Jess does da ‘Roon

So while sitting in my house as the rainy season began in full force, I decided that I had to get out of Cameroon or my sanity was at stake.  I didn’t think I could go home and come back for less than 4 months of service.  There was already a group of 4 volunteers headed to Ethiopia and others who had experience with Ethiopia urged me to go.  So I bought my ticket and started making plans for the parts of the country I wanted to see, shoving myself into their itinerary.

Even the plane ride was exciting for us. Free drinks! Lots of food! Your OWN seat! We arrived at night, and the expanse of lights of Addis Ababa surprised me.

We had a rude awakening to the fact that this was NOT Cameroon when we were forced to take 2 taxis because of “traffic control” (although later we were able to beg them to let us pack the car with 5 of us).  We also noted the COLD.  No one had warned us that Ethiopia would not be hot and I ended up wearing the same long sleeve shirt and fleece for most of the trip.  Who tells these lies about Africa being hot?? We got to a skeezy hostel and had a bit of a spat with the staff when we put 3 people in one room with one bed.  Ethiopians were scandalized.  But they probably just wanted us to pay another $10 for another room. 

It was about 9:30 or 10pm and we needed dinner. So someone took us into a nearby bar with low lighting and we got injera (the ever present pancake that marks Ethiopian food) with kitfo and tibs (I LOVE these names!) – meat dishes.  We were enthralled with the food.

Addis impressed us, even though the guidebooks describe a ”maybe-you’ll-learn-to-like-it” relationship with the city.  It’s huge with so many things to do. Museums and beautiful churches, cuisines from all over the world, a market that spans city blocks.  One of our favorite things was to wake up in the morning and grab a coffee or tea in a relaxed cafe. Pastries!! Italian occupation did Ethiopia good in a culinary sense – pasta could be found at most restaurants and espresso/machiatos were easy to find.  Although coffee couldn’t happen without electricity and the country’s on a weird every-other-day schedule, but since we hopped around so much we were often arriving in a place that didn’t have power that day.

Our trip was set up so that we entered Addis, did a loop up and around the northern half of the country, and came back to Addis before setting off for smaller trips toward the south or east.  Then we’d come back to Addis before flying out. 

So on our first encounter with Addis we mostly ate delicious foods (lasagna!)and did walking explorations of museums and shopping chances.  Addis has quite a few museums but we only went to the Ethnological Museum and the National Museum. 
The Ethnological was a bit about different cultural elements and featured one of the king’s bedroom and bathrooms (separate from his wife’s… blue and piink bathrooms respectively).  There was a creepy statue of a horseman with realistic beady eyes – they focused a lot on the regalia worn by horses in battle… the poor animals weighted down by silver and embroidery.
The National Museum had 4 floors of different ancient artifacts.  Ethiopia has a long history that has been well-preserved, something that I think Americans sometimes take for granted.  It’s hard for us to conceive that things haven’t been fully discovered, that in Mexico the pyramids are still underground.  Or that history might have been stolen and lost, not captured behind glass in an air-conditioned museum.  Cameroon definitely hasn’t kept up with artifacts and such, since it seems as if that’s a foreign idea.  They try to carry on living traditions of food or dress but no one is putting up money to keep old forms of money or ancient farming tools.  At any rate, the National Museum had all types of cast bronze fertility goddesses and jewelry but I really loved the modern art section with all different styles of capturing religious legends and human emotions.
The main draw of the museum is Lucy.  Forgive me for not remembering her scientific classification, but she’s the link to “mankind” – although now an older skeleton was found.  Lucy is on tour right now so a replica was all we could see. Ethiopians are proud of Lucy and we were asked a few times throughout the country if we’d seen Lucy.  To be honest, she’s tiny and a lot less human than ape.  We were amazed at the conclusions scientists were able to draw from a tiny scrap of bone to have an idea about what the rest of her body would have looked like (or just the fact that it was a “her”).
While in the basement room of Lucy, someone saw Danny’s Elon sweatshirt and asked if it was North Carolina.  He said he was from Raleigh and I sauntered forth to exchange southern twangs.  Jessica, who’s from Raleigh while I’m just from a suburb, didn’t feel it was all that miraculous to find a fellow Raleighite and didn’t even confess her origins. When I told him I was actually from Fuquay, he said his sister was a Bengal Tiger… and I could not believe that he was calling out my high school mascot in the basement of an Ethiopian museum. Talk about a small world.

