Here is the story of the first half of our trip through Southeast Asia. My camera was acting up during the first parts of the trip so many photos are from Paul's collection. Enjoy!

Bangkok, Photo by Paul

Henry and I sleeping on the train to Surat Thani, Photo by Paul

The view from our hotel in Ko Phagnan, Photo by Paul

Angkor Wat

More Angkor Wat

Patrick and Henry in Sukhothai, Thailand

Chiang Mai, photo by Paul

Crystal Temple, Chiang Rai, photo by Paul

Paul, Henry and I at the Crystal Temple, Chiang Rai, photo from Paul's camera

We left Chiang Mai the morning of the 27th. It proved a bit difficult to get out of town, though, as it was the holiday season and so many people were travelling. We ended up having to wait for about four hours at the bus station but it all worked out because we talked for a while with the Canadian guy who had some great advice for Laos. He was a bit older than us and was travelling with his wife. We expressed some of our dissatisfaction with Thailand being so touristy and whatnot and he told us about a few good places to get off the beaten path once we crossed the border.

We arrived in Chiang Rai late afternoon and found a hostel which was much nicer than we were expecting or wanting. We stayed there, though, as it was a bit far from anything else, we were tired, and didn’t want to go looking for anything else. We relaxed for a bit, played some cards, and then went searching for the night market. At the night market we ate some really good food. We had a big clay bowl of soup that we cooked and prepared ourselves right at our table as well as a wide assortment of fried vegetables and seafood and a few spring rolls. I was looking for mango sticky rice again but came up empty handed. Ah well. There was also some traditional Thai dancing going on at this big stage at one end of the eating area. There were two women and two men dancing in slow, rhythmic motions. To be honest, it was a bit odd and a bit boring. I can only assume it was done solely for tourists because we made up about 80 % of the audience.

On the way back we stopped at a few little shops and decided to pick up a couple things. I got a long sleeve T-shirt, Henry got a snap-button up blue shirt (I called it his cowboy shirt), and Paul got a new pair of shorts. It was a bit chilly and only going to get colder in Laos so we decide that Paul’s shorts were special and would actually keep him warm, so we dubbed them his “warm shorts.” The verdict is still out on whether or not they worked.

That night, Paul and I went to a restaurant near our hostel and to watch the Arsenal-Wolves game. The restaurant seemed pretty nice and I just nursed on a sprite during the game while Paul had a coffee. There was also some music going on. I don’t believe it was karaoke but nonetheless this older man got up and took the microphone at one point and sang along for about 4 or 5 songs. Paul and I found it amusing and I think everyone else from the guy’s table were pretty drunk; they loved it and applauded after each song.

The next morning, Paul, Henry and I went out to Wat Rong Khun, more commonly known as the White Temple (or sometimes as the White Pagoda or Crystal Wat or any combination of the terms—it all just depends on how you translate it). It’s this amazing temple that’s being financed by some super rich Thai businessman who gave this artist free reign to do whatever he liked in creating it. When you first get there you have to go over a bridge where below you are tons of hands reaching up towards you and towards the sky, representing Hell. As you walk over the bridge you come up to first (and thus far only completed) temple building which is completely white with decorations shooting up everywhere like colorless flames. Once you enter the temple, on the back wall, are a bunch of paintings of pop culture icons such as Darth Vader, Neo from the Matrix, Dragonball Z characters, the Twin Towers on fire, Lara Croft, and the Terminator, just to name a few. Then as you move forward in the building, the art gets more fluid and positive until you arrive at a large portrait of the Buddha on the opposite side. Outside of this building there were 6 or 7 more temples in various stages of construction; the White Temple is a quite ambitious project and the main artist thinks it will take something like 70 or 80 years to complete.

We hopped on a bus that afternoon to make the trip to the border town of Chiang Khong. We’d heard it was an interesting little town which, while not necessarily off of the tourist path was at least not as worn down by it. We found a cool hostel overlooking the Mekong River and over into Laos. It was run by a really nice and funny middle-aged Thai woman named Maleewon (probably in her 50’s) and her older American expat boyfriend Don. Maleewon definitely wore the pants in the relationship and while Don portrayed that he did a lot at the hostel, it was clear after a bit of looking that she was the owner and ran nearly everything. He was a nice enough man though a lot of what he said seemed to be a bit over dramatic and maybe even sensationalistic.

We went to the weekly market which happened to be that day and got a bit of food there. The most interesting thing I had was a hotdog wrapped in a waffle. Weird, right? Henry also got something that we thought looked like chopped shrimp mixed with some vegetables and sauce. We went down to a field by the river to eat it and Henry pretty quickly realized something was wrong with his shrimp. For starters, there wasn’t any skin/shell on it but it was a bit crunchy. The smell also didn’t resemble seafood in the slightest. Once he was about 1/3 finished with it we came to the conclusion that it was chicken feet—and we weren’t entirely sure they were even cooked. Luckily he didn’t get sick from them.

That night we went to a restaurant down near the main road and ordered a few different dishes which we all split. Man, they were delicious. The only one I remember was mine: a cashew chicken and rice dish. Stupendous.

The next day we weren’t really sure what to do. We had contemplated renting motos or bikes and going to a nearby cave or waterfall. Well, Don and Maleewon left around 9:30ish to go to a wedding and told us we’d be in charge of the hostel for about an hour until they got back. They were mostly kidding but as we didn’t really have any plans and they took the bikes we were thinking of renting, we just relaxed and played some cards until Maleewon came back. The wedding she’d been to was one of her friends from elementary school who was getting married to a 75-year-old guy from Luxembourg. They told us to go check it out if we wanted to. Well, we decided to walk around town for a bit and sure enough, we ran across the wedding. It definitely wasn’t our scene, though, so we walked by with little more than some curious stares and polite refusals when one guy offered us some rice whiskey.

The town of Chiang Khong was small but interesting. It definitely functioned as a stop for people either on their way in our out of Thailand. Contrary to most border towns, though, there wasn’t anything sinister or sleazy about it and instead was pretty calm and even slightly charming. That afternoon we met up with the Peace Corps Volunteer in Chiang Khong, Josh. He took us on a nice walk through the southern part of town past a driving range (yes, a driving range, even he thinks it’s weird) and through loads of corn fields and along the river. That night we went to an awesome little Thai restaurant. Josh ordered all of the food for us and it was definitely my best meal in Thailand. I have no idea what any of the dishes were called but we were all eternally grateful to Josh for ordering everything for us and showing us tons of dishes we never would have tasted or even known about otherwise. We tried to go to a bike museum/bar later that night but the British guy who runs it had apparently gotten too drunk the previous night and wasn’t opening. Josh said it was a pretty bizarre place but interesting. We wandered around for a while that night and eventually said goodbye to Josh, as it was our last night in Thailand. Next in store was the much talked of, but little known, country of Laos….

We left Sukhothai on the morning of Christmas Eve and got into Chiang Mai sometime mid-afternoon. As we normally did, we went to a restaurant a little ways away and chilled for a while, eating and having a beer. Once the crowd from our bus had cleared away we went and found a tuk-tuk (a three wheeled, open-aired vehicle, kind of like a rickshaw) that took us to a hostel we’d heard of, Julie’s. We got there and luckily there was a couple rooms for us. This was a typical backpacker joint filled with pillowed, raised-floors, a pool table, an extensive menu of mostly pseudo-Western food (Pizza Baguettes were my favorite), and loads of mostly Europeans. Julie’s turned out to be the first real backpacker place we stayed at and we all liked it a lot. Consequently, though, I think we all got a bit caught up in the backpacker circle and didn’t get out and explore the city too much. It was also here that Paul’s foot started acting up. I guess it was getting a bit swollen in Sukhothai but in Chiang Mai he almost couldn’t walk on it. Remember that cut he got from the coral on Ko Phagnan? Well, I guess it never completely healed and now erupted so Paul was in considerable pain. We had been telling him for a while to take good care of it and when he finally did go to the pharmacy in Chiang Mai, the woman scolded him for a) letting it get that bad and b) for using soap and water (among other things) to clean it out: “You know our water is dirty here!” She gave him some antibiotics and alcohol and iodine to clean it out and about 5 days later it was pretty close to being completely healed.

That first night we wandered around for quite a while through the old city and then outside of the city walls through the newer, fancier parts. We found a good night market and then wandered around for quite a while trying to find a bar. Unfortunately, most of the ones that looked nice from the outside were filled with old, chain-smoking expats (mostly Australian) who were sitting there and getting hammered with their Thai “girlfriends,” so we opted against them. At one point we found some amazing Pad Thai from some small restaurant which I doubt we would have been able to find again if we’d tried. There was only one thing on the menu, it was filled with Thai people, and I don’t think the cook spoke one word of English. It was a true gem and an awesome find. We eventually walked back to the hostel where we spent some time playing cards with some British guys who I’m guessing were around 20 and all left at around 11 to run off to some club and find some Thai “girlfriends” for the night. After they left, however, we started talking with these three guys (from France, Holland, and Bulgaria) who were all studying in Guangzhou , China. They were on Christmas vacation from school and were very cool guys. I got into a discussion with the French guy that I probably shouldn’t have about France’s roll in Africa today and development in general. I think he started getting kinda pissed at me so I ended up saying something like “to be honest, if you haven’t been to Africa you really can’t know what I’m talking about.” A bit pretentious and snoody, I know, but I think most French people who have been to sub-Saharan Africa would agree with me.

The next day was Christmas and Paul, Henry, and I went wandering in the morning to try to find presents for our Secret Santa, of which our limit was 200 baht (or about 7 bucks). Unfortunately, the market we went to was a bit dismal and we ended up returning to the hostel empty handed. We all half-joked about just getting 200 baht worth of beer for each other. When we got back I went for a run through the streets of Chiang Mai and saw some really cool wats (temples). Chiang Mai is renowned for being one of the religious and cultural centers of the Thai people and all of the intricate artwork and architecture on the wats certainly shows this. As I was running, I came across a used bookstore and picked up a couple books: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut for Paul’s Secret Santa gift, and Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux for myself. I had about 20 baht left afterwards so I cooled off and walked back towards the hostel and found a good Noodle Soup place where I had probably my best noodle soup in Thailand. I also talked to a Chilean guy named Nico there who had arrived the day before and was in Thailand to get certified in Thai massage. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that we struck up a conversation because he turned around and looked at me after I let out a huge burp when I was finishing my soup. He didn’t seem too fazed by it.

That evening we went to the Christmas (or maybe just Sunday?) Market which was only a few blocks away. The street was blocked off for a few blocks and it was filled with souvenirs, trinkets and loads of food. I think I ate about 4 or 5 different plates here, and I had my first plate of Mango Sticky Rice. A volunteer from Cameroon swore by it and, while I’d been keeping my eyes open, I hadn’t been able to find it. Mango sticky rice consists of sticky rice topped with chopped up mangoes and lightly drizzled with sweet coconut milk. It was so good I contemplated getting a second, even though I was really stuffed.

We spent the rest of the night hanging out at the hostel. For our Secret Santa (which became not-so-secret once gifts were disbursed) I got a Cameroonian Muslim prayer scarf from Patrick—which I really wanted having forgotten mine in Yaounde—Henry got a Panda hat from Paul, Patrick got a pair of head phones from Henry and I gave Paul the book I’d bought earlier. We started talking to a couple of French girls at a table next to us and then after a little while this American came up to us and said, “I’m sorry I overheard you guys a bit, did you say you were in Peace Corps?” Well, it turns out he’s an RPCV from Kenya from about 10 years ago. His name was Adam and he now had a job working with a student study abroad program and had just finished a tour in Vietnam so he and his wife were travelling a little bit before heading back to Portland. He was a very nice guy and gave us loads of good advice about travelling around SE Asia and, more importantly, about readjusting to the US once we do finally get back.

The next day we didn’t really do much of substance. I’d wanted to go bungee jumping or kayaking or something but nobody else wanted to shell out the cash for it, which was a bit frustrating for me because the day before a couple of the guys had been at least interested. Anyway, I guess it’s my fault and I should have gone anyway. We still had a decent day and walked around and saw a bunch of different wats, some that were really quite old.

That night, Patrick and I also went to see some Thai boxing matches. It was definitely set up for tourists as I don’t think I saw another Thai person in the audience, but it was still very cool nonetheless. We saw two knockouts, which was also pretty interesting as a few of the fights seemed more just a test of who can land the most blows and knock the other down, not who can actually take the other person out. At one point, we moved seats to a bar closer to the ring and this Thai guy next to me kept trying to get us to make bets (which we’d been doing with a few other foreigners we’d met). He was being pretty ridiculous, though, as he kept saying “200 baht! Red or blue! You want red? Blue? I take bet!” We all refused because gambling is illegal in Thailand and we also thought maybe he knew something about the fights, like if they were arranged before or something. Eventually, he left us alone and went somewhere else at which point Patrick noticed that on the back of his jacket said POLICE. I don’t think he would have arrested us, or probably even fined us if he’d caught us, he probably would have just taken our money and said something like “what are you going to do about it?” Interesting night, to say the least.

The next day we woke up around 5:30 to be ready for our taxi at 6. We wanted to get to the Thai border as close to 8 as possible because we wanted to make it back to Bangkok that day, if possible. Well, on the Thai side of the border we found a van, not a bus, which shaved a couple hours off the trip and we got back to Bangkok before 2. We relaxed most of that afternoon at the White Lodge, the hotel from our first few days in Bangkok, and then had a very American night.

We had McDonald’s for dinner and then went and saw Mission: Impossible 4 at one of the huge mega-malls near our hotel. That movie was terrible, but then again I wasn’t exactly hoping for anything special. I’m not entirely proud of having such an American night while in an awesome foreign city such as Bangkok but I feel like we could justify ourselves easier than most people: we’d spent the last two years out of the US and (I at least) had been craving some fast food and a movie theatre for a while.

The next day Henry and I went to the Laos embassy to try to get our visas and man did that turn out to be a pain in the ass. The BTS didn’t go all the way there, so instead of doing that and then getting a cab we decided to just take a cab the whole way. Well, it took us about an hour to get there in the cab because the traffic was so terrible. The total we spent in transportation that day was more than we’d normally been spending on hotels. Well, we got the visas but to add another kink in our plans, the cell phone network was down so we couldn’t call Patrick to tell him and Paul to go get bus tickets the next day.

That night we met up with a married couple named Susan and Adam. Susan had worked with Kim Peven, a fellow PCV from our training group in Cameroon who extended for another year, in New Orleans when Kim was getting her MPH. Now, Susan and Adam live in Bangkok where Adam teaches English at an American school and Susan does Public Health consulting. Susan was also a PCV in Cote D’Ivoire and was one of the last volunteers there to finish her service before the evacuation before the civil war. They were two awesome people and let us stay at their house that night. Not only that, but they ordered a couple pizzas (almost entirely for us) and left us to our own devices for the most part as they were somewhat overwhelmed with work. They also had a new baby, Meryl, who was adorable, and a big dog, Chester, who was a lot of fun to play with.

The next day was Susan’s birthday so we gave her a small present that Kim had sent with us: a little dress made out of traditional African fabric. Susan seemed to like it while Adam may have been a bit confused as to why it also came with a little head wrap made from the same fabric. I guess you have to have lived in Africa to get that part. Anyway, like I said earlier they were two standup people and we were very thankful that they opened up their house to us so eagerly—without even knowing us. This was our first lesson about RPCVs (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers): we stick together. (I guess I should say “we and our significant others” to not exclude Adam, who was equally awesome.)

Anyway, we soon headed out and made our way to the bus station north of town where we soon caught a bus to Sukhothai. Sukhothai was an ancient Thai capital from like the 1400’s and is also a UNESCO world heritage site. There was a little contention in coming here as I really wanted to, Henry and Paul hadn’t really heard of it, and Patrick didn’t think we’d be able to due to time and travelling around Christmas which we were told was a bit difficult (or maybe he didn’t want to at first, I don’t know). Anyway, I coaxed them into agreeing to go and we followed our normal protocol and immediately walked away from the bus station and found a beer before figuring out where to stay.

We found a really cool hostel called “No. 4 Guesthouse”. It was possibly the guesthouse that was the least “advanced” but the most charming. We still had wifi here but the little bungalows were made of wood and bamboo and seemed like they could fall over with a strong push. It was also built in the middle of a swamp so the mosquitoes were everywhere. Inspite of this, I loved the place. The woman who ran it was eclectic and funny and the place just had an awesome charm to it that I haven’t seen since.

We spent two nights in Sukhohthai and on our one full day we rented motos and rode out to the “Old City” where we saw some more ruins that were really quite awesome. They were on a much smaller scale than Angkor Wat, though I think I enjoyed Sukkothai more. For one, there were a lot less people and commotion. For another, it was a lot cheaper and low key. We got in for around 3 bucks and were able to ride our motos just about everywhere except on the actual ruins. We spent a good number of hours exploring the temples and trying not to compare Sukhothai to Angkor Wat, but doing it nonetheless. Also, the degree to which the Thai government kept the ruins shows a big difference between the two governments—and societies. I got the feeling that Cambodia preserved Angkor Wat to a large extent because it was a good money maker for the state. My impression with Sukhothai was that it was preserved and promoted more out of a respect for the past and the history of Thai culture. I might be very uninformed but that’s what I drew from the differences between the two places.

The border didn’t open until 8 the next morning but we were there at 8:02 and almost made a huge faux-pas when the Thai national anthem was broadcast and we didn’t immediately stop and pay our respect. Well, nothing happened and we crossed into Cambodia and avoided a 20 dollar bribe (each) from the Cambodian border official for our visas and then got a little food and found a car to take us to Siem Reap. The ride was only about two hours and once we got away from the border, we could pretty much immediately tell that Cambodia was a much poorer country than Thailand. The road was brand spankin’ new but the houses along the side, while not shabby, were definitely made of cheaper and less-durable materials. More wood and corrugated tin, less concrete and shingles.

Rolling in to Siem Reap was a different story, though. About two kilometers from the outskirts of town in to the center these huge luxury resorts and hotels line the roadside. Most of them have some name utilizing the word “Angkor” mixed in different ways with words like “Resort,” “Palace,” “Chateau” and the like. The other guys were a bit surprised and taken aback by these but I’d heard that Siem Reap was touristy and that you could find deluxe accommodations there—for a price.

In Siemp Reap we pretty easily found a cheap guesthouse and then went about walking around. We found a market where everybody got a good dish but me. My dish even sounded good: “Curry noodle soup”. Oh well. We walked around this market for a while and I got a couple Christmas presents and a new pair of sunglasses as my other ones kept breaking. Then we split up because Paul and Henry wanted to keep shopping and Patrick and I wanted to wander around some more. The two of us wandered around the walking streets for a while until we found a bar that had 50 cent draft beers. We had a couple and then went back to the hotel and relaxed.

That reminds me of one thing I found a bit odd about Cambodia: they use US dollars. Sure, they have their own currency and you can use it if you want, but most prices are just made in dollars and the ATMs don’t even offer reap (the Cambodian currency). I realize that we were just in a very touristy area but I’ve heard these things hold true pretty much throughout the country.

At one point during the day, I went to the ATM to try to take out some American cash but my wallet was empty of anything resembling an ATM card. Had I left it in my bag? Maybe in my little card holder with my credit card? Long story short, I couldn’t find it. The only thing I can think of is that I’d forgotten it in an ATM in Bangkok a few days earlier. I immediately checked my online bank account and no other money had been taken out, which was good but I emailed my parents to immediately cancel the card. This left me in quite a predicament, though, as I had another ATM card, but not the PIN. Again, long story short, I couldn’t work it out with Wells Fargo so up until now I’ve been having Paul slowly pay back the money he owes me from the plane tickets in whatever local currency we’re using.

