Dir Sweet Dir

Dir Sweet Dir

We got our post announcements on Wednesday! It was a very exciting morning as all 22 health (sante) volunteers got handed on a small piece of paper our home for the next 2 years! Felt just like Christmas morning (except take away Snow and Santa's cookies and insert rainforest and bananas).

A word about Cameroon before I get started. Before coming here I had read in guide books that Cameroon is considered to be, "Africa in Miniature". It's so very true, and nationals take a lot of pride in the diversity that Cameroon embodies. There's a multitude of ethnic groups, local languages, geography, and wildlife.

Cameroon has 10 different regions, and within these regions there is great cultural and geographical variance. The Centre Region is currently where we are at right now for tranining. It houses the capitol, Yaounde, is Francophone, and is characterized by rainforest and equal parts rainy and dry season. Littoral is next to Centre and houses the economical capitol, Doula. Other than that I've decided not to familarize myself with the other 8 regions, so that I wouldn't have any bias before recieving post announcement. But here is a little of what I know:

The East and South are mostly rainforest and have long rainy seasions. The West and Northwest and very mountainous (and are home to Mount Cameroon, another landmark that nationals are very proud of). My host family has told me that in these two regions you can find a lot of tradition, including traditional chiefs! Adamouwa is the nation's transitional region, hleping connect the hub of Cameroon to the northern regions. Our technical trainer, Theo, has said that Adamouwa is like, "the melting pot of Cameroon". The North and Extreme North provinces are infamous for their hot climates (fortunately its dry heat instead of humid because its desert), their conservative culture (no knees or shoulders allowed) and strong Muslim presence.

As part of training, we have current Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) come and give us technical sessions and share their experiences. This has been one of my favorite parts of training, as its really inspiring to hear their direct experiences. So far we have had 5 volunteers come to training and each one has sworn that "my region is the BEST one in Cameroon."

With that said, (drum rolll please!) I am posted in DIR, a small village in the Adamouwa region! Here is the information that I have thus far: Dir is a small village, about 6,000 peoeple. It it a Francophone post, although a lot of local languages are spoken. It is a pretty conservative village (so I'm gonna be putting away my knobby knees for 2 years! aaaannnnd...will probably have to cover my head! So happy that my headscarfs have translated over to the African continent = ) DIR has no running water or electricity and is divided inbetween a Muslim and a Christian population. I have a small enterprise development post mate in a close by village, and two other fellow health volunteers about an hour away by bush taxi! There are 4 NGOs currently working in DIR and I will be working at a medical center with Dr. Gaya, as my supervisor! On a fun note (Alison, you will appreciate this) Adamouwa is a cattle breeding region so I will have plenty of milk! And also bountiful mangoes during rainy seaon = )

On Saturday, (Karen and Kelly, flashbacks to Europe?) I will be taking a night train with my community host, Norbert, to the regional capitol of Adamowau. From there we will continue on bus, to Dir. I will be spending a few days meeting hte community and talking about both my expectations and theirs for 2 years of service. Then I'll head to the regional capitol with Samantha (another sante) and we will stay with a current volunteer and get a slice of what being a volunteer is all about!

Sending y'all love and will try to write soon about my time in my new home!

Du Courage

Du Courage

The Cameroonians say this saying often as a form of saying, "keep on going/ have courage". Neighbors say it to me when they see me on my morning runs, as I'm sweaty and huffing and puffing up this village hills. My host sister, Jordan (17) is constantly saying it to me as I learn how to do everyday tasks in an African household. When I am washing my clothes by hand, or sweeping the floor, or peeling potatoes she comes to me and says, "Amanda...Du Courage". My language trainers say it to me when I fuddle up a French answer and I have to search for it somewhere inside my brain. My other host sister, Merveille (19) tells it to me when my eyes get teary after a phone conversation with my parents.

I hear it at least once a day and its a saying that I have really come to love. Volunteers say that the three months of training are some of the hardest during your months of service. A time when you are gonna ask yourself, "why in the world did I ever dream of doing this?" when you have to get used to making a new country your home, and all your routines are turned inside out. Its really hard to believe that tommorow we start our fifth week of training! A part of me feels as if I have been here for so much longer, and I have no doubt that if for some reason I were to come home tommorow my life would forever be impacted by these past four weeks. There have definitely been those moments when I question my sanity and wonder why exactly I did dream of doing this since I was 12 years old. Those are the moments when I have to tell myself "Du Courage" Then there are those moments when I find myself loving the simplicity that has become of my life these past couple of weeks, when I feel immensely happy to be here, and it all feels right.

