C, F, L, R

Sometimes, when I don’t put the date in the corner of the board, my students get upset. This year I’ve been cultivating something of a Mad-Hatter Willy-Wonka style persona (Last year I started from the assumption that I was their friend. You’re not their friend. You can never be their friend. You are an authority. They are your children. You are therefore their parent.) so I’ve been putting all kinds of things up in that corner when they complain that I forgot. They’re used to the French style of dates (20 fevrier 2012) or the English style (February 20th, 2012), but they don’t like informatique style (2012-02-20 or 2012 fev 20). To tweak them I’ve started putting all kinds of other crap up there, my personal favorite being "42 Septober 2088", but also a simple "aujourd’hui" ("today"). My 4es go utterly apeshit when I do things like this. They’ll beg and plead with me that they be allowed to go up to the board and correct it. When they didn’t like "aujourd’hui" I decided to correct it myself to "demain" ("tomorrow"). Personally I was hoping to provoke a riot, but not quite. (They’re just 4es.) The lesson being that: I don’t fucking care what the board says. You already know what the date is. And more to the point, I don’t care whether you write it correctly in your notebooks or not.

I’m telling you this because it’s the first thing I came up with when I wrote the date at the top of this entry. I had a hard time writing it at first because I’ve been drinking. I’ve been drinking because it’s President’s Day, or at least Tor.com says it’s president’s day and that’s good enough for me.

A real man rides a bear!

I’m ACTUALLY drinking because every day is a 10-hour day, with today’s hours being attributable to:

• class (4 "hours")
• faire-ing the marché (1.5 hours including a much-needed beans-and-beignet breakfast)
• lab time (5.5 hours, including 7 minutes of standing around and watching M. Diffo play Spider Solitaire badly while insisting that he finish the game he just started)

I got the chance to repose a little bit after yesterday (what we call "Sunday"), which was only a 6 hour day in terms of time spent in the lab, but an 8 hour day when you count the amount of time people spent standing outside my door and playing music while waiting for me to grace them with my presence.

Things I have not yet worked on today include: grading my 3es (or any other class), cooking anything, becoming a better person, etc. I’m probably going to starve while pleuring my eyes out, clutching this awful bottle of "Djindja" (i.e. "Ginger") whiskey, 1500 CFA, which is actually the worst thing I’ve drank in country, even worse than the other thing that I said was the worst thing I’ve drank in country ("Samurai Rum-Cafe", also 1500 CFA).

Things I hate: people knocking on my door after 19h, by which time I become increasingly undressed, especially after I drink.

The lab was a little bit bad today because (my fault!) Domche asked some questions: "How does one go about writing a program?" and then "How does one make that program enter into the menu of programs that I see if I click in this corner of the screen?" Both of which are legitimate questions but I think I made his brain catch fire by breaking out the terminal emulator and doing a bunch of tab-completion (which made him so angry that he explicitly asked me about it) and making things happen that, even to a Tle C student, might resemble magic. Domche, if you ever read this, I’m sorry. I’ll be honest, I’m not really good at teaching. I just watch where the first student stumbles and then I remember that, oh, right, actually, none of the things I took for granted make sense to you yet. I still need to explain what a terminal emulator is, why I used it, tab-completion, etc. whereas students tend to think of files as things you see in a window.

You know why else I’m drinking? Because I had been planning (always a bad idea in Cameroon) to wake up, go to the school, photocopy my exams, and interroge my class of 4e. Instead what happened was that I went to the secretary’s office, printed out my exam, and then there was no paper to photocopy it, so I was like "Whatever, going to the market", and then when I got back to the school, someone had taken the secretary’s keys so even the single exams I’d printed out before photocopying were lost to me. End result: 4m2 didn’t take a test today. Whatever! It wasn’t even a very good test! We’ll try to give it to them again on Wednesday. Otherwise, bottoms up!

When Boris came to visit this weekend (oh, did I mention? This is why I drink) we went to a bar (naturally) and the first drink I offered a toast along the lines of "à la santé" ("to our health"). Boris responded, "To Jenny". (Who is probably in Ethiopia or something. Did you know Ethiopia was never colonized, even by Egypt? History is fascinating.) This was of course before I started insulting the drunk who had hit me up for a beer by saying that everyone from this village is a drunkard.

You know what I wish I’d had before I started writing this blog post? Pictures of the students that were in the lab today. I’m gonna film the shit out of them, just you wait. I even kept my camera in my bag but I just haven’t had circumstances line up just yet. Soon. Soon.

Look what I picked up two or three market days ago! They definitely do not fit me.

"Monsieur!" my Terminale students shouted as I entered the room. "Have you heard? The lycée is sexuel!"

That’s the first and best introduction I got to the scandal at the lycée. Apparently a student walked into the proviseur’s office to find him seated with a female student on one of his two sofas. It’s not clear what the two were doing that alarmed the interloper, but now the story is that he’s been picking up (draguer) students ("as early as 2e", Brondon says, "or even 3e, if it’s an older girl"). An impromptu rassemblement was arranged so that these rumors could be properly quelled. The girl who walked in wasn’t able to name an exact date in full public view of the whole school, so obviously she’s making it up or whatever and certainly not being railroaded.