That night, I watched the Manchester United game at a little sports bar. It was a pretty decent place with a very friendly and cute bartender. I became pretty disgusted though by this Australian guy in there who was very obviously just a sex tourist and he was saying some pretty disgusting things to her, things I won’t repeat. It was all I could do to not get up and say to him “Just because you’re a foreigner doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole.” Luckily Paul was there and convinced me at halftime to just go and find another place. People like that Australian disgust me.

I talked to my parents for the first time that night in the hallway of our guesthouse on skype and had a pretty good talk with them. I was about to sign off when a door opened and a pissed off French woman walked out and said to me “Excuse me, but you know zat you are not zee only perzon staying here, right?” I apologized and said I was just saying goodbye but she wouldn’t let it drop. “I have been trying to zleep for a while now but you are being zo loud!” Again, I apologized and she turned around and stamped off back to her room. I later asked the guys if they’d been able to hear me talking and they all said no, and I realized that I’d been there for about 45 minutes so if it was really a problem she should have said something sooner. (To any French person reading this blog, please forgive my stereotypical French accent but that is really how she spoke.)

The next day we got up and had a pretty good breakfast of pork and rice. Afterwards, we rented bikes for the exorbitant price of one dollar per bike.fterwards, we rented bikes for the exorbitant price of one dollar per bike. We started pedaling out towards the ruins of Angkor Wat, only a few kilometers away. Well, about halfway to the ruins my bike broke down. I had to then hire a tuktuk to then take me back to the bike rental place and then back again to the gates of the national park where the guys were waiting for me. The price for the tuk tuk was double my bike rental! Anyway, we spent the day exploring the temples and they were quite stunning. I don’t think I could adequately describe them but I’ll make a few smaller observations.

First, restoration of the temples is still clearly ongoing. The main temple and the next largest one are restored just about as much as they can be but the really cool thing about the park is going to some of the temples that aren’t as well restored yet. In some, there are trees growing out of walls and many times bricks and stones are still lying around, littered about. This won’t be the case for much longer, though. As the Cambodian government sees all the money they make from Angkor Wat, I’m sure they’ll increase the pace at which they put the pieces back together, so to speak.

Secondly, Angkor Wat, along with the Eiffel tower and the Statue of Liberty, is one of the most touristy places I’ve ever been to. Rarely have I ever seen so many tourists in one place. Sure, there were loads of people in Bangkok and on the island but they weren’t all grouped in the same place and doing the exact same thing. But, you know, most of the time tourist places are popular for a reason: they’re stunning. And that was certainly the case here.

We ended up riding the bikes for somewhere around 35+ km. When we finally got back we were pretty pooped and grabbed a few beers in between showering and eating. We went back to the hotel pretty early and watched a soccer game before turning in.

We weren’t sure what time the bus for Bangkok left on the 15th, so we woke up at 5:30 and packed up our stuff and headed out to the bus station. well, luckily once we arrived we had some time to get some noodle soup and coffee before the bus left. That ride turned out to not be half bad at all. It was only about 6-7 hours which was half the time the train took.

When we got into Bangkok, we really just wanted some cheap, easy accommodations so we got the first cab we found and told them to take us to KSR. We found a place that was dirt cheap (around 4 bucks per room) and it was that cheap for a reason. The supposed wifi didn’t work, nor did any of the outlets I found anywhere. But, it wasn’t too far from KSR so we walked around for a while and tried to find some food. I had the worst pad thai of my life. It was essentially stir fried ramen with a little egg and chicken. I don’t think I even finished it—which was saying a lot for Thai food.

After we ate, we wandered around for a while and came across a little road stand bar where we ordered some beers and started talking to these two German girls and an Australian guy. They seemed nice enough but I eyed a few African guys sitting not too far away so I went up to them and struck up a conversation. Turns out they were Francophone (one from Togo, two from Niger) so I got the opportunity to speak French with them. I ended up talking with them for a couple hours and they were really cool dudes and put up with my passable-though-not-great French. They worked in China as businessmen of some sort and I wasn’t sure if they were in Thailand on vacation or just passing through on their way back to West Africa. We had a great time talking about Africa and they were really proud to head that a white guy like me loved it so much--I even told them that I was no longer American but instead I was Bamileke, a tribe in Cameroon. They got a real kick out of that.

The next day we woke up a bit late and wandered back to the previous hotel we’d stayed at in Bangkok because Joey had paid to leave his backpack there and Patrick had forgotten a folder with all of his medical stuff. Well, we got both and then we had to say our goodbyes to Joey who was heading back to the Seattle (via Seoul) that night. It was a bit sad to say goodbye to him, especially because he meshed so well with our group and our dynamic certainly changed once he was gone.

Anyway, we then went and met up with a couple acquaintances of Paul’s who are in Peace Corps Thailand, Elliot and Ashley. The three of them went to college together and though Paul didn’t know them too well they were still incredibly gracious and offered to put us up for a night at Ashley’s brother’s apartment in Bangkok with them. (The brother wasn’t there but works for USAID and was posted to Thailand two days after Elliot and Ashley arrived.) His apartment was really nice and swanky and we relaxed all day, did laundry, took showers, and watched The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Later we went and met up with some of their Peace Corps friends and got some pizza. We chatted with them for a few hours before heading back on the BTS towards the apartment. We got off at one point and were in a 7-11 buying some snacks when Elliot said “hey, it’s 2-for-1 margaritas next door, you in?” So naturally we all said yes. The margaritas weren’t very strong but it sure was interesting the different takes on margaritas that they had. After we were done we went back to their apartment and Elliot, always the wildcard, then offered if we wanted to do Karaoke. I think we all kinda though he was joking at first until he pulled up a program on his computer (which was hooked up to the flat screen TV) that is actual Karaoke. Well, we did a few sing-a-longs and then some people went swimming in the apartment building’s pool while I went to sleep.

We had thought about staying in Bangkok the next day to get our Laos visas, until we realized that it was Saturday and the Laos Embassy would most likely be closed. So instead, we ended up saying goodbye to Ashley and Elliot and heading East to the Cambodian border.

On the bus to the border we met a couple Canadian dudes from Vancouver and started talking to them at one of the pit stops. I noticed some day glo paint on his Brewers hat so I asked if they’d been to the full moon party. Affirmative. We didn’t get to the Cambodian border until just before sunset and rather than try to cross the border at night and then either arrange transportation to Siem Reap then or find a hotel on the Cambodian side, we decided to just go back to the nearest guesthouse, grab some food at a nearby restaurant (and also watch Live Free or Die Hard there!!) and go to sleep.

One thing I forgot to mention in the last blog was that the night of the full moon was also the lunar eclipse. As we were eating some food and hanging out, the eclipse started and it seemed to take forever. Isn’t the moon only supposed to be completely covered for a matter of minutes if not seconds? Well, this moon stayed an orangeish color for quite a while. Maybe there were clouds in the way, who knows.

Anyway, the four of us loaded into the back of the pickup taxi along with two German girls and two French girls. We started chatting with them and luckily they were nice because the ride to Haat Rim was about 45 minutes. We drove up and down steep hills as the lights from hotels and houses flashed by. But we knew we were there when we slowed down and I saw what looked somewhat similar to Duval St. in Key West. Lots of bars, restaurants, 7-Elevens, tattoos shops, T-shirt vendors, and our personal favorite: buckets of alcohol vendors. We were still hanging out with the French and German girls so we decided to get two small buckets and roll with that for the time being.

We walked around until we got to the entrance to the proper boardwalk and paid our 100 baht (about 3 bucks) to get in. I was a little opposed at first to paying the entrance fee as I thought it was just another way to rip some money out of us but I read earlier that the money from that goes almost entirely to security and cleaning up the beach the next day. And oh, that beach cleaning was needed.

Let me take a step back and say that I’ve never been to Cancun or anywhere else in Mexico for Spring Break, but the Full Moon Party is pretty much how I imagined it if there were simply more Europeans and less Americans. Most of the guys weren’t wearing shirts, lots of girls were only wearing bikinis, there was day-glo paint on probably 75% of people. The music was a mix of anything poppy and in a club from the last couple years (lots of LMFAO, Pitbull, and Duck Sauce), and the alcohol was flowing like water.

We got to the beach and the German girls took off and walked a different way. Had enough of us, I guess. After a few minutes, Henry also said he needed to walk around a bit. I think all of the lights and people were getting to him, a bit of a culture shock having come from Cameroon and all. Well, that was the last I saw of him that night, as it was a bit hard to keep track of your group when there’s around 8,000 people there.

So we were down to five (including the French girls, Lauren and Pauline) and we walked around the beach for a while, watched some fire dancers, and stared in amazement at how this place was so incredibly terrible, but at the same time so much fun.

Around midnight, Lauren and Pauline said they wanted to get a drink so we followed them up to a bar overlooking the beach. Well, I was right behind them and when we got to the bar, I turned around and couldn’t see Joey or Paul. I found out later that they thought we were going to a different bar, lost us, and then kept wandering around. Well, I tried to call Henry at this point to see where he was and, of course, he had left his phone in his room at the hotel.

So now we were down to three. The girls got their drinks and we continued to wander around, lazily looking for Paul, Joey, and Henry, and occasionally having impromptu three-person dance parties when a good song would come on.

We came across a giant flaming jump rope in the middle of a huge circle of people. It was held on either end from two people on stands about 6 feet off the ground. After watching for a bit, I knew I had to do it. So I ran into the middle where there was already one person and then started jumping. We got about twice around before he caught the rope and we both tumbled, furiously crawling away from the flaming rope. No burns!

There was also a slide from the top of a building that went down onto the beach and that was pretty fun. Somebody told me the next day that Joey was all about that slide. Kind of weird we didn’t run into each other then, ain’t it?

Around 3:30 am the three of us decided it was time to head back to the hotel so we went and found a pickup taxi and took the long ride back to our hotel. I had tried to call Henry a number of times, as I still didn’t know that he had forgotten his phone. Also in the pickup were two Dutch people (not very talkative) and two Swedes (very talkative). The Swedes were pretty surprised to hear me speaking French with the French girls, and I even tutored them a little bit on the particulars of Cameroonian French. (C’est comment mon frère? Tu es là? Prochainement!) Unfortunately, I think that I have officially forgotten all of my Swedish because I could literally only think of a few words in Swedish.

Well, when we got back to the hotel, I said goodnight to the French girls and went back to my room, wondering if Joey and Paul would be there, or Henry for that matter. Nobody was, but my spirits raised quite a bit when I realized that I in fact had the key in my pocket, not Paul. We had spent almost 24 hours straight travelling and then followed it with the biggest beach party in the world. I was exhausted and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow…

…And then was awoken at 7 when Joey and Paul stumbled in. Well, naturally I got up and we all started exchanging stories from what happened. Apparently they’d found Henry at some point wandering by himself (he had decided almost immediately after he left us to turn around and find us but wasn’t able to) and he had also seen me at one point from afar and then tailed me for a while before losing me in the crowd again. Like I said, Joey tore up the slide and they also said they were hanging around the flaming jump rope. They’d gotten back at around 5 and then slept in the hammocks outside of our little cabins and then woke me up when the sun became too bright. Well, I was awake at this point, fresh off my two solid hours so I woke Patrick and Henry up and the three of us spent most of the day playing cards, swimming, and using the internet. Patrick and I were also able to negotiate the price of our rooms down a bit. Each room was now only about 8$ per night. A pretty good deal considering it was right on the ocean with an amazing view. Paul and Joey woke up quite a bit later.

I also noticed a little after I woke up that I couldn’t locate my phone. I think what happened was after I tried to call Henry for the last time the night before somebody must have swiped it from my pocket as we were walking through the big crowd to find a taxi. It was only the first time I’ve ever been pick pocketed, so I guess it had to happen sometime.

At one point, though, we swam across the little bay to the island across from us and walked around there a bit. I guess swam is a little misleading. At lowish tide we waded over the sandbar, though the water was about to our waists and the rip tide was incredibly strong, especially on the way back. The island, though, was pretty bizarre. It was a resort of some sort, though it’s been abandoned. There were still mattresses in the rooms, though most of the doors have fallen off and the mattresses were pretty nice. It made me wonder if the place was a popular place for squatters or campers. Henry was convinced the whole time that we were going to find dead bodies around the next corner.

We had dinner at a restaurant next to the hotel (not too good and pretty overpriced), and then hung out with Pauline and Lauren. We played some cards and listened to music fairly late into the night. Paul tried to go for a swim at one point but didn’t walk to the beach we’d been at earlier in the day and ended up getting a few punctures on his feet from coral. They didn’t look too bad but, then again, what do I know about cuts from broken pieces of coral.

Pauline and Lauren left the next day and headed off to the island of Ko Tao. We had thought of going here for a bit, particularly as it’s the easiest island to hop to from Ko Phangan. In the end we decided against it because the main thing to do there is get your Diving License and do some scuba diving. The only person really interested in that was Patrick and he didn’t want to shell out all the cash for it.

That day we rented motorcycles at around noon (5 bucks for 24 hours!) and drove all over the island. We stopped at this nice little roadside shack and some pretty good fried noodle dishes. For my money, this was one of the best meals on the island. After a few hours on the bikes we realized we were getting pretty close to Haat Rim again, the town with the Full Moon Party, so we decided to turn around, take a break, and get something to drink at a bar. Well, the first bar we found was called Lady Bar and we stopped there and each got a Coke.

The place seemed pretty nice, with comfortable chairs and a pool table. After about five minutes a woman came over and sat down with us and tried to start a conversation. From what I’ve seen, any woman in a developing country who comes and sits and talks to a group of foreign men is generally a prostitute, though a polite prostitute who will generally leave you alone once it’s clear you’re not interested. Well, she talked for a little while with us—or rather: at us—before I realized a little something on her upper lip. Was that the hint of a 5 o’clock shadow? Was this the first Thai Ladyboy I’d spoken too? I believe it was. She was sassy and commented to Henry once that her friends behind the counter thought that he was handsome. After a few minutes she wished us a good day, I think realizing that her charm wasn’t working too well on us. As we were leaving, though, Henry refused to believe that she was a prostitute or a lady boy. “I think she was just nice guys, and she knows a handsome man when she sees one.” Sure Henry, sure.

The next day we used up the rest of our time with the motos and turned them in around noon. We spent most of the day using the internet, playing cards, and eating. Behind our hotel was a little bakery that had just opened up and was being run by a French guy and his French girlfriend, though I can’t remember their names. They were super nice and Patrick and I each got a pizza from them for dinner.

That night after every one else went to sleep, Henry and I crossed the sandbar and went to the island across from us to explore. The tide was completely down and we were able to walk across without getting more than our ankles wet. The island was quite spooky at night and we felt a little bit like we were in Scooby Doo. I picked up a big long bamboo stick to use for protection and Henry picked up a spiked palm frond. We tip toed around a bit and at one point I picked up a rock and gently tossed it nearby. Henry jumped in the air just like in a cartoon and I nearly died laughing. We came to a house, though, that looked like it had some weird shadows in it. Upon a closer inspection those shadows were just caused by the moon, though we saw some dark shapes on one of the mattresses. Was it a person? No idea. Either way, though, we dropped our stuff and booked it back to our hotel.

The next day we packed everything up and took off. The ferry ride was pretty uneventful, we just played cards and relaxed. There were two European girls on it though that just looked like a mess. They were falling asleep almost everywhere and could barely stand up straight. Partying too hard the night before hardly seems like an adequate description.

Anyway, we eventually made it to Surat Thani, a town a little bit inland where we could either catch the train or a bus. We opted to stay for a night, though there wasn’t too much to see or do here, and then catch a bus in the morning. It might have been one of the best decisions of the trip because we had a fantastic night.

We found a hotel and then relaxed for a little bit before going over to the night market. Definitely the best night market I’ve been to so far on this trip. We sport ate our way through it. I had some sausage, sushi, a kiwi-strawberry shake, and the best Pad Thai ever. I learned something from Patrick this night which is how we found the Pad Thai. When he’s at a food market he goes to wherever all the locals are and just gets whatever they’re getting. We didn’t even know it was Pad Thai at first (and it was so good and had some differences that maybe it wasn’t even bad Thai) but he got one and once I saw his I went back and got another.

Anyway, as we were eating these two British girls came up and approached us and we talked with them for quite a while. They’d just spent a few weeks on Ko Phagnan at this hippy retreat and were heading off to Cambodia next. I think before that they’d been in Indonesia and South Africa. Very cool girls and we jokingly said maybe we’d see them in Angkor Wat.

We went back to the hotel and watched music videos on Joey’s computer for quite a while when all of a sudden we hear a knock on the door. We opened and saw another British woman who we initially thought was going to ask us to keep it down. Instead, she asked us if we could wake her up in the morning when we woke up (she was in the room next to mine) because she had to be at work early. She didn’t really give us a straight forward reason why she couldn’t get up herself but I assumed she was partying a bit hard that night. After a minute or two of talking to her, I realized that she had something white on her upper lip and her pupils were pretty dilated. Joey had noticed this too and told us after she left that a lot of expats, tourists, and travelers around SE Asia get really into a ground up mixture of meth and heroin. That seems like a pretty serious thing to do casually when you’re working (or travelling, for that matter) in a foreign country, and especially one with such strict drug laws like Thailand.

We woke up around 10ish again on the 8th and had some good noodle soup for breakfast. Nice and spicy with fish balls and a bit of pork. Delicious. We tried to figure out a plan for the day and the only things we really had to do was Joey wanted to sell some books over in the backpacker neighborhood of Bangkok (Kao San Road), Henry needed to go to the UPS store to pick up his ATM card which apparently hadn’t made it all the way to Citi Bank the day before, and then late at night we were planning on meeting up with this Peace Corps Volunteer named Tracy who was coming in that night and offered to show us around a bit.

Well, I wanted to check out Kao San Road (or KSR as it’s known in the travelling communities) and Paul was down too. Patrick didn’t really feel like going to UPS with Henry so the three of us all tagged along with Joey. We asked the guy at our hotel how to get there and he told us to take the elevated train (BTS) all the way to the end and then from there to take a bus. So we hopped on the BTS and took it to a stop called Mo Chit and then from there wandered around a bit looking for a bus. Well, we couldn’t find one but eventually found a map and realized that we’d travelled quite a distance and we were still the same distance from KSR as from when we started.

We decided to hop on the MRT—the subway—which we started calling the Mr. T. We took that for a few stops because it looked like it would get us a bit closer to KSR. Finally once we got there, we found a taxi who didn’t seem to keen on taking us and instead offered to drop us at one of the canals where we could have taken a boat. By that point, though, we were frustrated with all of our misguided transportation advice and asked him just to take us to KSR. Well, he did it and ended up being a really nice guy. His English was very good and he told us that he’d even lived for a number of years in Brunei. Henry tried to call us at some point after he’d gotten his card and we told him to just take a cab over if he wanted to meet up with us because the transportation was just ridiculous to get there.

