September 3, 2007
I am now officially a volunteer and at my post in Bali, in the Northwest Province. My house is wonderful and slowly becoming a home! I have a stove/oven and will soon have a fridge…it is necessary because nothing keeps for longer than a couple of hours here, especially during the rainy season. My only complaint is about the spiders…which there are alot of and they are HUGE! I have resorted to chemical warfare…Moon Tiger all the way baby!! I just have to remember to include it in my weekly bugdet….there are alot of spiders in this area due to the large amounts of bush.
Africa is nothing like what I expected it to be…it is actually cold here! We are in the middle of the rainy season and it DOWNPOURS around 1:30 or 2 every day. It really sucks if you get caught in it somewhere where there is no shelter. In fact, almost everythng grinds to a halt when it rains…the taxis pretty much stop running, no one venture out and if you are in town you see everyone standing around under some sort of shelter. The weather kinda makes me think of October at home.
This journey has definitely helped me realize some constants in life though: there is always a constant need for water…which means that I have to boil at least 4 pots of water a day in order to allow it to cool and run through the filter (I feel like i am always at the stove boiling water); there is a constant need for mental activity, so I have managed to read 5 books in 7 days (if you thought my reading habits were voracious at home, you should see me now); and finally there is a constant need for human contact and I’m beginning to realize that I don’t even need to understand what they are saying (everyone speaks mainly in pidgin or the dialect) just as long as I can say a few words to someone and they respond. But I will start taking pidgin lessons soon …this will definitely be a cool language to pull out when I get home. Oh and all those comments that my brother John used to make joking about ” and if you get lost in the bush, don’t…”? Well, guess what? I LIVE IN THE BUSH!!!! Hahahaha (thnk hysterical laughter at this point).
You would be amazed at what I actually have here…the big city near me is Bamenda and it is just like any big city: bustling with a lot of traffic and people but a bit more dirty (there really isn’t a concept of waste management although they do have “city clean up” once every month) and the outfits are bright spots of color. It is actually kinda funny…you see Cameroonians walking around in western style clothng and then there are the Americans walking around in pagne (pronounced pawn-ya). It seems kinda backwards to me but you should see how happy they are when I show up for a meeting in pagne.
So yesterday, I went with 2 other volunteers to watch the induction of the new lamido, which is basically a cheif in the Fulani tribe. There is still the tribal mentality here, even with the two religions Christianity and Muslim. The ceremony is very elaborate with a large procession that walks over 50 miles with dancing horses and drums and music and a huge feast. It was really cool to see. While we were there, I met a young girl who is going to take me on some hiking trails when i return. We were able to take a very short walk while there that ended in a village with traditional houses (the rounded huts that are built out of leaves and sticks), that is being used as a farming village for the traditional herbs and medicinal plants. It was really neat to see the houses but I must tell you that I wonder how practical they are (and that is probably why they are not really used that much more in the bigger villages and towns) because the doors were SO small and short, I had to bend down to walk through, as well as having some reservations about my backside actually fitting through.
On another note, my counterpart the NGO Nkumu Fed Fed is really cool. It’s a women’s NGO and I work with alot of different women’s groups helping them to come up with income-generating projects, planning and development of said project, as well as funding like applying for loans, creating budgets, etc. I will also be working with the children that have been rescued from trafficking and rehabilitated for later re-insertion into society. It will be very interesting to see what that is going to entail. They are taught life skills, as well as a working skill (ie sewing, catering, farming) and I am going to teach them how t0 properly handle their money and run a business…a bit daunting but possible.
