Food

So one of the most frequent questions I got from Volunteers in Cameroon as well as people at home was : What food are you going to eat? What will be your first meal? So I figured I'd record everything I ate during my two weeks at home. I recorded through the first week, and the second week will be up to my feeble memory!

Ok Here it is. A list of my meals for my time home!

Friday Night

Got home in the evening, people were tired, so yes, first meal was Pizza, eating out in Charlottesville.

Saturday
french toast for breakfast

brocolli and chedder and swiss cheese quiche made by my sister for dinner--delicious!

Sunday

lunch at Peace Hill after church, so that means big potluck; i had some great baked beans, pasta, salad, banana creme pie, chocolate covered strawberries

On the way down to the beach

dinner at Nags Head Pier--seafood (yes fried) shrimp, trout, hushpuppies

Monday

Breakfast--Dunkin Donuts...and leftover seafood

Lunch--Cosmos veggie pizza in Corolla

Dinner--Veggie sub with eggplant, tomato, pesto, feta and provolone cheese, toasted, at Tomato Patch in Corolla

Tuesday
Breakfast--leftover sub
Lunch--Pauls Deli in Williamsburg, driving back home to C'ville, 3 cheese melt with pickles (I miss pickles!) and Root Beer
Also earlier, a peanut butter milkshake from Sonic
Dniner-- Early 80th birthday dinner for my granddad in C'ville; lobster, corn bisque and garden salad with raspberry vinaigrette--so-so. German chocolate cake at home

Wednesday
Breakfast--Cereal
Lunch--Thai food with Claire: Pad Pak Jae--Tofu, veggies, mushrooms, sprouts, peanut sauce. mmmm
Dinner--grill out with grandfather and Uncle from New York, fresh corn, leftover Thai food, rest of the family had chicken?

Thursday
breakfast--
lunch--my grandfather and uncle came down from New York, my uncle made us poached eggs (my favorite) and toast for my grandfather, himself and me, while we were home alone
dinner--it was Golden Corral for dinner, yes indeedy (my grandfather's favorite).

Friday
breakfast--
lunch-- Inn at Court Square with Mary Seay, chilled curried sweet potato soup and salad with chevre cheese, absolutely delicious
dinner--rehersal dinner for wedding; my aunt ginny's homemade lasagne, salad, strawberry cheesecake

Saturday
breakfast--pancakes at the greenes
lunch--some sandwhich at church, getting ready for the wedding
dinner--wedding reception food

Sunday
breakfast--
lunch/dinner--variety cookout food at family friend's high school graduation party (mac and cheese, veggies, fruit, pie, cookies)
at night--hot fudge chocolate sauce over ice cream

Monday
breakfast--
lunch--packed sandwhiches for picnic at Ivy Creek Natural Area
dinner--mexican food
post-dinner--party at my sisters house, more food, chocolate eclaire cake, watermelon, strawberries and whipped cream


Tuesday
breakfast--
lunch--date with my mom and Libby Hedstrom at the Batesville Country Store; falafal sandwich with hummus and good ice cream with toppings afterwards.
dinner--quiche again (this time mom's one, spinach? I can't remember)

Wednesday
breakfast--
lunch--date with Mom to harrisonburg, Tea House, delicious salad, cheese scone and Lavender, Mint White Tea
More ice cream at Batesville Country Store on the way back home
dinner--


I also ate tons of Cherries, Strawberries, and cheese, which I miss more than anything! The only thing we didn't get to was the buffet at the Indian restaurant, but there just weren't enough meals!!! Still, with all that eating, I don't think I gained my goal of 10 pounds! Sad. If only I'd have two more weeks of non-stop eating.

a look at my visit home

Well I'm getting ready to go to bed the day before I leave to go back to Cameroon, so I thought I'd share some of my highlights of my visit home for two weeks. It certainly was a packed and scheduled time!



