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).