New house, new paint, new start

Here are a few first pics of my new place in Nkongsamaba!! It's beautifully newly painted, weeded, scrubbed and redocorated. I am devestated (sheerly out of vanity) that my camera card got a computer virus and we had to wipe everything on it, which at that point included all the before pictures -- booooo. Just imagine something between a prison cell, an attic you would dread to enter, and a long-abandoned car garage, and you'll have half the picture of what I walked into here. Junk, dirt, cockroaches and grime EVERYWHERE, and a deep thick musty feel and smell you could have cut with a knife. I sure hope I will never have to face another "before" situation like this one, but I'm pretty proud that little by little I've turned it around into something homey, inviting, and CLEAN. The plumber, electrician and landlord go off every time they enter about their disbelief in the transformation. It's a perfect hobby for a home decor lover like me, and your home is your retreat here from stress and frustration and gawking, so its highly worth it to me to invest the time.

I am told that vine is a passion fruit plant, I can't wait to find out and enjoy. Rain water goes gushing down that gutter with incredible force. Oh, and yes, the pricacy is incredible... I do miss my compound neighbor kids, but not at 5AM.

This area gets great morning sun and is perfect for tea. The kids living above love to throw all their trash, clothes, cups and toothbrushes off the balcony, but I cleaned all that up, just for you.

The wicker sofa frame I found outside, and then made cushions from an abandoned foam mattress so permanently curled I had to bind it to the frame with ripped up fabric strips. Everything you see is redone! The wine bottle on the little table is a candle holder, they are perfect, and often needed for unexpected power outages.

Cards from you! And a canvas-esque painting I found so covered in grime the image was not recognizable. I bought the fridge in the kitchen after the one there was a moldy, leaky, ice filled nice and chilly hang-out for cockroaches and slaughtered chicken parts.

So, I'm kinda tickled with myself for making those cafe curtains out of an ill-fitting dress. I use a gas stove, heat water for tea in that little pot (there is a hole one third of the way up, so you have to fill it just right) listen to BBC from that radio in the morning, and look at my brother's Save the Date on the window to remind me I will be home visiting family in just three months!


It's coming along, but there is allllways something that needs fixing around here, nice as it looks. This morning my sticky-note of issues to bring up to the landlord (hey, at least now I have one!) included: Mice are getting in under the door, the electricity in the bedroom is blown, the toilet continues to run constantly even after a plumber came three times, the sink and the bathroom faucet are leaking heavily, and can we fill up the hole in the wall that has a cockroach nest inside? As a visiting volunteer pointed out slightly mockingly, problems are relative. Before I had no water, now I'm complaining that my flush toilet won't stop running. Rough life...but in a place where parts are cheaply made, things are poorly built and rarely maintained, and qualified labor is hard to find,  more ammenities bring more complications when trying to keep them up! It is a constant effort to hold back the tide of malfunctions, bugs, and mold, but pretty snazzy when you think you might be living in a mud hut.

Visitors welcome!

Lately

My new post is much more accessible to other volunteers, and is the central point for all PCV's in this region. As such I am getting to do much more hosting, and since this house (formerly nothing short of a filthy disaster) is thoroughly cleaned, newly repainted and now decorated (interior pictures of that are next up) it's been fun to show off my hard work, enjoy good company, and have an appreciative audience to cook, clean and fuss for. I've had nearbye volunteers staying with me this week for a goodbye party, a soy workshop, and to visit their posts (the new group of health and agriculture volunteers just arrived - now we're the big kids!). Here are three friends heading down my street off on a hike last Saturday.

