So tomorrow's the first day of IST (In-Service Training) and I'm spending the night in Bamenda so I can get an early start on travel in the morning. Looking forward to seeing my group again, but of course as soon as I pulled up in Bamenda I started to feel sick. Feels like a fever and headache coming on, so should make for a fun week.

Dinner turned out great and the rest of the evening surpassed anyone's expectations. I made cajun/southern food, blackened chicken, dirty rice, fried okra, green beans, watermelon, not to bad for my first go round. And definitely one of the most fun nights I've had yet. I think when you plan something to be low-key, it's most likely to turn into, well this...

I found a great place I can go and just get away from things. Up the mountains from Bambui there are some really interesting rock formations and I took the other day to go check them out. But I made the mistake of riding my bike and only got about halfway before I was completely drained and had to walk the rest of the way. The whole ride is straight uphill, so much so, on the way back I didn't have to peddle once. But the place is gorgeous and the views fantastic.

Easter came and went without much fuss, mostly because I hid in my house the whole day. I just assumed given how drawn-out and pointless normal church services are here, Easter Sunday has got to be like the finale of American Idol.

Anyway, here's hoping I'm not sick all week. Take care all

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.

Again I waited way too long between posts and I'm stuck with a whole host of stuff to write about. I shouldn't even try to do the last couple weeks justice because they've been some of the most memorable (for better and worse) I've had here. But I'll give you a run down anyway. Since we last spoke I've been really busy, both with work and socializing. Over the Valentine's Day weekend I traveled down to the West Province near Bafoussam with Jibo for the funeral of my good friend Jacky's grandfather. Funeral's not really the right word though as the guy died 6 years ago. That's generally the way it works here. The surviving family will wait to raise enough cash to throw a huge party that's more aptly dubbed a death celebration. From the pics you can probably get a good idea of what's involved, lots of dancing, food, people in all sorts of colorful finery, and of course homemade blackpowder rifles being fired constantly. It was probably the third or fourth I've attended, but definitely the biggest.

Things just seem to line up here, serendipitously, since I learned that there was a PC party happening in Mbouda, a town on the way back from Bafoussam. So I had the bus drop me off there and joined the party. Mbouda's a relatively large town. I had the my first real Cameroonian night club experience there and it was surprisingly western. It was honestly a bit disorienting when I walked outside later that night and found myself in Africa.

After all the partying I was actually glad to have some real work to do last week. NOWEFOR (Northwest Farmers Org), my supervising organization, had it's big annual general meeting (or AGM, Cameroonians looove acronyms) in Bamenda. My excitement quickly waned though after only a few hours in and realizing I had two more full days of pointless bickering and mind-numbing rambling to look forward to. At least Austin and Carl were there, the two other volunteers from Texas. And I did have a small moment of glory here as well when I caught a flaw in a change the delegates were trying to make to their election process. They wanted to vote in board members before voting for the president ensuring any other executive candidate not elected would have had no chance of even being on the board. It was nice to see they actually had enough respect that they listened to my observation. I didn't realize the effect my speaking up had actually had until a few days later when the guys from my town found me and bought me a round for "making Bambui look intelligent".

Once the meetings mercifully came to an end I decided it was time for another vacation and traveled up to Kumbo, near where Patrick from my stage is posted, to visit some folks including two of Tess's friends visiting from the States. I had always been warned about the ride up there taking forever, but I didn't expect to be ambushed by a band of Juju and subsiquently have our car break down three times. Juju are sort of like voodoo dudes who tend to spend a lot of time cursing people at death celebrations, sort of. Anyway, they jumped out in front of the bus, danced around a bit, and demanded money from the driver to pass. I'm not willing to say anything they were doing had any effect since I'm pretty sure they were just trying to make a buck, but about 5 minutes down the road the driver had to pull over. Long story short here but I actually ended up fixing the car each of the 3 times. It was a simple fix but it was pretty amusing to hear all the other passengers joking about the "whiteman's magic touch". Once I finally made it, the weekend was really a lot of fun and highlighted by horseback riding and getting stuck in the rain! Real rain! It's been 3 months but the rains are finally starting to return which means I should actually start having some work to do. And I can get to planting my vegetable garden.
Ok, so that was a lot more than a 'run down'. What can I say? There are many more stories that fell by the wayside. I'm probably way too lazy for a blog, but I suppose anything's better than nothing, right?

