Dating Advice in Cameroon

Eating in this country is just about one of the most unattractive things on this planet. You cannot look cute while eating Cameroonian food. Accept it. You’d better hope no one you’re trying to impress is in the room while you eat. Ideally, no other person at all would be in the room while you eat. Although, even if they are, at least it’s a pretty even playing field and everyone is at their most unattractive as well. Still, do not accept a dinner invitation if you hope to make a good impression on that particular person. Everything conspires against you. Literally nothing is going your way.

First of all, you eat with your hands, so food is all over your fingers. If you ever make the mistake of touching your face or wiping your mouth with your hand while eating, you just end up with food all over your face. Rookie move! Never touch your face! Unfortunately, you’ll most likely have food all over your face anyway. No matter how careful you try to be. This is because of the nature of the food. Fufu, the building-block of all meals, is a playdough-like ball of starch that is consumed with different types of traditional soups. No tidy bites of pizza or delicate bunches of salad (which, if we’re being honest, aren’t even that easy to begin with). Soup and fufu is all you get. Fufu itself is a bit sticky and ends up on your palms and fingertips. You eat it by molding it in your hand until a small ball forms and you then dip the ball (along with your fingers) into a bowl of soup. It’s the slimy, goopy soup that really gets you. The main ingredient is palm oil, and no matter how fast you try to scoop everything into your mouth, oil inevitably drips down your chin or oozes in the corner of your lips. Most soups are also the consistency of snot (especially that damned okra soup), and even trying to separate a glob of soup onto your fufu and into your mouth proves a challenge. There are little snotty trails connecting your hand back to the bowl back to the fufu back to your mouth (it gets crazy) and they absolutely refuse to break, despite your best efforts. Then there are little chunks of leaves and vegetables in the soup, that, when combined with the consistency of the goo, love to stick to the outskirts of your mouth and cheeks. (This is when trying to wipe them away only ends up backfiring). These little pieces of vegetable also love to get stuck in the cracks of your teeth. To top it off, the soups are loaded with hot pepper. This makes you sweat uncontrollably and you normally develop a mustache of perspiration beads along your upper lip. It also makes your nose run, so in addition to the snotty soup you also have real snot on your face. Again, if you try to wipe at it, you will only succeed in replacing it with bits of vegetable. So there you are, enjoying your meal, looking like you’re dying with snot dripping down your lip and sweat building up on your forehead and food all over your face. If you try to give a seductive smile, you will only reveal all the leaves stuck in between your teeth. There is zero sex-appeal. Zero. And there’s nothing to diminish your humiliation because Cameroonians eat all together in big circular groups. That’s right, every person in the room can see you and what a mess you are. There’s nothing you can do about it. Your only option is to accept that you cannot look good. You’ve been warned, avoid all dates that involve eating. 

Puppies!

Woomi had puppies! My dog, despite my best efforts, became pregnant. Since I have to travel a lot, it eventually became easier to have a friend take care of the dog as it was just too much back and forth and made her confused. At her new home, however, she has a bit more freedom and lives closer to other dogs. Woomi and the neighborhood dogs have a lot of unsupervised time together. And I have now found out exactly what they did during that time. She became pretty clearly pregnant this past month, but everyone still expected her due date was another month off. Then, the other afternoon, her caretaker came home to find three extra dogs in the room! Woomi gave birth to three health puppies, two male and one female. They are maybe the cutest things I’ve ever seen. They haven’t even opened their eyes yet. Woomi is, overall, a good mother so far and ran up to greet me and then led me to her litter to introduce all of us. She fusses over them and cleans them and feeds them. I have, however, also seen her get so excited that she just straight up sat on one of them, so we’ll see if they all make it. 

Women's Day

International Women’s Day is held around the world on March 8 to celebrate women and promote their advancement, and is an especially big holiday in Cameroon. In my town, activities started early in the morning. Women marched along the main road (also the only road) in a parade to the soccer field. Once there, they sang songs and marched in groups past the bleachers (really some chairs set up under a tent). Then they began different competitions, ranging from balancing a bottle on their heads, to an egg balancing race, to a 100m sprint. As part of my own work, we also included HIV education. Nurses from the health center announced basic information, pre-selected women performed a skit, and then we talked about prevention methods. This included a condom race. That’s right, 11 women represented each of the town’s communities in a race to put condoms on plantains. The women could not stop laughing. They were so excited. 

