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!

First impressions

Well, as of last Wednesday I am officially a Peace Corps volunteer. Left our training site Thursday morning, made it to Maroua last Saturday, then finally to post on Monday. Also have a new address...and you should probably send things to it:

Rose Edmonds
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 131
Maroua, Cameroon

My village is really wonderful -- about 7000 people, all of whom (well at least the ones that I have met) have been really friendly and welcoming...despite the fact that I do not speak Mandara or Fulfulde, and they do not speak French. My interactions with my neighbors take place pretty much entirely through smiling and hand gestures.

My house is also small but wonderful...the volunteer I am replacing left me a lot of furniture (couch, bed, bookcase, tables) and other household necessities (pots, pans, sheets, etc.) so that was a big relief. My compound is full of lizards during the day (big ones too -- like probably a foot long) and bats at night, but I have only had a couple of cockroach encounters, so I'm feeling pretty good about the whole pest situation. There is apparently a shortage of gas bottles in the Extreme North -- plenty of gas for cooking, but no extra bottles to put the gas in -- so my first couple of dinners at post involved me cooking ramen over a candle. It worked better than you might think. Then the principal of my school (who is really excellent) lent me an extra of his, so I have actually been able to cook myself real food...okay, I would have been able to cook myself real food, if I had had any. Mostly I eat a lot of beans. It's pretty okay.

My life continues to be very weird and surprising, and often also very fun. I spend a lot of time riding around on motos, catching rain in buckets to wash my dishes, and answering the incessant knocking on my door...which nine times out of ten turns out to be several small children from the neighborhood who shout "Bonjour!" at me (quite possibly the only French word they know), push their way into my yard, and then proceed to stand there and stare at me for several minutes. I think the novelty will eventually wear off.

School starts on the 6th, and as of right now I am still the only English teacher at my high school. Somehow I have managed to be at post for almost a week and accomplished nothing practical relating to my job, so I have no idea what grades I am teaching, how many hours, what my responsibilities are, etc...something to look into this week I guess.

I spent the weekend in Maroua picking up supplies and catching up with the other new PCVs, but am headed back to the village this afternoon. No internet there...or anywhere near there, so it's pretty likely that it could take me a couple...or a few weeks to answer e-mails. But I do have a phone, and you can call and text me on it through Skype, and I would really love to hear from you all...so if you do not know how to do that, you should probably talk to my parents or Kyle, who all have my phone number and know how it works to call me. Really -- I would love to hear from you.

Off to the market now, then back to post...hope all is well in the States! Please send me things (like text messages and hand sanitizer)!

Food

I think a lot of you probably remember that before I left, one of the things I was most worried about when it came to living in Cameroon was food...so now that we are about to hit the two month mark in country, I thought I would maybe give you the low-down on what I eat and how delicious (or not) it is...

The staples – the foods we eat pretty much every day here in Cameroon:

1) Eggs
Lots of them. Like easily four in a day. Usually for breakfast I eat some kind of omelette soaked in palm oil. Often it involves onions, and occasionally my host family will sneak some kind of fish part in there (possibly just as a funny prank on me). It is seasoned with maggi cubes, which I think is basically just a block of powdered MSG. Awesome. Then for lunch or in the afternoon I will usually buy a hard-boiled egg...they are sold from large platters balanced on top of people's heads or also often at the bar down the street from our training house.

2) Plantains
Fried, boiled, or even mashed. It is very unfortunate that they have so little nutritional value, because they make up such a substantial part of my diet. Mostly you get them burned almost black and dripping with palm oil, which is not so great (especially because they usually end up also being lukewarm), but sometimes you can get really thin ones, fried golden brown which are almost reminiscent of french fries...but sweeter.

3) Fish. Fish fish fish fish.
Sometimes I think about how hilarious it is that six months ago I did not eat fish at all...and now sometimes I literally eat it at every meal. Not always intentionally – Cameroonians are very crafty about sneaking it into your omelette in the morning, or onto your sandwich, or into your mystery sauce. Anyways, it turns out I actually like fish a lot...well, parts of the fish. Not a big fan of skin or bones or eyeballs, which end up in a lot of stuff here, but usually if you are vigilant you can avoid them. Or you can just close your eyes and pretend you are eating something else, which is what I did this morning when my host dad made me a sardine sandwich for breakfast (the stove had run out of gas, so this was the clear alternative to frying me eggs).

