Breaking Through
10 Septembre 2008
If you got an email from me, you can imagine my excitement in finally being able to connect to a reliable internet source, and my computer functioning properly to connect to it. I apologize for all the typos in the previous post. I was so anxious to get something up in writing that I did not thoroughly check my writing. I don’t believe it caused for any confusion, but you may be thinking that I have a less than adequate writing style. Haha… or probably not, since you’re my friends and you realize I get about 2 minutes of internet a day. Our school finally got their wireless fixed, so although it’s slow – the term high-speed anything, except for perhaps a stampeding motorcycle barraging a pedestrian, doesn’t mean much around here – I can at least use it for free, and when I am not in class. It seems that not much could happen in two days, but when you’re in a fourth world country – which developmentally is the category to which Cameroon identifies – brushing your teeth becomes a point of interest.
My French is improving, perhaps minimally because we speak so much English to each other in class, but mostly I would assume because I have only been here for a week and half and feel as if I should be fluent by now. The over-achiever in me needs to settle down as I am perpetually over-reacting to things I “should be doing” here, that I would be able to do at home. I’m learning that “culture shock” is in fact a medical phenomenon in which certain phases take place. Apparently we are currently in the depression/withdrawal stage, which follows the initial excitement/honeymoon phase. I haven’t really felt depressed, but it is definitely very exhausting to constantly be in a state of awareness – my brain is never really turned off, and I am always feeling drained. Luckily I have bonded with these fellow SIT students – Laura from Smith, Laura from Davidson, Nora from Northwestern, and Abbie from Clairmont-McKenna - faster than I could have ever imagined. It’s amazing what happens when you connect over survival, and I can see myself staying in touch with these girls for a long time. They have so many of the same ideals that I do, and their reactions to events that happen and people in the group are so similar. This creates for a real sense of relaxation from some of the always -impending stress.
Mon petit-petit frere JoJo is so fat and cute. He rarely ever cries and watching a mother (or moreso Roselyn) raise a baby here in fascinating. There certainly aren’t any major differences, but their reactions to things the baby does are quite humorous. For instance, they feel the need to respond to every sound the baby makes, like they are encouraging him to speak more. So I hear, “mh-mhm, mh- mhm,” for like probably 4 hours straight at a time. And singing to the baby is a top priority – I have heard every French version of head, shoulders, knees, and toes that there is… if you can believe there is more than one, plus American rap songs which I’m sure the baby adores.
They also love to tell me to sleep, but then insist on waking me up when it has been too long. I feel as if I sleep with one eye open here, or at least one ear, because they will tell me to take a nap or go to bed early, but instead of knocking on the door to wake me up – they just say “Oh-lee, Oh-lee?” (that’s what my name sounds like here), and at that point I just have to be awake and ready to go. I think Arnaud is becoming addicted to the Nintendo and I should probably take it away. He plays with it for like 1000 hours straight, that one game, which he has beaten like 32 times, for hours. I also brought another game I found – but it turns out it’s just a video of the cartoon Sonic the Hedgehog. He watches it anyway and laughs at what he can see is going on even though it is in English – I probably laugh more because it’s the one thing that IS in English. I love the juxtaposition. And Arnaud, Roselyn, Boris, and I played Play-Doh for like 2 hours tonight, and I learned a lot of new vocabulary from the things they made with the Play-Doh – like le serpent (snake) or l’elephant or yeah… pretty much every cognate in the French language. Still I loved it, and we had fun.
My host father is very sensible, and he is very rational about the things he likes. For instance, we watch TRACE TV, which is MTV dubbed over in French, all the time because they love American music, but he only likes Akon because he is from Senegal, and in his opinion it is very difficult to get somewhere in the United States from Senegal. He thinks he is very lucky. My host mother loves Usher and Chris Brown, and Roselyn (yes, spelling correction since she gave me her cell phone number today) loves Rihanna. I gave them the American magazines I brought (US Weekly – thanks Jac), and I got handed the baby in response. I suppose that was a fair trade-off. While Maman was working, mon papa said that he thought American music artists were very beautiful, but he wouldn’t say it in front of his wife. He said she would be jealous because all women want only one man to themselves – and he said he couldn’t understand why. I guess I never really thought about it, but I sort of agree with him. I’m not sure why women are so obsessed with having one man to themselves when they could probably have many, or the point my father was making was that it doesn’t mean he loves her less if he is with another woman as well. Polygamy is kind of a national hobby here.
