Saturday, October 27, 2012

Challenges

22 October 2012

When you join Peace Corps, you expect the most difficult thing to be physical discomfort. And, quite frankly, a lot of the times it is. Being far from family and friends from home is never going to be easy, but at least we’ve got a strong community of support amongst the other volunteers since we’re all the same distance away, have the same worries about our families, and have all missed important life events of people we care about. Volunteers get placed in places where there’s no water, electricity, or cell phone service. Others of us get placed in places where all of those things go out frequently and unpredictably. Travel runs late or never takes off, and you’re never quite sure how many times you’re going to break down once you get going. You’re a slave to the weather, and most likely you stand out. Badly. Corruption abounds. The language isn’t your own, and sometimes you make ridiculous mistakes. These are the things that you get good at laughing off fast, because otherwise you’d go insane. If you get a big group of Peace Corps Volunteers together in a room, it’s likely we’re going to be in a competition of who’s got it worse and throwing around the term “Posh Corps” to prove just how much harder we’ve got it. If one-upping was an Olympic sport, you can bet that the US team would be Peace Corps Volunteers. It's one of our more lovable qualities.

What you don’t expect, though, is getting used to the discomfort. I can’t buck the system and magically bring reliable phone service to a whole country, so it’s better to find the positive in it and be thankful that you’ll get a few hours of quiet. Water’s out again? Cool, kids, guess we’re rocking a scarf to cover up the greasy hair. Bus still hasn’t arrived? Great, time to eat breakfast! Go with the flow is the name of the game in Peace Corps Land.

There are some things, though, that you can’t and shouldn’t get used to. There’s a whole host of these things, but everybody’s got their big hot button issue ranging anywhere from animal abuse to malnutrition to the culture’s failure to accept homosexuality. For me, it’s the lack of respect for women. It took moving here to understand just how important the Women’s Rights movement was in the US, but I can tell you right now that I’ll never under-value that again. I have a new appreciation for feminism after living in a place where chauvinism and male-dominance affects every aspect of daily life.

Communities often prefer to get male volunteers over female volunteers. Women can’t easily be friends with men and should expect to lose most over marriage proposals. Females can’t sit in certain seats in buses or cars, and are almost always expected to have some kind of a chaperone. Likewise, women can’t go to places like the mosque, and need to be cautious about being seen in other locations like the bar. Male volunteers can go travelling with their best friends from town, but as a female, this will always be off-limits no matter how close of friends you are. Certain foods like pistache (or bananas in some regions) or cuts of meat are automatically off-limits unless you’re male. Stereotypes about women will affect work and personal relationships. It’s a lot to remember and balance when you’re used to being told that you’re worth at least as much as a man and that if you work hard enough, you can have everything in reason that you want. These things are chump change compared to the realities Cameroonian girls are dealing with, and that’s what makes it the hardest—it’s easier to deal with hardships when you know it’s just you and that those hardships were your choice.

Cameroonian girls are often denied the right to an education, married off at the age of 12 to 40 year old men, can’t demand the right to fidelity or monogamy or condoms, and are underfed in favor of their male siblings. Women are subjected to rape and violence and taught that it’s a normal form of punishment for not serving dinner on time or speaking out of turn. In many Cameroonian ethnic groups, if a women’s husband passes away, then she’s forced to go through humiliating widowhood rituals and sometimes forced to marry the sibling or father of her husband. In some ethnic groups women’s families have to pay a dowry to marry off their daughters making her permanent property of a man, and in the majority of the rest, a man has to pay the dowry to the woman’s family. Women are considered baby-making machines, and it’s not abnormal for a woman to have five babies in five years or less. Men complain and yell at their wives for their failure to give them male children. A woman has no legal right to land or property. In short: both socially and legally, women are viewed as being less than men.

As a woman, it’s offensive, and I hate it. Ever since returning from a week-long trip to small villages in the bush to help distribute materials to the Family Agricultural Schools in my department, I’ve found myself a lot more aware of the super-human strength and willpower women in this country must have to keep on living under these conditions. In one of the communities I visited, women weren’t allowed to speak in front of their chief as a sign of respect for his power, and in another women weren’t allowed to leave their homes after nightfall. I can’t imagine that living under all those prohibitions, especially ones inapplicable to men, gives you a strong sense of self-worth.

