C, F, L, R

I love Tuesdays, and I’m even starting to love Monday nights, because I don’t have class Tuesday. It’s the only time I am fairly certain I will be alone; the Boys from next door are in class so I can just do whatever I want even during the daytime.

Today, however, my nerdy reverie was disturbed by a rustling. Holy shit, is that a snake? Why is it in my house?? (Lizards sometimes hang out on my porch and run into the house when threatened, but I’ve never seen a snake.) But when I got up to freak out about it, it turned tail and fled. So I went back to being a nerd.. until an hour or two later when I saw it again out of the corner of my eye.

Sorry about the low quality of these pictures; my "real" camera is déchargé.

He’s finally getting ready to leave. That’s my raquelet, which functions sort of like a mop.

He’s checking out my garbage here.

Finally chased him out of the house; even went out onto the porch to scare him off with a broom. Some students from my première class came in to the compound at just that time and addressed me in patois. Rather than engage, I thought it would be fun to respond in French. "Do you see that snake over there?" I got the response wanted; one of them flinched. "Where was he?? In the house??" And then they picked up a heavy piece of wood and attempted to smash the snake to death with it. I didn’t stick around to see if they succeeded.

So back to being a nerd. I have something interesting I’ll be uploading in the next day or two. Stay tuned.

It’s 8:30 on a Friday and I don’t feel exhausted or bitter or anything. In fact I feel kind of happy. I’m not sure if it’s the aftereffects of physical exertion — shot some hoops at the lycée, puised some eau — the fact that I’m almost over my cold, the sudden reappearance of free time, or a reflection on how classes went today, but I’m feeling loose and ready and maybe a little bored. I’ve been letting the dishes pile up out of habit, because I "don’t have time", but I didn’t know what else to do tonight so I tackled most of them. "Repos" means rest, like the verb "se reposer", literally to rest oneself. Flashback to a language training session where the language trainer Marcel asked us (in French) since if we wanted to eat, it meant we were hungry, what does it mean if we want to sleep? And Peter saying "Tu es fatigué", "You are tired", to which Marcel said, "Si on es fatigué, c’est qu’il faut se reposer." "If you’re tired, you need to rest." The answer he was looking for was the verb "avoir sommeil", to be sleepy, which in American English tends to just get folded into "tired". But I digress.

Among other essentially unproductive activties, I’ve been going through old todo list items and checking them off. Since I stopped reading most of my news feeds since I came to Africa, I’m able to take back some of the space I let fill up with recommendations. An appalling number of the things I dog-eared for later are really curio at best. But that’s what I get for having such high standards. Slightly more productive is time spent polishing my patch series for offlineimap, which, distressingly, may be the most useful thing I’ve done here. Cf. Rose’s recent experience teaching "why". This is the bread-and-butter of what we’re supposed to be doing here, and mostly, I haven’t. I’ve started emulating her example by addressing certain classes, asking them why they think I get upset when they just copy whatever another person has doing, or talking individually with the smarter students and explaining to them that they need to learn how to help without giving the answer. There’s a palpable gravity to these situations; sometimes they really do focus and listen to you, because they are really just impressionable children. But I haven’t yet found that one gem of hard-earned wisdom which will change lives when I speak it. Maybe after spring break. Or maybe next year.

Still, all in all, stuff’s great. Ate rice three, possibly four times today — although the middle time was spaghetti-rice, light on the spaghetti. And there’s only two weeks left until spring break.

I’m kind of sick but not to the extent that I have a fever or anything. I just feel like crap for no reason and don’t feel like doing anything. I keep taking my temperature hopefully but no dice — 98.6, like clockwork. (The thermometers we were given are Fahrenheit.) Le rhume is a cold (la grippe is the flu), so to have a cold is to be enrhumé, "enrhumed".

Right now I’m sitting in my house with my landlord, who wanted to talk to me about something tomorrow, but J-C keeps flipping out about this guy and insists on being present désormais ("henceforth", "from now on") at every interaction between us. J-C is at the lycée today, which is maybe three hundred meters away, so he’s going to come by after he finishes class. In the meantime, I’m just sitting here awkwardly in my house with the landlord and waiting.