Sunday morning: stop in at Peace Hill, my church through college, for the service and potluck lunch afterwards. So great to see everyone, as well as get the garden tour from Jessie!



Sunday-Tuesday: Continue on down to the Outer Banks, visit to Corolla for the day, seeing old coworkers, (lifeguards and Wildlife Center) as well as old friends was wonderful! And we were blessed with such wonderful weather!



Tuesday night: early 80th birthday party for my grandfather, with our extended family (i.e. aunt, uncle, cousins)


Wednesday:


Wednesday-Friday: my grandfather and Uncle drove down from New York to visit. And of course excellent highlight of Golden Corral (or the Golden Trough. My Grandpa's choice!)


Thursday visit to Downtown mall with my Uncle

night: pick-up soccer with Claire's friends!


Friday afternoon: Lunch with Mary Seay, at the Inn at Court Square, hang out with claire, help her pick up some of her kids from school in the big bus to take them to their afterschool program; drive to Richmond for rehersal dinner for my cousins wedding. Really special coming home with them, spending the night at my aunt and uncle's house with my three cousins, talking with Jessie before falling asleep.


Saturday: morning, getting up, family time, getting ready for the wedding alltogether. Time for pictures, meeting people at the church, thoughts about weddings and marriage. Great time after the wedding, with the young folks, talking for a little bit longer

Sunday: morning: drive back to Charlottesville, and to Trinity Pres. for church with Claire.

Afternoon: high school graduation party for family friend, in Staunton.

Evening: three of my best friends from college come to visit, spend the night, talk/cry through the night. (of course!) It was soooo nice to get to see them, and be together. So incredibly spiritually refreshing and I feel so blessed for their visits.

Monday: Morning: walk in Ivy Creek Natural area with friends and visit to Splintered light bookstore at UVa Center for Christian Study. Drive to Orange where I met up with my dad at his work, to drive back with him, through beautiful Orange and Albemarle Counties at the end of the day.

Evening--party thrown by my sister at her house, so I could meet all of her awesome friends, and see a few of my friends from high school. Again, Jeff, Matt, Katelyn and Claire and I, laughing until the wee hours of the night, really did my soul good. I don't remember when I laughed like that in the past few years!

Tuesday: visit with some of the neighbors; lunch date with my mother and her friend at the Batesville country store! More visiting with neighbors after.

Watching Bad Hair with Katelyn at night!

Wednesday: date with mom going to Harrisonburg, for lunch at the tea house and visit to the quilt museum, then last minute shopping for gifts. Thankfully, all home for the evening.


very restful? no. tiring? yes. I probably would have opted for a little less activity, however I feel blessed to have been able to see so many people, see such beautiful scenery and have such great weather. And eat good food! A very good visit. Everything about it was wonderful.

Leaving for the airport to fly home in 1 hour!!! Excited and nervous!

Another face of grief--The death of Gazawa Andree

The old chief of our village, and the father of my best friend in village, and my old counterpart, died on Saturday evening. He was hit by a car, crossing the road, coming home from the field.
It was about 6:30, not dark, and I was doing work on my porch, getting ready for my trip home for two weeks. I heard women, near the center of town and it sounded like they were singing. I assumed it was a van full of church women, going to a conference or celebration, as often they sing songs as they pass in their car. But the location of the noise didn't move, and continued. I looked up to the road and saw people running a few at a time towards the carrefour. Surely an accident, and by the sounds of the women who I now realized were crying, it must be a very bad one, children? many people? I locked up the house quickly, threw on a pagne over my shorts, and walked hurriedly up the path through my neighborhood, joined by other villagers along the way. As we neared the carrefour, the keening increased, and a woman coming from down the road, from the sight of the accident announced "It's Andree, Gazawa." By the time I reached the main road, the highway that splits the village, 200 people were out and on either side of the road. There was a very nice new white compact car parked on the road, the driver having left the site for the moment, possibly hiding somewhere. From the point where he had hit Andree, he had been thrown over 50 yards. People didn't know what to do, and rightly so. Such a bad accident, no ambulances, no 911. They tried to hail some of the passing vans and cars, to take him to the hospital in Garoua, but no one would stop, as they were all full. And even if he had been transported, such an accident for such an older man, it seems to me there is little that cold be done. After about 20 minutes he was pronounced dead. By this point it was dark, and I searched all over for my best friend Rebecca, one of his daughters, but all the women were crying shadows, and every time I recognized some clothing of hers it was on a different body type. I finally found her back home, and spent the night with her an other women, in their courtyard, sitting in silence through the darkness, as she cried silently.

