This blog is solely the responsibility of Rebecca Hartog and does not reflect the views of Peace Corps.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

One big step

Lately (roughly the last month, minus IST), I’ve been feeling a bit blahblahblah. That is, a general malaise, marked by occasional spikes in my spirit, but for the most part, there’s been a decent amount of pathetic self-pity. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself – this experience has been much harder for me than I imagined it would be – but I feel as though in some ways I’m not living up to my own expectations. Ironic considering that all along, I said I had no expectations, but those little buggers just crept up on me, so insidiously. And now here I am feeling… just crappy. Self-doubts plague me: am I doing enough work? At the rate I’m working, will I really make any legitimate difference or contribution to this community? Am I trying hard enough to integrate? Will I ever feel like I have “integrated”? What will it take for me to feel like a success at integrating, to feel like I belong here? All of these doubts make me feel unhappy. Volunteers tell me this is normal, and that after about a year, things just click and you start to groove. Lately I've been doubting that wisdom - at one year, will things click, or will I just become complacent in my unhappiness? Lately, all of these thoughts have made me consider how nice it might feel to just give up and ship back home to the states.
Anyway, it was in the midst of these kinds of thoughts that I was sitting in my living room this afternoon, about to get ready to go to market, when I heard some ruckus outside my front door. I opened the door to find my two male neighbors, tearing apart my decrepit and badly-in-need-of-replacement wooden stairs leading up to my front porch. Awhile ago, the top step caved in (probably from rotting), so now you must make an almost comically large step up onto my porch to bypass the fallen soldier (impossible for my neighbor’s 5-year-old little girl to accomplish).
About a month ago, when it first crapped out, my neighbors commented that I needed to get it repaired. I know, I said sheepishly. I didn’t really know how to explain to them all the barriers involved to resolving this small problem: that I didn’t know who to go to get it done; how much it should/would cost; how to negotiate (indeed the headache there involved) with the landlord that I shouldn’t have to pay for this since the house should just have sturdy steps anyway; the fact that there are so many other problems with my house that this really seemed pretty insignificant by comparison (holes between the floor and the walls where I once found a tarantula, and where, I recently discovered, mice live; a leaky roof with heavy rainy season on its way; lack of ceiling throughout half the house; insect infestation; spotty electricity… the list goes on). The bottom line was – the mere thought of resolving the problem gave me a headache and it honestly wasn’t that much extra work for me to take a giant step everyday onto and off of my porch.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked my neighbors, who had already dismantled the steps and were now digging into the dirt to remove the pieces that were embedded in the ground.
“Fixing your steps.” My neighbour answered. It wasn’t even a question, “would you like us to fix your steps for you?” It was a statement. Almost as if saying, this needs to be done and since, for whatever reason, you haven’t done it, we’ll take care of it. As if I was their family, and not just their inept white neighbor.
Wow. I was dumbstruck and sat down to watch them work for a minute, not even knowing how to properly express my gratitude. I almost started crying out of appreciation. Did they know that they had just saved me probably a month’s worth of footwork in negotiating who would build new steps, who would pay for them and how much they would cost? Probably not. Beyond that, did they know that their actions spoke worlds to me, said more than they could ever have said with words? Maybe. Just when I feel like I can’t possibly fit in and despite my efforts, I suck at integration (indeed, probably my greatest fear at the moment), my neighbors go and do this. They go and remind me that I don’t need to go home to the US to be happy. I’m already home.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

International Day of the Woman

March 8 is International Woman's Day. This has caused some confusion amongst villagers who were excited to incorporate American traditions of how the fête is celebrated in America. When I told them that Americans do not celebrate International Women's Day, many asked me then why is it called International Woman's Day. Hell if I know, it's your holiday, I wanted to say.

Anyhow, the celebration began on the 7th with an afternoon round-table discussion whose topic was "Investing in our daughters." I was not officially invited so I wasn't sure if I should go, because I still haven't figured out whether having an invitation is necessary for me to attend an event. I opted to come kind of late and sort of mosey by the venue to see if they'd just let me come participate. They did.

