My room in Africa a plus stank que my room in des Etats-Unis

Men playing drums

Men dancing

Dancing

Planting trees

Soccer

Greetings from Camie!

We are in our forth week of "stage" or training for those of you outside the Peace Corps. Things are progressing right along. Many in the group are ready to go to Post already, even though we have 6.5 weeks left.

We find out in three weeks where are posts are, and then we actually go to our posts for a week and if we are replacing a volunteer, we get to hang out with them. If not, you go and stay with your Cameroonian counterpart and learn about the community and do some initial "need assessing". This will break up the monotony of the training a bit.

It's rained for almost three days. It wouldn't really bother me, except that I spent three hours on Sunday washing my clothing by hand, and it's "drying" in my room. Hence, my room smells a little bit like wet dog. I'm probably breeding Malaria in here. I purchased some French laundry detergent to supplement the soda soap that my family uses for their laundry. Their soap is really great at getting stains and things out, but it smells a bit like glue or animal renderings… maybe a little of both. Luckily the dry season is right around the corner so my room wont smell like lavender dog forever.

I think I have mentioned previously that the roads in Cameroon are dangerous. Well, this manifested itself about a kilometer away from our training site. A seven-year-old boy was killed last week while walking along the side of the road… he was hit by a car. Tragic. Tragically common. They had a funeral for the kid on Saturday. I did not attend the first part of the funeral (where there is a burial and a lot of crying), but I did go to the fete that occurred in the afternoon. It was quite the cultural event. In Cameroon, there is always a huge party that goes along with a death. If there isn't enough money to throw a party, the family will sometimes wait up to 10 years to save and throw a decent one. This particular fete occurred outside the Catholic Church. A big xylophone type thing was brought, and a few men played it. Then the crowd made a huge circle and men without shirts danced around, carrying swords, tassels and spears with rattles at the end of them. They danced to the beat of the drums and xylophone. I was one of three stagiares at the event, and we were quite the commodity. We were all pulled into the circle to dance. I was given a sword… and I danced with it? I don't really know what I was doing, but a lot of people were looking at me and speaking in Patwa, and so I smiled a lot and bounced with the sword in my hand.

We visited a volunteers post last week, a fairly interesting event. She served us cake that she made in a pot with sand in the bottom.. Dutch oven, essentially. We at it in her little three-room house and watched the kids running around outside. She brought them some cake.., I think they were pretty excited about it. It was really great to see a volunteer in action, and we surveyed some of her work with local farmers. We got to see a successful nursery, seed banks, alley cropping… even planted a couple of nitrogen-fixing trees.

My sisters are currently outside my window wailing. My mom calls my littlest sister (Joelle) "la championne de pleurer" – the crying champion. I think, for the most part, children in the US get a different reaction from parents and siblings when crying ensues. Here, well… its just different. The Bamileke people of the West province, where I have my homestay, are a very… aggressively vocal people. The local language sounds harsh. Sometimes it is an intended harshness, though oftentimes it just sounds mean. It's not my most favorite language at 4:30 or 5 am when my little sisters get up.

If you have any suggestions for unique camping recipes (that's essentially how I will live for the next couple of years, as if I were camping) that utilize limited food resources, let me know… I am looking to expand my culinary horizons and kitchen resourcefulness over the next month or so…

Ciao for now!

Kels

The Life of a Peace Corps Trainee, To Continue for 7 More Weeks

Salut tout la monde!

Hope life in the United States is wonderful. You don’t realize how much you take for granted, really. Refrigeration is a big one. Go and kiss your fridge. Do it now. Then go read the Declaration of Independence or Constitution or something.

I have just finished my third week of training. This week was pretty exciting for the agroforestry trainees. We started working on our own vegetable plots (maize, peanuts, beans and sweet potatoes). We are also planting trees at our homestay sites. I spent a number of hours mixing manure into my soil with my bare hands (found some chicken ca-ca in the room next to my family’s outdoor kitchen… just 4 bags or so) and then built a fence with bamboo that I cut from the river near my house (with my machete). Shortly there after, I discovered that chickens can jump, and that a 2-foot-high fence is not acceptable in the African bush. So, I had to return to the fleuvre (river) for some more bamboo.