Madame Ann, the orange lady at the school, had been trying to encourage me to "leave with" Dulisse, one of my smarter students in 1ere. It’s not good, I kept saying, for a teacher to hook up with his students. This whole affair’s been helpful in making that point clear. Madame Ann’s take on this has been 1. "Is he even capable of that kind of activity?" (Our proviseur is beginning to show his age.) and 2. "Obviously that sort of thing happens but I have a hard time imagining that a man of his cunning would use his office instead of just going to a hotel in Bafoussam. I mean, the man has a car."

This is Youth Week so I didn’t have class Friday, instead being obligated to go to a matinée culturelle where the youth of our village presented whatever stupid bullshit they do, mostly dances and a few skits. Also, "interpretations", which are straight-up lip syncing performances. It is traditional for people to show their appreciation for these acts with money, either collected in a basket or rubbed on the forehead in a manner suggestive of wiping off sweat. Some of the acts were enjoyable in one way or another — I especially liked the dance number set to "Le Prince Charmant", starring a girl who exuded the kind of confidence you get from being the prettiest girl in an 800-person high school — but mostly it went on too long. One thing that always squicks me about this type of event is the gyrations that the kids do. It’s not just the underage girls, but sometimes even the underage boys. My feeling is that if you’re too young to need a bra, you’re certainly too young to need sparkly bra straps. Sexuel indeed. I’ll try to upload videos of the whole spectacle when I next get my hands on some decent Internet.

The kids in the lab have been pretty well-behaved lately, not sure if it was the threat to their game time or the threat of violence. I also suggested that if they didn’t shape up I would delete GTA, then destroy all the computers, burn them and then pee-pee on the ashes. For one reason or another they’ve started to "take conscience" and they are either trying to develop moral sensibility or pretending really hard. Last Wednesday a good number of them told me I shouldn’t open the door to the lab at all because of how unorderly they were being, and then one of them had the idea that I should open the door, then go inside the lab and close it and let in students one at a time.

So the students are starting to manage themselves. One of them even stood at the door and tried to control the crush of students, letting them pass one by one until he just gave up and ran to a computer. I kind of like seeing this sort of thing, but I never know if a given student is bossing people around just because he can, or trying to get a monopoly on the good computers for him and his friends, or what. (Smart money says they’re not doing it out of a sense of duty or fairness.) I guess they’re not really sure either, and this is all part of their development into a capable and informed citizenry.

As for beating the kids, one thing happened that made me regret ever raising a hand: in all this self-discipline discovery, one of my favorite little kids, André, was trying to get some kids out of the lab during class hours. His threats and pleas fell on deaf ears. So what did he do? He went for the stick, the same stick I used just a week or two ago. Really drove home the idea that I’m modeling behavior for these kids. Then again, Kalika writes that they like hitting each other so maybe it’s no big deal. Another time in lab, one of my Terminales was getting jostled by littler kids on the same bench, and without skipping a beat he turned around and said "I’m gonna break your head, eh?"

Haven’t been writing much, mostly due to lack of time. I have a report to write on what I’ve been doing the last four months (teaching, you goofballs!) and I should probably be writing tests. Mostly I’ve been in the lab, working with the three or four students who actually want to learn something. Home stretch..

As you probably know, I follow most or all of the Volunteer blogs that I come across. Most of them don’t impress me at first but some of them are really good. Eriika is from one of the newer stages and she’s a pretty good writer. Here is her post about a ghost story that I never got to hear in full. I read this on Tuesday night when the power was out and freaked the fuck out. I’ll note that I always thought the word sounded more like "Macaque", but it’s not my patois so I’ll leave it to them.

Rosalie posted lately about discipline. I really admire Rosalie’s spirit and gusto and idealism and willingness to take a stand for her beliefs and all that, but my values aren’t the same as her values. Before I came to this country, I probably would have said, as she does, that corporal punishment is just unacceptable and hitting a student is bad, but this is one of those things that Cameroon has changed in me. When students annoy me — and they usually annoy me — I can make a dry remark about their intelligence, I can yell at them, but they tend to just brush that off. I can tell them to get the hell out of the classroom and they drag their feet and take their time, or they’ll just stay there and look at me with puppy eyes or beg forgiveness. But once you start kicking a few of them, man, you get your way fast!

Timothy said last year that all our non-violent methods of discipline are so laughably ineffective on our students because they aren’t calibrated to our culture. They don’t really understand that you’re angry or that they’ve fucked up until physical pain (or the threat of physical pain) is applied. This is certainly not optimal, but it is one of the realities on the ground.

Rosalie says she doesn’t have problems of discipline in her classes and she doesn’t use any punishment more painful than docking points. Rosalie is a heroine in my book and watching her manage a class is one of the best things you can do in this country, but I’m not having that kind of success, especially outside of the classroom in contexts like Club Informatique. Since I installed a bunch of SNES games on my computers, the kids have gotten utterly bloodthirsty. They will crowd around the lab door for hours waiting to see if I will open the lab or not that day. They will stay in the lab and play until dark. Students have told me that I need to stop opening the lab because the other kids won’t even go home any more, they just want to play on the computers all the time. I said if a child didn’t want to go home that’s the problem of the parents, to instill that kind of responsibility in their children, and students have said, "Yes, monsieur, the parents hit them every single day but they still prefer to stay here."

