One Year Later

A year later and I am glad that I am still here in Cameroon. Seems like more time has passed and that training was a few years ago. It is amazing how much a person can learn by living in a place for 12 months. Although I felt like two years was a long time when I first got here, the feeling has not changed with only one left. The work never gets easier and I will always stick out like a sore thumb no matter how much I learn about the culture and try to blend in. On a more positive note, my French and Fulfulde are a bit better and I know my way around this place. I have a few Cameroonian friends who see me as a normal person and not the “white man”, “nasara” or “la blanche” that can take them to America. But those are few and far between. I am finding out that even though westerners have been coming to work in Cameroon for a long time, the view of westerners from colonization is still rooted in the culture. I fight that picture of me as a westerner every day from dealing with the pressures of living in a culture where women are inferior to getting treated as a “grand” because I am a westerner and having to visit the leaders or “grands” in the community just so that they can say they met me and shook my hand. Every time I step into one of those offices and see the picture of a young Paul Biya, President of Cameroon, I think how scary it must be to know that it is an unspoken law to have that picture there and the real ,very old Paul Biya would have something to say if anyone spoke against the “elected dictator” of Cameroon.  I guess what I am saying is that a year has brought me so much knowledge of Cameroon and its culture, but it has also taught me that some things do not change and that I do not have the freedom here that I am used to in the U.S. Life is certainly easier than when I first got here but every day I am reminded that I am a foreigner and people do not understand that I am just a simple farm girl that wants to help…for free.

My neighbors children making bead jewelry with the beads my friend, Alexia, gave to me. (with Annie hanging out as usual)

 

That helping for free has been working , by the way. Work is going great even with a few bumps here and there. After coming back from Tanzania, my work partner and I jumped right into visiting fields. Each participant in the soy project was supposed to plant their seeds at the end of June. Mostly everyone did and their soy is growing great! Some of the fields we visited were what we call “out in the bush” which means off the beaten path and very difficult to get to. There was one time where we had to tramp through a pond that had formed with water up to our thighs. It’s rainy season so every day brings downpours. My work partner is a very good motorcycle driver but there were a few times where I screeched and almost fell off. I got some good ab workouts from those trips because I was frozen and hardly breathing as my work partner glided along a muddy path with both legs stuck out to support us if we tumbled. The stress of getting out to the fields was all worth it when we arrived. The participants were so happy with how their soy was growing and didn’t mind at all as my work partner filled out the evaluation forms. They even sent us back with some food from their fields. I felt more at home in the stretch of green than I did anywhere else in Cameroon. Chickens were everywhere along with herds of cows walking nonchalantly as we drove next to them on the motorcycle. I learned more about the other kinds of food grown here like peanuts, gumbo, and the all too common sweet potato. Some of the participants had problems with birds eating the soy plants although I found myself enjoying the bright colored birds flying around our heads. I think they are called Red-throated bee-eaters. One participant planted his soy and left some of the weeds after he had sprayed them with herbicide so that the soy was protected. When you walked in his field, you would think nothing good was growing there, but then you see a little soy plant sticking out among the browned leaves. Funny how life can be like that too.

Crossing the pond to get to a participant's field

Just recently we visited the field of a Soy Cooperative member. She had been having trouble with bugs eating her soy but didn’t know what kind. It took over an hour to get out to her family’s farm which was so far out that the motorcycle had to just follow a narrow path with prickers on both sides. A couple times I had to get off so my work partner could push his bike through the mud. Unfortunately the cooperative member wasn’t there (which is a common occurrence with the cooperative-they are not very reliable) but her father and mother welcomed us into their house. Her father has two wives and 23 children so there were a couple houses and a few mud huts with straw roofs. His fields were vast with corn, okra, potato, soy, and all kinds of other vegetables. He told us he had planted the corn where the soy had been last year and showed us how much bigger that corn is compared to his corn that he planted in other plots. The soy brings so much nutrition to the soil. It was nice to see that finally a farmer had tried it and proved it worked. This farmer also showed us his Biogas set up where he adds water and cow manure to a deep fermentation pit where it produces gas that goes through a pipe into his house. He turns on the nozzle, lights a match, and whalla, there is a flame to heat food on his little camp stove. I didn't have my camera to take pictures but I plan on visiting him again to give his children crayons to color. He adds 4 buckets of manure every day to the pit so that he can use the gas for up to 8 hours a day on the stove. It had been funded and built by Smart Development Works (international organization) and Wageningen UR, which is based in the Netherlands. He asked me about finding a group that would bring solar power to his farm since he lives too far away for even a chance at getting electricity. I was so impressed by his work ethic and strive to make his life better. But then I saw his son had malaria and they asked us to read the instructions on the box of medicine since he couldn’t read French. I asked them why they didn’t sleep under mosquito nets to prevent malaria and he said he didn’t have enough money. Also he doesn’t have enough money to send all his children to school. With one success there is always something missing here. I see such potential for living a better life even in a mud hut out in the bush, but then I see the wife lower her head whenever she gives her husband or my work partner something and I am reminded of the masculine led culture. My work partner told them about how his wife going to college in Ngaoundéré and they just laugh while asking how many children he has. He proudly says two boys and no more until he can afford to send them all to school. My work partner always tells me that even if I didn’t pay for his fuel or give him extra money for his time, he would still help me teach about soy and help the farmers. So it seems that for every volunteer group in the U.S. that helps their community, there is one Cameroonian who does the same.