I’ve paid rent for January, February, and March, plus apparently I paid two times for October, so I shouldn’t have to pay until the end of April, but the guy (Tiyou something or other) has an eye condition and apparently also has "tension", which I think is high blood pressure, and he’s going to a hospital tomorrow so he’s probably gonna hit me up for money in any event.

It’s also la Journée Internationale de la Femme, International Women’s Day, which isn’t a big enough deal for the school to close, but is a big enough deal that women teachers don’t go to work. They might be défilering somewhere too, but I just can’t be bothered. They have their own pagne and there’ll probably be people drinking and I’ve just had my fill of défiler.

I guess the good news is that I don’t really mind sitting here and being awkward. On the agenda after this is: being a nerd, trying to recuperate, and waiting (17 days until spring break).

Ah, here he is. They’re talking in patois now. Sweet, I’ll just sit here and whoooo.

Edit: It turned out it was to address that I paid one month twice. J-C just basically chewed the guy out in a patois/français mélange. Good times.

Got the most recent Times today with the other mail that Jenny left with Ryan in Bafoussam today. Issue 4, 2010 (PDF; 1.4 MB) has a short piece called "The Everyday Nuances of a [Organization] Volunteer", which caught my eye with the line "That’s five ‘little lies’ I had told, and it wasn’t even 10 a.m." It’s an interesting read about the "white lies" we tell during service. It’s surprisingly easy to tell people here "versions" of the truth that suit our individual needs at the time, from claiming to be married to saying that our organization forbids us from doing certain things. This is one of the peculiarities of being what we are. If we were immigrants or refugees, say, maybe we’d feel an obligation to be honest with these people, to be the best we could be to start the new rest of our lives.

I like to think of myself as someone for whom honesty is a deep personal commitment, but I break the rules a certain amount. The word "mentir" means "to lie". As a teacher, you hear it a lot in the phrase "Il ment!", "He’s lying!" I’ve listened to Cameroonians getting out of obligations, and they don’t seem to feel a need to make up stories or provide excuses like we do; they just say "No, I’m not doing that". And because of the inbuilt hierarchy of the society, nobody ever asks "Why not?" (although I guess they do sometimes ask the same question again).

This comes back to an ongoing problem I have with managing people, especially people here in my house. When I’ve been "performing" all day and I want to power down, and someone walks into my house to hang out, or to eat my food, I sit and seethe. But the truth can set you free, and it doesn’t even have to be a spectacular truth. Other volunteers just say "Can you leave? I’m tired/I need to work". And that’s culturally acceptable, I guess.

Today I watched Ryan take sugar cane from a kid on the street, just because he wanted to. That’s also culturally acceptable, I guess, but I couldn’t control my appalled facial expression. He figures the kids take so much of his crap that it’s only fair. It’s just another approach to navigating the two cultures in which we find ourselves. Ryan’s always been especially good at "playing Cameroonian", in haggling or in ordinary discussion.

So I’m still working it out, I guess. More later, maybe.

Wednesday, on my way back from getting bread and returning beer bottles (consigner, to deposit — 150 CFA a bottle, which you get back when you return them), I ran into a nice older couple who decided to start talking to me about God. Turns out they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses (temoins de Jehovah) and I think they have a salle just up the road towards the chefferie. They left a French "Awake", "Réveillez-vous!" for me to read, and then they asked for a donation. Basically exactly the same as Jehovah’s Witnesses back home, except I had to debate theology in French. Guess it’s better than grading papers.

Temoin, a witness, is also a verb, temoiner, to witness, and it happens to also be a helpful counterexample to my recent theory that English is more regular about noun suffixes then French. In French, it’s silence, "silence", but silenceux, "silent"; there’s "danceur" for "dancer", but "cuisinier", cook-person. In English it’s often -er, like driver, dancer, singer, but we don’t say stealer, cooker, or witnesser. So I guess it’s a crap shoot. Thanks, linguistics!

