Two years in the making

This is the blog entry I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but I think my emotions hit me hard today when I said goodbye to Amanda at the station for her very last return to Lolodorf, thus inspiring me at last. This is a bit of a multi-session ramble, and though this entry will likely turn out like an African telling a story, I hope I will somehow make a point of some sort…

I’m at the final countdown of a once in a lifetime experience, probably what has been my biggest life-defining experience to date. Just around 2 months to go, more specifically. Some of you may not know that I’m extending, but I am. I’ll be staying for a year with the WWF in Campo on the SW coast of Cameroon, where I will get to put my graduate school lessons to use combined with what I have learned here about the culture. I will be the sole sociologist on staff and I am very excited to start this new chapter in my life, as you can only find limited value in a job that tells you to go out and be fruitful individuals in a society that has no idea why you’ve come except, obviously to throw money at people and problems. Really, where does one even start with such a vague job description?

I was too uncertain of what would happen after Peace Corps, too fearful of how my life would be in America (I mean, do I even remember my ATM PIN number or how to use a credit card or pay my taxes? Will I remember how to drive or keep my mean but funny comments to myself because everyone actually will be able to understand me? Will I even be culturally funny again in America?), and fortunately, since I get to prolong my stay another year, I don’t really have to start dealing with the end of an era just yet. But, sadly, this is the end of my time as an “organic” volunteer. This is the end of my time to sit for hours and hours and think about what it means to be born a Cameroonian, an American, a man, a woman, black or white. This is the end of my time to create work for myself in a culture that doesn’t necessarily want my help or ideas (unless it comes in the form of cold, hard cash). This is the end of my time to forget what day of the week it is because… well, honestly… same shit, different day. This is the end of my time to sit around with my neighbors and bullshit for hours, gossip, tell stories, compare cultures, in short to be effective in being ineffective. I may have not been the most productive, creative, inspiring volunteer (I would give that title to Julia Gallus who gives heartfelt meaning to the word “volunteer”), but I am happy and I am leaving good friends with good memories.

Peace Corps provided me with the experience to not just live in a different country or a small village, to wear clothing with crazy colors, to speak a different language; Peace Corps provided me with an opportunity to think differently in every possible context. Seriously. Just throw everything you know out the window. I guess we can start with language. First you must learn to communicate in French, but a villager’s French mixed in the local village references. Ask a French person what a “Yoyette” is, and I’m pretty sure they’d have no idea that you’re talking about a hip and well dressed young teenaged girl. “Ndjo,” meaning “free,” is market talk that definitely comes from Bantu roots. So, aside from the language barrier, you also have a whole cultural barrier you must first acknowledge exists and then you must figure out to transcend. Like, for example, humor. I can’t tell you how many blank stares I used to get when I would tell a joke here. Now my tailor knows me as the funny one. I hold my own with people in the market when they want to derange… uhhh, bother me, and I use humor to diffuse difficult situations that could possibly end in violence.

Food. It is an endless battle. It’s either feast or famine. Today I was offered two very large and complete meals just hours apart, and I couldn’t turn any of them down because I couldn’t figure out what to cook at home anyway, plus you don’t want to offend anyone. Sometimes, I even run out of money at the end of the month and am forced to conveniently visit my neighbors and friends around mealtime. Also, life would be a lot easier if I could just buy dog food in processed morsels instead of verifying each day that I have rice and dried fish pieces in sufficient quantity. Transport is an endless battle, too. It seems like whenever you need a moto urgently, there is not one to be had, and when you don’t need one they’re everywhere. Oh, wait, let’s start with what is a mototaximan in the first place and how much do you pay this person to take you from point A to point B. Water, electricity, money. Sometimes you have these things and sometimes you don’t. You can only imagine how much harder life is without these things, and how it is your relationships that help you get around problems with them. Disease. Volunteers can spend at least an hour a day engaged in personal or indirect contact with other people’s germs, many that come from unwashed hands after they pooped out in the field (or even worked in the field because, let’s be honest, poop is everywhere). I actually told a police officer who was checking moto legal papers that if he didn’t let us go through the control he would get to see a white girl crap her pants. We got through.

