Easter Weekend

Last Thursday I went out to the ecole primaire where my neighbor and friend Mambih works. There’s only about 6 teachers there and several hundred students. But the kids were all so sweet … at least compared to my 4eme class at the lycee. Anyways I did some English classes with the older kids, sang some songs with the younger ones. Then me and the one female teacher there talked to all the girls about the dangers of early marriage. The numbers are absolutely crazy, when the girls start primary school, they are even more numerous than boys. Then so many drop out, in the final year there there were just 11. Two 14 year old girls had left literally the day before I arrived for marriage. However, while I was there one of the girl’s father came by and explained to the teachers that he hadn’t arranged this marriage, his daughter had run away. I get the feeling that both situations happen but I had incorrectly assumed that it was always the parents’ fault. Anyways the ecole primaire was a ton of fun, the kids were super sweet and hopefully I can work more with them next year too.

On the morning of Good Friday everyone climbed up Baba Simon, the small mountain in the center of town. They stopped along the way to do the stations of the cross.

My friend Martine got baptized at the Easter mass. She had been really excited for this and had a big party at her house afterwards.

It rained for the first time since October last night! First the electricity went out (which was pretty annoying since the teachers at the lycee were attempting to watch a training video from UNESCO,) and then it downpoured for about 7 minutes during which I was soooo delighted. But then the next morning it was humid and horrible. Usually it is extremely hot, but because its dry heat, its not so bad. But today I was just dripping sweat in my classes which were all before 10am … totally ridiculous. Eventually enough rain will come that the temperature will drop a bit, but right now the ground is just too dry and hot for it to make much of a difference.

Spring Break

Me at the crater lake

Friends

Spring break was a great success. We “fled the heat” as the Camerounians are so fond of saying and went down to Ngaoundere. The climate is much cooler there and it is an easy 9 hour bus ride away, nbd. We met up with some friends from other regions and basically just enjoyed the weather and the company. I learned how to play Texas hold ‘em… and won. One day we went out to this big crater lake. There’s a big hotel/restaurant structure built there, but according to my friends back in Tokombere, it all got abandoned because demons were pulling people into the water. We also visited the Lamido’s palace and the grand mosque.

Just a little bit of school left back at post!

Most of my water got wasted soaking into the ground with the broken pipe situation so now I’m back to an empty tank and haven’t been able to convince the waterman to drive across the cornfields again. Occasionally sparks shoot out of my fridge and water has been running out the bottom, but it still seems to be working, which is a miracle cause when the water comes out of the filter it is a bazillion degrees.

Its officially mango season so I’ve been eating lots of those. If possible, there’s even more children in my yard now since they can easily hop my walls and then into Mariam’s, mango trees next door. When they do this during the night Butternut goes crazy barking at them and wakes me up.

Butternut legitimately has the flu. I have never seen a dog sneeze before but she sneezes, in spurts of 4 or 5 even, just like a human. I think part of it must be the heat, this is her first hot season. I’ve heard about 4 dogs in my neighborhood who have already died from the heat. Mostly I chase Butternut around and dump water on her to try and keep her cool, but she doesn’t seem to like this at all, and now I feel bad since she has all these flu symptoms.

It is also probably as hot as it will get (I’m telling myself) …. But that being said, it is pretty hot. My friend found a meat thermometer which was measuring 115 degrees in the evening.

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!