Jess does da ‘Roon

Graduation

So the university here has a graduation once a year (its one of the only universities in Cameroon that actually has a ceremony) and Buea goes ape shit. Everyone knows someone who’s graduating. Luckily, my new family at Reach Out (where I work) felt the need to take me to see the festivities.

I should say that Cameroonians feel pretty strongly about ceremonies and speeches and pretty much anything formal like that. They love speeches long rambling monologues. But the whole campus was like the state fair, with people laying out in the grass, eating ice cream and roasted meats. And the clothes! So Robert from work comes to pick me up and he’s wearing a full suit. Immediately I realize I’m not ready for Buea. Before I came to Africa there was no way I could have anticipated being in Buea; people dress traditionally sometimes but all of the younger community dresses really suave (in tight jeans, sexy tops, stillettos, or for men: pressed shirts, dress pants, spotless leather shoes). So after I tripped off to the ceremony in my Chacos, I went to the market to buy shoes.

I found shoes that fit (I’m a size 5 somewhere.. which is shocking that my size 9.5 feet can do that kind of magic) in the market.  Amidst a dangerous set up of high heels hanging from strings on the ceiling I found a sparkling, beaded pair of Indian slippers (Cameroonians had a hard time comprehending that I didn’t want heels). As I went out to the parties that evening, I couldn’t stop looking at my feet. After tip-toeing down gravel streets all night, blisters were threatening and I was content to not look so pretty anymore.

The parties would have been a lot more fun if: I drank beer and I ate spicy food. A drunk graduate nearly got me to dance the Bakweri traditional dance (involving you bending over like you’re tying your shoe laces, and taking old man steps, while shimmying your shoulders and shaking your arms the whole time) – but I resisted. I had a long conversation with a drunk 12 year old girl in a party dress who wanted me to take her to America and get hair like mine. (Here all the children have shaved heads, the girls have pierced ears)

By the end of the night, I was exhausted and tired of being bothered by drunk men. (Even my bodyguard Hans was tired of them “acting funny”)

Company!

So the new Hut Zero has opened for business. I had my first visitors last night, 3 volunteers from the North who were climbing the mountain. We made do with an extra mattress and a sleeping pad. I definitely have to work on being the hostess with the mostest …ants/big smile/big empty house. But it was nice to have people around.

So here we go with my house…

My neighborhood is pretty cool. I take a gravel path to get back to my house, and you have to greet everyone here to get to know people. Although sometimes people take greeting to the extreme [side story: at Bill's house, people come by just to greet him all the time. Then they will sit together out on the patio and pontificate. One time while I was there, I got so tired of people blowing hot air that I put my head back against the wall and fell asleep before excusing myself to go inside].  There’s this crazy network of footpaths from my door where I can go anywhere. The path to Bill’s is about a 10 minute walk, and it’s quiet. There’s this great little stand on the way where I can buy sweet peanuts. My neighbor is this grandma who only speaks pidgin, but she’s so sweet. She takes things inside for me when I leave them out, so they don’t get stolen.

When I moved in, the only thing is my ginormous house was an old foot-pedal sewing machine. I was pretty excited about it. I named it Francine, since it seemed appropriate. But the landlord has since taken it out, removing half of my furniture.

I needed to get the house cleaned. I had Hans find 2 boys who came to clean the floors and walls. As they started to soap the salon floor, I walked in and had a moment of panic. It was definitely a scene from Pipi Longstockings as the boys skated across the flooded floor. They had dumped at least 2 buckets of water all over the floor which was running into my kitchen. I sent a frantic text message to a friend and went back into my bedroom to read. Somehow they did something with the water, and it turned out OK.

I’ve mentioned Hans, and if you’ve read Bill’s blog then you probably have heard a lot about him. He’s my bodyguard/ex-wrestler/carpenter/networker, I inherited his friendship from Bill. He’s one of the few Cameroonian men I trust with pretty much anything at this point (although things may not be done in a timely fashion, he is Cameroonian still). He lives really close to my house with his family.

