The Daily Life of a Peace Corps trainee in Cameroon

Two weeks have gone by and I am starting to learn how to live life here in Cameroon. The sun rises every morning around 5:30am. I am awake and take a nice, cold bucket bath in the latrine (trust me, you would be thankful too for cold water when there is a hot, humid day ahead of you).  I still believe that the latrine is one thing I will not miss in Cameroon. Doing your business in a hole in the ground and throwing buckets of water over your head beside it is not my favorite sport. But it is a way of life here.

About 6:30am, my host momma gives me some hot coffee and bread before I skip off to meet Sam, another Peace Corps trainee, so we can walk to school. I actually like mornings, it is the least stressful part of the day.

It is about a 40 minute walk to school (Sam and I have got it down pretty good now). Probably by the end of 8 weeks we will be walking pros.

Sam and I on our way home from training

At 8am classes start with maybe language training, agriculture or business training, and random safety & health classes. The language classes are really helpful and focused since there are only about 2-3 people in each class. What I don’t learn in class, my host mother teaches me at home. The agribusiness classes are really interesting. Cameroon has some similar vegetables to the U.S., but there are many others that I had never heard of. Casava is a main staple (the one that smells like string cheese). Really good once you get used to it. We started using machetes this week and learning some neat ways to grow food in Cameroon. It would be nice to have a tractor and some really good rakes, but we must learn how to prepare our garden with the same tools that are used in Cameroon.

Using a machete to cut down the grass for our garden

My classes are interesting, but are overwhelming sometimes. We are cramming a lot of information into 9 weeks of training. During my breaks I jumped onto the internet but since we all have the same idea, sometimes it is a bit slow. By 4:30pm, my classes are done and we start to get ready to walk home. Sometimes I stay at the training center for an hour but I can’t wait too long because it gets dark around 6:30pm and it is dangerous to walk on the road in the dark, especially being female. I am lucky that I have Sam to walk with.

By the time I get home, it is time to prepare dinner and work on homework. It is a wonderful feeling to be in complete silence as my host sister and I do homework together while my host mom looks at my homework now and again to check that it is correct. We live such different lives and yet there are always similarities. I wish I could give my host family a real bathroom and a stove to cook on. I wish that I could give them electricity all the time. I wish I could give my host sister the opportunity to go to college someday. I wish, I wish. But all I can give them is my time. They are giving me their time, teaching me their life, and opening their doors to their home.

An example of my host mom's cooking: Fish, beef or chicken not sure cassava, and just for me: French fries. (or apple of the earth when translated in French)

I hope that by learning how they farm here, I can find ways to help them live a better life through agriculture. My host mother is a farmer and there are nights where she is putting cassava to dry in banana leaves, but even with a good job, she is living a difficult life that could be better. But they are happy. They don’t know what they don’t have. Except electricity of course.

I am waiting for the electricity to come back on. It has been out for days; ever since the thunderstorm that took out two electricity poles down the road from us. I’m assuming that someone comes to fix it, but by what I have heard, that someone could take weeks to get here. Using a lamp or flashlight after 7pm gets old quick. We are usually in bed by 9pm. I try to do homework but the darkness swallows me up in dreams.

I washed my clothes for the first time last Sunday. I have to say for being washed in a bucket, those clothes turned out pretty clean. I also went to a Catholic Church. I guess my host family is Catholic but they do not go too often. I asked to go just for the experience. It was really just like every other Catholic Church service I have been to except that it was in French and there were large wasp nests hanging from the lights up above. Not sure if I will go back to that church. There is also a Presbyterian and Baptist Church down the street where I heard there is dancing during the service.

Washing my clothes in a bucket

Last weekend I also went to the main city of Ebolawa with my host sister. We took a moto (motocycle taxi) which was really awesome. I was surprised that I felt safe riding a moto. Most of the guys are pretty good drivers. Sometimes there are up to 5 people on one moto and I have seen a guy carrying a very large pig while riding one. In the city, there were vendors everywhere. We bought a few essentials for me and I treated my host sister to some things she wanted. We went home with gifts for the entire family.

Life is here has one big difference from home: necessity. Some Cameroonians who have gone to college or traveled in Europe know what they don’t have. Others people can only imagine what they don’t have or just don’t think about it. Sometimes I forget what we don’t have when we are sitting in a circle around a lamp, playing cards, and listening to the rain clash against the tin roof. I fall asleep in my bed easily after a long day of hard work. I wake up from a usual dream (I probably was fighting off dragons or something crazy) and realize that I am still in Africa. I go to training and find out that one of the Peace Corps volunteer’s host sister just died from typhoid fever. The host sister was healthy when we arrived here in Cameroon.

I remind myself that I need to be thankful for what I have in the U.S. I may only notice the mice under my bed here, washing my clothes by hand, and the very large ants that like to sting me when I am working in the garden. But the real gift at home is life. Life is cut short here and malnutrition is a norm. There are many people trying to improve Cameroonian life. And I am very thankful to be one of them.