The place has been getting major work done! This is my fantastic painter (sitting on a flower pot), who every day takes the ripe papayas from my tree without asking, and who sterly told me he was going to cut down those rose bushes because he said they did not belong there. It seems men, and elders, have the habit of making the decisions even when it's not their house...we have had to create some house rules, including that he will take care of the painting, and I will take care of other things, like what wall my bed should be against : )

Making delicious fresh soymilk and tofu with local women at my house...including this cook for one of the orpahanges I visit. In fact all the cooks for the two orpahanages pictured below were there and want to try this for their kids. Soybeans are cheap, available, and full of nurtrients the tradiational diet of white starches and oil does not provide. But using soy in cooking is not widespread, so promoting it is a favorite and fun volunteer project. If you fry tofu and add enough MSG cube, they love it!

Finished product...YUM!

HIV education with a farmer's group - classifying activities that do and do not transmit HIV. If you can read French you can see that "Common use of needles" is on the "Cannot transmit" side and "Shaking hands with someone with HIV" is on the "Can transmit" side. It's really satisying to get the correct information across...Knowledge is power!

One brave volunteer doing, yep, a condom demonstration on an ear of corn. We work with what we have!

Kids from a local orphange showing off the t-shirts that were recently donated to them as well as their puzzle assembling skills. They did this puzzle five times in a row and really figured out how it works after a while. At first, when pieces did not slide together they thought they could not fit (its not intuitive to lift them up and overlay them) and the fact that an edge side cannot go next to a  side with a stub sticking out was hard to visualize. Fun to see them THINK and learn something new.

Studies from the sixties up to now have shown that non white-skinned girls will often choose white dolls and pictures over dark ones as "good", "nice", "pretty" and preferable...sad and eye-opening about the racial cues even little kids pick up on.  So I was really encouraged when this girl chose to give the three cute girls in this coloring book picture brown skin : ) , and not because she has not been exposed to different races - they get a decent amount of European volunteers here. Doesn't she look like she should be one of those girls herself, and that she thinks so too? Love that.  

Evening sudy hour at another orphange that is very near and dear to my heart...this is where we did the summer camp, and I love going back to visit.

Enjoying the sunset outside while the kids finish their homework...

...and then we got to play!

After an hour they were pretty proud to have finished the puzzle!

Some of the new trainees getting their Zumba groove on during their Saturday afternoon off! 55 newbies arrived in September, just like I did a year ago, and are doing their 11 weeks of language, culture and technical study before setting out for two years at post. Aside from Community Health and Agriculture volunteers, this year Cameroon opened a Youth Development sector, that I was honored to get to help design this summer. I spent a week in October helping out with their training too, doing sessions on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, Life Skills, water/sanitation and other health/youth development topics that hugely affect the groups they will be working with.
I had a blast meeting them and sharing what life is like as a volunteer - I remember so vividly how much I valued having older volunteers visit us during training, and I really wanted to pass that on. I'll be back for two more weeks soon - its really wild to be the older generation of health volunteers now, but when I see how fresh and wide-eyed they are, I realize we've put in our time, and somewhere when I wasn't looking, we got a handle on Cameroon.

The three agro volunteers coming to my cluster, L-R: Brian, Katie and Shane  - they spent a lot of time at my house this past week and it was awesome getting to know them, cooking together, swapping stories, and trying to impart some second-year volunteer wisdom and survival tips -  ex. remember that when everyone tells you in an accusatory tone, "You've ABANDONED me!" when you have not gone by their house or workplace for a few days, its just their way of saying they miss you and are happy to see you - don't feel guilty!

Driving out of my town, Nkonsamba, at 6:30AM

It's...beautiful here.

Your birthday packages - absolutely worth battling corruption for!



This shelf has never been so stocked - I'm eating like a queen!

A huge

THANK YOU

to everyone who made the effort to get a box of goodies packed and out the door for my 25th birthday - I know care packages do not throw themselves together, and I am truly overwhelmed with the incredibly generous response to my request for mental health boosters. The time and care that clearly went into putting the packages together is so touching - you have definitely taken the edge off "going without"...who knew what some Annies mac and cheese or scented lotion or nice tea could do for my day!

