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