East Siiide (insert gang sign here)! Or: My Close Encounter with the World's Most Dangerous Animal

Note: This blog was written about 3 weeks ago, since then I've not had internet access. Expect another one in a week or so detailing the last month!

Well, I'm back in Mamfe now after a lovely holiday to the East Region of Cameroon. Few facts about the East: It's generally less developed than the rest of the country, it's in the Congo basin, so it's rainforest-y, though in a “je ne sais quoi” way different than the rainforest I live in. Bertoua is the capital, and there are about 8 volunteers currently posted there from the health and education programs.

Anyway, arrived on Saturday in Bertoua from Yaounde. Side note: Peace Corps Cameroon has transit houses set up in several major cities throughout the country. This is AWESOME because it allows for volunteers to travel easily, knowing that they have a place to stay, and not having to worry about a hotel. So, stayed at the “Case” (pronounced “cause”) Saturday night and Sunday night, generally relaxing and recovering from traveling. Siobhan is the PCV that is in charge of the case there, and she's great! Bertoua doesn't really have a lot going for it as a capital city, compared to others—there's not too much that's special about it that I gathered, but it's a nice enough place, although there's a lot of harassment—more so than I've noticed in other places. The East also has a much higher proportion of Muslims than the Southwest does, so it was interesting to see the prayer rugs everywhere, and mass group prayer happening. Not so much as in the North (or so I've heard), where life shuts down completely for every prayer time.

Next, Monday headed out to Batouri, the next largest town in the East, about 2 hours from Bertoua. There I met up with Jackie, a Health volunteer. She was kind enough to show me around her city. It's similar to Mamfe for size, probably a bit bigger. Ate some yummy street food, had a few drinks, a very mellow relaxing time. The power was off, so things stayed pretty quiet.

Tuesday I headed to Ndelele. This is about 5 hours past Batouri, getting quite out into the jungle! On the road, it's easy to see the lower level of development—houses are made of mud and sticks, almost all thatched roofs, very little metal or cement to be seen. Ndelele itself has no power or running water, and it is much bigger than the villages we passed coming into it. Despite this, the mayor of Ndelele would like for his town to be a tourist attraction! To that effect, he had roads put in to three spots of the river and very large signs erected advising that there is a “Site Touristique” along the river: Hippo Viewing!

So of course, being a tourist, I had to go and see the hippos. Hana, the volunteer in Ndelele, came with me on the half hour motorcycle ride to the second of the three viewing areas. There are fisherman along this river that fish from these traditional canoes made from hollowed out logs—pretty awesome. For a little bit of money and some sweet talking, they'll take you out in their canoe to get a closer view. Now, Hana had been out here a couple of times before, and had not had much success. But this time, as soon as we got to the water's edge, we could look upstream and see what turned out to be 4 hippos in the middle of the river. I'm pretty much the worst judge of distance, but I think we were maybe 100 meters from them at that time. We found a fisherman, and he took us one at a time up to where we were about 50 meters away, and dropped us off in a tree that was overhanging the river. Awesome. We watched them for a while from this vantage point. Pictures unfortunately don't do the experience justice—a hippo doesn't look like much from that far away when 90% of it's body is in the water. But trust me, it was cool. One of the best moments was when this bird swooped down and kinda dive-bombed the whole crew—they all jumped up and out of the water a ways and were obviously quite put out by this outsider. Pretty cool to watch.

Anyway, I was the last to go back to the bank where we put in, but as I was waiting for the fisherman to come back and pick me up, one of the hippos moved closer to where I was! And kept heading downstream! He was in the middle of the river the whole time, so I didn't feel threatened, but it was still a bit scary for a bit. In any case, the boat man didn't feel safe coming back to pick me from water, so I climbed up out of the tree onto the shore and walked back to where we started. The hippo actually came all the way down to where we were standing, stayed in the middle of the water the whole time, opened it's mouth, made a few noises...probably saying “Get the heck out of my territory”, but we were too busy taking pictures to notice...Eventually he turned around and headed back upstream to the rest of the group. Probably for the best. Then we hopped back on our motos and went back to town! A brief pit stop with an angry chief that was trying to extort money from us to go on a PUBLIC road to a PUBLC river to see WILD hippos, some fast french talking and understanding by Hana (awesome, by the way), and we were back. Again, no electricity or water in Ndelele, but we played bananagrams by candlelight (look it up, play it, it's awesome), and by morning we were on the road to Bertoua.

