1) As Peace Corps Volunteers two of our three goals involve cultural exchange. We are meant to learn about the life of people in other countries and hopefully share that knowledge with Americans back home throughout our service and beyond. We are also meant to share American culture with host country nationals. At times we are the only American people have ever/will ever come into contact with, and thus its a rare opportunity to share what Americans are truly like. This can be a frustrating and amusing task in a place where stereotypes and misconceptions of the United States are sometimes outlandish. People believe that my best friends must be Beyonce, Rihanna, and President Obama, that all Americans have servants, that when cars break down in America we just leave them in the middle of the street because we have enough money to buy new ones, etc...
**Sidenote: Even though sometimes I laugh at the craziness of the stereotypes people hold, I try to remind myself to take a step back and remember how many stereotypes I had of Africa before coming here. How misconcieved I was to group all of Africa's countries into one culture, when truly one country is as different from its neighbor as the Mid West of the United States is different than New England. How scared I was to arrive here and how I had no idea what to expect, and if someone would have told me that I would be wearing a loin cloth and a bone in my head for two years....I would have believed them. But what I've discovered is that I didn't come to a different planet, I didn't come to a different world...I came to a different country, and there are more similarities than differences.**
The most frustrating stereotypes to try to break are truly those related to money. If you are American you must have LOADS of it, point blank, discussion closed. People are constantly telling me how people must be so much happier in America because they have so many more things. Its difficult to explain to people that materialism doesn't equate to happiness, and that there is so much beauty in the simple life that they live here. Its difficult to explain to people that even in the United States people have problems, that people suffer, and that (and this is difficult for them to get their heads around) there is also poverty in the United States.
One of the most shocking concepts for people to understand is the phenomena of homelessness in the United States. I mentioned in my last blog post, that African hospitality is truly exceptional, and that no matter how many mouths there are to feed, or how many people are already sharing one bed at night, there is ALWAYS room for one more. So when I explain to people that there are people who are suffering in the United States, without a place to rest their head at night, or not having means to find their next meal, people simply do not understand it. They spout back questions like, "What do you MEAN they sleep on the streets? Where are their families? Why don't their neighbors feed them? How can the rich people in your country not give these people something?"
My senior year of college I worked my community nursing clinical at a homeless shelter, and those couple of months taught me that the answers to those questions and the reasons why people fall into homelessness are incredibly complex. However, I think that the simple logic of African hospitality could help answer those questions: someone is hungry, they are human, they are your brother, you give them to eat. End of story.
I recently read an essay by Barbara Kingsolver that struck a chord with me, and this passage explains what I want to say better than I ever could:
"Whatever else "home" might be called, it must surely be a fundamental human license. In every culture on earth, the right to live in a home is probably the first condition of citizenship and humanity. Homelessness is an aberration. It may happen anywhere from time to time, of course, but when I look hard at the world, I see very few places where there resides an entire, permanent class of people labeled "homeless". Not in the poorest places I've ever lived, not even in an African village where everyne I knew owned only one shirt (at best) and most had never touched an automobile. Because even there, as long as the social structure remains intact, people withut resources are taken in by their families. Even if someone should fall completely apart and have to go to the hospital, which means a trek on foot over dozens of miles or more, the whole family goes along to make sure the sick one is taken care of. "Home", in this case, becomes portable. I know this because I lived as a child in an African village that housed the region's small, concrete-block hospital. Whever I walked past the hospital's lively grounds never failed to impress me. It was just a bare-dirt plaza, maybe stretching among all its corners to the size of a city block, but it was always a busy place, where dozens of families camped out around their cooking fires while waiting for some relative to have an operation, have a baby, or die. Meanwhile they passed the time by singing, mourning, washing dishes, arguing, daydreaming, or fussing at toddlers who ran around wearing nothing but strings of beads around their bellies. In the rest of my life I have never witnessed another scene so solidly founded on both poverty and security. I don't wish to glorify the impoverished half of this equation; these children had swollen bellies from kwashikor, and they had parasites. But they also had families they could not forget under any circumstances, or ever abandon, or be abandoned by, however they might fall on madness or illness or hard times. I don't believe that the word homeless as it's used in our language could be translated there."
-"Household Words" Small Wonder
2) On the topic of African hospitality, a couple of weeks ago I had one of my most powerful moments yet to date in country. Papa Iza and I had gone out en brusse to vaccinate DEM BABIES! We are now at the debut of rainy season (in Cameroon there are only two seasons: rainy and dry) and the expression, "When it rains it pours" has never made more sense to me. The rains here are truly impressive, and they arrive very quickly, with almost no warning. After a day of vaccinations, Papa Iza and I are on our way back to Dir and noticing that the skies are changing. Still 25 km away, there is no way we are going to make it back to Dir before the rains arrive. Fortunately, we came across a settlement of farmers living in straw huts within a few minutes, and pulled over. No questions asked, we walked into the community, we were welcomed, and we took shelter from the pouring rain for close to an hour and a half. Sitting on the floor of this hut, making conversation with this family of 5 cooking their dinner, I was overwhelmed with emotion at the beauty of how fluidly we had been accepted into their home and into their afternoon. We needed shelter, and we were given it, no questions asked.
3) Some of the advice that more senior volunteers have given me is to not rush into any projects, because what you decide to get involved in will be your life for the next two years. I'm taking that advice to heart on most projects, slowly deciding when to say yes and when I need to say no. However, because we are at the debut of rainy season, farming season is at its peak. The land needs to be tilled before the rains start, and seeds need to be planted a couple weeks after. Norbert (my counterpart) and I had to make a quick decision as to whether we wanted to start a soy project. Soy is something that I have been thinking about for a while, and with its insane protein value, something that I really do think can make a difference in Dir. So! We have started a community soy field!
Norbert has a background in agriculture and he couldn't be happier to be helping me learn how to farm. His neighbor gifted us a terrain of land across from the hospital and over the past couple of weeks we have worked the land and its ready to be planted!
We've had two community efforts at the soy field, both on Saturday mornings. These were my first attempts at trying to organize and motivate people in the community, and there were a lot of lessons learned from them. I had talked to maybe fifteen people who had given me a definite, "Yes! I will be there Saturday morning". Yet, come Saturday morning only about four of those people showed up. At first, I was pretty down by the outcomes and overwhelmed as to how we were going to convert this field into a farm, but slowly and surely it happened. Although the people I asked to come did not show up, people I have never met who were simply walking by came to help for twenty/thirty minutes and continued on their day. Once the kids got out of school (there is a halfday of school each Wednesday, so thus...school on Saturday mornings) they came and did so much good work! We drank honey wine, and were gifted some rice from neighbors, and when the morning of work was finished we sat around and shared a meal. The second community effort was entirely different, with mostly teenage boys and I working the field together. So I learned that I need to keep my expectations flexible, that simply because something doesn't go as I planned, it doesn't mean that it isn't working. And that when I decide to focus in on what ISN'T happening, I fail to notice the good that is.
A couple of mornings over these past couple of weeks, I have gone to the field by myself to get some work done. These mornings have been exhausting, my body and hands hurt afterwards, and there have been mornings where my body wakes up feeling 40 years older than it actually is. Yet, there is something incredibly rewarding about working the Earth, and realizing how much WORK goes into producing a crop of food. More than anything, these mornings have made me realize how hard people must work here to survive. People work the fields year in and year out in order to put food on the table. With the combination of physical labor and heavy sunshine I am starting to understand why the older generation here looks so much older than they actually are.
Wrapping this up now, with love = )
