Happy Birthday Baby J!!

Happy holidays everyone; I hope the greeting cards in matching cheesy sweaters and drunken make outs under the mistletoe at the office Christmas party are putting everyone into the spirit of the season. I’ve been listening to Charlie Brown Christmas music all morning, but it isn’t making it anymore real when I glance outside and see palm trees and kids running around all naked due to the heat.
Things are going great here; I’m making slow but steady progress pimping out my house and meeting neighbors. I have a few friends at the bar down the street that sell grilled fish and drink all night every night, so I’ve been hanging out and drinking 40s with them when I’m not exploring other watering holes around the village. My first night, one of them informed me that the bar was out of, well, booze in general (a problem much more common than you’d think), so she took me to this 60 year old woman’s house in the middle of nowhere, where the broad had constructed a bar in the middle of her yard that served warm beer and whiskey. As it turns out, this place is pretty popular among the elites, as I met the chief of police and the owner of the huge Sodocotton compound there. Score, I guess…
I suppose I should point out that I’m not telling stories about drinking and bars here because I think that’s all you guys want to here or because I’m trying to be like yeah, college in Africa; it’s more because it’s such a huge part of life here. Like, yeah we have people in the states that drink away their children’s college funds, but some of the parents here actually watch their kids grow distended stomachs and die from common colds just so they can black out in a field with their buddies every week day. It gives a good many of my bad decision Thursdays a whole new perspective…and one I currently choose to ignore.
Christmas was absolutely bizarre. I met up with the other whiteys in our provincial capitol for Christmas Eve and we went to drink and hang out at the hotel bar where we were staying, and it turns out the hotel was hosting a high school dance at the same time and place. Long story short, a lot of my friends ended up grinding on Cameroonians ranging in age from 14 to like 23 while I belted out Let it Snow and pretended I was drinking really strong egg nog and not boxed wine the costed 2 american dollars. For Christmas morning, we ate omelets and fried plantains and listened to Bing Crosby, then we randomly watched Beauty and the Beast, with an extended break to discuss Tim Curry’s role as the Evil Pipe Organ in the sequel and why this organ is never alluded to in the original, though he apparently posed a pretty formidable threat to their love during Belle’s Christmas season in captivity…You know, my typical ponderings during lazy/hungover weekends when I can’t find Flight of the Navigator or a random E True Hollywood Story to keep my mind limber.

So this is me during our peer educator training, teaching some Cameroonians about how you get, prevent and treat AIDS. Keep in mind that I'm doing the whole thing in French. You'll notice that the dudes are taking notes; let's talk about how weird it is to have people taking notes from ME, instead of me pretend to take notes from them, but really just budgeting how much I can spend at the bar that night or playing MASH with myself to see who I'm going to marry and what type of house I will live in. As of right now, it's Maury Povich in a Mansion.

Ok, so here's me with all my homestay brothers and sisters...and a few randos that I'm sure are related to me. I feel this pic doesn't really capture they're cuteness, because honestly, I sometimes feel like I'm in a Baby Gap Africa commercial, but it's hard to get pictures of them because they freak out and swarm the camera whenever we bust it out. If you're thinking to yourself 'It really looks like the boy in the front is saluting the camera,' you'd be right...he is.

Yeah, we'll see how long I keep this up...

So we all know how much I hate technology in general and egocentric websites in particular, but I guess living on the other side of the world in a town comprised mainly of mud huts, free range pigs and bars (wait, am I still in Cambridge?) justifies my decision to create this stupid thing. Since I don't really know what I'm doing, I'm going to use this first little deal to explain the title of my blog. If I've already told anyone this story, I'm really sorry, but hearing it again is still probably better than making a new cover page for your TPS report or playing spider solitaire (and only the EASY level, since you're so starved for gratification and a sense of accomplishment that you can't face maybe losing the game at MEDIUM)...

So I'm visiting Bibiemi, my village the other week, and I've already met everyone that works at the hospital and chatted up some of my neighbors and such, and everything's going really well. The gendarme (like state police in village) is chilling with me and my postmate Whalen at the upscale bar (meaning there are wood chairs, not just the white plastic shit you see people sitting in outside their trailers on cops) on the main road and up drives the hospital's one ambulance with my supervisor and the doctor. They stop in the middle of the road and say hey, and we're like 'this is sweet; we have friends here already,' and I'm a bit surprised, because I had been informed by the peace corps that the ambulance wasn't really used for the hospital's purposes as much as as a car for the mayor and other officials to drive around in.
So later that day, we're walking through the market, checking out the fresh produce and toothpaste from the early nineties that's oin sale there, and I see the damn ambulance again...only this time an old woman is driving it with another random dude and maybe a sheep sitting shotgun. Now, I had met everyone who works at the hospital, and these people certainly did not. As this was just the latest quirk in one of the most random days ever (my postmate got peed on by a goat qnd some dude decided to sit directly on my lap while we road a bush taxi, then we proceeded to drink homeade booze called billbill out of garbage pails in the middle of a field), there was nothing I could do but exclaim "Who the hell's driving the ambulance!?"
This happened about a month ago, and since then the phrase has come to signify every moment we have here when things happen that can't be explained, or are simply so random and unreal that I have to remind myself that there is a place called America where people each get their own seats in taxis, drinks come in glasses, and medical equipment is actually only used to help people who are sick.