I kept mentally noting how something like a Woman's Day round-table discussion would have been really different in America. The discussion was directed by the sous-préfet and though he made an effort to include the women in the community who hold places of importance, a lot of the discutants were men and a lot of the discussion centered on how women were the matriarchs, the foundations of society because it was they who raised the kids who would become the next generation. Women needed to do their jobs, they said, keep the courtyard clean, do their laundry, take care of the kids. No slacking. It wasn't only the men who said this - it was the women too who expounded along these longs and who literally applauded this line of thinking. There was also some discussion of women needing to take the helms, to demand change if they wanted it, though this line of discussion was taken with less fervor.

Soon after I sat down, the sous-préfet broke out of his French to ask me in English if I could address the crowd with an American perspective, noting that he knew I spoke English, but it'd be better if I spoke in French so everyone could understand. I know he was trying to be accommodating and welcoming by acknowledging that French is not my first language, but I've been in Cameroon for almost six months and at post for three, and I've had conversations with him in French, so I was a little baffled and kind of miffed at his assumption that I couldn't address the crowd in French.

I quickly swung past my irritation, though, to focus on mustering up all of my Lit Hum bullshitting skills to develop a coherent speech on the spot. During training one day, one of the language trainers had asked us to come up with 15-minute long arguments in French on a topic without any preparation. She had warned that this might be demanded of us and it would be expected that we would be able to do this by our communities. At the time I found it irritating and impossible. Now, faced with the same demand, I still found it irritating, but I was at least kind of expecting it from the moment I sat down. Here was an opportunity to both share an American perspective on women's rights, and how I wished I could have had time to prepare something and tuned it to Cameroonian culture so I could have said something of value. I spoke for about five minutes, after which the audience applauded me. I mostly felt the praise undeserved because I wasn't sure I said anything of substance or value, but c'est la vie.

The round-table discussion lasted far longer than it should have and I was waning, not having eaten lunch, but immediately following the discussion was a series of sketches and dances put on by the women planners of the whole celebration, which I just couldn't tear myself away from. I made it home around 10 PM, not having eaten since breakfast nor having anything in my house to prepare for dinner.


The next morning, the schedule I'd received said the community should show up at 8 AM for the 9 AM arrival of the mayor and 9:30 AM arrival of the sous-préfet. When I went by the parade ground at around 8:30, Magloire's brother Kasimi, the resident electrician for the entire village, was just starting to set up the acoustics. No chairs were set up. I know that Cameroonian schedules are not always (read: never) followed, but I still can't quite figure out exactly how late to be. If I thought I was fashionably late showing up at 8:30 AM, then Cameroonians may as well be on the runways of Milan. Anyway, I went back home to hang out and came back to the parade ground at 10:15. The Sous-préfet decided to grace us with his presence at 11:15. There was a march and some speeches, and some what-seemed like chaotic dancing and chanting when that was all over. The afternoon brought a soccer match of two all-women's teams, which I missed.

The evening was marked by a dinner and dancing (and obviously, drinking). There were a several women who seemed to have been highly involved in planning the whole event and they were running around stressed out for what seemed like the whole dinner. After dinner, they started the dancing with a "Tournée d'honneur" in which the most-honored guests are invited to dance in pairs to "open" the dance floor. Each round lasts for literally all of 5 seconds, so I think it's more symbolic than anything, and I was assigned to dance with the sous-préfet and immediately I felt like I was at an awkward middle school dance for all excruciating five seconds of it. The dancing (I'm sure) went on til all hours, but I pooped out at 11 PM and caught a moto home.


