African Autumn

It's that time here in Cameroon where the leaves start changing color, although it's not exactly the same as Fall at home.  Here the leaves change color because it is now dry season, meaning that the leaves don't actually change color as much as they are coated with a thin layer of red/brown dust.  Most of the roads aren't paved here, so once the rain stops the motorcycles and cars that drive by kick up all kinds of dirt.  You have to walk around with a handkerchief to cover your face unless you want a lung full of dust.  My nasal passages are very dry and painful right now, which is think is related. 

There are positives of dry season, however:
(1) Traveling is easier because the roads are not giant swimming pools of mud for the van to get stuck in.  Instead they are full of giant craters because no one thinks to fix the roads until rainy season comes back and it's too late.
(2) It's cooler now, especially during the night and in the mornings.  It's still much hotter than at home, but I'll take what I can get. 
(3) Also, I appear tan although really I'm just dirty.

Exhibit A

Also, MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Peace Corps Graduation

These photos are long overdue.  They are from the swearing in ceremony that happened December 1, 2010 where 48 trainees officially became Peace Corps Volunteers.  The next day we left the protective bubble of training to live on our own all over the country.

A bunch of santés with our instructor, Theo

Calling out the new health volunteers

Country Director Lahoma, from Durham, NC and also a UNC-CH graduate

Rachel and I with our two host families and the American Ambassador

Tina doesn't want to leave for the Extreme North

Adios, amigos.  See you at IST in March.

Why living in Cameroon is like the opening song of Beauty and the Beast

The opening song of Beauty and the Beast is the one where Belle walks into town and everyone talks about how beautiful and weird she is. This is our life:


1. Everyone you walk by says « Bonjour! »
2. We get our water from a pump
3. All the locals talk about us as we walk by
4. Everyone wakes up at dawn
5. We buy eggs and bread in the morning
6. There are sheep everywhere
7. Markets are open doors
8. All prices are negotiable
9. Women carry water on their head
10. People speak to you in French
11. Women wear wigs/weaves
12. No one reads books for fun
13. Ladies get a lot of unwanted marriage proposals

This list could go on forever.

Woah, woah, woah… T-3 days

Training is officially almost over.  Our final exams have been taken and our final presentations have been presented, so now we’re just waiting for the swearing in ceremony on Wednesday Dec 1 (also World AIDS day).  It doesn’t feel like 11 weeks have already gone by.  I’m excited to get to post and have my own house and be able to cook anything I want, but it’ll be really weird to not see at least 47 other Americans every day.  It’s definitely going to be a lonely first couple weeks.  However, I will be able to predict my internet access once I’m at post (unlike here where I have no control), so we can schedule a Skype date if you want!

Meeeoooowww

My city homestay family has a kitten clock (aka a clock with kittens on it) right next to their dining room table.  It meows really loudly on the hour, every hour (ALL night long).  My host parents said that when they first bought it they didn’t know that it meows, so they thought a cat was loose in their house for a couple of days until they realized it was just the clock.  Every so often it doesn’t meow, so I don’t really understand its schedule.  I may miss this clock when I leave in about 2 weeks, but I’ll have real cats so it’s cool.

I sneakily took this picture this morning while my host dad was watching TV across the room.  I’m glad he didn’t notice, because he’d think I was weird. 

Village Life/City Life

Training is 11 weeks, and halfway through we switched homestay families.  This isn’t the way training is normally done—we are the first group that they’re trying this on.  The health trainees started out in the village (Nyamsong and Lablé) and the Agros were in the city (Bafia) and now it’s the other way around.  The two are pretty different, which is why we were given a chance to experience both environments.  It was really weird to move though, because I had just started getting comfortable in the village house and then had to start the awkwardness all over again.  I think everyone doesn’t enjoy that our families compare us to the person we switched with a lot, especially if they liked the other person better.  I’m glad to be in the city now because my host mom is a good cook and I have an indoor bathroom, but it would have made life a lot easier and it would have been better to have only one homestay. 