And just some of the day-to-day stressors that never help develop my sentiments towards Cameroon. 1) People shouting, spitting at you, “La wat! La Blanche! Nytangan!!” from 3 blocks over, whistling at you like you’re a dog, running over to you, and taking it personally when you don’t want to shake their hand, let alone talk to them. My first year as a volunteer, I would actually hide in my house for days on end to avoid even hearing that. 2) Corrupt gendarme stops on the road when you’re the only one who’s ID gets checked. And, no, that doesn’t make you want to date them. 3) Drinking and chronic malnutrition. Sure, this is definitely a regionalism, but I’m drowning in men and women, parents, pregnant and nursing, who drink from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. And then you see undernourished, underparented children running around on the streets and everything feels so hopeless. You meet functional adults who would be considered very stupid in America, and you can’t help but feel that chronic malnourishment and fetal alcohol syndrome is the curse of bountiful Africa. 4) Never feeling like you can just be friends with men. And not ever really being able to be good friends with women because they’ve almost all had children since the age of 17.

And despite all of this, or maybe because of all of this and my deep understanding (which has turned into a forced acceptance) of all of this, I’m having a really, really emotionally hard time. I can’t believe my 2 years is up. I know this is only nostalgia hitting me, but the reality is, as RPCV Maggie Murphy reminded me, I will never be able to have “this” ever again. What is “this?” I am still trying to process “this” and I am sure I will process it for a long time to come, but it helps to have some contrast to what “this” is not. For example, I heard through my father who heard from my sister that I don’t “really work”. I’m not sure if it is because maybe she thought I was doing amazing, life changing things living/working on 300 bucks a month (which I think is the common outsider reaction a lot of us PCVs get to life as a PCV) and I’m trying to not take it personally because probably my dad misunderstood, but I will try to defend what looks like “not working” to most productive citizens of the developed world.

You are privileged. You were born into a more or less functioning society. Things are more or less easy. Even if you’re poor, you have welfare, you have sliding scale medical clinics, you have food banks, you have schools that provide books free of charge, buses that take you to wherever you want to go with a full seat all to yourself and a seatbelt. And if you’re middle class, you’re well educated, you have health insurance, you cut coupons, you buy food that’s been subsidized by the government and has met FDA health requirements, you work 30 to 80 hours a week at a job that has accountability, goals, standards, evaluations, and seeks to be better, you have a car that gets you places, you will live to be 80something. You’re life is good. Be grateful for what you have and give back when you can.

PCVs, particularly those volunteering in the cursed/blessed Central African area, work in a world that navigates all of the factors listed above, but then throw in the fact that we have no structural support, no financial support, no to very little peer support. All we have are our ideas and the resources (population, structural, ecological, etc.) around us. Human beings are only as good as the other individuals surrounding them. For example, several generations of us stupidly dedicated volunteers of the South Region have been working on a soy project to help combat chronic malnutrition. It is entering painfully slow into the culture. I once even tried to sell soy seeds to a neighbor, an old woman, who told me, “I want soy to eat, not to grow.” The people of the South are stubborn, proud, don’t want to be told that their children are suffering from malnourishment because, “I’m a great cook, my kids have plenty to eat.” The idea of working as a team is completely foreign, and as a result, women suffer endlessly lonely hours at the field trying to be productive as one to feed a family of 10. Tribalism does very little to help combat these problems, and any good Southerner will tell you, “We do not have soy in our culture. It comes from the West Region. We do not work in groups in our culture. That idea comes from the West Region.” People have traveled so little that every problem is automatically associated with outsiders. A murder last year caused a sort of tribal war between the Bamoun (from the West) and the Bulu (the Southerners), as the Bulu blamed the murder of their brother on the Bamoun. In the end, we all learned it was some of their own brothers who killed the guy, but no one took this as a learning opportunity, an opportunity for societal or personal growth.

