to senior year of high school. There tends to be a very wide range of ages in each class, so you might have 10 year olds in sixieme sharing a desk with 14 year olds...terminale can range from 16 to 25. There is a HUGE shortage of teachers in Cameroon, so class sizes tend to be very large (100 or more students in a class), although decreasing in size in the older years as more and more kids drop out. The Cameroonian educational system is all exam-based, with large national exams (kind of like those standardized state exams we would have to take every few years in public school, except that they determine your future) at the end of 3eme, 1ere, and Terminale. The national exams cover every subject you study in school and are VERY difficult. If you do not pass, you do not move on to the next grade or graduate. This causes the classroom to be very exam-driven, with a lot of focus on copying and memorization, and not much at all on critical thinking. So while to graduate high school kids will have had at least seven years of English classes and successfully passed an exam, they may be completely unable to hold an actual conversation in the language.

I will be teaching sixieme, seconde, premiere, and terminale. Five hours a week of sixieme, then three hours each of the others. This means that tomorrow I will be alone in a room with over a hundred 10-14 year olds who speak no English. This also means that half of my classes (premiere and terminale) are exam years, and if I do not do my job well, they will not pass their exams, and will not move on or graduate high school. No pressure or anything.

Anyways, I am trying to take things one day at a time (my general Peace Corps philosophy), and come into class prepared and enthusiastic...and ready to work my pants off. I am very excited and very nervous. Also, my principal (I would like to preface this by saying that he is REALLY excellent, and I am super excited to work with him) told me yesterday that he was still working on the timetable (schedule of when I teach what class) but would bring it to my house today...It is now five o'clock and I am starting to think he is not coming. So on top of everything else, I do not know which classes I am teaching tomorrow, or when I am teaching them. This is something that would have driven me CRAZY in the U.S., but which doesn't faze me here.

This is one of the big differences I have noticed in myself here – my friends are shocked when I tell them that in the U.S., I am the person who is ALWAYS prepared, who ALWAYS has the things she needs, knows what needs to happen, how to do it, and when to be there. Here, I jump on a moto one morning to do some curriculum planning with the other TEFL volunteers...I show up at my friend Liz's house. She asks:

“Did you bring your computer?”
“...no.”
“Your USB drive?”
“...no.”
“Textbooks?”
“...no.”
“Do you even know what grades you are teaching yet?”
“Hmm...no.”

And somehow I am not worried. And somehow it all works out anyway. This total lack of preparedness has been balanced out, however, by another surprising attribute – where at home, I would get lost driving around my hometown, couldn't read a map, etc., here I am an expert navigator, and somehow always seem to end up in front of the line, leading the way to the market, to downtown, to someone's house...often through cornfields and down tiny dirt paths. There are no street names and no maps, and I have to rely exclusively on my sense of direction...and somehow I always get us there. Often I even find a shortcut. Do you believe it?

Anyways, despite the fact that I don't know what classes I am teaching tomorrow, or what time they start, I should probably do some work tonight...especially seeing as I spent most of yesterday drawing elaborate charts for my classes in different colored pens, rather than planning actual lessons. And in about 14 hours, I will be standing in front of 100 children, speaking French (yeah...first day will be in French). Yup. I should probably get to work. Hope you all are well! Much love!