Welcome to the City of Brotherly Love

Thus concludes our staging event!

Today all the volunteers in my "stage" (group? training class?) came together in Philadelphia for ice breakers, welcomes, and brief orientations.  There are 55 of us total, and everyone seems really nice!  Here's our schedule for the foreseeable future: Tomorrow morning we take our final hot showers and hop on a bus to JFK, where we wait around until our 5:15 flight to Brussels.  Once we arrive we have another thrilling many-hour wait in the airport until our flight to Camerooon!  So, Friday evening we will finally touch down in Africa.  

We will all spend the first few days in a hotel in the capital, Yaoundé, as training begins and we take our language placement test.  Next, the Youth Development (that's me) and agriculture volunteers head to a smaller city called Bafia, where we meet our host families.  That's where we'll be for the next couple of months as we get intensive French language, cultural, and technical training.  Mid November is when we swear in (yeah, there's a ceremony... I know) and become OFFICIAL Peace Corps Volunteers!  In the meantime we are mere Peace Corps Trainees :( This is the point when we all get assigned our communities and spread to the four winds of this country!

For those of you who may not know, Cameroon is commonly referred to as "Africa in miniature."  First of all, yes, I too think it's weird that certain countries have taglines.  (Throwback to Taiwan: Heart of Asia, anyone?)  Second of all, the reason people say this about Cameroon is because it has such a wide variety of climates, geographies, culture, languages, ethnic groups, etc etc etc.  I know when I first read the Wikipedia article about Cameroon that claimed, "Natural features include beaches, deserts, mountains, rainforests, and savannas.", I laughed, wondering what natural features Cameroon DOESN'T have.  Well, tundra, apparently.

Briefly, on packing:  I felt pretty proud of myself for not leaving all my Peace Corps prep stuff (including packing) to the very last minute.  Throughout the summer I referred to check lists, bought vital items, and gradually ran more and more errands necessary before departure.  I even started packing SEVERAL DAYS before my flight (!!!).  Still, the last day was basically spent looking at all my stuff - so much stuff - and figuring out how to space out the weight and what to carry on and then weighing and re-packing and re-weighing.  When I got to the airport this morning, one bag was 50.5 pounds (nailed it!) and the other was 48.  I refrained from frantically grabbing two pounds of stuff from out of my carry on and shoving it into that underfilled bag to retain some dignity.  I suspected that my carry on might actually be bigger than carry on size, and I spent the whole time sitting at the gate staring at other people's carry ons, trying to discern whether any of them were as tall, wide, or chubby as mine.  I felt ashamed and embarrassed of it, like as if everyone in the airport could see some hideous toe fungus that I couldn't conceal.  They still let me on with it and it even fit in the overhead bin!

At the airport, my mom told one guy that I was about to do the Peace Corps, and he said, "thank you."  It was so cool.  It felt undeserved but I was touched :)

I absolutely feel like I don't know what to expect out of this whole thing.  Some days I am afraid I'll be the first volunteer on a plane back home, unable to cope with the spiders and isolation and diarrhea, and other days I think to myself, "Oh yeah.  I got this."  Frankly, I am really nervous for the nasty critters, and for the living conditions, and for the ideological cultural differences that might come as a slap in the face.  And like that cab driver told me a couple of months ago, I'm too prissy for the Peace Corps.  I really like hot showers and washing my hands, and I really hate cockroaches and spiders.  Also, aside from all the Africa-specific stuff, I don't feel qualified to be a Youth Development coordinator!  I simply do not know how to develop youths!  

I guess that's what training is for.

More to come...