Author: astraykate

Yesterday I arrived in Casey’s concession around 11 for a Cameroonian Thanksgiving. We took some quick pictures (because we looked nice for once) and then the chicken cooking process began. It took all day.

We started by watching the slaughter of the 4 chickens (we couldn’t do it or the concession couldn’t eat the meat since we aren’t Muslim and it wouldn’t be halal). I have a video of it, if anyone is curious about the process. We then put the carcasses into tubs of hot water for defeathering. Casey and I did 2. It was weird at first but after awhile it was oddly satisfying to rip the feathers off. The mommas then rubbed the chickens down, removed the icky bits, roasted them a bit, and dismemembered them. After that the cooking started, which Casey and I didn’t see much of because we went to buy soda, watch Ocean’s Eight, and have a dance party.

We had a pre and post dinner dance party , so I was pretty tired by the time I went home.

I have to say the chicken was some of the best food I’ve had here. It was even more delicious because I knew I’d helped with it. Casey explained the meaning of the holiday to the concession, and we dug in. All in all, it was a great Thanksgiving! I had mashed potatoes and chicken, got to video call my family and introduce them to all of Casey’s concession kids, and learned something new about Cameroon. Any day I learn something new is a good day here, and there’s a lot I am thankful for while living here. This year I am thankful for newvillage  friends, my fellow volunteers, my adorable cat, my new furniture, and my vacation in 29 DAYS!!! Most of all, of course, I am thankful for my family. I really cannot wait until I see my parents, my brother, and my cousin Emily in the UK. These next few weeks better go by quickly!!!

Long time no post! Since I last blogged we’ve had 2 birthdays, an anniversary, a series of mushroom trainings, and Casey and I have started a beekeeping project. Lots has happened!

Casey had an insanely amazing birthday celebration. The twins took us to some falls around my village and treated us to a meal.

I held my first training on mushrooms in village, we took the bottles of mother spawn we were given during the Peace Corps training and inoculated jars to create more seeds.

Fanning’s sister visited during our clusters celebration of our year anniversary of living in Cameroon. Ginnie is serving as a PCV in Benin! We took her on a tour of the chefferie in my village.

Fanning also had a birthday. It was basically a party for me too since we made sushi and it’s the one food I’ve really been craving since I got here that I haven’t been able to find (for good reason). I almost cried, it was so delicious. We watched “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”, did face masks, and ate brownies and key lime pie. I’m amazed by the cooking and baking skills of Fanning and Casey. I’m lucky to be posted so close to them and that they feed me <3.

Casey and I have started a new project that I am very very excited about. We have formed two beekeeping groups, one in my village and one in hers, and are starting to write up a grant to get money to send these groups to a training in Ngaoundere. The current traditional beekeeping methods in the Adamawa use fire during harvest, which is harmful to the bees and produces a smoky, dark honey. Our goal is to train these small groups in improved apiculture methods, and to provide them with Kenyan Top Bar hives and the associated beekeeping tools to get them started. The long term aim is to create groups of trained individuals that will then go on to train other farmers in their villages on these new methods. Our first step was to hold a business plan training for each group. This gave them the tools to express their long and short term goals, and set the groundwork for their projects. Each group filled out a questionnaire which helps us to write out our grant.

I’ve also started teaching English class twice a week to four girls and my landlord’s son. I had a great deal of appreciation for teachers before, and I have even more now. It’s not easy to teach kids English via French when students here don’t really have a grasp of French. They speak mostly Fulfulde, and so my classes end up being French and English classes. Am I qualified? Nope. But I’m trying. And that’s all we can really do! Hopefully the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree, and I managed to get just a little bit of the patience and skill that my mom uses every day in the classroom.

Speaking of my mother, as of today there are 43 days left until I reunite with my parents and my cousin Emily in London for Christmas! We’re going to Wales after that, and then Edinburgh for New Years, where we’ll meet my brother. After Edinburgh, James and I are headed up to Northern Scotland to see the Northern Lights. Then I head back to London, and back to Cameroon just in time for Mid Service Training (MST) in the capital! And I mean just, I’m landing the night before it starts. I can’t even imagine a 3 week vacation right now, but I’m sure it will fly by and then I’ll have just under a year left of service! Ok, that’s all for now, if I don’t update before I go to the UK, I will for sure have a blog post after vacation!

