A Sense of Direction

Many of you back home are familiar with my absurdly terrible sense of direction. In Madison, you've asked me to pick you up on the way to some familiar destination, watched me make a couple indecisive turns before finally admitting I don't know how to get where we're going. You've gone on a road trip with me and wondered how someone managed to make it all the way through college without learning how to read a map. Maybe you've been on a trail ride with me at camp, and witnessed a conversation like this:

Me: Hmm...okay kids, looks like we're going to do some trailblazing!
Camper: Umm...do you know where we are?
Me: Toooooootally. We're on an adventure!

It's common knowledge in America that I have a terrible sense of direction. Even if we were in Madison, Ann Arbor, or Devries Woods, it's likely that I didn't know where I was, much less how to get where we were going, or even back to where we came from. Then last June, I got dropped off in the middle of Africa and told to find my way around. How have I fared? Well, with the exception of my second day in training (where I lived in the only house that was not near any of the other volunteers' houses, and my host sister forgot to come walk me home and I got stranded in the middle of Bafia until my language teacher saw that I was almost in tears and showed me the way)...surprisingly well. Which isn't to say that I never get lost – there was a memorable occasion where I had no idea where I was and just stood on the side of the road eating beignets until my principal came to find me on his motorcycle and drove me where I needed to go...and also the time I was taking a cab by myself in Yaounde and only knew to tell the driver to go to the stadium, but when we got there I didn't recognize anything and made him drive in circles around it until he eventually refused and made me get out of the car – but that I do tend to be more aware of my surroundings, and have more strategies for getting myself unlost. For example, in pretty much any decent-sized town/city, if you get lost, all you need to do is flag down a moto taxi and tell them the name of the place you are trying to go. This gives you the opportunity to pretend that you were never lost in the first place. The moto drivers are not always convinced.

Me: “I'm going to Domayo.”
Driver: “DOmayo?”
Me: “Yes.”
Driver: “But that's in exactly the opposite direction you were walking...”
Me: “Umm. Duh. I know.”

In general, though, my knowledge of where I am and how to get where I am going is vastly improved, and when traveling in a group, I often find myself leading the way. My nascent sense of direction was put to the test a couple weeks ago when I decided to bike from my village to a friend's about 15 kilometers away. I had been there several times on a motorcycle but never when I had to know the way myself. I had actually only gone on one other bike trip, which was not altogether successful. Most of you will remember that in America, my biking skills are right up there with my navigating skills (i.e. pretty much nonexistent; I literally refused to ride a bike from the time I was 12 until I was 21, claiming I had forgotten how). Before leaving on this first trip, I managed to put air in my tires in such a way that caused all the air to go out of them while I was riding. Naturally, I did not notice that I was riding on two flat tires and just thought I was really out of shape. It was not until the next morning on my return trip when everyone started shouting and waving their arms and pointing to my tires that I realized there was a problem. So, I was a little nervous setting off on my own on this next trip, and decided it would be better to just not attempt to put any air in my tires before leaving. In America I am an almost OCD-planner, and usually have to think through several worst case scenarios and back up plans before feeling prepared to do something. I still do this here in Cameroon, except now my back-up plans are things like “Well, if I get a flat tire, I will sit on the side of the road until someone feels bad for me and helps me fix it.” Or: “If I get lost, I will ask someone for directions. If they don't make any sense, and I look confused enough, probably someone will just decide to accompany me.” This was my strategy for getting to the village a couple weeks ago.

So I threw my bike pump in a bag, strapped it to my bike (thanks for sending me some straps, Dad!), and set off for Tokombere. Sure enough, about half an hour into my ride (which I estimated could take anywhere from an hour to three hours), a girl around my age rode up beside me and started talking to me in Fulfulde, the lingua franca of the Grand North of Cameroon. Lots of volunteers learn Fulfulde, but it's not spoken in my village, so my Fulfulde is pretty much limited to asking “How much does that cost?” (Literally, that's about it...I don't even know the numbers very well, so when a vender tells me the price I don't actually know how much they've said, and usually just end up handing them an arbitrary amount of money and hope they give me change back) I did finally recognize the word “baskur”, because it's the same in Mandara. Aha! She is saying something about my bicycle. She thinks it is a nice bicycle? She likes my helmet? She wants to ride with me to Tokombere? I remembered the words for 'yes' and 'that's good' in Fulfulde, and so I smiled and nodded and said them. “Ooho! Boddum!” She frowned and pulled her bike over, then pantomimed pumping. Oh. My tires are flat. Of course. At this point she was clearly convinced of my incompetence, and probably slightly worried about the chances of me making it to my destination alive, so she stopped and helped me fill my tires, then we biked the next leg of the trip together before she arrived at her village and I continued on. Useko jur! I never feel so much like the stereotypical stupid rich white person as when I ride my big fancy Peace Corps-issued mountain bike that I clearly have no idea how to use.