Two soy project participants and their fields of soy

Along with the soy growing well, my garden is giving me green beans every day, a cucumber here and there with tomatoes and corn on the way. My friend, Ahmadou went to visit his family in the bush during summer vacation and brought back a chicken each for Carl, Jasmine, and myself. Ahmadou gave the rooster to Carl but Carl was nice enough to give him to me so I ended up with two chickens. A few weeks later I found the rooster on a nest of eggs. I was wondering why such a big rooster would have hardly no comb. Right now the chickens are playing games with me and hiding their eggs. It’s a war I am used to playing in the U.S. Sometimes chickens are just way too smart. Once I find the next nest, I will take only one egg at a time and hope they don’t notice.

The children helping me weed my garden

Annie is doing great and saved my life, well kind of, the other night when there was a scorpion in the house. I ended up squishing it but I’m pretty sure she is a ninja kitty on the inside because she wasn’t scared of it at all. The rainy season has brought vegetables but also huge storms. Annie and I woke up the other night to drops of rain falling on our heads while we slept in bed. Now I really know what Annie is afraid up. We sleep on the couch in the living room when it storms like that. The tin roof makes it so loud I can barely hear my dreams. My living room is the only room with a wooden ceiling that blocks the noise of the rain crashing into metal. But the couch sure is not a softy.

Annie and the two chickens

 

The volunteer that lives in Ngaoundéré and is finishing her 5^th year in Cameroon, Rachel, just finished her food transformation project. It was a week-long of classes teaching Cameroonians how to make fruit juice, yogurt, soy milk and tofu. She has been a great friend and helped me a lot since I first got here so I was glad to help her with this project. I remember one day I walked in and everyone was shaking bottles of milk to make butter. The image brought me back to my 4-H club and our visit to Shelburne Farm where we sat in a circle and learned how to make butter. One person would shake the container of milk and we all would sing “Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake all you can, shake like a milkshake, and passed it to a friend”. We would sing and pass it around the circle until it was butter. I tried explaining this memory to the people in the class and even sang the song, not quite sure if they truly understood why I was telling them. It is moments like that that bring me back home and remind me of why I want to spread knowledge and create memories like I have from my childhood.

Shaking bottles to make butter

Our county fair occurred at the end of August. It was one of the first Washington County Fairs that I missed since I was a child. I am so thankful that my Dad took time out of his day to skype with me while he walked around the fair and showed me all the wonderful people that were there. I have internet sometimes at my house now (expensive and unreliable internet like the electricity here but better than nothing) which allowed me to show my neighbors some images of the fair as my Mom walked around with skype on her phone. They saw all the cows lined up in the barns and watched a bit of the goat show. One of my neighbors said in French, "Wow, America has big cows!" It is amazing how much better I feel when I can connect home with Cameroon. As Guiya sat on my lap holding the Washington County Fair stuffed cow that I gave her and watched the real Fair on the computer, I thought that I saw a twinkle of understanding in her eyes. The U.S. is not just the reality T.V. show that they see on televisions sometimes in Cameroon. It has muddy dirt roads, farm animals, dirty kids playing in front of a house, and poor farmers who can hardly keep up with expenses. But Americans do have choices and freedom. Cameroonians have yet to see they could have that too.

The best part of having internet at my house is when my neighbors sang Happy Birthday in French to my Dad on his birthday. It is that connection that brings a rainbow into my life on a rainy day. I know you all have your busy lives and I am so thankful to have friends back at home that truly miss me. Not all Peace Corps volunteers here have that. But I have another year left and I still need your support. I still need to share this beautiful but different place with you. Because when I get back to the U.S., I want to be ready to jump back into helping you all do what you do best: making our home in the upstate New York so wonderful. And I don’t think I could miss many more Washington County Fairs.

P.S. I was watching Star Wars in French with the children the other day and one of them said I looked like Princess Leia- gosh they know how to make me happy sometimes! And here is the video I made of my trip to Tanzania and hiking Mt Kilimanjaro! https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0gapyPvKVzcNWdrbzBtSTZ3dW8/view?usp=drive_web