I will begin by telling you that this story is real, it did happen, and it is not in any way shape or form, fiction.
For weeks I and the other trainees patiently awaited our post assignments. When that day finally arrived, everyone opened their envelope with so much excitement…. Then, once the actual words of their town came out of their mouth, that level of excitement came to a screeching halt. At that moment we realized that we didn't know a damn thing about this place, other than we will be living there for the next two years. The trainers could say a little bit about a few of the towns, some of them had grown up and attended the schools that we will be working at and some of the current volunteers may or may not know someone who lives in a particular town. To put it simply, we thought we knew but we had no idea, so of course rumors were all around about post sites.
However, the good news was that in three days later we had a "counterpart" work shop. A counterpart is the Cameroonian who we will be working with to help us understand the school, the culture, and they may help with secondary projects. Now, before these three days, everyone lived off the rumors and seemed to be pretty happy and somewhat uncertain about the days ahead of them. The fun part for me began when my counterpart failed to show up at the seminar…supposedly he got the information too late. I still had wondered now what do I do? The 2 day seminar really told us nothing about our community, it was more or less to introduce the counterparts to what the Peace Corps is….which they should probably be doing from the start but for some reason they're not doing that. All the info that the others got became my duty to tell my counterpart, so I let most of it be until I actually start. I figure I'm the 3rd volunteer there so they should know how it works…should being the operative word.
Last Wednesday, I departed my host stay family with the other trainees that were headed north. Because my counterpart did not show, I had to go with another trainee to her town and then the next day we would visit mine. This didn't really make sense to me, because that town is in the opposite direction of mine. Before we left on the train that night we had time to get lunch. About 10 of us went to a restaurant and 3 different groups of us ordered a number of pizzas. My groups pizza came out first, we were all starving. I figure that in our minds eye, we were eating the pizza very calmly and very proper, "hmm, indeed, this pizza is of the best quality, don't you agree?" In reality, it was 4 people demolishing a pizza in about 3 minutes. We must have looked like wild animals that haven't had a kill in weeks. Lol. Then the next pizza that came out was our second one, so the others had to watch us eat again, not fun for them. Good for me though!
The train left at 6:30 that Wednesday, when we went to board it, we were told that our car had left the day before…sigh, ok, now what? Somehow, they got us tickets for another car and it was no big deal (turns out trains here are always a 50/50 situation). The train finally turned up at the stop around 5 a.m., and we jumped in a bush taxi for the second time. It was very dark and the road was pretty rough. There are some roads that are well paved and others that are only paved down the middle, but even the ones with little paving have massive pot holes in them that you don't want to drive over. Plus, there are cattle that have decided the road is a better place for them to be then in the field. Good news was we made it! Got a hotel room in the other trainees tiny town, met a lot of people there, and ate a lot of good fish (still not scaled or beheaded though, but very good).
The voyage to my town began at 6 a.m. the next morning. However, by the time we left the "bus station" it was 7:30. This bush taxi was not full with people to begin, so it was a little roomy and nice, but that would not last. Let me describe a bush taxi so you have an idea of what it is. It is not the size of a metro bus or tour bus; it's smaller, but bigger than large van. I would say it is the size of a 25-27 foot camper. It usually has about 6 rows that can fit 4 people comfortably plus two people can sit up front; so 24 people can get about no problem. But, this is Africa, and they usually (by usually I mean all the time) fit as many people as they can in a row. Instead of the 4 in a row it can be 6 or 7 if there are children who get on. It gets very uncomfortable. Every time 2 people get off 5 get on, it's ridiculous. People do this to make more money on the side, we even stopped to take giant rolls of fence to another town…we didn't even pick up a person. So if you can picture a camper that is overcapacity that is one thing, but unless you've lived it, you can't imagine the smell, lol. Anyways, as we went we picked up as many people as we could, some people got off and others got on.
We made until about 11 a.m. before I ran into trouble the first time. We had stopped for lunch and gas. I ate some macaroni noodles and beef at a restaurant and then while looking for a bathroom, I was called over by a man who spoke to me in decent, but really pretty bad English, and said, "Monsieur, come here." So I thought to myself, "How does he know I'm looking for a bathroom?" Then he said, "Do you know where you are? This is the police station. Special police." Now, none of the people that were sitting outside this building had a uniform on, including this man, but it looked identical to the police station in the capitol city so I knew he wasn't lying. He asked me if I spoke French and I said a little, and then he called in a man who spoke better English. So, he then proceeded to treat me and the other trainee as criminals and began to ask us questions, who are you? Where are you from? Why are you here? We showed him our identity cards and told him we are working for Peace Corps, the man who spoke
English fluently understood this much better than the man who did not…even though we said most everything in French…lol. The angry fellow seemed a bit upset because no one called him to tell him we were coming…we didn't even know so how could we call him to tell him? We decided that he must have thought that our post was in that town and that we would be staying. After he got done copying our i.d. cards word for word we were allowed to leave, no problem. After seeing us, les blancs, he must have thought we were an easy target to hit up for some money, but Peace Corps does not pay bribes.