My Premiere class today was only 8 or 10 students, which was great. They did a little better on this sequence’s exam, which is good.. still show an appalling lack of creativity and originality for "literary" students. I blew up at one, even picking up a stick and banging it on a desk for effect, as the other students laughed inappropriately. Not sure if they were laughing at me or at him. It’s probably bad form to blow up at a student who really deserves it, since it signals that you’ve lost control in some way, and let them bother you, which is of course exactly what you are never supposed to let a bully do.

He had copied another student’s program, failed to understand it, and then asked me to give him credit, calling me "nduk", patois for "white person". It’s probably a little better than "le blanc", which refers directly to color — "nduk" is distinct from the patois word for white, which I learned once, and is "just the name given to Europeans", according to one of the other teachers. It’s still not extremely polite (though maybe not outright rude), and it’s an ugly word — you have to swallow the word, to borrow a phrase. Not as nice, for example, as nasara, in Fulfulde. (We compare notes on this sort of thing when we get together.) Ah, I hear it now; some lowbrows are wandering around outside. I guess losing my temper really was a tactical error. I try to respond with "le noir"/"la noire" ("black") when I hear it, but lately I’ve been stepping it up to "le nègre" — which my dictionary translates as "sometimes offensive Negro". Side note: expect me to be extremely politically incorrect when I get back; that’s just how service is. It’s just weird that growing up white in a Caribbean neighborhood means I know more about actual racism than a country full of for-realz Africans.

I guess the good news is that it wasn’t really that bad as far as Premiere classes go. I need to talk to the brighter students about how to really help their comrades, and I promised to give another remedial class Monday. I figured out a neat trick, which is to focus on the slowest student who wants to learn, and just teach "at" him/her. Focusing on one student lets you bring a lot of the old tutoring tricks to bear on the teaching problem — ignoring the noise/disruption from other corners of the class, ferreting out problem spots from signals on the face, mental models of what they’re likely to understand/not understand — which are a lot harder to wield at the front of a class. Of course, it should have been pretty obvious to focus on the students that actually want to learn and aren’t just being useless for fun. I’m a slow learner, I guess.

This week’s been a little bit of a challenge; 4e and 3e didn’t do so great on the tests, although there’s always a few that do perfect or almost-perfect, and giving back a test like that is basically a ready-made discipline problem. Jenny and Ryan are in Bafoussam tonight, going out and drinking, and right now I’m having a bit of FOMO ("Fear Of Missing Out"; also, one of my students’ names) despite the fact that I really would rather sit here at the computer and consume chocolate.

I just feel lately like I’ve been giving a lot, putting a LOT of myself into this stupid country with its stupid students. I’m developing that eyelid twitch that I tend to associate with sleep deprivation, although maybe it’s outright stress. I feel my blood pressure rise when the Boys walk into the house, because I know they’re just gonna sit around, do nothing, fuck around with my electronics, eat my food and ask stupid questions when I’d really rather just not deal with them. All I want right now is to sleep in, eat sustainably-made pancakes and watch 30 Rock in bed — and I’m all out of 30 Rock. This duty I have to be a volunteer teacher is starting to feel less like an opportunity and more like an obligation. Also see months 7-10 and 11-15 in the chart.

At least I graded and handed back all the tests for the 4th sequence. Any classroom you can walk away from..

I also got my mosquito net finally up, which is good because recently there’s been an influx of some kind of blood-sucking flying ants.

Due to the fact that I haven’t actually yet bought a bed, it sort of resembles a pillow fort. That’s also my tiger blanket. Rawr.

Woke up in the Binam Voyages bus back to Bafoussam; we’d only left a half hour ago but I was in desperate need of sleep. Had a brief moment where I wondered if the last two days were just a wonderful dream. It was easy to figure out that it would be dark by the time I got back to Bafoussam — the sun was yellow and low in the sky — and apparently "binam" means "le soleil couchant", "the setting sun", in the Bamiléké language family, so that was appropriate.

