Winter in the PNW

Winter, it seems, has been blowing by in the form of a few snowflakes, some drizzle and the regular recurrence of a cold, low northern sun. We have purchased a house in the still-industrial northern burrough of Portland: a neighborhood at the edge of which lies the Willamette river, its numerous bridges and Downtown past a starry scape of warehousing and train yards.

If one could picture a forest of pine trees invading the city of Pittsburgh and light rail commuter trains chasing box cars and locomotives into a final stand at the river - old, steel backs to the water -

it's a start.

Then, drink in a former stronghold of taverns and cash-only diners - now aged and diminished yet still loyally patroned - half recycled into Italian cafes, bakeries and rebuilding centers and splashed with bright paint.

Finally, stand on a bus corner. See the health food store across the street with its armada of 'bru wagons and vested, scarfed eco-soldiers. Watch a bus deploy its platoon of rough-handed long timers, minority high schoolers and paperback wielding transplants. Feel the ever present drizzle on your neck (if you're new and unscarfed). Smell the raw exhaust from a potent PNW grade octane, and listen for the boat horns playing a weary lament on the Columbia, reminding you that the pretty river to the south with its abundant, decorative bridges and city prominence is, at best, just a pretty face.

There's a bumper sticker here that I like, particularly as we live close to the Rose Garden, home to the Trail Blazers.

The bumper sticker says this: Bring NBA Basketball to Portland.

We've Moved to Oregon!

It seems as though we've traded Cameroon for Oregon. In a humorous comparison, we are now in the 2nd "Whitest" state in the U.S. (after Kansas). I also work in the town of Beaverton (the city sign has a little beaver on it), have up until recently commuted through Troutdale, and am within striking distance of the little town of Aloha.

At the end of September, after weighing our options, we decided to pack up and head to the Great Northwest. We've been up here before: visiting friends in Seattle, close relatives in Hood River, and on a recent trip, driving out to the Oregon and Washington coasts. We like the trees, the people, are set on embracing the weather, and have procured for ourselves one of the ubiquitous Subaru that inhabit these parts.

I, (Chris), find myself once again at a computer, now doing contract software work, but hopefully something a bit more meaningful and rewarding in the months coming up. Kim's back on the job prowl after finding us an apartment within a mile of my company (go Kim!) and I'm stoked that I'm walking to work again.

We've spent some quality time with Kim's sister's family already. I look forward to seeing the friends in Seattle that we've known for some time, and embracing a new city in Portland, which is within reasonable distance of a very surfable North Pacific coast. I figure I'll have more water time here than in Africa, if it is a bit cooler to the touch :)

An oddity I've encountered, since coming here, is that Oregonians keep asking me, "Why Oregon?"

People in Santa Barbara never ask you why you moved to Santa Barbara.

Why Oregon, indeed.

I usually answer that I've come because family and friends are in the area, and I like the weather. It seems that most Oregonians also like their families and friends, and tolerate the weather (and like people who tell them their weather is great).

Those that know Santa Barbara find it hard to believe I'd want to leave, and sometimes I don't quite believe it myself.

But I know if I don't explore what the rest of the world has to offer, I'll never know anything more that a few dozen square miles and a little stretch of coast.

And I know I'll end up somewhere like that eventually :)

Cameroon Recap: Part 5 - Medical Sessions

Part 5 - Medical Sessions

We had several ‘Medical Sessions’ meant to brief us on the many, many, many things we would come up against, but also to ‘reassure’ us that more volunteers got hurt in car accidents than fell ill to filaria, rabies, HIV and the like. We were also told that many of our host families had pets, and not to touch them until we completed our rabies shots. One of the families even had a monkey, and we were “NOT TO PET THE MONKEY.” I’m sorry, but get 40 young adults together tell them that and you can’t help but get some laughs, and requests for a repeat. “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO PET THE MONKEY!” Our buddy, one of the class-clown types, ended up at the host family next door to us, with a family of 12 born-again Christians, and the monkey! He also got held up at knife point the 6th day in, and he’s still there. Impressive :)

