First Weekend

Sunday, January 31: 2:00 pm

What a crazy few days it's been! This weekend, I've spent a lot of time with my host siblings and mother. Yesterday, my brother and I walked around the city and he showed me some interesting spots. On the way back, we stopped at his girlfriend's house – but he told me not to tell Maman that we had done this, since she doesn't like it when he goes there. Her adorable little sisters were watching cartoons and I gave them some stickers with smiley faces and dogs on them, which they were very excited about. Then Simon's girlfriend put on some Cameroonian music and told the little girls to show me how they dance. One girl stuck our her butt and put her hands in front of her chest and starting wiggling, shaking her butt really fast. We laughed, and she kept dancing like that; I was told that Cameroonian women dance with their butts!

Back home, I watched a friend of Adda's style her hair, which was a long and painful process. I finally understand what it means to have a weave – after braiding Adda's hair into tight cornrows, the stylist sewed on blondish-brown hair extensions with a needle and thread. I told Adda about the English expression, “Beauty is pain,” and she agreed.

Later, I helped Maman prepare a traditional Cameroonian dish called Ndole. She cut down a huge pile of branches from a tree in the backyard and lay them on the kitchen floor, where we sat on stools and pulled off the leaves. She told me to taste a leaf – it was very bitter, to the point of being inedible. She said that you had to wash it many times to get rid of the bitter taste. After we pulled off all the leaves, she grabbed bundle by bundle and chopped them up into small pieces. When she was done, there was a entire large basket full of it, and I asked whether the family could eat all of this. She explained that in Cameroon, you always prepare for more people because you never know who's going to come over for meals.


Maman preparing Ndole

Once the leaves were chopped, we started the washing process. First we placed them in a large pot of boiling water; then Maman took the pot off the flame and removed all of the leaves, handful by handful, squeezing the water out. She told me to taste the water, which was very bitter. She said you continued this process – boiling and squeezing with new water – until the water was no longer bitter. After three times, it was ready, and she moved chunks of Ndole from the pot to a wooden bowl, where she mashed it up with a tall stick. She let me try mashing for a bit as well. What struck me about the whole experience is that she is a government minister, a modern woman, but she still spends hours preparing traditional meals like this. Tradition matters here.


I take a turn mashing the Ndole

As we worked, we talked about religion. My host family is very curious about Judaism, though they are devout Catholics. She told me how in Judaism and Christianity, there's only God, and you pray to him, and that's all that matters. She invited me to come to church the next day (which I did – more on that later!); while they prayed in French, Latin, and Beti (a local language), I should pray in Hebrew. I was excited to go!


The outside of the church. We didn't actually go inside this building, though

Last night I gave my family some of the gifts that I brought, including a 550-piece puzzle of the US flag with various politicians' campaign buttons on it. My sister was interested in learning how to “play this game,” so I showed her the basic jigsaw puzzle method: separate the edges from the insides, look for corners, categorize the pieces by colors, and so on. It took a long time, but we're starting to make some progress. She said that at some point she hopes we “win the game.”


A blurry image of church

This morning, we woke up at 6 am to go to Mass. As we were walking in, I saw a woman leading a goat on a string, which I was confused about. Later in the service, I realized that people had brought offerings for the poor, including live goats, chickens, a large (and fortunately dead) fish, and various other items – a big pack of toilet paper, lots of bottled water, and a bizarre number of pineapples.



The service was a fascinating mix of Catholic ritual and Cameroonian tradition: a choir wearing church choir garb sang African songs while the congregation clapped along and danced wildly, the priest clad in Western-style priestly clothes gave a sermon in Beti, the altar boys lit candles and bowed and crossed themselves, and the congregation took communion just like anywhere else. The ritual during which the donated items were presented was fun – the choir sang while women in matching colorful dresses and head scarves marched in carrying the items; they marched up the stairs to the back, around, and down to the middle, where the priest blessed each item and an assembly line of children passed them outside. At one point, a boy dropped a chicken and caused a bit of a ruckus as it flapped about, until a woman picked it up by the wings and carried it outside. At one point during the service, a woman in front of me passed me her baby and I held her for the duration.



Returning to the house, Simon helped me do my laundry. Again, I felt like an idiot as he wondered how I had never done laundry by hand before. I scrubbed and scrubbed and felt thankful that washing machines had been invented. I also explained to Simon and Adda what a laundromat was and told them how cheap and available they are in cities, making situations like this rare.

Simon and Adda also told me how in general, they find that Americans are not clean and don't shower very often. I thought this was funny, given the general stereotype in the other direction. At their house, we are required to shower twice a day – once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Since it's so hot and I get sweaty so easily, the cold showers have been a blessing. I explained to my siblings that American adults are usually very clean, and that it's only adolescents who don't shower often; Simon was astounded and said that adolescents should be the cleanest, since they are trying to present themselves to adults and to court the opposite sex.

While we were washing, Adda was preparing a peanut sauce from fresh peanuts. She sent Simon and me to a nearby neighborhood to have the mixture ground in a machine owned by a resident there. Simon explained that it was a very poor neighborhood, which I noticed as soon as we walked over. It's just behind our house, not even a block away, but the conditions there are vastly different – people live in thrown-together houses made of wood or mud, and a garbage-filled stream runs through the whole of the area. For 100 francs CFA (about 25 cents), a woman ground the peanut mixture with a large and ancient-looking machine; I wanted to take a photo, but I wasn't sure it was a good idea in that neighborhood.


The view from my window, overlooking the poor neighborhood

We just finished eating lunch, which was the Ndole we prepared yesterday, in addition to Cameroonian couscous – essentially mashed corn (which Adda grows in the backyard). The Ndole still tasted bitter to me, and I couldn't finish all of it, and the mashed corn didn't have any flavor. I hope I get used to these traditional foods eventually.

Tomorrow, it's back to SIT school, and I need to write a 3-page paper on the topic of development in Cameroon. I'll let you know if I come up with anything interesting.

Monday, February 1: 3:40 pm

Just finished our first Field Study Seminar. I have a feeling this whole class is going to be very repetitive and covering things that I've been learning for the last 3 years at Pomona - how to do social research, how to write an ethnographic paper, and so on. It's going to be slightly painful.

Anyhow, it's nice to spend some time with the Americans after so much time with my Cameroonian family. Coming to school requires less thought than being at home, where I constantly need to translate my thoughts, try to understand what my siblings are saying to me, and try not to step on anyone's toes. Now that school has ended for the day, though, I'm off to walk back home.