I got out at something like 9:45 PM, which is super late by Cameroonian standards, and I knew finding a car back to post would be extremely difficult. I screwed up my courage with the aid of five brochettes of soya, basically grilled meat, and went into the road to try to flag down a car.

Cameroonians have fairly specialized roles in the travel business — some drive the cars, of course, but others merely charge, or load, the vehicles. They get a commission for each passenger they furnish, and since they know the "lay of the land" in terms of where passengers are likely to be found and where cars are likely to go, they can play optimization games, along the lines of "Well, it’s really hard to find a car to that outlying village right now, but if I get enough of them together, I can talk some driver into taking all of them," or "There are five people for village A right now and only one for village B; I better assign one car to village A and hope for the best for the guy going to village B". A good chargeur is resourceful and creative.

So it came to pass that one of them called out to me as he clung to the outside of a truck driving by. This was one of the extremely recognizable trucks used to ship "33" Export, a fairly popular beer in this country (and one of my favorites). The chargeur had set up the deal; I paid 2000 CFA for what is normally a 600 CFA ride and I got to go back to post in the cabin of a 33 truck. It shuddered and it strained like it had worms, but it did the job. This post is thus named for that beer, which in Francophone Cameroon is pronounced "trente-trois", but in Anglophone Cameroon is called "export".

I’m back home now. It’s midnight, which is astonishingly late, but there’s a deuil going on tomorrow in my compound, so people are still out and about and I can still even hear them talking.

Fridays are the worst. I don’t think it’s really Fridays that sucks — Terminale is my first class on Fridays, and they’re beginning to get it a little bit — but specifically Première. I don’t know if they’re specialized at pissing me off or what. I’d like to call what they do refusal to learn — which sounds closed-minded and ignorant of the difficulty of the material, but they always say they understand and then always utterly fail to successfully perform in the lab, on paper, whatever. So let’s call it refusal to learn.[1] Between the refusal to learn, refusal to think or even look for themselves, and just general insouciance and rudeness (they tore up their own attendance roster), I always want to stab someone by the end of the day.

Today was especially wonderful because when we went to the lab to practice, M. Dinesso and M. Domtchom were there hanging out. M. Dinesso started things off on the right foot by telling me that we should go back to my place after class and drink whatever whiskey I had, "because you guys [white people? Americans?] only drink whiskey", and M. Domtchom (in between writing correctly the answer to the exercise without ever having seen the programming language before) told me that he didn’t like Python and that Pascal is much easier to learn because "it doesn’t have conversion functions" — which is just so face-palmingly ignorant and incoherent that I’d have to teach him for three months just so we could even talk about it. SO ignorant that I had to respond in English, "Actually, that’s complete bullshit". And even if it weren’t — seriously, not during class.

The exercise was to write a program that did a thing, and naturally the students passed their time variously:

• Asking me "What do we do?"
• Telling me that the computer they’re seated at is broken because it doesn’t have Python on it
• Opening random other programs, like "Tux Typing", out of confusion or desperation?
• Typing in random programs that we’ve talked about in class
• Studiously not finding the errors in the programs that they’ve just typed in and asking for help. Yes, I know it’s hard when you don’t know the language, but matching parentheses isn’t rocket science.
• Trying to find someone else whose program seems more correct, so that they can copy them.
• Asking me if they’ve finished, without testing whether their program does a thing, or after seeing that it generates an error, or just flat out does something else.

OK, sure, programming is a little confusing, especially if you don’t have practice at learning how to learn or being creative. But the terminales are doing so much better than they are! Is this the same phenomenon I’ve seen in 4e/3e, where the 3es just seem to understand so much better seemingly by virtue of merely being a year older?

I’ve long since given up on the scheme of work — which was basically bullshit anyhow, since most of the stuff in this year is boring or useless — and just focused on this one simple thing, programming. Input, output, variables, if statements, while loops. I’ve had lectures where we just do drills of reading and writing programs, and they bomb quizzes and lab sessions. I’m reminded of my last job, where I told my co-worker that if we wanted our client to fail, all we had to do was build exactly what they asked for at a reasonable pace. I can probably keep teaching this one thing for the rest of the year and they’ll still fail every test. I’m starting to look forward to it.