Nyamsong (house) or Lable (school)                        Bafia                        
       
Training Centers, notice tomb in front of Lable school

Road Conditions

  

Hang out spots, random town square v. the bar

  

My bedrooms, painted the same color by Peace Corps

Homestay houses 

  

Classrooms, normally there are chairs in the Bafia room

Africa vs. The USA

Here is a cool picture that I took from a National Geographic. I had never seen this before, but it’s an interesting comparison:

Site Visit

I am back from Western Adamawa, aka the forgotten region of Cameroon. We are pretty much a mixture of everything, but don’t really belong anywhere. We have the culture of the Grand North (conservative and mostly muslim), but it’s closer to do banking in the West region and our geography and climate is more like the West. It’s beautiful because I live right in the mountains, but the roads are terrible (not paved, even though it’s the major trucking highway) so it takes forever to get in or out. I am replacing a current volunteer, Anna, so my house is all set up for me and it’s adorable. I’ll post pictures after I move in and make it my own. Anna is very active, so she has a lot of projects that I can continue with, mostly youth group activities, but we’ll see what I end up doing. Peace Corps encourages us to take the first 3 months easy, so I’ll probably just start out with some observations. 

Where other volunteers live in relation to me

Here are some of the highs and lows of site visit:
1. We left Bafia with at least 20 people packed into a 15 passenger van. There was a goat strapped to the top that cried the entire way to Bafoussam.
2. The Golden Center hotel in Bafoussam has the most amazing shower ever.
3. The volunteer in Bankim, Kate, made us pizza and pancakes. Delicious.

Hunter and Jackie with pizza

4. We had to take motos on the worst road ever to get from Bankim to Nyamboya. Jackie burned her leg on the exhaust pipe. I almost tipped over in a mud puddle.
5. After our Halloween party in Mayo Darlé my new post mate, Kaitlyn, and I realized there was a bat in our room. I’m pretty sure we woke up the entire village by screaming.
6. I have a cat, Mi-Hao, which just had 5 kittens 4 weeks ago. I am going to keep one of the girl kittens, name TBD. They are so cute.

My new babies

7. Baptist missionaries live in Banyo and gave me a cinnamon bun.
8. It took me 10 hours and 27 minutes to get from Banyo to Bafoussam, which is apparently good time. I will be banking very rarely. My bank in Bafoussam is called Afriland.
9. I miss cheese. We only have laughing cow triangles in Bafia, so I spent more than I should have on a block of Gouda when we got back to Bafoussam.
10. We watched a countdown of 30 Urban Hits music videos (African and American) in the hotel on the French MTV channel—Trace.

Mountains in Banyo

Dangerous African Wildlife

1. Ducks- There is a really mean duck that lives at my house. He is gigantic and always fluffs up his feathers when he sees me. He can tell I’m afraid of him because he won’t run away when I shoe him. Most of the time it’s not too bad, but the other day I was outside alone and he was coming at me so I hit him with a big stick the family uses to shoe them. Normally he would run away, but instead he chased me all over the yard. Anytime I tried to hit him he would fly up in the air at me. I ended up hiding behind benches and trees until I was able to sprint inside, but it was really scary and I thought for a second that I was going to die by duck. Now he knows he’s the dominant one in our relationship and waddles at me all the time. I’m scared to go outside alone.

2. Ants- African ants are deadly. I thought I hated ants at home, but I really hate the ants here. They come in all sizes, but the worst are the giant ones. Some are almost an inch long. Those are the ones that sting and bite, which is actually really painful. They are also really hard to kill. They’re fast and run in a zigzag, then don’t die when you step on them. When I got to my homestay there were a whole bunch of baby ducks, but now there is only one. I didn’t know what happened to them but I found out that these ants swarm the ducklings while they’re sleeping and sting them to death then eat them. My host family said they could kill a human if the person didn’t move. Seriously? I miss the vegetarian ants.

3. Mosquitos and Moutmouts- My ankles and feet are torn up right now. I’ve got a lot of bug bites and they itch soo badly. Somehow they even get you when you wear pants. Moutmouts are these really tiny bugs that bite you and leave a flat red circle (usually arms) or a small bleeding prick (legs) on you. They don’t really itch though but they transfer filaria, so probably have that by now. The good news is that filaria doesn’t really do anything to you until 40 years later when you go blind, but I’ll be treated for it in about 2 years so I’ll be fine.                         

