Catholic Education Week/Happy Thanksgiving Africa-Style

Happy belated Turkey Day! Special wishes to all those in Texas and Louisiana—I missed you guys this year, as well as the Dickey's BBQ, deep-fried turkey, and football. Ok, maybe I didn't miss the football, you caught me! But really, people look at you funny here when you try to explain American football—all the padding, all the stopping and starting....anyway....

I'll back up by a week, and take you back to last weekend, which was the celebration of Catholic Education Week. This was a bit of wild and wacky event held at another boarding school a few villages over. It required a lot of surrender and trust on my part, because little was explained about the program to me beforehand, so I wound up Friday afternoon driving off to this village with no real plan of where to sleep, and didn't really have a travel plan either. Fortunately, in Africa, people take care of you, so everything worked out fine. The event ran rather late into Friday night, but elementary school kids doing traditional dancing are super-cute even at midnight, so that was ok as well. Saturday morning saw a 6:30 am Mass, and a discussion of the theme of the week “The Fear of God is the Beginning of Wisdom.” Followed by a late breakfast, a thrilling game of girls handball (we were up 6-0, but wound up losing 7-12!), and the highlight of the day, staff vs. students football (soccer) match! Fortunately, no one was silly enough to ask me to play! But it was a good match, that the teachers fought hard for and lost. Late afternoon lunch, and then managed to score myself a seat in a car going home! My puppy survived the night alone, though managed to break out of the shower room that I shut her into (oops). All in all, an ok weekend, though I was very tired by the end of it—I can't handle late nights very well.

Oh, and yes, I typed that right, my puppy is in fact a she. Oops. Veterinary confirmed this as fact. Yes, I do have a degree in biology. I studied reptiles, not mammals!!! In any case, she is still named Moki, and has now been thoroughly vaccinated and de-bugged. I also found out this week that Moki actually does have a meaning in the local dialect. It means “Many Small Tigers.” I think that is just about the most awesome unintended consequence I've ever had! She is eating well, and putting on weight quickly, so quickly in fact that I think I need to take down her feeding a bit! She continues to be all things adorable, and now that she is debugged, I've let her sleep in my bed. Yeah, she is that cute. And over Christmas break, I'm going to acquire faster internet such that I can post pictures to prove it!

This blog's bug story would be better with a picture, though I think Amanda might want to skip down to the next paragraph. So you know the overflow hole on the back of a sink? Where the water escapes if you have the sink too full? So I had a tarantula living in mine for about a day. I never saw the whole thing, just the front legs and eyes sticking out a little bit, waiting for something to come by and attack! I have a really cool picture that clarifies this a bit, again, patience!

Anyway, on to Thanksgiving! We (the 4 volunteers in the greater Mamfe region) celebrated on Saturday. Menu: grilled chicken (one guy has a BBQ—Cameroonian style, an upended oil drum with a metal grate on top and firewood underneath), mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, gravy, spaghetti and meatballs (special for Lauren, who is going away this week!), and angel food cake for dessert! Yes, you can make all of those things in Africa! Now, some of them are of course a bit more complicated....chicken involves killing, plucking, gutting, and then moving on to the more traditional preparations. Stuffing involves seeking out the elusive french bread (only seen rarely in Mamfe, though very common in the west region), toasting it to dry it, then assembling that and all the other ingredients—no stove-top here! Baking a cake—fill a pot 1/3 with sand, put it on the stove, and watch the cake carefully—no temperature control. All in all, everything was delicious, and it was a day to be thankful for.

Coming up next—I've decided that the best thing I can do with myself next week is administer practical computer tests to well over half the school. Yes I am a masochist and a glutton for punishment. But unfortunately, with the upper forms where I've essentially ONLY taught practicals, there isn't much else I can do to assess them! So, if you need me, you'll find me hiding in the computer lab all week long.

