The Week of July 12th

Yesterday was a great day. For a while I was feeling my patience strain in interactions with Cameroonian co-workers, people on the street, and my housemates. I think I did a pretty good job of hiding it, and the impatient feelings have subsided at least for the time being. It’s frustrating to be late all the time (I know my readers are finding that statement hard to believe, coming from me) but when you’re late all the time just because people walk slow it kills me. I have had a very hard time parting from my usual walking speed- a very fast pace that emulates speed-walking, necessary for those who cut it really really close all the time. There is a different emphasis on punctuality depending on the culture of a place. Locals have told me that when they were young, on a few occasions they did show up on time, but after having to wait on the event or the other attendees for up to an hour, they realized that later is better. Here people leave at the time they said they would meet. If church starts at 10:00 then don’t get there until 10:20 because you would have ended up catching the last 20 minutes of the early service, then having to sit through the service you had intended to, which won’t end until quarter to 1.

On the subject of church: the service I went to this past Sunday bothered me. Laura and I went with our co-worker Pam to her church called the Mercenary Gospel Baptist Church. The music was great but it wasn’t enough to pull me out of the low mood the sermon put me in. The pastor who spoke was just visiting from Nigeria, and he had an agenda in Cameroon. He preached about how the Nigerians have prospered and capitalized on their natural resources because they have made Jesus their nation’s master. The word “master” was used a lot, and I found that really strange, considering Cameroon’s history with the slave trade. As the pastor went on to mix politics and religion I got more and more anxious to leave. I understand that people living in poverty under a dictatorship that stifles any attempt at private business ventures need to put their hope and faith more devotedly in God than those of us living in a capitalist world with more comforts and conveniences than we need. I get that. But until that church service I had really struggled with the causation for all the poverty here. Any Cameroonian will tell you that it isn’t lack of resources- it’s the government, it’s mismanagement. I was shocked at how comfortable everyone is with blaming the man and then resigning themselves to “there’s really nothing we can do, would you like some more cassava?” At church I saw why there is that resignation- and what a Westerner like me tries really hard not to say but can’t help but think- that complacency. Like the pastor advised, when people are studying for an exam, they put their faith in Christ and they will surely pass. When they are trying to open a business they pray for capitol and it will come. I think a certain amount of faith is healthy but in many cases here it is taken to the extreme and actually ends up in a non-productive dependency upon God. And at church that dependency was being perpetuated by a highly respected minister and I just didn’t like it. Maybe I overreacted but it was hard to shake off. I am realizing what exactly sets “The West” apart. One thing I’ve realized is that I am incredibly secular in thought, more so than I thought back at home.

This secular mentality leads me to the subject of an instance at work. I realize that first I need to sum up what I’m doing at work so here goes: Aya, Laura, and I go to work from 9 to 4 Monday through Friday. On Tuesday we go to a school called Zenith Evening School (which is really just a normal school, I don’t get the “evening” part of it) and teach about HIV/AIDS for an hour (that’s what we’re supposed to limit ourselves to, but last week we talked for an hour and 45 minutes). We try to get there by 11 because these are holiday classes and students are dismissed by noon. But again, we go over, and the kids don’t seem to care too much. On Mondays we spend a lot of time at the internet doing research about grants for NGO’s like ours, the Elyon Rock Foundation. I have had a lot of luck in finding loads of American Foundations (Coca-Cola, Carnegie, Mellon, etc.) but Laura has had a lot of trouble with German companies as is Aya with finding Japanese funding. I think Laura has actually given up on getting any money from her mother country and is now hitting up American foundations like me. Wednesdays we go to a school called Salvation Bilingual College (Cameroonians speak both French and English) and deliver the same lesson we did on Tuesday. Then we have Thursdays for donor research/proposal writing. Fridays are very busy because we have two schools, one at 9 and one at 11. The one at 9 is the tricky because it’s the St. Theresa Catholic Secondary School (we’ll talk more about that later) and the one at 11 is Summerset Bilingual College.

Always after teaching classes we head back to the office, then the internet to do more research and letter-writing. It seems mundane but classes and lunch are really exciting. Lunch probably more so because we have been hopping around from spot to spot- everyday we tried something new. That was until　we found Mr. Clean． Mr. Clean actually went on vacation so now we are eating mostly at Mr. Munch. The reason these places attract us is because they do not serve tremendously spicy food. And Mr.Clean was really cheap, you could get good tasting rice and beans or ndole and plantains (my fave) for 350 francs, which is far less than a dollar.

So back to the religion in this culture. Today we were playing a game at Zenith with a class of 17 kids from ages 11 to 16. We may have overestimated ages because the game ended up being a bit awkwardly received. We asked questions of the class and kids would go to one side of the room marked “agree” or another side marked “disagree” or a different area marked “unsure”. Questions were “If a woman says no to having sexual intercourse, she really means no” or “I would drink out of the same glass as a person who is HIV positive” or “A woman cannot be raped by her husband.” It was the last one that really gave us some trouble. A third of the kids stood firmly along the “agree” wall. Aya thought that they must have misunderstood, (and to be on the safe side we repeat messages to the class almost three times because we each pose them with accents that make us hard to understand). I had a bad feeling that this was not the case and that in actuality these students were of the firm opinion that wives are property. It is worth mentioning that some of these agreeing students were girls. We asked a representative or two from each wall to explain why they chose the side they did. The one from the “agree” side said bluntly “the Bible says that a woman gives herself to a man when she marries him. A wife gives a man her body.” Aya and I looked at each other and I could tell she was going to protest somehow, but I suggested loudly that we hear from the disagree side and then move on. One of the rules I made　for myself before beginning that game was that no matter how students felt I would try very hard not to make them feel wrong. It is their culture, I am an observer and by trying to impose my feminist values, (or what could be argued is just fundamental awareness of human rights), on them it would not change anything, but it might make us less wholeheartedly received. It was hardest though, to let the teacher sitting towards the back of the class applaud the kid for his statement and commend him on referencing the Bible. It was like what the kid was saying about rape was totally fine as long as it was from the Bible. The kid used the Bible to support rape. I know that he made that connection because Aya and I, after hearing his answer tried to ask in an objective way, if he would please define rape for us. He knew what it meant. Then we asked if there might be any occasion in which a woman would not consent to having intercourse with her husband. He said yes, maybe if she did not want to or did not want to have babies. So there is some sort of disconnect between the rightfulness or wrongfulness of rape in the circumstance of marriage- and that is imposed by the Bible, or this society’s interpretation of the Bible.

We are not allowed to educate students about condom use at St. Theresa’s Catholic School. We are to encourage abstinence although the priest/school master conceded that there are students at his school who may be sexually active. It’s funny that at the school where they tried to shelter the students most, I was asked twice for my number by boys in the class.