Yesterday was interesting. Magloire and I had our prise de contact at the ecole protestant and afterwards headed to market. On the way, I saw a bull by the side of the road, a bunch of men beside it. Magloire said they were going to slaughter it.
On my way back home from market, I stopped to watch the slaughter for awhile. They had killed the bull and were now dismembering the body, part by part. An anglophjone man and his friends, also watching, explained certain parts of the process to me. When the butchers pulled out one of the chambers of the four-chambered stomach, still full of undigested grass and started cleaning it, I asked if people eat the stomach. “Of course. They call it the bible because it has so many pages (layers),” he laughed at his own joke. “So if I go to a restaurant and ask for the bible, they will serve me the stomach?” I asked. Yup. He was right, it did have an incredible number of folds, and I thought of all the villi that are on the surface of the stomach to absorb food as I looked at the now-clean, nubby stomach tissue. Next, as they chopped apart the abdominal cavity, one butcher took the lungs, now unattached, and dipped them in the blood that had pooled on the bull’s skin. Like a giant paintbrush, he used the lungs to spread the blood across the skin. “It is to give it (the skin) a nice color, like a dye” the Anglophone man told me. I figured they’d use the skin to make leather goods but then the Anglophone man said that they’d eat the skin, so I wondered why it needed to be a nice color.
I watched as another butcher slowly squeezed would-be shit juice from the large intestine and then dipped the membrane in a bucket of water from the nearby stream where I always see people doing their laundry. Another butcher took a machete and began hacking at the spinal column, as if the bull were a tree he was chopping down. Oh and I almost forgot to mention the reason they were butchering this bull – it had been pregnant but had a breach delivery – the baby bull had died during childbirth, still inside the mother. One of the first things they pulled out from the mother’s body was the giant uterus, baby’s legs poking out the bottom. The Anglophone man told me “Whats [that is, white people – often pronounced like “what” here] like to eat the baby meat, not Africans though.” I wasn’t sure about the validity of that statement, especially since as I watched the bull become less and less a bull and more and more dismembered meat, I was becoming more and more vegetarian.
In any case, then an interesting thing happened. Right there, as we watched a bull get butchered up into sellable meat pieces, like some sick twisted Discovery Channel Special, the talk turned to politics. “Do you support Clinton or Obama?” the Anglophone man asked. Instead of answering, I threw the question back at him. “Obama,” he said. America needed a black president, “ someone who would not do harm, like Bush.” I asked if he knew that Bush was in Rwanda at the moment. Yup, and Condaleeza Rice too, he said.
I found the discussion interesting because, even here, in this small villagee quite out in the forest, people were keeping up with American politics. They were keeping up with a country half a world away, when I, an American, barely managed to keep up with my own country’s news when I lived there. What power America must wield when people across the world, even people who don’t have electricity, manage to tune into the news and find out what’s up in the grand ole’ U.S. of A. It was a bit sobering.
I left them to go home and relax before my animation with the high school health club. I had planned an animation about HIV transmission, and bolstered by what I thought was last week’s successful animation, was hopeful it would go swimmingly well.
I started by asking is anyone could recap what we discussed last week. Crickets. Finally, someone raised his hand to explain that we’d learned about the difference between HIV and AIDS. Good, I thought. I asked if anyone remembered the game we’d played to illustrate how the immune system works and how HIV destroys the immune system. Crickets, again. Finally the same guy raised his hand and gave incorrect answer. Crap, I thought. Maybe I was too optimistic last week.
I hoped that things could go better today, but I don’t think they did. For one, I get the sense that the kids are afraid to ask me questions, or just nervous to speak up at all, so when the comprehension isn’t there, it stays that way because they wont ask me a question to be sure they understand.