This is where a lot of the pictures are from. The people in the photos are mostly other trainees (Reese, Nathan and Alex), though we did have quite a posse of local kids following us around. I live on a hill that overlooks the river area, and it’s really pretty around sunset. I apologize for the blurriness, but it’s hard to look for snakes and snap a photo at the same time (I have not seen any snakes. However, I have seen a million lizards and beaucoup de spiders. There are also ants that bite, mosquitoes that bite and something called moot-moot that left big welts around my ankles).

I think that I pretty much never want to eat another plantain for the rest of my life. The starch is overwhelming (as I have said before). In general, the Peace Corps volunteers I have seen so far are not so much thin as they are… round.

Other pictures that will hopefully (pending some agreeable African technology) get posted are of my host sisters, Patricia (4.5) and Joelle (2). They are pretty cute when they aren’t too boogery and screamy (screamy at 5am is especially unbearable). Another picture is of my room… I am hoping to get some better photos of my living conditions (very good by Africa standards), but am waiting to get a bit more comfortable. Note the bars on the windows.



There is another photo of the agroforesters who take their languages classes in the “Blue Maison”. Across from le Maison Bleu is what we call la Cabane d’Omelette. Yes, the omelet shack. Here you can get a warm coca-cola and a fresh cooked omelet (did you know eggs last for days without refrigeration? You test them by putting them in water. Rotten eggs float.). What do they put in omelets here? Well, at my house in the AM, its pieces of leftover fish and tomato. At the omelet shack, you can get one with onions, tomato, piedmont (essentially habanero peppers that make your mouth want to fall away from your face) and spaghetti. Yes, what would an omelet be without spaghetti?? I challenge all of you to try a spaghetti omelet… and if you REALLY want to try Cameroonian food, put your spaghetti omelet inside a baguette (with the spaghetti cooked into it). Then set your mouth on fire, because that’s how piedmont tastes.

Things are clipping along. Training is not that easy and not necessarily always that fun. Four hours of straight French is a bit of a bummer, but it will be nice to know what the heck the kids are calling me. This week we got really down and dirty in agro tech classes, and my hands were out of commission for nearly two days. Hoeing is much different than in the US (for those who know what a hoe is). It involves bending over and sticking your but in the air – and lots of blisters. But three weeks have passed already, meaning there are only seven left. During week six, we will all be making “site visits” to our future posts, meeting with our host country national counterparts and doing an initial assessment of our communities. For now, I am trying to be spongeful and attempting to retain as much language and technical information as I can (put the ca-ca into the hole first, then put in the tree. Bring your neighbor a papaya and you wont get robbed. Don’t eat the things that look like dirty curled up paper – its cow skin, and it will make you sick).

Kelsey from Mboa

Only 8 weeks of Training to Go!!

Salut!

Sorry for the delay in posting. The last two weeks have been interesting ones, to say the least. They have involved enormous transitions and uncertainties. If you hadn’t known already, I do not speak French. Since my last post, I have moved in with a French-speaking Cameroonian family. Peace Corps calls this “emersion”. I call it total dependency and frustration. Ha.

Alright, I’ll admit it’s pretty effective. My french is improving daily, and I am able to communicate just about anything in broken French or fraglais. Such communications include. Le car, est pour moi? Ou est la car? Tu takez moi pour la maison blue pour l’ecole (direct translation. The car, is for me? Where is the car? You (franglais) takez me for the blue house for the school?) .

The Cameroonian family life is pretty good. My family has some Western amenities, such as an indoor (flush) toilet, running water and electricity. They even have a television that has one channel (airing mostly horse races, bad news and Mexican soap operas dubbed in French…). Some other trainees have home-stays that are not as nice as mine… pit latrines in the backyard, no indoor plumbing and there are a number who live on pork farms.

