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.