This led me to start reflecting on my work with Magloire, who is certainly NOT your typical Cameroonian. All through training, we were warned that we had to be very patient with people, that Cameroonians rarely came on time to meetings, and sometimes just never showed up, that drinking starts at 8 AM and is a full-time job – in essence, that our American sense of urgency need not apply here. On the contrary, my work with Magloire has never borne out the truth of these warnings – he is always on time to our frequent meetings, he works very hard, rarely drinks, and always understands things pretty quickly.
I began to realize that there’s a disadvantage in working with someone so much more in tune with an American work ethic; namely, I’ve been a little blind to the reality of work with people other than Magloire. It’s almost as if my comprehension/integration scale is in fast-forward with regards to my work with him, but is in slow motion with the rest of the community. Only I didn’t realize it until yesterday. Now I’m starting to realize the reality of working with people here – how slow it might actually be. A few days ago, Magloire chuckled at something I said and said “Oh, Beck-a, you are still too American.” When I asked why he said that, he replied “ You still expect things to work like they do in America, whereas here they just can’t work like that.” At the time, I was really stung. I thought I had come a long way in adjusting my expectations, in being flexible, and trying to just appreciate Cameroonian life. I was glad I was wearing sunglasses so he couldn’t see my eyes well up at what I took as a huge insult and he intended as a joke.
But now, I wonder at the validity of his saying that. Perhaps I have been blinded to certain realities – but if so, it’s at least partially because he himself is such an exception to these realities. As I walked home after the health club animation, I got to chat with some of the members. This is one of my favourite parts, the chance to shoot the shit with the health club kids. I think it gives them a chance to get to know me and be less scared of me. As we were walking, a girl, 12 y.o., said “I still have questions about the difference between HIV and AIDS.” I encouraged her, said it was fantastic that she was asking questions – why didn’t she ask them during the meeting? So then, I tried to explain by way of analogy how HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. I used the example of malaria – a parasite enters the body and then causes the symptoms, the malaria illness itself. HIV is like the parasite, I said – it enters the body and causes the AIDS symptoms. Then I asked her to explain the difference to me. She began by saying “First, there’s malaria and a germ in the body…” and then she trailed off. CRAP. Clearly, my analogy had not made anything clearer, but merely confused her more and now she thought that malaria was somehow part of the difference between HIV and AIDS. I tried once more to explain before giving up. How could I make this understandable??
After the health club, I had my Tikar lesson, during which I started to feel like shit. I had felt especially tired after running in the morning, a fatigue that had lasted all day. I started getting a headache and just felt like I was wilting as the lesson continued. Finally, I cut the lesson short and went home, totally wiped. For the first time ever, my neighbour brought me some dinner. I had been hoping for awhile that she would invite me over, but I didn’t know how to finagle this. And she just showed up with a plate of food for me, unasked. I asked if I could come and eat with her and the family, but I don’t think she understood my question. In any case, it was a well-timed, happy surprise for me – it means that my neighbors are starting to warm to me, and this makes me happy. They’re a young family (their two kids are adorable but still frightened of me. Whenever I say hi or try to have a small conversation, they still just stare at me without responding) and both are teachers. They’re not originally from Ngambe Tikar, but I’ve been trying to figure out how I can get into their good graces for awhile. This was a positive sign for me. I asked Carenne, who had brought the food over, if she could show me the whole process of making koki – if we could do it together. She smiled and said sure.
Later, when Magloire came to check on me, I was feeling better and I ended up showing him me “St. Louis, Then and Now” book. As he looked at the photos of St. Louis now, he commented that he wasn’t sure he could live, eat like that – there wasn’t enough nature. And indeed, concrete sidewalks and tall buildings everywhere doesn’t leave much in the way of nature. But I pointed out to him, imagine how it is for me here; “you say you couldn’t like there because it’s so different. I say I can’t live here because it’s so different.” He just chuckled.

