Post Announcement: Bafang!

At the end of the day on Wednesday after MUCH anticipation, we finally found out our posts!  Amadou (the youth development program manager) orchestrated a dramatic ceremony where one person went up, pulled a paper slip out of an envelope, and read aloud the next person’s name and post.  Then everyone clapped nervously, mentally crossing off that post and dreading hearing the next, and the next person proceeded down the line.  This is the first time they have used the bidding system (where volunteers read post descriptions and rank their top and bottom three choices) and it appeared to be very successful, with almost everyone in YD getting one of their top three choices.

As for me, I listed Bafang as my first choice but was prepared to be sent just about anywhere.  The girl I’m replacing in Bafang, Sarah, has been one of the PCVs helping out with our youth development training, so we all met her week 2 and she came back for more training this week.  She’s a volunteer who has been here two years and is about to head back to the US.  It has been amazing having her around this week so I can ask her a million questions on the house I will live in (her house), what the town is like, what my host organization is like, and what my future friends in town are like.  And I have taken full advantage of that opportunity!

Here’s a list of Everything I Know About Bafang, or, Why Bafang is the Best Post Ever:

·       -    My house is a mansion.  I have two stories!!!!  I have two bathrooms for moi seul!!  Apparently there’s a huge downstairs kitchen/dining/living room, and upstairs there’s my bedroom, a guest bedroom, a bedroom that has been used exclusively as Sarah’s closet, and a workout room.  Wow!  I was expecting one bedroom and one “other” room for all of the above.  Incentive for people to visit me from the states?  I think so.

·      -     It’s not just a mansion – it’s an amazing modern mansion.  I have reliable running water and electricity and cell phone service and there’s internet available close by (cyber cafes in town, good service for internet keys, and a potential option of future wifi in my house!).

·     -    And while I’m being materialistic… Because I’m replacing Sarah, I’m inheriting a bunch of her stuff to help fill and furnish my house.  After talking to her, it sounds like the list of things I’m inheriting includes two mattresses, pots, pans, dishes, forks, spoons, spices, a stove, a gas tank to make the stove work, a French press, a drip coffee maker (!!!!!!!!), buckets, giant emergency water reserve bucket, table, chairs, two yoga mats, exercise bands, a nifty device that will convert my mountain bike into a stationary bike (yes, I really will have a workout room!), an internet key (!!), a hammock, bath and cosmetic products, etc etc etc.  I’m paying Sarah a little bit to cover some of the costs and sponsor her trip to Ethiopia, but she’s definitely cutting me a deal and not charging the entire 200,000 CFA that we will be given as a moving in allowance.  According to Sarah I still have some furnishing to do (because it’s a mansion) but it sounds like a lot of my bases are covered.  Plus I will have to figure out what to do with yoga mats and exercise bands.

·  -       I am also inheriting Sarah’s friends.  Included in the price.

·  -       Bafang is beautiful.  It’s in the mountains, and there’s apparently a great view from my front door so I will wake up every morning feeling energized and awed by this amazing experience in this amazing place in this amazing universe.  There are waterfalls within a five minute walk of my house.  It sounds like paradise.

·  -       The climate will be to die for.  The west is one of the cooler regions.  Cameroonians will tell you that it’s freezing there and you need to bring wool sweaters, but as far as I know they mean that it’s regularly in the low to mid 70s.  The West and Northwest are both cool and not humid, as compared to the apparently insanely hot and humid coastal areas and South region and the dry but scorching North and Far North regions (where during dry season the temperatures supposedly get up to 130 and the water comes out of the tap boiling.  I thought I’d be prepared for desert coming from Texas but apparently not!).

·   -      I have post mates!  There are two other PCVs in Bafang who will apparently be my neighbors to the left and right.  From everything I’ve heard (both from Sarah and the trainees who visited her on site visit), they are apparently both really nice and cool and I already love them. 

·    -     People in Bafang speak French.  And English.  And Féfée.  The West is a francophone region, so I’m really excited to be using my French on a daily basis and hopefully becoming totally fluent by the end of two years.  But, there are apparently also a bunch of Anglophones in Bafang, so if the stress of speaking a second language is too much, instead of breaking down and going back to the US, I can take a day off and speak English with Anglophone friends.  And Féfée is the local language that I get to start learning.  I’m really excited about that, too, so that I come out of this not JUST knowing boring old French, but a cool African language that will totally impress people back home.  Rose Nicole, one of the language trainers, is from Bafang and has agreed to help me get a head start on my Féfée.

·  -       The West is pretty volunteer-dense.  I was nervous about isolation, but the west is the most densely populated region both in terms of Cameroonians and PCVs.  10 or so from our stage are headed there and there are a bunch of volunteers there already.

·  -       My host organization sounds organized, structured, and motivated.  Sarah said that they have offered to put me up in an office, which sounds super cool.  She also said that the woman I’ll be working with has a list of goals set up and it sounds like there is already structure and work to be done, which was another thing I was nervous about.

·   -      Bafang is my hometown, my market town, and my banking town.  Volunteers in smaller villages have neighboring towns where they need to go to buy food or anything, and they sometimes have to travel for several hours to get to their banking town to withdraw their monthly cash.  But Bafang has it all!

·   -      And the market is apparently amazing.  Everyone who has been there tells me how great the market is.  It’s every day and apparently has a huge variety of fruits and vegetables available, as well as everything else you could possibly want.  I asked Sarah what things she could buy in Bafang and what she needed to travel to Bafoussam, the regional capital, for.  She said she has never needed to go to Bafoussam because Bafang’s market is so complete.  But at the same time, Bafoussam is only an hour or an hour and a half away, which in Cameroon distances or Texas distances is not bad at all!

·   -      We have clubs.  When Shanna, one of the other PCV trainers, mentioned that Bafang has clubs, I thought she meant after school clubs.  Turns out she meant night clubs.  What???  Okay!!

·   -      My house has a high wall and gate surrounding it.  Safety and security is awesome.

·  -       People in Bafang are apparently relatively educated and relatively well-off.  So it’s apparently easier to get work done.  If I went to a poorer, less educated area, I would also be excited to be in a place with really obvious need, but this should be great.  Also the houses in my neighborhood are apparently comparable to mine so it’s not like I live in some fortress while everyone surrounding is living in tiny shacks.

·  -       Sarah has been there, but not for too long.  I’m not going to a remote village where no one has seen a white person before, so that should help reduce the unwanted attention towards me.  But Sarah was evacuated from her original post and has only been in Bafang since June, so she hasn’t been, like, a real institution in the town that I could never live up to.  No offense.

We’re supposed to go in to post with as few expectations as possible, so I’m going to try to forget everything I just wrote down and expect the worst again.  But I really feel so excited for Bafang and the next two years no longer seem scary and daunting.  My only reservations are that I feel like I kind of wimped out by listing such a cushy, beautiful, perfect place as my first choice post.  Who would have thought that I would join the Peace Corps and move to Africa only to have a way nicer house than I could afford in the states?  I know there will still be plenty of challenges and that the youth of Bafang still need plenty of help, but it is definitely one of the most posh corps posts and sometimes I feel guilty for not listing something a little more rugged and difficult.  But then I remember all of the stuff listed above and I stop feeling guilty and start feeling excited.