Snowsuit in April

A little over a year ago, my friend Scott and I braved the coldest Minnesota night in order to blow soap bubbles and watch them freeze. That doesn’t happen unless the temperature drops below -12 degrees. Today, I came home to find the daughter of my next door-neighbor wearing a full-body snowsuit (without a hint of irony). It couldn’t have been colder than 60 degrees.

Although this latest incident made me stop and laugh (not helping my relationship with said child), it also made me realize how much of my life here already feels normal, despite its relative newness. Today wasn’t even an atypical day, but I’m chuckling to myself just looking back on it. Some highlights of today included:

• ·      Attempting to explain and commission a set of cookie sheets from a team of welders
• ·      Accepting a ride up the mountain in the pouring rain from a man who happened to be leaving the Alliance Francaise right before the daily monsoon began (but don’t worry, he was vetted by the director of the AF)
• ·      Grudgingly taking said man’s phone number (everyone wants to share their contact!) and then immediately needing to use it when I realized I forgot my cookie sheets in his car. Oops.
• ·      Accompanying my counterpart to a new village and very nearly getting stuck in the mud. Then quietly sitting and listening to counterpart and his friend discuss the “wild people” that also inhabit said village. On our way out we watched a team of pre-pubescent boys jump in the bed of a pickup as a means of helping the driver extract the truck from the mud.
• ·      Learning that none of the three local stores near my house will sell me a tub of margarine, but all of them are willing to wrap any amount of my choosing in paper for me to take home.
• ·      Greeting an entire school of children and potentially getting roped into teaching computer classes when the current teacher goes on maternity leave next week.
• ·      Teaching my landlady how to make cookies and learning that she had seen cookie sheets in secondhand stores before but had no idea what they were used for. And then we proceeded to make cookies for the neighborhood!
• ·      Watching my water begin to dribble out of the faucet and getting overly excited. Only after I took a celebratory shower did I fill up a bucket and notice that the water was browner than I have ever seen it be.

Regarding life in Cameroon, my friend Anna likes to tell me that, “there’s never a dull fucking moment” (Anna was with me when I visited my first Cameroonian hospital a few weeks ago…).  Truer words have never been spoken.

When I was visiting the school this morning, I went to the head teacher’s office as a way of following protocol. After I introduced myself as a Peace Corps Volunteer, she looked up in recognition and said that she knows about the Peace Corps, and knows that we’re here to teach Cameroonians how to develop. That’s an attitude that I really have trouble with, so I responded with what has sort of become my standard reply: “Well, I like to think that we’re here so that we can learn from each other”. And as maddening as life can be here sometimes, I’ve realized that my instinctive reply is becoming more and more true the longer I live here.

TL,DR: Sometimes life here is a little crazy, but the craziest part is how normal it is beginning to feel in the moment. Does that mean I'm beginning to integrate?