Up and down, round and round we go

Oof. Life here is so bizarre. I’ve been in village alone (i.e. without Magloire) now for almost a week since returning from my banking trip. This has left me without a ton to do, since he is the very life force behind CAPJ. I’ve had one meeting with GICALAN and today I worked with the club santé, but two meetings does not a whole week’s worth of work make. Yesterday, all I did was suduko. That and cook an okra-tomato dish that was delicious (I think it was the addition of citron). Otherwise I sat around the entire day doing suduko. I didn’t even leave my house once. In fact, when I was getting dressed today, I actually thought, “hmm, I guess I can wear the same clothes as yesterday because it’s not like anyone saw me wearing them yesterday.” At times, I enjoy this lifestyle that allows me to be a complete slacker. At others, I don’t know what to do with myself.
In the absence of the all-consuming schedule I’ve become accustomed to practically all of my academic life, I’ve taken to what some would call neurotic record-keeping; I now keep a record of all my daily activities and one of everything that I purchase. I have a little journal for recording random thoughts, new discoveries and tidbits of info that I want to remember (especially people’s names when I meet them); I write blog entries in addition to maintaining a personal journal; one of my recent projects has been to try to make a more accurate map of the village – around dawn and dusk, I’m out trying to determine which direction the roads face and I’m figuring out distances by timing how long it takes to walk in a given direction. In other words, I’m applying my near-neurotic study habits to my daily life – with interesting overly recorded results. Besides all that, I’ve got a mile-long to-do list for basic home repairs and maintenance and the house can always use a good cleaning (it seems to be immune to sustained cleanliness); in essence, despite Magloire’s absence, I’ve still got a lot to do.
But I’m in no rush to do any of it. Sometimes I chide myself for not being more proactive – for example, for being nervous to approach the landlord and ask her (AGAIN) to please just sign the damn lease that I originally asked her to sign at the beginning of December and can we please work out a deal so I can get my damn ceiling installed that was supposed to have been done before I even moved in? But then I remember something my good friend Dani, former lifeguard, once told me in high school. Dani told me that up on the lifeguard stand, with no one to talk to and pretty much nothing to do (honestly, how often does a drowning or anything resembling one really occur in Clayton??), she would get painfully bored. “Sometimes, I’ll be sitting in class or just doing something and I’ll think something interesting. Then I’ll tell myself, ‘wait, don’t think about this now. Save it for the lifeguard stand!’” she said. At the time, I laughed.
Now I understand. I’ve got a ton to do, but if I do it all now, with typical American expediency, what will I have left to do afterwards? Plus, I don’t have the money to do some of the stuff, like buy living room furniture. And since I’m in Africa, I may as well operate on Africa time, ne c’est pas? So I suppose to spend an entire day doing suduko (actually it was one of those megasudukos and of course, right near the end, after working on it for more than 15 combined hours, I made some fatal mistake and now it is unsolvable. CRAP.), because theoretically I AM working hard. Just in African terms, not American.
Anyhow, in contrast to my utter boredom yesterday, today I had a totally exciting meeting with the health club at the high school. I did an animation about HIV manifests itself in the human body. Which means that I had to write my own “workshop” and then teach it. In French. To students who seemed more nervous to talk to me or ask questions than I of them. I think it went well. Of course, I find it harder to gauge here than in America. Is the silence when I ask them a question to check for comprehension a sign that they haven’t understood or simply a sign that they are nervous because they don’t know how to act with this crazy white woman who’s calling the different white blood cells “factories” and “Mister Captain” according to their function in the immune system? I felt good when we played a game to illustrate how HIV attacks the immune system, and the kids were all laughing (if you’re having fun, you’re 1. engaged and 2. going to remember what you’ve learned much better), and I also felt a lot of the confidence that I usually had when I facilitated workshops for PHE, but I know that it didn’t go perfectly. So, there are things I could improve, and I will try, but I still felt pretty good with today’s work.
After the animation, I walked back toward market with three of the kids, including one of my favorite – a tiny little boy who is far too bold for his age (today he told me he’s 12! I can’t believe it, he looks like he’s only 8 or 9). The very first time I met with all the 35 or so kids of the health club, everyone was very quiet and nervous to introduce themselves. But not Idrissu. He stood right up and cracked a joke that had everyone laughing. And he’s always ready to step up and be the center of attention. I like his swaggering confidence – it’s unlikely in someone so young, and I think I can use him to my advantage somehow, I’ll just have to figure out how. So I’m walking back with them, and for once I’m able to hold a semi-normal conversation.
It’s one of the harder things to adjust here – not knowing what on earth to say, a problem that arises both because I don’t have the same capacities to express myself or ask questions in French as in English, and because I feel like I lack common ground with the people here. My conversations with friends at home are based at least in some capacity on common ground, shared experience – if nothing else, living in and understanding a shared culture. Here I feel like I have very little common ground with people (though it is expanding little by little) and this makes conversation challenging.
Today, however I felt like I had been hit with the chatterbox stick. I was chatting with people left and right, most of whom I hadn’t met before. When I had about 30 minutes to kill before heading to dinner, I was thrilled when the Surveillant Generale (the disciplinarian/vice principal type guy at the high school) invited me to have a drink. And we managed to chat for the whole time! Miraculous! Even his questioning of whether he could by my boyfriend didn’t bother me like usual (this was the first of three such conversations today. I swear to God the romantic attention I get here is enough for a lifetime. I will so happy when I get back to the states and my unshaven legs, baggy clothes, and general plain style of living I employ here will receive the lack of attention it deserves) – this time, instead of the “I already have a boyfriend” tack I usually take (and which is usually easily countered with “but he is in America – how will that work for two years?”), I asked whether he was married. When he said yes, I told him it could never work. I will be no one’s “deuxième bureau.” (i.e. no one’s “dish on the side”) We had a good laugh over that, and were able to move past.
I guess I just find the life here a bit bizarre. One day it’s nothing but suduko followed by a sense of guilt at my slovenliness; the next it’s a high of succeeding at things which had previously inspired terror. Oh this crazy crazy life – how can I make sense of you?