The point being that now I am faced with children who may one day stab each other to get into the computer lab. EVERY single time I open the lab door there is a mosh-pit of squirming little bodies all trying to get through the door at once. It’s my second year coping with this kind of thing and I thought once the novelty of the lab wore off, they’d be a little more blasé about it, but no such luck. Last Friday I refused to let them in until they formed a line and could only let a few in before it became the familiar type of mess. I closed the door and waited for them to calm down and order themselves again, and while I was waiting I identified a couple of my Terminales who wanted to actually work on the computers. I told the mass of kids that I was letting my Terminales in and the rest of them were going to stay outdoors until they were calm. But when I opened the door, they all rushed in! Open defiance! This is what the old-school authoritarian Cameroonian teachers would refer to as "insolence".

Of course, like Rosalie I don’t want to hit the students, not least because it’s technically illegal, so I turned off the power to the computers and screamed at them to all leave until Monday. That led them all to standing outside the door, periodically begging "Please, monsieur, forgive us!", basically making noise and being nuisances, and even dragging benches over to the windows so they could peer in at what was going on. Eventually they came into the lab without permission AGAIN. So out you go again, no computers until Thursday. But they KEEP coming in and they KEEP playing video games so now I’ve started dragging kids out of the lab by their ears. Their behavior is frankly unacceptable, and the forms of discipline I have been trying to impose just aren’t taking. But you know what worked really well? When a strapping lad from première grabbed a meaty-looking switch and brought it to the lab door with a certain expression on his face. They cleared right out, then.

We’ll see if they behave any better tomorrow, when the punishment is formally over. If not, I’m deleting all the games off all the computers. It shouldn’t be this hard.. So remind me, Rosalie, why I shouldn’t just slap ’em around a bit? She writes that it never occurred to her to have to explain why beating kids is bad, but I don’t have too many reasons not to.

Ultimately this is the story of all development work. It’s easiest to work within the constraints of their culture, to limp along with them using the tools available. It’s way harder to fight that culture, to go outside it and bang on it until it works better, and it’s not what I’m good at.

A bunch of villageois kids sitting on what should be a fountain, but doesn’t work. Among them is Kamgang Basile, easily the worst student in the school. Somehow he graduated 3e and he’s in me 2A4 (Séconde Arts) class, which is probably my worst class. They’re raising their hands and shouting "No, no, no!" because I didn’t ask permission to take their picture. (Obviously the polite thing to do would be to ask first, but these are the kids who have never been polite to me and thus do not merit politeness.) Afterwards they asked me if I was going to use it in my "reports" or to show "the behavior of blacks". Then they said that the only fair thing to do was to pay each of them 200 CFA.

This is the kind of bread we call "gateau". It comes in rectangular bricks like these. This particular one is getting mustard and tomatoes to make a sandwich out of.

Timothy’s library. (We’re using it for a regional meeting.)

My Terminales are learning HTML. "When it’s good, it’s really good, but when it’s bad, well, you know how it goes.."

Babies! This is the baby of a German woman and a Cameroonian man. He can be described by the word metise, which is something like "mulatto". (Describing the race or color of someone in Cameroon is not inherently rude as it is in the States.)

We decided to refresh ourselves at Air Force One, which is either affiliated with or at least neighbors with Denver. (These are bars, naturally.)

[Note: Today’s coping mechanisms include: two little packets of Swedish fish from my parents (thanks guys!), three sips of refrigerator-cold Sprite, and this little bit of writing.]

Zhenae aren’t unattractive, exactly. Some are even beautiful, and like humans, occasionally you find one who is breathtaking. Sometimes people talk about Zhenae looking like slightly less refined humans, or the other way around, but they really look just different — you couldn’t confuse a human with a Zhenae — but within striking distance. It’s the same way they think different, but still close enough that you can communicate with them. They look different, but not too different. And anyhow, I’m thinking now of a Dutch woman from a long time ago and people aren’t really all the same either, no matter what they look like.

There’s a funny story about this. One time I was in my village visiting a Zhenae friend and his daughter was there outside, cooking, but her voice sounded oddly different. I know he has lots of daughters and I thought to myself, "I’ll bet that’s not Betteu", but I didn’t know how to approach the subject. She recognized me, of course: "Good evening, Sandiego! How’s the school?". But one thing I really do love about the Zhenae is their frankness, so I just said to my friend, "That’s not Betteu, is it?" And he laughed, a grinding noise like a whetting stone, and he said "You can’t tell them apart?"

I had this moment of shame, oh no, I’m *that human, that thinks all Zhenae look alike*, and then it was replaced immediately with relief when he said "That’s Djan. They’re twins."

This is the kind of thing I’m thinking about as I sit in the club, letting my mind drift in a pool of whiskey. I’m in my "region" and I am noting with approval the black arm-bands, symbols of the political unrest we’ve been actively fomenting. It’s about a month after I chose my regional Zhenae counterpart for Revolution Committee, and judging by the arm-bands, he’s been doing well. Each flashing light picks out some arm-bands, tied between the first and second arm joints (just north of a bicep on a human). The black of the bands are pleasing to the human eye against the dark-green Zhenae color.