Thanks for reading!

We are steadily approaching the year anniversary of our departure to Philadelphia and then on to Cameroon. On the 16th of September last year I left my parents and my brother at the Cleveland airport and landed in Philadelphia. There I met the people with whom I’ve been spending the past year. We never would have guessed when we flew out of the US on the 19th what was in store for us.  A lot happened our first few days in Cameroon. I left the US thinking that there was a chance that I would go my entire service living in an Anglophone region and rarely needing to use French. Now, here I am in a Francophone region with a second common language, Fulfulde. It’s been quite the ride thus far.

Since my last post, I’ve done a series of composting trainings in village, visited lakes and waterfalls, built a pepiniere, planted lots of herbs and lettuce, and went to a training on mushroom propagation.

Casey and Fanning conducted a training on the miracle tree, moringa, and I tagged along for moral support (and as an official photographer). They nailed it, it was amazing!

My composting series was definitely a highlight of my service thus far. I had a classroom session on different types of composting and their benefits, and then a second hands-on session where we made Bokashi, a nutrient rich compost that can be made relatively quickly and affordably.  Hady  was an enormous help in translating my French into Fulfulde when farmers needed clarification, and as a result I asked him to be my counterpart for the mushroom training in July.

Here are a few other exciting things that have happened in the past couple of months:

Casey’s friend Scott visited, and we FINALLY swam at the ranch like we’ve been planning to do since the first month.

The mushroom training was great, I can’t wait to get things going in village this month with the information and the “seeds” we were given.

These trainings are especially important because they teach PCVs techniques to use in village that are not included in the agriculture documents that we have from our general pre service training.  At this training we learned much needed “bush” options for sterilization and propagation of mushrooms that don’t include incredibly expensive and difficult to obtain equipment. The trainings also include a community counterpart for each PCV, which makes the exchange of information more sustainable.

After the training, I achieved a months long dream, and got to eat some Indian food that I didn’t make.

I came back after the mushroom training to find that my landlord had vastly improved my pepiniere by vaulting it in the middle, allowing the water to flow freely off the sides. I’ve now got lots of weeding and TLC to do in and around the beds themselves, there are a few things sprouting here and there but I definitely need to resow. I’ve turned down Yaya’s offers to spray the grasses around my garden several times now.  I know it would be a lot easier than manually weeding but I feel like on principle I should avoid chemicals wherever possible, especially since this is such a small scale endeavour. I’m also not a huge fan of the thought of eating lettuce that’s been in close proximity to herbicides, but that’s just me.

My melon fruited while I was gone! I had honestly nearly given up on this bed ever giving anything, what with the torrential downpours drowning the baby plants every other day. The cucumber in the bed next to it has come up as well, so I’m hopeful that those will survive as well, they’re a pickling variety that I’m really looking forward to using.

This is my current view! I’m sitting on my veranda enjoying our SECOND SUNNY DAY IN A ROW. It was the perfect day to wash and get rid of the damp that was clinging to my sheets. When I got back on Tuesday night my whole house seemed to be covered in a fine layer of mildew. That’s what happens in the dead of rainy season when you leave for a week I guess! No open windows = party time for the damp and gnats. Don’t even get me started on the gnat invasion. You leave ONE cup of berries out that you meant to use for seeds and suddenly you’re hosting a swarm of the things. Luckily a jar of sugar water mixed with apple cider vinegar and some dish soap does a pretty good job of attracting and subsequently drowning them. That being said, I did get frustrated and spray Raid at one point yesterday. Which I realize is funny coming from someone dead set against using herbicide in her yard.

Other than the gnat infestation, I’m doing well! Power was on when I got back, but has since gone back out again. This really isn’t a big deal though, since we’ve had so much sun and I’ve been able to charge my solar panels. I’m convinced it’s a present on my mom’s birthday, which is actually why I’m posting this today! I was going to wait until my pepiniere was a bit more presentable, but there’s nothing wrong with showing a work in progress. After all, that’s what Peace Corps service and life is all about. We are all works in progress, and I will be working at integrating and improving and learning up until the day I COS. And then after that I’ll be doing the same somewhere else.

