Things to get used to

Ann reads this entry over.

The gate on the fully-barred front porch; note padlock, kept locked.
All houses here are completely barred. I wonder what the fire codes are?

Brand-new barbed wire going up at our place,
since we're the first people to live there for awhile.

(written Thursday, Oct 25, Yaounde, kitchen table)

Ann and I have both visited Africa before, for much briefer visits, so we had at least some idea what it was like to live here. But all the differences from life back in San Francisco still take some getting used to.

The biggest one is that you stick out here. There are a few ex-pats around Yaounde, since it’s the capital city after all, a city of maybe a million and a half, but there aren’t many. If they‘re in public, they‘re probably Peace Corps, NGO workers or missionaries; there are diplomats here but we haven‘t seen any yet. We might see an ex-pat or two if we walk half a mile to the grocery store and back, somewhere along the way or in the store itself, or maybe not. So if you’re a white westerner here, you look like almost nobody else. People wear both African and western-style clothes here, and tend to wear fancier clothes than at home, but affluent people here drive everywhere, so the people with less money are the people walking around the street. And people here stare at you. People don’t smile on the street in Yaounde if they don’t know each other, so as you walk down the street you get people staring at you directly without smiling, until you pass by and they go back to whatever they were doing. If you stare back, they just keep staring, and if you smile at them, they don’t smile, just keep staring. It’s disconcerting. I just wear sunglasses everywhere, and I’m starting to forget about it after being here a couple of weeks. Cameroonians we met back in San Francisco before we left warned us that Youande was not a friendly place, that they themselves like the rest of the country more.. And everyone, really everyone we work with or somehow know personally, whether ex-pat or Cameroonian, has been really welcoming and helpful, so this is not an general impression of Cameroon, just walking around in public in Yaounde. We may have a chance to travel to a village a few hours away with Ray and Ann K, so sooner or later we’ll see how different it is outside of a big city.

No, that’s not the biggest adjustment. The biggest adjustment is that we speak French all the time. But that one’s so obvious it hardly seems worth mentioning. And it’s one we saw coming from a mile away, so we were mentally prepared for it. It’s a mountain, so you climb it slowly, at a sustainable pace, and rest when you have to. But we both love hiking. And there must be a downhill slope coming eventually. Which is a lot less tiring, but worse for your knees (hmm, I don’t think I can work that into the language metaphor, so I’ll just let that go). Anyway, the French is a lot of work. But the fun thing is that if you spend all day in it every day, if you’re patient, you can catch yourself making progress. You can actually catch yourself learning things. It’s encouraging. Everyone’s willingness to put up with our halting French, and repeat themselves as necessary, is a huge help. We can’t understand much when 2 French speakers are chatting, yet.

Another big change is personal security. We’re night people back home; we’re lucky enough to have flexible hours at our jobs (no, make that the jobs we just quit to come here, and hope to pick up again next fall) back home. We’d go into the office a bit late, stay a bit late, and then stay up late at night. We went out a lot on weekend nights, to concerts or theatre or social events or whatever. That doesn’t happen here; not yet, anyway. (So Sean G, if you’re reading this, no, Ann and I are not spending our nights going clubbing.) Ray and Ann K have a vehicle, and so does Valery from RELUFA, so we’ve gone out at night with both of them, but they know their way around. Everyone, from our guide book to Ray & Ann K, to RELUFA people, to Christi and Jeff who we’re house-sitting for, has warned us in somber tones to avoid wandering around after dark. It’s not safe. If you’re an ex-pat, you live in a locked house with a wall around it topped with broken glass and/or barbed wire, and you have a big dog and a guard 24 hours a day, or maybe you live in an apartment building with similar arrangements. You only take taxis at night if you know the driver.

Not to panic, though. Just to put this in perspective, I rode a motorcycle for years, including a few cross-country trips of several thousand miles, one of them by myself without even a windshield. I’m sure that living here, like motorcycling, is probably a matter of taking proper precautions and paying attention, except that, statistically, living here is a whole lot safer. And we do get out occasionally, as I mentioned, with veteran residents. We’re headed to a Barn Dance with missionaries this Friday, which should be a hoot. Ann K and Ray invited us; it’s a benefit for Rainforest International School where their kids attend. Ray tells me that they have a benefit sale too, including homemade pies among other things. He and I are plotting to bid high for one and split it. Mmm, pie.

Hmm. Other differences, let’s see… Cost of living is about the same here, actually. A trip to the grocery store here costs about the same as in San Francisco, although the cost of individual items is very different (a whole pineapple, out of season right now, is about two dollars, a whole chicken is three dollars a pound, and a package of dried figs is nine dollars, and cheese is expensive, foreign and delicious). Fresh fruits and vegetables are far less expensive than either San Francisco or the grocery store here if you go to the public outdoor market, and although we are not yet Francophones enough to go and hold our own in the negotiations that this requires, there is a lady who works at the house where we live who goes to market, and can get these things for us if we ask. So ten dollars here gets you maybe ten pounds of oranges, papayas, bananas, cabbage, spinach, and other fruits and vegetables. You have to wash them in a diluted bleach solution, though, to make them safe for ex-pats to eat; Marie has worked for ex-pats a long time, and has the system down, and you can’t taste the bleach.

The big difference in cost of living here is rent. A big two-bedroom apartment in an upscale neighborhood near the office is about three hundred dollars. A whole house including salaries for a guard agency and a lady who cooks and cleans is maybe five hundred. The housing landscape looks very different too. Apparently it’s hard to save money securely here, between economic instability and social expectations around sharing, so people who have enough money will put what they get into their house, build as much as they can, and then live in a partly-constructed house, which they will work on some more when they get more money. The climate here allows this, since Yaounde is equatorial but at a couple thousand feet of altitude, and ranges from about 65 to 85 degrees. It doesn’t rain sideways here, either, as far as we’ve seen during our two weeks at the end of the rainy season, like it does in the Midwest, so you don’t particularly need windows either. I’ll see if I can maybe get a few pictures of the partly-built houses that are all over the place. There aren’t any in our immediate neighborhood here in Djongolo, however; the buildings here seem to have been here awhile. There is a big concrete shell of a three-story place with columns next to Ray and Ann K’s, which Ray said went up last month; I’ll try to grab a picture of that sometime this weekend if we’re over there.

Things in general are a little less convenient and more basic. Lighting is fluorescent bulbs. Furniture at the office is folding tables and plastic chairs. Televisions are smaller. The power and water go out intermittently every so often. Broadband internet runs at 56Kbps, maybe 20 times slower than our cable modem back home. The water’s not potable, so you need to get a filter, which we have. You can wash and do dishes and laundry in it, though you need to let dishes and clothing dry thoroughly afterwards. You chop back your bougainvillea and your banana trees severely so that you don’t get snakes. Snakes and dogs are both unpopular with the locals.

The biggest difference of all, of course, is that we are starting up a new life here for one year where we hardly know anyone, halfway around the world in another country, working at different jobs, with a couple suitcases each of stuff from back home. But that seems obvious. And all the Francophones we see regularly have been really welcoming, helpful and tolerant of our French. Between this and our Anglophone friends, and of course our friend the Internet, it’s not nearly as hard an adjustment as it could be.

So mom, if you’re reading this, don’t worry too much :)