One of my favorites though happened just after our briefing about what to do if we were injured or having a medical emergency. They told us to go to the hospital first and then to call the PC medical phone, as someone was on call and had it 24 hours a day for emergencies. They also gave us their personal phone numbers in case of dire need, and asked that we only really call if we couldn’t get through to the first number, and it was an extreme emergency. As we were sitting there during the lecture the emergency phone the nurse had sitting on her desk started to ring. She paused for a minute, picked it up and looked at it and, not wanting to stop the lecture, put it aside, saying ‘see that is a volunteer calling.’ It rang again, and someone behind me said “Wait, isn’t the ring tone Morse code for “S.O.S.?” YUP. Did she answer it, No. Hmmmmm. We then proceeded to a culture seminar on the problem with apathy in Cameroon. Seriously.

We also learned how to create “clean drinking water” by adding a good portion of bleach. Hmmmmm again. And that we shouldn’t use iodine tablets for more than 3 weeks straight as it would cause liver damage. Huh.

They did however furnish us each with a very nice water filter; move over Brita this was the real deal. We learned how to put it all together & clean it and all and then proceeded to our host families with all our bags, our giant filters, our large medical kits and about 20 lbs of paperwork and readers which we could never quite find time to read.

We made it about 2 days at our host family on the bottled water they had provided before we had to boil water for our filter. Water had to be boiled for 2 minutes at full boil before filtering it to make sure to kill all the little meanies and then clean them out. During dinner we told our host mom that we needed to boil water – the PC had already briefed the families that us Americans had weak stomachs and would have weird requirements – so she had one of the boys go get a bucket of water from the tap in the driveway and bring it into the kitchen. They then put it on the stove and pulled up chairs for us to wait. While chatting with the mom, the younger son brought in a stool, and then 2 of the other family members joined us. Now a large iron pot of water takes some time to boil, so after discussing how the school system works in Cameroon, I felt compelled to point out that we were in fact, watching the pot of water boil. And then in my best French tried to explain the expression “a watched pot never boils.” In fact it does, it just seems to take eons with 7 in the audience. THEN, once it had sufficiently boiled for 2 minutes the mom pulled the pot off the stove, and we proceeded to – watch the pot cool… so that we could put it in the filter (can’t do it while hot because it would break the ceramic filters). After about 5 minutes I realized that it was going to take a good hour to cool and that they had other things to do, and my limited French just couldn’t last us that long without many minutes of awkward silence, and so I made the suggestion that we deal with the cool water in the morning. Everyone smiled at my grand idea, and we went to bed.

Another interesting point in the Medical Sessions involved one of Cameroon’s big subsistence crops: peanuts.

We were warned by the medical staff about a fungus that can grow on peanuts if they get too wet and start to mold. We were told that this fungus generates a carcinogenic toxin…greeeaat. Alas, the first evening in our host family what were we offered? Why moldy peanuts. They had them drying on a blanket on the ground near the kitchen, with a stray rooster running around over them, and then put some in a bowl and offered them to us. They were, in fact, quite soggy and soft, and the shells all had some mold on them. Now I’m a peanut fan, so I didn’t want to give the wrong impression, or offend them by not taking the offering, so I had a couple, ate them slowly, dropped several ‘accidentally’ and skirted the issue. They all sat around knocking back handfuls and chatting. Scratch your head and say “wouldn’t you realize the peanuts were soggy in the first place and stop eating them?” Yeah, I don’t know….

Cameroon Recap - Part 4: a shoe, a shot & the police station

Part IV: A shoe, a shot, and the police station.

People really do walk around with just about anything balanced on their heads. It was incredibly impressive, and I was told by one of the volunteers that should I ask my host mother she would have been very happy to teach me how; starting small to build up my neck muscles. They carried around containers with donuts they were selling 3-high, platters of bananas, platters with eggs & mayo (yes, lots of flies, and hot hot sun – we were duly warned to avoid this delight), and my favorite…. a single shoe. I kept seeing men walking around with one running shoe on their head, and wondering where the hell the other one was! Then I noticed that some of them would be carrying a variety of single shoes around, with one balanced atop their crown as a kind of billboard. They were shoe salesmen! I guess if you happened to like the one perched on his head you simply needed to inquire to get a matching set and jog on your merry way.

