Some stuff to note after I got to my house:

• My bleach leaked onto some clothes in the same suitcase. Kind of annoying, but only one shirt I really liked got ruined.

• When I first got to my house, the bathroom smelled foul. I spent a bit of time last night scrubbing the toilet with bleach. It helped a little, but it’s still a little funky.

• Went to Bafoussam yesterday to buy shit. A blanket, because it was cold, with a picture of a tiger, for 20,000 CFA. I think I overpaid on that one; similar blankets at the supermarché cost 13-16k. Bought my first bucket for 2k (which may have been a mistake too; the vendor swore it was a high quality, and I talked her down from 2.5k, but I think a fair price for a bucket is less than 1k). This bucket enabled me to take a much-needed bath. Bleached the water first — eight or ten drops in the bucket, to guard against schisto (as though the tumbo flies weren’t bad enough).

• I bought a "plaque à gas", which is like a portable stovetop, but I don’t yet have the gas in order to use it. That means I can’t boil water, which means I’m drinking bottled for the moment. I’ve also been eating whatever stuff I don’t have to cook. I ate a lot of boiled peanuts from J-C’s family, and I’ve had a couple meals there. I also ate a banana sandwich (a bunch of the little bananas they have here cost me 100 CFA, and bread was 200 CFA).

  They have big heads of cabbage available at the other end of town, but I’m just not yet equipped to do anything with them. When I wandered past I saw some avocados which looked appealing, but the vendor warned me that they weren’t ripe. They tried to push the cabbage, but when I explained that I couldn’t yet cook them, they said "Take some passion fruit." I ended up in front of a bucket of what I thought were passion fruit, and bought one for 300 CFA. Turns out it’s a squash. I’ve been eating it raw anyhow, even the strings and the seeds, cutting it open with the serrated blade on my Leatherman and scraping the flesh with my teeth (trying to avoid the skin since I didn’t really wash it well). Beggars can’t be choosers.

• So far I have spent this money on actual housewares:

Total: 56850. Plus a couple thousand to bounce back and forth to Bafoussam, and a well-earned lunch. Still want to buy some chairs.. I’ve just been sitting on my air-mattress.

As Claire writes, it turns out that putting clumps of dirt/grass in the road is a signal to drive slowly here. I got to see it in action on the bus ride out of town when we drove past a few such clumps in the road, marking the site of a fascinating accident where two trucks apparently careened off the road and flipped over. Lots of people were hanging out and trying to salvage the contents.

At other times we passed buses that had suffered other bizarre fates. Some had run off the road, one looked shredded. One looked like it had been stripped and then set on fire. Kind of ominous. But don’t worry, guys, there’s cheerful Nigerian pop playing!

Lots happened in the last few days, the conclusion of which is my installation here at my post. We’re all officially Volunteers (with a capital V). Let’s try to break it down a bit.

Getting ready to head out. Packing up everything. This reveals a certain amount of "What do I do with this?" — for example, house keys for back home. Bittersweet.

Last Saturday wasn’t so bad. Allison’s birthday. I left before people went to the nightclub, figuring I didn’t have enough money to participate. Jenny reports that Jeneca apparently came to the bar and said "I’m marrying the bouncer, so you all get in free". That’s pretty typical in many respects for our experience here. (I don’t think she’s actually going to marry the bouncer.)

Dance party at Ryan’s today, which I crashed. Every time we get together and I listen to American music with Americans and try to do American dances, I just remember the times back home, the Pulsewaves, the Blip Festival, Gus, etc. Also bittersweet.

It’s our "last night in Bafia", but next night we’re celebrating at a hotel until all hours, and then crashing there before finally departing Thursday. So tonight at the bar was the "last night at the bar". Also bittersweet. I didn’t think it would happen, but I’m going to miss (some of these fucking) stagiaires.

Power finally came back on today (it’s been off since Sunday). All my equipment is charged, I think.

Packing is a lot easier this time, as compared with being at home, trying to decide what to buy, what to bring, etc. Everything in your room is either coming with you or being thrown away. The real mystery is how we could have accumulated so much crap that we can no longer fit everything into the suitcases we brought, or even in the additional trunk many of us are bringing. It’s not really a mystery: helmets, textbooks, baking soda. Hope I can keep track of all this shit until I get to my house. I hope my "counterpart" at post has the keys. I hope I can get into my house. Sigh.

