The End of the Beginning!

            There is landmark in Peace Corps service after the first three months at post.  We have a conference called In-Service Training (IST).  It marks the boundary between the “don’t worry, take it easy, just work on integrating into your community” phase and the “get shit done” phase.  Before IST, you’re not really expected to do any work, so nothing you do can be disappointing.  After IST, you’re officially a lazy, useless, unproductive waste of space.  Unless you’re not.

            Our IST begins this weekend in Bamenda and will go for almost two weeks.  I am SO EXCITED for a few reasons:

1)      To get the gang back together again!  This is absolutely the #1 reason.  Some of my favorite people in this country I haven’t seen for the past three months and that is just unacceptable.  Plus, last night I was realizing how much I miss sarcastic American senses of humor.  I am picturing this conference as 20% hugging, 30% drinking, 50% gossiping, 100% laughing, and 0% boring educational sessions.  We’ll see how accurate that perception is. 

2)      I think for me mentally, once I get back from IST I will start to really buckle down, figure out what work and projects I want to undertake, and start making commitments.  I think I’ll feel much happier when I am getting out more, doing more work, and maybe even – if I’m lucky – being kind of productive.

3)      Bamenda is nice.  It’s kind of a bummer that this chance to travel the country happens to be held in one of the three cities I’ve already been to… twice… but that being said, it’s beautiful, and I know what delicious foods await me.  Plus I heard promises of Honey Bunches of Oats and/or Cocoa Puffs.  So, ya.

But also I’m absolutely dreading it for a few reasons:

1)       Getting the gang back together again.  And hearing about all the wonderful things everyone has already done at their post and why they’re the best volunteers ever and I’m a useless failure.

2)      As previously mentioned, after IST, I will officially transition from being “chill-ly integrating” to a useless failure.

3)      Boring sessions?  No.  Surely there won’t be any of those.  We will be too busy laughing and hugging.

Anyway, I am leaving for Bamenda today.  In fact, I meant to leave already but have been too busy procrastinating doing my post report that was due two weeks ago packing and thus have, in the meantime, read through every text message I’ve sent or received since getting an iPhone, given myself a haircut, uploaded photos from my iPhone, camera, and iPad, and looked through them all three or four times, thought of at least 15-20 hilarious Facebook statuses that I will never post, and written two blog entries.  And they said change was inevitable.  I haven’t changed a bit since high school!

Okay.  Here’s what happened in the past month:

            This guy I know (actually I mentioned him once before – he was the one who peed mid-conversation the first time we met as he walked me home.  I don’t really know his name because they’re hard to pronounce so I refer to him as “that guy… you know, that guy.”) invited me out to the farm with him to see what it’s like.  Although that sounds like about the sketchiest invitation that you’d be so stupid to accept (because yes, man I have spoken to four times, I would love to accompany you alone to an isolated area far from town), I also was kind of curious what the farms are like.  After all, according to my post report which I have almost finished, 80% of Bafang’s residents get their income from agriculture!  So I told him that I was going to bring Lee along too, and we made a plan to go the first weekend of February at 6:30 AM.  As the date approached, Lee and I started to realize that it sounded incredibly boring, laborious, and early.  But I couldn’t sacrifice my close friendship with that guy whose name I don’t know, so flaking out was not an option.  We blinked ourselves awake before the sun and got ready to farm.

            Anyway, long story short, the day turned out to be a lot more fun and interesting than either of us anticipated.  And a lot less laborious because we are clearly incompetent and didn’t even bring machetes, so we watched and did no work at all.  The farm was a 45 minute walk from our rendez-vous point at one of the local high schools.  And when I say “walk” I mean speed walk because that guy had us sprinting there.  (The way back, led by his 9-year-old daughter, was at a much more reasonable pace of a mile or two an hour.)  Oh, and the walk, by the way, was absolutely gorgeous.  Lee and I agreed that it was considerably nicer than then hike we’d gone on the week before, and that we should take visitors this way to show off our post’s beauty.  As we walked we got closer and closer to a river which we eventually got to admire.  By the time we arrived at the farm, there were no sounds of anything manmade and it felt like we were completely alone with nature.  That’s also when I realized that there were tons of ants, no quick routes to the hospital, and I had obviously neglected to bring my epi pen.  But other than foreseeing my imminent death, being isolated and alone with nature was basically a good thing.