Thus far, I have consumed many things. I have not really enjoyed many of these things, but I am trying them all the same. My first night in Cameroon, I was served spaghetti and fish head sauce. Yes, fish head. I don’t even like mayonnaise. Fish heads? Since then, I have had fish soup, a dried-fish sauce over eyams (very dry tubers), and several omlettes with fish in them. My family likes fish, I think. Last night, we had the real sticker. Current PCV’s serving in Cameroon warned trainees about the “viscous soup” that some of us may experience. It is a “soup” made of okra and some kind of something that is taken from the bark of something (maybe if I knew it would be easier for me to eat). Essentially, its like eating snot. It’s green, warmish, and slimy. Viscous. My family ate it with their hands (they usually eat with silverwear), slurping and lapping it off their fingers. They use what they call cous-cous (think sticky, bland Cream of Wheat) to scoop the viscous matter out of the bowl. Totally grossed me out. Definitely ate a bowl and a half of the stuff with my right hand.

The training has been going great. Language classes are tedious most of the time, but they are very small and comfortable. Nathan, Yune and I have all made the cut as “Novice-Mid” french speakers (Novice-Low is the bottom rung…. Only have to climb 4 rungs to qualify for service). We laugh a lot in a small, blue room in the back of some house where we are taught by real Cameroonians. Agroforestry is also going well. We are beginning technical training next week (we received our machetes on Friday. I am not joking.).

My family is great. I have a host mom and dad, the brother of my host father, the sister of my host father, and then four children ranging in age from two to fourteen. However, I am not sure if all of the children belong to my mother and father. There are two fourteen year olds, and they don’t look alike, so I don’t really know what’s going on with that. I have decided I may never know… maybe when I speak better french. They are really great though. On Sunday, they took me to the “white man store” in Bafoussam… a grocery store. My mom got dressed up to go, and when we got there, they wanted to buy me all sorts of things. They ended up getting me a toilet brush, some peanuts, a bar of chocolate, six bottles of water, and a piece of cake. When we returned to their house, they explained that I am now a part of their family. So, that was a pretty important part of my experience so far.

The agroforestry trainees received their machetes this week. This is one tool among half a dozen… but really, who cares about hoes and shovels? I have a machete. The only real instruction I have received thus far is to think of the machete as an extension of my arm. A large, rusty, sharp extension of my arm.

This week-end, the agroforesters will begin to make tree nurseries at our homestays. We will be graded by Dr. Njiti, the zany professor that runs most of our technical trainings and activities. Zany might be an understatement. Njiti is maybe the most enthusiastic prof. I have ever had, and is definitely a well-read (and published) academic. I must also give a shout-out to TaTa Katie, who is a current PCV in Cameroon, and has been a great guide for we newbies.

Things are going great. I am liking it, looking forward to winning the pugnacious battle against the French language that I have been fighting since my freshman year of high school. I have not yet had any convoluted stomach experiences (I’m not saying its pleasant all the time, but no major issues). I do know that there was a health volunteer that pooped her pants. I do not know who this was, but I congratulate this anonymous person on her determination in being the first to “join the club”.

If the pictures aren’t up with this post, its because I am in Cameroon and there are more than a few technical issues that come up. Please be patient! Images are to come soon! Regular postings from now on (or at least during training).

Love you!



Peace Corps Trainee
B.P. 215
Yaounde, Cameroon
Africa

(Don’t forget to mark as Par Avion … more details on krosey.org).

Kelsey in Bandjoun

Kelsey in Bandjoun...

Kelsey's Mom here...She wanted me to post a note to say that she is now in Bandjoun. She will probably be able to update this site on Saturday when she goes to Bafoussam. I have been getting bits and pieces of information and hope everything is correct. She is living with a family of eight. It is a husband and wife, four children ages 2-14, the husbands brother, and 18 year old sister. The grandpa and grandma live close by. Kelsey has her own room, bed with mosquito net, toilet, and somewhat of a shower, a spigot with a drain. Her family keeps the house extremely clean...The mother even taught Kelsey how to scrub the floors and do her laundry...which she said was the hardest thing she ever did...All by hand. She thinks that the father has something to do with lumber trading and that the mother is a nurse. She lives about a 5 minute walk from where she does her training and has other PCV's in training close by. So far, three other trainees have gone home. She is not loving the food yet...Her telephone works well there...So give her a call. I am sure she will have a nice LONG update on Saturday. Later! Sue

First Week of Training

Oh, just sitting in my hotel room watching CNN. Yes, they have Anglophone CNN here in Cameroon. And no, there is no internet in my room. It is Sunday night, and due to the difficulties associated with the french-style keyboard (it just ain’t right) I am forced to type on my own computer and transfer. So, if you become a frequent reader, you may want to be aware of this to mitigate confusion.