So, until next time!

See yeeso and Au revoir,

Katie

Sorry about the hiatus everyone! A lot has happened in the 4ish months since I last posted; for example, we had IST (In-service training) during the majority of March (for the crew in the Adamawa who went to the Agriculture training it was about a full month away from site). We covered a lot of ground, and did several presentations during our time in the Southern region of Cameroon, in the city of Ebolowa. We learned how to raise brooding chicks, make organic insecticide, make chicken feed, and lots of other fun stuff.

As you can see in the photo above, we were all very engaged during this break between projects, me especially (far right).

We worked at the model farm of one of my fellow PCV’s counterpart, and made a crazy number of garden beds there.

During IST we also had the opportunity to meet the new Country Director of PC Cameroon, and I love her! Danielle is very nice, and actually visited my post last week.

IST wasn’t all fun and games. The very last day of training I started to feel kind of funny and left to go to my hotel room. I had a slight fever in the afternoon, and things went downhill from there pretty fast. By 2 AM I was in the hospital with a fever of 103.5, nausea, chills, shakes, and diarrhea. I’d taken the rapid malaria test and tested negative, but I still had all the signs so they got me on malaria medication (the lab wasn’t open for tests). I was taken to PCMO in the capital and went to the lab. My blood results came back negative for malaria, which was good news! The bad news was that they weren’t super sure what I had “maybe a bacterial infection or a mixed infection or the flu, or a combination of the three”. All I knew was that my skin hurt and it was the sickest I’ve ever been. The antibiotics they gave me were magical though, and I was able to eat and drink water again a few hours after I took it. I was so happy. I have to say, if you have to get that sick, it’s nice to do it around a lot of PC admin and near the capital.

My brother came to visit me in April, and brought a bag of goodies with him! We packed an insane amount of activities in the short few days he was at my post, and managed to hit all of the important places. James got to experience the market in Ngaoundere, and the cattle market near me. We also had a tour of the chefferie, and got to see the top tourist site near me, Tello Falls! It was a great time.

Shortly after James visited me, I had my latest hospital visit. While doing something really cool and not at all idiotic I cut my finger to the bone. Luckily I was going to the city the next morning, and applied first aid and was at the hospital the next day. The wonderful Dr. Max literally glued me back together and I went on my merry way. A month later and I’ve regained all feeling in the finger and it no longer aches at the end of the day. I also avoided infection, what caused my first visit to my hero Dr. Max. It could have been worse! I used to think I was careful with knives, but I guess I had to be taught a valuable lesson about care around sharp things.

These next photos are just a random collection of images from daily life in Cameroon, I figure I owe everyone lots of pictures after being off the radar for so long!

A week ago (the day before Danielle came to visit) a swarm of bees came into my roof and a few escaped into my house. This is why I keep my spiders!

A hobby I’ve picked up here is bird watching. I’ve done IDs on about a dozen birds so far!

The following photos are all of my house, I’ve made a lot of progress decorating and furnishing it in the past few months!

The last few photos are all of food here. It’s a big part of my life after all!

It might seem kind of odd to end the post with a photo of pizza, but I do seem to think about pizza a lot, so it’s kind of fitting! Sorry for the long wait, things are going well here, my first big training for my village is the 20th of this month, and I’m training about composting. I also want to do a film club in village for the English students, and a cultural exchange with the maternal school and the students at the elementary school where my mom works. Both involve a projector that my parents will be sending with a PCV that is visiting home in July. I should get it in time for the new school year to begin! I also have plans to make a garden near the health center focused on nutrition with the seeds we got from a recent nutrition training. So that’s it project wise for the next few weeks, I’m in Ngaoundere at the moment, but will be leaving tomorrow to return to village. It’s dinner time right now, and I just made chicken taco salad for everyone to eat during our Gossip Girl marathon. It’s a fun night!

Until next time, which will be far sooner than 4 months, I promise!