Joyeux Noel

Happy Holidays all! I hope your Christmases were merry and as white as applicable; I'll go ahead and say mine was very merry, but more earth-toned and sandy. After hanging my fake snowflakes on the windows with an ironic smile and endlessly explaining that they weren't stars, doilies or hair ties, I commenced my holiday activities Christmas Eve by having a quasi-American-style Christmas meal with my postmate, comprised of grilled chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and subpar American boxed cake. It was actually pretty delicious, and I ate enough to effectively put me out of commission for the rest of the night, though many of my neighbors sent pots of popcorn, sweet beignets and random meat (pictured above), which is the traditional party food. I accepted it with a tense smile and achingly false sense of gratitude, then proceeded to feed everything to my cat.

Christmas day, I left early to play Santa and give out all the American presents I brought back, like nice bar soap, watches, eyeglasses, etc. They were all terribly practical, but went over very well. The concept of the Christmas gift is pretty nonexistent here, but the concept of the 'back from a long voyage' present is quite real, so my gifts weren't surprises, but attributed to my trip to America, not Christmas. I was sent some gifts and candy for kids, so my favorite part of the holiday was finding a way to distribute everything without being ground into a fine paste by a children-stampede. I didn't always succeed, and the day I tried to walk around the Muslim neighborhood handing out smarties was the day I realized just how uncomfortable and distressingly intimate a mosh pit is. Bad decision Lamb Feast.

I found that my neighbors celebrate Christmas much like they do the other Christian/Muslim/national holidays, with lots of food, new clothes for the whole family and big parties. Since Bibemi is predominantly Christian, and the Muslim Lamb Feast also happened this week, this is probably the biggest holiday I've seen, and the one guaranteed to last the longest (generally until February-no joke). We're in the middle of the harvest here, so everyone is busy in the fields, but also collecting lots of money, so spirits are high. It makes work a little hard, as the temptation to make merry all day is omnipresent, but we're slated to start fixing water pumps the 5th, so I have tons of logistical nonsense to take care of. I suppose my next blog will update everyone on how that went, so until next time, keep your friends close and your enemies incarcerated, SLAV

Boyma Jahangal Mango (after the big trip)

Hey everyone, as promised, I’m actually using the page I set up to update you about my life to update you about my life! No one is as surprised as me.
Well, after a month of shameless gluttony, high heels and cross cultural sharing (aka “this is how we take a shot in Cameroon,”) I arrived successfully in Yaoundé, our capitol. Thanks are in order again for everyone who fed me, housed me, entertained me, or tolerated me falling asleep at like 4pm for the night on Thanksgiving. Jet lag plus turkey plus multiple microbrews equals what you saw there. In all seriousness, I appreciate the hospitality, so much so that I am tempted to play the “I live in rural poverty in Africa” card long after I’m back and working for Exxon/Mobil.
I had a bag left off my plane from Brussels, meaning I hung out in Yaoundé for a week to claim it, since they’re not exactly going to deliver it to my current address (‘the house to the left of the garbage pile with the kids trying to break in the window to get the American candy, Bibemi, Cameroon’). I was bored out of my mind down there, but took the opportunity to complete most of my obligatory mid-service medical exams…which I passed with flying colors you’ll all be happy to know. It’s actually something of an aberration to have completely clear blood and stool samples, so of course I attempted to pat myself on the back, realized I’m not nearly as flexible as I used to be, tried to disprove this by doing a spontaneous backbend, and ended up more in pain than if I had actually had one of the diseases I was cleared for. You win some; you lose some.
Once I actually got to my village (after a 20 hour train ride and combine 10 hour bush car rides, ish), it was like I was Robin Williams circa Hook, returning to the lost boys in Neverland after 20 years and them freaking out and dancing around about my return. Ok, it wasn’t really so much like that, but I’m having trouble thinking of a good homecoming pop culture analogy today, and Hook’s always a safe bet. Basically, everyone was really happy and dare I say relieved, as it’s hard for them to understand why, after being pampered and reintroduced to modern conveniences, I would CHOOSE to come back and wash my clothes in the river…Ok, pay children to wash my clothes in the river. Handing out pictures I developed was a huge deal; I plan to take way more this year now that I see the furor they cause.
It will be hard to get much work done before the new year; like the States, Christmastime is pretty much an all-bets-off few weeks. I’ll be sure to write again in January detailing how we celebrate Baby J’s birthday east of the Atlantic; I hope frankincense and myrrh are involved.
I’ve once again restructured my method for picture sharing. Pictures of other volunteers or anyone that’s on facebook will be posted there in the Tag Photos folder. Everything else (as in the interesting pictures) is to be found in my Google albums. I’ve attached a link. Almost my entire first year should be there (it’s pitifully few; I think I took more in two weeks in Australia). If there are problems getting to the page, let me know so I can inform you personally that there’s really nothing I can do about it. I’m trying to maintain a certain level of quick-response customer service here.
I wish everyone the happiest of holidays; I look forward to next year when we can go wassailing together, but until then, merry Christmas and watch the expiration dates on your eggnog, SLAV

