The 4th of July

I returned to village this week from a month of traveling and conferences in the South, where I, among other things:

-visited seven of Cameroon's ten regions;
-saw crocodiles and hippos in the wild, and lions and gorillas at the zoo;
-participated in a conference to design Peace Corps Cameroon's new Youth Development program (first volunteers arrive in September!);
-met Cameroonian soccer player Samuel Eto'o;

...and celebrated the 4th of July, four separate times. It turns out that Americans who are not living in America get VERY excited about our country's birthday. The first of these 4th of July parties took place on June 29th at the U.S. Embassy. I guess each year they throw a fancy soiree, and this year's theme was “50 Years of Peace Corps”, which led them to invite 50 Peace Corps volunteers to help them celebrate. We all got ready at the Peace Corps house beforehand like we were going to prom, fighting over mirror space, trying on multiple outfits, fretting over jewelery and shoes, trying to figure out how to class up our pagne. We arrived early as the ambassador's wife had decided that as a way of sharing American culture with Cameroonians, the embassy staff and the Peace Corps volunteers would do a flash mob after the ambassador gave his speech. A lot of us had been in country so long that we didn't know what a flash mob was, but we went along with it anyway, and when Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the USA” came on after the ambassador finished speaking, we streamed down the lawn of the embassy and burst into dance. I'm not sure that the Cameroonians really understood what was going on, but the Americans called it a success. The rest of the night involved a lot of meeting and greeting (non-Peace Corps Americans as well as Cameroonians), delicious food, and plenty of attempting to look classy and grown-up while rethinking my decision to wear heels to a lawn party (particularly as it had been over a year since I had worn anything besides flats and flip flops).

I'm not sure the embassy was entirely prepared for the damage fifty Peace Corps volunteers can do to an open bar, but we must not have made too poor of an impression, because we were invited back a couple days later for the embassy's annual 4th of July barbeque/pool party. Without the distractions of ridiculous shoes, dance performances, or free drinks, I became more aware of my surroundings. As I ate my hot dog (so good) and mingled with embassy workers and their families, I started experiencing some culture shock. Here I was, standing next to a pool, celebrating my country's independence day with maybe a hundred other people, also from America and now living in Cameroon, and I realized that everyone else around the pool seemed to have a better idea of who and where they were than I did. Standing on American soil, eating American food, wearing American clothes, speaking American English, celebrating an American holiday, I looked across the grounds to the African forest and above it the mountains surrounding Yaounde and felt confused and terribly out of place. I was not so sure what I had in common with these people, many of whom were much older or younger than I am (there were more families than I expected), the majority of whom lived in Cameroon, but had never ridden a moto taxi, eaten a baton de manioc, or spoken Fulfulde at the market. Were we living in the same country?
A beer later and I found myself contemplating what we were celebrating. America's independence...but what is America? People, place, language, food? I watched a hundred or so white people in Africa drinking beer by the pool and acting like the land we were standing on was America and I wondered what made it so. Eating hot dogs while speaking English, wearing khaki shorts, talking about sports and listening to Bruce Springsteen?

On the last 4th of July, as an overwhelmed Peace Corps trainee on site visit to the Grand North for the first time, I had a boisterous and rather intoxicated volunteer at the end of her service inform me that if nothing else changed for me, at the end of my Peace Corps service she guaranteed that I would leave loving America. I've always been kind of mystified about the meaning of the word “patriotism” and how one loves a country. I'm still not sure how to define this place that I come from, but already after a year I feel that I can truly say that whatever it is, I feel a love for my country that I did not know before I left it.

A couple weeks later, I found myself on the very last leg of my journey, sitting at the dusty bus station in Maroua where I waited for a tired bush taxi that would take me banging down the series of potholes that is the road to my village. I had survived the sixteen hour train ride from Yaounde, immediately followed by a ten hour bus ride from Ngaoundere, and was looking forward to getting home, greeting my neighbors, unpacking my suitcase, and taking a bucket bath. As I sat waiting on a wooden bench in my worn out pagne dress, a Cameroonian woman in designer jeans and a nice t-shirt followed by her young daughter came and sat next to me. She struck up a conversation, asking me in beautiful French (so beautiful it was almost difficult to understand) what I was doing here, where I was from, etc.: the standard questions you ask a nasara sitting at a bus station in Cameroon. When I told her I was from America, she asked what part, and I said “Wisconsin,” giving my standard explanation of, “it's near Chicago.” She laughed and said she knew, and that she had been to the States several times. It turns out her husband is an international journalist, and they have actually been living in France for ten years (explains why I was having trouble understanding her French) and traveling the world, and she's just come back to Cameroon for a visit.

She turned to talk to some friends and I returned to my book, but a short while later I overheard her ask her friends if it was the Mundang tribe that lived in Mora (the town we were headed towards). Her friend said she didn't know, so I jumped in and said that no, it was the Mandara that live in Mora, and the Mundang live out by Kaele. At this, we both burst out laughing, and she slapped my leg and said “Of course it would take an American to teach me about Cameroon.” At this point she introduced me to her daughter:
“This is Hope.”
“What?”
“Hope. You know, espoir,” she translated into French. Of course I would need a French translation to understand the words of my native language. We both laughed again. We chatted some more, and I found myself asking her all the same questions Cameroonians usually ask me. Where do you live in France? People always ask me this question about America, despite the fact that unless I said “New York” or “Los Angeles”, they wouldn't really understand the answer (often they've heard of Chicago, which is how I explain where I live...sometimes I just say “near Canada”). After asking her where she lived in France, I realized I'd just done the same thing: unless she said Paris, I was not really going to understand. She explained to me anyway, laughing, and when I said I had never been to France, she immediately invited me to come stay with her. She asked me when I was going back to America, then said she would be there sometime next year, and could she have my e-mail address so maybe we could meet up. Officially the second time a Cameroonian has asked me for my e-mail, rather than just for my phone number or a description of the location of my house. She then handed me some type of shiny smart phone to type the address into. I took it nervously, looked at it for a minute, then blurted out “I don't know how to use this.” She laughed and demonstrated how to press different parts of the screen to make letters appear.

Soon after we climbed into our bush taxi, and an hour later, as we stopped at my village and I climbed out, she promised to e-mail. Will I go stay with her in France? Will she meet up with me in America next year? I guess probably not, but you never know. Whatever happens, I think we both learned something about how different we have both become since leaving our home countries.