My host brothers seem pretty torn up about my packing up and getting ready to move out. Can’t say I’m completely clear-of-heart either.

Presentation went well. I could give you notes if you wanted, but they’re in French and they basically just boil down to "languages with tones" and "noun classes".

Instead I want to talk about the "soirée culturelle", which is an event in which all the students show what they’ve been working on the entire "semester" (or 4 weeks or whatever in our "model school"). "Soirée" in this context means "afternoon"; we started around 2 PM, because though scheduled time to start was 1 PM, it had been raining around noon and Cameroonians don’t believe it’s possible to travel in the rain.

The club that I run with Peter, "Computer Science Club", didn’t have anything in particular to show. Some students created posters to advertise the soirée ("Ça sera chaud", "It’s gonna be hot"), and a couple wanted to "animer", or DJ the event. So we did that. Gaston was clear that we had to use our own computers if we wanted the students to be able to play with them, so I volunteered mine. At first it was a little bit of a disaster, because Ubuntu, plus foreign language (English), plus false keyboard layout (Dvorak). Me and Peter, naturally, were pretty checked out at this point, and to us this whole thing was disaster, but somehow we got it together, although that led to the fuckup that when the microphone was on, it cut out the music from the computer, so you couldn’t sing "with" the song on the computer. Additionally, the first group that sang was pretty not-good at singing. But they showed good humor and everyone got through that.

As the soirée went on, it became clear that there was actually a lot of really cool stuff going on here. Art Club presented a piece of "grid art" where each student had drawn on a sheet of paper and put it all together at the end. Girls Club sang too (by this point we’d worked out the technical fuckery, but stay tuned).

And then it started to rain. All the students naturally took shelter on the veranda of the school, which had been our impromptu "stage" (the field in the center of the school is a few feet lower).

Poetry Club read two poems in French, one about HIV/AIDS (!) and another directed towards us volunteers and the Organization. Dance Club’s number was pretty damn awesome. It was raining hard at this point. Everyone was under the roof on the veranda. And I realized: this was really cool.

Then something happened. The microphone stopped working. Someone smelled something burning. Power to the mixer wasn’t working. Apparently a speaker was emitting the burning smell. Fun times. It wasn’t coming back, so we hung out for a bit, trying to see if the rain would stop. It wouldn’t. I watched a guy use a "raquelet", which is essentially a giant squeegee, to push dirty water off the veranda. It was mesmerizing.

Then the Chorale Club decided to move indoors and do their performance in a classroom. Holy wow. They were amazing. It’s nominally Jenny’s club, but according to her they just completely self-organized, completely without her doing.

And then we called it a day and went to the bar.

Jessica’s been running around telling everyone the good things she wrote about them at the beginning of stage. Example: I am "inclusive, individual, and delights in his girlfriend". Then she took the quote I printed out from a Gus email down from the wall and showed it to me as evidence of something she had been trying to say a few days ago. She hadn’t realized I’d put it there three weeks ago. Damn right I delight in my girlfriend: because she’s awesome.

Timothy wore a delightful boubou in green. Andrew R. has a vest made out of our stage pagne. Katelin was wearing a beautiful dress she had made. I picked up my shirt today and it was way short, belt line and no further. What do you do about something like that? Not much, I guess. It’s a far cry from the fitted shirt Timothy wore last Friday which looked like pimp doused in baller. Guess I have to work on how to direct tailors.

It’s still raining on and off, and the power’s off now, so I’m gonna cut this short, take a shower and go to bed. Tomorrow’s closing ceremonies for model school and there’s really not a lot left.

Spent a little time talking with my host family. Relaxed conversation. Christelle asked how I will feel after I leave next week. I said I’m ready to be independent, but a little scared, and a little sad to go.

Vladimir is rambunctious as always. Today we started chastising him, and he responded by throwing a tantrum. Astride finally got fed up, plucked him off the floor and plopped him onto the couch. "Go to bed, why don’t you," or words to that effect. Vladimir responded by peeing on her, and then, as we watched in startled-but-amused awe, peed on her again.

Oh, I guess he was running around pantsless. I guess some things have ceased surprising me.