Once we finally got to KSR, we were horrified by what we saw. A few images: loose tanktops, pizzas and mojitos, dreadlocks, McDonald’s, Jimmy Buffet, really shitty street food. But these images don’t really do it justice. KSR is kind of revered in a lot of travelling circles for being this almost Mecca for people backpacking through SE Asia. The funny thing is, though, aside from the fact that it’s located in Thailand, there’ absolutely nothing Thai about it. There’s a McDonald’s, a Burger King and a KFC on one side of the street with another McDonald’s a little further down. People are pedaling shitty trinkets, sunglasses, shirts with pictures of Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes peeing on things. It really just seemed like a place for where foreigners went in Bangkok if they wanted to get trashed and hang out with other foreigners. The only, and I mean only, redeeming quality was that the prices for rooms were incredibly low (less than half of what we were paying).

Anyway, we walked around KSR a bit looking for this bookshop Joey wanted to find and eventually we ran across it after some searching. I sold a book I’d brought with me but which I’d realized was too big, bulky, and heavy and another one which I’d started and didn’t like. In exchange, I got an Asimov book and a Rough Guide to Laos. I only ended up paying about 3 bucks. Sweet! Henry called us again while Joey was still in the bookstore and said he was at Mo Chit and what to do now. Apparently he hadn’t taken our advice and instead had listened to the same guy from the hotel who’d told us to take the BTS to that station and then a bus. Well, we told him KSR was pretty shitty and he decided to just walk around a bit near Mo Chit and that he’d meet up with us back at the hotel later.

We were pretty much finished with KSR before we even got out of the cab so nobody was too pissed when we decided to leave after we were done with the book store. We walked back out to the main road but the taxi drivers were trying to screw us on prices like they can probably do to the usual KSR crowd. Well, we walked a bit down and then caught a cab back to the hotel.

Back there, we relaxed a bit, played some cards and then decided to go looking for a couple brewpubs that Henry had heard of. One was supposed to be pretty close to our hotel in a mall but when we got there we couldn’t find it. Oh well. So then we took the BTS a little ways away and found the other brewpub. Once we walked in, though, we realized that it was super expensive, like US prices. Instead, we turned around and walked back to this Irish/English pub (there weren’t too many distinguishing characteristics making it lean one way or the other) where we had a couple pints of some various Asian beers.

Around 9 PM we headed back to the hotel and relaxed outside while we waited for Tracy. Eventually she showed up and we sat around talking for quite a while. The original plan was that she was going to meet up with us and then take us to an island about 4 hours to the east. I was not aware of this, though, and had assumed we were going to head down to the southern part of the country where there are a lot more options as far as islands go. Turns out, though, that Tracy was a bit broke at the time and she had wanted to go with another volunteer who was supposed to be coming back from vacation the next morning. She ended up deciding not to go with us which may have been for the best because then we were able to change our plans and head down south instead.

The next morning, Tracy went with us to the train station and we found out that the train heading down south to Surat Thani—where we would need to disembark to go to any number of islands—didn’t leave until 7:30 that night. Bummer. We pretty much just hung out at the train station all day, walking around a bit, playing some Settlers, eating some street food, and Henry and I poured a bunch of baht into this PS2 system that was set up and played each other in soccer a bunch of times. I think at our final tally we were tied at 2 games apiece and when time ran out, the 5th game was also tied.

We got a bit more food and then loaded up on the train. We were taking third class which wasn’t too bad to be honest. Sure beat second class in Cameroon. The seats were basically just benches with straight upright backs. We weren’t too sure about how the seating worked out so we just stretched out over a bunch of seats that were facing each other and relaxed. Patrick and I had bought a big piece of grilled chicken before we left so we slowly munched on that throughout the trip. The trip was fairly uneventful. We took turns watching stuff on Joey’s and my computers, and I think around 1ish I stretched out on one of the benches and had a pretty rough sleep. I didn’t sleep that well but it was a bit odd because every time I woke up I didn’t seem to mind too much.

Sometime before dawn on the 10th I woke up. I was pretty tired but managed to stay awake for another few hours until we got to the station (around 9). Right away we decided to go across the street and get some food and I think I got some spicy fried pork over rice. It was pretty good if I remember correctly.

When we emerged from the restaurant, we didn’t see any more of the buses that would take us to Don Sak (or Dog Sack as we called it), a town around 60 kilometers to the east where the ferry terminal was. The buses had left almost immediately when we got there and so we had to take a bus to the town center/bus station, and then from there we got a shared taxi to Don Sak. And by Shared taxi, I mean a pickup truck with a covered back and three rows of benches going length wise. It would go along the highway and periodically stop to pick people up who would then hang off the back for a while and then drop others off. It rained a bit while for the hour long ride to Don Sak and the mist coming up from the back tires made my pants pretty wet as I was the one sitting closest to the back.

We had decided to go to the island of Ko Phangan in the Andaman Gulf (eastern coast of the peninsula). I’d read about a bunch of different islands that were possible to go to but most either sounded incredibly touristy or pretty difficult to get to. Ko Phangan had been described as somewhere in between. Yes, it was big on backpacker circuits but it didn’t seem to have the extravagant resorts and deluxe dining options that some places like Phuket, Ko Phi Phi, or even neighboring Ko Samui had. So we chose Ko Phangan and caught a ferry just in time to make it there. The ride was a little over two hours and we passed the time by napping and playing cards.

We got in to the port town and once there everyone was trying to rip us off to hop back into the share pickup taxis and so after a bit of try to haggle we did what would become our go to move when in a new town on this trip: walk away from the port/bus station/etc., find a place to sit down and have a beer. That way we could relax a bit, pull out the guidebook, and even ask some of the locals around about what to do in our situation. Around the corner from the little corner store we were sitting at was a weird shack with a TV and loads of Thai guys watching it. I think that on the TV was Thai boxing, but it could have been any of a number of martial arts. I didn’t see any money out, but I got the impression this might have been some sort of underground betting place. It was also the only place selling beers so I bought one for each of us (a bit pricey) and talked with the guy who was running it a bit. His English was pretty shaky but he seemed pretty chill and somewhat confused by what I was doing buying beer and trying to start a conversation from him. After a couple minutes of trying, I gave up and walked back to the corner store.

One woman who was riding by in a food cart attached to a moto stopped to see if we wanted anything to eat. We politely declined but then she asked us where we were staying. We told her and she said something like “Oh, that’s far.” We asked her how much it should be, if she knew if hotels sent cars to pick people up, etc. She offered, though to call the hotel for us to ask what to do. She talked with them and then said they were holding two rooms for us and the price of a shared pickup. She was super nice, so I bought a beer from her and then gave it to her as a present.

We got the share taxi to the hotel, which was quite a ways away, and the price was only about half of what they had been asking earlier. Joey and I stood at the back of the pickup so we could see the scenery and talk a bit more. It was really good catching up with him. He and I have had our differences in the past but I’m really glad we’ve gotten past them and that he came to meet up with us in Thailand. Anyway, the ride was gorgeous. I’d been expecting a pretty small island but this place was really big. It took around 45 minutes to get all the way to our hotel and we were driving through small mountains, dense forests, a bit along the coast, up really steep hills and zipping around corners so we had to hold on tight to not get thrown. It was great.

We got to our hotel and the scenery again was amazing. It was right on the beach on the northeastern part of the island and it was situated in a little bay with another island a little ways off that you could walk to on a sandbar at low tide. (The hotel’s called the Royal Orchid, by the way.) We checked in and got each room for around 6 dollars a night. I found the place to be really nice and charming but somebody made the comment that in the states (or many other places) a hotel like this could be considered roughing it. Our rooms didn’t have A/C or hot water and consisted really of just a bed, a fan, a bathroom, and a porch with a hammock. To be honest, though, I couldn’t have asked for more.

We got settled and ate a little supper there: overpriced and underspiced—I guess I could have asked for one thing more. We talked a little with a couple Germans who were also staying there but then at 9:30 our share pickup came to take us to the Full Moon Party across the island. Patrick opted not to go as he was too tired, and didn’t think he’d enjoy it but Joey, Henry, Paul and I all decided to suck it up and do it. You’ll have to wait for the next post to hear about that debauchery and nonsense.

Paul, Henry, and I arrived in Bangkok mid-afternoon on December 6th by way of Nairobi. Flying into Bangkok was a bit of a head trip. For one, we could see a bit of the evidence of the recent flooding on the outskirts of town. I read that Bangkok was spared most of the damage of the flooding because the government diverted the water and flooded a lot of suburbs and cities nearby instead. We didn’t see too much water and, to be honest, some of that could easily have just been rice farms, but whatever the case I saw a lot more water around a huge metropolitan city than I would have expected somewhere else.

On that subject of huge metropolitan cities: Bangkok is gigantic. I’m not sure of the exact population but it might be the biggest city I’ve ever been to—and I’m including New York in that list. It’s like a mixture of the tall buildings everywhere from New York mixed with the spread-out-ness and car culture of LA, all wrapped with an Asian flair. Oh yeah, and they drive on the left side of the street too. Who still does that?!

Anyway, the three of us arrived and waited around near the baggage claim for Patrick who was on a different flight from Addis Ababa which arrived only a short while after us. We met up with him and then took the sky train into the heart of town. It was when we were on the sky train that the level of development really hit home for me. We were flying through at speeds of probably close to 100 km/h and from the windows we saw ten-lane highways, huge condominiums, shopping malls seemingly every twenty seconds, and (my personal favorite) Manchester United billboards all over the place. (MU has a big following in Asia and many companies are official sponsors so they use MU logos and images in their ads.)

Well, we got to the heart of town and rather than try to figure out the elevated train, we decided to walk what looked on the map to be just a few blocks. Well, it was a bit more than a few blocks but we made it and found a hotel to check in to. Patrick went and bought a SIM card for his cell phone and we ate our first Thai dishes. I got a Pad Thai (a bit cliché, I know) and it was fantastic. I had a few more Pad Thais from this women over the next couple weeks but this was definitely the best one. I think it was so good because it was my first meal in Thailand as well as my first taste of Thai food in about two and a half years.

After we ate, we decided to walk around some and retraced our steps a bit back towards the sky train as we’d seen some cool eateries and bars near a canal that was a few blocks that way. Well, we got there and the food stand was just that: a little stand with some ingredients, a few tables, and a few coolers filled with soda and beer. Well, we pulled a table out behind the stand near the canal. We ordered another plate of food, a few beers, and started playing some euker (a card game I picked up from other PCVs in Cameroon). Well, the light was getting pretty dim so we moved back closer to the stand and snagged a table there under a light. We saw an older white man sitting at another table chatting with the women there in Thai and sipping on a beer himself.

Well, we continued our game of euker and the woman from the stand came over at one point and looked on a little incredulously. Then, she started laughing and rattled something off in Thai towards us and went back to cooking. The white dude behind us laughed a bit and told us that she thought we were gambling. We asked him to explain to her that we weren’t gambling but merely playing a game. He shrugged it off and said it didn’t really matter because the police wouldn’t bother this woman. I did a bit of a double-take and asked something like, “Why would the police care if we played cards?” To which he responded, “Well, gambling is illegal here and if the police wanted to they could come up and arrest you or extort a big bribe from you for gambling because how are you going to prove you weren’t?” He really shrugged it off when we asked if we should quit playing or not which later made me wonder if playing cards was really such a big offense. (Note, however, I still have not seen anyone else playing cards in Thailand—foreigner or otherwise.)

About that time my buddy Joey from college called Patrick’s phone (I’d left the number at the hotel) telling me he was waiting for me at the hotel. Sweet! Joey has been travelling for over a year now and was most recently in India. I told him a while back that I’d be in Thailand in December so he decided to meet up with us for a bit. Well, he dropped his stuff off in Paul’s and my room and then we headed back to the bar/eaterie. By the time we got back the white guy was sitting at our table (stole my seat!) and was giving Paul and Patrick loads of advice and tips about Thai culture, customs, laws, etc. I found out his name was John and he was Australian, but he’d been living in Thailand for a very long time, he wouldn’t really say how long, only that he was on his third Thai wife. Some of his advice for us was pretty bizarre, though. For example, “don’t insult a ladybody, she’s much more beautiful and stronger than you are,” and “don’t rip, throw, or kick the Thai money, because the king’s face is on it!” Well shucks, I sure do love just kicking money.

After a while of talking with John we decided to head back to the hotel and turn in for the night. Paul and I split a room with Joey crashing on our floor and then Patrick and Henry split the other room.

****

The next day, I was the first awake at about 10. Jet lag will do that to you but luckily this was about the worst we got of it. We ate some grub and then went to the Citibank Bangkok office because Henry needed to pick up his new ATM card which he’d arranged to have sent there for him. Well, it wasn’t there and they just told him to call the US hotline and ask what to do. So we walked around a bit and I was incredibly tempted to hit up a Starbucks, though it was on the other side of the 8-lane street. Passed. We found a really cool outdoor market and basically sport-ate our way through it. Some of the things I remember eating: sushi, Thai sausages, grilled chicken, mangoes. We wandered around this sprawling market for a while, got lost, and when we came out the other side we just kept on walking. I think we walked for a ways through one of the financial districts before finding some noodle soup to snack on.

Eventually we found our way back to the elevated train and took it back to the hotel where we grabbed a couple beers, played some Settlers of Catan and relaxed. We started chatting with a French guy named Julian who was also staying at the hotel and he was at the tail end of a month-long trip that took him through Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

After chilling for a while we started hearing a faint cheering sound which was to be the main part of our night’s entertainment: Thai boxing. At one of the mall’s near our hotel they set up a rink and have Thai boxing matches every Wednesday. So we walked over and looked down on it from the platform of the elevated train. It was some pretty cool stuff and an American woman was even one of the participants. She lost, though, I think she took a few too many kicks to the guy. We started getting bets going about who would win each match: either the red trunks or the blue trunks. We also stipulated that we had to chose our corner before the match actually started, so we were basing the majority of our judgment on physical appearance, coolness of name, and how well they performed their dance before the match. Oh yeah, I had it down to a science as the players I supported won almost every time.

After a bit of that, we walked around and found some more food. I was being restless and kept looking for different food and ended up walking quite a ways. Finally we found a place that looked decent but as soon as we approached these shirtless guys sitting outside near our table were trying to get us to buy the food there. We kept asking them how much the dishes were and the prices were fluctuating incredibly. I mean, c’mon. If you’re going to scam us, at least be smart and consistent about it. We ended up leaving and going back towards the hotel and found something to eat around there. We talked with Julian a bit more and then found out that he had to wake up at 4 to catch a cab to the airport. Well, it was almost 1 at this point so we all decided it’d be a good idea to crash. (Un?)Fortunately, Joey and I weren’t that tired so we decided it’d be a good idea to call a bunch of our friends from back in Seattle and Phoenix using Gmail Call (1 cent a minute!). Eventually ,we got tired enough to go to sleep and Patrick told us the next day that they’d heard us giggling from the next room until about 3 am. It’s still hard for me to tell whether this was jetlag or just Joey and I whenever we get together. Probably both.

Well, my time here in Cameroon is coming to a close. In less than a week I will be out of Ngong and on my way. It’s been a terribly interesting experience here, both with Peace Corps and Cameroon. Some other volunteers have had their problems with PC and the Cameroonians they work and live with but the vast majority of my experiences have been very positive. If you’re thinking of joining the Peace Corps, I strongly suggest it—but only if you’re open enough and flexible enough to do it. I'll be doing some traveling in the coming months, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to or want to continue blogging. If I do continue, it'll be here on this site. Anyway, I don’t really know how to say goodbye on a blog or anything so instead I’ll just make a list of a few observations I’ve made and experiences I’ve had here…

Malaria sucks. There’s no other way around it, I’ve never felt that sick in my life.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, soccer is actually pretty cool.

No matter how awkward anyone is at dancing, Cameroonians love it. One of my favorite things about this country is that in almost any social situation, somebody can stand up and just start dancing (with or without a dance floor, usually the latter) and nobody thinks anything of it.

From everything I’ve seen, corruption and aid money are the two biggest deterrents for actual development.

Big 66 cl beers are far superior to small 33 cl beers.

Traditional wine—like bilbil or palm wine—is awesome, but don’t expect your bowels to agree with that statement.

Moto accidents suck. I’ve been in two but luckily neither of them was that bad.

Some people are just small-minded assholes. I sat at a restaurant in Yaounde once talking with somebody for an hour who accused me of being a spy. At the end of that hour, he still wouldn’t shake my hand. I’ve also seen volunteers berate Cameroonians for not being open to new things and then refuse to even try a meal that a friend prepared for them.

People can survive in 120 degree weather. But they don’t have to like it.

“Africa” by Toto, in all its kitschy glory, is actually a fantastic soundtrack to my life here.

Who knew grown men would follow Brazilian soap operas that are dubbed (poorly) in French?

The more it happened, the more it pissed me off when people would call me “white man” 40 times a day. I thought I would have gotten used to it. A good response, though, is “villageois”. Kinda like just calling someone ignorant or a redneck.

Cameroonian food can be amazing. With the right ingredients and spices it can be some of the best food I’ve ever had. Without those two things, though, it can be some of the most boring food I’ve ever had.

Having a cell phone that plays music is actual quite handy when packed into a bus and the only music playing is an auto-tuned woman singing in Hausa about cows.

I’ve gotten really comfortable being uncomfortable.

Time is something here that’s taken me a bit of getting used to. The Cameroonian (dare I saw “African”? I’m not sure it’s similar continent-wide) way of looking at time is incredibly different than my western, American way. I’ll try to describe some of the differences.

Well, for starters, people here are almost always late. I don’t mean like a number of people are consistently showing up 5 minutes late to meetings, I mean people don’t even start showing up most of the time until 45 minutes after it was supposed to start. I’m usually about 10-15 minutes late every Saturday for soccer practice and most of the time I’m one of the first five people to arrive. Another time, I was trying to hold a food security workshop for local women in community groups. It was supposed to be at a conference room at the mayor’s office and was also supposed to start at 8:30. Well, we told everyone to get there at 8 o’clock sharp and, sure enough, by 8:30 there was only 3 people there. (That turned out lucky, though, because my collaborator couldn’t show up until much later.) Finally around 10 we started, though most people had shown up by around 9:30.

I have a running joke with the doctor at the hospital about time. When he tells me a time to meet him somewhere I always immediately ask him, “Is that WMT or BMT?” Those acronyms stand for White Man Time and Black Man Time. White man time invariably means that if you show up one minute late: you’re late. Black man time means that you can show up sometime in the general vicinity of the given time, usually about 30 minutes late. (Side note: Those two phrases aren’t nearly as racist as everyone in the US ais probably thinking. Nope. In Cameroonian English and culture they don’t refer to Americans or Europeans as foreigners that often, instead we become “white man”—even the women—and any African is “black man.”)

The doctor frequently asks me if we can make our time “more elastic” when he’s running late, which is something I got a bit frustrated with at first. “Why tell me to be here at 7:30 if we won’t leave until 9?” I’d think. Eventually, though, I just learned to be patient. I’d shrug my shoulders, sit down, and people watch while waiting for him. I mean, most of the time I had nothing else to do, so why should I be rushed?

When I first arrived here, I didn’t really understand why people are so habitually late. Is it because of laziness? Is it because nobody wants to waste their time when everyone else is going to be late as well? Is it because nobody respects other people’s time? I think all of these reasons have potentially some degree of validity, but I also think it goes deeper than that. I believe now that Cameroonians just have a vastly different outlook on time and, consequently, life than most Americans.

In our western worldview, we tend to look at time as something fixed, as something that exists and, to a large extent, we follow. We tell people we’ll see them at a certain time, we want to watch a particular TV show at another time, we have to be at work no later than yet another time. In doing this, we kind of let time control us. Sure, we can make a decision to do something at a specific time, but then we pretty much have to plan everything else around it and be held captive or simply blow it off with the full knowledge that we missed out on something or inconvenienced somebody else.