I’m at this club with a few Zhenae friends, one of whom is female and very, very into me. This wouldn’t normally be a problem — I’ve gotten very good at blowing off Zhenae in general and women in particular — but this is one of my closest friends, one of the few people on this planet who makes anything like sense to me. The truth is that I would be interested in her. That "would" encompasses a lot of things — if this whole disaster with Morgan weren’t still reverberating through my psyche, or even if I weren’t actively trying to overthrow her planet’s government. I’ve tried explaining this to her, once, when she called me on the phone. "I just can’t right now," I told her in Sumi, conscious of how little credit I had for this phone call, wishing in vain that she could understand English, or at least enough English for me to let her down gently. "I just can’t right now." was the best I could do. She responded, just one short sentence in a voice so small: "I understood."

So here we were again, at a club, and she’s pulling me to dance, and dancing close, and she’s brought her A game, she’s pulling my head down to her diminutive frame, into spaces near her ears that a platonic friend of any species should not be entering, and I’m keeping my hands clasped together behind her back and trying to stay away from any zone that could be erogenous. My own stubborn human biology isn’t cooperating. I can’t let anything happen, it wouldn’t be good. I’m usually better at self-control than this. Wait: all I need to do, I think to myself, is to outlast the whiskey. So I pull away from her and go to sit down. A few songs later she follows me, takes up a position kneeling between my legs. The implications are not lost on me, and I need her to stop.

I’m not sure exactly what I said to her this time, but she just hung her head, and I waited for her to pull herself together again while thinking about the juggling act I was trying to pull here — how nice it feels to be wanted, and how you can’t just queue up girlfriends like songs on a playlist, and how I would like her friendship but it is becoming increasingly clear to me that I can’t even have that if she is going to get over me. Is this what Morgan felt like? At first she told me she wanted to be friends, and I even tried to do that out of some eulogy for an emotion I used to have, but all I got was dead air.

Whatever. I’ll be happier when I’m off this rock and the only communication I have with her is the conversations we have at reunions about how great the life is that I am living without her. (I’m not bitter.)

My Zhenae friend pulls me up to dance again, and this time when we get onto the dance floor, she lets the seduction aside and just leans into my chest and sobs. This is more familiar ground for me, consoling a friend, and I’m much better at it, so I just hold her and wait it out, even as (in the back of my mind) I’m wondering if this is authentic, her actual response to pain, or whether maybe this is just what she learned from some movie, how she thinks Earther romance normally works. It’s not a good thought — unworthy of me — one more example of how being a Missionary is just making me more speciesist..

The school administration had been hoping that teachers would have given all their exams before the Christmas Break, so that grades could be put onto papers and report cards filled out as soon as the school year started. Of course, due to my little jaunt to Morocco, that wasn’t a real possibility for me — in fact, I haven’t technically taught anything during the 3rd sequence, so the last couple weeks have been a fire drill of make-up lessons, hastily-written tests, and generic anguish. I haven’t even started grading the tests that I have given, except of course for the practical exams — because like last year, they’re the last, best, hope for last-minute student evaluation. Except..

I gave a quick lesson or two on file management to my 2e classes last week and this week we tried to put it into practice. I didn’t think there was really all that much complexity here — you have paths, they have separators, you explore the folders and you’re basically done, right? But as usual my students surprised me by utterly failing to put into practice the concepts we had briefly discussed. The assignment is pretty straightforward — open this file, write down what it says inside, create this directory, copy this file to that directory, rename this file, delete that file. But 2C (the "scientific" 2e class) managed to pretty much bomb the whole thing. Maybe it’s because I didn’t give them enough time, or assumed they’d understood better than they did, or didn’t give the directions clearly enough. I told them yesterday that their performance was shameful (une performance honteuse) and that I was going to give them another lesson today so that they could do better on the make-up exam Monday, and then today when we finished the lesson in 20-30 minutes I wondered aloud how they could have taken something so simple and fucked it up (niquer, which I learned from Timothy). Some students asked me what niquer meant so I told them it was a technical word meaning to fail. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m getting more comfortable using French to express my feelings about my students, which helps me keep my spirits up. I’m flipping through Merde! et Merde Encore! that my parents sent me (thanks guys!), but haven’t quite settled on a way to ask Kamgang Basile of 2A4 (the "arts" 2e class) why he’s being a douchebag.

Of course, I’m no stranger to the surprising complexity that computer stuff represents to my students. Did you know you have to do four different things to copy-and-paste? And that only the last one provides anything like feedback for what you’ve done? But we mastered that and I don’t see any hidden complexity as regards the directory tree. My only hypotheses are that 1. they didn’t think through the implications of what I talked about in class, which actually goes without saying, and 2. that the instructions, which amounted to some stuff written on a chalkboard in class and incomplete directory names that I wrote on slips of paper, were confusing to them. Yeah, well, blame the administration for putting me under such time pressure. I’ve printed out written directions that are as complete as I can make them without giving anything away. The make-up test is Monday and we’ll see how that goes.

