Where the boys are

Tuesday, 2 November 2010

In spite of my bewilderment and exasperation and just plain fatigue at all the (negative and positive) attention I receive in this country, I am grateful for the friends in my town who have adopted me.

The head of one of the travel agencies in my village has taken care of bus tickets and package shuttling for Peace Corps volunteers at my post for at least the past 12 years. He’s proud to have the phone numbers of so many Americans in his contact list. He found painters and negotiated a good price for them to paint the interior and exterior of my and my post mate’s houses. He brought us lunches and snacks while we were homebound making sure the painters weren’t tempted to steal anything. He was ready to send a driver to pick us up last weekend when the road back home was blocked by a log truck that had stalled and slipped cockeyed down a hill. He regularly stops by to ask about our health and readily teaches us any Fulfulde phrases we ask about.

The head of security for an American-owned company in my region used to work for Peace Corps and has befriended countless volunteers over the years. When we arrived in town our first day at post, he brought a borrowed pickup truck to haul our trunks and bikes and suitcases to our houses. He rushed to my aid my second morning when I discovered my faucets and showerhead didn’t work. He was at my post mate’s front door not 10 minutes after she called to say her lock had broken and she couldn’t get into her house. He’s always ready with a smile and a hearty laugh and is never shy about poking gentle fun at our American ways. (Recently, my and my post-mate’s neighborhood were without electricity for close to eight days. One friend’s water runs by electric pump to a water tower in her yard, so without current, her tower ran dry. She asked our friend if he could take her to a public pump so she could fill one of her emergency water containers. But he had already thought her. He said he was planning to bring a generator to her house the next day so she could have electricity long enough to fill her entire water tower. Amazing!)

My post mate’s “community host” at the small business where she works invited us a few times for the bouille (a drink made of rice or corn and sometimes peanuts), dates, fried rice, and sweet rice beignets with which he broke his Ramadan fast in the evenings. He’s always ready to answer cultural questions or to teach a bit of French or Fulfulde. My two female post mates and I may not see eye-to-eye with him concerning the place of women in society, but he, too, has an easy smile and jolly laugh. It’s been fun to have him and the other guys join us for meals, movies, and nights out.

My own community host turned out to be a young man with thoroughly modern ideas: He wanted to help me learn my way around school and the local culture, but he wanted to learn from me, as well, notwithstanding my sex. We were to collaborate. “I don’t want to overshadow my shadow,” he said in English. (He’s an Anglophone from the Northwest, part of the 20 percent of the country that was colonized by Britain after World War I).

I was sad at first that all the volunteers in the East are women. But it wasn’t long before I saw how perfect it is. When we’re all together, for business or pleasure, we don’t have to think about censoring girl talk, which mostly consists of unloading the special frustrations we face as female volunteers in a patriarchal society. And in my town, in particular, I certainly don’t want for male companionship, despite the lack of American boys here. I have all these wonderful Cameroonian men who have offered all kinds of manly help and friendship to me and my American sisters since we arrived at post. I owe them a great debt of gratitude for making sure I’ve been taken care of – and have had fun – since I started my service as an official PC volunteer. Inshallah, we will be friends for a long time.