The Bubble

A little while ago I met a fellow American, and fellow transplant Chicagoan named Jarred. He's here working for the Christian linguistics organization called SIL and he lives with some relatives of Jibo's family way out in the hills past my village. Apparently when he comes into Bamenda he stays with an American family also working with SIL. The Jacksons are an interesting bunch; Chris and his wife have 2 daughters, and adopted Cameroonian daughter, another girl from the States visiting, and a female tutor, so it's estrogen overload. Both Jarred and Chris seemed pretty happy to have me there to balance things out and it didn't hurt that I brought a bunch of my movies for them; a nice alternative to the constant stream of Gilmore Girls that's usually playing in the background. Their house is really nice and staying there was like taking a small step back toward the US. I had enchiladas and a bagel and a waffle in the morning. They even have a Wii! So needless to say I'll be returning whenever I need my American fix.

The rains still haven't come back after that brief appearance earlier this month and now the planting season's in limbo. People in village are confused and even getting a little worried. Normally we'd be well into the rainy season by now. I've been getting small tastes of how much work there is to come though. I broke ground on both the medicinal garden at the hospital (at 5:30 in the morning, ugh) and my vegetable garden in the backyard, but in both cases, I'm holding off on actually planting since I'd have to manually water everything.

IST (in-service training) is also coming up in a couple weeks. It'll be nice to see everyone again. Usually ISTs happen in Kribi, the beach destination in Cameroon, but since we're Agros, I guess we need to be somewhere where we can get hands on agricultural training which means we, and the health kids haha, have to go to land-locked Foumban in the West Region. Still it's supposed to be an interesting place with a lot of cultural sites, but it's hard not to feel jipped. Anyway, we'll probably head to Limbe, the other beach, after to celebrate.

Tonight is dinner at my place, assisted by all the great food my mom just sent, so I've got to get to the market and start prepping. I feel like I'm really doing this blog a disfavor since I've got so many good stories I haven't even shared yet, but like my mom said, I'm "doing" and not "reporting" so I guess you'll just have to deal with it :)

Small time

The Fog

Sorry for the long hiatus. The internet has been pretty inconsistent recently. We're convinced it has something to do with the mystery dust that's clouded Cameroon and it seems most of West Africa. No one's really sure what's going on, but of course the speculations and conspiracies are running rampant. One day this gray haze just showed up and blanketed everything in a layer of ashy dust. And it hasn't gone away. The sky is just solid gray. Pretty weird, but I'm willing to bet it's not skin cancer-causing acid rain clouds like the homemade handouts tell me.

I don't have much time to write now, but I felt like I had to update with something. I'll write again soon, but in the meantime here's me conquering a natural bridge I discovered.

So I'm willing to bet that one of my proposed projects is something that's never been done in Peace Corps Cameroon before, maybe not even the entire organization. I little while ago I met a guy who is leading a group that organizes youth events that tend to focus on entertainment; things like singing competitions, art classes, and as I found out, movie-making. I've been looking for opportunities to work with youth (when they say youth here it generally means 14-30) so I decided to meet the guy at his office and discuss some ideas. As soon as I mentioned that I had attended film school and had been working in the industry for the past 4 years, he just about lost it. I actually had the idea a while ago, when Brian, my predecessor, told me he had been in a few local productions, but now it seemed like there was a legitimate way for me to start a film club. The idea is that I can serve as a sort of technical advisor to the group, helping them mostly with improving their filmmaking skills. I've already screened a couple of the films they've made and the are definitely suffering from the same problems all movies here seem to suffer from. Bad, inconsistent audio, lazy cinematography and confusing, underutilized editing. The acting and the stories are definitely in need of help too, but I'm hesitant to get involved in those aspects, as to me, the style of the acting and subject matter of the narrative are what make the filmmaking style unique to its origins. Most movies you'd see here are made in Nigeria. Nigeria is actually the third largest film market in the world behind Hollywood and Bollywood (hence it being dubbed Nollywood). Anyway, I'm confident saying that all of them are family dramas, usually dealing with forbidden love, the clash of tradition and modernism, and always with a healthy dose of witchcraft thrown in for good measure. It's frustrating because there are a wealth of interesting stories to tell here that don't involve a family arguing in a living room for 2 hours until the ghosts of the ancestors show up and kill everyone, but no one seems interested in telling them. Like most things in Cameroon, something is done one way and only that way, why ask questions? Anyway, I'm thinking I'll even be holding some informal classes on filmmaking basics like shot compostion, screenwriting and storyboarding, and editing.

So it seems I actually will be able to put my film degree to some use as an agroforestry volunteer. Another pet project that might do just that as well is something the Training Officer actually suggested to me. I say suggested, but really he volunteered me into the position of making a training video during stage. That idea quickly fell apart though since they really didn't have any idea of what they wanted. But I think it would really be great to have some sort of orientation video to put on the PC Cameroon website for invitees so that they would have a better idea what to expect, bring, etc. So I'm going to propose the idea next month when we have In-service Training and we'll see what happens. At the very least it'd give me a good excuse to travel some more and even visit the training of the next group of invites.