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