WOW! I am in Africa. And so far I have found that there is a lot of normalcy here, but mostly its really pretty different. For example, they have no shower curtains (I should be thankful for a handheld showerer(er), cause I will likely be without organized shower shortly). Another example, you cannot leave your hotel in Yaounde at night. Different. Another example, bananas grow in your backyard.

Wow. I’m really not sure where to begin (but I can assure you this is only the beginning). The Delta leg of the plane ride was miserable – the Air France part was awesome. Which one just filed for bankruptcy? Ooooo… we have a winner (loser)! Actually, it was probably due to the African flyover that included Tunisia, the border of Libya and Algeria then the border of Nigeria and Chad and down into Cameroon. We entered the Sahara desert and I was blown away. Then I took an hour nap, and saw the Sahara again, and was again blown away. Then I took a two hour nap, woke up, and saw that the Sahara was still outside… and really I was just kind of tired of seeing nothing but sand and finding that I was blind from all the reflection. You would die if you went to the desert. There is nothing there. Really. I flew over it for like… 4 hours.

Then we flew around a couple of the hugest thunderstorms I have ever seen. I was glad that we flew around them, but then we flew into Cameroon (aka one huge thunderstorm). The best part is that we had to land twice in Cameroon. The Country Director, Robert Strauss, met us at the airport and my passport, inoculation card and baggage tags were all taken from me. Of course, I was so tired I would have given up just about anything for a PB&J and a clean mattress (only one of these needs was met in the end). A bunch of people lost their bags, but not me! No, I got them both. Everyone that overpacked got their bags. That’ll teach you rule-abiders a lesson. We sat at the airport for at least two hours, and when we left (to drive for an hour in a van into the city of Yaounde… in the wind and rain and dark) it was.. .really late? Yes. Really late. There were people just about everywhere. Lots of grills set up cooking.. meats. Meats that were not so appealing when you slept 3 hours and haven’t eaten anything since your pear flan and chicken in white sauce on the plane. There were also people walking on the road. In the rain. In the dark. And these people are not easy to see. I thought we might kill someone.

Got to the hotel and sat down for dinner. My first meal in Cameroon was interesting. I think they are really into starch here. We began with a delightful cold chicken salad and onion thing…. Then our entrée arrived.. a heaping plate consisting of fried fish in a white sauce, spaghetti, and rice. Yes, spaghetti and rice. Breakfast.. bread. Lunch.. rice, friend plantains and stew. Being fat is really awesome here.

On Sunday evening, we headed to the Country Directors home in Yaounde. He lives in a large home with 12 foot walls with glass shards and barbed wire on top. He has a guard. And a gardener. And a cook. And really awesome art. I met his daughter’s rabbits and had one beer (which I promptly thought to be a bad idea… higher alcohol content = red face faster = no more beer). We played hearts for a couple of hours outside this evening.,. until the hotel turned the lights off on us. We had nicknames. They called me “Ms. Information”… because I provide many of the interesting statistics and facts about snakes, spiders and bicycle safety.

Tomorrow (probably today, Monday)... training really begins and we get more shots. More info to come… and perhaps some photos… :)


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This was a post written two days ago. Since then, I have received two more shots (Typhoid and Hep A) and my arm has only just recovered. I did get into the "Novice Mid" language group... aka, I have a long way to go. We were issued our water filters and a lot of French books today. Rained this morning.... went to the corner store and bought a snickers bar (but did some situps).

LOVING IT! CALL ME IN THE EVENING! (237) 535-9889!!!!

Love, Kels

Bonjour from Africa

Hey! I made it! Travel was really long and I was exhausted last night.... countryside is absolutely GORGEOUS. Saw the Sahara from the plane window... totally awesome.


I am definitely in that culture shock phase. especially with this keyboard! I will type more later... love, kels