Dust in the Wind

Here are a few tidbits:

 

Backhanded compliment of the week

"Romney is a passionate advocate of each new stance he takes."

            - The New Yorker (Oct. 29, 2007)

 

Mail/COS Dates

While I don't know the specific date I'll be coming home, it will definitely be in December.  Peace Corps Cameroon, up until my training group, started COSing PCVs with December swearing-in dates mid-November through mid-December.  ("Swearing-in" is the day we officially finish training and become volunteers. December 13, 2006, for me.)  Even though we can leave starting 30 days before through 30 days after our swearing-in date, due to some budget thing on the Washington side or some nonsense like that, we'll nearly all be leaving starting December 1.

 

The reason I'm telling you this now is because I'm setting Last Day To Send Jay Mail days in case you feel inclined to make my day.  Because packages take between 2-4 months and I'll be home soon enough, I'm setting June 5 as the last day.  (Packages meaning boxes.)  For letters, je pense que September 15 should be the last day for those.  (Letters meaning things in envelopes.)  Normal letters seem to be taking between 3-6 weeks.  And, as always, thanks again for sending mail, I appreciate it greatly, if only to give the guy at the post office something to do.

 

Newsweek

I think I've mentioned it before, but PCVs worldwide get free international edition Newsweeks because someone high up at Newsweek used to be a volunteer.  While this is nice, we get sporadic issues, and of the issues we do receive, they're nearly always at least a month behind.  (We also realize the international Newsweek doesn't really have good reporting, but that's neither here nor there. It's free!)  Another problem is that it takes a while for things to get up from Yaoundé to Garoua, so that makes them even more out of date.

 

There are a few big supermarkets in Yao that are really nice and just about equivalent to Western supermarkets, or at least as equivalent as you're going to get.  The biggest one, Score, has a magazine section that includes up-to-date Newsweeks.  Therefore, the United States government can't get its employees current issues of Newsweek, but a Cameroonian grocery store can get them on its magazine racks on time.

 

Getting Here

I finally got back to post January 16 after a miracle 21 hours in Cameroonian transportation history.  The train from Yaoundé to Ngaoundéré left on time (6 PM) and pulled into the station at 9 AM, when the earliest I've ever gotten in before has been noon.  (There was also a derailment a couple weeks back.)  I was on a bus to Garoua by 10, in a car from Ngong to Lagdo by 2:15, and back in my house at 2:45 to perhaps the dustiest house I'd ever seen.  Instead of spending the night in Ngong (there's another volunteer there) or Garoua like I had planned, I was sweeping my house down and cleaning the mold out of the fridge.  (I unplugged it for the month I was gone in order to save a lot of money on my next electricity bill… and to save the environment, too.) 

 

This is the middle of the dusty season, which I'm about 95% sure comes from the Sahara.  Either way, it's "winter" and only about 85 degrees in the shade, and it feels really nice if I ignore the finicky sinuses.  I remember this time last year I had the fan on me at all times and eventually turned it off at some point during the night when it was too cold; but now I'm going all day and night sans fan.  This leads me to believe I can make it farther through the hot season without the AC than I did last year.  (I think I made it through mid-March last year, which isn't really that far since that's when the obscene hotness starts in earnest.)

Year 2

Well, I don't really know what I'm gonna be doing at post when I finally get back, but here a few ideas, work-related and not-so-much.

Work

• Continuation of the aforementioned ACMS project, but that will probably be mostly on ACMS. It will depend on if they can get their ish together or not. I want to do a malaria sensibilisation (French word without a direct English translation - kinda like a program of lessons, I guess.) before the rainy season starts April/May-ish, but it would be preferable to do one if mosquito nets are readily available. (They're currently not.) ACMS' exists in part to make health-related products like mosquito nets available, so let's see if they can.
• School project - Hopefully the mayor will pull through
• Random stuff - I'll probably go back to a different elementary school and do the same health presentations I did a few months ago. At the catholic mission, one of the nuns - an Indian - wants to hold English classes for kids, so I might help with that. I'll have to see her and see if she still wants to do it. And other than that, I have no clue what I want to do.

Not-so-much

Here is where things are a little bit up in the air, but not too, too much. Here's a timeline and a rough guide to non-PC work:

February - VAC meeting (PCVs in each province get together and bitch about something, then someone reports it the country director) up in Guider. I'll probably go visit another PCV's post that's the most remote in the province.