11 Septembre 2008
So best day of my life here by far. For one thing, I’m understanding my family much better, and my French is really improving. I may a chance at actually pulling off speaking French if I continue to stop speaking English when it is too difficult.
2 more bars of soap are in the toilet. Meaning I have no more soap, and we probably have the cleanest pipes in the whole town – I’m just going to guess from the 30 bars of Dial down there. I was choking myself not to laugh since my family was already asleep on both – yes two separate occasions.
I am going to the market with my mother tomorrow after school, and we are going to buy fake hair or extensions in America (la meche) for my braids (which I am sincerely very excited about – I said I wanted red fake hair), and a few dresses. FINALLY – I am going to get my hands on these gorgeous dresses. Wait until you see them!
So Thursdays while we are in Yaounde are student evenings when we are permitted to stay at school until 8 p.m. (since it gets dark at 6:30) to socialize with each other. This meant that we had from after school at 3:30 until 8 p.m. to do whatever we wanted. So by about 6 p.m., we were starving (since you wait as long as possible to eat in order to avoid eating something bad). Now, you must know, that all I had eaten was an 8 in. baguette with Nutella for breakfast and an 8 in. baguette with Nutella for lunch, so one can guess that I was a little sick of baguettes, Nutella, and any form of bread product, since that is more or less the staple of my diet in Cameroon. So by the time dinner rolled around, we were starving for something non-bread related. It was too dark to get a taxi to Bastos where most of the restaurants are (which we probably would not have wanted anyway since the majority serve cow skin or chicken on sticks), so we went into the corner store across the street to try to piece together a meal we could make on the Butane stove at the school. We were pretty sure that they sold “la vache qui rit” or Laughing Cow Cheese, and they also happened to have bag of extremely over priced pasta – so we decided to embark on creating home-made, Cameroonian style, mac ‘n cheese. Now this sounds like an excellent idea because we were starving and completely used to carbo-loading at this point – so anything that wasn’t a crusty piece of bread with chocolate smear is pretty much like I-could-die-and-be-happy-right-now food. So it costs us about $8 for all of these things (4000 CFA), and we hurry back to the school. Now before I even get into the preparation of the mac ‘n cheese, I have to recount the other story that went on in the corner store, elegantly named “The Melting Pot”– of what I’m not sure. Apparently, Cameroonians think that speaking in English somehow equates to speaking in a really high girl voice – so this extremely drunk Cameroonian man is trying to get my cell phone number in English, but he is speaking in his highest voice like a girl… and I can’t help but laugh uncontrollably because he wreaks of alcohol and sounds ridiculous. I’m dying of laughter and trying to say that I don’t want to give him my number, but it’s not really going all that well –so I’m literally inching away from him while Abbie is spending five hours arguing with the cashier because she was trying to rip us off. Point: Cameroonians think all English speakers are women.
