Greetings once more from bangangte, I am writing earlier this week because I travel to my new home on wednesday. I will be living in the East almost exactly on the border of the Central Republic of the Congo and Cameroon. IT is a rainforest and from what i gather I will be seeing manu gorillas. I am very excited because it will be the real peace corpse experience but i guess i will really be roughing it. Today I met my counterpart who is the local community memeber that traveled here for the workshop before helping me travel to my site. HE told me that I have a house ready for me and that it has two rooms, a salon or living room, a kitchen, and that we get water from a well and the electricity only comes on for about 4 hours a day, when it does come on. I am assured I will have service, i f not in my house in the village. I will be living about 15 miles from another peace corp member who lives outside of the forest, but i guess we are seperated by a large river that you have to take a canoe across because there are no bridges- welcome to the third world!
Some other things I learned today that were unsettling were the following:
1 many counterparts thought that we were going to invest our own money into the village and that we were bringing a lot of financial backing with us, I dispelled this rumor by explaining my debt after I laughed a long time, then I was chastized for not speaking French and talking too fast
2 When told we couldnt use corpral punishment a counterpart leaned over to my friend joe and said "sometimes you will want to punch the kids, and you are able to do that, but we dont hit to kill." Oh good, im glad they have priorities
3 We are only supposed to teach 12-18 hours a week because it will take us double that time to prep and to grade hundreds of papers, but the counterparts got very mad because I guess we are the only english teachers at a lot of schools for instance my town only has 1500 people in it and our school only has 500 kids so i think im the only teacher, but they didnt understand that xe have other goals as pc members like creating girls groups, teaching about AIDS, and creating theatre groups - well maybe just me with that one. So we have a lot of responsibibilites and teaching cant be the sole one.
4. They think we might be spies from the US to which I reply in teh Following with my espionage goals for Cameroon:
1 Take all the information from the Pygmies and train Star Wars like foot soldiers to swing from trees and attack enemies
2 Catch all infected mosquitos in Cameroon and release them in our enemies locker rooms or gentlemans clubs
3 Buy all the 3rd world country piece of crap pens and switch them with our enemies quality bics so that we dry up their ideas
4 Learn Pidgin English -essentially ebonics- and teqch to yound children in Americq iso the man can continue keeping the less fortunate down
5 Steal all of the monkeys and send them into space to travel or do our bidding
Thats why the peace corps would send spies to Cameroon because of all their useful information!
Something really good that I learned today:
My counterpart studied in Scotland and speaks fluent English
HE loves theatre and wants to create a group with performances- this is why i think I was sent here
HE has written 2 books and he wants me to read them
He has 4 kids and took in 2 more becaus they didnt have the means for education
He doesnt seem overly religious and he is supportive
So these are all good things!
Love you all- Send me some news!
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2 comments:
aaah. this makes me sad that my blog is a graveyard now. good stuff elyse. what's your living arrangements gonna be like? i hear they build pcv's a concrete pillbox in places like that. when do you move to site?
Elyse, I think about you all the time! I love being able to connect through the waves from thousands of miles. Keep it coming. : )
luv Debbie
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