When we started the 2nd half of our journey, we began to get stopped by the police whenever the bush taxi entered a new city, sometimes we got lucky and there was not police or gendarme to stop us and we could go straight through. Some of them didn't ask for our id's though, but they would ask other Cameroonians who may or may not have had theirs. Now, they would have to pay bribes. At about 2:30, we stopped to pick someone up and found that one of the tires was flat. It didn't really look flat, but it can be hard to tell with a dually. The tire they put on was bald and didn't look good at all. The kid that put the tire on was maybe 16, he did it in about 20 minutes, which is pretty impressive, but he didn't tighten the lug nuts in a star pattern…yikes. But the wheel didn't fall off while I was in it.
All day I had noticed that turning the starter with the key would not start the engine and they had to pop the clutch to get it to run. I had thought to myself, well this can't be good. Well, about a half hour after the flat tire and 9 miles outside of my town, they shut the bus off and it didn't start again. No matter how many times we pushed it up and down the street nothing would happen. I saw that they replaced some wire, I asked if they knew what the problem was but they must have thought that white people didn't know anything about vehicles. They never did get it fixed, luckily another, smaller van came and took some of us to my town, and the others had to ride on motos. Our trip that was supposed to end at 1:30, didn't end until 5:00 that evening…not a fun day.
I finally got to meet the principal and vice principal of my school. They seem pretty nice. I found out that I will teach English and IT, and that I get to finish the previous volunteer's work which was getting books for the library. If you can find some books or programs for getting them, let me know! The time in my town was very short; as we arrived at 5 p.m. we left at 5 a.m. I don't have a house there yet, apparently it was too far from the school. The principal and the vice principal showed me a place where I could live, however, it resembled solitary confinement and I passed. I think it may have been smaller than my studio apartment. It had one room for a kitchen/living room/dining room, another for a small bed, and a bathroom. Worse comes to worse, I'll have to stay with the volunteer that is there now until I can find my own place. The town itself didn't look bad; it had a few more hills than I would care to walk up and down. Also, most of the roads are dirt and therefore will become mud in the rainy season, not something I look forward to.
We stayed at the Peace Corps house in the capitol of Adamowa, it turned out to be the most favorable trip because it only took about two and half to three hours to get there. I was told that there was hot water there. At this point, a hot shower would be amazing, so I went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water and nothing happened….sigh…damn. I thought, "well maybe it will get hot while I am taking the shower."…sigh…no. So, the cold shower wasn't too bad, I guess I would say it was cool, not so much cold. The bad part was, when I got out I was told that, "that bathroom doesn't have hot water"….
I replied"really…ya, don't say…" "
The hot water is in the other bathroom" I was told.
I asked, "where is the other bathroom? You couldn't have told me this before I took the shower?" lol.
It was all pretty funny and that not big of a deal…but I would have streaked across the house and would not have cared to get a hot shower. I did take one later on though; of course the light wouldn't stay on so it was by flashlight…still nice though. It was a really nice time in the capital; I got to stay there that night and did not have to travel until the next evening.
The next adventure started at 8 a.m. the next day when we went to get our train tickets. Another trainee and her counterpart had reserved the tickets on Friday and we were the second people in line to buy the tickets on Sunday, so it should be no big deal right? Wrong. Wrong. We sat there until 10:30 when the ticket booth finally opened (I felt like I was waiting for really cool concert tickets). Now, the problem is that corruption is everywhere, including the train station. Somewhere between Friday and Sunday someone either changed our reservations for Monday, or someone paid them to change them so they could get our beds. It is a 17 hour train ride from Ngaoundere to Yaounde and you really want the cars with the beds. Luckily, while we were waiting for to buy our tickets we met a young man who knew a lot of other volunteers and had helped them, he came in very handy when our ticket buying mess went wrong. He works for the tourism office and knew what we had to do. But, after 2 hours of talking with and searching for people we had to buy first class tickets. I know what you're thinking…first class…go ahead and cry about it. No, it's bad. Instead of having a roomy bed car with 4 other people, we were in a car with a bunch of other people that found places to sit and sleep on the floor. A gendarme brought a little stool and sat down next to another stagiere and basically fell asleep with his head in her lap, it was not fun. We ran a greater risk of something getting stolen in this car. And the worst part of it was that there was a bathroom in our car and it stunk the whole place up pretty much all the time. I've spent 3 days on a train before and I thought that was bad…this was 10 times worse. Throughout the night we stopped at various places and awoke to the calls of vendors yelling "l'eau, l'eau, l'eau" or "anana, anana, anana", in English it is "water, water, water" or "pineapple, pineapple, pineapple". Most of these vendors were little kids too, probably anywhere from 7 years old and up…if not younger. At one point the train just stopped and sat on the tracks for about an hour and half. Eventually we made it to Yaoundé and finally made it back to the training site that same day. It really felt like Ohio when I got back here because it was cold, grey, and raining; the other Ohioans agreed.
The Peace Corps Model School opened today and they had us sing The Star Spangled Banner. Now, you would think that in a group of 23 Americans, someone would know the words to the national anthem…nope. The good part was that we all sang it as a group, horribly, but as a group. There was a lot of laughter mixed in to our version. We heard that it may be on the national news tonight, not our proudest Peace Corps moment to broadcast.
I know this was a long post, but thanks for taking the time to read it. I hope it was entertaining. I'm sure I've left some things out because I can't remember them at the moment, but the major events are there. Miss you all and talk to you soon.
Melissa, if you read this, know that you are missed by all!!!
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