One of the traditions at parties with buffet-style food like this is that the most important people (sous-préfet, mayor, village chief, notables, etc) get to serve themselves first and then the rest of people in decreasing order of importance. It struck me that this tradition was followed during woman's day. I kept thinking: these women have worked SO HARD to put together these two days of events - creating and practicing dances and sketches for over a month, having regular meetings for a month, attending daily soccer practices, slaving for hours preparing food, doing cotisations (pooling money) to fund everything... all to have just this one day of celebration. The least the sous-préfet and other VIPs could offer is to honor these women and their work by letting the women be the first-served. Just this once. When I made this comment to Magloire later, he said "but really, the women like to do all that work - it's them who want to do it and put together such a ceremony." Hmphhh. I'm seeing that one of my roles as a volunteer is simply to introduce new ideas and see if the villagers run with them. This is definitely something I want to try and introduce for next year's fete.

Here's some photos from the event:

Here are two women from the Friday night of sketches and dances. These two were pretty well coordinated (outfits and the dance itself). Notice the bowl of money in front of the "stage." One of the traditions I've noticed during any performance, especially dance and singing events, is to come right up to the dancers and press money pieces on their foreheads. Often the dancers barely react, and some other person runs around frantically collecting the money that fell on the floor into the dish before the petits can grab it. You dance, you get paid.

Along with the money tradition, some people decide to momentarily join the performance by dancing with the dancers. Sometimes they just dance along side the dancer(s), but sometimes they coopt the performance. Here the man from the audience was so taken with this lady's dance that he just had to jump in front of everyone and take a swing with her. Inevitably, this causes tons of hooting and hollering, which increases when he drops his cash in her bowl or presses it to her forehead before taking his seat again.




One of the dances on the evening's program was listed as "Tikar dance." I think it was this one with these three women, but my resident cultural translator, Magloire, wasn't with me, so I'm not sure.


Here is the actual day of the march. ALL of the women are wearing dresses made from the same "pagne" or fabric. (Again, more confusion when I was asked earlier in the day - "do they use the same fabric in America? Is it the same fabric the world over?") Some of them just do a kabba (what we might call a mumu in the US), but some ladies get really creative with their dresses. It appears that there were two different pagnes for the woman's day, though I don't know if the distinction between the two signified anything. This is some of the semi-chaotic post-march dancing and hooting and hollering I mentioned.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Field Trip

I’ve been bugging Magloire for awhile to show me his fields – I’m very curious to see farms here since cultivation is huge element of most Cameroonians’ lives. Every morning when I go running I always see people dressed in drab, dirty, holey clothes heading out to their fields, machete perched on their heads or hanging loosely in their hands. It always makes me chuckle too, when I think about how Americans might respond if everyday, farmers headed down the streets of say, New York, for example, casually waving a machete at passerby’s in greeting.
Anyhow, he said to be ready to go out at 7:30 AM, to which I replied, “that’s a bit late, isn’t it?” The sun starts to come up here around 6 AM, and Magloire had told me before that if he’s going to work his fields, he’ll usually head out at 6 AM. He replied that he didn’t want to disturb me, but I said, don’t worry about me, just tell me when to be ready to go. So I woke up at 5:45 AM yesterday to meet him at around 6:10. We walked about a half hour out to his uncle’s field.
What’s interesting about fields here is that they’re totally in the forest and there aren’t really discernible or obvious boundaries between the farms and the surrounding forest. So we turned off the main road onto a small footpath headed right into the forest. Along the way he pointed out all sorts of different plants – palm trees (from which people cultivate palm nuts, which are pressed to make palm oil), the difference between plantain and banana trees (plantain tree trunks are yellow; banana tree trunks are black), both wild and domestic mangoes, cocoa trees, coffee plants, manioc plants. Every now and again, he would exclaim in surprise, “Beck-kah! You can’t recognize coffee plants?!” I think he’s having trouble understanding how the whole domain of farming and cultivation is totally foreign to me. To which I try to explain, “Magloire, I grew up in cities. Have you ever seen a field in the middle of Douala or Yaoundé?” His response: “Well, not fields, but they have mango trees at least.” Oof.
In any case, the field trip (haha, no pun intended) was really fun and informative, not to mention beautiful. Afterwards he headed out of the forest and down the road to his much smaller field where, the day before yesterday, he had cut down three stalks of bananas. He said we would carry them back to village on our heads. I still haven’t mastered that skill (or even really tried… it’s pretty intimidating) though I know enough about it to know that the trick is that people wrap a piece of cloth in a circle and put that on their heads before loading whatever it is they’re carrying. The “coussin” (or “cushion”) gives a more flat surface to work with and helps stabilize the load. We hadn’t brought any cloth to use as coussins, so instead, Magloire fashioned coussins for us out of dead banana leaves. Next thing you know, I was walking back to village with a stalk of bananas perched on my head, greeting passerby’s in Tikar. Granted, I was still using one hand to stabilize my load the entire way, but still. Yesterday, for a short time at least, I was hardcore fulfilling objectives two and three of Peace Corps service: cultural exchange.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