I have all the bath necessities to keep me (starting out) clean and sweet-smelling for months, enough chocolate to derail my bridesmaid slim-down plan (I've had to put a picture of the dress as my desktop background to keep me on track, but Ohhh is it worth it : ), Peeps and decorations for Halloween, momentos from my best friend since childhood's recent wedding (congrats Anna!!), cereal, tupperwear, peanut butter, tea, hair clips, lots of canned tuna, nuts, brown rice, lentils, bed sheets, notecards, fun jewelry... even pressed fall-colored leaves to bring a sense of seasons to the tropics.

Anna wins the prize for the lowest claimed total value of contents ("$3" - nice work!) and Mrs. Corey wins the prize for getting the most packed into a standard sized box (she's a dedicated care package sender with lots of practice!) I was stunned to get a boxful of love from a friend from grad school I'd lost touch with, as well as from my dear high school advisor - wow, you all know how to make a girl feel special! Every box was delightful and is being cherished (though that's a delicate-sounding word for how fiercely I tore through the packaging - luckily this time I was the first to get to the goods, no rodent-ravaged snacks)

And while I know it was an effort to get those presents off to me, they did not just fall into my lap once they crossed the Atlantic...three of them (totally random, not based on contents or anything else in your control) were slapped with a $50 "customs" fee, above the fee I already pay to pick up packages. $50 (25,000 francs)  is a LOT here (you can get a plate of food for 20 cents), and is a large chunk of my monthly stipend, so X3 was just out of the question...but so was relinquishing your lovingly prepared boxes.

The fee is totally bogus too - no explanation, no papers, no regulation anyone could quote...nor would they offer me ANY address, phone number or name of whom I could contact to find out more. Just a huge sum on my pick-up slip, and after that, nothing but dead ends in trying to get to the bottom of it...the director of the post office told me I should go to the seaside port myself where the fee had supposedly been applied and "see if someone there wanted to listed to me"...gee, THANKS. Until, after pleading and crying and yelling and stomping and cursing in  the post office lobby did nothing but negate all my efforts thus far to come off as a classy and well-adpated American,  I spent two weeks working with Peace Corps security officials and getting in touch with and finally meeting the top government authority of this region. I brought him an official document stating that Peace Corps is exempt from customs fees (a nice way of saying workers' trying to make a buck or 50 under the table won't fly here), and he proceeded to give the local post office a solid shake-down much more effective than my whining -  I had my packages within the hour!! Hooray - one small step in the fight against corruption, one giant leap for my sense of accomplishment. And of course it made all the treats inside that much sweeter.

 Before he took action, the government official (called the "prefet") asked if I was a Christian and believed in God. I smiled - no matter how inappropriate this seems to me, I've got this routine down, and was not going to let my feelings about separation of church and state get between me and weeks of eating well. He gave me a Bible and a booklet he wrote about the experience that brought him to God years ago - angry townspeople apparently burned his house to the ground, killing a child of his that was inside. I am supposed to read it and give him my thoughts on Jesus and salvation at our next meeting. My thank-you gift of tupperwear and some fruit was notably less heavy.

My actual birthday was a lot of fun - I had a little party of volunteers and Cameroonian friends (low-key since the presidential elections had been a few days before and no one was supposed to travel far in case the results sparked any issues, which luckily they didn't). I made my specialty here (my dad's specialty, really) - pancakes, which I serve with jam and yogurt - a big hit! We also made a huge bowl of guacamole, and had fruit salad, fresh fruit juice and cookies. I planned to make an actual cake, but the city was quite literally out of flour. I got lots of nice calls from friends here (Cameroonians are great at thinking of others like that) and from home - my whole immediate family got on the same line from three different locations and sang happy birthday in unison - unforgettable!