My self-medicine lately (instead of alcohol) has been food and video games, hence today’s title, jeux. Food is easy to explain: it’s lettuce season, and also avocados are starting to show up, and I think mushrooms maybe around the corner? I made fried rice the other day and I’ve been using the sesame oil that I squirreled away from when I came back from the states. It is delicious. As for the video games, I’ve lately been playing through the games that I downloaded from the official Ubuntu archives, figuring that when I finish playing them I can uninstall them and free up a little disk space. I have played: Freedroid, Dink Smallwood, Lincity-ng, Micropolis (long enough to discover that yes, it is exactly SimCity), and FreedroidRPG. Dink Smallwood was smirk-worthy in a couple of places, but basically forgettable. Lincity-ng is actually kind of cool, especially since as a Volunteer "sustainability" is a concern for me. FreedroidRPG was also surprising — a compelling little game, kinda like Diablo, but free-software-nerd themed. Chiz has been muttering darkly about Spacechem lately, so I’m liable to try that next, even knowing that it’s bound to consume me entirely.

Also on the subject of jeux, we have the lab. Students put games on computers, like tomcats marking their territory, and it’s as inevitable as the tide so there’s really no use trying to control it. Lately I have seen GTA: Vice City, which they find so compelling as to even play during classroom hours. To the extent that they even care about the storyline, they certainly don’t care enough to save their progress. Instead the current fad seems to be commandeering a tank and rambling around the city, blowing up whatever crosses your path. I’ve also seen something called Super Mario Worlds (N.B. not Super Mario World, the classic for the SNES), which appears to be a small knockoff of various Mario games. The first level is a fairly-faithful copy of the first level of the original Super Mario Bros., but the second level graphics portray rain, and they took the carry-objects mechanic from Mario 3 and the charge-jump from Mario 2. I have learned, from the comments students make while playing Super Mario Worlds, that Mario’s fireballs are actually sauce tomate, tomato sauce, which I guess means that what we always thought were fire flowers are actually tomato plants.

Curiosity got the better of me and when I got the chance I sat down and decided to see how far I could get. To my dismay, there are only three levels, after which you return to the first level. Of course, most of the students haven’t found that out yet because they can’t get past the third level.

The students are terrible at Super Mario Worlds. They prefer to do charge-jumps instead of running jumps, which is just setting them up for failure when they attempt other platform games later on. In fact, they hardly run at all. They rebind the keys so that to jump you press Up, about which words fail me. Most of them are convinced that the third level is impossible if you don’t have the fire flower, so after they inevitably die for the first time, they just quit and restart. For some unknowable reason, all of this makes me incredibly angry. It’s not even real Mario! Why are you so bad at this?? You’re crap at crap Mario!

So last Sunday, when I was getting all my files in order for the aforementioned 2e practical exam, and also formatting a couple of the GTA’d computers, I decided to discreetly sprinkle a SNES emulator and some ROMs here and there. (Allison asked what the right stance is regarding teaching Cameroonians how to pirate stuff well, as opposed to letting them pirate it poorly. The stance I take in my lab is quite inconsistent.) Nobody is going to discover a SNES emulator by themselves, of course, so when I had a little free time, I started it up and loaded Super Mario World. It was only a matter of time before one or two students saw me and marveled at the fascinating capabilities of this new Mario game, where Mario can even fly! (And by the way, Yoshi’s not a dinosaur, he’s a horse. A green horse.) When I got called away from the computer, I shut everything down quickly without leaving any indication of what I’d done or how, and then relished the puzzlement of the students as they tried to figure out how to "put" the game I’d just been playing.

But you know what? There’s a lot of stuff going on, even in the first level, and SMW is English-only, never translated to French. So, e.g. the fact that there is both regular jump and spin-jump is kind of mysterious, and the idea that you pretty much always need to be running is kind of taken for granted (because everyone who was going to play SMW had already played Mario 1-3). So the next time, I started up Super Mario All-Stars (which, by the way, Super Mario Worlds took the opening screen from). This game showcased polished, SNES-ified versions of the original NES games. The first level is recognizably the first level from their crap Super Mario Worlds, but it all looks a ton better. But you know what? The first Super Mario is hard! I can get pretty far now that I’m way experienced with platform games, but even I die a lot and without the "continue" that All-Stars offers, I’d get nowhere. And when I think back to how hard it was when I was just a kid, I realize that when I was first starting to play video games, I didn’t know to run either, and the idea of ever beating Super Mario seemed like an impossible fantasy, and people that could were wizards, heroes without limit.

Anyhow they’ve started to figure out how to use ZSNES, even though it’s been less than a week. I think they’ve picked it up so quickly because for a while there was a MAME emulator floating around some of the computers, so they already understand in some vague unarticulated way the idea of emulators vs. ROMs. They aren’t terribly interested, actually, in any of the Super Mario games, probably because they’re so bad at them. One of my students started up the French version of Secret of Mana (one of my favorite games ever), but then gave it up as "too hard" before he even got the first sword. I’m trying not to be disappointed. Maybe he’ll come back to it later. Maybe not.

Since a week and a half ago, today’s the first day that I’ve had "off" (after I taught two hours and printed some exams for tomorrow). Every day I come home totally exhausted, but then a few hours later I start to feel energized, cognizant of just how awesome I am being and how cool I am for doing what I’m doing, and then I figure out how I can do it even better. Is this the effect of being a 2nd year volunteer? The fact that I’m drinking less, or playing video games more? The simple pleasure of knowing that I only have seven months, five days left in this country, or contrariwise the pressure of knowing that the time I have left to effect a difference here is slipping away like sand through an hourglass? Maybe that’s why I don’t blog so much, but I’m thinking of you all the same.