As a PCV, we have the benefit of being a true participant observer. I am both an outsider and an insider at once. Although I don’t navigate the language perfectly, I know how to get around. I know who to talk to to get things done, where to buy stuff at the market, when someone is lying, how to sit 4 in the front row of a station wagon even when the seatbelt clasp is sticking straight into your butt cheek. I know many of these things better than many Cameroonians, as it is essentially my job to visit villages and hang out with villagers. We (female volunteers) are also caught in a middle gender. I am not quite a woman, not quite a man. I eat with the men, I am allowed to do men’s work sometimes, I hang out with men and drink at the bar with men. But, I know it is very different for actual male volunteers and I can’t ever just be “one of the boys.” I am also kind of a woman. I can sit in the kitchen with woman, hang out with them, go to the field and work with them, but I am often not allowed to work in the kitchen. I also don’t have children and am not married, so I am often seen as a threat to some women. I have unique insider experiences in my interactions with people, but I usually catch people I don’t know very well off guard with how Cameroonian (villageoise) I am. Also, trust is a difficult topic for most PCVs. Many people change who they are when they are around me. They may put on a different face, talk a different talk, seem more serious about working with me than they actually are. I can never know this side of someone, and I usually get the information second-hand, and you’re left wondering who to trust. For example, I once trusted my neighbor until she stole soy seeds from me. When I told this to my former counterpart Judith, she told me, “See, Lauren, not everyone is like me.” And I trusted Judith, until I didn’t trust her anymore because she eventually showed me a different face.

So, knowing what you know now, I hope that you all can understand the many challenges that PCVs face everyday. My first year I struggled to find my groove. I worked a lot to avoid dealing with my limited selection of friends who usually exhausted me, usually because of language. I struggled to find good projects, good people to work with, how to work with these very limited number of individuals. I liked to spend my free time hiding in my house- reading, playing with the dog, playing on the computer, working on the computer. I found comfort in being alone and food and beer. I gained twenty pounds (typical me, typical female PCV) from stress, from a need to seek American-style food, from pushing myself and my need to exercise aside because the social and environmental problems seemed so big and yet so easy to solve with just my help, limited expertise, and lack of financial resources. I had a work breakdown right around October/November of last year and everything fell apart. I started spending more time with friends, more time interacting with the people I like, less time formally working. I picked up my exercise again, which helped give me mental sanity. I focused less on being in America, on being an American with an identity that you can’t touch. I gave in to Africa, to where I am, to my friends and my families here. I tried to better understand life here, and in doing so, found less meaning in driving forward with work that seems, often, pushed from the outside. My ideas of what is right and what is wrong have changed, and I always see more grey than I ever did before.

And maybe it is the grey matter than hinders my work productivity. I will never forget when my mom and sister came to visit and they had so many great, simple solutions to such seemingly simple problems. I felt like, next to them, I had lost all hope to see change here. Or maybe I stopped seeing the need for change in everything that constructs this society. But, I think what has actually happened is that I stopped seeing the “problems” as unique, solvable problems, per se. What used to be a problem has become just how life is and likely always will be, unless local governments step up or foreign aid agencies better understand how interconnected everything is and how life works here. Maybe the problems are too big to even be solved, or maybe the solution is the same one we found in America: immigration and equal rights for all. And maybe that is where PCVs are most effective. We spend money that we earn here. We give ideas to people in passing, we talk to everyone as representatives of America. We encourage idea sharing and we bring the idea of “the customer is always right,” which is usually an idea that is too strange for Cameroonians to comprehend. But maybe this is where we, as PCVs, can be most effective.

So, in short, I have felt useless, frustrated, helpless and hopeless, lonely, and stupid. I have also felt powerful, helpful, driven, loved, and intelligent. I have often asked, “What is the point of PC?”, “Why is the mandatory 2 year service so long?”, “What am I doing here?”, “Why don’t I just go back to a functional society?”, and “How can I work here?”. I have also often thought, “This is the coolest thing I will ever do in my life,” “I can’t even remember life pre-PC, pre-Cameroon,” and “Why is two year service so short?” I have made great friends, I have learned the realities of life here, I have forgotten many words in English, I have become a member of several families, and I have found my two feet. Being a PCV is indescribable, which is why this entry is a jumble of thoughts and emotions. Being a PCV is the most wonderful way to learn. When we first got to country, I remember standing in front of all my fellow stagemates and office staff for self-presentation. I was so hopeful and idealistic. I remember talking about my Masters degree, how I want to work with woman, and when I had to present my fear, I couldn’t really imagine how it could be being a PCV. My fear that I came up with was that I would love it so much here that I would never want to leave. I can’t say that I love every moment here in Cameroon, as I often have dreams of returning to America, but with time I have come to accept the things I don’t love and look past the things I can’t accept. I’m in a good place. It is, as they say, the toughest job you’ll ever love, and I am just not ready yet for it to be over.