I have a presentation tomorrow, which I chose to do on the local language, and in general the manner in which you can learn a little about a language. Things like tones, noun classes, stuff you might encounter. I’m so far beyond caring whether it’s a good presentation; the bare minimum is 15 minutes. I have 15 slides. Talk slowly.

In the meantime I’m feeling pretty good. It’s raining right now. Today I downloaded some albums by she and filed a bug report.

A number of good things happened today:

• Got an opportunity to just chill and play with my laptop for a few hours while we waited for another teacher to fill out their grades. Then, was able to use my spreadsheet skillz to rapidly calculate the students’ averages and give them all ranks. Filling out the report cards became a meditative exercise, like shoveling snow, once I stopped making mistakes in the copying.
• In the meantime, exchanged music with Timothy. He has recently shared with me "Lust Lust Lust" by a band called "The Raveonettes". It’s wonderful, that kind of crunchy thick echoey polyphony. Don’t buy their Sony releases, but Lust Lust Lust and "In & Out of Control" are safe.
• Got my language level back. Advanced low. Gaston congratulated me, to which I only had a weak smile.
• It rained today. Like usual, the rain was only for a few minutes, but today it had an intensity that had been missing. It was incredibly calming, the release to a tension I hadn’t noticed.
• The pineapple. Today the pineapple, good lord. Have I mentioned the pineapple here? ‘Cause when it’s good, it’s really good (and when it’s bad, well you know how it goes). Today it was that sweet-tangy with hints of orange and vanilla, rather than just the normal flavor of pineapple. Falling off the bone, if you can say that. Delicious.
• Wrote a little code (emacs lisp) when I was working with tables in that last entry. Posted it to a mailing list. Nice to bring to completion something even as small as that.

So I decided I might as well take the time to work on the presentation I’m giving Thursday. I guess I have enough for now. I’ll have to work on it more tomorrow. Still, today has been pretty good.

Note: The original uses the name of the Organization directly, and some Organization-specific acronyms. I have elided these for the sake of generality.

You will note that the behavioral reactions listed below all tend to be negative. This is NOT meant to imply that your [Organization] experience produces only difficult, unhappy emotions. It’s just that when you’re feeling "on top of the world," you don’t look for changes. Given, however, that [Volunteers] spend their two (or more) years in a foreign culture, the likelihood of ups and downs is more common, and normal. This diagram was put together by a group of [finished] volunteers in Senegal in the mid-1980’s; it is applicable wherever you are. Take care of yourself!

Someone bleached the entire well. All of it. I thought I was just smelling something funny, but I asked a local, and she explained that it was to kill microbes, and that if you don’t bleach the well, you could get "the gane" (although I have no idea what that is). I guess I’m safe. Not sure about my laundry.

This morning Claude asked me to borrow my dictionary. He wanted to look up some words: "will", "forget", "was". Considering the likely sources of English text, I’m assuming it’s something he got from his ladyfriend (another stagiaire). Hope it’s good.

This evening, Hyacinthe brought some friends home; one of them apparently has a crush on Christelle. This was completely obvious to me even through the language and cultural barrier within a matter of seconds. I have to assume Christelle knows too. Hope that works out too.

The language test seemed to go OK (although that’s what I thought last time). I really have to start finding the time to work on my presentation for Thursday. I decided to count the quiz for 10 percent of the grade in both 3e and 5e; grades are in, and tomorrow we calculate averages for all the students in our classes.

There’s a chart here that we got (today?) from "resiliency training"; the stages of life here for Organization volunteers. I’ll try to include it in full at a later date, or find a link to it. For now, the important part is "Month 2": "Too much structure. Too much routine. Group constancy. Fatigue. Impending assignment." leading to "Withdrawal. Anxiety. Restlessness. Easy irritation. Low tolerance for frustration." Suggested interventions: "Explore independence. Visit other volunteers. Make plans for first three months. Visit new site. Establish relationships with volunteers and staff. Gather skills for immediate use." Instead I’ve been spending a bit of time online and hacking when I get the chance. Today’s discovery: emacs’s visual-line-mode which does word wrapping correctly (more correctly than longlines-mode).

Well, at least now I know it’s not the booze; it’s something else about Saturday nights that makes me unhappy like this. I should probably just stop going out with the other stagiaires.

Twelve more days like this (unless I bomb the next language test, in which case it’s twenty-six more days).