Tu va t'habituer....

It literally means, you are going to habituate yourself. This is one of the most frequent statements I hear on a daily basis from Cameroonians and while it is almost always a response to me explaining that I am not cold in the mornings or evenings here, and that the thought of 140 degree weather in March and April makes me want to cry, it's a helpful philosophy to have. You'll get used to it. Right now I think I'm at the second stage of culture shock as defined by our medical manual where it seems like everything is different and the habituating is a bit of a never-ending process. Yesterday I saw a child in a full-on snow suit complete with a fur-trimmed hood at 7 am....it was probably 60 degrees. And he was probably the envy of the neighborhood. Everyone gets seriously bundled up here in the mornings and looks at me like I am crazy in my short sleeves and skirt. Don't I know it's winter here? It hasn't rained since mid-October and won't until May or maybe June. Moving from Seattle, the idea of eight months without rain seems impossible, but the reality of the situation, and the gravity of it, is strikingly apparent every time I pass another huge river bed that has been reduced to miles of sand dotted with people washing clothes in the puddles of water they've dug down two or three feet to reach. And this is the cold season, where temperatures dip to 55 or so overnight and hit 95 in the shade at midday. Some days the sunlight is tempered by what look like clouds that could hold rain, but most of the time that's actually all the dust the Harmattan winds blowing down from the Sahara are bringing in.
Climate is just the first, albeit the most ever-present, difference I'm encountering here. Time is a whole different ballgame too, with most meetings I've been present at running on for 3 or 4 hours, partly because few people even begin to show up until at least an hour after the scheduled starting time. Another place time scheduling seems to be very flexible is the schools, which are supposed to run from 7:30 to 2:00 but inevitably end around noon or so, often because there are not enough teachers to teach all the subjects. At the high school (lycee) here there are nearly 1600 students but only about 22 teachers, 11 of whom just left for additional training in the provincial capital. This includes the only English teacher they had, and the principal has been trying to recruit me to step in. I'm going to start working with their English club, but don't feel ready to commit to a teaching job just yet. It's going to be an uphill battle for the students in exam classes to get fully prepared with so few instructors though, and from reports from other volunteers it sounds like unfortunately this is the norm rather than an exception throughout at least this province, if not all of Cameroon. I hope I'll get a better sense of the situation as my work with the Club Anglais continues.
The other day I was walking back to my house with a friend wearing a baseball cap to keep some of the sun off my face. An old man called out to me, “Bonsoir, pere!” an interesting variation on the usual calls of “Nassara”, “La blanche” or “Ma soeur” which had my friend in stitches laughing as he explained that the man thought I was a priest. Guess he missed the skirt! The initial perception any given Cameroonian decides to have of me is shaped by a complex and varied mix of experiences they've had with non-Africans. While I am neither explicitly a missionary trying to save souls (though I certainly have been entrusted with a mission in my service here) nor another traveler passing through town I am also obviously not one of this village, not yet. Children who don't live in my quartier still hopefully demand 'cadeaus', 'bonbons' or 'argent' from me routinely and only today did I finally get charged the same price as the rest of the villagers for an item of street food, a small step in a struggle that I imagine will continue for quite a while. Throughout all of this though I am continually reminded of how lucky I am to get the chance to work through these growing pains, to uncover more and more of the puzzle that is daily life in Cameroon. As a wonderful line from the poet Ben Okri reminds me, I have been given such “a gift of freedom to think and remember and understand,” to get used to a wholly different way of life so that I can better find ways to give something back somewhere along the way.