Double Good

Two good things happened today: I had a particularly productive meeting with GICALAN and afterwards I tried to make my first “complicated” dinner meal: fettuccine alfredo with vegetables.
The meeting with GICALAN was scheduled for 13h00. I went by Veronique’s (the president of this GIC) house after my 6:30 AM run to remind her, but she wasn’t there. Fortunately, I ran into her on my way home. It’s a good thing too, because she thought the meeting was at 15h00. I asked if that was alright, if she thought people would come at 13h00 if she told them the change just hours before the meeting. She assured me that they would. I was doubtful.
Imagine my surprise when, in fact, everyone had shown up by about 13h35. This is practically a record for timeliness – most of my previous meetings have involved people showing up as much as an hour and thirty minutes late, with the first arrivals usually around 15 or 30 minutes late.
So in addition to the relative timeliness (maybe I should change all of my meeting times at the last minute), I feel the meeting was relatively productive. We were doing a problem analysis – the ultimate goal of which is to (1) narrow down how we want to tackle the problem and (2) develop a plan to do so. Their identified problem was “poverty.” This is frustrating because everyone here seems to think that the white person will come and bring money. A significant part of my initial work thus involves educating people that I bring my brainpower, energy, and ideas, but (probably) no money. This exercise turned out to be very helpful, because we were looking at causes of and results of poverty, in order to try to come up with some potential solutions to solve those problems.
There have been times in the past in working with this group of women when I’ve felt like nothing was really accomplished, when I felt like the group didn’t quite understand what the hell we were doing (hell, I didn’t totally understand…), but this time, people seemed to get it, and I felt like I finally clicked with my role as facilitator. There was even a moment when I stopped myself speaking mid-sentence to internally acknowledge that I had spoken a French sentence grammatically correct without having to think about it, when previously I would have had to pause and think about how to phrase it correctly. The group appeared to understand what I was saying, the objective of our meeting and (maybe it’s too much to hope for) the future direction of our work. I think this because they came up with great ideas for how to address the problem of poverty.
There is one woman in particular who I’ve noticed is really smart. She pointed out that one cause of poverty is the huge family size (lots of mouths to feed) and that a potential solution could be more information about family planning. This is a fairly insightful idea and requires an ability to see and analyze the “bigger picture.” Usually, I’d have to plant an idea like this in the women’s mind to get them to think about, but she came up with it without any prodding from me. I’ve noticed that she often has insightful ideas like this in our meetings and often understands better than others what I’m asking or saying. I have a vague sense that I want to find a way to work closely with this woman. A woman this sharp in a small village like this is a gem.
Anyway, the work and the meeting was a total high. And it pretty much made up for the fact that no one showed up to my next meeting even after I waited for an hour (best advice I can give anyone doing work in Cameroon: always, ALWAYS have a book with you. You never know when you’ll have to wait for an indeterminate amount of time for one reason or another. There have been so many times already when I have kicked myself for not bringing a book with me.)
Anyway when I got home, I decided without much planning to finally try some “real” cooking. My power was unexpectedly working last night, so I thought it would be on again tonight. It wasn’t but that didn’t stop me from making a solid-first-effort-quality fettuccine alfredo with vegetables. Though it didn’t quite taste like any alfredo sauce I’ve enjoyed in the States, the consistency and taste were surprisingly close, considering that I was working with a hyper-processed cheese (slightly past its expiration date, no less) that doesn’t require refrigeration and powdered milk. Leftovers re-chauffed tomorrow will be sublime.