I had the Cameroonians laughing at my stories of being a naive newbie a year ago...ex. the first time I rode a motorcycle taxi, I threw my arms around the driver's waist as he tore off down the road...isn't that what you do when you ride a motorcycle? Turns out that's a clear local signal for wanting to "take him home", and when we arrived to my village homestay house and he tried to follow me inside, assuring me it was no problem if my host parents were there, the conversation was awkward at best. I had no idea what mixed signals I was giving him - poor guy!

25 feels pretty great so far - making mistakes, making progress, making a dream come true by being here,  all the while held up by loving friends and family - I'm a lucky lady!
Thanks again from the bottom of my heart for the support you all show me in all your ways <3

Birthday Wishlist! If you ever eventually wanted to send me a care package or have asked me what I want, here you go : )

It's shameless and maybe out of line to come out and tell you what I want for my birthday (October 13th), but getting insults to the French and marriage proposals alike barked at me from roadside bars where men have been drinking since dawn has started to wear down my recollection of what is appropriate when...so excusez-moi.

And your birthday only comes once a year, so since I have the added excuses of it being my 25th birthday AND being in Africa where pulling into a CVS is but a fuzzy fantasy, I've gotta make the most of it. For those of you wanting to shower me with love, please know that the bar for what makes me giddy like a 5-year-old at Christmas, like my standards in nearly all areas, has plummeted to unrecognizable lows since being on this planet. I mean continent...wow, really just wrote that.

So, while I have let myself go wild with this list, putting just a couple of these things in a $13 flat rate envelope will make my month, and if past experience is an indicator, I will squeal like a puppy upon seeing even a pack of M&Ms. Heck, I'm not sure my heartrate will be able to handle the shock if I actually see all these things too close together, so please, against your better judgement, control thyself when purchasing.

"A happy volunteer is a productive volunteer", so don't hesitate to consider your boost to my mental sanity a contribution to the promotion of peace and development in my tiny corner of the world. Your encouragement will keep me motivated to share many things with Cameroonians - the advantages of exclusive breastfeeding and birth spacing, the important elements of a balanced diet and a recipe for making preteinlicious tofu, songs, card tricks...but peanut butter, mac and cheese, nice chocolate, these things will be MINE, all mine. Cameroonians don't have a track record of loving our food, so when we try to share they end up forcing down food they don't enjoy, and we end up losing our precious hard-to-come-by ingredients and resenting that anyone would not enjoy something so obviously delicious.

Did I tell you about the time I made Jello for my neighbor kids and they ran around saying they were going to vomit? Another volunteer had a more polite, grown friend try a dinner dish, and even he asked "umm...do you have any salt? ...do you have any...oil?" But I already know what I love, so there is no such risk of disappointment or anticlimax involved. Just the opposite -- I actually scissored in half the first jar of peanut butter I got here just to make sure I could swipe every.last.morsel from the bottom with my finger.  So:

Toiletries: Shampoo; body wash; deoderant; nice smelling lotions or sprays - (believe me, I'm not picky on what scent!); Q-tips; toothpaste; razors; toothbrushes; Aveeno "Positively Radiant" face lotion, make-up removing face cleansing wipes, little grabby hair clips (you know the kind I wear, if you don't, skip this one : )  

Condiments: Soy sauce; balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing; any salad dressing packets; natural peanut butter; taco/fajita meat seasoning packets; instant soup packets; curry powder (red or yellow); brown sugar; honey; no-calorie sweetener (preferably the natural kind, like Stevia) 

Food: Canned tuna fish or chicken - oh protein, how I miss thee; Luna bars (especially Cherry Pie flavor) or Clif Bars (any peanut related flavor); milk-chocolate covered pretzels (like Flipz ); boxed maceroni and cheese (oooh, Annie's brand please!); parmesan cheese; dried lentils; brown rice; granola; any not-super-sweet cereal like honey roasted shredded wheat (take it out of the cardboard box!); nuts, other than peanuts; dried fruit, preferably unsweetened; gummy fruit snacks; tea- anything but Lipton black which I can find here (caffeinated or herbal, loose or bagged is all fine); emergen-c vitamin c packets 