Typical Clothing

Part Un: Traditional Pagne
The most common fashion, particularly for the older generations and pretty much everyone in rural areas, is the sometimes absurd/sometimes beautiful/occasionally incomprehensible and ALWAYS loud variety of African fabric, called 'pagne' here in the francophone Grand North. One buys it in a 6 meter sheet at the market or in stores in larger towns. In provincial capitols, there are usually young dudes walking around on the streets and in bars with 5-20 sheets displayed on their arms, apparently keen to take advantage of the drunken impulse buy...of a crapload of neon orange fabric with ducks fighting roosters on it. In my defense, the blue accents on the roosters' talons really bring out my eyes.
Pagne is something a bit hard to explain well, because it varies SO much. The fabric itself might be made of a million different materials, and the designs vary from a monochrome black silk with sporadic gold stars to a rainbow-colored affair covered in multilingual slogans and cartoons urging the populace to 'support their local post office,' 'honor their mothers and fathers,' or ' wipe from front to back...EVERY time.' Basically, your institution, national holiday, ethnic group or social initiative doesn't exist unless you've created a pagne pattern to announce it.
For the buyers, once you've chosen the pattern that defines your innermost soul (or you wake up wrapped in one you apparently couldn't live without the night before), the next step is to turn it from a sheet into a sundress or cute flowy skirt...or pajama pants in my case. Most villages are teeming with tailers, and once you've found your dude and he's taken your measurements, all you need to do is walk in, give him the newest fabric purchase and a rudimentary sketch of what you'd like made, and haggle down the price for the job. Since most women in my village prefer 80s-style huge sleeves and extra room in the stomach (for the inevitable next pregnancy), I've had a few disasters attempting to recreate American fashions, but Lucien (my man behind the sewing machine) is finally coming to understand that 'basic' and 'understated' never mean adding plastic beads and ruffles.
Part Deux: When Your Pagne is Dirty
Though pagne is infinitely more comfortable than jeans and a T-shirt (it's really more like wrapping yourself in a sheet than anything else), the impracticality of wearing it to work in the field and the ever-present and ever-growing influence of Western habits has led many in the country, particularly youth and those living in urban areas, to abandon the rainbow patterns in favor of tube tops, thrift store t-shirts and tight jeans...with rainbow patterned patches of course.
Where does one find these leopard-print vests and Thompson Family Reunion 1983 commemorative sweatshirts, you ask? At the Frippe, that glorious section of the market that's really just a huge, open air Salvation Army, specializing in everything from old-school Adidas track suits to boutique-quality hand-made beaded tops and accessories. The best frippes are in big cities or close to the border of Nigeria (aka Land of Wonders and Quality Electronics), but items as diverse as tapered jeans, knock-off LaCoste polos and Nascar jerseys occasionally wind up at local rural markets, for at most $2 a piece. Jackpot.

Half-assed Disclaimer

So I'm going to attempt a new concept with this blog, as my devotion to the 'pick a random picture and describe it' motif is clearly weaning. Since uploading the pictures is the difficulty, I'm going to forgo them unless I have one really pertinent to my topic (I mean, if I'm talking about fashion, NOT including the pic of the functionary sporting the 3-piece dinosaur print suit with straw cowboy hat and neon orange Puma slides would just be negligent). I came to realize the other day that my tightest emails and snippets involve me elaborating on a theme, so I'm going to describe village life in segments, covering each subject area as completely as possible before general malaise and desire to forget my surroundings at imdb.com take over the proceedings. If pictures are more your jib, there's a few assorted shots on facebook, and more to come after my strongly worded letter to the nation's government, unmasking the REAL development crisis (slow jpeg upload speeds), is received and acted upon. Until then, I guess just imagine me hanging out in whatever you conceive Africa to be; in other words, yes, I'm touring a war-torn village with Angelina and Oprah until my date to a female circumcision ceremony, after which I will sponsor 1 child with $20 a month ($4 of which she will see), raise a lion cub on grubs and good-natured apathy, run from a dude with a machete, encourage my boobs to sag to my mid-thigh by tying a baby to one and an anti-apartheid sign to the other, and devise a way to extract billions in oil revenue without paying my host government a cent in taxes. Oh yeah, and I'm doing all of this using ONLY clicks and tribal dancing to communicate. Hope you enjoy the new format, and dear god quit sending me emails telling me to update my blog...