Our training class is HUGE! We have 22 health volunteers, and 33 youth and agroforestry volunteers. Most of the trainees are straight out of college, although there are a handful of us who are graduate students or who have been out in the working world for a couple of years. The trainees are really well qualified and there is a lot of enthusiasm and support in the group. Due to the size of our group, Peace Corps Cameroon decided to split up our training class. The health volunteers are in a village and we get to travel to see the other volunteers about one to two times a week. The village we live in is called Bokito, and living here has definitely been an introduction to African life. There are no paved roads, and everybody in the village knows that there are "white people" in town. The little kids come running after you interchangedly saying "la blanc la blanc!" or "good morning!" Electricity is spotty, and some of my favorite moments here in village have been the nights when I come home after school and hang out with my host family via battery powered lamp on the porch.

Part of the Peace Corps training is that you live with a host family for three months. The purpose of this is to really immerse you in the culture and allow you to practice your French with a Cameroonian family. They are told that they are to prepare me for living in Africa by myself, which is something that they are taking in full stride. Merveille even had me clean a chicken for dinner the other night. Even though I begged her to let me just watch she said, "No you need to learn" and then (you guessed it) she followed it up with a "Du Courage". I wish I could capture in words how amused my host family was by my reactions to killing/cleaning the chicken. I had to explain to them that chicken comes already cut and in plastic bags in the state, which they got a wonderful laugh out of. When I asked Merveille how old she was when she killed her first chicken she said, "Eight! I do this all the time...and when Lolita (our pet goat) gets fat enough I'll kill her so we can eat!"

My host family is the family of Mama Bogo Therese. She's a single woman who works for the local government here in Bokito, and although she only has four biological children, there are seven kids that live in her house. Fabiola is 22, Patrick is 21, Merveille is 19, Juniour is 17, Jordan is 17, Nick is 16, and little Patrick is 14. The kids absolutely run the house and its amazing to see how much they respect and do as Mama Bogo says. Jordan prepares all our meals (over an open fire) and started learning how to cook when she was six years old! The kids also breathe a lot of life into the house, there is constantly music playing (I'm more up to date on MTV's top 20 hits than I was in the States!) and their constantly putting on little performances and dancing around. Some mornings they go running with me, but only if they wake up early enough to finish their daily chores as well.

I think something that I've realized is that people are insantly born with courage here. My host sisters are the most fearless young women I have ever met and they laugh at me constantly for the way I freak out at little insects/snails/frogs/or snakes in our courtyard. The day I found a huge spider in my room and went running to them to kill it they simply laughed at me and said, "but why?" Which is an absolutely wonderful question considering that there really is no point in killing them, and that you just have to learn to live with them. The animals everywhere is definitely one of the things that I initially was struggling with, but I'm taking baby steps and the other day I was able to share my bucket bath with a frog without running to get my sisters!

Without a doubt though the scariest thing I have done since coming to Africa is playing soccer with the village boys. Female roles are very different here and the village girls dont play soccer after school. So here I am, the WHITE FEMALE, asking to play soccer with these fellows. They were gracious enough to let me play, but I can't tell you how intimidated I was throughout the game. These village boys are crazy talented at the sport. I think I might have proved myself after taking a ball to the stomach and the other day a village boy asked me when I was coming back to play!

I have also been fortunate enough to find a Catholic church in Bokito, and its been uber comforting for me to go to church with my host mom. The services here are easily two or three times as long as in the States, but dont seem like it. The singing and the dancing is really uplifting. A couple of weeks ago we sang a song for FIFTEEN MINUTES, and when we finished the priest said, "Where was the dancing?" and we sang it all over again including dancing this time around! Today at church I was suprised to hear a chicken clucking throughout the service and even more suprised when during the offering of the gifts the chicken was placed on the altar (no worries it was not sacrificed on the altar!)

I am really loving village life, and pretty much every day I wake up at 6 am and report to school by 8 am. Training goes from Monday to Saturday, for about 8 hours a day (sans Saturday, where we only have a half day of school). Our training has been pretty language intensive so far, because Peace Corps believes that you need to be able to communicate with the community that you are serving. We have also recieved plenty of technical sessions about health issues that we will be dealing with and seeing in our communities. The first couple of weeks were very theoretical and lecture oriented, but this past week we have started integrating into Bokito. We have visited a local health center, and an AIDS clinic, we got to do a community assessment with the children in the community, and have also started a community group that we will work with for the upcoming four weeks. It feels good to have those sessions where you get to interact with locals. The part of training that I love the most is that current volunteers are some of our trainers. Its been really refreshing and inspiring to hear their stories and experiences in country, and I think it makes all of us trainees excited and reminds us of why we are here.

Speaking of which this upcoming Wednesday we get our post announcements! We've had a couple of interviews with our program manager as to where we envision ourselves doing our service (as to what region of Cameroon we would like to be in) and on Wednesday the health posts are announced! Following that, on Saturday we travel with our community host (an individual from our post who is in charge of helping us integrate into our community) and get to stay and live in our community for a week. This will be the first time since coming to Africa that I wont be with my fellow Americans! I'm a bit nervous about that, but really excited to see where I will be serving for the next two years! I'll be sure to write about it next time I blog, until then...Du Courage = )