Made it back to Bertoua with no trouble, there were a few people passing through the Case, so we opted for a BBQ night, which was great! Burgers, chicken, and bushmeat. Someday I'll tell the story of the person that left a (live) chicken in a plastic bag in the sun...but for now they should remain anonymous to protect their reputation.

And that's about all there is to that!

Now, of course, I couldn't just sit at home and relax with my dog for a week (much less plan my lessons). No, instead, I was home for one day, and then turned right around out the door to go to Ekok! And in an effort to be not boring, why not on my bicycle! Yes, the Bike to the Border trip has now come and gone, and was quite a success if I say so myself.

Just to remind you if you've forgotten, a few volunteers in this area have been planning for some time to do a bicycle tour to the Nigerian border to raise awareness and sensitize this under developed area about HIV/AIDS. The area between Mamfe and the border has some of the highest AIDS rates in the region (possibly in the country), and there are a lot of other gender/youth issues as well, such as prostitution, very young arranged marriages, even female circumcision still practiced in some places. So, this is a population that needs some training.

The fabulous Melissa (http://travelsdemelissa.blogspot.com/) planned a wonderful program for us, giving out basic information about the disease, it's causes, and prevention, and included a wonderful section on assertive communication techniques, with roleplays for the kids to try out. Throw in Stanson (a business volunteer teaching for the first time) and we were a golden team of 3. All good information, and the combination of knowledge with the power to put it into practice made for a great plan.

First stop was a Catholic school in Nchang. About an hour and a half of biking through mostly good roads. Bit hilly, but we managed. We met with all but the oldest kids here. A very fun day, and hat's off to the school for keeping us well accommodated—we wanted for nothing for the whole time we were there. Best part of this day was that, as a boarding school, we were able to meet with the kids in the afternoon, then have them come back in the evening to present some of the best role plays to the entire school. Any time, any place, any school where you have teenagers talking about sex, there's bound to be laughing. Throw in some comically large (FAKE) marijuana cigarettes (which were REFUSED), and the evening was hilarious. The principal and the staff representative of the teachers gave us some very nice parting words at the end of the evening. We felt good about our first day out, first day teaching this particular material, and ready to go on to the next site.

The next day had us biking about 2.5 hours to Ayukabah. This is starting to get out into some “bush”, if you will. It's a tiny village, the secondary school only goes up to Form 2 (about 7th grade) at the moment, but it's looking to expand, and we were ready to go. This time, we only met with about 40 kids altogether, but it was a good opportunity to see how we each took a different take on things, as we team-taught the program. We wrapped up with presentations of role-plays from everyone (almost), and counted the day a success.

Side note: it is now like the REALLY REALLY REALLY HOT season here. I don't have a thermometer, but basically it's like this. You wake up, you take a shower/bucket bath, you step out, you're drenched in sweat. And yeah, this is what we decided to bike in. This was more apparent in Ayukabah than in other places, because we arrived at the school, walked to the principal's house to bathe, walked back, and we might as well have not bathed at all. Anyway, we all survived. Lot's of iodine was used this week in purifying our water, and special thanks goes out to Mom, Texas crew, and Amanda for things that made my dirty, iodized water taste better than it should have.

Moving on. After spending the night in Ayukabah, and having an “interesting” conversation about TB Joshua (google “Nigerian Prophet AIDS”), we left the next morning for Ayumajock. This is a much larger town (village? I don't know the distinction), and is the seat of a sub-division. The secondary school has about 500 students, and we met with nearly all of them. This was my personal favorite day. I met with the oldest students (10th-12th grade equivalent), and I started thinking I would blaze through the information part of the session (which they've heard about since they were born). However, I quickly found out that while they know the basics quite well (HIV is transmitted by sex and blood, use a condom, etc), they had some “advanced” questions that they wanted answers. Topics ranged from why “pulling out” is not an effective method of birth control or HIV prevention, to whether or not the AIDS epidemic has caused an increase in morality, to whether or not AIDS is just a ploy by the Americans to stop Africans from reproducing. We wrapped up with some excellent role-playing, with some of the boldest, most assertive young women I've met in this country. Even better, after class I was approached individually by some of the quieter girls, and felt very good about getting information to them that they wouldn't have been comfortable with asking in class. We wrapped up the day with presenting the best role plays to the entire school, and everyone seemed very pleased with how things went!

