Rose, me and the other teachers at her lycee at Waza Park.
Giraffes!

Last Thursday Rose and I had a day trip to Waza Park with the other teachers from her lycee. Her principal lives in my town and invited me to come along. We drove through the park with a guide and saw monkeys, antelope, giraffes, an eagle, some other cool birds. Unfortunately we didn't see any elephants or lions cause they were all hanging out in a different part of the park this time of year.

Afterwards we visited the old house of the first president of Cameroon. It was a pretty elaborate compound that had just been totally abandoned which was sort of bizarre. Then we visited the hotel/restaurant at Waza which is really cool and went over to someone's house for lunch. Hopefully I can get some more of these pictures on facebook soon.

This is Rose in her new outdoor kitchen building. Liz and I helped her clean it out so it wouldn't make her house so hot when she cooked inside, then we made some mac and cheese for lunch, great success!

This is me on Rose and I's bikeride to our safety meeting.

The girls in my premiere class staged an intervention for me. Madame, do you need help with your laundry? I already have someone who does my laundry. (That’s a whole different problem b/c I like this other girl a lot but everyone insists that she steals things but she has never stolen anything from me and I think it is just an unfortunate rumor…) Anyways I told them that, and they were like well your backpack is really dirty, you need to wash it. It had never really occurred to me to wash my backpack, but it really is covered in dirt. The problem is that I use it pretty much everyday so I’ll have to find sometime convenient to do that.

Especially right now, everything is just SOO dusty. Some people walk around with surgical masks on, this is a little extreme, but it is pretty intense. A car will go by you and you feel swallowed up by a huge cloud of dust. Right now the dust and the fog have been going together. Tuesday was so foggy that I literally had about 12 out of my 70 seconde students show up on time for class. I gave them all an extra point. It is pretty intense with all the fog and dust in the air, however I don’t see why this should be an excuse for coming late to school. I keep telling them about all the snow back home and how everyone still has to arrive on time.

We’ve had a very exciting fete de la jeuneuse week (Youth Week) at post. There was a soiree cultural where all the kids performed dances, skits, songs etc. Then we had an evening of round table debates about the anniversary of the reunification of Cameroon. Friday was the big parade where each school marches down the main street together. They get judged on how well they march and then the best school gets a prize. The parade turned out to be quite extensive because there were all sorts of other schools from other smaller surrounding villages who came in for the fete that I didn’t even know about. I got a special invitation to these events which means I got to sit in the shade with “the grands,” which kept me a bit cooler.

There was a lot of ceremony related to all these things. First of all, none of the events can start until the proper authority shows up. So, for example both Tues. and Wed. evening, the delegate showed up about an hour and a half after the “start time,” so everyone was just forced to sit around there waiting. This is usually annoying when it happens, but I thought even more so when you consider that this whole event is for kids who are supposed to be in school the following day. They finally ended the performances at 11:30pm, but some of the kids didn’t get to perform and everyone was either sleeping in class or absent the next day.

Things were a little more organized on the day of the parade because the President of the Assembly happens to live nearby and everyone knew he would attend. Basically he is the second person in the government after the President, Paul Biya. He turned up in this brigade of range rovers and then the different chieferies all rode in on horseback and it was a big ta-do. There were also some soccer matches.

Bilingualism Week

This week was Bilingualism Week, which culminated in a large celebration at the lycee this afternoon. It was a really fun celebration. The English club prepared a bunch of skits, mostly about people getting confused, losing their jobs etc. because they didn’t understand English well enough. For example a secretary got “sacked” for not being bilingual, and ended up bringing a “sac” (bag) in to her boss because she didn’t understand what was happening. So, they were pretty cute. There was also this one student who did these spot on imitations of the principal and the vice principal… they were seriously so good… and then he did me! The principal took it in good stride but apparently the vice principal was a little bit deranged by the whole thing. I thought it was pretty funny to hear him imitating my French voice. I didn’t take it too critically since everybody told me I had spoken well after I delivered the opening speech in French. (The principal delivered the same speech in English – bilingualism). I helped the girls’ club prepare “Still I Rise,” which they read aloud. There were also songs, quiz questions, English news, etc. The ceremony ended a little bit early since the power went out and it was difficult to hear without the microphone, but we had pretty much gotten through everything.

Inexplicably, they sent all the English teachers to a training session in another town the day before this program. Finding out about this at the last minute complicated planning the celebration which was primarily organized by the English department. And I was further frustrated when I discovered how disorganized the whole training session actually was. Let’s just say that at about 3 hours after we should have had a break for lunch and hadn’t, I found myself making tally marks for every time this one teacher used the word “bamboozled,” as in “Don’t do this, it will bamboozle your students,” in completely casual conversation. This was the high point of the day.

Next week is Youth Week which I think will have activities all week culminating in a large parade through town on Friday. I think this will be a much bigger deal!