Vive le Dash

It was called IST which is an acronym I should probably know.  Pretty sure the "t" stands for training though.  My whole training class got together for the first time since we first departed to posts.  It was, as one might imagine, a bit of a shit show.  Extreme isolation ending suddenly with being surrounded by a language and culture you actually understand can lead to… certain excesses.  A couple weeks of that can take it out of you. The training itself was relatively useful.  We brought our counterparts from all over Cameroon.  It was incredibly interesting to just watch how different people from all over interacted with one and other.  Cameroon is bilingual too; everything had to be in both English and French.  This kind of draws everything out, but can be pretty useful to someone still learning French.  Actually, it got really interesting when we broke into groups and I found myself in the middle of anglophones and francophone ...

Water fell from the sky yesterday.  Hadn't seen that one in awhile.  Per usual, the Americans drew strange looks from Cameroonians as anyone from the Grand North ran outside to stand in it.  I should have snagged a few photos of us arms spread staring straight up like kids in a winter's first snow. Two and a half months is really not a long period of time, but... it is just the strangest thing to never see rain.  Weather has always been unpredictable for me and everywhere I've ever lived has had rain pretty regularly.  I'm not the sort of person to check the weather; I just go outside and look at the sky.  And I get rained on a lot because of it.  The Extreme North (and the two other regions making up the Grand North) are completely dry for months at a time.  I can just leave things outside and it doesn't matter.  Because I know, with a hundred percent confidence (take that weathermen of the world), that it will not rain. I think I m...

Right, you remember how I was saying that I’m not particularly good at football?  SOCCER, I mean soccer.  Well, that was an understatement.  I’m atrocious.  I’m not even good at being bad.  This time when I went down, I was not as graceful as the last. Do you know how sometimes when you are watching soccer someone randomly falls down even though no one is around?  Like they are trying to pull a foul?  Maybe it’s my Italian blood, but that’s exactly what happened to me.  I was trying to just jump in the air and change direction, but I landed horribly on my right foot.  Collapsed like a ton of bricks.  Which was technically a change of direction.  It hurt like hell. But it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as when my good Cameroonian buddy came running over to try to help out.  First, there was a slight communication difficulty as to where I hurt myself.  He thought knee when I tried to convey ankle and manhandled the shit o...

Or the north part of the west.   It’s a bit confusing.   Cameroon is kinda shaped like a chicken (seriously, go look at a map).   There is this whole western part where they speak English.   The northern part of it is called the North West and that makes sense except there are three other regions that are much farther north. We had quite the adventure and left Monday afternoon and didn’t get back till Thursday.   This probably doesn’t seem like much, but when every second of every day is planned a bit of an escape seems damn near the most amazing thing ever.   I think we spent half the time in a bus and that was fantastic as far as I was concerned.   It was too bumpy to actually do work which leaves hanging out, listening to music, and drinking.   I’M JUST KIDDING.   The only person who’s allowed to drink on the bus is the driver. There may come a point when my jokes no longer make sense to anyone other than Cameroonians and Peace Corps ...

I don’t know shit about Cameroonian foods.  At the same time I desperately want to talk to you about it.  You just NEED to know.  The thing is, I’ve only been living in one place.  Everything I hear about food here is that it varies drastically.  They have bushmeat down south (which could really be anything, but is probably monkey) to apparently a ridiculous number of cattle in the northern center.  They have jungle down south with all the tropical fruit you could want all the way to desert in the north.  There are places in the middle where you can literally grow just about anything.  Variety is the word. And I get none of it.  It’s a logistical problem really.  I had a hell of a time explaining this to Mamma Alice (I really have no idea what to call the people in my host family).  She was asking me what sorts of foods I liked and ate at home.  More importantly how and I tried to explain to her that we don’t really do ...

Well, where the hell do I start?  It should be obvious now that my internet usage will be irregular.  There is some hope for when my training is complete (in two months), but I wouldn’t keep your hopes up.  There has been internet and I’ve even had free time, but, alas, the two have not coincided.  I’m actually writing this to upload later when I can connect. First, I had a week in Yaounde (note: there will be no Wikipedia involved in the making of this blog, so expect errors).  This was the orientation part.  Or staging or some other fancy name.  We were under super tight control.  While they said there wasn’t much to be worried about, a group of 55 whites following a regular, predictable schedule and only a few of whom could speak the local language would be bound to draw attention.  We therefore basically either at the hotel or the Peace Corps HQ and chauffeured by Peace Corps SUVs the whole time.  We also enlisted the local Guan...