P.S. Thanks to Lee for posting a link to this scallion pancake recipe. Turns out the only thing you need that you can’t get here is sesame oil, and you can fake it with some of the sesame seeds you see being sold on the street. Now, onward..

[N.B. I’m posting a lot of text-only posts right now because the front page of my blog has like sixty pictures and it takes forever to load.]

School restarts tomorrow, marking the first time I’ve taught class in about a month. I’ve forgotten my entire schedule and lost my place in each class. I’m not sure what the hell I’m going to do about 3rd sequence, which basically just vanished. So in other words, business as usual at the lycée. The good news is Boris finally left today, liberating me to pursue an afternoon of housework and finally some video games. Bathed for the first time in three days, cooked for myself, and generally doing much better. I really would have preferred another day off, but what can you do?

Preston mentioned that he was getting a little ready to go back to school, that he was starting to feel useless without classes to teach. Sure, but I’m also tense about going back into duty. Back to the grind, back to the soul-sucking tedium of it all. Maybe I should spend less time in the lab, or maybe I can stop going to classes so much.

Last year, at the beginning of winter break, one of the senior Volunteers sent us an email saying something along the lines of "Congratulations! You’re 2/3 done with the school year, because the rest of the year is as a Swiss cheese of vacations and holidays." And with the 2012 on the calendar, I feel tangibly as though I have entered the home stretch. Seven months of service left! This is doable, right?

Last year, I resolved to be focused outside instead of inside. Did I manage it? I’m not sure.. a part of me is saying that I’ve only succeeded at pretending to be focused on the outside when really spending much more time inside. I still greet everyone I see on the street, and I’ve got a few more friendships with people here in village than I did last year, but I still play stupid games with conversations and when I’m in the lab after school, sometimes I just sit there and read. So a partial success, let’s say. This year I think my resolution will be: get creative. Make something awesome. And get through this thing in one piece.

Last year I went to Bamenda for New Year’s, which was a good if complex time. This year it seems as though no sincere plans are being proposed. I might just be staying here in village, kicking it with whoever’s still in town. In the meantime, Boris is (still) here, still mumbling along with his favorite English songs, including "I Want It That Way" by Backstreet Boys. So it is that I learned the True Meaning of Christmas: some motherfuckers are in your house and just won’t leave, so grin and bear it. Boris has been generously telling me that I sleep way too much, am weak, or otherwise sowing chaos and discord in my house. I am tired of him specifically and maybe the rest of the country more generically. I want to go home..

Haven’t written in a while. It’s been busy; since coming back from the Maroc I’ve been back to post, then to a wedding, then, in a fit of senselessness, to Mount Cameroon. A bunch of people climbed it last year, and although I was never really interested in going up there, word on the street was that it’s hell, but worth it for the descent on the other side (lava fields and crap). Apparently dry season is the best time to climb Mount Cameroon, which for Education Volunteers means Winter Break. Everyone else in my stage has either already climbed it or had no interest in climbing it, so I was unable to convince any Volunteers to come with. Instead I went with Boris. Boris has some weird male-ego bullshit going on, and so it was important to him that we prove that we were very strong, and especially that we were stronger than the group of women, including my postmate, who had made the journey a few weeks ago.

I will spare you the details of just how the trip went. I will tell you that we didn’t make it to the top, due to some kind of foodborne illness afflicting both me and Boris. We turned around about the middle of the second day, and managed to get back to Buea, the nearest city, by nightfall. Over the two days of hiking, I got to listen patiently to Boris as he talked, variously, about: how strong he was, how strong we were, how weak I was, (after he threw up) how weak he was, and finally about how strong we were. Then: the singing. Francophones singing English songs generally involves a lot of mumbling and guesswork. "We Are The World" is not improved by such treatment.

One way or another we got down without my stabbing him and then crashed at Allison’s. Allison’s brother and his wife are in town for a couple weeks, and we got down in time for Christmas. When in Rome, make Romanade, so me and Boris joined them for Christmas on the Beach in Limbe. Nice place.

Boris recently bought a CD of Nigerian music. Cameroonians are often quite eager to play music, sometimes even when other music is already playing. Accordingly, we got to introduce Allison’s family to the latest musical craze — the equivalent of their Top 40 being played to death across the nation — which is to say that if you know anyone in Cameroon at all right now, they are probably hearing this song (hi Lauren’s mom!). It’s called "Chop My Money" by Nigerian band P-Square (so-named because its members are the brothers Peter and Paul). The lyrics do rely a little bit on some cultural background — in this part of the world, purchasing things for someone is a completely legitimate way to earn their affection. The bigger the purchase, the more the affection. "Chop" is Pidgin for "to eat" or "food", and so a girlfriend might legitimately be expected to chop your money. Which seems like a bad thing, but the singer of this particular song is saying that he is completely willing and even eager for the object of his affection to chop his money, because she’s so beautiful and he has so much money ("Cos I get ‘am plenty").