The four fastest women were awarded boxes of condoms as prizes. The women were literally squealing with delight, jumping up and down, dancing, shouting, and making rather inappropriate comments and gestures, which were met with roars of laughter and loud applause. It was an incredibly fun event. To close the ceremony, the women played a soccer match (a traditionally male sport in Cameroon). After that, the town turned into one giant party with food and drinks for the women all night long. 

Death in Cameroon

I was watching Interstellar (a lucky occasion for me) when I was struck by a comment in the film about how a parent should not have to see their own child die. And while it may be true, it certainly is a luxury of the developed world to have such a concept. It reminded me of a ceremony that I attended the other day for a neighbor who passed away. She was only in her thirties, had one young daughter, and also lived with her younger sister (in her twenties) who also had a daughter. It was the sister who had hosted the reception, and in attendance was a pastor who gave a small speech. The young woman began to cry during it and he told her, “Tie your heart. Be strong. You are still young so maybe you don’t know as some of the others in the room, but death comes for all. Tie heart. You don’t need to cry. You will also die. Your daughter will die. Next it might be your child. It might be you.” I, of course, was rather shocked as I doubted that much comfort came from being told your four-year-old daughter might be the next to die. It seemed insensitive to me. At the same time, however, it is the culture here. Death is simply more common. There is a funeral celebrated every single weekend in my village. I have known more people who have died here, in the past year and a half, than I have in the rest of my American life. And while death is still always sad here, it is more a part of life.

Death in the American mindset is always unexpected. In the Cameroonian mindset, death is always expected. In America, no one ever considers their own death; death is not imminent. Here, people reference their own death all the time. I will be talking about some sort of event that is to take place in one week and some one will say, “Yes, I just pray I will still be alive to attend it” or “I hope I live long enough to see that day” or something along those lines. People can be young, healthy, happy, but they still often reference their death as if it is imminent. And the thing is, it is. Or at least, it very well could be. People die all the time here, often with no real warning. In America we have the luxury of knowing death as something that comes for the old, but here, in Cameroon, death comes for all. The concept of death in not necessarily linked with age. Often in America we associate death with elderly people or some sort of accident, like a car crash. But here, random (and often preventable) diseases, illness, accidents, or other unknown causes create death continually, without regard to age. Death really is imminent. From the time they were born, people here have had a closer relationship to death. They are familiar with it, experienced with it. Everyone knows death. Part of it is due to the nature of relationships here—when a community is so strong and everyone is like your family, any person who dies is like a close relative. But more people also have true family members who have died. Indeed, the sister who held the service, lived with her elder sister (the one who passed away) because both of her parents were already dead.  

And so, while it might seem rather insensitive to tell someone who has lost a loved one to tie their heart and be strong, it is also necessary in this culture. Which brings me back to the idea that a parent should not have to bury his or her own child. It is an idea that most Cameroonians would agree with, in concept. But in the developed world it is an expectation: no parent should see their child die—here, it is a desperate wish. People in Cameroon expect death because life does not often afford them the luxury of abiding by that maxim. In fact, the woman who passed away had already lived through the death of her only son. Death truly comes for all here. 

Abuse

            It is commonly accepted in Cameroon that women do not share equality with men. There is a particularly common trend of violence against women. In fact, I have heard on multiple occasions that, “Beating is a way for the husband to show he loves his wife,” or that, “if he does not beat her, it means he doesn’t love her.” I have talked with men who say a man must slap his wife around a bit, because he must. It doesn’t have to be a real beating, but just a light slap, it is necessary, it is his right, it shows that he cares, if she misbehaves she must be punished, etc. Sometimes they say these things jokingly, or with a smile on their face, but it is clear that some sort of physical punishment is part of most marriages.