My future home

We received our post assignments on Thursday! Right now everyone is together for training, but December 1st we will become volunteers and move to our posts alone to begin working. It seemed like we had to wait forever, but we were actually really lucky because most groups don’t find out until a few weeks later.
Our APCD, Sylvie, handed out post-its with the name of our city or village and what region of Cameroon it’s in. Then everyone ran over to the map to figure out where that was and who is going to be living nearby. I’m posted in Banyo, which is a decent sized city in the Adamawa region. It’s right on the border of Nigeria. I will have to travel 10 hours at least once a month to get to the West regional capital Baffousam, which is where I’ll do my banking. It seems like a long trip, but apparently travel takes forever in this country so I’ll be used to it. If you look at a map, it’ll take me about 16 hours (or more…) to get to Ngoundere. If you’re planning to visit, you might want to think about being here for about 2 weeks. I’ve also started learning Fulfulde 50% of the time we have language classes because that’s pretty much the language they speak in the northern regions. I got lucky, so I have a post mate (another volunteer in the same city) who is an education volunteer. She swore in around the time we got here, so she’s only been there a few weeks. Two of the other trainees are within 3-4 hours of me, which is also exciting. I don’t know a whole lot now about my post, but I’ll be visiting in about a week and a half.

Look at how big this tree is

This is a tree that I pass everyday going to and from training.  It is enormous.  You can’t even tell in the pictures, which is disappointing, but I’m not surprised. 

Host Family

I have three “brothers” that I live with because the rest of the kids live elsewhere—one about middle school aged, one 6 and one 4.  Family structure is very confusing, so one of them is actually the son of my host sister, who is actually my host cousin (if that makes sense).  The two younger kids are really the only ones who talk to me regularly and they’re super sweet.  Every day when I come home they run up and give me a big hug.  They also do really adorable things.  For example, the 4 yo was supposed to be drawing the letter A for practice, but when we brought it over for inspection he had actually been drawing pictures of pots for cooking (he spends a lot of time around them).  The family thought it was annoying, but I thought it was hilarious.  They found out I have a camera, so they made me do a photo shoot which was basically them holding stuff in the room up and telling me to take a picture of them with it.

Bahon (or Baron?) and Kevin

Laundry

In Cameroon we have to wash our clothes by hand in a bucket and then hang them outside to dry. Or sometimes in most of our cases, hang them in our rooms until they smell like mold. Then we have to let them sit for 3 days after they’re dry before we wear them so we don’t get infested by Mango flies. Laundry takes a long time. Also, it is so physically difficult that I have reassessed the way I wear clothes. Something that would have been dirty before is no longer dirty and I won’t wear jeans just because I can’t imagine how hard it must be to wash them. Sunday was my first attempt, but I had to go to church and didn’t get back until later so my host mom finished my laundry for me so it wasn’t so bad. I had some other items to wash, so I did them Tuesday night. My fingers kind of hurt that night afterwards, but Wednesday morning I woke up to realize that I had scraped up my fingers pretty bad. Apparently I’m the only one in the health training group that really scrubs hard because this has not happened to anyone else, but I was assured by the Homestay Coordinator that it was normal because we are not used to doing it. Hopefully I’ll be set for a while and won’t have to clean anything any time soon.

Body Pump comes to Africa

Most of the stagaires (trainees) stayed after class Wednesday for a Body Pump session.  One of the girls is an instructor back home so she led us in a v. amusing class.  We didn’t have any weights, so we used books and water bottles.  Then, we didn’t have mats, so we used pieces of butcher paper.  Eventually, the kids who live in the houses around our training site got curious and came and watched how ridiculous we looked (especially since organized exercise isn’t really that common outside the US).  I think we had about 15 audience members by the end.

Send me mail!