Cameroonians look at time in a different way. Instead of being controlled by time, they look at it as something that you control, or something to disregard. Meeting at 4? Well, I’m not going to drop everything to go to it. I’ll finish what I’m doing, take care of myself and then show up when I show up. Will it be a bother to somebody if I’m not there at the time we agreed upon? Probably not, he’s probably doing the same thing. Instead of living by the clock like many Americans do, Cameroonians just live and act how they want to and often look at the time as an afterthought.

Here is a brief, introductory guide for how to haggle for goods and services at a market in Cameroon. I have compiled and perfected the method after many months (years, even) of trial and error until eventually it’s more of a game than actually an exchange of goods. Take note, and enjoy.

Step one: Walking through the market and greeting people

While strolling through the market, you should first and foremost wander as close to the middle of the street as possible. (I use the word street because it’s easiest. Other interchangeable words could include: alley, passageway, aisle, or human parking lot.) If you see a friend of yours walking the other way, step off to the side, shake their hand, and exchange greetings. How is the family? The house? How are your kids? By asking these important questions, the vendors in the market will realize that you are not a foreigner here and know the community enough to at least ask an acquaintance how they are doing. This will help later on when the haggling for a price actually starts. After a minute or so of discussing, bid your friend a good day, step back into the middle of the street, and continue on your way. If you are friends with any boutique owners, do the same with them.

Step two: Concealing desire or need

After you’ve been walking through the market for a short time, and after having greeted several people, you can ease up and start looking around for whatever it is you came here for. Whether it be mangoes, soccer jerseys, powdered milk, or a new machete, it is very important to not seem over anxious. Maintain a relaxed countenance—wearing sunglasses helps. Once you spot something you are interested in, leisurely make your way over to the shop (or stand or ground space as the case may be). If the proprietor was not already calling you over and was possibly busy with somebody else, wait until he acknowledges you. If this is perhaps a market in the southern part of Cameroon, or in a bigger city in the north, chances are people were shouting at you from half a block away to come to their shop and buy soap, bouillon cube, or bicycle parts. Unless there are no other options, ignore these shop owners. They know you are a foreigner and will be difficult to argue with.

Back to the first type of shop owner. Greet this man. Shake his hand. Say at least a few words in his dialect and, if you are capable, go through all the greetings and then even ask him for what you want in the local language. Ideally, he will be grateful that you learned the local language, but he will also know that you know a bit about the culture and will not be duped so easily. This is also why it helps to be spotted greeting friends or acquaintances of yours in the market. If vendors see that you know people around they will also be less likely to try to milk a few extra pennies from you. Once you have told him what you wanted, the real test begins.

Step three: Make a game out of it

The owner of the boutique will likely start at a price that is far too high. How high the price is depends on several factors: how many foreigners come through the market (more=much higher), how well you followed the previous two steps, and how well you know the owner—or rather how well he knows you. If the original price the owner gives is the actual price (or something very close to it), try not to be surprised. This has happened roughly eight times in the last thirty years, so don’t count on it. If you are lucky enough to experience the ninth time, however, buy the good under question at once, thank the man a lot, and also offer to buy him a cup of tea or a mango if there is a kid walking around selling either of them. This way, the owner will always give you the correct price right off the bat, and that will save you money and time.

Most of the time, though, you will be given a price that is ridiculously high. The first thing you do is act like you didn’t quite understand the person. Repeat the price in either the dialect or in French, with a big question mark at the end. Act incredulous: start laughing, and looking around to see if other people are noticing. If they are, ask them if the man you are talking to is a comedian or if he is crazy. The owner will probably be asking you what you want to pay for it at that time and trying to shut down the outside conversation. He will try to regain control over the situation. Don’t let him, make him wait. Talk to other vendors and people walking by and joke around with them that you didn’t know a new comedian was around, and maybe you should take him to (insert closest big city) to perform his act and maybe even go on television.

After some time discrediting the original price, ask the man if he needs to go to the hospital. Sometimes they will not understand what you mean by this. Explain that because of the crazy price you know that he is either one of two things: a very funny man who should be using his talents across the country to make people laugh, or a crazy man who has escaped from a psychiatric clinic and you’d like to take him back. He may be starting to tire from the joking around so now it is your turn to offer a counter price.

Step four: The counter offer

If the man started you off with an incredibly high price, it is 100% okay to low ball him that way. If he’s insulting your cultural intelligence with a stupid price, insult his back. But don’t be mean or vengeful about it. Always have a smile on your face that says “Don’t treat me like that, I know what I’m doing.” If the price wasn’t too astronomically high, though, it is proper to give a counter offer in the same ball park. Make sure to keep it as a game. Nobody likes when tensions rise, and keep in mind that the person is usually not trying to insult you or take advantage of you being a foreigner, they’re just trying to make a living.

Sometimes they will shake their heads if you’re counter offer is pretty low. They will start to put the shirt or goat back. This is when you put your hand on their shoulder in a friendly way and say “what is this, we don’t argue in a market?” Maybe they’ll pout and say something like “not like that” or “it doesn’t leave the house like that.” Well, you tell them that it’s the market and they should then come down to their next price.

Step five: The negotiation

You will go back and forth several times with the prices. Sometimes the vendor will tell you that even he didn’t buy the goods for that price. 99% of the time, this is a lie. I know this because I have gotten good for far under what some people have said they bought it for.

If the person is jerking you around and not coming down enough, one thing you can do is to stick with your price and tell him you won’t go any higher. Maybe they’ll get angry. Keep your cool. If the person is really not going to change their shifty ways and won’t give you a good price on something, come up a little more (maybe 200-500 cfa) and then say that’s your last price. When you say it’s your last price they will either do one of two things: they’ll stare at you and then place the goods back on the shelf (sometimes a bluff), or they’ll start dropping their price immensely, though still trying to get you to dish out a little more money. Whatever you do, stick to your price after you state your final price. If you come up from that, they know you can come up some more.

Step six: The purchase, or walking away

Once you have come to an agreement, give the man your money while they put the dried fish or tupperware in a plastic bag, and many times double or even triple-bag it. Never try to tell somebody that you don’t want a plastic bag because you either have so many at the house or because they are wasteful and bad for the environment. This is poor judgment on your part because the vendor will think you are crazy for not wanting a plastic bag, thereby possibly raising the price they will charge you next time.

If you haven’t come to an agreement, though, reiterate your last price one more time and walk away. You have to be prepared to lose it, though, or to start the negotiation somewhere else with somebody else. Because if the vendor does not call you back (which sometimes they will do as you are halfway across the market) and you come back to buy the goods from him, he will charge you even more than he said he was before, because he knows you want and need it.

Well, it certainly has been a minute since my last post. (Sorry about the video not uploading, too. I'm not sure I know a way to do so, any advice is welcome.) Things have been going pretty smooth as of late. I survived another hot season and this one was a bit rougher than the last. I was in a three day conference in Garoua during March that literally made me sick to my stomach. After lunch one day I almost got up to excuse myself because I thought I was going to be sick. I've got a few ideas as to why it might have been worse. The first is that I remember last year feeling like "hey, this is really hot but I'm not dying or anything." I don't know that it was any hotter this year than last year, but I think remembering it as not too bad last year was my first mistake. Also, I spend a good chunk of time in the grand south last April, at the height of the heat. Furthermore, we had a huge dust storm that rolled through last year and cooled everything off for about 10-14 days. This dust storm was so big and strong that some cities in the Far North region actually had to shut down business for several days because people couldn't see 5 feet in front of themselves. Lastly, people said this year that the hot season started earlier than last year. That point is debatable, though, as I remember it being pretty hot early on last year, and I also remember people saying last year that the hot season was early. My guess is that the hot season never comes late enough.

At the end of April this year I went down to Yaounde for a couple days for a committee meeting and then went to the West and Northwest to hang out with a few volunteer friends. It was a pretty sweet gig as I got to visit my buddy Henry in his pretty small village in the West and then I went up to Kumbo in the Anglophone Northwest. Kumbo is a fantastic city of around 150,000 making it the Northwest's second city. While there I had a great time eating some good Soya (like shishkabob beef) drinking beer at a bar with a second story balcony, and then also eating of the best chickens of my life at a restaurant called "Casa Blanca." The owner, Casa, is a Nigerian who makes a special variety of the Northwestern dish Chicken Didji, which is like boiled Chicken that is then fried with carrots, onions, garlic, and Casa's secret ingredient: loads of curry. Fantastic meal. Patrick, Jake, and I also went to a pretty awesome death celebration for this former big man in the government. Loads of dancing, shot guns being fired off, palm wine, and traditional masks and clothing.

Due to some transportation problems, I also stopped in Bamenda, the capital of the Northwest, on the way back to Yaounde. Saw a bunch of the volunteers in the area then and also had the closest imitation I've had to a cafe latte since being in Denmark last summer.

Since I got back to the North, I've been mostly focusing on trying to get some projects off the ground, and also saying goodbye to a good number of the volunteers who are peaceing out. The projects I've been working on are getting some Soy/tofu cooking classes going, HIV/AIDS testing, a food security conference scheduled for the first weekend in August, and I was also trying to do some work treating malnutrition for a while. Though that last project kind of fell apart as the hospital in Ngong never received the necessary supplements to give to the pregnant women we found who were at risk of being malnourished.

I also got a pretty wicked case of Malaria a couple weeks ago. I was laid out for a good two days and still pretty tired and sore for a few more days after that. Luckily, it was only my first one here (the French guy in my town has had it like at least 10 times) and it will hopefully be my last. No need to worry now, though, as I'm all better. I even scored a goal in our weekly soccer game on Saturday. So, maybe, the malaria made me get into even better form....

Here's a video the French guy in Ngong (Baudouin) made to re-cap 2010 for the Veteran's Club of Ngong. The first part is about our trip to Mogode, so I figured I'd post that and then people can see photos of Mogode, Rhumsiki, and then also check out some other things we've been doing.

Also, I have an idea to get the basketball court in Ngong paved. Basketball is quickly becoming a huge international sport but unfortunately our court in town at the high school is just sand (some of it pretty soft sand). Anyway, I figured I'd throw this out there and see if anybody knows international organizations or grant opportunities that fund sports-related endeavors such as this in Africa. If you know anything about it, please let me know!

Cheers.

So we headed out from Mogode, and got on the dusty path south towards Rhumsiki. The road ran along the east side of a valley and on the other side? Nigeria. As we drove along the scenery, which was already quite stunning, became increasingly bizarre and beautiful. (Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of it with me right now, I'll try to post some more from this whole trip on my next post). Towering volcanic plugs stuck out of the ground at seemingly random places, mammoth cliffs rose up and then descended just as quickly. We stopped a couple time to take some photos, and then again right outside of Rhumsiki at the top of a hill where we could see the town, a couple mountains, and a gigantic volcanic plug. Pretty crazy stuff. When I busted out my camera, everyone insisted that I take their photo, so now I have about 15 photos of people from my soccer club on my camera, and I'm a little hazy with some of their names.

We got into Mogode and pulled up to a hotel where we were told we had an hour to go around and check things out. Well, at this hotel there was actually a pool overlooking the big valley and the volcanic plug. Beautiful stuff, but Baudouin (the french guy) and I decided to walk around town instead and explore a little bit. We didn't want to sit at the nice, Western tourist hotel with a pool in the middle of nowhere. Why did this place even have a pool? I'm positive no local from the area could actually afford the price (1500 cfa) to swim there. We walked through some neighborhoods and came out to one outlook and marveled at it for a little bit. Some kid carrying around a bunch of trinkets and shoddy, 80's-style post cards came up to us and quite politely, though insistently, told us we needed a guide, a tell-tale sign that you're in a touristy area. Well, Baudouin looked at the kid and said "Oh my, you don't see me guide? He's standing right here!" At which point I said "What is this? You don't know me? How can you not know me, I live here!" The kid got pretty confused and rather than trying to argue the merits or our statements, kept insisting that we needed a guide. After a couple minutes of playing around with him we started walking away back to the main road. So, naturally, he followed us. We stopped after about 50 feet, told him, "Thank you for the offer but we don't want a guide." He just looked at us and we started walking again, so he did, too. After a few steps we stopped again and Baudouin asked him, "So you understand French, right? We don't want a guide. Please leave us alone." He again insisted that I didn't know where the good things to see in town where but he could show us for a small fee. I then looked at Baudouin and spoke my first words in English in a couple days and said, "Do you think we should just throw a rock at him?" I was joking but man was it a bad time to realize the kid spoke some English, too, because then he started hounding us in broken English about needing a guide. We cut him off and got pretty firm with him and asked him where he was going. He said into town, so we told him "Go then." As he started to speak again, we just kept cutting him off and telling him to basically get lost. He walked about 20 feet, stopped and turned around but we kept motioning for him to continue. Once he was out of site, we started walking again and took a different path to the market.

We got to the market and after walking around for a few minutes I looked at Baudouin and said "It's the same stuff as in Ngong." He responded that he was thinking the exact same thing. We found the bilbil (traditional millet wine/beer) market and then asked one guy who was standing there with his son if he knew a woman who made good bilbil. He led us to one mama's stand and we sat down and playfully asked her if her bilbil was any good. She was somewhat older with facial scarring and tattoos stretching from her forehead to her chin and she was wearing a really bright, intricately designed panye (flashy african fabric) dress. She looked at us blankly after the question so we then asked if we could have some bilbil. Again the blank look. So then I switched to fulfulde, and again she just looked at us and then at the guy who led us there. He then started rattling off in what I can only imagine was Kapsiki and she gave us two wooden bowls of bilbil. (Side note on Kapsiki: ever wonder what Mandarin, Greek, and Housa sound like when mixed together? Kapsiki!) We drank our bowls, thanked the mama, paid, and left. I don't remember the bilbil being particularly good, but we were a little afraid of the recent Cholera epidemic around to go bilbil hopping and try everyone's different brew.

We started walking back towards the hotel and ran across some veterans in a little boutique. I bought a bottle of water (100 cfa more than normal--another touristy sign) and even saw some post cards. How did Rhumsiki become such a tourist destination? Sure, the landscape is really pretty but the town itself is pretty unimpressive and the level of harassment you get from kids demanding pens, 25 cfa, and to be your guide was really annoying. And again back to the pool: why was there a pool in the middle of nowhere?! Bah. I'm glad I went to Rhumsiki, but I don't know that I'll be going back any time soon. Beautiful? yes. A bit of a tourist trap? yes.

Anyway, we got back to the hotel where a few people had gone swimming and a couple others were eating a meal. Somebody had even gone to get his fortune told by the "crab talkers," a group of guys who talk to little sand crabs and apparently can predict your future. Eventually we piled back into the bus, some people grabbed some beers for the road, and we headed out.

About twenty minutes in, one of the veterans pulled out a box of condoms and started tossing them around the bus. Why? Don't ask me. Well, about a minute later, an empty Guiness bottle started being passed around the bus and what was on the top? An unrolled condom. I feel like that kind of sums up the veteran's club of ngong: empty beer bottles and unused condoms.

The ride back was pretty long, but once we got back onto the pavement in Mokolo things were a bit easier. By the time we got to Figuil, though, I was uber-tired and basically a walking zombie. I ate a little bit of meat, a couple beignets, and drank a soda and actually felt a bit better. With the late breakfast and the walking around in Rhumsiki, I'd forgotten to eat lunch, and judging by the general energy level I think many people had. Well, once we were about 45 minutes outside of Garoua, we started singing. We went through so many celebratory and festive songs that everyone's spirits were lifted. We stopped for a few minutes in Garoua to drop somebody off and then continued on to Ngong where we threw open the windows and let anybody who was near the road know that we were back and in very good spirits.

Home, sweet home.

Well, the game was relatively uneventful. Amadou scored about 10 or 15 minutes in from a shot a third of the way down the field that just lofted in over the goalie's head (he was too far out). Mogode equalized at the start of the second half and I came in on the right wing a little bit after that. I fed a near-perfect ball to the president of our club, who was playing forward, but he bobbled it a bit and couldn't get a proper shot off. With about 5 minutes left to go, we took off two of our players and put in Rachel and Flo, the wives of two of our members, and the crowd went nuts. "Women playing on a man's soccer team? Incredible!!" I got moved around the field a bit as we frantically tried to see if we could knock in a winner. With a few minutes left (and the sun almost below the horizon) one of our defenders tripped up a Mogode striker who was on a fast break. Since he was the last defender and the only person left between the striker and the goal would have been the goalie, it should have been a red card. Thankfully, the ref just gave a free kick and to Team Mogode's complaints he said, essentially, "You're here for the brotherhood and to make friends! Not just to win!" Wise words.

So the match was a 1-1 tie. After the game we split up and went back to our respective houses to clean up. I took a bucket bath and Mbirama, the man of the house and my host, insisted that the water be heated up over the fire first. I tried for a while to persuade him that it wasn't necessary and I could shower with cold water with no problem. After a while, though, I just gave up. Sometimes it's better to accept the hospitality and be grateful, even if it's really not necessary. To top it off, the water was actually too hot! It wasn't necessarily burning but I was kind of uncomfortable at how hot it was.

Me and Mbirama wandered around Mogode a bit because I wanted to buy him a beer. Well, we went over to one bar and walked in and it looked like there was a little community group meeting happening. Everybody stared at me so I said "bonsoir." I could have broken the ice a little better with Fulfulde if we'd been somewhere else but this was Kapsiki country and people don't speak Fulfulde too much around there. We sat down and after some discussion we realized the bar was out of beer. Well fantastic. So we went to another bar down the street where they did have beer and a few other veterans were hanging out. Well, I didn't get to buy him a beer because he immediately paid for it. So much for trying to be a good guest, this guy was bending over backwards to be a good host.

We wandered over to the restaurant/community center/main bar in town where we were holding our party that night and eventually things got started. Mbirama was drinking beer like a fish and kept tagging along with me the whole time. I guess it was fine but I was enjoying talking with my friends and other members of the Mogode community as well. He even jumped right into my conversation with the Commandant of Yagoua (the general in charge of the troops in a big city in the extreme north) who was visiting his family here for the weekend by saying, "Hey, do you know me?" I kinda tried to keep my distance from Mbirama and circulated around to the other tables which was too bad because the Commandant I'd been talking to was really interesting. He even thought I was Canadian at first. I asked him if that was supposed to be a compliment, but he didn't get my joke.

Eventually we ate, some standard Cameroonian fare: shish-kabob style meat, grilled fish, ndole, rice, plantains, etc. It was pretty decent but by the time all of the food got out, some of it had become pretty cold. Naturally, because I'm a nasarra, I was one of the first people asked to go up and grab my portion. Again, this is a time where it's best to just accept it and move on, if you argue people will think you aren't grateful.

By this point it was beginning to get pretty chilly. Mogode is up at a higher elevation and gets pretty cold at night at some times during the year. This was one of those times. I was only wearing a short-sleeve shirt and my jeans. I got Amadou to let me wear this sleeveless hoodie he had which helped a little bit. Around 11ish, we did the standard thing where all the members get introduced and line up in front of everyone. "Et maintenant, nous avons Monsieur Harley, avec le Peace Corps." (And now we have Mr. Harley with Peace Corps.) It's pretty funny that certain people don't use the French translation of Peace Corps (Corps de la Paix) but instead on not only using the English name but also pronouncing the P and S at the end. C'mon guys, it's a French word to begin with.