So my first night in my house alone was a bit strange. It’s a pretty big house and I hadn’t put the bars on the door (ready for this? I close my huge metal door, lock it, then deadbolt it twice, then I close the wooden doors, I think I lock those, then I put 2 metal bars across those). And the windows were cracked so I could hear sounds through the house. Right near my bedroom window, the neighbors are keeping puppies. They don’t bark but they do tend to move around making the wood creak on their cage and me freak out.
My house is still really empty.     I’m having issues with budgeting for the first time in my life. I’ve got to make the money I have last for awhile but I need to buy so much for the house. I have nothing in my huge salon because I can’t afford it. I am having a dining room table made with 4 chairs, I bought a bed. But I need to start on my art studio and the guest bedroom. I have no curtains, I can’t afford them yet (makes dancing in my giant salon fun but the neighbors all get the show too). I bought a sweet cookstove though (I’m still waiting for Hans to find the gas bottle so I can cook something).
My carpenter is really pretty cool. They don’t use electrical machines. Their workshop is this open-air sort of carport, with banana leaves gleaming green through the back slats. The sun comes through golden on all these gentle curls of wood that they’ve shaved that cover the floors. It’s a really comforting place to be in.

I went searching for food last night by myself. There’s roasted fish everywhere on my street, but I wanted something different. After asking a couple of people, I finally just went to the one restaurant I know. The woman who runs it is really nice (she comes and greets me and asks if pork is all I’m eating, where are the fried plantains? I said I didn’t know she had them and she whisks some over) and last night there were no men at all in the place, and I felt pretty OK eating alone.

I realized the other day that I’ve been drawing geckos since I was a little girl. Desperately trying to get the curves of their little toes right. And now here I am, with geckos all around to watch over me. I don’t have such benevolent feelings toward the spiders, roaches, and other random junk in my house but the geckos are OK.

The other day Hans and I sat on my veranda and we talked about getting someone in to clean my house. He asked when I wanted it done. I said soon. He said “Tomorrow I think. Yes tomorrow. Because today is already done.” It was 3:00 in the afternoon and sunny, but as soon as he said it, it became cloudier and the sun didn’t come out anymore during the day. It was as if Hans had pulled the curtain on the day.

So I left Bangangte to come to the pretty big city of Buea (for those of you who refuse to do research on where I will live for the next two years, the population’s around 78,000). Not quite the traditional definitition of pioneering, but I definitely feel like I’ve started all over in a lot of ways.

For starters, I’m suddenly without Americans. I have not mapped out where I can get food at what times of day, so that’s always a fun game. I had to ask someone to take me to the internet place. My house… well we’ll get into that later. Let’s go over the journey…

So our last night in Bangangte should be a …bang (lame pun… it amuses me and I’m smiling here in the cafe)… but it didn’t quite turn out that way for me. First, there was a severe shortage of hot hook-ups before we dispursed across the country. Secondly, I suddenly got “ill”. When you’re sick, it’s this weird vague “my skin feels weird and I ache” sensation. By 11pm, I started feeling sorry for myself. (sort of a “it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” phenomenon). I made a quick exit of the club to head for the hotel, but not before I cried in front of a lot of people. Ok, skip ahead.. insert me groaning in the hotel in the not-good way and sauntering home at 6am with a too-heavy bookbag.

I get in for 15 minutes to say goodbye to the family, and my older brother manages to ask me to give him my mp3 player. Seriously?! I’m deathly ill and you’re asking for the one luxury I have here (which I had just recently hauled out of the safe in Yaounde after safeguarding it for 3 months and going without my music).

I’ve been stressed since I got accepted into Peace Corps about traveling with all my luggage and needing to be able to carry everything I brought. So here was the final moment when I would travel with my trunk, helmets (I sent my bike back to Yaounde since I can’t bike on the damn mountain, I can walk for exercise), tons of books, a water filter, and then all the stuff I’d brought from the U.S. Peace Corps drove me all the way to Buea, which didn’t happen for everyone, but I didn’t have to haul my crap off the top of a bus or change buses or anything. I laid down in the backseat, drunk off Dramamine, the whole time.  But there’s always time for harassment by the gendarmes!  So… these are somewhere between police and military and even though we’re in an anglophone region, they only speak in French. They pull us over at one of the roadside checks and ask for our documents. We give them over. He asks what we’re doing here, how long we’ll be here, making us repeat everything. Then he asks Lauren for her notebook (its Cameroonian) since its got a sports star on it. He asks me for money. In my sick/drunken stupor I give him a face of “oh-no-you-didn’t” before telling him no. Finally he lets us go.