And yes, since I'm testing, that does mean that the term is almost finished! We are supposed to have all of our testing done by next Monday, so that we can be ready to fill in report cards by the end of next week. After that, I'm off to Kribi for in-service training. School goes on here for a few more days, but they'll just have to make do without me. I am looking forward to seeing all of my training friends again, and to spend some good time on the beach. Oh yeah, and to learn more about development, teaching skills, and funding sources, right!

Weather has finally began to dry out here—nights have been cool and lovely, mornings stay cool for some time as well, the days get quite hot, but I'm handling it pretty well I think. In any case, I do miss my sweaters and jeans a bit, but not too much.

On the package front, I have gotten notice of a few more in, but none have made it to me—my associate director attempted a trip up here a couple weeks ago, but had to turn back and get towed due to the state of the roads! So I'll probably get my stuff in Kribi. THANK YOU! One thing to emphasize on my current wish list—conditioner! The stuff available in the one American store here is not cutting it, and my hair is kind of out of control. So anyone wanting to throw some quality conditioner into future packages would be greatly appreciated!

Love to you all, please keep the notes and wall posts coming, I appreciate everything and all your support!

Puppy!!!

Ok, the big news of last week is that I have taken a puppy! His name is Moki (Mo means small in one of the dialects, and ki just kind of sounded right), he's a few months old, all black except for a patch on his throat, and is adorable in spite of a slightly rodent-like look. He's very energetic, and appears to not have rabies, though is a bit mangy, a visit to the vet this week should clear that up quickly though. So please feel free to include assorted chew toys in your future packages! At the moment, he likes to play with toilet paper rolls, sticks, and a big hunk of foam from where I had to cut my mattress down to size. He eats dried fish and rice, which means that my house now smells like fish. So far, that's the only downside! He's very sweet, loves to play, and is doing quite well in house-training. I have been informed that he's too small, (I think about the same size, maybe a bit smaller, than Amanda's cats) and would be better to eat than to keep (!), but I choose to have selective hearing around that subject. He is on the small side, most likely has worms due to being raised in a village, and once de-wormed, should put on weight and grow quite well. Yes, people do eat dogs and cats here, and I've heard that “Dog Pepe Soup” sells out as fast as the Mami's can dish it out. My dog will not be eaten, if avoidable. My intention is to give it to another volunteer when I leave—by then, there should be at least 5 in the general area.

Last week was one of the more challenging weeks I've had, mainly due to over-scheduling. I was “on duty” at school last week, meaning that in addition to teaching my regular classes, I was also supervising student's study hours in the afternoon and evening and on the weekend. Tuesday was when the puppy arrived, which of course added a new level of activity, and Friday was a send-off party for Lauren, one of the nearby volunteers who is leaving in December (sad!). So, there was a lot to do, and not much time to do it in. Plus, the girls evening study hours run until 10pm! My usual bedtime is somewhere around 9, even 8:30, so I was tired on top of everything else. In any case, I survived, the send-off was very fun, and touching to see how much of an impact Lauren has had. She will be very sorely missed!

Let's see...light has been off again for the last week, though we did have it on today, thank goodness. The rains continue to fall. Climate change! According to everyone here, rains used to finish by mid-october. A quick check of the calendar would notice that it's a month past that!!!! Please, turn off the lights in your house, drive your car less, use recycled shopping bags, etc. Stop the rains, please! Mostly, I'm looking ahead to December, when I have to travel again, and I'm SOOO not looking forward to the trip if the roads are as bad as they were last time! I don't want to take a motorcycle all the way to Kumba! Ugh. In any case, you can truly see the affects of climate change happening here, right now, so send Al Gore some money on my behalf, and tell your science-doubting Republican friends to come visit Mamfe if they don't believe in global warming.