I’ve also been reading REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson (thanks Allison!). I’m not quite finished with it yet, and as such I’m a little hesitant to say very much. I will say that in my opinion, REAMDE may sometimes look like Stephenson but is not Stephenson. Which is to say it’s more like Tom Clancy. The Tor.com review says that each Stephenson book is completely unlike the others — which is true to an extent. But there’s always at least one big idea which is to an extent the spine of each work — whether it’s the Metaverse, post-national United States, cryptography, platonic ideals, or gold — and in REAMDE the spine of the work is just a simple adventure thriller. Cryptonomicon is the comparison I keep coming back to — which is also a great yarn, but a nerd yarn, mostly about nerds. In REAMDE the nerds are almost peripheral to the story. Example: "REAMDE" is the title of the book and for a while it seems like it’ll be a plot point. Spoiler alert: It’s not. The writing is also tangibly different — thorough, meticulous, almost plodding. I’m enjoying it all the same, of course — but it’s not really what I was expecting.

Other than that I found myself interacting quite politely and with kindness and friendship to a student at the lycée, which hasn’t happened since the beginning of my service. Guess I had a refreshing vacation.

Well, I’m still on the plane, may as well write up some more pictures.

Decorating your moto is a time-honored tradition in Cameroon. This one is labeled "the black pope".

We did a surprise baby shower for Guillaine, who used to work at our favorite bar.

This MTN ad campaign (half a year old now?) is still a little inspiring to me. Be unstoppable.

"Detective Whiskey" and "Officer Vodka" are brand names that we find amusing. But nowhere near as amusing as..

Gin My Lady! Purchased by Allison for a stunning 1000 CFA.

Bunch of people came to my house to watch the Retirement Dance (Dance de Retrait).

One of the dancers!

Dancers in traditional garb. Note the designs on their, uh, skirts. That’s a traditional Bamiléké design.

One of my students, who borrowed my camera to film the event. The shirt I’m wearing is the coordinated pagne for one of the concerned families.

Queue de cheval, horse tail.

This kind of cane is traditional in this dance.

Here’s a bonus: some pictures of our Thanksgiving in Bangangté.

I’m writing on the plane back to Cameroon. I’m trying to sleep but can’t — the light is on, and unlike last time, I wasn’t sufficiently drunk (and it wasn’t sufficiently late) before boarding for me to just pass out. So instead I’m preparing this blog post, which I really should have prepared and then uploaded when I had access to good-quality Internet.

I took the train, which is run by a national train company, to the Casablanca airport and it was quite pleasant. A transfer at Ain Senaa (am I remembering that name right?) was called for, but I managed to navigate that successfully. I know it’s not entirely fair, since I spent my entire time in Rabat, which is the political capital, and only got to briefly see Casablanca, which is the economic capital, but everything I have seen so far suggests to me that Morocco is tangibly more developed than Cameroon — not to say that it’s completely and evenly Westernized, of course. A volunteer in Morocco named Yanyi snapped at me with a line about how East/West African Volunteers tend to unfairly envy Morocco just based on what they’ve seen in Rabat. So I stared out the window of the train as the landscape rushed past and tried to imagine what she saw when she looked at it. I almost had it, but then a guy walked in and sold me a small can of Pringles for 15 MAD (almost $2), and I lost it. All I could see were paved roads (OK, Cameroon’s way below normal there), streetlights (though come to think of it, there’s a couple streetlights in my village too), and then horses. Why can’t I have horses???

So I’m sorry Yanyi, but I’m inclined to think along the lines of what Quad said: the challenge of being a Volunteer in Morocco isn’t material, it’s cultural. Not to say that all posts are easy and wonderful or that the country isn’t a developing nation, but every indication I was able to acquire indicated that Volunteers lived just a little bit better in Maroc than in Cameroon. More Volunteers have running water in Morocco, and almost all of them have electricity (which is not a given in Cameroon). Women Volunteers get harassed a lot more in Morocco (which is saying something), but that’s definitely cultural, not physical. Not to say that it doesn’t wear you down.. I wavered between daring to go out and find things to enjoy on the town and wanting to just hide in my room and wait to go home, wherever that is.

Here are some more quick facts contrasting life in Cameroon and Morocco for your average Volunteer.

• Volunteers in both countries get to learn an exotic foreign language. In Maroc: Dirisia (Moroccan Arabic). In Cameroon: French.
• In .cm, Volunteers drink. In .ma, Volunteers smoke.
• In Morocco, "grand taxis" (inter-city travel) are old Mercedes Benzes. In Cameroon, taxis are old Toyota Camrys.
• Morocco has political protests (I saw at least one and perhaps as many as three in Rabat) as part of what has been referred to as "Arab Spring". (Although some of the things that I had thought were protests turned out to be football games.) We don’t have protests in Cameroon.
• People beg a lot in Morocco. Also, cats are all over the place. In Cameroon, cats are a kind of meat.
• As an American, local nationals will address you using a distinctive vocabulary. In Cameroon these words include "le blanc"/"la blanche", "whiteman"/"whiteman woman", "wat", etc. In Maroc, corresponding words are "Roman", "Christian", "outsider". I think this basically sums it up — Morocco has a very old relationship with the Western world, and it’s not based on skin color but rather on religion, or something else entirely. Plus, it’s way cooler to be addressed as a Roman.

