Finally!

Ahhhhhhhh I am sooooooo shamefully behind on blog updates! I apologise!! Profusely!! I’ll try to remedy the situation by sharing a couple of quick tidbits about my life.

I could talk about school, but it’s much the same as before. Lots of paperwork, lesson-planning, test writing, grading, attempts at classroom management, etc. But some good stories from the past couple of weeks:

-I was in class with my sixièmes (like sixth grade) one Thursday, and there were only a couple minutes of class left. Suddenly, one kid (who is always disturbing class) stands up and starts yelling, “Cholera! Cholera! Madame, Madame, il y a le cholera!!!” Naturally, I assumed he was just trying to create a distraction to get out of having to listen to me explain English grammar. I eventually went to investigate a found that another kid had projectile vomited on the whole bench of kids sitting in front of him. Since there was a Cholera epidemic in the Extreme North region of Cameroon over the summer, these kids have been conditioned to think that whenever anyone is sick, it is Cholera. So as news spread that there was indeed vomit within the class, a stampede erupted. I was nearly trampled as over a hundred children fled the scene, all trying to simultaneously squeeze through the classroom door. It was chaos! But I did have to laugh.

**The kid did not have cholera!! Just a stomach bug :)

-Another day with my sixièmes, there were probably about 5 or 6 kids sitting on one bench (that’s how Cameroonian classrooms are, there are a bunch of benches and the kids shove as many as can fit onto one that probably made for 2 to 3 students). And from underneath them, the bench collapsed! I absolutely freaked out, fawning over them, repeatedly asking if they were injured in any way. They assured me they were fine, and one of them asked to go out of the class for a minute. He comes back within seconds with a fist-sized rock which he uses to pound the nails back into the bench. Once repaired, the same students went back and sat on the same bench for the rest of the class, urging me to continue. It blew my mind.

So school the end of the second sequence also brought the end of the first trimester. This meant grading the tests of the second sequence, filling in all the report cards (on giant sheets of paper with carbon paper beneath it to make copies!), calculating the averages of all the students, and since I was forced to be the head of the English department (who knows how or why this happened), I had to fill out all this paperwork documenting the progress of the department as a whole. In essence, this meant chasing around the other two English teachers who are hardly ever there to find out how many hours they had actually taught and how many chapters they had covered. A lotttttt of hours were logged in the Salle des Professeurs (Teacher’s Lounge) but it was nice because almost all of my colleagues were just as busy as I was. And in commiserating over our collective hand cramps and statistic calculating-induced headaches, I think we got closer. I’m starting to feel more and more comfortable and accepted. I’ll always be the crazy white female (gasp!) that doesn’t really know exactly what’s going, but I think the male teachers at school are coming to recognize my presence a bit more. I’m “la petite soeur” (the little sister) of everybody, or so they like to say. I could take offense that they still see me as a little girl, but they all look out for me (I suppose as an older brother should), so I’m picking my battles.

As soon as I finished with all my paperwork, I had to cut out of school early!! I left a week before Christmas started because I had a Peace Corps conference in Kribi. Kribi is in the South Region of Cameroon, and it is a touristy beach town! We spent most of our days in a conference room, but we did get to go to the beach a fair amount. The first day we got there was actually my birthday, and I went swimming! It was crazy, having a December birthday, I’d never had that opportunity before. The conference, called IST, for In-Service Training, was good overall. We got some useful information about funding sources, more medical information, various Peace Corps committees we can be a part of, etc. Unfortunately, it ended on a bit of a sour note, as towards the end of the week, about 20 volunteers were robbed at a bar next to our hotel :( No one was gravely injured and the gendarmes actually caught two of the guys responsible and found almost everyone’s identity and bank cards. Still, no one wants to be threatened, and it put quite a damper on things.

*tangent- I know some out there are prone to worry, but please don’t! This could have happened in any touristy place anywhere in the world. I feel completely safe in my village and am being as careful as possible!

Anyways, I spent one last night in Kribi, saw some beautiful waterfalls, ate a lotttt of fish, and bought some cool African jewelry!

So I headed back up to the Grand North of Cameroon in time for Christmas. I visited a town called Meigonga in the Adamoua Region. A bunch of volunteers are posted in an around Meigonga, a town absolutely covered in a thick red dust. When traveling anywhere you get coated in it! I wish I would have taken a picture of us after being on a bus for four hours- it looked like we had smeared red clay all over our bodies and my friend Rose’s blond hair had turned to copper! Christmas was so fun, we had a private Cameroonian concert in one of the volunteer’s houses. We also did a secret Santa, watched It’s a Wonderful Life, played Risk for about four hours, and cooked a veritable Mexican fiesta for dinner. All in all, a pretty great Christmas! (Although I must admit, with the weather here, it felt nothing like Christmas. I think this fact has tricked my psyche into believing it’s not truly Christmas, and this is the single reason why I avoided feeling a crippling amount of homesickness over the holidays.) Then I headed back to Hina for a few days to decompress, but was back in Maroua (the Extreme North’s regional capital) for New Year’s. There was a HUGE new year’s eve party at our Peace Corps house- there must have been about 50 or 60 volunteers there! It was a lot of fun and dancing and general absurdness, as usually occurs when a mass of Americans who have been sitting alone at post for a while get together.

School started again on the 3^rd of January, and I have been BUSY!! I think this is a very good thing, and I’m happy to be getting even more involved with the students. My clubs (English Club and Les Filles et Progrès, Girls’ Club) are garnering more interest. Yay! And there are sooooo many activities coming up tht we have to start planning for, like Bilingualism week, Youth Week, Women’s Day, Labour Day, Independence Day, etc. etc. AND other big news; I have a post mate!!!! Her name is Cheryl, and she is another Peace corps volunteer, in the health sector, living in Hina now! I’m sooooooo happy to have her at post! I hope this doesn’t sound to ethnocentric, but sometimes it is really nice to have another American to talk to- to vent, to share a story or joke that Cameroonians simply wouldn’t get, to lament a failure or celebrate a success, or just to spend time with someone who can understand you without at least a portion of what you say getting lost in translation.

Yeah, things are good! I feel like I’m kind of getting in the groove of this living in Africa thing. I love the people (Cameroonian and American) that I’ve met here, I love my beautiful village, my job can be frustrating but simultaneously rewarding, and feel like I’m growing. Successes all around! Downsides, of course, being that I miss everyone at home terribly. But I am thinking of you always. Hope everyone is spectacular, and I promise the next post will not be so long in coming!