It feels like forever since I've been able to post anything that I've been able to think about. I've only been in Cameroon for what? A week and a half, wow. Peace Corps does a good job of keeping us busy though, seems like I've filled out tons of paperwork, received fifty manuals about jobs, health, safety, PC staff, and once we finished that they gave it to us again just to be sure.
We spent a week in Yaoundé at a hotel. I ended up getting a single room with a full or queen size bed, a refrigerator, full bath tub, shower, toilet, the works. A lot of trainees were not as lucky. They gave us a quick tour of the city one day. We also had dinner at the Country Directors house our first Sunday in. It was a very nice place. As we walked into the backyard, you could hear and see hundreds of huge bats flying around and making noise. I was a little happy they were there, they lessoned my chances of getting bitten by a mosquito and therefore, lessoned my chances of getting malaria. Lol.
Bangante is not as big and it is very muddy. Red mud too, not just the "oh it will come right off" mud, oh no, you have to work to get rid of this stuff. Not fun. I'm living with a host family now, as are the other trainees. My situation is not too different from Yaoundé; I have a room with my own bed, shower, and toilet. The only difference is I have people trying to make me eat things all the time. We have a lot more freedom here, but we still have a 7:00 curfew, thanks to previous trainees. Once we become volunteers, we won't have any restrictions on curfew but it gets dark around that time anyway, so you might as well be at home. It's strange to me; I'm used to daylight in the summer time until 9.
I did get sick for the first time about two nights ago. My host family made some French fries and I'm pretty sure they cooked them in palm oil, which apparently does not go well with American stomachs, i.e. mine. So I skipped the second half of language training yesterday to go home and go to bed. I'm better today, but still have some stomach cramps and what not…but that might just be normal for the next two years… L enough about maladies though, I've learned a lot about what we can get and I don't want to think about it anymore today.
A lot of you have been asking what I've been eating. Well, you may know me as a picky eater, lol. But here, I have to give some of that up. The hotel in Yaoundé served pretty good food, usually bread or a croissant for breakfast with coffee or tea, a salad (sliced carrots, onions, some sort of dressing, no lettuce, nothing really green at all, except sometimes it was avocadoes with onions), then rice with either fish or chicken, one day there was beef and noodles, then they would bring out some fresh fruit to finish us off, papaya with limes, pineapple, and mango. Dinner was pretty much the same as lunch.
The food at home stay is a bit different…the first night they made rice, spaghetti, and chicken in a sauce. It turned out that the sauce was basically liquid fire. It was spicy, and what surprised me the most was that I didn't get heartburn from it…I couldn't eat a Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich without getting heartburn at home!! The other interesting thing was the fish that was not gutted or scaled, just cooked and cut in half and put on the plate, head and all. It's not all bad though, you can get plenty of your favorites (or knockoffs) at the super marche (mar shay), you have to pay a little more, but they are available.
There is still a long road ahead of me, a challenging road. The language barrier is a hard one to cross. I know it can be done, but it takes a minute. As I sit in language class, I have to laugh because I'm used to being the teacher and not the student. Our language teacher uses the same techniques that I have been using, so I guess I must have been doing a decent job.
I hope this was interesting for you, I'll try and post again sooner!