Traditional Meals

Nourishment in a village is a curious thing. On the one hand, you're eating exclusively fresh, unpackaged and preservative-free food. If you're chomping ona steak kabob, you can rest assured the cow was killed that day, and it's head is probably still resting next to the skin and entrails on your butcher's roadside table, staring at you. If your friend gives you a banana, she probably carted herself out to the grove outside of town to pick it. Not bad.
On the other hand, since cultural traditions and the realities of the desert dictate an emphasis on quantity, availability and food that makes you feel fullest, the meals prepared from these fresh ingredients is extremely hit-or-miss. Take the basic staple, couscous. First, a few words about terminology. The French is couscous, but this isn't your mother's couscous (or your friend Susanne's). It's comprised of whatever carb or starch you have a surplus of (normally corn or millet) ground into a powder and mixed with boiling water, forming a thick, chunky paste that tastes like gritty, well, grit. Revolutionary concepts like 'adding salt' or 'striving for a less gag-inducing texture' haven't played out because this food is about sustinence, not a pleasant dining experience.
The other word in need of clarification is staple. In the States, I would consider a chicken breast a staple food for me, as I tended to eat about one per week on a fairly regular basis. Maybe same with sliced bread and (at a certain period of my development) vodka sodas. In the villages here, however, couscous isn't a favorite meal or the stereotypical food; it IS food. Like, the native language word for food is THE SAME as for couscous, with no distinction needed. Midday and nighttime meals nearly always involve huge piles of couscous (unless one is upper class and can afford piles of rice or potatoes sometimes) with an accompanying sauce.
Thankfully for some, variety is possible in the sauce (though unfortunately for others, it's not universally affordable). Most involve a particular leaf from a tree or bush plant, salt, maybe some dried fish (reliably 70% bones and heads), MSG cubes, and 'gumbo' (also misleading), which creates a sauce with the precise consistency and temperature of snot, down to the stringy, globby details. To eat, you pick up a glob of couscous, depress it a little and then dip it in the communal trough of sauce, virtually slinging it onto the mush and into your mouth in a gesture most people here have done daily their whole lives.
I'm writing this pretty frankly and perhaps a little unfairly not because this is the way I currently view dinner at my neighbors' houses, or because I'm looking to score some cheap sympathy, but because this is how I imagine a Western 'outsider' would describe them. If you were visiting me and eating with me at someone's house, this account is undoubtably what you would come away with.
That said, don't worry; it isn't really all that bad. I'm pretty used to the couscous and gumbo 1-2 punch, and sometimes enjoy it when it's well done and I'm hungry. Also, this is just the most common meal, there are also leaf sauces made with peanut paste, beef bits and tomato paste that occasionally transcend the mediocre...and at MY house, I can make them with rice.

Now, don't everyone rush out to buy there plane tickets to Bibemi at once; I'm pretty sure there's only 1 plane coming here this month, and the soccer team's already booked most of it.

So here's a shot of us fighting the waves in Kribbi. We were here for a week long seminar about our work objectives and information sharing and whatnot, but after the meetings we got to spend our lives on the beach and eating some of the most authentic seafood I've ever had. (As I live in the middle of the U.S. where fish direct from Lake Michigan is considered a delicacy, this should not surprise anyone.) The waves were strong enough to pull my suit off a number of times, and the fields of jagged rocks didn't help things, but it's an African tourist locale, so imminent death and random nudity (representing all age groups) are par for the course.

These are the two youngest kids of my neighbors, Aoula and Anna and their dog and puppy. This puppy is the reason I don't have the desire to get a dog, since I can go and play with it whenever I want. Puppy's like children, aren't too hard to find in my village. On any given day,

about 2/3rds of the female dogs are pregnant or nursing pups, and people are dying to get rid of them.

Ok, so this is my little neighbor Anna (pronounced with really long A's) right before she went to take a bath. She's on the porch of her parent's house, which is slightly bigger than mine, but holds 8 kids. I like the shot because the surroundings are very typical of upscale Cameroonian families in my village. Basically the rule is, if you have money, you have a cement house, and if you don't, you live in a mud hut with a straw roof. Anna comes over to my house to play with the cat or search for fruit seeds pretty much every day, and at first I couldn't communicate with her by anything but exaggerated hand signals, but now we can chat in Fulfulde...sort of.

This is me in my sweet Women's Day outfit, waiting to march in the parade with the Wives of People in the Medical Profession women's group. (That's the literal translation from the French; I'm sure I could think of something a little jazzier if I had the motivation.) International Women's Day is every March 8th, and in villages as out there as mine, it's really just an excuse for the women to get dressed up, parade around, then get drunk without having to worry about doing chores or cooking or watching the kids. The sad part is that in reality, they just work twice as hard the day before in order to have the freedom to leave their duties for a few hours. Women's Day ends promptly at 6pm, 'when the women return to their kitchens,' as the posters read, but luckily for me, I qualify as some sort of androganous anomaly that needn't follow the rules, so I partied with the women all day, then just continued with their husbands at night. One of my goals for next year is to attempt to turn Women's Day into a time for actual awareness of gender issues, instead of a rote festival with vague motivations that have been lost in the translation from the highminded government officials who created the holiday.