I was really angry. It was one of the big Angry moments of my time here. Because the cars race through the village at obscene speeds. To me, it is one of the pinnacles of selfishness, how these drivers (both private and those driving "taxis") will go through these settled areas at 50, 60, 70 miles an hour, just to get there a little faster, with no regard to the villagers who live there. They are willing to kill animals and People just to go at a high speed. There are numberless amounts of goats, sheep, dogs, donkeys killed in the village each year by cars passing, which is a major blow to household economics, and there is always the fear of children as well, crossing the road each morning and afternoon, going to school. As such, in January the village listed as one of their top three priorities for village development the installation of a couple of speed bumps. But here, now a 74 year old man, crossing the road, obviously slowly, not darting out in front of the car as children might, is hit by a car who would not slow nor veer and thrown 50 meters? That is insane. And to me absolutely unpardonable. I was so angry at this driver, at his selfishness and carelessness, I wanted to sit on his car and wait for him to come back out of hiding, and get in his car and say "we are driving to the Mayors and Sousprefets right now." Not that that would have been possible. But it was my sentiments. As it was, he stayed hidden for a while, and I returned home to be with my friend.

Andree had not been chief for about 3 or 4 years, perhaps, and he was around 74, certainly aging. He often came and visited me from time to time, to talk about his dreams (renovating a building to improve the village, and preparing to plant soy this season) and also to make sure that every thing was ok with me, in his village. in many ways, though old and no longer chief in name, he still played the role for many people, settling disputes, active in village meetings and affairs, always showing up to check on different neighborhoods and activities. . His natural death would have most likely arrived in the next few years, and for him to have fallen sick and died, while sad, would not have been surprising. But the manner of his death, how sudden, how brutal,how "unnatural", is what made this so tragic. And so shocking to the system.

I called the Mayor of the area, hoping to inform him of the death, and also bring up the conversation of speed bumps along the village, as its something that I have gone to talk to him about in the past, but which seems like a difficult thing to obtain, because the decision is at the level of the national department of transportation, and as he told me when I asked about it in January, "Cameroon does not want to slow down circulation between Ngoundere and Garoua." He did not answer the phone the times I tried to call before leaving town, so maybe when I return I can meet with him again, concerning this much needed installation in town.

Schools here....

I said earlier that I would write a bit about schools here, or at least village schools like the one in my village. My village, being a small village, only has an elementary school and that has only been in existence about 3 years. It has 6 classrooms, two of which are in a cement building, and the other four are made of wood posts and grass woven mats covering the walls and the ceiling. There are 3 state-paid teachers, including the director of the school, and these three do not live in our village, but live in Ngong. The other three teachers are "Benevoles" a term also used in health centers for those that "volunteer." Their salary is technically supposed to come from the village parents group, but more often then not they pay late or not at all, as they have trouble raising funds.

Not all school age children attend school. Though it is a public school, there is a school fee, and there are other fees for exam years, to pay for taking the exam that will allow you to advance to the next grade level. There are no school uniforms in my village, although in bigger cities, and high schools there are. Because of these costs many families are not able to send all or some of their children to school. Boys are preferred and so in some cases when given the choice, they will be the ones sent to school if money is running out and a family has to make a choice. But, I believe those times are changing a bit, and more families are more equal about that. The times that I have taught the oldest class at the elementary school the numbers of boys and girls has been equal. I would say (though based off of ideas rather than hard evidence) that only 15% or less of village children continue on to middle school after elementary school. Perhaps this is because of money. Perhaps this is because it is a 99% farming community, and there is little need of higher education. Or perhaps it is because the quality of education they receive is so poor that they are not able to pass the tests in order to move on. All three play a role.

