Women's Day

Women's Day was celebrated on March 8th, with of course, a parade. Despite cancelling classes at the lycee for everything from bilingualism to youth day to mother tongue day, there were no plans for the girls to participate in the women's day activities. Classic. So, Rose and Claire came to visit for the holiday and we took the girl's club down to march in the parade.

The pagne: got the women's day pagne made into a giant kabba so I could just ride my bike in it easily enough. OMG, I have never received so many compliments in my life as when wearing this outfit. My seconde class stood up and applauded when I walked into class. It literally resembles a giant potato sack with a ruffle down the front.... pretty sure its the opposite of a la mode, but whatever.

The girls marched in their school uniforms, and lots of other women's groups etc. marched as well. If you look closely at my feet, I'm definitely not walking in synch with the other marchers.

Butternut and I are both very pleased with the new gate situation. While she is being kept in and stray herds of cattle/goats etc. are being kept out... it has done little to deter the small children who now just climb over the wall. But perhaps even more exciting, I now have running water! I was seriously beginning to think that the whole "water tank" was just a huge joke but sure enough this huge truck rolled across the cornfields behind my house one night last week. He slung the hose over the wall and filled up my water tank... then we pumped the water up..... and nothing happened inside the house. So my neighbor, Mambih, put his mouth onto the facet and was able to suck out some water. A true friend. So he deduced there was some sort of pressure problem.... so turns out that the electrician is also a plumber and he came over to see what the problem was.... pretty much every single pipe was completely rusted through and broken so he just replaced everything. Pretty much taking care of March's rent payment as well.... I'm sure my landlord will be so pleased if he ever decides to start talking to me again.

Great success : I now have a door to my compound! Turns out my landlord is known for not really accomplishing tasks that he has promised. So, I ended up dealing directly with the builder and everything got sorted out in no time. Now Butternut can run around freely in my yard! The only problem is that there’s a bit of a gap between the bottom of the gate and the ground where she likes to partially wiggle through, so I’m worried I’m going to come home one day and just find her totally stuck in there….

Additionally, Moussa (the builder) is very nice and my new friend. He has replaced the window screens on about 90% of my windows. When he saw my “shower” situation which is basically just all my soap etc. on the cement floor he said he’d make me something to arrange this, a cadeaux!

I just came into Maroua to attend a librarian’s conference…. I had been hoping they’d give us some information about obtaining more books, best practices, etc. but instead we spent in inordinate amount of time learning how to catalog books. So I was getting in heated arguments with the other bibliothecaires about identifying the publishing date, sub-titles, etc. of random books. I was like I have done this for every research paper since the fifth grade… blurgh. However, there are a few things I’d like to try. Right now, my students aren’t allowed to borrow the books, they can only use them in the library. So, I think if I can make out cards for each book then there could be a sign out system and hopefully that’d provide greater access to the books.

This week is exams at school so I’ve got lots of grading to do. I also need to “harmonise” the next sequence with the other English teacher so that we can cover the same topics - not my favorite activity. This sequence was the first time we harmonsied, and even though we agreed on topics we ended up spending different amounts of time on everything and had a really difficult time putting the tests together. Next year I just want to have both sections of each class I teach.

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!

I think “cold season” is ending prematurely. I haven’t been sleeping with my blanket for over a week. I was mentally preparing for March to be the start of hot season so this is not exactly good news.

Last Saturday I rode my bike to another village for a meeting. Rose and I got there successfully. But, on the way home we had a combined total of 3 flat tires!?! So it took forever to make it back. Reassuringly, we learned that basically every person en route knows more about bikes than we do and received lots of much appreciated help.

