Yes, we're in Yaounde

4-6 June 2010

During the three nights our Peace Corps group spent in Yaoundé, I slept harder than I’d slept in the past year and a half. I budged not when my roommate came in late, when the music of the hotel night club blasted until 3:00 a.m., when there were violent storms during the night. I think I slept the sleep of one who has been relieved of a great responsibility. Although my tasks often were not many, I’d spent the better part of a year in my hometown developing a finely honed “mother’s ear” at my grandmother’s boarding house. Every stir Grandma made in the middle of the night, every footfall on the back stairwell where her mentally ill residents drifted in and out, roused me to attention. And I’d wait, poised to act if something seemed amiss. Sometimes I’d go right back to sleep when I felt all was clear, but usually I’d lie there brooding for awhile.

I knew Peace Corps would give me many more responsibilities than I’d had back in the States, but, in Yaoundé, I slept serenely, knowing that those responsibilities would be ones I had chosen. While I’m grateful for the shelter my grandma’s boarding home provided as I awaited a verdict from the DC PC office, the house and all it included was not where I’d ever envisioned myself as an adult.

Orientation in Cameroon’s capital was whirlwind of activity. The highlight was dinner at the PC country director’s house where I felt we tasted authentic Cameroonian food for the first time. At my table sat a former PC volunteer and retired diplomat who gave me hope for my future. He, too, had been a graduate school dropout. He’d gone back to school to avoid the draft and had studied political affairs, just as I had done. But he flunked out after barely a year. Then he joined the Peace Corps. Save for my three-year interlude working for a newspaper, this diplomat’s story sounded just like mine. He went to law school after PC (as I have thought so long of doing) and said it was a great background for what he did following that: join the Foreign Service. So someone who never finished his master’s degree still went on to do great things. And his trajectory is so much like the one I’ve imagined for myself.

I still have no idea what I will do after my PC service. But I’ve filed this man’s narrative in my memory bank to spur me on when I feel discouraged because of all I feel I have yet to accomplish. In the meantime, I was so grateful finally to be in Africa, to have been selected to serve my country – and the world – in this peaceful way, that it was hard not to get teary. Soon enough, however, I’d be overwhelmed by different feelings: bewilderment at our seriously intense training schedule and culture shock.