First of all, the farm is not at all how you’re picturing a “farm” to be.  You’re picturing bales of hay and big wide flat areas with tidy rows of whatever-it-is, sprinkled with tractors and other heavy machinery.  And maybe a red barn.  This “farm” looked a lot more like a forest.  It was on a pretty steep hillside and there were no discernable paths or organizational systems.  Nothing about it looked deliberate, but the guy/my friend/you know seemed to know his way around pretty well.

            The most striking thing about the day was that it hit me how little I know about the food we eat.  For example, take chocolate.  I have eaten perhaps a thousand pounds of chocolate throughout my life.  Where does it come from?  Oh, I know this.  Cocoa beans!  Right?  But do you know about… cocoa fruit??  Maybe you all do and I’m just really ignorant.  But the beans don’t grow loosely on the tree.  They are the seeds within the cocoa fruit!  It’s yellow or orange and shaped kind of like a papaya.  When you open it, the beans are all covered in a white filmy flesh which you can eat, and it’s delicious!  The most similar thing I can compare it to is passionfruit, except you spit out the seeds in the center.  And the taste is tangy and sweet and absolutely delicious (also, probably most similar to passion fruit)!  I was shocked to discover this.  A wonder of the world and I’ve never known.

            I also got to see coffee growing for the first time in my life.  And that came with its own surprises.  It grows on these trees with white flowers, like berries.  But each coffee bean comes encased in its own shell!  Little jackets for every bean!  I also learned how they produce the red oil here.  Palm trees produce these hard, red… things (Fruit? Bean? Nut?) that you can kind of suck on to get just about no flavor from.  But when they heat a bunch of them, and press them, and boil them, and I kind of lost track of the process but then you get red oil!  And I saw the trees where we get black fruit, and kola nuts!  And all kinds of wonders.  At one point we came to a tree and the guy said the word for it in French, which neither of us knew.  He explained that having this tree there helps protect the rest of the crops.  To explain what it was, he scraped off a piece of bark with his machete and told me to taste it.  At that point I had already put any number of unwashed bacteria-laden morsels in my mouth so I risked it.  I was so surprised to find that the taste was immediately familiar – cinnamon!  And I realized I had never known where cinnamon actually came from and certainly not that it was tree bark.  Anyway, throughout the morning, my mind was blown time and time again and I left feeling more keenly aware of my own ignorance.  So I guess that was a success.

            For the past couple of weeks I was brainstorming a blog entry called “Why Colby is the Best Cat Ever.”  When I looked more closely at some of the reasons on my list, however, I realized it would be more aptly titled “Why Colby is A Cat.”  For example, he likes to bury his poop and was housetrained in just four days!  And, he purrs when I pet him!  He’s wacky and jumps around weirdly and hilariously!  He curls up and is fuzzy and freaking adorable!  But seriously, I was going to write about how wonderful and sweet he is, and how he sleeps with me all through the night, every night, and sits on my lap whenever I’m sitting down, and loves me and is an excellent little spoon.  Plus he resembles me better than anyone in my biological family and we could do the cutest mommy and me act.  But right now he has been driving me absolutely crazy by slashing my legs with 20 claws at once.  He’s playful and it’s cute, but he bites hard and attacks every part of me with all his might.  Plus, he finds it easier to climb up the ladders that are my thighs than to actually make the jump onto my lap.  If you saw my bare legs, you’d probably be more likely to think that I fell into a paper shredder than that I adopted a sweet kitten.  All this aggression and yet when it comes to anything but me, he’s an absolute pacifist.  Birds come every day and peck away at his food.  He crouches, ready to pounce, concentrating hard on the offenders.  “Do it, Colby,” I whisper, because I have a weird sick parental desire for him to become a fierce killer, “Protect what’s yours.”  And then he continues crouching.  And continues.  And acts surprised when the bird finishes its meal and flies away.  Come on, man.  You have NO hesitation when it comes to pouncing on my face in bed.  Luckily, he is still incredibly cute and I’m still incredibly shallow so there’s a pretty strong foundation to our loving relationship.