Late March through May - Hot season. I will be in front of the fan and the air conditioner. It will not be pleasant. (120 degree highs)

April - I'll probably go up to the Extreme North, more than likely the western part, and see some friends' posts and maybe Rhumsiki, a tourist trap. Bike riding might be happening, we'll see.

April/May - Rainy season starts, school ends, work grinds to a halt. Temperature goes down, so that's a plus.

August - Possible vacation to Tanzania (Kenya's on hold). COS conference in Yaounde, where I find out when I go home.

September - December - Shutting things down at post.

Sometime in December - Home sweet home.

Meanwhile, I'll be studying for the GREs and deciding what I want to do with my life post-PC besides Netflix. Right now, here's my plan: Come home, take the GREs in the first couple months back, find a job. Also, I'll be looking into what kind of grad program, if any, I'd want to do. I'm thinking about public policy because it seems like a practical degree (I might get a job with it) for a social science, specifically politics. Peace Corps has a program, Peace Corps Fellows, that gives benefits to RPCVs (Returned PCVs) who are enrolled in specific programs at participating universities. I'd apply to grad schools for Fall 2010 entrance, which seems so far away I can't really imagine it, but that's the way the application process works at some of the schools I've looked at. The job search would be for something somehow related to public policy work.

Vacation Recap

Right now I'm hanging out in the case for Mid-Service, a special time in a volunteer's life where he or she gets a physical, pees in a cup, poops in a cup twice and has to deliver the specimens in a brown paper bag to the lab, gets a blood test, and goes to the dentist for the first time in atleast 15 months. I've done everything now except the dentist (that's tomorrow), but I still have to stick around at the case until next Tuesday because my supervisor wants all of the health PCVs in my training group to have a "best practices" meeting next week. So, assuming I get back to Lagdo the 16th, I'll have spent a month away from post. Here's a recap of how I spent my winter vacation:

Superbad
Out of the 5 or so movies released in 2007 that I've seen, this is my favorite. "Samesies!"

Mt. Cameroon/Buea
Well, the "vaykay" (how do you spell that?) didn't start off too well. Mount Cameroon was a bust for me. Several key issues: One, I'm out of shape. Two, things weren't explained well by the tourism organization that runs the hike. They didn't explain that the porter's weight limit would immediately be met by the amount of bottled water you're encouraged to buy, so we didn't realize we'd be carrying packs. Also, there were no switchbacks - the paths on a mountain that wonder across and back - so you are basically walking straight up a 12,000 foot mountain and reaching the summit in less than 36 hours. The guidebooks etc. say that the hike would be hard but not that hard.

My main problem was the very quick change in altitude. You start off in rainforest, then after 4 hours or so, you're above the treeline. I felt rushed from the guide, and I started to feel my head pounding, which was described to me as my "brain expanding in my head," and woozy, so I turned around and was disappointingly back down the mountain 10 hours after we started. I was not at my best. Everyone else in our group - other PCVs - made it, but not without blisters and saying the second day of the three days (2 1/2 really) was 10 hours straight up and straight down, so it was best I didn't try to make it.

I did get to enjoy Buea, though, for a couple extra days, which is probably my favorite city in Cameroon. It's the provincial capital of the South-West province, which is anglophone, but it's not too big and it has a university, so it's a young town and even has English-language bookstores.

Paris
Paris was great. It was nice seeing the padres and M. McCarron, and I recommend the Rive Gauche Marriott breakfast buffet. It was so nice getting a Cameroon break, and slipping back into the Western lifestyle was disconcertingly easy. We did all the touristy stuff: Eiffel Tower on Christmas Day on one of the only clear days of our trip; The Louvre, Musee d'Orsay, Picasso; Notre Dame, etc., etc. I also went to Starbucks (cafe mocha), went to the movies (I Am Legend - English, French subtitles), and ate at a "tex-mex" restaurant called Indiana that was decorated in Native American memorabilia (Nachos) all on the same block. Vive la republique.

All-around great trip.

Limbe
I got back to Yaounde from Paris New Year's Eve and went to Limbe, Cameroon's best beach city, which is in the South-West province, the next day for four or five days. The beaches are black sand because it's on the foot of Mount Cameroon, an active volcano, and the place we stayed at has tents set up to sleep in for 5000 cfa a night (10 bucks), so it was non-stop bumming around before heading back to Yao for mid-service.

Axes grinding
Here's a link from the New York Times of an op-ed written by the last PC Cameroon country director, Robert Strauss, who bears a strong resemblance to Larry David. I agree with a lot of what he says on my first read-through of the article. My first question was who does Strauss know to get published in the Times.