Peanuts, Computers, and Uncontrollable Smiles

Etienne seemed to tower over me, but his doe like eyes and playful demeanor made him anything but threatening. As the chief’s storyteller and right-hand man, Etienne deftly straddled the world of ancient tribal chiefs and impending globalization. He came bearing peanuts in search of the Peace Corps Volunteer Nara (Naarra, he said, in his beautiful Cameroonian English that made me wonder if speaking French would have been easier). As he sat down on my veranda, he smiled and said, Let me tell you the story of those peanuts. In 1998… I bowed my head, not wanting him to see the smirk on my face, wondering exactly where this story was going. I worked at the hospital, the chief of finances there. He paused, so that I could appreciate the weight of his words. A woman came into the hospital sobbing with a dying baby in her arms. I was the only one there who could help this baby. He needed blood, but at that time there was a, what do you call it, stamina? Stigma, I replied. Yes, stigma with AIDS. I said, My God, I must help this baby. But what if I have AIDS and give it to the baby? So I waited for them to test my blood, and it was good. I have very good blood, you know. I smiled. So they gave it to the baby. I never knew what happened to him until today. A woman came by with a huge basket of peanuts and with her a young boy. No, a young man. She said, Do you remember? This is the child you saved. And Nara, it was him. It was the baby. So today I came by to bring you these peanuts because these are peanuts of goodwill. You are good will.

Wearing my watch scares me. I can watch the seconds, minutes, hours, and even days pass by. Sometimes it makes my heart stop so that all I hear is ticking. I’m worried that I’ll run out of time. That I’ll leave here, and all the projects I had planned, the people I wanted to help, everything…I won’t have finished it. Maybe I won’t have even started it. Maybe I won’t figure out what “it” is in time. And sometimes I’m just worried that I’ll be crushed under the weight of everyone’s expectations. I’m such a cliché. A split second later, I feel my heart stop again. Two years? Two whole years. It’s like an eternity. You can imagine how hard it is to start a day when you can’t decide if you want it to be over before it’s begun or you wish it would never end.

Sometimes it happens when I’m on a bike ride. The wind is blowing with me, the sun bright but not blazing, and the hills graciously buckling into flat escapes making the ride sheer bliss. Or sometimes it happens when I’m in the garden or on a farm. My hands in the soil, beads of sweat dripping off my forehead oozing their way into the earth. But sometimes it happens when I’m just sitting. Sometimes I’ll be talking to someone. Or sometimes I’m just doing nothing. It starts with my forehead. The wrinkles pushing their way down to my furrowing brow. It spreads to my eyes, and then my cheeks. Eventually it reaches the corners of my mouth. And I can’t stop it. Every part of my body, my mind, and yes, my soul is involved. It’s the most fantastic smile I have ever felt. I can’t believe I’m here.

I met with a group of women in a neighboring village. After hiking out for about two hours, I stumbled upon, well, a wall. It was beautiful brick red, and against it sat a line of proud women. Indeed they were the women’s group I was looking for. Though they had hoped to build a meeting house, they came up short on funds. So they built a wall. At first I thought it was foolish. Surely they could have used the money for something else. But I kind of like it now—one wall up, only three more to go. Right? I promised them things that I’m not sure I can deliver, (it seems as though I’m going to have to brush up on my soap making techniques), but hopefully we’ll figure it out. If not, start sending soap.

My computer classes got off to an interesting start. Turns out that by signing up for one class, I obviously meant to sign up for five. Silly me. So now I’m teaching five classes, and one of them has a little over 100 students in it (one of the student’s names is, and I kid you not, Fomopussi). It’s pretty great because there are only 5 computers to teach on. But we make things work—I made the students draw computers and now we practice on those. The high school’s a pretty incredible place. Overcrowded, understaffed, sometimes the kids don’t have teachers so they just come and sit in the classrooms for the whole day and talk to each other. There’s so much I want to do, but I don’t even know where to start.

I find that the days that had idly passed without work are now filled with meetings, appointments, and visits. And everyone wants something different. The handicap association of Bamendjou needs a business plan for how to sell their meat at the market because they can’t get there themselves. The women of Toumi need a medicinal plant garden (and the know how that goes with that) because they can’t afford to take their children to doctors. The men of Bameka need soil fertilization techniques because the soil is just “too tired” to produce anything. Oh and the reforestation project at the various tribal palaces requires some kind of complicated anointment process (or something like that…) that will allow me to be able to plant trees in the sacred forests. I’ve never been in so many places at once and felt so incredibly whole.

And in the midst of all the work, life happens. My neighbor pounds on my door at the crack of dawn to make me go running with him (he foolishly thinks that I’m going to run a marathon up Mount Cameroon with him despite my cardiac arrest like wheezing whilst “running” up a little hill). The children across the street have finally decided that I’m not a nun due to my lack of presence at any church service, and have taken it upon themselves to teach me how to tie a cricket on a string and play with it like a dog (which I guess is something that nuns don’t like to do…). The old women comment on my child-bearing hips and steadily increasing derriere (I know, Africa. So funny! You make me walk a billion miles everyday in the blazing sun, and then make me paler and fatter than when I moved here. You are hilarious, you old dog, you.) And, of course, country profiles’ are read: Angola, the proud owners of a 27-year civil war that counts among its accolades 1.5 million lost lives and an additional 4 million displaced citizens; Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, highest (on average), and driest continent that receives more solar radiation on the surface of the South Pole than the equator; and lastly, Antigua and Barbuda, one of the Caribbean’s most prosperous nations (thanks to tourism and “offshore” financial services) that in 2004 ended the longest-serving elected government in the Caribbean (which seems like being able to claim having the longest toenail on the 3rd Sunday of the 4th month of 2007 at 4:00…).

So that’s it. The prelude to the opus of my life in Bamendjou…month 5, week 18, day 122…but who’s counting? As always, missing you all and hoping that the powder dusting the slopes is plentiful, the hot chocolate in your mugs sweet, and the work piling up on your desks’ magically disappearing.