The "middle school" is located in the neighboring village Sanguere Ngal. After that, is high school, and high schools are only located in bigger cities. There is one in Ngong, and in Sanguere Paul, and perhaps in Djalingo as well. If children go on to high school, depending on the distance, they may walk or ride a bike for a long time to get there. Many others end up residing in the high school town, with families, or renting out rooms with lots of other high school students.

As farming season gets under way, and the rain falls, less and less children go to school as they are helping their families with the preparing and planting fields. The same thing in the fall. School officially starts at one date, but really it starts after that, as the majority of kids will still be helping with harvests and will trickle back to school a good bit later.

Children are generally very well behaved and very happy and excited to be at school, unlike our state-side sentiments. They have the utmost respect for their teachers, due to strong discipline. However, it is generally very difficult to get them to participate in lessons, as that is not the Cameroonian model of education. Being based on memorisation there is little emphasis on creative thinking, and very little individualism. In general even through high school, students are trained not to think for themselves or be creative, but just to generate the correct answeres, whether they understand them or not. This could follow a general societal trend through much of the continent of the larger society being more important than the individual, and people who rather be part of a group rather than stand out. If I am teaching a lesson and ask a question, there is not a flurry of hands raised in excitement for the chance to answer. If I call on students they are terrified of saying something incorrect, no matter how many times I say "There are no wrong answers." or "what do you think?" "What ideas do you have?" For those used to teaching in an American setting this can be very frustrating. However I still think it is valuable and prefer to plow on in this method rather than revert to writing on the board and chanting facts.

What are some of the major challenges of the school system, and in particular my elementary school? First there is the lack of buildings...and teachers. The grass mats shade a bit from the sun, but not of course the rain. They have to be replace year after year as they decompose. Lack of materials is another thing. There are no books for the children, only notebooks the purchase and copy lessons down in. There is a lack of visual aids, no posters, no stimulating colors and pictures on the walls. 90% of teaching is oral, and rote memorisation, the teacher reads lessons or writes sentences on the board and the children copy them down in their notebooks. This is why I had wanted to make those posters for my geography/ecology class, taking continent by continent and have pictures of people, landscape and animals for each region. I was able to do two classes (Africa and North/Central America) before school ended for the year, and they were a big hit! But one of the biggest challenges, and my personal frustration is the lack of school days. It seems like there is really only school held maybe 60-75% of school days. First of all there are many many holidays. Then whenever there are teacher meetings, with the director or other teachers in another town, there is no school. (there are no teacher meetings after school, its always during school hours). And on top of that there are so many times where the teachers just don't show up. And the children come to school! For example, I had a class I was going to teach a few weeks ago, and in the morning it rained. It rained hard for about 2 hours but then it turned into a drizzle. As it turned to drizzle, the students and I made our way to the school. And waited. And waited. The teachers never came. Because it was raining, slightly. No school. And the last time I went to school as well, to teach, a beautiful day, the teachers never came. So I taught, then shuffled the kids back outside for them to wait for their teachers, and locked the door. And so many times this happens, the kids go to school and wait and wait, and then return home, their teachers never coming. It kills me, because I think of how much better off they'd be, how much more advanced, how much more equipped to pass their tests if they actually got to attend class the number of days they're supposed to! The kids are being gypped.

Imagine, with all of these challenges, the frustrations that many Peace Corps education volunteers feel during their service. There are exceptiong, but I believe that education volunteers as a whole have a lower satisfaction rate of their service, and feel less content, useful and happy during their time, than other programs in Cameroon. And I think they might have the highest ET (early termination=leaving early) rate, although I don't know the numbers.