I stayed for the first two obligatory dances and then Mbirama and I headed out, after I'd given him my free beer tickets so he didn't have to pay for the ones he'd been tossing back. I think I told people I had a headache (partially true) but really these types of Veterans parties get really boring for me and I was freezing. I went back and immediately hopped in to bed and went to sleep. I was a bit cold that night because I only had a sheet covering me but I managed and woke up a little after sun rise.

I went for a walk with Mbirama who wanted to go visit one of his friends who had been sick. Well, we got there and the guy immediately offered me a beer. As it was 8 AM I turned it down and instead asked for some tea. Mbirama took the beer and I was given a bit of tea and bread. After a few minutes Mbirama got up, left the room with his beer and left me with his friend who was just getting over malaria. That was a little bit awkward for a while because I think both of us felt obliged to make conversation. we were somewhat constrained because I was having some difficulties understanding the accent and he was having a hard time mustering the energy to speak after his bout with malaria. After about 10 minutes Mbirama came back and we took off back to his house.

We hung out for a little bit there, and I was getting impatient because the previous night I was told to arrive back at the restaurant place at 8AM for breakfast and then loading up for the long ride back to Ngong. Well, by now it was about 9. He kept insisting that I wait, be patient, he wanted to give me some breakfast. I was very grateful but the dude did not want to understand that I wanted to get back to where I was supposed to be. I know how bad this sounds, but his hospitality was starting to turn into a bit of a weight on my shoulders. Eventually I just said screw it, if the veterans need me, they'll call me, and I'll just wait here. Well, we had some meat in an oil-tomato sauce with bread and then they even got me a nescafe. Finally after that was done, I had some pictures taken with him and his family, and then we hopped on his moto to go to the restaurant. After we pull out a few feet he stops and says, I forgot something. Fantastic. Well, he went back into his compound and comes out with about a 10 kilo bag of unshelled peanuts. "It's a gift for you from me!" he told me.

I had some more breakfast at the restaurant and the veterans were slowly trickling in. Some were already on their second beer (it was about 10 am). I bought myself and Amadou a couple Djinos (like a fruity soda) and then for good measure I tried to buy Mbirama one too, but he asked to trade it for a beer. He had been so hospitable to me, even when it annoyed me, that I didn't really have the heart to tell him no. We gave some speeches to the Mogode members present about how grateful we were for the good time and how much we appreciated it. The president of the club said that we would actually be taking two buses back to Ngong, one for us and one for all of the babies they made that night. Holla.

So we loaded up the bus, hopped aboard, bid adieu to Mogode, and headed off to Rhumsiki, about 10 k down the road and a big tourist spot in Cameroon...

Well, it was pretty smooth sailing after we left the old principal. We kept continuing north and a little bit before Maroua, we turned off onto the road to Mokolo. At that intersection, though, we stopped for a bit to wait for Baudouin, a French NGO worker who lives in Ngong and another fellow veteran, who was doing some work in Yagoua, a city in the Extreme North, but finished the day before so he could meet up and come with us. Well, I walked a little bit and grabbed a coke with Amadou and by the time we got back, Baudouin had arrived and we were ready to roll.

We hopped back in the car and took off. The next stop was Mokolo, a little over an hour from the turn off. The further west we drove, the more the scenery started looking like New Mexico’s. The vegetation became more sparse, the hills and mountains became a bit more jagged, and I started seeing some plants that looked incredibly similar to Mesquite trees. Maybe I was a little homesick, but I almost felt a sense of déjà vu from the sights of everything around.

In Mokolo we stopped for about 15 minutes to grab some street meat to tide us over until we got to Mogode. I didn’t see a whole lot of Mokolo but for some odd reason it reminded me a bit of Santa Fe. There was nothing incredibly nice or Santa Fe-y about it but for some reason I felt reminded of the city I was born in. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the scenery around it was so similar and the cities are about the same size (Mokolo might be a little bit bigger, actually).

The road after Mokolo was rough. The pavement ended with the town and so after that we had about 35 kilometers of beat, uneven dirt road. Also, it was getting pretty hot so we had the windows open, but that also allowed the dust to come streaming in through the windows. I covered my nose and mouth with my shirt but I was really wishing I had brought a handkerchief with me. Amadou, always the fashionista, kept his head and torso covered with a jacket and kept brushing the dust off so he wouldn’t get, or rather stay, dirty. Finally the president of the club turned around and said “Leave it Amadou! You’re just going to keep getting dusty, wait until we arrive!” At one point we were driving along the road and there was a shallow valley off to our left and a small mountain on the other side of it. Somebody turned to me and said, “See that? It’s Nigeria.” I answered with something like, “you mean those mountains a ways off?” “No,” he replied, “The bottom of that valley there.” I was literally a stone’s throw away from Nigeria. Literally.

Well, we pulled up to the outskirts of Mogode, a fairly small town (maybe around 10,000-15,000 is my guess) and some members of the veterans club met us there. We got out and took some photos and boy was the scenery pretty. Volcanic plugs and jagged mountains shooting up out of the arid landscape. Eesh it was nice. We drove into town and made a big convoy/tour with all the motos accompanying us. We drove all over town and then got to the sous-prefet’s (government official’s) house where we said hello and introduced ourselves.

After that, we went to the house of the president of the Mogode Veterans Club. We had a pretty decent lunch there and the mood was very festive. One veteran, Alioum, even busted out dancing randomly for a few seconds. I had a sprite (from Nigeria as we were so close) and underneath the cap it said “Open again for more happiness!” Drink more, Coca Cola says, Drink more.

At this point we all got our assignments for the night of where we were going to sleep. I got assigned to this Elementary school teacher’s house and so we left, hopped on his moto (with my helmet of course), and zipped over to his house. His accent was a bit hard for me to understand as he slurred his speech quite a bit, and I actually don’t think he was too terribly strong with French. As we were going over to his house I kept having to tell him I didn’t understand what he was saying and so when we got there he stumbled a bit in broken English and said that somebody had come to his house on Monday (it was a Saturday, remember) while he was at school and burned it down. His concession was the type with a number of separate small one and two-room huts and the only thing left of his were some scorched mud brick walls. All of the guy’s clothes were in there, along with his identity papers, bank papers, moto documents, in short: just about everything of material value of his, save the clothes on his back and his moto. It was at this point that I noticed a faint scent of whiskey of him. Later, somebody explained to me that the fire wasn’t an accident, somebody came and specifically burned it down. The guy told me that he had two wives and somebody guessed to me that one of the wives, or maybe a girlfriend, got jealous and came and burned it down. He did talk about the burning of his house quite a bit but he always came back to saying, “I have my health and my family is safe, so I thank God.” I guess it’s good to always keep a positive attitude.

Well, I put my stuff in the room I was going to stay in, and then headed over to the soccer field. A few people were already hanging out and stretching. I started warming up a little bit and people slowly started trickling in. It was starting to get kinda late, and we weren’t sure we’d have enough time for the game so rather than do a full warm up, we did a couple sprints across the field and then a few stretches. And then the game started….

I recently took a trip to Mogode in the Extreme North with my soccer team. Here is the story…

I.

I woke up at 4am on this particular Saturday and, after hitting snooze a few times, I got up and finished arranging my bags and getting everything together for the quick, whirlwind trip to Mogode, a town in the Extreme North region of Cameroon. A few weeks back, one of the government officials from Mogode invited us, the Veterans Club of Ngong, to come play a friendly match. Naturally, we said okay and after raising the money for transportation (10,000 cfa/person) we were ready to go.

Several people told me the day before to get to the sous-prefet’s office at 5am, no later, as it was a long trip and we needed to make good time. Well, I got there a few minutes after 5 and, in typical Cameroonian time-management fashion, I was probably the fifth person there. I sat around and talked to a few other veterans for a bit as people slowly started trickling in. One person asked me what was wrong because I looked sad. No no, I said, I’m just sleepy, I want to be back in my bed. Well, he replied, Wake up! We don't sleep on this bus! Oh, and that bus that was supposed to be there by 4:30? Well, it showed up around 6. Around 5:45, a few people started opening their first beers of the day. I abstained, but it was at that point that I knew what kind of day this would turn out to be.

We loaded up the bus and I sat next to my friend Amadou, a flashy guy with dyed blonde/yellow hair, a pretty spiffy man purse, and a really good soccer player. He even told me once that when he was younger he played for a time in the Cote d’Ivoire leagues. Anyway, we sat together making jokes and screwing with each other. We were also doing little pranks like tapping somebody’s shoulder and then pretending to be asleep or tickling somebody’s neck with a piece of grass. Real mature stuff, I know.

We had to stop in Garoua to wait for the president of the club who had to take care of something at the Catholic Mission there before we left. Well, it turned out to be about an hour stop so, naturally, as the people who had been drinking beers were out, they went for a quick run to a beer store. I tried to get some people to kick the soccer ball around with me but nobody really wanted to. Interesting, seeing as the supposed purpose of the trip was to play a soccer game. Anyway, the president finally got there and we took off.

On the bus, everybody was laughing and joking around about how they were all going to have newborns the next day after the party tonight, and it seemed that half the people on the bus were playing music with their cell phones…at the same time. Well, somebody had the bright idea to put one of the memory cards into the stereo on the bus so that cut down on the number of songs playing at once, though there were still multiple going on. But as things seem to happen here, the memory card would quit working after a song or two so the vice president in the front seat would skip songs, people would yell at the “DJ” about missing a song, and eventually the card would be changed. (“C’est les cartes chinois!” It’s those Chinese cards!)

About an hour and a half out of Garoua, we stopped in a town called Figuil for breakfast. Figuil is a dusty city on the main road to Maroua and its main claim to fame is that there’s a gas station and a huge cement factory there. Well, breakfast consisted of bread and some beef in a bouillon sauce. Pretty tasty, but all-in-all a pretty standard Northern Cameroonian breakfast. I also had a glass of sweet tea (“Shai” in Fulfulde) and the wife of one of my friends gave me a can of orange juice because she said I looked tired and needed the energy. When another volunteer saw me drinking both at the same time, he told me “Harley! how can you mix the hot and the cold!” I replied, “I’m not! I take a drink of one and then a drink of the other later… it’s not difficult.” He shook his head in disbelief.

We had been making pretty good time before Figuil but, unfortunately, after Figuil the nice, new, pot hole-free road that the EU built ends. After that it’s still pavement but we were frequently swerrving around pot holes, driving on the other side of the road and, a couple times, almost coming to a complete stop to maneuver through some tricky dips and holes in the tar. As we kept driving north, the scenery kept getting drier and browner, with less trees and more yellow grass. In the dry season (which we just started about a month ago) the North region (where I live) is pretty hot, pretty dry, and pretty desert-y. I get the impression the Extreme North region is like that most of the time, and has a legit claim to being in the Sahel desert.

About an hour outside of Figuil we saw a little green sedan on the side of the road with a smashed up front end that continued to a caved in windshield. A couple people were standing by it, one person in a Red Cross-logoed vest, and I realized the wreck had happened shortly before we got there. Somebody shouted out “That’s the principal’s car!” I wondered what the principal from Ngong was doing in the Extreme North until I remembered he was affected up here over the summer. The president of the club talked with the guy in the vest and apparently the principal’s wife had been driving with one other person in the car, not the principal. He wasn’t sure how everyone was. We got a move on again and a few minutes later when we had some service the president called the principal and he said that nobody was too terribly hurt, but we decided to stop by his town (about 20 minutes later) to visit for a short time with them.

We met the principal at the hospital and I think he appreciated all of us visiting. Then we visited with his wife and a younger man who might have been his son (I wasn’t exactly sure) in a hospital room. The younger guy looked to be in some pain and had a taped up wrist and some blood on his shirt. The wife didn’t seem to be injured, though it was hard to tell for just a short amount of time because I didn’t linger.

Outside of the room, one of the veterans Noele was sitting on the steps with his head in his hands. A few months ago, Noele had been in a pretty bad car accident—the car had rolled several times though, luckily, he wasn’t seriously hurt. I’m sure seeing the car wreck and the boy who was hurt was just bringing back memories. A couple other veterans were sitting with him and then got him up to walk away, holding his hands and with their arms around him. Cameroonian camaraderie.

We loaded up the bus again and hit the road.

When greeting somebody in Fulfulde, it’s proper to ask a series of questions, essentially about how the other person is. This can range from 2 or 3 questions to 5 minutes of questions, depending on how much you know the other person or how much respect you have for them. The response to each of them is almost always one of three things: “Jam nii,” “Jam koodume,” or “Koy dum nii.” The first and last mean “fine” and the middle response means like “really fine.” The answer depends on how the questions are asked and also how you answered the last question. Usually Jam koodume isn’t used multiple times in a row, though Jam nii or Koy dum nii can be. Also, one other thing used from time to time is “al hamdu lillaahi” which is Arabic and means “Thank God,” or “Thanks be to God” or something like that. The questions can go back and forth, sometimes with each person asking and responding at the same time; sometimes one person asks for a while and then switches; and still other times a chief or lamido will just sit there and the other person will ask him the questions. It can get quite confusing. Here are a few of my favorites, in Fulfulde and then with a rough English translation…

(Note: most greetings in fulfulde don’t use verbs, so I’ll put the direct translation and, if necessary, what it actually means)

Sannu! Hello/good day!

Mi hofni ma. I say hello to you.

Jam. Fine/hello.

Jam na? Fine, yes? (Are you fine?)

Jam bandu na? Body fine, yes? (Is the body fine?)

Jam saare na? House fine, yes?

Jam saare ma na? Your house fine, yes?

A don habda, na? Are you managing? (Can also be translated as “Are you defending yourself?”)

Jam bikkon na? Children fine, yes?

Noy? How?

Noy guldum? How heat?

Noy peewol? How cold?

Noy nange? How sun?

Noy kuugal? How work?

A don saati na? Are you are hard? (I kid you not, they use this.)

Noy saati? How hard?

Noy comri? How tired? (How is the tiredness/fatigue?)

Noy sukle? How work?

A hirti jam na? You passed a good night, yes?

Noy ndiyam kadi? So then, how rain?

Noy laawol? How road/path? (This one is usually used if you’ve just come from/to somewhere)

A wari na? You have come, yes?

A nyalli jam na? You passed a good day, yes?

Well, it's been a little while since I last posted anything and I think it's probably because of several reasons, one of which is that I've been busy travelling (back up to post after the training workshop) and then back down a few days ago to Bafia, a city about two hours from Yaounde where the new training group is. I'm here doing a few sessions on infectuous diseases and food security. anyway, I figure I'll write a little bit about my journey down, as it was definitely a different experience than anything else I've had in this country.

I had a reservation to take the train on saturday with another volunteer, Kim O. We got to the train station in Ngaoundere at a decent hour on that morning to pick up our tickets but unfortunately they were all out of the two-person sleeper car rooms so we had to get spots in a four-person one, and split it with a cameroonian couple. We kind of lounged around for most of the day, I grabbed lunch at a decent restaurant down the street, watched some Office episodes, and then at about 2:30, Kim and I went across the street from the peace corps house and hung out at this restaurant/bar to watch the cameroon-congo soccer match which is a qualifying match for the 2012 african cup of nations. I'm going to take a step back and first say that the match was in Garoua that day. Garoua, the city 35 minutes from my post. I was pretty pissed when I found out that the game was going to be in Garoua because I HAD to take the train on the 9th in order to be in Bafia on time to help with training. anyway, Kim and I had a beer or two and watched the game. While we were sitting there, I started chatting with this chain-smoking Lebanese guy who lives in Ngaoundere now and he was a pretty interesting guy. We talked a little about religion and language and then about the conflicts that have been going on there for a while. Around half-time he got up and left and paid for our beers which was pretty awesome. Kim and I ordered some food, I got a meat sandwich that I ate there and then a hamburger that I was planning on eating on the train. I called a volunteer at the game and expressed my extreme disappointment at his lack of getting a wave started. Less than five minutes later, the TV cameras were focussed on the wave circling the whole stadium. Kudos to you, Mike.

After the game (a disappointing 1-1, own-goal tie) Kim and I got our stuff together and made our way down to the train station and got there at about 5. The train is normally supposed to leave at 6 but when we pulled up, we didn't see it there. We heard an announcement which I thought said something along the lines of "the train will leave an hour and a half late" but kim thought said something about 1:30 in the morning. Anyway, I ordered a beer and said "well, if the train's leaving soon then I'll have to finish this quickly and we'll hop on." I asked our bartender if he had any news on the train and he shrugged and said "nothing. It hasn't come yet." Normally, the train gets in at around 10am, so I thought he meant it hadn't come back from being serviced yet, but he clarified and said "no, it hasn't arrived from Yaounde yet." Merde. About that time I got a call from Brian, the volunteer in Ngaoundere who said he'd just got a call from another volunteer, Anais, who was on the train and stuck about 3 or 4 hours south of Ngaoundere because the engine was broken and they were waiting for another one to come and pick them up. After this, I called Anais and I said, "so you think it'll be about 3 or 4 hours 'till it gets here?" to which she replied, "try 8 or 9 hours." Merde.

So I went into the train station and talked to a woman who gave me her phone number, said to go home and call her in two hours and she'd let me know the news. So Kim and I gathered up all our stuff, headed back to the peace corps house, ate the food we'd bought for the train, and then I went to grab a beer with Brian and one of the guards for a business next door. We sat around for a while and around 8 I called the woman again and she said "it's still not here, call back in two hours." I didn't mind too much, though, because I was having a decent time shooting the shit with Brian and his friend. Around 10, I tried to call her again and she didn't answer. Being overly optimistic, Kim and I thought maybe the train had arrived and she was too busy to answer her phone. So we went back to the station and, my god, it looked like a refugee camp. Hundreds of people crammed into a small waiting room, sleeping on the floor, fluorescent lights glaring down. We found the woman who said, "train's still not here, call back in two hours." So (for the third time that day) we went back to the peace corps house. We watched an episode of the office, though I started falling asleep during it. We started another episode when Jessie, one of the volunteers at the house came out and said "you guys came back?! I thought I just heard the train whistle." Then, we called the woman again and couldn't really make out if the train was leaving in an hour and a half or if it would arrive in an hour and a half. I called this guy Brian knew and he said "the train will arrive in 13 minutes." So, it being about midnight, Kim and I gathered our stuff again and made our way over to the train station.

The train had just pulled up when we arrived and so we put our stuff down out front of the station and sat there for about an hour, during which time the train pulled away to be serviced and cleaned. There were so many people inside that we couldn't really see the doors so around 1 we moved inside, pretty close to the front. Needless to say, I was getting a little grouchy. The German girl standing behind me who's backpack kept hitting me in the head wasn't helping. Kim and I sat on our moto helmets, backpacks between our legs and essentially took turns dozing off until the train finally came back from being serviced around three. Everybody stood up and the porters started coming through pushing people aside and carrying bags around. One guy in front of me pushed a porter who was trying to get through and yelled at him "there's no room here! Go back and around!" then the porter tried to go past me and I did essentially the same thing, which really pissed him off. He started yelling at me about how we're not at "Chez les blancs" and how he doesn't like "les blancs" in his country and how if he dropped that bag, I would have to pay for it. I then used some of the nifty French my French friend in Ngong taught me to tell the guy to piss off and find someone else to bother. When he persisted I increased my profanity and was actually quite proud at how in my tired state I was able to express myself how I would in the states when some jackass is judging you based on arbitrary reasons. When the guy kept muttering things about me as he was walking away I loudly said something about how if he wasn't drunk he could probably walk straight and stop bumping into everyone. Those who weren't too tired laughed at the idiot walking away.