flying coyote

Today was a blessed day of nothing, much needed. Work has an ability to simultaneously depress me and buoy my spirits, a balance which is, despite its inherent ambiguity, definitely exhausting. Therefore, it was a wonderful feeling to wake up this morning to face a day, or rather a morning, unburdened by the necessity to head to CAPJ, at least not til the afternoon. It gave me needed time to rest (well…after drawing water, which still stresses me out). I spent most of my day reading an entire book, after which I spent some time pondering why, when I have enough time in one day to read the entirety of a book, I can possibly be so exhausted?
I came to the following conclusion: You know those cartoons with the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote always chasing and trying to catch him? I have a distinct memory of one of those episodes where the Road Runner heads towards a cliff, but in his stealth stops short, so as not to fall. Predictably, the coyote (not as wiley as his name might suggest) doesn’t stop in time, but keeps going, right over the edge of the cliff. There’s a moment where, hanging suspended in mid air, he realizes he’s going to fall a quite far distance before he splats on the canyon floor below him. He feebly holds up a sign declaring “uh-oh…” (or something like that) before gravity grabs him a throws him to the canyon floor the way a penny supposedly rockets to the earth when thrown from a skyscraper. Further, as salt in the wounds, the lightning-fast Road Runner inevitably reaches the canyon floor before the coyote and hangs around just long enough to rub in how badly the coyote has failed to catch him, before he “meep meep”s and jets off again.
Here in Cameroon, in this context that is so unfamiliar, I feel completely like the coyote, like the ground has completely been swept out from under me. However, in some sick, twist of fate, I’m not falling down, but falling up, sideways, and every which way except what I’d expect. To my horror, the one rule I’d expect – gravity - is not even operating. To be honest, even a mile-long drop would be welcome at this point, because at least I’d know to grimace as my body slammed into the ungiving Earth.
Instead, everyday I struggle simply to understand my context, to understand the priniciples under which Cameroonians operate (ie that gravitational principle). I’ll give you an example. Beginning this week, Magloire has been mentioning how he’s needed to make mud bricks. When I ask what he’s building, he says a house. For him? Yes.
Now, Magloire already has a house, a pretty nice one at that, and I’ve noticed several improvements over the three or four months since I first saw it (ie ceiling installed, walls painted, curtains hung, etc), which would indicate to me that he has no intention of moving (why invest all that time and especially money improving a current home just to move?) so naturally I inquired why he’s building a new house. His answer was basically, “because.” Well, if there’s anything I’ve learned the hard way, it’s that when you ask a question here and get an answer that does not answer your question (which happens more often than I’d like), you probably didn’t ask your question right (ie there’s something that goes unsaid and understood in the Cameroonian response which is not immediately apparent to you). So I tried again, “But… you already have a house. Why are you building another one?” Again, the response is something along the lines of “why not?” Okay. Fuck. I guess I’m the idiot. I give it up for the moment.
But today, as we left the CAPJ, we passed the site where he’s building the new house and I said again, emphatically “I still don’t understand why you’re building it.” He laughed, as he often does at my incessant questions, chuckling “you still don’t understand?” And then explained that his father had bought the land and if he didn’t build on it then the people who live around that site would slowly parcel it off. Building on it is a way to protect it from encroaching neighbors. And when the house is built, he can rent it out and make a little money.