After class I went to the nearest bar and drank a Fanta, then bought bread and made a peanut-butter and banana sandwich (thanks, mom). I’m studiously ignoring the whiskey sachets that I do, in fact, have in my house. Fridays. I’ve been counting down Fridays to spring break. No other day really gives me trouble. I was also counting down to next Friday, when I was going to Yaoundé to see someone, but it turns out that she might be coming up here instead, as early as Wednesday (though personally my money is on Thursday). So let’s focus on that instead, shall we?

Monday was the installation of the sous-prefet of my newly-minted arrondisement. We were told last week that we should be there and that class was cancelled, but it turns out that was all a big joke. Naturally I didn’t have a lesson planned, or have the papers graded that I got the week before. So it was a fun day.

Today, Brondon came by my house briefly to ask if he could borrow my copy of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. I think he is drawn to the gripping narration of the crisis and the clash between indigineous worldviews and those of the Occident. Ha ha, just kidding! He’s using it to find verbs for English class. Yesterday he came by with an assignment where he had to find 10 English verbs and provide their present and past tenses, and the only ones he could find in his notebook were ones that his teacher had used in class (and so couldn’t use). He tried some others, but most of the interesting verbs are irregular — "read", "speak", etc. So he asked if I had any "reading books" in English, and when I presented him with the aforementioned, he began skimming the text, looking for appropriate words. "Is this a verb?" he asked, pointing at "nothing", or "accommodated". I think he’s keying onto the conjugated endings. Not bad for a boy who still regularly has trouble finding the English section of the French-English dictionary (I’m actually impressed as hell). So I guess he must have turned in his homework with four- and five-syllable Latinate verbs in present and past tense. I wonder what his teacher thought.

I am looking now at the "Planning des Activities du 2eme Trimestre", which we received about a month ago. The 2nd trimester includes 3rd and 4th "sequences", and the 4th sequence is coming to an end — we give out tests next week. The planning indicates that Friday is International Mother Tongue day, that we give out tests next week, that we grade them and fill out report cards the week after, and other sundry things. Planning is one of several English loanwords like gentleman and challenge which you can get away with using in French, even in official documents. ("True" French would be planification.)

I’ve been doing a little planning of my own, since I have a regional meeting this weekend and I’m taking a road trip to Yaoundé the weekend after. So I need to have as much of the test writing/grading done as far in advance as possible, ’cause odds are I won’t have much time to do it over the next few weeks. So far I’m doing fine; today I finished grading the quizzes I’ve had for over a week, and all my tests are written — just need to get them printed out. I even managed to finish a review of the "textbooks" the Agency supplied us with back in stage; we want to make sure they follow the syllabus pretty closely, in case we get audited by the Cameroonian government. Not the most likely thing in the world, but I guess Admin’s doing their planification too.

Other reading: Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. I’m especially fond of the entry on hot showers.

Défiler means to march. Not to be confused with marcher, which means to walk. And the youth day festivities ended with a march at the "stade municipal", which is a soccer field at one of the secondary schools here. Every school in the area showed up — and there are a lot. Apparently a country-wide policy has been implemented to the tune that the smallest administrative unit is no longer a district, but an arrondisement, so my village is now an arrondisement. No practical changes, as far as I can tell.

"Let’s work for the future of the nation!"

Anyhow, lots of schools. We started with the smallest and worked our way up. There are even a couple of école maternelle, pre-school sorts of dealies, here, and their kids were the cutest.

The woman in the pink dress is Madame Dorothé, and these are her students.

The little pumpkins didn’t really "get" the idea of a march, and one or two of them just sort of wandered off to do its own thing. This is their teacher, herding him or her back.

The majorettes at my school. None of us know what the ring-y things are. They’re not hula hoops.

I think this is a private school. They’re pretty gung-ho about informatique, apparently. Look at them carrying around their keyboards and scanners and flat-panel screens! I’m pretty sure these are teachers and not students.

This is the phys ed teacher at my lycée. Love the pink shirt.