Baby's First Christmas

We just attended a Halloween party in the North region. It had been a little less than one year since we’ve been back to the North, and we had almost forgotten just how incredibly hot it gets up there. Not quite the surface of the sun, but pretty close. A volunteer informed us that in 2008 Garoua was ranked the sixth-hottest city in the world, which may or may not be true. We’ve noticed that Peace Corps volunteers fight for bragging rights about virtually everything, from the heat to the amount of rainfall to the quality (or crumminess) of the roads. The computer program I’m using to type this letter is trying to convince me that “crumminess” isn’t a word, but I think we all know that it is. So take that, uppity computer program!


We had the chance to spend a few hours with our homestay mothers, who we haven’t seen since last December. I pluralize “mothers” because polygamy is a rather common practice among Cameroonian Muslims, and the majority of Cameroonians living in the Grand North are, indeed, sons and daughters of Islam. Not that strangely, our homestay family is actually christian. Multiple wives often leads to (if you can believe it) an influx of children; the number of kids in our homestay family added up to a baseball team (decent pitching, but no real power-hitters in the line up.)


At first we had some misgivings about living and working in an Islam-dominant culture, concerns that were undoubtedly the result of the way the American media depicts Muslims as fanatics, which certainly some are, but only a very small percentage. Peace Corps has many organizational weaknesses, however the cross-cultural exchange and education is certainly not one of them.


A few weeks ago, during a trip from Ngaoundere back home, we found ourselves stuck again in a crummy bus on a crummy road, squeezed in like sardines. Jessie was sitting next to the pane-less window, and I was on her immediate left. Suddenly, water started trickling down from the roof of the bus, onto Jessie’s right arm and sholder while also hitting several people in the row behind us. To make a long story somewhat shorter, it turned out not to be water at all, but in actuality, pee! Goat pee, to be precise. Because the flying goat pee had missed me entirely, I had a good laugh at my wife’s expense. She did not find the situation as immediately amusing as I did, but funny is funny.


(so lets all be thankful for brian’s very first entry. I’ll pressure him into more in the future. Also-you know you’re well integrated when getting pissed on by a goat is not a highlight or a lowlight of your day.)