So anyway, we get back to school with 3 bags of pasta, 2 wheels of “la vache qui rit,” snack wedges, and 2 packages of instant milk in order to make this fabulous pasta dish. Now, first off, I feel like I haven’t eaten at this point in like 3 days, maybe because of perpetual food poisoning (another story) or maybe because the food is just terrible, either way – so I’m like trying to hurry this process as much as possible, but we can’t work the stove because you have to turn on the butane tank and then light the burner with a match, and Abbie’s hair is about to be lit on fire because we have no idea how much butane is coming out, and her head is about an inch away from the burner. So finally, the burner lights, and we begin boiling the water, which takes like 3 days. After that, we put the pasta in the pot, and a whole host of bugs fall out of the sealed bag into the pot. Since we’re starving, and we’re in Cameroon, where sanitation is the least of your concerns, we decided not to worry about the bug carcasses floating in our pasta and waited for it to cook. Finally, bugs and all, the pasta is cooked, and we begin dumping triangles and triangles of cheese, plus instant milk powder into the pot, grab it off the stove, set it on the floor, and go at it with 4 forks. Needless to say, even with the added insect protein (which you couldn’t see from the oregano we added), it was delicious, and we finished probably like 3 pounds of pasta. Finally, satisfied. Plus, student evening usually equates to being introduced to some sort of alcoholic beverage – some really disgusting whiskey in this case. However, I don’t need to tell you what happens when you haven’t eaten in about 3 days, or have been food-poisoning all over what you have been eating (yes, food-poisoning is a new verb), and you are underweight – one drink of alcohol is enough to do it. So we’re really having a grand old time.
8 p.m. rolls around, and our teachers escort us home, and at this point we’re totally fine from the pasta and whiskey, and get home. And I can’t say to my surprise, but to my dismay, I return home, and come to find another ENTIRE meal waiting for me there. And not just any meal – the most interesting/bizarre/disgusting/traditional/somewhat okay meal you could possibly prepare. This consisted of: barbecued fish – which translates to fish heads and tails, with the skin on, put on some sort of grilling mechanism, cassava – the worst tasting, bitter vegetable on the entire planet (looks a lot like raw intestine) and has the texture of cartilage, and Mkova, which is corn mixed with mashed vegetables and oil from palm nuts. Okay so, I’m am stuffed, and about to die from over eating insect-ridden mac n’ cheese, but we have guests over. Another cousin is here from the university, so I cannot ditch out on dinner. I manage to force down all of these items – which by the way are eaten with your hands, and dipped in straight up mayonnaise. Plus afterwards, they usually have fruit as a dessert, and it’s like a running joke in my family to give me one more piece of fruit for every person at the dinner table once I have finished. I think this is a ploy to fatten me, but I haven’t quite caught onto the language yet. And if that wasn’t bad enough, friends, I have been drinking the water because they re-fill the mineral water bottles with tap water and put it in the fridge, and then put it on the table for dinner so… (I think my family is trying to poison me)… so while I’m building an incredible resistance, I really have had perpetual food poisoning for going on 48 hours. But I’m optimistic and grateful because I think – I definitely wouldn’t be experiencing this to the fullest if I didn’t have food poisoning in Africa, right? So it’s part of the complete survival code. I’m a little weak, but I’m surviving. People survive. Cameroon has taught me that life is more than FDA sanitation codes and readily available antibiotics. It’s more about living with a little less control, and a little more vibrancy.
It’s really interesting to me that Cameroonians are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, but in the cruelest sense. I suppose because Americans are so individualistic, it’s hard to recognize harassment in America, which is a completely normal/daily activity to people here. Being white, I stick out, and everywhere I go, I’m constantly getting grabbed or hissed at (the noise to get a woman’s attention). It’s actually extremely frustrating, and you cannot even walk into a store or market without 30 people begging you to do this or buy that. Sometimes I do just want to mentally escape. I just want to relax, and go home – not home in the sense of wanting to leave Africa, but knowing that I can get away from this. It breaks my heart that these people can’t get away from this. This is what life is. There isn’t anywhere to run home to in 4 months. However, Cameroonians never seem to be disheartened and respond to rejection, despair, and rudeness with little worry. An admirable quality since Americans seem to get hung up on just about every little comment made to them. There is a lot to be learned from these people – and it’s really nothing you need to talk to them about. Observation is critical to enlightenment.
My host father also has some odd tendencies. For instance, in order to get his vitamins he cracks an egg in a glass and then fills the rest of the glass with beer, and then drinks the frothy combination. He does this 3 times. Now I hate to judge – but wouldn’t a multi-vitamin for his 50+ be a little easier, and a little less typhoid?
