Six months!

This past Saturday (December 4th) marks the six month anniversary of my arrival in Cameroon. How did I celebrate this momentous occasion? Well, my day began as usual around 5:30 (it stops seeming so early when you're in bed by 8:30 every night). I drank a cup of coffee, read a book (see my “List of Books I've Read in Country” page), then hauled out my buckets and spent an hour scrubbing dirt, sweat, and miscellaneous filth out of my clothing. After hanging it out in the sun to dry (one nice thing about living in the desert – clothing dries faster in the sun here than it does in a dryer at home), I ate a bowl of spaghetti (come on, breakfast options are limited in the village...plus I live alone, so there's no one here to judge me), got dressed, and headed over to the lycee (high school). I spent a couple hours filling out report cards, writing grades over 20 (10/20 is passing; 15/20 and above is overachieving) in tiny boxes, then multiplying them by a coefficient (each subject is weighted differently in each grade) and writing a predetermined comment (18/20 is “Excellent”, 12/20 is “Assez bien” ('good enough'); my favorite is 9/20 – “Mediocre”) and scribbling my signature. I did this about a hundred times (halfway done!), then threw in the towel and headed back home. There I raked my yard and turned over my compost piles, discovering all kinds of horrifying gigantic insects in the process. Feeling pretty accomplished, I grabbed my Ipod, set a chair out in the shade of my tree, and passed a couple highly enjoyable hours watching a swarm of delighted lizards chase the bugs that I had just made homeless.

Sitting in the shade, listening to Lil Jon, and watching three particularly large lizards chase a smaller one who had managed to dig up some kind of huge (like seriously – bigger than my pinky finger), disgusting larva, I suddenly began to think about how I used to spend my Saturdays. Sleeping in til 10 or 11, maybe going out to breakfast (bacon and eggs instead of spaghetti), doing some shopping (buying things off a shelf instead of out of a bucket, not spending ten minutes arguing to get 10 cents knocked off the price of tomatoes...), hanging out with my boyfriend (instead of a pack of lizards)...

The funny thing about being away from home for six months now is that my “normal” life in the States no longer sounds that normal, and unless I stop to think about it, I don't necessarily realize anymore how weird it probably is to have to shake lizards out of my bucket (they fall in and can't climb the slippery sides) when I want to “shower”. Six months feels like a significant landmark – when I first got here, it felt like so much happened every single day but somehow no time was passing, and the date when I would come home never seemed to get any closer. Now I'm wondering how it got to be December so fast (although part of that might have to do with the fact that I spent a considerable part of November sleeping off malaria and amoebas) and eighteen months isn't seeming like that much time to do all of the work I want to do. My stage (training group) is no longer the newest – the stage that arrived in September swore in earlier this week and is on their way to post. The stage that took us on site visit and showed us the ropes is now back in America, and I find myself now in this funny position where I am expected to know how to do things (I've been here half a year!), and yet I am still often so absurdly clueless.

Fortunately, I've now been here long enough and done enough things that aren't completely ridiculous that people here (my colleagues, neighbors, etc.) have realized that I'm not totally helpless and do know how to do some things (like teach English...at least sometimes). I think this has helped me make the transition in people's minds from being a total crazy to being perhaps charmingly quirky (at least this is my hope). “Oh that Hose. She is still almost completely unable to form a logical sentence in Mandara, but she does have some cool pictures of America and she's definitely good for a few laughs...” At the very least I think I provide entertainment for the village children who love to shout hello to me as I walk to and from school. They don't speak French, but have learned “Bonjour Madame”...or more often, “Bonjour Monseiur” (lots of local languages around here don't distinguish between masculine and feminine; I've spent a lot of time in 6eme explaining that your mother is a girl and your father is a boy)...although often when they say this, I pretend they are saying “Bonjour ma soeur” – “Hello my sister” – much more pleasant. Anyways, after one of them gets up enough guts to shout hello to me and they find out that I am, in fact, capable of responding, each one (children usually travel in packs of about ten here) proceeds to greet me (the littlest ones usually shouting something that sounds more like “Banjo Adam!” than anything else) and then dissolve into giggles. This isn't to say that I've won over everyone – it's still a normal occurrence on my walk to school in the morning to pass a parent who has decided to play a hilarious prank on their toddler, and waves them right in my face as I walk by, cracking up as the child begins shrieking. This seems to have the same effect on small children as if their parents were dangling them over the edge of a lion's cage at the zoo. Hilarious.

Anyways, I am now approaching another Peace Corps landmark – In-Service Training (IST). I will spend most of December down south, reuniting with the rest of my stage and our counterparts at a hotel by the beach. The alleged purpose of this trip is for new volunteers to receive further eduction on health, safety, project planning, and funding opportunities...but the fact that they are putting all of us together at the beach makes me wonder if part of it isn't just Peace Corp saying congratulations on making it this far, and thanks for not panicking when you were on your own for the first time and deciding to quit and go home. The first three months at post are supposed to be the very hardest part of this whole experience, and I'm looking forward when I return to the village at the end of the month to really being able to sink in to life and work here, and figure out how to get the most out of the next eighteen months.

Thanks, as always, for all the letters/texts/packages/love/support, etc. You have no idea how much it is appreciated. Much love!