I love Cameroon and I love my community, so I’m not willing to give up on it and let it be what it’s always been. These situations and the knowledge of what women here are dealing with give me a sense of purpose, direction, passion, and fight; rather than giving up, I’m starting to work in all 7 of these schools in the department to teach Men’s Engagement, Women’s Empowerment, and Gender Equity for the remainder of my service. In less technical terms, that’s everything from HIV/AIDS education, conflict resolution, teaching about the difference between sex and gender, working with parents to help them speak with their children about puberty, and teaching that violence and rape isn’t what makes a male a man. I’m still working out the details but I’m bound and determined: it’s happening. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, after all. My host organization is arranging for all of my transportation, and each community will be responsible for my lodging, food, and security. Right now, I’m working at doing basic assessments of every community to determine the specific problems I need to target in each and to determine if there’s any correlation between gender dynamics and the success rates of the schools. I start my assessments in Pkanadji and Garoua-Sanbe on Friday.

I’m lucky to have a partner in my new post-mate, but I’m still fairly certain that we’re in over our heads. I might also be utterly screwed language-wise since only a small handful of people in each village (in one village: one person total) speak French and my Kako is limited right now to saying good day, donkey, thanks, duck, mat, and good-bye. That said, I know that I’ve got communities that have been welcoming me with open arms, honesty, and a willingness to work with me to help make changes and improve the social situation of the people in their village, which is a lot easier than fighting people to get them to pay attention. I’ve got next to no idea what I’m doing, but I’ve got a big sense of fight, a motivated national organization to partner with, and a bunch of little villages that believe the future to prosperity is through emancipating their women, and for right now, that’s enough to go off of. Hopefully.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Reality, or something like it.

2 October 2012
Now that I’ve passed my year mark, it’s time to admit it: blogging is getting harder and harder. Every time I sit down to write, there’s about five deleted drafts before I finally find something that I feel like is worth writing about. I’ve been here long enough that I’m struggling to figure out what’s interesting to other people that haven’t been to Cameroon, much less to explain it all in intelligible English. But it’s not just that, it’s so much easier to sit and watch movies on my laptop than to try and analyze my experiences in the context of America.
How do you capture a place that’s so different and difficult to define and make that make sense? …I’m not so sure that you do…. But, if we’re going to be honest, I can’t really understand what volunteers in other regions talk about with some of their experiences, either. The Northwest volunteers combat the evil JuuJuu spirits, the Far Northerners bond over their mutual hatred of hot season, and the volunteers in the West Adamauaua can discuss their extreme isolation from the rest of the country. I can’t understand what that’s like; that’s part of the difficulty of living in a country that possesses all of Africa’s major terrains, all of Africa’s different varieties of climates, and where the people speak about 260 languages and often can’t communicate with one another. This is a country with two official languages, so if we can’t all have one common language, how can we expect the culture to be the same? And if the culture isn’t the same, how can we expect to be able to make anyone else actually understand? And how can you make someone who’s never seen it appreciate it?

There are a lot of things that clearly distinguish Peace Corps as being a difficult experience: not speaking the language fluently, living in a culture you don’t always understand, trying to find worthwhile work that the community is passionate about making happen, dealing with loneliness and being far from home. I’ve gotten better at dealing with those. Harassment isn’t a big deal anymore, I laugh off the “white skin” comments and usually respond to marriage proposals by telling people that I live in a place that’s colder than the freezer they buy fish out of. The fat comments sting, but the cultural context and the positive connotations associated with weight make it such that I know the comments rarely have anything to do with body figure but rather their hope of your happiness and feelings of welcome in their country. Loneliness isn’t a problem because I’ve created such a strong network of friends in town and with other volunteers in the region. Corruption doesn’t enrage me to the level it used to because I’ve been confronted with it so many times during my service. Quite frankly, I’ve come to love living here. It’s not easy, but it’s definitely always been worth it. What’s the hardest is trying to assimilate the reality of my life here in Cameroon with the reality of my life in America and remember that somehow they’re both real. It’s not survival that’s hard, it’s talking about the hows and whys and trying to find a way for my current reality to fit into somebody else’s reality. It’s like fitting a large square peg into a circular hole; you can only get so much of that peg in at one time before having to pull it out and try from a different angle. That’s me with blogging nowadays.

It took me a long time to make things make sense, and the more I talk with buddies in other PC countries, the more I realize that we all struggle with it and none of us really knows how to address that to anyone who hasn’t had to deal with that in a long-term situation like Peace Corps. That alone makes it difficult to explain what I do and what Peace Corps is to anyone who’s emailed me to tell me they’re thinking about applying. Add on the fact that you don’t know anything about where they could potentially go or the project they’d be assigned to, and it starts to near on impossible. It’s frustrating when you’re applying that nobody can give you these answers, and it’s even more frustrating during training that the answer you receive most often is “it depends.” Turns out, it does depend. It also turns out that it’s frustrating not to be able to give those answers. You want to be able to make things accessible and easily understandable, but that’s not reality. Ever. And not just about Cameroon or Ukraine or the Dominican Republic or Senegal or Zambia, it’s hard to explain the reality of the US to people who’ve never experienced it, too. See: http://whatshouldpcvscallme.tumblr.com/

That’s what makes blogging so hard, and this job so difficult. But, that’s also 66% of the job: goals two and three of Peace Corps are both cultural exchange and an attempt to make “the other half” make sense. I get paid to make friends, tell you about how I wash clothes by hand, make Mexican dinners from Cameroonian friends, and post photos for you on facebook. Coolest job ever? I think so. I can’t really describe what it is that I love so much about my job or my community, so I might as well make fun of how ridiculous my life tends to be here. And, for that, what’s a better, more embarrassing American reference than Disney?