The doors opened a few minutes later and Kim and I made it to our cabin, claimed the top bunks, and then discovered out window didn't open. Shiiiiit. I was too tired really to care, so I just went to sleep and then I think we left sometime after four. Around 8, I woke up because an annoying guard came in and demanded the two Cameroonians in the room pay him money for some onions they had in a box. Then, after 10 minutes of arguing and they paying him, he finally started to leave. As he was closing the door, though, he started bothering them again about something and I sat up in bed, looked at the guard and said "We are trying to sleep. Get out of here and stop bothering us." He started apologizing and explaining to which I said, "I don't care. You can't see I want to sleep? You talking is not helping." Well, I didn't really get back to sleep after that as it was too hot in the room so I went out to the front of the car where a couple guards were hanging out and had the doors of the train open. In the US this would be against quite a few safety regulations but here, well, one of the doors didn't even latch closed. So I sat there, on the floor, next to the bathroom, between two open doors and two guards and let the cool wind blow over me. I talked with one of the guards for a while and then found out he was Congolese. A little later I found out he was actually a UNHCR (UN human crisis relief) Refugee who'd been in Cameroon for a few years. Really nice guy and for the next three hours I spent sitting with them and talking. Kim and I split a plate of chicken and fries and then she came out to sit with us too. Around 3ish, (keep in mind the train normally arrives at 9 or 10am) it started raining, and the cool mist wafting in the doorway felt so soothing and relaxing after all the heat and grime. I stood a little behind the doorway at one point and let my head get wet. Then I went back to our room and tried to sleep, which I accomplished for about an hour and a half before the heat because too much again. When I woke up, I looked down at the lower bunks at the food the Cameroonians had purchased and seeing that it was baton de manioc (a very stinky cassava concoction) I decided it was time to go hang out with my guard buddies at the front again. Well, Kim and I ended hanging out there until we got to Yaounde, about another 1.5-2 hours. Finally, a little after seven we got in to the train station. By far the worst train ride of my life, and one of my worst experiences here, so far, but there are a few silver linings. And they are...

I wasn't alone so I had someone to commiserate with.

I didn't have to quickly finish my beer at the Ngaoundere train station.

At least there was a cool place at the front of my car, albeit next to the bathroom.

I wasn't stuck on it for 36 hours like the volunteers who had been on their way up.

Well, maybe bronze linings is a more accurate description. Hopefully the train has recovered and isn't so shitty on the way back up on thursday.

I'm in Yaounde (again), and I've been here for over a week now. Man, I am ready to get back to post. There's really not much to do in Yaounde except spend money on expensive western food and/or drink beer. But there's only so much money you can drop before you start to feel your soul drip out through your wallet and evaporate into the pockets of the wealthy Yaounde-ites who cater to the tastes of westerners who miss the culinary traditions of their homelands.

Well, it's been awhile since I updated anything about my work life so I'll go ahead and give a brief update. Before I left Ngong I was doing demonstrations about 4 times a week on various health topics from Malaria to nutrition for mothers and babies to the importance of vaccinations. The first day I did my nutrition presentation to pregnant mothers I mentioned the importance of eating meat and getting lots of iron because pregnant women are at a high risk of anemia in our part of the country. Well, when I went in the next day all the nurses told me that about half of the women bought anemia-prevention medicine which definitely shows that at least I had an impact and got through to the women--if not necessarily in regards to how they can naturally prevent anemia through diet.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm in Yaounde right now and I'm here because I've been selected to help out with training for the new group of agro and health volunteers arriving in a couple weeks. I'll be coming down and presenting the technical sessions on Diarrheal Diseases, Water & Sanitation, Malaria, and Food Security. The last one I'll be doing with my friend Patrick, an Agro who lives in the Northwest. I'm really excited, though, because I will also be in Bafia (the new training city) when the groups find out their posts. Not only will I be able to see who'll be the new kids around me but I'll be able to give information on a lot of the northern posts and calm some of the unavoidable fears of the trainees going to the grand north.

On the back burner right now is my trash collection project. I've been green-lighted for funding, the only snag right now is that I don't have all of the prices down for the plaques I'd like to have made for our sensitization campaign. Hopefully I'll be able to find those out before I head back up north on Wednesday night.

One other project I'm working on right now is getting a pump fixed with Chris, a SED (small enterprise development) volunteer about 22 k from me. The pump is in a small town called Rabingha, 4 k south of me. Chris is going to do some savings and general money-managing classes with the members of the water committee there, and I'll be doing some water sanitation sessions with whoever wants them.

I also did a short jam-making project a while back. It started out pretty well, but I definitely started the project too late into the mango season, so I wasn't able to teach as many people as I wanted to and I doubt the women I taught had much time to practice before the mangoes were all gone. Oh well, next year I'll have to start when the mangoes arrive.

There was an outbreak of cholera in my health district back in July but, as it stands, we've only had seven cases (none in Ngong proper) and no deaths. The last case was also over a month ago, so we're pretty sure that this specific outbreak in our district is done. Knock on wood. Who knows when another case will slither on down from the Extreme North and infect more people, though. I went out to the town where the first case was and, let me tell you, I have no idea how there weren't 100 cases. The latrines were uncovered, dirty dishes were laying around everywhere, and the well where people got their water was horrible. It was about 200 meters from the big river in the North (the Benoue) and the water table was only about a foot below the surface. The water was so cloudy and dirty that I couldn't see more than five or six inches below the surface. It looked like the water in my buckets after I get done washing my clothes. Anyway, the authorities treated the well (LOADS of chlorine in it, closing it off for a couple days), and made everyone who lived nearby start boiling their water and using chlorine when washing their dishes.

Well, guess that's about it for now. I'll probably be pretty busy in the next couple months, what with traveling back down here for training and working on the pump and trash projects.

Until next time....

Peace Corps is a unique and interesting organization for innumerable reasons, though the one I'd like to look at now is how it affects the relationships between people.

I thought of this pretty early on after I arrived in country but Peace Corps really is like a revolving door of people. When we first got here, most of the volunteers we met and got to know left before we even finished training because their two years of service were up. After that, a few people I got to be good friends with left again back in June-July, with a new group in to replace them. Throw in the people who have to randomly go home due to family illnesses or other reasons and you can see how there's constantly people filtering in and out of my life around here. Now, a good number of my friends and volunteers around me are going to be leaving in November and December and I think that's going to be pretty tough on me. Sure, I've still got some friends around me, as well as the rest of my training mates who I'll see when I come down to Yaounde, but I feel like I slipped in pretty well to the health/agro stage before mine and it's going to be a sad day for me when they're all leaving and off to bigger and better things. I know that might sound like an egotistical thing for me to say but I guess I'm just saying that I'm going to miss everyone when they leave.

Peace Corps also does an interesting number on personal relationships. During training, friendships and relationships are on a hyper-accelerated pace as we spend 8+ hours a day together. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as you get to know people pretty well in those short 11 weeks. Since training, though, I haven't really seen much of the others from my training group as I am pretty far away from them all, so many of these friendships have kind of fallen to the side. Somebody warned me that it would be hard to stay involved with their lives being, at the least, a 2 day journey from 90% of them. With a few exceptions, it's turned out to be pretty true. So I became good friends with the people around me in the North region, a good number of who are leaving in the next 3 months.

Another volunteer nearby me who has been here for close to 3.5 years now has said it's hard seeing people you trained with go, and while I didn't train with the people leaving soon, I definitely became good friends with them. I might take a couple days of vacation and go hang out with him in the Extreme North in December before the new volunteers arrive, to get away from all the empty posts.

Maybe this blog has been a bit of a downer. I hope not, but it's been something on my mind a lot lately.

Alright, well, it's been a while since I've posted something and I've definitely not been standing still so I figure I'll write about a little travelling I've just done.

I just got back from a nine-day vacation in Denmark where I visited with my family that lives there as well as my parents and three of their friends who were taking a little vacation of their own in Scandinavia. Even though I love my post, my friends, and many things about this country, it was really nice to take a break from Cameroon and my Peace Corps duties. The first thing I did after my red eye flight to Brussels where I was changing planes was run to the Starbuck's in the main terminal (after passport control, that is). I got a tall latte, and boy was it amazing. I haven't had anything other than Nescafe or the occassional cup that I brew myself in 9 months so I was thrilled to be able to gulp down a shot of espresso mixed with delicious, frothy milk. I usually avoid Starbuck's in the states but, hey, beggar's can't be choosers. They even let me pay with some US dollars I'd brought with me! I figured I didn't want to push my luck and see if they'd take some of the Central African Francs (cfa) I also had in my wallet.

After that, I was hungry so I started wandering around, wondering what to get. I saw a Pizza Hut express which wasn't open, a little food court with some traditional Belgian dishes, as well as a few cafes and bars that were quite full at 9 in the morning. I wandered around from place to place, wondering what to get to satisfy my desire for Western food. Do I wait around for that deep dish with pepperonis at the Pizza Hut? Should I just get a burger or some pasta at the food court? Is it too early for a Stella or Hoegarden? Then I started looking at the prices. Seven euros for a personal pan pizza, 5.50 for a small beer, 12 for a burger with fries and a coke. I started going through this in my head, changing these euros back to CFA, and realizing that a meal here would likely cost about as much (if not more) than what I normally spend in a week on food. I felt incredibly conflicted about what to do. Could I justify to myself spending this much money on a meal when I haggle over pennies in the market? As my hunger increased and my flight to Copenhagen approached, I frantically wandered the airport trying to figure out what to do. I ended up just getting a bag of chips and some gummies from a vending machine. I also searched for a Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew but came up empty handed.

My other little cultural touble--I don't want to say shock as that's a little extreme--came the following morning when I woke up at my cousin Tess's house and it came time to brush my teeth. Normally I just brush my teeth without water as it's a bit of a hassle to bring a water bottle outside with me at home, and I definitely don't use the tap water when I'm in bigger cities. I stood in front of the sink for probably a minute telling myself I would be fine to use the sink water. I drank some of that water the day before, but for some reason there was almost a mental barrier for me with using this tap water that I knew was safe. I ended up using it but it took some mustering up of courage to do so. Throughout the rest of my trip I still had a bit of trepidation every time I filled up my glass or water bottle at a sink.

I'm not terribly sure the rest of my trip would be that interesting to anyone so I'll just throw in a few more highlights. Yes, I had some McDonald's. Twice. It wasn't Taco Bell, but it did the trick. I had so much amazing Danish food, mostly centered around their cheese and what I consider one of the least appreciated cheese-cultures in the world. I believe I put on about 9 pounds in the 9 days I was there which is pretty good considering I'd lost quite a bit of weight since arriving in Cameroon. There's also a microbrew on the island my uncle and aunt live on that makes some really delicious beers, including one of the best American Pale Ales I can remember drinking. I didn't have too many, but I cherished each one. My last night in Copenhagen, I went to the big town center with my cousin Ben to watch the Denmark-Japan match. Well, after Japan got off to a quick 2-0 lead, we decided to go meet up with my other cousin Tess at an Irish pub where we watched the game and then danced to this Irish guy playing a guitar and singing mid-90's classics such as "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Wonderwall." I convinced Tess to ask him how he felt about playing "Sunday Bloody Sunday" though he tactfully responded with "As an Irishman, I'm over it."

At the beginning of the trip when I was in the Yaounde airport, I initially feared not wanting to get back on the plane at the end of the trip. As the trip went on, though, I started to get easier and easier with the idea of coming home to Cameroon. Throughout my whole time there, I was not-too-secretly hoping the second volcano in Iceland would go off, thus "stranding" me there for a while longer. When I got on the plane at 6:15 am, though, I was glad to be starting my journey back. In the last couple months, Ngong has really become home for me and I really enjoy my time there, even with some of the problems I've been having. My step-mom said something to me at one point that was like "I can tell you're not 100% here." I hadn't really thought of it but once she said it, I had to agree. It was great to see my family and relax but quite often I was wondering how my friends were doing in town, what other volunteers were up to, if anyone had eaten my cat and, if not, how little Chavez was doing. And now that I'm here I am not sure that my mind's 100% back. It's a weird feeling to not know where your mind really is, caught between two worlds.

The 20th of May is Unification Day in Cameroon, the day that the Anglophone and Francophone regions were reunited under one government, the year after independence. It is a huge national holiday and I’d equate it to the 4th of July in the U.S. Here is my story.

I woke up on this bright, sunny, hot Thursday morning to yet another day without electricity. The power had been out since Sunday, (it ended staying out for more than another week) and many people were pretty pissed because they expected this to effect the festivities. Well, you be the judge as I continue the story. Anyway, I got up and put on one of my boubous and then started wandering through town, grabbing some beans and beignets along the way, until I arrived at the stadium where the parade was supposed to start at 9. Naturally, I’d forgotten my camera at my house so I snagged a moto back and forth, getting back to the stadium around 10ish, before anything had even started. Our lamido cruised up in his nice Land Rover, surrounded by his guard of men in colorful outfits, equipped with swords, and giant umbrellas, all seated on Arabian horses. If it wasn’t for the Land Rover I would have said it seemed like something out of Aladdin. I walked around a little bit until I heard a familiar voice call out “Nassara! Nasarra! Alhadji!” I turned around and saw Baudouin, the French NGO worker in town, with a friend of his from France who was (and still is) visiting named Marie. We wandered around for a while and made our way over to where the school children were lined up and talked to some of the teachers Baudouin used to work with. The parade finally started sometime after 11 and was, for the most part, exactly the same as every other parade I’ve seen here. The schools march in order, each group carrying a Cameroonian flag, occasionally singing and praising Paul Biya, occasionally clapping or doing a little choreographed stutter-step. We saw Linda, the Anglophone owner of the bar which is the general hangout for us and our friends, and she said she had cold beers at her place. I didn’t catch some of what they said then because they were rattling off in some pretty rapid French but I did here her say something like “Oh, I know my clients. They’ll drink the beer even when it’s hot.”

After a few hours under the hot sun, the three of us were quite thirsty so naturally we decided to leave the parade and go to Chez Linda, where Linda’s husband Ekambi was keeping an eye over everything. We had a couple beers and we knew that this was going to be the place to be as Ekambi had gone to Garoua that morning and bought a bunch of ice. Anyway, we hung out for a while, and watched as the parade ended and everyone streamed back into town and then realized this place had cold drinks. The mayor even showed up, fully decked out in his boubou made of Paul Biya panye(fabric), and had a Fanta. Somewhere around mid afternoon I went home to change out of my boubou and then got back only to see that several of our friends we’d been hanging out with were back at the stadium for the over-50 soccer match that was going to happen. My friends Kais and Limbo pulled up on their motos and said “Harley! Baudouin! Go get your soccer shoes, we need more players, now!” Now, Baudouin is 25 and I am 24 so between the two of us we almost have 50 years. Naturally, I caught another moto home, grabbed my shoes and got back to the stadium. Somebody tossed me a yellow jersey. I figured it’d just be a bunch of old guys kicking a ball around with a few casual onlookers. There may have been 10 guys there who were over 50, and that’s probably a generous estimate. Also, the lamido, the marabou (my neighbor who is like a cross between a witch doctor, a fortune teller, and a wizard), and most of the grands in town were sitting in the stands along with countless people looking on. We had a pretty fun game, I played a little over half of it and we ended in a 2-2 tie.

Baudouin and I wandered back to Chez Linda, joking around about how while we might not have 50 years between us, we sure played like we were 50. When we got back there, the music was going full blast (generators!) and people were up and dancing at their tables, in their seats, and basically any place open. That’s one thing I love about this country, you can start dancing whenever and wherever you please, so long as there is a little music. And the best part is that nobody is self-conscious at all, you just groove how you want to and nobody really pays attention or judges unless they are also dancing. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen somebody dancing by themselves at a table while everyone else was still seated and talking. Anyway, the ice from the morning had all melted and the beers were only mildly cooler than the air (maybe only about 90 as the sun had gone down a little while before), though that was still a plus. Linda was definitely right when she said she knew her clientele. Marie had been at the bar during the whole match and when Baudouin and I got back he had to finish her beer and then take her home so she could go to sleep. I hung out for a little bit more with some of my friends and then walked home, grabbing what might have been the best spaghetti omelet of my life, the guy put some avocado-salad-mix on top which was simply awesome.

Best fête day yet.

2 May 2010

I’m coming up on my first full week back at home after being gone for a while. It sure is nice to be back in Ngong, sleep in my own bed, and play with my kitty Chavez again. I was in the southern part of the country for a good chunk of April, and apparently that was when the heat was the worst so I’m not too sad to have returned right when the rains started. Also, my French friend in town told me my French is much better now than when I left. Schwing! Anyway, I spent one week at IST (In-service training) in Foumban, a cultural-touristy city in the West (read: good food, not as hot) and then a week in Yaounde for a committee meeting—I joined the Environmental Education and Food Security Committee. I had a great time in both places, it was really fun to see all my friends from training again. I figured the Environmental Education committee be a good committee to join, particularly considering the poor treatment of the environment in my town. Plastic bags and sachets are everywhere, people relieve themselves whenever and wherever they feel like it, and whenever you finish with something, say a candy wrapper, you just drop it in the dirt. As some of you who have been to Africa know, this isn’t incredibly uncommon. Establishing some form of trash disposal isn’t generally high on the to-do list for most governments, though the population generally hates looking at all the trash around. The really sad part is that, like most problems, people blame all the trash around on poverty. There isn’t any money to clean things up, and there isn’t any money to change their ways. Which brings me to the first major project I’m undertaking…

Starting a trash collection system! The main thing people told me when I first got here was that our town is too dirty, we need to do something about it. (Often the person telling me this was flinging a bottle cap into the street or letting a plastic bag flutter off into the wind.) I tried to get something going with the chief of hygiene in town, a Monsieur Toloba, (actually a salaried position at the city hall) but due to a combination of an acute lack of French skills on my part, a mutual uncertainty of what the other’s job actually was, and a lack of funds, nothing really got started. Now, though, equipped with my apparently improved French, at least a feeling for how to get something done, some knowledge of where I might be able to find some funding, and a new sense of ambition to get some projects going, I approached M. Toloba earlier this week. Not only did he immediately jump on board, he’d already had something like this planned for a while, including a disposal system practically already in place. The only road block has been the mayor who hasn’t supplied any funds. We came up with a preliminary budget and hopefully this week we’ll get a map of Ngong and jump around to the different quartiers and see where we can install some trash cans.

The big problem in development work is how to make something sustainable. If you just come in and build something, eventually it’s going to break and then if there aren’t the proper resources—be it knowledge, money, etc.—it’ll just sit there broken and unused. What makes me excited about this project is that the city already has a means to dispose of the trash (depending on the month, Toloba has anywhere from 3-6 “agents” who work for him), a person who can be in charge of the project once my part is done, and the means to continue the project at a relatively low cost after we get the initial capital to get it running. I’m hoping to be able to get some funds through a Peace Corps program called SPA, and I believe the clams are provided by USAID. On a side note, if I’m not mistaken this is the only funding that comes to Cameroon from USAID—they pulled out of here a number of years ago. If that falls through, though, I might try something called a Peace Corps Partnership which is a program where I’ll make a description of my program and then Peace Corps will put that description online and people from around the world can donate to it from there. If that’s the case, I’ll make sure to post a link to it on this blog.