This was honestly one of my favorites – shots in a baggie. We learned a common saying during training: “Peace Corps Volunteers to South America return Revolutionaries, to Asia return Buddhist, and to Africa return Alcoholics.” Depressing, don’t know how true.
Sadly many Cameroonians have a problem with alcohol, and one of the easiest ways to satisfy your craving is to head into a shop, or corner store and buy a little plastic tear off bag, (think those racks near the cash register at the store here), filled with alcohol. A Shot-in-a-Bag, so to speak. They only cost about 5-10 cents! Apparently, we were told, you shouldn’t be alarmed if you jump in a taxi, the driver starts up, stops, runs into the store for a couple baggies, drinks them, and then begins the journey… I thought, hey if nothing else, throw a couple in your med kit, and if you get run over by a bus (or taxi for that matter) then you can splash some on the wound to disinfect it and knock one back to dull the pain….

They were also very fond of packing as many people into cars/vans as possible. 5 people on a scooter, with bags. No problem. Or as we managed in one of the PC vans, 19 of us! Good training for cross country trips we were told. Arriving only a little banged up about the shins at the end of our site-seeing trip back from the police station.
Oh – great story about the police station. So we all had to go and get our pictures taken for our in-country identity cards. We were put in a little wooden booth (think outhouse) and told not to smile. Alas, our black & white photos had us all looking either mortified or exhausted. Then we had to fill out a form and go in 2 by 2 to have it finished by 2 clerks. They cut the pictures out and placed them on the form with our info, and made them official. Then on to the height measuring & finger printing, measuring went OK. Though they were a bit pushy with some of us. Then the finger printing went like this: The man would take some ink, drip it on the edge of a desk, spread it out into a thin film, and take our fingers – all 10 – dip them in it, and finger print us. No big deal really, though they must have just left everyone up to their own devices to clean the ink back off (our wonderful PC staff had a couple buckets and soap for us) because there were black fingerprint streaks all over all the walls of the station – inside & out. So upon arriving it kind of looked like some unlucky prisoners had been dragged off grasping the walls for help (think nail marks on the coffin if you know what I mean.) And the smell – we must have been just down wind from the ‘toilet’ because it smelled to HIGH heaven, in alternating gusts of stench and foulness. Finally, as we were all finishing up, someone realized that they had accidentally used someone else’s form. Instead of just tearing it up and re-doing the fingerprints on a new form, the resourceful staff busted out some White Out and whited out the fingerprints. Naturally the ink was pretty dark and saturated, so whiting out really just resulted in a nice purplish hue on the form. Waited around, and started again. Great….

Cameroon Recap - Part 3: Hotel Hilaria

Part III: Hotel Hilaria continued –

Our last night in the hotel we were surprised with seating outside for dinner, and some great shows. Not sure if it was the hotel putting it on, or the PC, but I’m sure the acts were happy to leave with some of our PC pay in tips. First there was a traditional Cameroonian dance group – dressed sort of like a Hawaiian hula, but African style. Three women and a man, who could shake it so fast our mouths fell open. They could honestly shake it SO FAST that their bodies BLURRED before your eyes! Amazing! One girl also shook it so hard her top fell off, but I guess that happens ;)

Then came time for them to pull some unsuspecting spectators up to shake it with them. Haven’t laughed that hard in maybe my whole life. Of course they didn’t choose JUST anyone to dance, but the ones that would make the funniest targets (the computer geek, the older reporter-guy, the shy girl) – and happily for us, they all got really into it – and sat back down to some extended hooting and back patting, but also with our great appreciation for their own sense of humor about themselves ;)

Then came some bongo drummers, that could beat it, (no pun intended) equally as fast. Which did of course lead to us nudging & winking about how they might be in other areas of the evening activities. There was another musical group after that and then some of the drummers stuck around to jam with 2 of the volunteers who had brought their guitars. So as the evening darkened we were soothed by a chorus of “No woman, No cry” ahhhh Bob.