Based on my real life at my real post and real conversations I’ve had or heard about me, I present to you, “La Blanche” re-written to the tune of “Belle” from “Beauty and the Beast.” Do yourself a favor and look it up on YouTube to appreciate the glory of how well the lyrics fit, will ya?

La Blanche
“Little town, it’s a sleepy city. Every day, different from the one before. Little town, full of really loud people, waking up to say: bonjour, la blanche, bonjour bonjour bonjour!

There goes a moto with some harassment like always, the same old comments as before. No morning’s been the same, since the moment that I came to this poor undeveloped town… Good Morning, Souer!

Good morning, mon frere!
Where are you off to?
The market. I’ve just finished the most wonderful fruit and I…
That’s nice. Sister, my US Visa, hurry up!


Look there she goes again that Blanche, she’s walking, all the way from Trypano*! Always on her way into town, on her feet, she walks into town. No denying she’s a strange one, that Nassara.

Bonjour!
Good Day!
How is your family?
Bonjour!
Good Day!
How is your health?
You need this fabric!
That’s too expensive!

There’s nothing better than this village-oise life!


Ah, my Blanche!
Good Morning! I’ve come to buy more bananas.
Finished Already?
Oh, I couldn’t put them down! You have any for 100 francs?
*Laughter* Not since yesterday.
Oh, that’s fine. I’ll go over… there!
THERE? But why not buy these oranges?
But sir, bananas, they’re my favorite! And the price, I know it! I’m a Cameroonian in disguise!
Well, if you like them that much, they’re yours.
But Sir?
I insist!
Why sir, thank you! Thank you very much!


Look there she goes again, she’s doing the market!
I wonder if she’ll marry me?
With her shining, sweaty face, and her feet covered in mud,
What a puzzle to the rest of us, that Blanche!


Oh! Isn’t this amazing? This is my favorite town because, you’ll see! Here’s where I met that student, and we had that one really great conversation about HIV!

Now it’s a wonder that she’s always busy; it’s 10am, she should be at the bar! Well, behind that white, shiny face, I’m afraid she’s always in a race. Very different from the rest of us, she’s rich unlike the rest of us, she’s different from the rest of us, our Blanche!

Wow, you didn’t miss a shot, Gaston! You’re the greatest footballer in the whole world!
I know!
No football alive stands a chance against you! Hahahaha! And no woman, for that matter!
It’s true, Amadou, and I’ve got my life planned around that one.
Who? The white woman from Trypano?
She’s the one! She’s the lucky one I’m going to marry!
But she’s…
The most beautiful woman in all of Batouri!
I know, but…
That makes her the best. And don’t I deserve the best?
Well of course, I mean you do, but….


Right from the moment that I saw her walking, I said she’s gorgeous, and I vowed: here in town there’s only she, who speaks English good enough for me, so I’ve made my plan to woo and marry the Blanche.**

Look there, he goes, oh he’s so sketchy! Monsier Gaston, he smells so bad! Run fast, dear women, I’m hardly breathing, he’s such a tall, dark, sketch, and smelly moto-man!

[Insert Mixed Chorus of “Show Me the Meaning (Of Being Lonely)”, unidentified angry gangster rap, “I Done Seen My Wifey”, and weird Fulfulde music mixed with screaming people and beeping moto horns]

There’s nothing better than this village-oise life!
Just watch I’m going to make that Blanche my wife!

Look there she goes again, that Blanche she’s yelling. A most peculiar mademoiselle. With pagne down to her shin, look how much she’s fitting in! She really is a sassy girl, a sweaty but a sassy girl. She can’t really be an American giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl, our Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanche!”

Yep. I think I lost a few cool points in the making of this blog entry, but hey, gives you a pretty decent idea of what Centre-Ville is like, right? It’s loud, crazy, and sometimes pretty frustrating, but it’s mine, it’s home, and I love it.

*Trypano: My surrounding neighborhood, a 20 minute walk from Centre, of which Cameroonians are petpetually amazed that someone would voluntarily choose to do. Number of times I've walked into a public place and been recognized as "the white girl whose always walking": Countless.
**True story.