And we're back

Note: I wrote this post about three days ago and finally got wifi again to post it. The dates are a little off but I hope to catch up soon!

Well after a whirlwind trip I have finally landed in Cameroon! I will try to shortly summarize my two week vacation before explaining my current situation in Douala.

After leaving Hanoi, I flew to Seoul, South Korea to visit many of my friends from college who are teaching English over there. I had a fantastic trip and found it very interesting to compare Korea to Vietnam, mostly because they have nothing in common besides the fact that they share a continent and that their inhabitants are hilarious without trying. Korea is just an Asian interpretation of the western world. Everything is new, clean, high-tech and it is incredibly safe. There is great shopping and the food is very different but delicious. I also spent two days visiting the schools my friends teach at, where I was greeted very enthusiastically. At Zoe's school a boy ran into the class and screamed I LOVE YOU!! to me before running out giggling.

After Seoul I flew to Madrid via a horrendous layover in Moscow, and waited for my parents to arrive the following morning. It was a great vacation and there is really nothing better than staying in nice hotels and eating nice meals after living in a developing country and having only traveled in Europe previously by penny pinching and staying at hostels and eating muesli for every other meal.

I left my parents early on April 29th and flew from Sevilla to Paris to meet Matt. We spent three days relaxing in Paris and eating nice meals since I couldn't knock the habit I developed with my parents. On May 2nd we got on a direct flight to Douala and landed there at 7:30 pm. We got off the plane and walked into the most run down airport I've been to. We literally had to walk through dirt sideways in the airport to get to border control. It was like the airport was only half-finished, which is very possible.

At baggage claim there were a lot of locals trying to convince us to come with them in their overpriced taxis, and we had an incident there that I will not repeat for fear of scaring my parents but it all worked out fine. People from our volunteer org picked us up and drove us to our host family's house, which was about 25 minutes from the airport.

When we first walked in we met our house mom named Olivia, who is so great. We are living in a nice middle-class apartment. It has two bedrooms, one that Olivia and her husband share, and one that Matt and I share. We have our own bathroom and shower and we share a small kitchen and living room with them. Olivia took us out for pizza after we got settled, and we managed to have a conversation with her even though she only knows a little English and I only know a little French. Being an African country I was expecting them to speak French only as a secondary language, like many other countries colonized by Europeans. But French is the language they use to speak to each other, so I need to improve my French immediately. I am trying to practice but I am hoping that my french lessons here will help me a lot. I like Olivia because she is warm and welcoming, but not overly so. She is very down-to-earth and is very sarcastic, and I can imagine she must be considered very funny by her friends because the few jokes she is able to translate over to us are hilarious.

Also, at dinner I saw a bunch of cakes in a glass window, and I said to her "J'aime le gâteau!". Which means 'I love cake!'. Then with a mix of French and English‚ she explained that Africans eat cake like ‘this’, motioning eating huge chunks of cake with her hands. I was like “really?? I would love to eat cake like that!!” and she looked at me with the most skeptical grin and then told me it was a joke. Matt thought this was particularly funny.
Also this night Olivia invited us to come with her to her brother-in-law’s wedding that was being held over the upcoming weekend. It is a six hour drive away and we are leaving very late Friday night to arrive early Saturday morning. I have to buy two dresses for the wedding so we’ll see how that turns out. The city we are going to is supposed to be one of the most scenic in the country, so I’m really excited for the experience!

Douala is very poor, although there are few beggars here. In Cambodia there are always a lot of children bombarding you either asking for money or trying to sell you something. The difference definitely does not lie in GDP, as Douala is probably in a comparable economic state, if not worse. I think it is mostly due to tourism, since hardly any people come here to tour. Cambodia has largely adjusted to tourism and many people there survive off it. I’m sure Douala would be the same if they received more foreign visitors.

Most of the city is very rundown, and some areas are probably bordering slums. The small apartment building we live in is nice, and looks even better because it is surrounded by very poorly constructed houses with scraps of sheet metal for a roof. As dilapidated as most buildings are, the city seems to function fairly well, which is confusing because at first glance you would think everything is completely stalled here. Douala has a very colorful and vibrant street life though, and maybe I’m crazy but there’s an odd charm to the city that makes me really enjoy it. Then again I really haven’t been to city I haven’t liked, as my mom recently pointed out (although I’m not crazy about Milan) so maybe my opinion in this case shouldn’t be taken very seriously.
As for safety, it’s definitely not a good idea to go out at night here by yourself. Many of the people are honest and good intentioned, but with poverty comes crime, prostitution and illegal drug activity that needs to be avoided in certain areas here. If you are careful though, you can get by just fine.

The atm’s and banks here are especially vulnerable, so all of them are guarded heavily by armed police. It was strange to go to an atm while an officer stood in front of me with a gun and a look on his face that I’m sure would deter most from trying to rob me or break into the atm.

Also another oddity with money here is that you have to exchange foreign currency on the black market. I have no idea how the local Cameroonians from our volunteer org that took us around knew who dealt foreign currency on the street because there a ton of people standing everywhere around buildings. But they always just go up to someone and they can always exchange money for us. Exchanging money through banks in Cameroon would give us a much worse exchange rate, if that was not implied. This was weird for me to partake in, for obvious reasons but also because I wrote a report for the executive director at my internship at the Genocide Intervention Network about how all the banks were failing in Sudan and it had resulted in huge increase of black market trade of foreign currency.
As for the people themselves, they seem mostly uninterested by us. I was told this is not the case outside of Douala, because in Douala there are a significant amount of foreigners because of all the oil companies taking residence in the area. Some people seemed to not like us, but I was told later that they thought we were French, who they dislike for many reasons I haven’t fully uncovered yet. The kids here still seem to be very interested in white people (they call us ‘la blanc’) and yell bonjour! when we pass.

As for the environment, right now the heat is killing me. We don’t have AC, and it is incredibly humid here all the time. The only relief we get comes in the form of a cold shower at the end of the day, and there have been at least five times already where I feel like I will pass out when I stand up too quickly. I am constantly sweating (cute), so no matter how much I drink it never feels like enough. I have finally adjusted to sleeping in the heat though, having had my first full night of sleep last night, so I finally have hope that I will adjust to the heat during the day as well. It is also rainy season here; but it’s mostly sunny and clear skies all day except for once or twice a day when it DOWNPOURS for about an hour. It is the hardest rain I’ve ever seen, pretty cool to watch and not even bad to get caught in since it’s such a nice change from the heat. It’s also so hot here that 20 min after it rains you can’t even tell that it did because the water has already evaporated.

Finally, I am happy to share that there are no mosquitoes in our room. Olivia has a device that releases a smell that only mosquitoes can detect, and they hate it so much that there are none in our room, even with the light on and the windows open in the middle of the night. This will make the chances of us contracting many tropical diseases almost zero, since mosquitoes feed at night.

Today we visited the center for disabled children that we will be working at, and it went very well. I will write more about our experiences there and the wedding trip next time! I hope to post pictures too.