Bandit

I went to lunch today at my favorite restaurant, La Belle Fourchette. It’s my favorite because they almost always have “legumes” (basically cooked leafy greens, served with some sort of carbohydrate) and also because one of the women who runs it has the most adorable four-year-old daughter, who unlike most children here, has never shown any indication of being scared of me or even surprised by me, but instead orders me around, as if I were her daughter (some might even say she reminds me of me at her age).
Anyhow, when I got there, the legumes weren’t ready yet, so I sat down to wait. I was pissed at myself for forgetting to bring something to read, and just sitting, the only person in the restaurant. Suddenly, from outside the restaurant I heard a woman sobbing and what sounded like pleading with someone else. I also heard a man quietly scolding this woman, a kind of quiet that spoke of controlled rage. Before I could confirm my suspicions just overhearing what happened outside, the woman was pushed into the restaurant, and fell down on the dirt threshold, the man right behind her, not yelling, but threatening. She looked straight at me, our eyes locked for a second before she turned back to him. She stood up and cried out “Bandit!” (something like the equivalent of “bastard!”)
They continued to quarrel, while I was at once on edge, filled with terror. What would happen to this woman? Was the man her boyfriend? Her husband? Who was going to protect her? Could I help her? How? If I got involved, could the man turn his intentions on me? If that happened, who would protect me? I sat there, tense, frozen, watching what was happening, but really just wanting to disappear.
Soon, the two ladies who run the restaurant came out and shoo’d the couple away, and then watched from the doorway, as ostensibly, they continued fighting. I didn’t move from where I was sitting; I didn’t want to see what happened.
The whole scene passed in less than two minutes, but it made me think. There’s no law against hitting children or women here (in fact, an education volunteer recently shared a story of when she was forced to watch one of her students receive 25 lashes from a teacher. She recalls how the teacher stopped after every few lashes, so the student, holding back tears, could try to recover enough to take the next few. She was telling the story to a marine, who asked “don’t their parents do something about it?” “Oh, they want the teachers to do it,” she replied). In the states, when I did crisis counseling, I felt frustrated with the system and with society’s apathy, or worse, blaming of victims/survivors of assault and abuse. But at least there was a system, as imperfect as it is – an acknowledgement that abuse is wrong. This scene quickly brought to my mind the frightening reality that abuse happens here and there is no recourse. Hurting one another is acceptable behavior here. How does one combat a system in which the very idea that hitting someone less powerful than you is okay? If I tried to do some sort of intervention centered around abuse – what kind of progress could I realistically make?
The look in the woman’s eyes as hers met mine while she was still crumpled on the dirt floor will haunt me; as will the defiance set in her back, her posture, as she stood up straight, proud, suddenly after getting up, looked straight at the man and with her chin held up, cried out “Bandit!” African women are fighters; I wonder if this is a battle we can fight?

bush taxi to yaounde

Alright, so I'm mostly past the whole being surprised at Cameroonian modes of transport - the endless waiting (to load the vehicle, to get gas, to leave, to wait while some broken down part gets fixed), the cars that are about as old as me and function as well as someone dying, the driving on "roads" that would never be called such in America, the cars being packed-to-the-gills-and-then-some, the dust visible in the air and filling your lungs. However, yesterday's harrowing 9-hour commute to banking in Yaounde was pretty miserable. See if you can make sense of the following happenings from the day:

- chicken shit on the floor of the van
- wooden canoes to cross a river, carved from large tree trunks... with outboard motors
- stopping every five minutes to say hello to people as we pass by villages
- pretty much everytime we stop, at least one man approaching me to ask for my phone number; some not even repulsed when I say flatout: "you do not interest me"
- "Wow, you got suntanned!" [I lick my fingers and rub my face] "Am I still tan?"
- reading "War and Peace" out of sheer boredom. It's possible that it only makes me more bored. - the guy sitting next to me checking my watch, despite the fact that he's already verified that his watch is one minute faster. The same guy constantly checking over my shoulder anytime I pull anything out of my bag
- the travel agency operator telling two passengers to get out because the car was too full, resulting in a shouting match and general testing of testosterone and manliness between said operator and a passenger. Passenger's screaming delays departure by ten minutes. After the dispute, passenger and operator jovially laugh with each other: "no hard feelings"