Vive le Dash

Is it "I'm flying by the cuff of my pants"?  No, something about the seat of my... and the cuff of...  Right, so it has been awhile.  I've been busy.  Quite.  Incredibly even.  And this is not prepared.  A target of opportunity at best.  And yes the words appear a bit blurred at the moment.  Haven't the faintest idea why. I'm a volunteer!  Official and sworn in and the like.  If you happen to have access to Cameroonian newspapers you can find my picture there.  AND the celebration even made the front page.  Mostly (entirely) due to the fact that a Mrs. Biya, aka the president's wife and most popular woman in this country, came to our swearing in.  If you have facebook, you have seen the photos of our matching blue shirts and my ascot to represent Sante (health for the layman).  It was a fun day.  We sang Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror".  They stuck me in the back far from the microphone; haven't...

Bogo, Cameroon.  My post.  My soon to be home.  My life for the next two years. I know almost nothing about it.  I'll be the first health volunteer there though they have had an agricultural volunteer before.  It's a fairly large town compared with a lot of other posts.  I won't have water.  I should have electricity.  Might have internet.  It will be hotter than the blazes of hell, as in a high of 130 degrees Fahrenheit.   In the shade apparently. It's really close to the capital of the region--the Extreme North--called Maroua.  You might actually be able to find information about that place.  Feel free to clue me in via email.  I won't actually see anything till I move there in two weeks. I'ma have to learn another language on top of French called Fulfulde.  That should be fun.  And... yea.  Basically, from everything I can tell, all systems are go.  The plan is coming along nicely. ...

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 ...

Some people have been asking for me to explain a bit more how Peace Corps is set up.  Or training.  Or basically what exactly am I doing with my time.  That's probably relevant to this blog and useful for anyone joining the Corps, so I suppose I'll help out. OK, so first they flew me one morn to Philadelphia.  Bright and early.  We had a sort of orientation where we met all the folks headed to Cameroon.  We had meetings where we filled out paperwork, did icebreakers, and talked about what to expect.  Basically team building and some prep work.  The next day we drove up to NYC for reasons never explained to me and started a ridiculously long train of flights to Cameroon. We put down in Yaounde (the capital of Cameroon and location of our Peace Corps HQ) and they put us up in a hotel there.  As I said before, we were under guard and strictly chauffeured around.  I believe we were in town for about five days.  Mostly...

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 ...

Right, so the internet has been down.  Aside from it being incredibly evasive and nonexistent in my village, it has been down even when I’ve traveled to the “big city”.  Now, it looks like things may take an upward swing.  Such a thing as internet USB devices exist.  Unfortunately there are three sorts and they don’t exactly work everywhere.  Until I know exactly where I’m going to be posted in this country, I won’t be making such a purchase. I also should apologize for what you are about to read.  At the moment I’m incredibly unorganized.  I don’t really even know what exactly I posted last time.  It is quite difficult to express exactly how busy training is.  I mean anything would be relatively busy when compared with what I did for the six months or so prior to leaving the good ole US, but we are pushing things to the extreme. Training is an all day affair, six or seven days a week (though Saturdays and Sundays have so far been ha...