I got back from Ethiopia on Monday and apparently wasn’t re-adjusted to Cameroon’s deep gutters yet. This morning I stuck a foot into a particularly abysmal hole and fell sprawling across the road.  I think someone in the background made some kind of “Oooo” sound (or maybe that was me?) Luckily my phone and laptop survived the crash but I’ve got bloody knees (I think for the first time since I was a little girl), scraped up hands, and pants that have to be washed (travesty!).

Welcome to Cameroon again, Jess.

I’ve been somehow a bit (just a wee bit) resentful of my healthiness here in Cameroon. I chalk most of it up to being on Doxycycline, an antibiotic, daily for malaria. I call it my superdrug. But I’m amazed at how the least little bit of weakness and I’m ready to be laid up all day. Last night I had a bit of stomach issues (one of those where you’re not sure which end of your body to aim at the toilet… pretty, huh?) and I was ‘bout ready to die. Then my drugs kicked in and I was OK by the morning. I hopped on a bus to Yaounde and arrived with really sore joints. I honestly don’t know how most Cameroonians function when quite a bit of the time they have some sort of illness. (Although I’ve seen plenty of examples where my office is nearly empty because everyone has some sort of something and can’t work)
I haven’t had nearly enough exotic parasites to brag about when I’m back home. But I can say I’m experienced with them. In the last 2 weeks I have diagnosed, extracted, supported, or warned about 5 different people about mango flies. A friend in Buea got real intimate real fast when I had to check her backside for whether the 10 (!) welts were mango flies or not. Another volunteer (who will remain nameless) had one in her back and I wasn’t sure if it was a mango fly or not (one never is… it could just be a nasty zit). Mango flies are flies that lay eggs on clothes drying outside then if you don’t iron clothes or wait 4 days for the larvae to die, they enter your skin and a small worm starts growing. You gotta squeeze it out. The tricky thing with it is that you can control YOUR clothes but you can’t really guarantee at a hotel. So I extracted the tiny larvae while being very calm (it’s a gross thought). Then later on, I watched the extraction process for chiggers. I’m proud of being a true NC girl and knowing all ‘bout chiggers but Cameroonian chiggers are a different game. They live in dust/mud often with animal feces and they lay eggs in your feet, often near your nails. You gotta dig the egg sack out. I’ve seen it done 3 times now and …it’s still gross.
And speaking of things that inspire me (I thought that was a reasonable transition…), I did paper mache this week. At the slight mention that I should make a pinata for July 4th, suddenly I was up and tearing strips of newspaper. I do believe that paper mache might just be miraculous. It’s profound. I’d started a mask project with Lucy earlier but she wasn’t really motivated since she’d never seen the glory. Once she saw mine with a layer of the hardened paper on it, she got really enthusiastic. So there we were, squatting on my concrete floor late into the night as I gently tried to steer her away from drowning her mask in paste.
And then! Oh sweet miracles! How would we ever get these artful affairs dry in Buea, the land of damp? A DEHUMIDIFIER! On loan from Bill’s office (Bill I promise I’ll bring it back at the end of rainy season), it’s exactly what every citizen of Buea needs. My clothes aren’t growing as moldy and my paper mache dries over night. It’s pure joy. Things you don’t think you’ll need in Africa…
The way the rainy season works is that meetings are sort of inconsistent because the rain holds people up, kids are in flux because some kids go on vacation to bigger cities while village kids come to Buea since it IS the bigger city, and it RAINS. So my work’s been a bit slower. But I’m finding motivation in an art therapy workshop I want to hold with secondary school girls in October. After nearly 2 years, this is what I’ve learned about my work style: I’m not great when there’s little structure but I need to set goals for myself that are fun. Sounds a bit like common sense, huh?