            Today, when I went into work at the health center, there was a woman with a large bandage on the back of her head. The nurses began undressing the wound to clean it. It was a large scar, fresh, with multiple stitches, spanning two or three inches along her scalp. It had happened a couple days before. When I first saw it, I assumed it was from some accident, something at the farm, who knew. However, it quickly became apparent from the nurses’ discussion, that it was the woman’s husband who had done this to her. I was horrified. I stared at the red gash on her head and tried to imagine someone inflicting that type of pain on his wife. I became so sad. So utterly sad and angry. Sad that a person could do this to another human being simply because that human was a woman, his wife, and he thought he had the right to do such a thing. Sad that society views this as normal, acceptable; sad that society allows this to happen and does not hold this man accountable; sad that society views women as inferior to men, without the right to protection, without the right to their own bodies, without the right not to be beaten. My grief was clear on my face, and the nurses began consoling me, telling me it was all right, it was normal. This only made it worse to me. I told them that it was certainly not all right, that someone being beaten like this simply because she was seen as lesser, simply because it was thought that a husband had a right to do this, was in no way all right. I said it shouldn’t be normal, and that’s what is so horrible about it. It won’t happen again, they told me. How can you know that? I asked. Because that, of all things, was a lie. It would likely happen to this woman again, if her husband could do this once, it would likely happen to millions of other women. It would likely happen to the two nurses once they married, it would likely happen to the 2 year old baby in my lap when she grew up. It really was too painful to bear. That in many societies, and particularly in this one, women are treated with so little respect. That a human is treated with so little respect. That someone thinks they have the power or right or ability to inflict harm to another living person. That because she is your wife, and she is not your equal, you can abuse her.

It’s true that I don’t know the full circumstances to what happened. One of the male doctors tried to explain to me that we didn’t know the full story, that the husband could’ve been drunk, that it could’ve been “a reflex,” that the woman could have started it. I tried to explain, that all those possibilities were true, but that it didn’t matter. That there was nothing that made this event acceptable. Maybe the wife had done something wrong—maybe she cheated, maybe she hit him first, maybe she did nothing—but none of those things made it acceptable for him to hurt her that way. Nothing she could have done could have warranted that treatment. No matter what had happened, or how, it was wrong of him to beat her, wrong of him to crack her scalp open.

Overall, witnessing that type of abuse filled me with sadness and even a slight despair. How can you stop something like that when it is so widely accepted in a culture? When people say things like, “It shows that he loves you”? When it is so systematic and engrained? I did receive slight hope when the doctor informed me we had to pretend it was not so bad, because the wife was now saying she wanted to leave her husband. While the first part of his statement was all messed up, it gave me hope to see that she understood it was wrong, unacceptable, that she did not deserve to be treated that way. It has also strengthened my resolve to restart the “men as partners” trainings that had been cancelled due to scheduling conflicts. I will be trying to reform the group in the next few weeks so I can try to combat some of the inequality between the sexes or the abuse that occurs in relationships. 

Race of Hope

            Each year a race is held on Mt. Cameroon, the largest mountain in Cameroon and also an active volcano. The event attracts thousands of people from around the world. Runners are able to complete the race in a single day, going up to the summit at 13,000 feet and back down, sometimes in just several hours. Peace Corps has begun using the event as a grounds for education and outreach in recent years, and has seen great success. This year, certain volunteers worked incredibly hard to organize a mass HIV screening and education. Over 30 volunteers showed up to help out, and I was lucky enough to participate. Participants came in and played several games to learn about the facts of HIV and AIDS, from condom demonstrations to trivia. If they wanted to, they were then able to undergo rapid HIV testing to learn their status. This year, the race fell on Valentine’s Day, and many couples were encouraged to attend together. Around 700 people were successfully tested throughout the day.

            I took the opportunity to do epilepsy education. While participants waited for their test results (normally about a ten minute process), I ran a booth in conjunction with CODEF (Community Development and Epilepy Foundation) to promote awareness. We were able to reach over 650 people. We taught them about the causes of epilepsy, the treatment options, and what to do in the event of a seizure. People were very interested and often knew or had seen people having seizures but had many misconceptions about it. Many thought it was contagious and many thought there were no treatment options. It was wonderful to be able to reach so many people. In addition to the education activity, I also met with the Regional Delegate for health and gained his approval and support for the work we are currently conducting to combat epilepsy. 

Free Medical Clinic

            This week an outside organization partnered with the local health center to provide free medical consultations and medicine to anyone who wanted to attend. People turned out in droves. The health center was packed with the entire community, from the very young to the very old. The campaign lasted for three days and were were able to see over 400 people. We treated everything from the common cold, to malaria, to joint pain, to babies who were unable to breathe. It was incredible work and both the American doctors and Cameroonian doctors worked tirelessly to see as many patients as possible. I am very grateful to the American volunteers who traveled all the way here to help the community.

            On another note, I learned that the term “whiteman” has now been replaced by my own name. When the volunteers showed up in village, my neighbor ran up to me and reported, “Auntie Allely, I have just seen five Allelys!”