Yesterday, I went on another mountain/hike adventure extravaganza. I set off at about 7am with my neighbor and another friend who I think is a policeofficer. We had to ride about an hour to get to the base of the mountain. This time we had definitely left my village and were in another one. Once we got there we found Tikirai’s friends, a father and son who goes to my lycee,, and they agreed to guide us up the mountain. So we set off as a group of 5. The initial part was pretty steep and we weren’t exactly following a path. Our guide had a giant walking stick and a metal tool that looked like Captain Hook’s hook and he was just tearing up whatever was in our path. But my legs are still pretty scraped up from the pricker bushes. When we got to the top we visited this small village there. I couldn’t really talk to anyone there because they weren’t speaking French or even Fulfulde but another local language. But everyone was so nice and welcoming and shaking my hands. Two boys were walking around with radios and getting way better reception than I get at my house, I guess because they’re so high up.

Then about 5 children joined us to climb the final part which was just this huge stack of boulders, making the highest peak in the area. The all took off their shoes and scampered right up the bear rock. I was like nope, I’m going to stay right here. But then they found this crevice and climbed into this opening within the boulders that they somehow coaxed me into. It was pretty narrow and then it ended and the only way to go was up. So I lifted my arms up and they pulled me straight up about 6 or 7 feet. Then all of a sudden we were at the top, and I realized how far up we were. It was an amazing view. Everyone thought it was pretty hysterical that I couldn’t even point to where our village was but once they showed me you could pick out the mountain/hill that’s in the middle of it. You also had a great perspective of which way the road goes to all the other nearby villages. Getting lowered down the rock opening was definitely worse than going up, and it was good to be back on solid ground again.

We went down a different route that was much less steep and took us by a couple of other isolated houses where we stopped to chat, eat peanuts, and have some cold drinks. They took me inside one of the traditional houses and it was crazy how modern everything in town seems by comparison. This house had these long storage containers for grain/millet etc. Then there were different rooms, each with a mini “kitchen” next to it for each wife.

It was was a pretty hot day and when we finally got down and biked back home it was 5pm, making it a 10 hour excursion… I was a little sunburned and very tired out. Just to make things more exciting, when I got home I discovered that there is some sort of problem with my electricity. It sort of flickers when you slap the box outside my house really hard but then it goes out again. Good thing all I had the energy to do last night was get into bed.

Last Sunday morning I went on a hike/mountain climb with another teacher. He made it sound like it was going to be an all day excursion so I was getting ready for Mt. Cameroun part two, but it actually turned into a delightful trip. First we road our bikes about 40 minutes to the base of one of the large mountains that surround the town. I had noooo idea that this whole ride was still part of my town and had he left me there, I would have been pretty hard-pressed to find my way back. (That’s not true… I’m sure somebody would know exactly where I belonged and taken me back… but now I’m starting mission discovering the different quartiers.) We leave our bikes in some woman’s house at the bottom of the mountain, who I realize halfway up my friend has never met before. Anyway, the initial hiking was very steep and a little difficult. But then the ground leveled out and it was more like a hike and less vertical.

We found 2 people on the path who turned out to be students at our lycee. They both actually live in a smaller village farther back in the mountains then we were even trying to visit. They spend the week in town living at a “sari” together with a lot of other students and then only return home once in a while. They knew the lay of the land really well so they became our guides and took us to the “borage,” this huge damn built in the middle of nowhere within these mountains. It just sort of appears out of the blue. Apparently the Germans built it in the 1980s but it’s not necessarily for drinking water. The boys washed their school uniforms in it and talked about the big fish in there. They said its “really deep,” but that’s sort of a relative term… just like how now its “really cold,” although definitely too cold for swimming. Anyways we had a little picnic up on the rocks overlooking the water and then the students continued onward and we hiked back down the mountain. Being the informatique teacher, my friend LOVED the flipcam so we have a thoroughly documented mountain climb… or rather minutes upon minutes of me hiking in my track suit pants and fleece tied around the waist… had to do it.

We saw a pretty big snake en route. Thankfully he was up in the rocks and I declined to follow everybody else as they trooped over to get a better look at it. Alex got a little too excited and recorded about 2 minutes of their argument over whether they were looking at the head or the tail while pointed at a random rock. However, he said it was the biggest snake he had ever seen. The students assured us that it wasn’t the kind that bites though.