Start sending me letters!!  Everyone is starting to get letters, which is always exciting.  It feels a lot like summer camp because they pass out the letters to everyone.  If you send more than one letter, write what number the letter is in case it gets lost.  I'd love to have some pictures or cards to hang up on my wall!!

Here is my address:
Shannon Mentock
Corps de la Paix
BP 215
Yaounde, Cameroon
AFRICA

You can send packages to that address too if you'd like.  We have to pay a tax on packages that I think is by weight, so keep that in mind when deciding what to send.  I've been told it is best to write the addresses in red because of superstitions and to not send anything too valuable or to seperate things into multiple boxes because it might not make it.

ALSO, if you want me to write you letters email me or leave a comment with your address.  I have envelopes and free time and I know how to use it.

Thanks!!

Week two of training

Last night my host mother made me eat two bananas. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was for me. I never, ever eat bananas at home or really even touch them because I’ve always thought they were really, really gross. I literally have no memory of eating any bananas at home that weren’t in a smoothie or banana bread. So far I’ve been able to avoid them, but (1) there’s a bunch of foods here I really would rather avoid than bananas, (2) it was the second time she had tried to get me to eat them, and (3) I feel really guilty because I can definitely tell that they make an effort to offer me special foods. My host mother already thinks I don’t eat because I can’t down an entire quart of rice in one sitting, so I had to give in and eat the banana. To be honest, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The texture is different, but the taste isn’t (still gross). I could see why they’d be good frozen and covered with chocolate, but I’m not going to be running out to the nearest grocery store to pick some up (which I couldn’t do anyway because they don’t exist here).


It was also the first time the whole family had sat outside at night since I’ve moved in, so it was the first time I really got to see the stars and how awesome they look out here. The power was out, so literally the only light pollution we had was from our kerosene lamp. Wish I could have taken a picture, but you know.

Yaounde and the environs

We only spent a short time in Yaounde (Cameroon’s capital) getting our ID cards and being introduced to PC Cameroon’s headquarters, but I shot a video out of the bus window to help everyone out there understand what it’s like. This is just a sample and there are larger buildings in town, but for the most part this is what I saw:

This part of Cameroon is so green and vegetated. There are a lot of hills too. Here is an attempt to show off the landscape right outside of Yaounde:

Seven days, seven beds

Thankfully, I finally have both power and internet at the same time so that I can finally post. I just moved into the homestay where I will be for the first 5 weeks of training in a tiny village (aka about 15 houses), but when I first arrived there was no power. Power is pretty erratic here and cuts on and off at any time. Besides the internet, the greatest gift power gives us is crazy African music videos. We just watched a whole bunch of them while I ate dinner and I hope this becomes America’s newest import.


Where I slept
Tuesday: My own bed in Durham, NC
Wednesday: Holiday Inn at Arch St. in Philadelphia, PA
Thursday: American Airlines
Friday: Novatel Hotel in Brussels
Saturday: Jet Hotel in Douala, Cameroon
Sunday: Hotel Jouvence 2000 (cool name?) in Yaounde, Cameroon
Monday: My mosquito-netted haven in Nyamsong, Cameroon

It was a crazy journey to get here to our training site. We all met in Philadelphia for a day to meet and orient before we left for Cameroon out of NYC. Right before we began boarding at JFK (after about 7 hours of waiting… thanks Peace Corps for making sure we got there with enough time to spare) there was a freak thunderstorm that came out of nowhere. It rained really hard for a while, so our flight was delayed. Then it was delayed a little more because the line for planes waiting to take off got so long. Eventually we got to Brussels, but the gate agents wouldn’t let us try to make our connecting flight to Cameroon even though boarding wasn’t supposed to start for 5 minutes. PC paid for us to spend the night in Brussels, although we weren’t allowed to leave the hotel so don’t ask me how Brussels is because I don’t know. We had to get a new flight the next day, but it flew into Douala instead of Yaounde so we ended up about 2 days or so behind on orientation and had to jam it all in to get to our homestays Monday night. It has been rough being so nomadic and it feels like I’ve been gone months already instead of barely a week.

The group in Douala

pre-Cameroon Activities

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