4) Starch
I guess I already mentioned plantains, but seriously we eat so many of them that maybe it is acceptable for them to be on the list twice. The bulk of the Cameroonian diet consists of starches – plantains, sometimes potatoes, but more often macabo and patates, which are kind of like potatoes, but drier and more flavorless.

5) “Legumes”
In French it means “vegetables”. In Cameroon it seems to be the name for any number of random green leafy products cooked until they have either reached the consistency of mush, snot, or grass. If you try to ask someone exactly what you are eating when they serve you something like this, they will invariably say “legumes”. Further inquiry into what KIND of legumes just adds to their mounting evidence that you do not actually speak French or understand anything they say.

6) Palm nuts
Palm nuts, in various forms, are the basis of pretty much everything you eat in Cameroon. They can be made into palm oil which is used to fry eggs, plantains, and sometimes potatoes. They can be turned into palm wine, which is actually pretty mild (in flavor and alcohol content) and which is usually drunk out of a gourd. Palm nuts can also be mashed with a king size mortar and pestle into a nut pulp, which makes up the basis for many Cameroonian sauces. My sister also claims that you can break open the pit and there is ANOTHER nut inside which you can eat...although I don't actually think it is edible. It felt pretty much the same as trying to eat a rock.

7) Manioc
Also comes in many forms, but my favorite is the baton. You will have to google pictures of it, because it is just the weirdest color/texture/flavor/consistency...but somehow it is also just outrageously delicious...especially when eaten alongside grilled fish and a cold beer in the shack next to the bar on Saturday night.

I've been going on and on to some of you about how much excellent food I am going to cook you when I get back to the States, so maybe now is an appropriate time to describe some of the things I enjoy the most here, so you know what to expect...as much as I love fried plantains and mystery fish sauce, here are the things I REALLY look forward to eating:

1) The Avocado-Spaghetti Sandwich
It is exactly what it sounds like...spaghetti, lightly coated in tomato sauce, topped with a mix of avocados, tomatoes, and onions...on a baguette. Delicious. This is what I often eat for lunch, and sometimes also for breakfast, if I can sneak out of the house quickly enough in the morning before someone starts cooking for me.

2) The Bean Sandwich
Again, exactly what it sounds like...literally a bunch of beans on a baguette. Somehow, just outrageously delicious. Especially if you get them from the bean stand on the way to the center of town...although it often takes a lot of explaining to get them to make you one (“Hold on...you want me to cut the bread and then put the beans ON it? Really?”...it's a pretty ridiculous idea).

3) Peanut Sauce
Cameroonians make excellent excellent peanut sauce. I am not sure what goes into it, but it has a different texture and flavor from Asian peanut sauce...often it also has chunks of fish or meat and other mysterious vegetables thrown into it, and is eaten over rice or (if you're lucky) mashed plantains. Delicious.

4) The Spaghetti Omelette
My family doesn't make them, but many do, and they can also often be bought on the street. It is an omelette with spaghetti in it. You eat it on a baguette. It is delicious. I will make them for you in 2012. It will be great.

I also eat a lot of bananas and avocados...although they do not have these in the Extreme North, where I will be moving in two weeks. It is kind of a mystery to me what they DO have in the extreme north...so far all I have heard is millet and onions. Oh well. One time I also made macaroni and cheese for my host family...which despite having to use powdered milk and laughing cow cheese (the only kind of cheese you can get, besides in the regional capitals), I thought was delicious. It got mixed reviews from my family...my sister's reaction was “Oh, so this is why all Americans are so fat,” but my 18 year old host brother and his friends ate absurdly large amounts of it as quickly as possible. Overall I would call it a success.

In general I like the food here a lot more than I thought I would, although every once in while I get stuck eating something that tastes disgusting, has a weird texture, and also has no nutritional value. But in general I am pretty happy to eat nut pulp and legume paste with macabo...until someone calls me to talk about the enchiladas he had for lunch.

It was a very fun weekend, which involved spending half my paycheck on gas station print pagne, eating an entire fish with my hands, and then somehow ending up dancing to Britney Spears and Shakira at a nightclub until four in the morning (we really wussed out – the party doesn't start here until 2, and usually goes until at least 6 if not 8 in the morning). Sometimes I wonder if I am maybe having too much fun here (but ain't no such thing, right?).

Anyways, training is winding down here and we are all gearing up to leave for post on the 19th. I am nervous of course, but mostly just very, very excited to have my own house, cook my own food, and start my real job. Miss you all and hope you are well...please send more news from home!

Much love,
Rose