Day
20 – Wednesday, June 20th
After two full weeks of training and living with my homestay
family here in Bafia, there are a handful of things that I still find rather
amusing about my experience in West Central Africa thus far. And of them
all, it will be quite some time until I don’t get a good laugh out of hearing
my fourteen year old host sister singing every word of every line to whatever
American pop song plays on her cell phone – in perfect English. In my
broken (but improving) French, I asked her about the American music that she
likes the most and apparently she has a list of artists on her phone that
includes Rihanna, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, and Whitney Houston. Nevermind
that she doesn’t speak much English, I just thought I was going to get away from
that kind of music for 27 months. I don’t think I need to ask her to know
that she doesn’t share my enthusiasm for NPR’s “Car Talk” and “Wait Wait, Don’t
Tell Me.”
As I would have expected, each night at the dinner table has been
increasingly less awkward with the combination of my improving French language
skills and an innate ability to feign comprehension at whatever is being said
around me. Our language instructors have told us since day 1 that
children will be some of our best coaches while learning French, as they don’t
mind having to repeat themselves, but I have also found a pretty good advocate
with my host Dad. Although he spends the week working a couple hours down
the road around Yaoundé (presumably as a civil servant – I still couldn’t understand
it when he described it to me twice), he manages to catch up with us for dinner
on the weekends. With me being this family’s 8th Peace Corps
Trainee, he is quite good at making sure everyone speaks French at the table
even though he and I could probably have a substantive conversation in both
English and Spanish. The routine is pretty simple for me when I have
something to say (which will almost never have anything to do with what they’re
currently talking about since I can’t keep up). Form a phrase or question
in my head … wait for awkward pause … try to say it out loud without too many
mistakes. At which point, my host Dad will put up his arms to make sure
everyone is quiet so he can piece together my question. He is built like a
house and speaks rather authoritatively, so everyone complies with his
request. Some questions get across and some don’t, but it’s still quite
difficult to understand the responses anyways.
Other than the persistent (but slowly diminishing) awkwardness of
living with a host family, this is probably one of the best that I could have
been placed with. A couple of the youngsters have been sent “on vacation”
to be with other family in Yaoundé, so there isn’t ever more than 5-6 people
here every night. The number of people who stop by, come over for dinner,
or stay overnight is always a moving target for most Cameroonians because they
are incredibly generous to their friends and family. Adults and kids
alike, countless people come through the house on a daily basis, so there is a
lot less privacy and a lot more activity going on than I previously
expected. Also helping the cause for my homestay is that my Mom is both a
cook for the lunches that we buy during training everyday and for the
restaurant that she operates. In a country without the familiar comforts
of pizza and burgers, it’s a hell of a nice proposition to have the luxury of
eating food made by someone who does it for a living. Rice, beans and
plantains persist regardless of the time of day, but recent firsts for me have
included cow’s liver and a legume dish that included mostcaccioli-shaped cow
skin. The textures of both dishes were exactly what you would imagine
them to be and I’ll answer the question up front … No, there haven’t been any
gastrointestinal issues thus far … thanks for asking.
As for the house I’m living in, there are three bedrooms and two
bathrooms. Peace Corps has minimum requirements for homestays, one of
which includes having a room to yourself. It was pretty crappy seeing three
kids split the couches and floor in the living room before two of them split
for Yaoundé, but it sure is nice to have a chance to decompress by myself at
the end of the day before going to sleep – which has typically been between
9-10pm. By American standards, “chez moi” is not very nice. The
walls and ceilings are pretty dirty, there isn’t running water, and I am up at
various points of the night with something new crawling around. Without
the help of the psychedelic malaria medication that many of us are on
(apparently the side effect is weird dreams), I have been kept up by mice and
crickets inside, while dogs, roosters, and parties have raged through my open
window. Can wait until someone eats that rooster … and those
dogs.
And although we ate Saturday’s dinner to the light of my Shart
Light, which is originally intended for mountain bike night riding (600-1000
lumens is more than enough for a family dinner of 5-6), we are in what is
widely considered to be a more affluent part of Bafia. With that mind, I
am certainly grateful that I have everything I need here in the house or at the
neighbor’s water well, as I may not be so lucky as to have regular electricity
and a nearby well when I assigned to my post when training is over.
I’ve done my best to show appreciation to the family by helping
them fetch water and by playing cards and quiz games with the kids.
They’ve taken a liking to S-P-O-O-N-S thus far, so we’re going to stick with
that one for awhile until their interest wanes. As far as the quizzes go,
I have simply used my studying notebook of about 10 pages worth of French words
with English translations and asked them if they knew the words in
English. Not surprisingly, they know most of the words. Early one
night they also recited the alphabet and counted to 100 … in German. So
the studying continues…
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