Another long overdue update!

Once again I should apologize for the inordinate delays in posting. 3 months is a long time, and especially with the amount of down time that I get you’d think I’d manage to keep my blog a little more current. So today on the trip back from Ndélélé, as the goat and the two sheep on the roof got in yet another brawl and threatened to bash the top in with their hoofs, I vowed to sit down and share a little of what’s been going on in the East province of Cameroon.

Not surprisingly quite a lot has happened since September both good and bad. Let’s start with the bad so we don’t have that hanging over our heads.

Rachel (my stage mate and closets volunteer outside of Batouri) lost her counterpart on thanksgiving. He had had bad diarrhea then four days later died. I didn’t have much interaction with him, only occasionally when I would be in Ndélélé (Rachel’s village) but he was known throughout PC as a honest and hard working person. In fact the first time I traveled there, on the back on Benoît’s (my counterpart) moto in a trip from hell, he helped me tell Benoît, who I was still reasonable scared of, that I was way to sick to travel the next 300km we had planned. Anyone who gets me out of a trip through the bush on the back of Benoît’s Yamaha will forever have a place in my heart. Rachel of course is having a rough go, they were quite close.

Death provides an interesting lens through which you can view a culture. If you’ll allow me to make some sweeping generalizations of carve out some stereotypes…Southern Cameroonian culture, and specifically Kako culture, is generally very animated, conversations are filled with expansive gestures and exaggerating to the point of absurdity. If someone takes your seat on bus (I use the term ‘bus’ oh so loosely!) its appropriate to carry on as if they killed your first born, and then to let them know that by making you change seats they are in fact possible killing you as well. Thus to an American it seems like everyone is always yelling (well, they are actually) and about to break out in a fist fight (which happens surprisingly rarely). Yet for such an emotionally expressive culture that keeps nothing bottled inside, in matters of death they can be startlingly stoic. Meeting my old French teacher on the street I chatted with him for nearly five minutes before he threw in that his wife had just died a few days ago. People can be so seemingly unemotional that it really disturbed me when I first arrived. I’m not sure if it’s a response to the banality of death here or just a different way of expressing grief, or both. When I do seasonal calendars with my community groups as a way of assessing their needs they mark February-March and November-December as the “season of death,” a rather morbid way of expressing that this period of change between the wet and dry seasons is when most people get sick. I can’t help but imagine in, sort of a pop-psychology kind of way, that this is a reason it’s so hard to get people to plan and save for the future. When life is so ephemeral it follows that if you come by a little money enjoy while you can rather than cache it away for a future that might never arrive.

Interestingly, or rather disturbingly, whenever I told someone that I was going to a funeral they would get concerned and inquire if it was “my brother” who died, aka was it a white person, and look sincerely relieved when I confirmed that it was in fact a Cameroonian.
However there has also been some good in the past three months. Namely, the youth group project has jumped through all the hurdles and finally been approved by the Washington office, meaning that it is now on the web and accepting donations! I am immensely happy that the project has made to this stage as now I can be sure that this project is going to happen sooner or later. I can’t say I would be pleased if I came out of Peace Corps with this project as my only success story, but I believe this will be the most important and lasting accomplishment of my time here. The link to the project page on the Peace Corps site is:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=694-125

Anyone wanting more information is free to contact me; I have further descriptions of the project and community as well as budgets available for those interested. Hopefully by this time next year the youth group will have a fully functioning chicken farm operating completely independently of Peace Corps!

Though for now I have to get to the market before all the vegetables are gone (yes that’s right mom and dad, I said vegetables).

But before I go I want to give a ‘shout out’ to Aunt Emily for her birthday today! Also a much belated happy birthday to my sister- I still need to get your phone number btw. And if I don’t get another posting before Christmas, merry Christmas to everyone too!