Lauren's send-off was centered around a pig roast. There is something truly amazing about shoving a metal rod through a pigs mouth and out it's anus. Yes, I have pictures. No, I can't post them, because my internet is too slow. But rest assured, you will see them someday. Other highlights of the evening—my new puppy sniffing everything in sight, and eating so many pig part scraps that it looked like his stomach was going to BURST. Lauren and Melissa crying during the part where everyone said something nice/advice for Lauren, and then all the Cameroonians not understanding why they were crying (not much crying in Cameroon, as it turns out). Children roasting peeps (courtesy of Melissa's mom) over the pig roasting fire. EGG ROLLS, courtesy of George, master of food for the evening. And generally delicious food and wonderful company. I hope and pray that I can look back on my service with the same satisfaction that Lauren does.

Computers continue with difficulty, but progress is being made. Your's truly reset the BIOS on some of the computers, being talked through the procedure by the wonderful Alec Dhuse (google his blog). I can't really explain what it means to reset the BIOS, but it was fun to play around with the insides of the computer. And I didn't even electrocute myself! Unfortunately, it didn't solve the problem. So, hopefully, Alec himself will brave the roads to Mamfe at some point in the near future, and act as computer technician to the stars....I mean me. Maybe then I can teach the young ones how to turn on the computer by themselves. At the moment, so many of them have error messages that pop up on start up, that it is WAY more trouble than it's worth to have the students turn on the machines. In other teaching news, the oldest girls are now upset with me, because I will actually be giving them a grade for computers, not just letting them mess around for their one period a week. No one is going to take standardized tests this year, thank goodness, and I am planning to teach myself how to upgrade the RAM, in order to create computers that may possibly, someday, be able to handle the internet.

In one of the more fun moments I've had, I opted to join the girls on Sunday when they were “making sport”, and discovered that the hand clapping games that we know in the US are just the same, just different words over here. And I'm JUST as bad at them here as I was there. But the girls were patient with me, and I'm making progress. Earned some props too for being able to do a backbend. Yeah, I've still got skills. And of course, the talk of choice is Miss's new puppy, who has not yet made his debut amongst the general student population (want him to get shots first). My new nickname (which I'm desperately trying to suppress) is “Miss Gloria-dog-dog.” Catchy, huh?

Bug stories of the blog: the kids have taken to chasing me around with what are called “Rhinoceros Beetles.” Wikipedia that for a picture. To sum up, it's like a good 3-4 inches long, with a 2 inch long horn on the head. And tall. And like, big. So, no I don't want to hold one. Kids here are used to playing with them, they certainly appear to be harmless, but I'm not going to take one as a pet. Contrast this, however, with the Giant African Millipedes. Yes, Explorit folks, I HAVE seen them in the wild now! The kids brought me one of those (Class Diplopoda), carrying it on a shoe. I picked it up, having handled this particular arthropod hundreds of time at Explorit, and all the kids FREAKED out! Cultural differences in arthropod handling. Good times.

Other than that, life continues to continue here. It's not always easy (haven't had a running water shower in over a week) (note that I now have no real craving for a hot shower, but running water would be really nice), but it's good (I have a cute puppy!). No more packages have made it to me :(. But I have hope for the future! I intend to purchase faster internet by mid-december, because I am really getting tired of not being able to do what I want to do. So look for a bunch of pictures to make their way up around then! Have a Happy Thanksgiving as well, I'll let you know how my own goes! Sending love, as always.

My Life in a Computer Lab...not exactly the Africa I imagined, but pretty good!

Light has come back! Hooray! Of course, it's a flighty thing, so goes off during my computer classes....which is a bit unfortunate. But in good news, I have cannibalized and rewired my way into setting up 4 of 7 new computers in the computer lab! And the other 3 don't work, boo! Anybody know the password to get onto a computer once used by the West Ottawa school District? No? Ok, thanks anyway. If you happen to run into someone who does, let them know that I have their “Linspire” CD, which I think contains a Linux OS, but I can't find a file that will boot anything up.