            Also I went to church for the first time in community as an integration attempt!  The mass was in English but I still didn’t catch any of it because it was early and I paid no attention whatsoever.  But it was kind of fun, in a getting-out-of-the-house-before-noon sort of way.

            February 11 was youth day.  We don’t have this holiday in America, because, as my grandfather put it, “every day is kids’ day!”  To celebrate, there was a march.  I was told to show up at 9 am.  Feeling guilty and embarrassed when I arrived at 9:10, I found that only one student had arrived.  Everyone else got there at ten and the march didn’t start until after 11.  Oh, right.  Cameroonian time.  Anyway, it was a lot of waiting around and looking at the hordes of children dressed in their different school uniforms.  Some people took pictures with me because I’m white, which my students found hilarious.  Local vendors took advantage of the crowds and people circulated selling yogurt, folere juice, frozen sugary treats, beignets, cookies, plantain chips, etc etc etc.  After standing for two hours, I sat down on the steps to gasps of horror that I would dare place my derrière on something so filthy.  Finally, the parade began.  Given that Bafang is essentially one road, I figured we would march down that road pretty much through the town.  Well, as it turned out, we marched about 50 yards, just far enough to pass in front of some video cameras and town officials who looked on.  Can you believe we had an hour of marching practice… for that?   After our strenuous trek, we all took pictures with my iPhone in two or three hundred different combinations of me and students, me and teachers, me and students and teachers, me and students and teachers and the sign, etc.  In general, the composition of the photos is dreadful, but cropping exists and I’m glad to be in them!  I got kind of tricked into abandoning my coworkers to go meet a student’s parents, which I thought would take five minutes but actually took an hour and a half.  However, they were nice, and they fed me, and although I never found my coworkers again, I joined up with Ricky and some of his colleagues to party into the night.  And then exactly 9 days later we celebrated unification day in the exact same way and it made both celebrations feel a lot less special.

            For Galentine’s day on Feb 13, Allison hosted a westies get together at her post in Batie.  Batie is perhaps the closest Peace Corps post to Bafang – it costs only 500 francs to get there and takes about 40 minutes.  The initial party featured such delicacies as breakfast pizza(/quiche), homemade bagels, hash browns, mimosas, and a bottle of tequila that can only have been sent from heaven.  Lots of fun was had by all.  The next day was spent in its entirety with the remaining five of us in a heap of cuddles on Allison’s spare mattress, chatting and passing around the remaining bottles of beer and champagne.  All in all, it was a wonderful time and always great to see those American friends.

            As for how teaching goes, it goes.  I gave a test this past week.  Making up tests is so much fun!  Feeling like I can see exactly what I’ve taught them, and coming up with examples and exercises that hopefully are clear and easy and showcase all the knowledge they’ve acquired.  Giving tests, however, is far less fun.  We learned in social psych class how when students do badly on tests, they say the test was written poorly, and when they do well on tests, they say, gee, how smart we are.  So basically it’s a no-win for the teacher; no teacher has ever been recognized for really writing a great test.  Oh also, all that knowledge I bestowed on them?  They forgot it.  No one studied.  People did terribly and the bad grades aren’t even as frustrating as the actual process of administering the exam, where everyone is mumbling under their breath, speaking in the local language, laughing at me or each other or whoever, looking at each other’s papers, refusing to read the directions or pay attention when I carefully go over each section and what they need to do and then asking me repeatedly during the exam how to complete one section or another.  Basically I hate students and teaching and am feeling repentant for every time directions were written on the top of the page and I didn’t give them a single look before asking what to do.  After several warnings, I did eventually confiscate one student’s paper and give her a zero.  It was a power rush and the rest of the class was much better behaved after that.  Perhaps I would be a very successful teacher if I gave them all zeroes.

            Well other than that, this month has been more of the same.  Good days, like when a couple of killer care packages arrived (Smoked salmon!  Cheese fondue!  “How can that be??” you ask.  “I know!!!!!” I exclaim).  Bad days, like when I accidentally don’t leave my house until after dark and then I can’t leave my house because it’s after dark.  IST will be a turning point for sure.  Let’s see which way it turns!