I think the toughest part about this project is going to be getting people to actually use the trash cans. Toloba and I are going to have to go around and sensitize many, many people in town as to the importance of the trash collection system and why they should use it. Also, we’ll have to pick the places in town where the trash cans can make the biggest difference. I’m going to make a bunch of flyers in French and Fulfulde and post them around town in the bars, restaurants, boutiques, and basically anywhere public.

Here’s hoping everything works out!

I'm in Yaoundé right now, sitting in the Peace Corps office. IST (In-Service Training) went well up in Foumban in the West Region but I'm stuck back here in the capital until probably Friday because I joined the Environmental Education Committee. I think the main goal of the committee is to meet twice a year and learn about how we can promote environmental education and tackle some environmental concerns in our communities. Anyway, I said I’m stuck in Yaoundé. Like that’s a bad thing.

We flew into Yaoundé back in September and while I’ve traveled through it to get to and from post, I haven’t spent much time of substance here. Mostly just hanging out at the Peace Corps office/transit house or taking advantage of some delicious burgers across the street. When we arrived back in September, I was pretty intimidated by this place. Loads of traffic, pollution, people, poverty. This big third-world city with all the aggression wasn’t exactly where I wanted to spend my time. While I wasn’t determined to stay away, I was pretty set on not spending too much time here.

It’s amazing what a few months can do. Especially a few months in a place, such as the north, which is so drastically different from the south. Many people live in mud huts with thatched roofs and live on far less than a dollar a day up in my neck of the woods. Coming back to Yaoundé, I’m actually stunned. The level of development here boggles my mind. There are multi-story buildings, Mercedes, Chinese restaurants, and even a Hilton. In fact, last night I went to happy hour in the bar on the top floor of the Hilton. I felt like I was in America: I was sipping a Mai Tai, eating olives, and watching a soccer game on a flat screen. It’s amazing how spending four months eating little more than couscous (fufu) and sauce and speaking villageois French mixed with a little Fulfulde can sensitize me to be so stunned when I came back to this capital city, a place I initially thought to be little more than a big, dirty metropolis. I’m planning on meeting my parents in Denmark this summer and that will definitely be interesting seeing how I react when I get off the plane in Copenhagen. If I’m feeling this much culture shock in the same country, I can only imagine what it’ll be like in Europe.

-Michael Scott

21 March 2010

As many of you have probably already gathered from various things I’ve said and written, the hot season in the Sahelian desert is a doozey. A couple weeks ago we were hitting temperatures that I believe were over 130 degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t know for certain because my digital thermometer stops counting at 122 and just says “HI”. The hottest it’s been inside my house is 105, and I recorded that a couple weeks ago. Staying hydrated isn’t easy, but I do what I can. Also, some volunteers are getting over some cases of heat rash right now. The rains generally stop in October or November and don’t start again in earnest until May or June, though occasionally a few rains trickle down in April. I’m told (and hoping) that once the rains come, things start cooling down a bit.

Last weekend (the 19/20/21) may have been the worst. I was in Bibemi which is a town en brousse (or on bruce as me and my friend text each other because we’re too lazy to go out of our English T9 and type it) about 2 hours away from me. I was there because the two volunteers in that town were putting on an HIV/AIDS training for people in the community and I wanted to come see how it went so I could see if something like that would be valuable in Ngong and if so, how it’s run and set up. Anyway, I arrived in Bibemi in the afternoon and it was hot but actually not too bad because there was a thin layer of clouds keeping the sun off me for the moto rides there. The bad thing, though, was that the humidity was rising, which was bizarre because the humidity doesn’t usually pick up until the rains start. That night I hardly slept because I was just drenched in sweat and every time I rolled over my back or side had soaked the sheet under me. The next night (Saturday) was even worse and when I got back to post the humidity was still there. On Monday night I probably only got about an hour or two of sleep before the mosque’s call to prayer woke me up at around 5:15. I went in to Garoua on Tuesday for my Fulfulde lesson and—let me make a quick aside here. Garoua is by far the hottest city in Cameroon. It’s full of pavement, people, motos spitting black smoke out the back, and very few trees. Some volunteers refer to it as the surface of the sun or, less kindly, the surface of hell. I had to stop wearing sandals there a month or so ago because when I take a moto around town there, the hot air felt like a blow torch on my feet. Back to the story. I was in Garoua for my Fulfulde lesson but I spent a little time in the Peace Corps office beforehand, checking my email and making the most of the air conditioning unit. Expectedly, the heat felt worse when I went outside after the nice controlled climate of the office. I got to the place where I usually have my lesson and the wind was picking up. After about five minutes, my tutor suggested we move inside because he thought it was going to rain. Sure enough, ten minutes after we went inside it started pouring outside. Not necessarily like one of the torrential downpours like we had in the West during the rainy season but definitely a nice, hard rain. It continued for about an hour and a half and was still raining a little bit when I found a bush taxi back to Ngong. The best part was, though, that it had cooled off. Back home, though, it hadn’t rained at all, though it was still pretty windy.

On Wednesday morning when I woke up, I had a little sore throat and it looked foggy outside, though I didn’t feel the humidity that usually comes with that. The best way I think I can describe it is by saying that the air looked like the top of a mountain that’s in a cloud when you’re skiing. Things are hazy but you can still make it out and as you move along things materialize, flash past, and disappear. Similar to fog but the two things always seemed different to me. Anyway, the haze was so strong that a tree a few hundred feet from my house had a distinct whitish hue. Thankfully, though, it was noticeably cooler. When I left for the hospital at around 8:30 it was only about 85 degrees out, so naturally I wore a long sleeve shirt. As I walked over I noticed that I was coughing every so often. At the hospital, the doctor told me that the haze in the air was dust, not fog. Crazy. We’d had a few harmattan days back in January but this was much worse than they had been. For those who don’t know, harmattan is the name for a weather pattern that happens in West Africa in late-December or early-January. After the rains have stopped for a while, some big, gusty wind patterns carry dust from the Sahara south and it makes everything dusty, dry, and white. Some people have been telling me that this is the harmattan but I ask them what were those days in January, then? Why is it here now, in the middle of the hot season? “C’est comme ça” everyone says: “It’s like that.” Great response, guys. I ventured that maybe it was climate change and then the response was “Oui, oui, c’est comme ça, aussi”: “Yes, yes, it’s like that, also.”

The break from the heat has been nice but the dust and dryness is tearing apart my throat. I’ve taken to drinking more tea, keeping my windows and door closed, and not going out when I don’t have to. Even so, everything in my house has a noticeable layer of dust on it and my throat still hurts. Oh well, it’s only a few weeks until IST (In Service Training) down in the West region and then I’ll get a break from either the dust or the heat--which I know will return, and soon.

Like Michael said, “Too much change is a bad thing… just ask the climate.”

21.2.2010

Since arriving in Cameroon, people have given me many names and called me many different things. At first, it was mostly just “ ‘Arley” with a rolled R, Spanish style. In French, they generally don’t pronounce H’s. Then my homestay mother started calling me “Tangi” which she told me was the name of the chief of Bamena’s nephew and I later came to find out was also an honorary title given to a father of twins.

Upon arriving in the North of Cameroon, people started referring to me a little bit as “Ali”, though that name never stuck too well. For some reason when I say “Harley,” people here like to hear “Alim,” which is also fine. To add another element of confusion to the equation, they do use the letter H in Fulfulde, so some of the Fulbe people can pronounce my name. For some odd reason, however, many people are unable to hear the R when I say my name so to a lot of people I am “Haly”—even my Fulfulde teacher in Garoua knows me as this. I’m pretty sure I’m in his phone that way. To top it all off, some people (mostly in the market) still call me “Hassan,” which was the name Harvard, the volunteer before me, went by. Yesterday, I also got called “Baudouin,” the French NGO worker in town. Furthermore, when somebody says “aller” or “allez” (to go) I always look up to see if somebody is calling for me. As far as I’m concerned, all of them are fine.

The only thing people call me here that tends to get on my nerves is when I’m called “Nasarra” which means white man. Now don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware that I stick out like a sore thumb and I don’t mind when people call me Nasarra when they are asking me something or want to get my attention for some tangible reason. What I don’t like is when I’m walking down the street and somebody from out of nowhere just shouts “Nasarra!!” from across the street with no other reason than to just point out that I’m there. Usually I ignore it but sometimes I give them a dirty look or shout back “Sannu balaajo” (Hello, black man!). Sometimes I imagine that some people think if they don’t say Nasarra when I walk by, I might disappear with a *POOF*, like my existence is contingent upon responding to a semi-racist request for attention.

Recently, however, people have been calling me something different. I have two boubous which are some traditional Arab/Muslim garb and it’s like a ankle-length shirt with matching pants that are basically like pajama pants. Needless to say, the boubou is incredibly comfortable and with the long sleeves on the top part it keeps the sun off you and thus keeps you a little cooler. Anyway, add to this my recently purchased tan, black, and white head scarf, also like what many Muslims wear and very effective in keeping the sun off my head and keeping me cooler, and I’m starting to look like a real Fulbe! (“Tres bien integre” as my counterpart says: very well integrated.) When I’m walking down the street now, some people have started calling me “Allah-G” which I find simply hilarious. For those who don’t know, the term Allah-G is like an honorific title given to Muslims who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. For example, my landlord here is an Allah-G (I also have another theory that all landlords here are Allah-G’s but that’s for another time) and many people simply call him “Allah-G,” or “Monsieur Allah-G.” Anyway, I’m quite pleased with my new nickname in town. Maybe if people keep insisting on calling me “Nasarra” I can get them to start calling me “Nasarra-G” instead. I wonder if they’d get the pun.

Allah-G out.

I arrived at the bar (Chez Linda) at 5:20, thinking the match started at 5:30. When I arrived, however, I saw tons of people glued to the TVs and realized the game was already twenty minutes deep. Woops, better start betting on the safe side when somebody tells me when a game starts. Anyway, I grabbed a beer from the fridge and snagged a causiere (a plastic beer container) and tipped it over near the back of the back room next to my friend Amadou, a pretty mild mannered guy who was sipping on a fanta, and started watching the match.

Cameroon scored first and everybody in the whole bar that I could see (indeed, probably most people in the town and even the parts of the country with electricity) erupted in applause. We all jumped up, shouting, toasting to the team and some people even started singing and dancing. A couple people went into renditions of the Kirikou song which goes something like this: “Kirikou, il est petite comme ca, mais il est forte! Il est forte!” (Kirikou, he is small like this, but he is strong! He is strong!) They replaced Kirikou with “Samuel Eto’o,” the captain and best player on the national squad, and it worked out pretty nicely. I’m not sure there’s anything like watching soccer with Africans, especially when one of the teams playing is the national team. It’s makes the sport… interesting.

Anyway, the game went on and the Egyptian team equalized before the half ended. About ten minutes into the second half the Cameroonian team had a good shot on the goal but wasn’t able to capitalize. A few people in the room applauded the effort but one guy actually started cheering, “C’est bonne! C’est bonne!” (It’s good! It’s good!) Immediately, several people started yelling at him asking him who he was supporting. The second he said Egypt Amadou got to his feet (along with most of the room) and started advancing towards the guy. Like I said earlier, Amadou is generally a very calm guy and the only time I’ve ever seen him upset before was when Cameroon nearly blew it against Zambia the previous week. He was one of the first to grab the guy by the shirt and call him a Chadian, though several people quickly separated them—though whether to prevent the ensuing fight or to try to grab a piece themselves, I’m not sure.

Anyway, I thought this was a minor scuffle so I kept an eye on what was happening basically in front of me and also kept trying to watch the game. I can’t really go into details because I couldn’t understand everything that was going on but what I did catch was essentially people getting violently angry at this guy for not supporting his country. Somebody turned off the TV, one or two people tried to keep 30 people away from the Egyptian supporter, and I went into the next room to watch the match and keep an eye on the fight. Patriotism certainly runs high here. After about twenty minutes of scuffles, the guy was dragged out of the bar, on one arm by his friend who was defending him and then on the other by the owner of the bar who I’m pretty sure I saw taking a swing at him at one point—though I don’t think he connected and he may have been trying to “break it up”.

A couple minutes after the fight broke up, I went back into the room (there was still about 10 minutes left in the second half) and sat down back on my upturned causiere. Tempers were still high and people were still arguing, yelling and pissed, not only at the Egyptian supporter but also at how the match was now tied. After I’d sat down for a couple minutes, another guy stood up at a comment from somebody else and took a lunge at some guy who I guess was a friend of the guy who’d been kicked out. I left the room and went to talk to the guy who worked at the bar and he asked me what happened. I was starting to get carried away and I said, “There was a guy who was supporting Egypt!” He shook his head and replied, “It’s only football….” I snapped out of it and realized that was the most rational thing I’d heard all night. Talk about being grounded.

Yes, soccer is a big part of life here. The vast majority of people loves the national team and watches them play with a fiery passion. But is it really worth getting into a fight over? I understand the implications of nationalism and the need to support one’s country, especially when the national team has historically been pretty good and is a point of national pride… but is it really worth coming to blows over? I certainly can’t answer that question.

I guess the longer I spend here the more I realize I don’t have any answers to my questions, only more and more questions. Nothing to do but keep asking them, right?

9 January 2010

In Cameroon, whenever a new person, such as myself, enters a village or town, he needs to go around to all the notables in the community, such as the chief, mayor, sous-prefet, etc., and introduce himself and why he is there. I did this in Ngong and then also had to go to Garoua to do the same with the people a step up. I had to go the Gendarmerie (sorta like the army barracks) twice because the first time, the Commandant was in Yaounde. When I returned a couple weeks later, he still wasn’t in the office but I decided to wait for a little while and took a seat.

A TV blared in the background, playing something like afro-reggae-pop which I found surprisingly catchy. The guard there didn’t really ask me anything but worked on his paperwork and occasionally shot a glance at the TV. I looked to my right and on the wall was a tagboard with some photos and captions on it. In one photo, four people lay on the ground and when I looked a little closer, I realized there were others standing around them.

The people on the ground were dead, shot by Chadian rebels who had made a raid across the border a few years ago.

Another photo was a close up of a man missing half his head. He was also shot by Chadian rebels. The photo was odd because his face was still almost completely intact and he looked eerily like he could have simply been sleeping—save for his mouth which was open and, though not disfigured, seemed to express pain, or surprise. I’m not sure which.

Yet another photo showed a person missing most of his intestines.

You get the idea.

I’m not trying to alarm anyone; these photos were taken several years ago when Chad was much more unstable and were a decent distance away from where I am currently living so don’t fear for my safety at all. Cameroon is the most stable country in the region and one of the most stable in Africa.

I guess the point I’m getting at is that while I sat in a chair, waiting for the Commandant of the Northern Legion and listening to a blaring television, I saw these photos of people senselessly murdered. I felt an odd sense of disconnect. Disturbing: yes. Graphic: yes. I didn’t know what to make of it. I still don’t. I’m not going to lie and say I was rattled to my core to see a real life photograph of what we so often read about in the paper (or skim over) and see in movies (and subsequently ignore), but even through the detachment I felt, it was puzzling to try to make sense of.

Maybe I’m still trying to figure out what it means to me to see a picture of a man missing the back part of his head. Maybe it means nothing to me, or maybe it just means I’ll have a faint reminder in the back of my head when I see the name of his town on a sign as I drive by.

There isn’t anything I can do about it, that’s for sure. I do, however, hope to remain mindful of it, and of death, which I feel people acknowledge so much more here than in the US, because it happens so much more often and is so much more a part of life.

7-11 January 2010

“Welcome” in Fulfulde is “Jabbama,” which rhymes with “Obama.” So, whenever anybody welcomes me here, I want to say “Yes, We, Can!”

Cameroonians are amazed when Americans play soccer. I’m not any good, I don’t really have the right shoes, and in all honesty I’d prefer basketball or football, but everyone loves seeing me out on the dirt fields at 6:30am on Saturday mornings: “Eet’s Mister ’Arleeeeeey!”

It’s the cold season and so far the hottest temperature I’ve recorded is 97.8 Fahrenheit. I drink roughly 3 or 4 liters of water a day. I probably sweat 80% of that out, yet because of the dryness and heat, it evaporates almost instantly so the only time I really see or feel it is when I’m exercising… or sweating profusely in a room with little ventilation. I also leave a bucket of water in my room at night and splash some water on the floor in the hopes that when it evaporates, it might keep my room from being so bone dry. The verdict’s still out on whether or not this works… I still wake up with chapped lips every morning.

People give Nescafe a bad rap. Sure it’s crappy, tastes like dog breath, and is ready in 30 seconds—but when you add condensed milk (which is really more like condensed sugar with milk flavoring) you can hardly tell the difference between that and a Vanilla Latte. And, hey, it’s ready in 30 seconds.

A bout of constipation following a bout with amoebic dysentery isn’t nearly as welcome as one might think. And vice versa.

They don’t say “what can you do?” in Cameroon. Instead, they say “On va faire comment?” which literally translates to “One will do how?” I can’t think of anything else that seems so inherently Cameroonian to me.

I just finished my seventh book since I’ve been here. One of those books (Home by Marilynne Robinson) I read twice, partially because it was so damn good and partially because it painted such a good portrait of Middle America and I guess I didn’t fully appreciate it until I’d lived here for a little while.

I feel kinda spoiled at my post. I have electricity, which a good number of the volunteers around me don’t have, and I can get just about anything I need at the market. Garoua is only 40 minutes away and while there’s not a terribly large number of things to do there, there is free internet at the Peace Corps office, and mini-pizzas at a boulangerie (bakery) downtown. Consequently, I’ve seen a good number of the office episodes from this season and am not craving cheese as much as I probably would be otherwise.

In Cameroon, we eat huge portions of food. Partly it’s because so much of each meal is just simple carbs, and partly it’s because your burn a lot more calories here walking everywhere and also just hanging out in the heat. If/when I ever come back to the states, prepare to see me put on some massive weight.

Even with the visor down on my moto helmet and both vents closed I still always return from Garoua coughing and with a sore throat. Never underestimate the power of dust and pollution on the old respiratory system.

P-Square just might be God’s gift to man. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up the song “No One Be Like You.” It’s Nigerian R&B/Rap and in pidgin. I can’t get enough.

I don’t like watching Anthony Bourdain here for the same reason I had reservations (heh heh) about watching it in the U.S.: it makes me hungry. Except here, I don’t really keep snacks in the house aside from fruit, and a sliced orange doesn’t really cut it when Tony’s chowing into a big bowl of spicy Pho in Vietnam.

One of my friend’s daughters died a couple days ago. I think it was malaria. She was only a few months and old woke up sick one day. They tried to take her to the local hospital that afternoon but since it was a Saturday, it was closed. She died en route to the regional hospital in Garoua. Sometimes, things just get incredibly real here. It will definitely give me some more sense of personal purpose when I start doing malaria programs.

I can feel my English declining by the day. Maybe after two years I really will earn that superlative I got at Thanksgiving: Least likely to be able to speak English at COS.

11-13 December 2009

Population: 45,000 (Or so I’ve been told; it feels like little more than 10,000)

Dominant religions: Islam, 70%, Christianity: 25%

Hottest temperature recorded since arriving at post: 93 degrees, Fahrenheit (keep in mind, though, that this is technically the beginning of the cold season)

I’ve been at post for a little less than a week now and it’s certainly been interesting. Spouts of boredom followed by periods of frustration, and every once in a while a little fun and joy thrown in the mix. I kid, it’s been mostly good here so far. My language barrier is now much higher here than it was during training and I think there’s a few reasons for that: firstly, I don’t speak Fulfulde, the dominant language here. Secondly, I find those that do speak French harder to understand—probably a combination of the fact that I got used to the accent near Bangante and that I’d estimate only about 50-60% of people speak conversational French here. But I’ve been asking around about finding a tutor here in Ngong, so hopefully I can start learning Fulfulde soon. And if I can’t find one here, Garoua is only 30 minutes away, though that’d be more expensive. Regardless, I’ll be fine. These first few months just might be a little slow as I gain (or re-gain) my groundings in these languages.