So sometime near the end of January, the hospital staff through an end of the year party at the doctor's house, and I was invited, seeing as how I kind of work at the hospital. One of the inevitable features of Cameroonian fetes is a big, awkard group shot of everyone in attendance, usually after they're too drunk to feel self conscious or impatient about it. So here we have everyone that works at the Bibemi District Hospital and the surrounding health centers, including the doctor, nurses, guards, cooks and what-have-yous. Since it's not painfully obvious, I'm the white chick in the very front of the shot that looks about as out of place as Dick Cheney at a pro-choice rally.

This is Bouba Toumba, my Peace Corps-assigned counterpart in village. This means it's his responsibility to look after me and make sure I meet everyone and make friends and such. He's also the nurse at the health center where I work, so he pretty much runs my entire world in Bibemi. When we first met at the counterpart workshop in November, I couldn't speak French to save a dying bald eagle, and he couldn't stay awake through any of the sessions. Needless to say, our relationship going into post was tenuous at best, and he at first showed no indication that he even knew I was in town. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is that he's actually one of the most sarcastic and hilarious people I know, and we've since become fabulous friends. This picture is quintessentially Bouba. Side note: he drives a motorcycle with spiderman-themed seat covers, if that surprises anyone.

This is my house in village. Is anyone surprised it's the only picture I've taken since I finished training? Anywho, they'll be much more to say about this later, but the important thing is it miraculously has AC (only 2 houses in the entire program have it) and its in the middle of a forest, a point I have made before, but find so randomly sweet that it warrants repetition. Sidenote- yes, I will be adding red trim so I can say I'm the Peace Corps volunteer who lives in the red, white and blue house. Unlike in most foreign lands, unabashed American patriotism is COOL in Africa!

So the Swearing In ceremony is where we actually become Peace Corps volunteers, and it's a rather legit event with all kinds of officials and protocol and whatnot, and I co-presented the French speech traditionally given by a volunteer or two who came in with little or no French. This is me rocking that, and I clearly made quite an impression, considering the

Cameroonian ambassador later congratulated another volunteer who looks vaguely like me on the fine speech. Whatever, at least I got to wear a painfully loud skirt on national television...

Ok, when I talk about going to ‘the bar,’ this is what I mean. This establishment, cleverly titled "Club des Amies" (Friend’s Club), is actually a little more cosmopolitan than most of the places I frequent. I mean, it has chairs and murals on the walls. Sometimes ‘the bar’ is really just ‘the patch of cement with a dude selling whiskey sachets out of a duffel bag’…

Ok, this is what I mean when I talk about being in the middle of a Baby Gap ad. I’m not sure who the girl in the middle is, probably a cousin of some sort, but the little one is my youngest sister, Awahou (sounds like the Hawaiian island) and the really happy one is the next youngest, Aissatou. She’s the one that really likes to play clapping games with me, and speaks just enough French to ask me for candy. You really can’t see it well enough, but the building to the right in the background is my latrine. Oh, the sometimes painful, sometimes alarming, always degrading memories…

Ok, here’s the story with this shot. I’m hanging out with my family, eating some rice and trying to learn the Fulfulde phrase for "I’m tired of learning Fulfulde," and I hear a ruckus outside. We run out to find my host father and his posse of middle-aged Muslim men beating the hell out of something on the ground. I freak, thinking it’s a kitten or something, then they move away, and my brother starts screaming and runs back into the house. It’s this huge lizard. Apparently they saw it just strolling down the lane, and didn’t want it to eat the livestock. So here’s my dad holding the thing. I couldn’t get a straight answer on how common it is to see something like this here, but I’ve been told I’m going to see a lot of snakes of varying sizes once March hits…sweet.

Ok this is what passes for tabloid news in Cameroon. It’s written in both English and one of the patois languages, so I don’t feel I need to explain the storyline, but I will note that the seemingly gratuitous graphics of the goat giving birth is indicative of the culture here...as in gratuitous imagery, not goats having human babies (unless you believe this TRUE LIVE STORY). Pictures are really important for communicating information since there are so many languages, so a lot of my health pamphlets and posters sport some pretty frank cartoons of folk with diarrhea and worms and other nasty diseases. As it happens, this poster is hanging in my host family’s living right now, next to their picture of me with the American Ambassador and a picture of Superman Arafat (my bro) colored my first week with them (the store didn’t have any Batman coloring books, so you win this round Zenker).