In other fun news with electricity, I did discover EXACTLY how many computers you can run through one power regulator before it starts to smoke. Thanks to Upper 6^th girls for making sure that I don't burn the school to the ground. Background to that: the power here has a tendency to fluctuate—the voltage is not steady the way it is in the US. It goes up and down and all around. So, they sell these things called regulators to “smooth out” the current, making your electronic devices much happier than they would be otherwise. Of course, in theory these should be installed at a 1:1 ratio of computer to regulator. In reality, we're running a 10:1 ratio. Of course, the whole thing should have a battery back-up system in place to stop from frying all of the hard drives every time the power goes out, but that's beside the point.

In other computer news, the new computers, while in some way a step up from the others (all run Windows 2000 Pro), are really at about the same level. 64 MB RAM. Just to put that number into perspective for the non-techies out there, my computer runs 64 times that speed. And if you're connected to the internet in America right now, your's probably is probably AT LEAST 8 times as fast. Yeah. Oh and another note. If you ever feel compelled to donate a computer to any place that is sending them to Africa, please consider sending a laptop. I mean, seriously, think about the poor development worker that is out there having to lug these things around to set them up!

A note about Computer Literacy training here. Yeah, we don't have that. Case in point: Upper 6^th girls. This is the equivalent of 12^th grade. In theory, they have taken computer classes from Form 1 (6^th grade) on. And I still had to show more than one of them how to save a document. My probing around this area has shown what has happened. Basically, none of the people that have been teaching computer science here have been actual trained computer teachers, myself included. However, it appears that my predecessors, especially the Cameroonian teachers, have been afraid of taking students to the lab. Every class, from the bottom to the top, when I asked them about what they did last year, said that they hardly went to the lab. Case in point: Form 5, who in theory was supposed to take the GCE O-level, the first major standardized test, has learned about binary, and the ASCII code. They probably know more about code than I do. As well as processor speed, and I'm sure that nearly any student in the school could draw me a motherboard and label the parts, while I have fear struck into my heart at the idea of opening the system case. But half of Form 5 didn't know how to open Microsoft Word, and about a quarter of them still did not know how to double click properly, or type capital letters using the shift key. I think this is a HUGE disservice to these students—in the real world, no one is going to care if they can use binary or not, but you have to be able to use a mouse and a keyboard!

Fortunately this is something that I feel like I can deal with effectively. I have every intention of taking students to the lab every time that it is possible. The more experience that they get with the ACTUAL computer, the better served they are. Plus, lecturing about computer science is PAINFULLY boring to both me and them. I'm already at a loss with what to do in the lower grades—this week, when power was off, we had to cover Command Prompt because I'm running out of things on the syllabus that I can cover in the classroom. Raise your hand if you've used Command Prompt in the last 10 years. Now put your hand down if you are a professional computer programmer. No one? Shocking!

And I finally got to take the youngest girls to the computer lab! They had SOOO much fun. Remember back to the first time that you moved a mouse and saw the arrow move on the screen? Yeah, I can't remember that either, but they were SOOO excited. I'm very happy to be working with them. There's one girl in the class who, it turns out, has a computer in her house, so I'm thinking that she's going to start in on learning how to type while the rest of us figure out how to open and close programs. Way cool.

In other fun news, we're getting two new volunteers here in December, yay for new people! They came in and visited on Thursday, had all the fun of the bad roads, and even better, brought packages! Thanks to Maria, Dad, and Gram! I've also gotten word from admin that packages from Mom and Cathy have arrived. We'll see when they make it to me! THANK YOU!

Back to the newbies—two very nice girls, one is even a Davis grad! Hello to her parents, who apparently read my blog! Of course, the region is a bit bummed to not have gotten a guy volunteer—we have 2 out of 10! But we'll just have to make up for it by being super-buff chicks.

I think that's all for now! Love to everyone, miss you all, keep me updated on your life! Oh, and on that note—I'm back to email being the better way to contact me. Thanks Dad for the tip about yahoo mobile! But facebook works also. And to be honest, either of those is better than leaving a blog comment, those take quite a while to process. But do what works best! Love you!