Okay! Now there’s an explanation to the question I asked. Why was that supposed to be obvious to me? Why did I let him make me feel so stupid for asking about it in the first place? Afterwards he tells me that my questions surprise him. Who owns land in America? Anyone can. And how do they keep others from encroaching on it, he asks? I try to explain that a person can do whatever he wants with the land and the “contract” he has to the land is what keeps people off (and of course, the government and judicial system, which, in contrast to Cameroon, actually work) – a person doesn’t have to build on it to keep people off. But dimly, I see that here is another fundamental difference between how America works and how Cameroon works (or doesn’t, as the case often is), and probably the root of our mutual lack of understanding.
But this entire process, just to uncover this tiny morsel of a new understanding took a whole week from when I first encountered something I didn’t understand to when I began to understand it. And I’d say that’s a fast turn-around, because most people are not as cued into my utter confusion as Magloire is.
The entire process is positively maddening, exhausting, frustrating, and at times, rewarding. Imagine walking into your kitchen, and opening your fridge to discover that instead of keeping foods chilled, it cooked them, and finding that your oven instantly froze foods – now your butter’s melted, milk’s spoiled and your chicken that you were preparing for dinner is a frozen chunk. But then, adding insult to injury, when you call the landlord/repairman/anyone to ask “what gives?” they look at your sideways, as if you’ve asked why 2 plus 2 makes four, and say simply “because.” What you need is someone to explain that math for you, but it’s so evident to them, they can’t imagine having to explain it to anyone. It just is.
But not to you.
That’s what my everyday is like. Spoiled milk and frozen chicken and meanwhile I’m floating in space like a coyote on a wayward mission to the moon, gravity having taken a raincheck. If that picture is totally nonsensical and non sequitor for you, then congratulations. You understand just a sliver of what I’m facing every-god-damn-fucking day.
In this context, I have plenty of time to doubt myself, whether I’m doing any good, and whether I’m “measuring up” (to what, exactly, is a whole new question – the very lack of any measures, objective or otherwise, makes self-analysis extremely difficult). More often than not, I’ll cling to a recent event as proof of how well I’m succeeding or how miserably I’m failing in this whole experience. Lately, it’s been a bit more of the latter than the former.
So today, while Magloire and I were sharing a drink (at the only bar in town with refrigerated drinks), I was already in a fragile state when he mentioned that Stacy, the volunteer who prospected my post, and was good friends with Magloire, adapted uber-quickly and seemingly without problems. Now, I know enough to know that the average American does not adapt that quickly here and certainly not without more than a few hitches. Furthermore, I know Stacy (she’s still in Cameroon), and I could probably ask her about her specific problems if I really wanted to. The rational part of me was telling me, “ don’t compare yourself to her - Magloire surely doesn’t have the whole story and plus you are doing a good job adapting too.” But the emotionally vulnerable, judgmental, and already slightly depressed part of me gained the upper hand and I was pretty much a party pooper for the rest of the evening.
I know Magloire was concerned by my turn to a depressed state, and furthermore, one of the things that’s been getting me down lately is the lack of a real close friend, someone to confide in here. So I told myself, “Becca, if you want to develop your friendship with Magloire, you have to open up to him,” so in what was my most courageous moment of the eveing, I confessed that his comment about Stacy had made me feel like a failure in some sense. He had no idea, and felt terrible and assured me that was not at all what he meant and could I forgive him. And that made me feel a little better. Only slightly, but it was certainly an improvement over the Negative Nancy that I had been ever since he first made the comment.
Meanwhile, I’m still a floating coyote, frustrated, sometimes-depressed, emotionally-exhausted, with spoiled milk, and throwing frozen chicken bricks, and asking people to explain basic math.