I dream of cheese

I had a dream last night I went to the grocery store and bought swiss cheese and Ben and Jerry’s Dublin Mudslide ice cream, then I woke up and realized I was still in Africa and there aren’t any grocery stores that sell Ben and Jerry’s… When I first arrived here, I had cravings for American food ALL the time. Chuy’s Tex Mex enchiladas, peanut butter, hamburgers, bbq sauce, pretty much all dairy food, I thought about it all the time. However, the longer I am here, the less cravings I have for American food. Now that I have been here for awhile, I have found some local food that I really enjoy. One of my favorite meals is beans and beignets. Beignets are these little dough balls that kind of taste like a mix between a donut and a funnel cake. The Mamis (older ladies) make them in the morning by frying them over a fire in a huge pan filled with palm oil. You then place hot beans over the hot beignets. I never really thought of beans as a staple breakfast food, but now I can’t think of breakfast without them. Mmm, beans and beignets..so good. Other than that, I eat a lot of rice with various sauces, koki (kind of like a blob of ground up corn), cassava (this is a kind of plant), and burning fish (a whole fresh fish that is grilled over hot coals – I eat the skin and have tried the eyes, but they are kind of chewy and not great). I also eat a lot of eggs in various forms. There is the spaghetti omelette which is basically what it sounds like, cooked spaghetti noodles are added to the scrambled egg mixture in a bowl along with tomatoes and onions and then the whole mixture is fried in a pan. This is something else that sounded weird at first but now is just normal. I also fry or hard boil the eggs or make French toast. I also eat a lot of peanuts (they call them “groundnuts” here) either roasted or boiled – great to bring on long trips. I am lucky to live in the Southwest province because we also have a lot of fresh fruit. I eat a lot of papayas, oranges, and pineapples. Sometimes the fruit is hard to find if it is not a market day but the village is beginning to catch on that I love fruit and they leave me a cadeaux (gift) once in awhile. I will wake up to find a sack of oranges on my door knob or a bag of papayas on the porch. I was walking home from school yesterday and one of my friends told me he had something for me and went to his garden and he chopped off a pineapple fresh from the vine and gave it to me. So, yes, it is true they don’t have Ben and Jerry’s here but there are lots of other things and I am doing alright.
I am starting to give my second round of tests for the second sequence. When I gave the first tests, I wrote the questions on the board and they wrote down their answers on their own paper. I didn’t want them to start before I could turn around and monitor them, so I wrote most of the question but left out keywords so they couldn’t start before I wanted them to and cheat while I my back was turned to the board. Right before I had them begin, I filled in the keywords to the questions. Despite my best efforts, there was still widespread cheating. Kids were blatantly looking at each other’s papers and whispering. With a class of 94 students and 3 students to a desk, I just couldn’t monitor everyone at the same time. I did send some people out and take off points of the people I saw, but there were still some I didn’t catch. So, this time I decided I would make photocopies of the test and make different forms of it. This is pretty expensive and I have to go to a different town to make the copies but I decided it was worth it so I wouldn’t have to worry as much about cheating. Hopefully testing will go smoother this time…I’ll keep you updated.
There are many things that I am doing here that I didn’t anticipate having to do before I left. One of these things is drawing diagrams of dozens of different organisms on the board. The syllabus for my Form 2 Biology class (set by the ministry of secondary education according to which information they will include on the GCE – a standardized test they will take in Form 5) instructs me to teach basically a series of different animals. Most of the students don’t have a textbook, so the notes they take from the board are really their only source of information. So, I have to draw the diagrams of the organisms on the board so they have it for their notes. I started the year off with arthropods and so far I have become an expert at drawing a mosquito, housefly, honeybee, cockroach, spider, scorpion, centipede, millipede, crayfish and a crab. Now, these are not simple organisms to draw but I practiced and now I can draw a pretty decent arthropod with a piece of chalk and a board. Negotiating is also something I have to do ALL the time that I did not anticipate. Almost nothing in Cameroon has a set price, you have to bargain for everything. I bargain for the food I get in the market, how much I will pay for a moto ride, all the stuff I bought for my house, my cat – everything. So, I have learned to argue and get the right price. It’s all about not letting them know you want something…just walk away like you don’t have to have it and they automatically drop their price.