Until next time

Super

Well I won't forget that one anytime soon. The party last week was supposed to be in lieu of any actual celebrating on my birthday. It was a lot of fun, Catherine made great food and an awesome cake (that's me taking a bite out it), and there was a good number of us there. So I definitely wasn't expecting to spend my real birthday watching the Super Bowl live at 3 in the morning in a club in Bamenda.

Some of us decided we would get together and try to stream the game online, but once we were here we decided to hunt down a better option. There's an upscale restaurant in town that told us they got ESPN on satellite so after confirming that ESPN had the international rights to the game we managed to get some more people to come in to town, ten of us in total, and started the long process of trying to stay up till the game started fueled by grilled fish and beer. Gabe managed to line up a cabbie who would take us to the restaurant and then pick us up later which was huge because the actual city is completely dead late at night. So at about midnight we pile in the cab and make for the restaurant. Well, turned out the ESPN was really ESPN Classic and we were sure we had just blown it, but they turned us on to a club down the street, so Gabe and I went to scout it out just in time to catch the coin toss. It was a surreal thing to be watching that game here on a big plasma screen and to interact with Cameroonians trying to figure out what in the world we were watching and why we were so excited. I'd never be this determined to watch a Super Bowl between the Saints and Colts in the states, but you tend to latch on to anything American here. I mean I have a Beyonce poster in my house for God's sake.

Looking back I'm actually surprised we made as long as we did, through the 3rd quarter, without any power failures, but then the whole building cut out. We're still not really sure what happened, since the rest of the street was still lit. Either the place was on a timer or the guy baby sitting us, since were were there long after closing time and everyone else had long left, decided it was past his bedtime and took some initiative. We were able to get home in time, about 4am, to catch the very end online but we missed all the action in the 4th and sadly I never got to see Manning embarrass himself. Still it's always a good night when the Colts lose, right Ash? ;) Needless to say I'm a little exhausted right now so I'm going to wrap this up. We're all still hanging out in the case waiting on the Medical staff to get here from Yaounde with the now mandatory swine flu vaccines. With no reported cases of the virus in Cameroon I'm not sure what the point is, but I've gotten something like 12 shots already, what's one more?

Birthday

On my way through Bamenda today toward Bali and Catherine's place where I was able to convince everyone to convert pizza night into a pre-birthday party for me. Should be fun, I know carrot cake is making a special guest appearance so really we can do no wrong.

I should let everyone know that I've fallen in love here. Or rather love jumped up on my shoulders and licked my face. His name is Tsoni (I think) and he's a German Shepard mix. Cameroonians are all terrified of dogs especially ones that look like this so when Tsoni found someone willing to play he wouldn't let me go. He belongs to a woman everyone calls Sister Heidi, until I steal him. Sister Heidi is a Swiss woman who has been in the country since the early 60s. Jibo's wife was recovering at her home and I stopped by to see the baby, Mohamed now (Han Solo a close second). It's really funny to see a little seventy year old white woman speaking pidgin. It reminded me of that scene from Airplane!. She's terribly nice and very welcoming, so I'm hoping she'll be my jive-talking granny while I'm here.

Apparently waiting for repairmen is a phenomenon that knows no cultural bounds. The fridge I bought last week lasted about two days before it died on me. I was able to convince the technician to come out and take a look at it rather than me having to drag it back to the shop. He decided the motor was bad and after much deliberation I ended up handing the guy 20,000F (about $40) to come back tomorrow with a new motor. Tomorrow came and I hadn't heard from the guy, he wasn't answering his phone and I was sure I had been screwed. But in time honored repair guy fashion he shows up the next day, fixes the fridge and cons another 3,000F out of me. Oh well, maybe it's all for the better because the "arctic wind" sound that was loud enough to drown out my radio seems to have disappeared.

Alright gang, off to Bali. Here's a bonus pic of me schooling a 10 year-old with my mad shooting skills.