Me and a couple of the girls then spent the rest of the evening speculating about the various budding romances already underway between the volunteers. We actually got the very cynical helper volunteer in on the gossip, and he was so caught up in it, he demanded I go upstairs, wake Chris up and make him tell me who the 5th couple was that I couldn’t remember. Ha! Apparently Cameroon has quite a high ‘success’ rate in terms of getting the single ones married off (either to other volunteers or Cameroonians). However they also have a disproportionately high rate of couple volunteers going home early… Go figure. I’m pretty sure one of the fledgling couples is probably already engaged by this point. So sweet, young love.

Cameroon Recap: Part 2 - Hotel Hilaria

As we were falling asleep the second to last night we heard some loud yelling and banging in the hallway. Figuring it was just some of the younger, rowdier volunteers who had stayed at the bar after dinner for some beer, we rolled over. The banging got louder, the voice yelling sounded like one of the other, older, volunteers. We got up, opened the door and found our neighbor, we’ll call her “Judy” standing in front of her door with one of the other volunteers trying to get into her room. We only got one key per room, and most of the volunteers didn’t know each other prior to coming, so someone had to be responsible for the key. Now Judy had stayed downstairs that night, while her roomie, we’ll call her “Heidi”, had said she was going to bed early. So when Judy came upstairs to go to bed, she thought Heidi would be there to let her in, or would have left the door unlocked for her. Alas, the door was locked, it was about 11pm, and we only had to wonder what might have happened.

Did Heidi take the filaria pills and fall ill, hitting her head and passing out with the door locked?

Did she sneak off to a boy’s room, with whom we had all wondered if there was a potential
romance ensuing…?

What to do?

Chris climbed out our window, which had an adjoining balcony to their room. Now I say, “balcony” but basically it was a catwalk. About 2 feet wide with a 2-foot high wall, and a good three floor drop. He looked in the window, couldn’t see anything, but Heidi’s bed was kind of around the corner from the window… The music and the light were on though. Couldn’t tell if the key was in the door. He banged on the window – “HEIDI” he yelled. Nothing. Judy went downstairs and asked if there was a spare key. To which she was told no, the housekeeper had the only other key, and she had gone home for the night. Sorry. Meantime, the two current volunteers, read “babysitters,” had come up to help. The girl whaled on the door like nothing I’ve ever seen, and yelled for Heidi, to no avail. The cynical guy volunteer rolled his eyes, and moaned at the thought of having to make a late night visit to the guy Heidi might be hooking up with. Now, this might be awkward for some, and probably if nothing else, ruin the chances for any kind of future potential connection – as the insinuation would just be too embarrassing. But to make it worse, we were all pretty sure this guy was carrying around a pocket Bible with him. Not exactly the one you want to ask in the middle of the night if there is a girl hiding in his room, and could we please get the key.


Back downstairs, I pulled out my pocket knife, and we were about to try disassembling the doorknob, when we first decided it would be better to try opening the window again. Out the window climbed Judy, no luck. Out climbed the girl volunteer, Bang BANG, no luck. While we went in for the door knob, Chris climbed back out the window, and managed to lift it over the lock latch and pop it open. He climbed in the window, and what did he find?

Why Heidi sound asleep on her bed, glasses on, lights on, music on. Being half-dressed and the middle of the night – not to mention earlier in the day, an uplifting PC video screening about sexual assault – Chris decided it was best to open the door first. In we came, Judy, the volunteer, me, all standing there wondering HOW she could have not woken up. Then I said, well shouldn’t someone check if she’s breathing? Judy walks up to the bed, touches Heidi’s leg:

“Heidi?” she whispers softly.

Heidi: “ Huh, what? What’s going on?” She says, WIDE AWAKE.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah” she grumbles.

Touch her and she’s wide awake, but break down the frickin’ door and she’d never know! Amazing. Alas, Heidi felt quite bad about the whole ordeal, and we were able to stop Mr. Cynicism before he forever ruined the relationship that never happened with the guy with the “planner” in his pocket.