13 Septembre 2008
My feelings about learning French are always changing – some days I can understand everything and some days nothing. I suppose that’s the ongoing challenge of learning a new language.
My mother took me to the crazy market today – Marché Mokolo – where one can find the best deals in town, but at the price of severe harassment, grabbing, and heckling. My bicep muscle was probably separated from my bone approximately 30 times, but we managed to buy me three dresses, fake hair, and a whole host of groceries for about $40 (20000 CFA). My dresses are very beautiful, and you will hopefully get to see some in pictures. Roselyn also braided my hair yesterday, and it took 4 hours, and feels, at the moment, like I have a constant headache. It has red in it, and ends about mid-way down my back. I’ve never had hair this long, and it is very heavy, but I love the way it looks. My mother keeps calling me “la fille africaine.” Between my dresses and my hair, I practically fit in. Or not.
14 Septembre 2008
So Abbie and I braved Marché Mokolo alone this morning, and I managed to bargain for another dress, which ended up costing me 2000 CFA (or about $4 – what a bargain!) but the stress of being at the market for even two hours is slightly unbearable. There are more people in one square block of space than one could imagine, and every male either has to ask if we’re married, have a baby, or need what they happen to be selling. Thinking of creative ways to reply becomes a bit of a chore… makes me want to just walk into a Target, where everything is in one place, and no one bothers me. The human contact is compelling, but constant pressure is frustrating. One of the saddest things might be the contents of what they’re selling – mostly second hand items sent from the United States/Europe; Cameroon and other African nations become the dumping ground for things we don’t want, and African markets become glorified Goodwills. Every baby toy, pair of shoes, and sweatshirt has been used before, and while no American would want half these things, I can’t fathom why an African would either.
I also become staunchly aware of how “removed from the process” Americans are. We just allow the butchers to carve our meat and package it in hermetically sealed bundles for our grocery store shelves. Well I certainly walked into a market today where the butcher of whole cows, pigs, and feathered chickens was cutting meat on a 2x4 within a foot of the apple stand – and how when my mother bought a kilo of beef, it was thrown in a plastic grocery bag and placed in the same bag as my dresses. Now while it didn’t bother me, I couldn’t help but think that “things touching” and “contamination” like this would never be tolerated in the states. How privileged we are to have basic expectations of how our things should be handled.
Another point of sadness today had to be when my family took me to the zoo. While I was very grateful to go to the zoo, since I LOVE small animals, this zoo was certainly not what I had in mind. Mangled cages and marred animals, without a zookeeper in sight, sat in about a block of space. Most of the comments coming from my family at each of the cages were how much they enjoyed the tenderness of that animal’s meat (like monkeys, crocodiles, and snakes). Plus, one cage to the baboons was apparently broken since a baboon was roaming around the paths with the zoo-goers, and no one seemed to care. It was actually extremely aggressive, and we had to ward it off for our own safety a number of times. A part of me understands zoos in the United States, since many of the animals in them are not native to our climate zones, but in Africa, where on the other side of cage fencing lies their natural habitat, it’s difficult for me to stomach. It’s been a rough day, but school is in session tomorrow again, and that is always promising to me – I’m positive it will all be all right.
15 Septembre 2008
Today was not the good day I had intended. I was not able to go to school today because of sickness, horrible vomiting, and instead had to make the trek to the hospital – which cost me an arm and a leg. I had to have blood smears (yes, I asked to see that a new needle was used) for malaria, and I will receive the results tomorrow. On a positive note, though, it was interesting to see how my family took care of me. My host mother prayed over me, and said she knew I was going to be a warrior (une guérisse) about this. I slept for most of the day – besides the trip to the doctor – and my friends checked on me frequently. I still feel very weak, although my stomach is a bit better. However, my mother did try to feed me an omelette sandwich like 5 minutes after throwing up because she said eating would clear/stir up the sickness. I simply had to refuse that. But from father brought me APPLE JUICE – and I was pumped because I haven’t had juice – or a beverage I can trust – for almost 2 weeks. I’m looking forward to school, for real, tomorrow.