My week in Highlights and Pictures

Here's my schedule and some photos from the past week!

Saturday--Fete de Travail, and one of the days I have done the most "work"

6 am Morning meeting at my house with the committee members of the "community woodlot" planted at the school last year: planning which species to replace, how many, choosing a date to start digging holes, all logistics.

two pastors stop by, have tea, and ask if i can speak later in the day to a group of women having a conference on development, on the importance of women in development, environmentally

My best friend in village, Rebecca goes to the hospital and has her 7th baby, I run after her, but after the 12 minute walk, by the time I get there, she's already delivered, a baby girl. Sad, really sad I missed it! Amazed she didn't have it on the road.

After staying with her an hour, and outlining my talk, run back to the church and speak to the 60 women there, a delightful hour.

Rush back home to get ready to go to Garoua, to visit a site for one of the Embassy self help funded projects (a schoolroom for an Mbororo school) with two representatives of the Embassy and the host NGO CELDIE who submitted the project. This little trip was really fun, especially to see "my terrain" through the eyes of two Embassy workers who live in Yaounde, one of whom had never been north.

Return back to village at dusk.

Sunday--

Hanging out at the house, cleaning house

working in my pepiniere, filling pots, preparing and planting seeds

Mbororo girls come over to "accept their papaya trees" that I told them to come by and get

Monday
Market day in Ngong
ordered tanned hides, to sew into a costume
met up with my Mbororo pepinieriestes and chief, to choose a day for the big nursery celebration

Tuesday
morning 6 am (aka 7:30 am) meeting to choose committee for apiculture group that is hoping to get started in Mafa Kilda

can't remember what i did in the afternoon...which probably means hanging out at the house, preparing classes, working on my pepiniere

Wednesday
sunrise walk between the mountains to visit Israel, look at their pepiniere: it's doing remarkably well! enjoyed the scenery of the morning, and this stage of landscape life, on the brink between dry season and wet season, tottering into greenness

dry river bed with "Dr Seuss" trees around it; they look like that because the cow herders climb them and cut them for forage for their cows at the bottom.

A young Mbororo boy, cutting a Shea Butter tree for his cows.

Visit with the family of one of the nursery men in Israel, who had a baby when my sister visited in February (baby Adamou with older sisters Raihanna and Hawa)

Thursday
Rain, beautiful rain, for 4 hours, until 10:30!

(here come the rain clouds approx 6:15)

(the newly formed lake in my concession, approx. 8:30 am)

Went to the school to try to teach the first geography/ecology course to the elementary school kids, but the teachers didn't come because of the rain (more on that later!)

Went to the health center, and started painting for a mural that shows women in various stages of planting harvesting and using moringa, to show the benefit of the plant. Don't have photos of that yet, but will soon!

1 hour personal landscape painting session at Bokle on the way to Garoua

Friday

morning out to Langui refugee camp: taught Trees for the Future Agroforestry class on Live Fencing today (last week was windbreaks and next week is alley cropping). Checked up on the refugee tree nursery which looks great. They will start outplanting the 4000 moringa plants (4 at each household) this week.

(a few nursery workers and Jean Paul Yaoule (head nursery man) in front of their rows of moringa plants at Langui refugee camp)

Refugee camp today...

men waiting for the class to start, a Trees for the Future basic agroforestry class I teach once a week

the whole class, usually about 50-60 people, meeting in the church in the camp

Jean Paul Youale, a local Cameroonian who helps me teach the course and is working on the nursery

Youale, Onne Kissandou and Damon Ouangkreo, three nursery workers, in front of the Moringa beds

Onne on the other side of the pepiniere. The approaching water (this from one morning's rain) worries me...

I was really impressed with this little boys clay creations of cars and a moto!

PS Happy Birthday to my cousin Jessie!