We pull into Buea and Bill is meeting me. The Biz can take care of anything, so I just sorta put it all in his hands. But as I got down off the bus, I thought I would pass out. Sauntering over, I can’t find Bill. [Insert side story: When we arrived in Bangangte, all 42 of us were called out to meet our families. It was an awkward moment. But I waited, and waited. Finally I was last, and then not called at all. They had forgotten to call my name. The whole thing was so stressful, and I was so nervous about meeting my French-speaking family, that I almost cried] Finally after about 5 minutes, Bill comes and loads everything into a taxi and we go to his house. I lay down and pretty much sleep for a day and a half. The sickness evolved (I’ll spare you the details) but I think I had mild food poisoning.

So about the second night at Bill’s, I’m still not eating much and feeling pretty weak. I wake up in the morning with some red tiger-claw marks on my neck. (If you know my big cat obsession, you might think this was not too much of a set-back for me). By about day 2 of the claw marks, it blistered. While Bill was pretty cool about my nasty neck appendage, when my counterpart, Esther, came to see me, she commented heavily on it and told me that she thinks it was a “sheesh” or some bug. From what I can understand, there are several bugs in Cameroon with acid. There’s a fly that I think we call the “blister beetle” that will land and you’ll have a blister (you don’t pop it, or the acid will spread) and then there’s this new “sheesh” thing that if you hit it while it’s on you, acid in its body burns you. So now I’m on the mend, the burn is fading.

I’ve found that Cameroon’s capital is one of the funnest words to say, so let’s do that “Yown-day”. Mmm.. like hot cocoa, just warms the cockels.

So before we swore in, we took the trip back to Yaounde from Bangangte to do some banking. This trip.. by FAR… was the least organized part of the whole thing. We had no agenda, no time frames, or real clue what was going on. When we got there we had no real meetings and then we did banking the next morning.

<insert dramatic music> The Case (say it “kaz”)
So this is the transit house for Peace Corps. It’s our oasis and I’m going to try and describe its splendor.  (LIST TIME!)

• There’s a fully-stocked kitchen
•  a living room with a TV and a DVD player
•  tons of books in the library
• all these rooms with mosquito-net covered beds (they named the rooms, which makes PCVs freakin’ awesome. “Brady Bunch” room has 12 beds, all named accordingly)
•  there’s fantastic bathrooms with HOT WATTTERRRR (they’re stocked too with smelly-shampoo like “pecan” or hippy shit like “avacado and willow”) (but PCVs are nasty and some of the bathrooms have worms)
• a beer pong table (paint me less than fascinated by this)
• laundry machines! (although they apparently only break when I want to use them)
• free internet
• an “up for grabs” bin where you can dig through and find hole-y t-shirts that are great for that “vintage, I’m-too-cool-to-notice-the-hole-in-my-armpit” look or sunscreen and other medications that PCVs leave before they go home

Banking <insert other dramatic music>
Um.. so we go in a group of 15. We pull up to the bank but are warned not to make any loud noises or be crazy. Apparently this branch hates us because PCVs would go in and be talking in a loud voice (it’s not a freakin’ library). So we get tons of cash out, and then half of the group gets stranded on the sidewalk waiting for the PC car. 8 PCVs + shit ton of cash = not cool, Jess with shit ton of cash that she drops and lets 10,000 notes go flying everywhere = less cool. Finally we get back, I lock the money up and we’re golden.

So here’s my average day here for stage..

• 630am wake up
• 730 sessions begin (usually language or tech)
• 930 coffee/crepe break
• 1000 another session (if its language its gone too long already and it sucks)
• 12-130 lunch break/do stupid project preparation
• 130 yet another session (possibly tech..)
• 300 breakkkk
• 315-430 last session, usually tech or a meeting
• 430-6pm soaking in free time at a bar
• 6-8pm I try to stay awake, milling around the house, reading if there’s electricity

 As one can see, it’s quite structured. We’ve gotten really used to it. One might think that an hour and a half lunch break would feel like free time but let me assure you that it doesn’t (although when we go into town to have some “roti de boef” which is this fantastic beef with tomato sauce it’s a freakin’ party) and we relish our time before curfew.