Life bits and pieces: Cheap fun jewelry (earrings and necklackes - women love to get dressed up here and I got nothin'); leggings or thick tights to wear under dresses so I don't flash people climbing onto motorcycles - large size, especially black/brown/navy; stand-on-their-own candles, especially scented; fun headbands (cloth or plastic - trying to find cute ways to ward off motorcycle helmet hair); sturdy scrubby (mettalic) dish cleaning "sponge"; American stamps for sending letters back to you with travelling volunteers/Embassy officials; any size tupperwear containers with lids; large Zip-lock bags (the ultimate ant/roach/mouse protection for food); Clorox wipes; non-stick cooking spray; heavy duty drain de-clogger; Tylenol multi-symptom liquid cold medicine, (orange liquid in clear bottle); J Crew/Banana Republic or similar catalogues that have basic women's dresses - we show the pictures to tailors here when getting dresses sewn - its fun!

A few notes on sending:

1) Take items out of bulky packaging, and don't feel the need to add lots of extra padding. The boxes actually don't get too beat up, so no need to pay for a bigger box than the bare contents require.

2) Get flat rate boxes - USPS has a small, medium and large size, the biggest being around $58 last time I knew. Ask for these and avoid paying too much!

3) That's Sister Tess to you. Have fun with drawing crosses on the box and busting out those Bible verses you had to memorize in Sunday School. Try and get comfortable considering snacks and toiletries as "religious materials" when declaring contents. I mean, I find God in food, and will swear I'm in Heaven when I get your package, so it's not that much of a stretch. And for the total value of the contents, think: Limbo - How low can you go?

4) My address is still the same: Tess Marstaller, Peace Corps Volunteer, BP 15, Nkongsamba Cameroun (the French use a "u" instead of the 2 Anglophone "oo"s. Packages generally take 2-3 weeks to get here, but don't worry about the timing one bit.

THANK YOU! The Peace Corps has just told us we are not allowed to leave our posts for three weeks in October because of the upcoming Cameroonian elections and wanting to play it safe should tensions arise (though no one is expecting people to get rowdy, the outcome is already anticipated and generally accepted). That means that I'll be staying close to home come the 13th, so if I can't have friends and loved ones around, hearing from you will be all the more special.

Also, wacky seasons, time warpage and general disconnect mean I frequently have to stop and figure out what month it is (and when talks about preventing cholera or not blaming infant deaths on sorcery get interrupted by Justin Bieber cellphone ringtones, I often have to wonder what year it is too...). Point being, whether it's for my birthday, Christmas, or Easter, I will appreciate any displays of affection, anytime, however modest (remember, I freaked out that a store in my new town sells Tic Tacs). I love letters too and would be thrilled to have an update from any of you!

Thanks again for helping me get to the 1 year mark, I know the next year is going to fly!

Celebrating ONE YEAR in Cameroon

Yesterday marked my one year anniversary of arriving to Cameroon as a Peace Corps volunteer! Feels pretty. darn. great. I finished off year one with an incredible jungle hike to some remote water falls, led by a local villager and accompanied by a Cameroonian friend who took all the pictures. It was an awesome adventure and definitely one of those "This is not some fake amusement park Africa. I am really here!" moments : ) More about the difference that a year has made (so big its hard to wrap my head around) coming up, but for now, THANKS for all the support you show through reading the blog, writing emails, sending goodies and letters, dropping facebook messages - no show of encouragement goes unnoticed, they truly keep me going and mean a ton. So don't think I don't need them now that I'm a slightly more seasoned volunteer - the rollercoaster ups and downs never slow down. But thanks to my recent move and all the good energy resulting from those changes, I'm feeling the best I have since I got here and I can't wait for year 2.

Please note the Cameroon-shaped earrings! Wearing my pride.