Ngong is definitely an interesting place. As I noted earlier, it seems a lot smaller than it is and I think that is mostly because it isn’t as developed as, say, Bangante which is smaller than Ngong, but with many more amenities (internet, for one). The market, however, is amazing. It’s kicking every day, but I think I wrote about that before so I’ll let it be for now. Anyway, it’ll be the place that I learn a lot of Fulfulde, because most people there speak that.

I also have my first sort of program planned. There’s a French Catholic Mission in town and one of the sisters does a lot of health projects, mostly focused on sensitizing the population on issues relating to HIV/AIDS. She invited me to come along to a meeting she has with a community group this Saturday. I don’t think I’ll do very much this time but it will be good to observe how these groups work and also to simply work on my French.

Some people have also expressed interest in mailing me some things. Apparently flat-rate boxes from the post office are the cheapest, though padded envelopes get here the quickest and with the least amount of hassle. See the previous post for more info on mailing. My parents are sending me a few of these things but I think there’ll be a continuous need. Here are a few things I could go for:

Incense. You can find it here, I’m told, but the quality isn’t too great and the scents are pretty hit or miss. I have also been told that it is impossible to find Nag Champa here, so there’s that, too.

Mac and Cheese! Or, really, just the cheese packets. I can find elbow noodles in Garoua, but the actual cheese for mac and cheese is virtually impossible. I think some people even looked in Yaounde without any luck.

Deoderant. Yes, maybe an odd request but it’s also impossible to find here. I also grossly underestimated my deodorant consumption when I only brought three sticks with me. The one person I talked to who found it in Yaounde, once, at the market said it was 10,000 CFA (or about 20 clams). If you feel so inclined, I like the Old Spice white stick stuff (I’m allergic to most others).

PHOTOS! I have a few photos from the states but I would really like to have some more photos of everyone! Gimme some photos of what you all have been up to since I saw you last or maybe some photos of us together, too! I plan on decorating at least one wall with them.

Music! Maybe an MP3 CD or something of some new bands you’ve been getting into or some new music that’s come out.

And really, anything any of you send me will be greatly appreciated. Especially a letter letting me know how you are.

It’s been two days since I started writing this post and petite-à-petite, things are getting a little easier. I’ve found some friends in the community, some people who are patient with my crappy French, and some people who are more than willing to help me, l’étranger, figure things out. Last night I was at a bar with some friends, eating some fish and sipping on a coke, and thought, “this is just such a trip.” And it is, it really is.

A peculiar new phenomenon is on the rise here in Cameroon, and scholars take note, it is actually a brand new verb tense: the present obvious. It is incredibly easy to pick up and many people don’t even know they’re using it until somebody points it out. To do it, you simply take an obvious question which you already know the answer to, and stick it in the present tense. Here are a few examples:

Tu es la? (You are there?)

Tu est ici? (You are here?)

Tu part comme ca? (You leave like this?)

Tu arrive déjà? (You arrive already?)

This striking phenomenon is sweeping the nation, and is particularly infecting Peace Corps Volunteers who pick up on this amazingly useful new tense and use it with one another, both in French or English (Yesterday I heard somebody walk into the kitchen and say: “You’re cooking?”).

Another useful phrase which, while not in the present obvious, is in a similar vein is “patience.” Now, patience (pronounced: pah-see-anse), from all of my investigations into my French-English dictionary and questions posed to language trainers, has the same meaning as it does in English. However, when I hit my head getting into a van, somebody told me “patience.” When I tripped over my homestay brother’s foot he said calmly, “patience.” When one girl had to get stitches in the hospital and the nurse was scrubbing her wound with soap and water, the nurse told her “patience.” As far as I can tell, it’s somewhere between “be careful,” “don’t worry about it” and “calm down, it’s not a big deal.”

So if the present obvious is taking you some time to get the hang of, patience.

11.28.09

Today is my last day of language instruction before swearing in, which will be on December 3rd. I passed out of needing to take any more French last week, so I started studying Fulfulde earlier this week and I’m basically just getting a basic understanding of it before I begin to head up to post on Thursday (12/4). Fulfulde is a language spoken across much of the Sahel region of Africa, although it does differ from country to country. It seems like a pretty rad, easy language so far. None of the greetings use verbs and every verb is conjugated the same way, regardless of subject. The grammar is pretty straightforward too, it’ll just take a while to get used to the vocabulary because it’s like nothing I’ve ever studied before. I also realized a few days ago that Fulfulde is now the 5th language I’ve studied, 6th if you include English. (The others are Spanish, Swedish, French and German. I guess I could through in Danish and the local patois here in Bamena, too, but I’ve never properly studied them.)

Anyway, it’s been a pretty wild ride so far. No, that’s not quite right. I can’t really say it’s been wild, yet. I’ve had some pretty crazy experiences, some VERY interesting conversations, and also been given some cool names. I’m currently known in my neighborhood as Tanji. That’s a name my homestay mother gave to me, because it’s also the name of my homestay brother and the nephew of the chief of Bamena. I also found out when I went to the chefferie (chief’s palace) and an old Mama called me Tanji that it is a title given to somebody that means “father of twins”. Well alright then. One of the language instructors for PC has started calling me “le Prince de Bamena.”

My homestay family has gotten me a couple shirts made out of panye, the local fabric which is rich in vibrant colors and patterns. Joey, I know how you feel about white people dressing up in African garb but to this I say: too bad. My family loves it and tells me I’m a real African (un vrai africain!), especially when I greet them and their friends in the patois. I can’t wait to get some boubous once I get up North.

A couple quick notes on communication: I have a cell phone and I’m sorry if you tried to call me on the original number I posted on facebook, I wasn’t too clear on the area codes and whatnot. Anyway, my number, to the best of my knowledge, is 011-237-70143164. I think. Maybe if that’s not right, Joey or Jacob or my parents can comment on what to do. I would really like to talk to you all. If you’ve been waiting for me to call you, then, well, keep waiting. It costs me over a dollar a minute to call anyone in the states and I don’t usually have more than 5 bucks worth of credit at a time. Also, it is free for me to receive calls and I believe it’s the same price for you in the states to receive or make calls. So really….call me. Also, here’s an address you can send me stuff to, starting now:

Harley Hunner, PCV

B.P. 1825

Garoua, Cameroon

Africa

It might be useful to write on the letter in red ink, apparently that makes it less likely to be tampered with or stolen. Also, if you feel so inclined, draw some crosses or religious symbols on it and maybe write “Rev. or Fr.” in front of my name. It’d be great to get some mail from you guys in the states. If you mail something, it seems to take about a month to get here, so don’t be expecting an immediate thank you, though it will come. Also, padded envelopes seem to get here the quickest if you wanted to send something more than just a letter, though the flat rate boxes from the post office are the cheapest.

We had a great Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. We cooked a couple turkeys, made mashed potatoes, stuffing, and loads of other stuff. Then we read off a bunch of superlatives that we’d voted on, secret-ballet-style last week. I got a few: Most likely to write a book about their experiences, Most likely to have an unsual pet at post, Least likely to be able to speak English at the end of service, and then Paul, the only other male trainee in the health program, and I got most likely to become a couple. Good stuff. Guess I’ll be writing a book about my pet giraffe in French (or Fulfulde).

Well, I must be off, but I’ll try to post again in a few weeks, once I’m at post and can make it up to Garoua to utilize the internet.

11.6.2009

View Larger Map

I’m in Ngong right now, getting ready to head back to Yaounde and then hopefully back to the Western Region by Sunday. I discovered a week ago that my site was going to be Ngong in the Northern Region. Initially, I was incredibly excited. I feel like I would be happy anywhere in this country but the North is an area that fascinated me. It’s super hot, mostly Muslim, and almost a completely different country than the south. After the excitement, though, I realized that I was the only person coming the North. A few people were going to Adamoua (the region just south of the Northern) but most of friends from training are going to be posted in the West and Northwest Regions—a two days journey at best. What I’ve been telling myself, though, is that I came here to do development work, not hang out with friends. I’ll see them when I can, and talk to them when I can, but my main goal should be to integrate into my community and do development projects that way.

Anyway, now that I’m here, I love it. It’s the end of the rainy season so it’s starting to get hot (I’m guessing it’s been topping off in the 100’s) but there’s still some green on the landscape. I won’t be expecting that when I return in December. There’s a very large Muslim population here, and most people’s first language is Fulfulde, a language that is widely spoken across the Sahel.

A few things I’ve done up here: On both Tuesday and Thursday I went with the volunteer who is here now but COSing (close of service-ing) in December out into the bush. He’s teaching at a school for a group of Mboro (sp?) children and the tribe has never, ever had any form of traditional education before. It was a really powerful experience for me but it was also really difficult to try helping out in the teaching. I mean, how do you teach a group of people who have no history or tradition of reading, writing, or education? On Wednesday I also went out into the Bush again, but this time with the other volunteer and the doctor who will be my counterpart when I start in December. We went around to different health centers and checked up on the immunizations going on because that day was a big immunization day. Lastly, people in Ngong have started calling me Ali, because Harley is too difficult to pronounce. In French my name is just pronounced “Arley” so dropping the R isn’t too much of a stretch anyway. I think I might start hearing “Bonjour Ali” in the north as much as I heard “Bonjour Papa” in the west.

In regards to this blog, I’m planning on doing mostly sort of slice of life bits from my experiences here in Cameroon—like my last one about the man I met. Starting in December I should start having internet at least a couple times a month when I go to Garoua and I’ll try to post some blogs that way. I’m kinda scatterbrained right now so I’m going to sign off but I’ll probably post again once I get back to Ngong for good in December. One last thing: if you are going to mail me anything, hold tight for a little bit. It turns out I can get mail at the Peace Corps office in Garoua and I’ll post that address next time.

Written: 14.10.09

His eyes are docile: slow moving but attentive in their own way. They linger on me or my fellow trainee for long after either of us finishes speaking. Perhaps they judge the truth or sincerity in our words, perhaps they probe us to divulge further. But I’m not confident in my French, so I look away and take another drink of the beer he bought me—a Tuborg Gold.

He again offers us a cigarette, but we decline. He’s a businessman in Yaounde—the capital—but he comes from Bamena—where we’re staying. He becomes confused when I offer to light his cigarette with my lighter. You don’t smoke? he asks in French. No. It’s for my…my… I search for the word, …my…candles, when the electricity doesn’t work. Ah, he nods, that slow nod that keeps his half-open eyes fixed on me. Ah, that nod says, I understand.

We talk at length about soccer, the beauty of the Western Region, the Peace Corps, and what we want to do afterwards. My companion mostly talks; I listen and look around while the businessman alternates his gaze between us and takes drags on his cigarette. Et vous? he asks me when the last subject rises. Je ne sais pas, I start and then mumble something about going back to school. Mais, I want to say but don’t, c’est beaucoup des choses faire—-there are so many things to do.

After we landed at the airport in Yaounde, we packed into like 6 or 7 Land Rovers, Land Cruisers and vans. I was in one that only had a front seat and a back seat as the rest of the back was full of our back packs and we crammed four people into the backseat, “Africa-style” as they said. This small girl named Christina was sitting in the front and had the whole passenger’s seat to herself, she kept asking if somebody wanted to get in there with her because she felt bad that she had that whole seat to herself. As we were pulling away, a peace corps worker named Tiki stopped the car and hopped in with her, so she sat on the console between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. We all laughed and the driver said in his heavily accented English, “Welcome to Cameroon.”

As we were driving into the city it started to rain, slow at first--big fat drops that smacked against the windshield with a crack. After a few minutes the rain started to pick up and Tiki spoke up and said that when you arrive at the airport in Africa and it starts raining before you get to your first destination, it’s a blessing.

A few images from the drive in:

a shaggy green canopy with slender trunks and cloud-like heads pop up; mud and cinderblock houses with tin roofs and dirt yards; trash collects in any drain or recess between houses, yards and roads; big, fat raindrops tumble from the dark clouds that reached up for miles; [orange] signs on the corners of bars, restaurants, and road-side stands (what’s that? –fruit? –mobile phone minutes, I think?); fruit stands with large, tattered umbrellas selling green mangoes and fist-sized tomatoes; beautiful hand-crafted furniture stashed in groups under palm trees with thin blue and clear tarps stretched over; a large headstone next to a smaller one in a house’s yard, facing the road; a 15-20 story, abandoned building with a top-to-bottom World Cup advertisement; the slightly sweet, slightly bitter, poignant smell of sweat; dented, rusted yellow Toyota cabs beep and swerve in and out of lanes.

I'm in Philadelphia right now and will probably be waking up in a little over 5 hours to get ready to head out. We're getting our shots in the early morning and then heading to New York to go catch a flight to Cameroon! The Surreal-ness of this whole venture is beginning to slide away and the reality that I will be spending over two years in Cameroon is slowly taking it's place. I almost lost it on the way to the El Paso airport yesterday after I said goodbye to my dog who I will probably never see again and was preparing to say goodbye to my step mom. Insanity. But I am incredibly comforted by the fact that everyone here is essentially in the same boat as me and we're all kinda freaked out. I'm scarred shitless and honestly afraid of what is about to happen, but I'm also so indescribably excited (I don't really think the two can ever truly be separated, right?) that I think all the fear, self-doubt, anxiety, and probable hardships that have and will come will be worth it.

I've met some very cool, nice people here in Philly and I think we have a good group of people. I also think that I'll be able to get along with and make some good friendships with a good number of them.

Too many other things to think of now so I'll just leave off with two quotes/saying that have hit me particularly hard in the last few days:

-This is what Derek told me when I left Seattle: "Hey man, this isn't goodbye. It's see ya later." It's hard to say how much that simple line has helped me when parting ways.

-A tattoo a girl I met today named Stephanie (who is going to Togo with PC) had on her arm: "Make the most of today because tomorrow is a promise to noone." I'm sorry if I got the quote wrong, I'm just typing it from memory, but I think it's a pretty good way of putting how I feel right now.

Thank you for reading. I will be back with more once I'm in Cameroon. I'm not religious, but if you are... pray for me.

Anxiousness: check.

Nervousness: check.

Fear: check.

Excitement: double-check.

As I write this I'm watching the US Open and I wonder if I'll get a chance to see any tennis while in Africa. I'm resigned to the fact that I won't be able to see any baseball, basketball, or football but I wonder aside from soccer what will be popular. Alright, so it is a little over a week until I leave (again), and even with the jeopardy of jinxing it again, I'll share some thoughts and information.

I'm just beginning the packing process and writing down the few things I still have to get. The current plan is that I'm flying to Philadelphia on the 15th for some orientation/shots/introductions that start on the 16th, which means I'll have almost 24 hours to explore a city I've never been to before! I believe at last tally there's something like 33 of us heading over to Cameroon which I'm happy about because it will make it easier for me and my horrible skills with linking names and faces. On the 17th, we'll be flying out of JFK, through Belgium, arriving in the capital on the 18th. My address for the first three months of training will be:

Harley Hunner, Peace Corps Volunteer

Corps de la Paix

B.P. 215

Yaoundé, Cameroon

If you mail me something, keep in mind it'll take at least 3 weeks to get to me. Number your letters so I know if one gets lost. If you mail me a package of some sort, don't send something that would majorly suck to have stolen as mail theft is pretty common. That doesn't mean not to send me a CD or something but think twice if it's something sentimentally significant that might not make it. Lastly, I'll have a new address sometime in November or December so make sure to check back and then start sending letters there.

Well, I'm pretty scatterbrained right now and packing is calling me. More later.

Well, I got a call last week from PC telling me that our trip to Mauritania was canceled. I was incredibly unsurprised by this as we had been postponed without a new, solid departure date, our visas were still not coming, and the day before the call an American was shot in Nouakchott, the capitol. By Al Qaeda. Soooo, yeah. I was waiting basically waiting for the trip to be canceled and considering how long everything else has taken I'm glad they didn't wait until August to cancel it.

Anyway, I just got an email today with a new assignment that's in Cameroon and leaves in September. I will read some more about it but I'm pretty sure I'm going to accept it as it's still in the same field (Community Health) and Cameroon is still (partially) a francophone country. I know next to nothing about the country so I was a bit disappointed, mostly because I'd started reading up on some other country possibilities and, for no particular reason, this wasn't one of them. Regardless, though, I plan on reading up about it over the next 10 days and then making my decision.

In the meantime, it looks like I'm going to move to Phoenix in a couple weeks and spend the rest of the summer there. Why? Well, a) I have that big city itch again; b) Joey's there and has a room I can rent for cheap; and c) well...that's about it, those are my reasons.

Yesterday, I was really getting the itch to get out and take care of most of the loose ends I still had before I left next week. I studied on Rosetta Stone for almost three hours, ran all over town buying nearly everything I still needed, and then finally rounded out the day with a nice dinner with my parents. Upon getting home, I swung on over to my computer and then facebook where I saw one girl who I was supposed to go to Mauritania had posted her status as "really, REALLY wasn't supposed to go to Mauritania in june... too bad for the future PCVs!" I assumed that something had happened with her and she canceled. Then I scrolled down on my screen and saw that at least half a dozen other people had similar messages up. Insert me freaking out.

I checked my phone and I had no missed calls. I ran next door to my parents' house and we had no messages. My dad did have a missed call from a DC area code on his cell phone but they hadn't left a message. Franticly, I began scouring the internet for who to call and I must have tried two dozen numbers before somebody on facebook gave me the numbers for our regional desk directors in DC, where I then left messages.

And I just got off the phone with the regional desk director this morning and apparently the RIM government hasn't issued our visas. I guess it's not that they denied our visa requests but that they aren't issuing them now and we can only hope that they will after the elections. It probably has something to do with the elections being postponed until July. I was initially excited when I heard there was an agreement for an end to the political crisis in Mauritania that postponed the elections. Furthermore, I was even more excited to BE there when the elections were happening. Now, however, the delay looks to be the reason we can't get visas. We're hoping on a mid-August departure but at this point, I'm wondering if we'll ever get off the ground.

In less than two weeks I'll be on a plane to Senegal.

I'm still trying to take that in and every time I do, multiple waves of fear, anxiety, dread, excitement, wonderment, and confusion settle over me. I just got off a plane from Seattle, I was in LA three weeks ago, KC a month and a half ago, Tucson a little while back, and New York and Denmark in December/January... it's insane to now think that I'll be in Africa so soon. I am incredibly excited and antsy to finally get to Mauritania and get started on training and volunteering but at the same time my abysmal French skills are causing a large deal of alarm. Anyway, regardless of the anxiety, I've been waiting for this for over a year now and very little can possibly stop me at this point!

As for this blog, I'm hoping to be able to update it whenever I can. Maybe once a week (doubtful) but more likely once every month or two. I'm told that during the first two-three months of training my access to internet will be pretty limited, and once I find out where I'll be stationed I'll know what my more regular internet access will be like. If I get the chance I'll try upload photos and give a few impressions about what I'm seeing and experiencing.

For those who might be interested, here's a little map of the traveling I've done in the last six months, as I alluded to earlier...