The last day was a couple of hours of rolling hills to Ekok, the last town in Mamfe. Now, we called the trip “Bike to the Border”, but of course going to Nigeria was out of the question. Maybe someday (but not while I'm in Peace Corps!). Ekok is....how to be sensitive...not my favorite village so far in Cameroon. It's a bit dirty, a bit “sketchy”, and we were disturbed (harassed) more there than anywhere else. Border town, what do you really expect? In any case, we had arranged (lacking a secondary school) to meet with a women's group and a youth group via the chief of the village. Unfortunately, he was called to other business. The UN was in town, demarcating the border between Cameroon and Nigeria. Yeah, that's kind of a big deal. So, he was out of the picture. We tried to rustle up a group just around the town, but without a “big man” behind us, we knew we weren't getting anywhere. Throw in the fact that the UN was taking up ALL of the hotel rooms in town, and we opted to return to Mamfe and call it good.

And now I'm back at home, and very happy to be here! The school term is up and running, and it's quite short (only one month, and I'm missing a week of it!), so things will be moving quickly from here on out. I'm glad to be back to my routine, at least for a while, and glad to not have to climb into a bush taxi or bus for some time.

To file under “stories you're glad didn't come with pictures”, I picked up my dog (from the wonderfully understanding and accommodating dog-sitter), and saw what looked like some large pimples on her side. Looked a bit pus-y, so thought I'd try to get some of it out. Imagine my surprise when the bubble of pus turns out to be an inch long maggot. 6 maggots later, and I can officially say that my stomach is made of iron. According to the vet, they're from these little red bugs that I've seen around and admired for their color. Yeah, going to RUN AWAY from them from now on. HORRIBLE.

What's up next: I'll be helping out with the 45 new volunteers arriving in June! In mid-May I'll go down to Yaounde again to help plan the program, trying to make it even better than it was last year! I'll spend a separate week in Yaounde during the summer for my mid-service medical check-ups (aka poo-in-a-cup week). I'm also planning to spend 2-3 weeks in the North of the country. So by the end of the summer I should have visited all 10 regions of Cameroon, yeah! Time is going by SOOO quickly! Also—if you've had the thought of wanting to visit, I'm open to the idea. Talk to me, let me know! I'd love to share this experience with some of the people I love.

Package note: I've had a few requests for package requests, so here we go:
DO NOT SEND: Wipes (baby, antibac, hand, face, disinfecting) of any kind! I have SOOO many. Thanks to all who have contributed to that abundance! Shampoo/Conditioner/soap—again, thanks, but I'm stocked for the moment. Stationery—your letters are in the mail, I promise! Children's card games—I have enough that I think they'll survive till I leave, and will make great presents when I go. Sunscreen, lotion, bugspray. Candles.

Would love to have more of: Clif/assorted nutrition bars, drink mix packets, Dried fruit/nuts. Well-wrapped hard candies. Jelly bellies. Chocolate. Organic peanut butter packets. Pens/pencils (cheap, to give to students). Spices (I can get curry and cinnamon here, other things are scarce). Parmesan Cheese (the dried kind in a can, it makes everything taste good). Underwear, size L (hand-washing of clothing is NOT gentle here) Favorite: http://www.rei.com/product/742858 (Size L) 2nd Favorite: http://www2.victoriassecret.com/commerce/onlineProductDisplay.vs?namespace=productDisplay&origin=onlineProductDisplay.jsp&event=display&prnbr=GN-241072&page=1&cgname=OSPTYMWLZZZ&rfnbr=5528 (Size L). Ribbed, wide strap, cotton tank tops of the Old Navy/Gap/JCrew variety, size M (mine are dying a slow, painful death). Hair ties—preferably the big fat flat ones with rubber on one side. Hair clips (the bendy kind that snap down). Chew toys for my dog (anything to make her stop destroying my house). Letters. Mix CD's (thanks Eric and Jen!). Magazines/catalogs with ideas for making clothes. USB keys with movies (and no viruses) on them. Exercise routines (I have a resistance band now!). Books you think I'd like. Letters. Photographs. Love. Prayers.

Love to everyone, hope everything is beautiful in your life. Thanks for reading—even if I don't know you're doing it, it feels good to know people are out there hearing what I have to say!