I definitely saw a lot of wonderful things peculiar to Rabat. Right now I’m thinking about a trip I took where I meandered into the medina and stumbled into a "district" of people typing on typewriters, producing crisp black-and-white Arabic. And I probably could have done a much better job taking advantage of my time there, but I’m happy to be going home, even if the Internet connection won’t be as good there.

Here are some of the things I saw in Rabat, starting with the ruins at Chellah.

Chellah was originally a Roman settlement and it has a giant wall, but it’s been resettled over the years and there’s ruins even of a mosque inside. It costs 10 MAD (about $1.25) to enter and nobody bothered me while I was there, but that may have been because it was almost dusk. That black smudge at the base of the tower is a cat curled up in the sun.

This is the "site antique", although I’m not entirely sure what that means. It’s definitely antique.

That might be a bath-house over there, and there’s a mosque or something. Note the cats.

Foundations of buildings.

All the informative plaques were long since faded by the elements.

This building was locked.

This is the bath-house, I think.

A couple of storks have their nest up there.

Access to running water, perhaps?

Just on the other side of Chellah appeared to be someone’s property.

In some places, the ruin had been obviously enhanced.

Cats.

At the Rabat American School, there was a holiday bazaar, vaguely Christmas-themed but also kind of not. Here I am depicted with cotton candy. I also ate a hamburger and a hot dog and a few sundry other delicious things.

I also bought this knife, which this gentleman engraved "Stayin’ Alive". (It is the best I could do at the time. A nice fellow suggested that a better engraving would have been "Surprise!") I paid 300 MAD for the knife, and 180 MAD to ship it to America (instead of checking it in my luggage). The $36 per-diem (525 MAD) is very generous; even eating everywhere I wanted and buying this knife, I still came out ahead at the end of my trip by about 300 MAD.

This is the school itself (and part of its field). I’m not sure if there’s any academic facility this nice in Cameroon? It was cool to watch the kids, who were your basic generic American mix of kids, plus some of other Western affiliations with charming accents.

Salé, "Rabat’s bedroom community".

The Casbah, which literally means "fortress". It’s right on the water (the Atlantic, if I’m not mistaken).

I was told that all the buildings in the casbah have to be painted blue and white to reflect the colors of the sea.

On the beach, there’s this lighthouse. There’s a graveyard right next to the beach but I think it’s bad form to take pictures in Muslim graveyards?

During my week-and-a-half long stay in Rabat, I occasionally got to hang out with other Volunteers. Here’s Tina (who also goes by "Mina", since "Tina" means "vagina" in her local language). I’m also thinking of Jo, Kelsey, Marcia, and a group of gentleman named Russ, Bradley, and Xavier. Russ and Bradley play this game where they refer to each other by their own name, and generally encouraging the exchange of their two names — thoroughly confusing the poor helpless Medevac who’s trying to learn everyone’s name. One of them, probably Bradley, is an ENORMOUS ASSHOLE because during dinner, he decided to throw food at me. Having dirty clothes is much more inconvenient when you’re living out of two bags in a hotel. "What are you going to do, Cameroon, write about it in your blog?" he is reputed to have said.

Here’s his written confession! "Send [the Organization] your cleaning bill!" What cheek! If you or anyone you know is in Morocco in any capacity, FIRE HIM. Bradley Ogata, if that’s even your real name, I will find you.

The Bibliothèque Nationale. The only libraries in Yaoundé are privately owned, with the best-known one at the Centre Culturelle Français. I got a tour by one of the employees of the library, although really I just wanted him to leave me alone to wander around a little myself. (I was half afraid he was going to ask me for money at the end, but he just said "Bye bye!" and kind of pushed me away.)

Just next to the library is a little park, called a jardin. The stairs have a picture of the Spanish "Mona Lisa".

The jardin provides access to the roof of the library. I think the tower is a book repository. On the top, it’s decorated with Arabic lettering (but not saying anything as far as I know).

Not sure about these panes of glass.

If you were going to check out two things in Rabat, I’d recommend Chellah and Tour Hassan, which is a mausoleum for at least one and probably several deceased kings. On the other hand, you have to watch out because unscrupulous Moroccans will try to hassle you if you’re a tourist — stunts like starting to draw on your arm with "henna dye" and then afterwards asking you for money for the service they’ve just rendered. "Even as little as 300 MAD," she said — about a day of my $36 per-diem! I gave her 10 dirham and then wiped this crap off my arm as best I could.

I gave this guy 10 Ds too but at least he was upfront about what he wanted and for what.

I didn’t pay the guards anything.

This is outside the actual tower/mausoleum, which may have been closed that day. (And then I got accosted by a tout. Watch out for faux guides in Morocco.) I didn’t feel like going back the next day.

An English-Language Bookstore very close to centre-ville. The older gentleman on the right is the owner. I saw Marvel comics!

The outside of the medina, with the tramway tracks running right in front of it. All these buildings are still occupied. Damn, sorry for the quality of this shot; I neglected to clean my camera lens before I left Cameroon.

Things not pictured: the English-style pub "Upstairs", at which I spent a pleasant 100 MAD; the Chinese restaurant Tianamen Square where I did the same — actual Chinese people walked in and ordered while I ate; the cool shawarma place/guy "Snack Le Broodjest" pretty close to the hotel; or any of the other foods I ate while in Morocco! Google search tagine if you want to get an idea.