4 more reminders of home
on Notes from Quite Far (Cameroon), 20/Oct/2009 19:53, 34 days ago
• Mashed potato• Ulrika Johnsson• A dog that does tricks• The internet (at long last)Sorry yet again for my cyber-silence. The internet was broken throughout Cameroon for over a week. Apparently the three main networks depend on a single transformer in Kribi, and it broke. And now it is fixed and I have an extremely long blog to post.There remain a few technical problems to iron out at the ENIEG as well. We’ve come a long way, but still, at the moment, the success of a lesson can be determined not by the quality of the teaching, the level of engagement or any of that Ofsted nonsense.No.Lessons can more usefully be marked out of 4 according to the following criteria:1. Could you get into the room?2. Were there computers in it?3. Was the electricity working?4. Did any students turn up?The answer to these questions is sometimes no, but on the bright side, it is often yes, and lessons are well and truly underway. The difference compared with last year is staggering and it has been great to watch my students learning to use a computer, moving the mouse around for the first time, typing their name into Notepad, and giggling as it appears on the screen. Having grown up with computers, it is easy to take them for granted, but recently I find myself looking with fresh eyes at them, and marvelling along with my students at the things they can do. Some people, however, seem a little bit afraid of them. I’ll give an instruction like “Click on the picture” and they will sit there frozen, trying to remember what clicking is, how to do it and why. If I show them where to click by pointing to the screen using my finger, nine times out of ten they will themselves point to the same bit of the screenusing their own finger, and then become confused when nothing happens. In fact, I have had to reflect a lot recently about what it must feel like to be a complete beginner, and I think (I hope) my teaching has improved because of it. If I’m honest, I am enjoying teaching these lessons so much that I run the risk of becoming possessive over them, which is of course the opposite of what needs to happen. But for the time being I’m not going to push for anyone to take over my role, because I like it too much.There has still been plenty of time for meetings, of course. I am currently working with other volunteers on a series of 2-day training sessions for all the teachers VSO works with in the Extreme North. (This is quite a lot of teachers. So no pressure…) We will take this training to the three main centres Maroua, Mokolo and Maga, and teachers from surrounding villages will travel into the town. We will also be running a 2-day workshop with education managers from all over the Extreme North. And finally, my new timetable means I am free Thursdays and Fridays, so I will be working with national volunteers regularly on these days on training and mentoring sessions, jointly planning and team-teaching lessons.All of this training will obviously be a good experience professionally, and with any luck the teachers will find it useful. But also, it means I get to travel to lots of different towns and villages, which is something of a bonus.So all in all, work is going well.On the social side of things, earlier this month I went out rather a lot in Maroua, ate nice Maroua foods like pizza and grilled fish, and stayed up into the early hours singing and playing the guitar. Then a couple of weekends ago I went to Kaele. In Sid’s absence I stayed with a Peace Corps volunteer called Steven, who has been there a few years now. He has a well-trained dog, a nice garden and cable TV, which are all things you don’t tend to get over here, so it made a nice change. For reasons I have yet to work out, a random Arabic channel was playing re-runs of the 90’s fitness game show Gladiators. So on Sunday morning, in the middle of an impoverished African village, I watched Ulrika Johnsson smile manically at me from 15 years ago. And then I watched Wolf and Shadow chase Patrick from Slough up a rubber wall. And Britain seemedlike a very distant and utterly silly place.After Kaele the interest-ometer dropped a notch or two, as I’ve been in Yagoua since then. The excitement here probably hit its zenith on Saturday when I discovered potatoes at the market, took them home and mashed them up with powdered milk and water. With retrospect I should have saved them for Sunday, since I feel I peaked too soon and, frankly, the rest of the weekend was something of an anti-climax.Another, slightly more exotic food I tasted recently was given to me by my local shopkeeper Hamadou. He delights in giving me local foods to sample. Some of these I like, and some I have yet to develop a taste for, but I always eat what is put in front of me, because he is a nice man and it would be rude not to. Occasionally in the evening I’ll sit outside Hamadou’s shop and we’ll share a juice or a beer. We did this about a week ago. I had just given him a huge bag of sweetcorn from my yard, so I wasn't surprised when he tried to offer me something in return. I was, though, a little surprised by what that something turned out tobe. He disappeared around the corner and came back two minutes later with the customary bottle of beer in one hand, and a plastic bag in the other. And he announced in a very matter-of-fact way “I’ve brought you a bag of crickets”. Now, this is not something that anyone has ever said to me before, and I didn’t know if I’d heard him correctly, since I wasn’t entirely sure what he thought I might want with a bag of crickets. So in order to make sure I hadn’t got the wrong end of the stick, I asked a number of intelligent questions, such as:1.“Aren’t crickets insects?” (The answer to this question was yes.)2.“Are the crickets in that bag?” (Again the answer was yes)3.“Are the crickets dead?” (Again yes.)I had a feeling I knew what the answer to the fourth question was going to be, but I asked it anyway just in case.4.“Am I supposed to eat the crickets?”I was right about this one too. The answer was yes.5.“But aren’t crickets insects?”The crickets were deep fried and seasoned with salt and chillies, and actually they tasted quite nice. At the bottom of the bag, once I’d emptied it, were bits of leg and wing that had broken off, and I did not eat these.I felt absurdly proud of myself, and looked forward to telling my colleagues at the ENIEG, since they like me to do“Cameroonian” things. If I am wearing a locally-made skirt or top, for example, or eating beans or cake from the street, they beam at me and say “Liza, you are becoming a real African woman”. Hamadou, on the other hand, is a bit less impressed by stuff like that. All I had done from his perspective was put some food into my mouth. And I take his side on this one. I wouldn’t be impressed by a Chinese woman eating a Yorkshire pudding or a Kendall mint cake, even if she thought it was an act of pure heroism.So I hid my smugness from Hamadou and took it to the ENIEG the following day instead, fully expecting a pat on the back.I sat myself down on a bench with two professors called Max and George. They are from the south and relatively well-off. And much to my surprise, they looked horrified when I told them what I'd done.“But Liza, crickets are insects!”