I continued on my way alone, trying to quiet the increasingly anxious voice in my head that always thinks I am lost, even when I am clearly not. I did this by recalling the series of landmarks I had tried to notice on my moto rides: here is the village where some of my students live, and after that is that patch of desert that my moto driver insisted on stopping in that one time so he could chat with his friend, then that big dead tree, then that dip in the road that is shin-deep in water during rainy season and which my principal thought was hilarious to drive through at top speed that time I had malaria and he took me to the hospital. Here's a giant pothole, and coming up the dirt road, and now that bridge that looks like it is going to collapse underneath me, and now the pile of gas bottles that indicates the left turn into the village and...voila! I have arrived, with only one minor incident where I was out in the bush for longer than I thought I should have been, and couldn't stop thinking about the scandal that went around a few weeks ago when two men were smuggling cotton into Nigeria and stopped to take a nap en brousse and were eaten by hyenas. I saw lots of goats, cows, some neat birds, donkeys, and a couple dogs...but no hyenas. Whew!

Earlier this week I was in Maroua (the regional capital, about 60 kilometers from my village), recovering from another ridiculous illness when my program director arrived. In Peace Corps administration, there is a country director, responsible for overseeing everything, then four program directors, responsible for overseeing the different programs of PC Cameroon (education, health, agroforestry, and small enterprise development). My program director just started in January, and was coming to the Extreme North for the first time to visit our sites and see what we are doing. Basically, it was my first official one-on-one meeting with my new boss, and I was trying to impress...or at least not look like a total incompetent idiot. Because I was already in Maroua, he agreed to pick me up there and drive me back to the village. When he arrived at the house, I realized that although both he and his driver are Cameroonian, neither of them had ever been to the Extreme North before and expected me to guide them out of town and to my village. In his words: “We are like two blind men. How fortunate we have found someone who can see!” No pressure...So once again I pushed down that obnoxious voice in my head (“You're lost. You're lost. Oh my god you're definitely lost and are probably going to be eaten by hyenas...”) and tried to recall a series of landmarks. Here is the post office, we need to turn left at the giant topless lady...continue past the vegetable/haircutting market, make a right at customs...and yes! We are on the right road! At least I think it's the right road (“Oh my god we're lost we're lost we're lost...”) – yes, there is the spot where my bush taxi broke down five kilometers outside of town, and here's the field where my bush taxi broke down on Women's Day when we were trying to get to dinner with the ambassador, and here is the spot with the pothole that's so big that you not only have to drive on the wrong side of the road but you have to go all the way off the road to drive on the left shoulder...In my new-found confidence at giving directions, I found myself playing tour guide in French as well as giving directions, describing the villages we were going through (“that's so-and-so's village, he's a health volunteer...”) and the roads we passed by (“that's the road to Tokombere, but only if you are coming from Maroua, if you are coming from Mora you'll take this other road...”) until I realized I was perhaps being a little overzealous. We did, however, arrive at my house incident-free and had a really good, productive meeting, and I left feeling like I had managed to give the impression that I was not completely ridiculous. Excellent.

Approaching my one year mark in Cameroon (June 4th!), I feel like these are pretty good illustrations of what my life is like here. Often I wander around doing really ludicrous things (like riding my bike with two flat tires) until someone takes pity on me and helps me fix it, but sometimes I am also capable of accomplishing intelligent and difficult things that I could certainly not have done a year ago (like giving directions in French out of a major city to my village...this is definitely not something I could do in America, as anyone who has attempted to get from Milwaukee or Chicago back to Madison with me can testify...). I have almost survived both my first year of teaching (in the process of grading a few hundred exams, and then I'm done til September), and my first hot season (it's finally started to rain a bit in the last week...which right now means that it is often 120 degrees and humid instead of 130 degrees and dry, but overall it is getting cooler!) and I'm trying to figure out what I have accomplished this year and what I want to accomplish in the year to come. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I'm doing here – if I am “making a difference”, or how I could be doing it better; what problems I can solve and which are outside of my ability. Sometimes a year still feels like forever, and sometimes it feels like it's going to be over way too soon. Sometimes I am amazed at how much I have learned, and other times I can't believe how totally clueless I still am. The halfway point is a funny place to be.

Thanks as always to everyone at home for all your love and support – for keeping the letters and packages coming (special shout out to Nana and Grandad, Dr. Isom, and Bobby, for my spectacular series of birthday packages). I've just updated my “Things I Would Like” and “Books I Have Read” pages, so if you are interested in sending me things (it's probably a good idea) or in knowing how I pass the time while I'm sick or the power's out, you should check those out.

Take care and much love!

Rose