Cameroon Recap - Part 1: Arrival & Accomodations

Part I: Arrival & Accommodations:

So I kind of feel the need to try and record some of what we did experience in Cameroon, before I forget it all. And also, so that people can have a little better idea of what the first 10 days of the PC were like for us.

We arrived at the airport in Yaounde and were greeted by many of the staff of PC Cameroon. Very nice people who helped us get through customs, gathered up all our bags, handed out water and packed all 46 of us on the bus. The Country Director, who had flown in on the same flight with us after having been back to the States for a visit, greeted us. There were a couple of current volunteers there too, to help us along, answer our questions and laugh at our both bright-eyed, and bleary-eyed (it had been a LONG flight) reactions to the country. They took us to the hotel where we would be staying for the next 5-6 days, got us all checked in and settled for the night. We arrived on a Saturday, and were told not to stray from the hotel on Sunday, as we didn’t know the area, were basically prime targets being the ‘dumb, rich, white, Americans’ we are, and needed to catch up on rest anyway – it would be a long week. We had no idea… Plus they reiterated multiple times, we would be here for 2 years (or so we thought) and would have plenty of time to explore and get to know the town and the people after we knew more about the culture, what to avoid, and had a better grasp of the language. We actually got a very effective demonstration of what we really looked like to the locals, from our Country Director during his introductory speech on Monday. He took out several $20’s and hung them from his various pockets, off his eye-glasses and the like, and then said – “this is what they see, when you walk down the street” and really, he isn’t wrong. A huge portion of the population is living on less than $1-2/day. So even with our modest PC income we were still doing quite well.

I don’t know about everyone else. But I was totally surprised to find that I could actually communicate with pretty much everyone in normal French. It wasn’t a dialect, or pidgin French or anything. “Est-ce vous avez les serviettes?” served perfectly to get me some towels for our room, and a “oh, your French is very good!” to boot!

We were placed 2 to a room in the hotel, and yes, Chris & I got our own room – complete with cockroaches that scattered whenever the lights went on, but they were babies, so it wasn’t too bad. We would find out what the grown ups looked like at our host family’s house later in the week – an event that nearly pushed me off the fragile & eroding cliff I clung to on day 8. The sheets & shower were clean though, and there was a TV that got the World Cup, so we were pretty happy. They served us 3 meals a day at the hotel – so we all had to rise before 6 to get downstairs in time for French rolls and coffee or tea. Some days we had jam, some days no jam, but when they realized we were all starving by about 10:00 and no longer able to concentrate on the important info they were giving us until after lunch, they started giving us eggs for breakfast too. This managed to stop me from waking up between 2am and 4am grasping my sides in hunger. For lunch & dinner we actually had 3 courses, which was unusual, and awkward, but good. There was always the French bread – often times with just a hint of mold on the bottom, and then the appetizer was shredded carrots with some sort of sauce. We of course learned to designate ourselves at the “veggie table” early on, to avoid being served the avocado with tuna appetizer, or other interesting selections. The main course was usually kind of a red sauce with cooked vegetables and rice. Not bad. The last day in the hotel they actually served everyone else steak & French fries, which I think went over quite well – though we got the red sauce dish with French fries. And several of those at our table fell quite ill that evening – who’s to say if it was the wine, the sauce (was there meat in it?) or the filaria pills we started taking (those are to avoid getting elephantitis and having a worm crawl across your eyeball by the way, so personally I thought a bit of nausea was worth it….)

Our days consisted of getting up and showering – which basically meant sitting in our tubs and washing while trying not to soak the bathroom – a la Francais. Having breakfast and then getting carted across town packed into PC vans, to the PC headquarters for informational sessions with the staff. Heading back for lunch, back for an afternoon session, often involving some shots, and then back to the hotel around 5pm, for dinner. Started feeling a bit like a jail. Especially with the 2 armed guards standing watch in the lobby for us.

Stay tuned for Part 2: hotel hilaria