At Site (first month)

from letter dated 1/3/06

Well, the first month at site has been quite the roller coaster as we were told it would be again and again during training, but you can’t really imagine until you experience it. The first few days were the hardest because I couldn’t escape the feeling of isolation and the realization of what I had gotten myself into. Such exciting and morbid thoughts crossed my mind as “I could starve myself and no one would care”. So after about a week, I started teaching and eating, Isabel my host mom returned from the hospital, and I felt immensely better.
Teaching is hard here. My smallest class has 101 kids and the largest has 125. As much as I try to solicit participation, it’s always the same eager beavers answering questions, and it’s impossible to call on everyone. I’ve doing a lot of pronunciation drills just to get people talking. And then, of course, there’s the problem of whether the kids actually understand the lesson which I can never really be sure of even if there are a few kids who can correctly answer some questions. And of course, I can’t wait until all 100 plus kids get the difference between the simple present and the present progressive. But I do try to have fun with it, and those students who do want to learn make it worth it, at least I hope they do. A few people in the Peace Corps group have been questioning the value of teaching English at all here, but I’ve decide that it is worth it to the (very very) few kids who be able to go on to university and maybe get a job working for Esso or the US Embassy. Also, in my position as an English teacher, I already have somewhat more respect in the community (I still have to get over being a 23 year old unmarried woman) that will help me to do other projects. In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to start an English club and a girls’ club at school, and hopefully over the summer I can get started on doing more health related projects. Of course, what I am going to do may change as a result of getting to know the community better, but right now I want to have classes on prenatal and infant health care for mothers, and Isabel has already said she wants to translate for me from French to N’Gambaye. I’ve already been approached about getting books for the school, a new building at school, having an adult English class, and building latrines. It’s hard when there is so much need to decide what I want to do, but at the same time it makes the countless hours of boredom (I do crossword puzzles, read, play solitaire, write, and listen to the radio for a good part of everyday) seem worth it.
My family is also great and in many ways it cancels out some of the not so nice experiences I’ve had here. My host father Clement is the mayor’s assistant and also works for anti-AIDS NGO Care Tchad. He is very nice and laid back, and we hang out some and I help him with English (he knows a little and can tell me things like “I am going to Moundou to fix my generator.”) He has two wives (though he is Catholic), the older one doesn’t speak French but the younger one Isabel and I hang out everyday. She’s a little bit spoiled because just had a baby and has been sick so she doesn’t spend as much time cooking and cleaning as the typical Chadian woman. There are a lot of kids who live at our house who are related in a variety of ways. My favorites are Senghor, a 5 year old boy who has taken it upon himself to protect me from gawking neighborhood kids, and Adeline, who is 6 and is basically the Cinderella of the family, she is constantly being called to do whatever task. She doesn’t speak any Feench so I use my awful N’Gambaye with her and she laughs at me. We also have Natasha (or) LaNatasha as Isabel calls her which I think is hilarious because she’s The Natasha) a cousin who lives with us because her father died. She’s 14 and one of my students in 6eme, and I’ve decided to make her my little sister. We sit around and look at magazines a lot, they all love my trashy magazines. My other friend is Beatrice who is a student as well, but she’s in 3eme so she’s not in my class. She’s really cool, but definitely doesn’t have the easiest life, she already has 2 kids and no husband. And then there is Cizitot, my host brother, who was Roger’s best friend when he was here. He’s really nice as well, but I’ve decided against spending too much time with unmarried Chadian males. I also spend a good amount of time with my counterpart, the other English teacher, the only other person I’ve found so far who I can have intelligent conversations with ( who can actually remind when I forget the word “alexandrine” or talk about Animal Farm in relation to post colonial Africa). Of course, we have these conversations in French, his English isn’t that good.
For the holidays, I did some traveling. Before Christmas, another volunteer Sung-mun stayed with me two daysand then we headed to Kelo where about 25 people gathered at the Holmes’ for the fete. It was a lot of fun, but unfortunately only about half of our group could make it (it was mostly last year’s volunteers) so I didn’t get to see a lot of my favorite people, and I won’t until April. Then for New Year’s, on Thursday I went to Pout Carol, Catherine’s site. Though she theoretically about an hour away from me, the trip took about 4 hours, 3 of which were spent smooshed in the back of a pickup truck with about 30 people waiting to leave Kelo. The next day we left for Lere and that trip took about 4 hours more than it should have because of the time spent waiting for the car to leave Pala and the fact that our driver drove as slow as humanly possible from Pala to Lere while we got to listen to the same tape over and over again. But actually the driver was incredibly nice and told us that he knew James and Steve (apparently he sold James some nachif which gave him food poisoning we found out later when we ran into him in Lere.) The weekend was a nice break though we did absolutely nothing. Lere is beautiful, there is a lake and mountains so we went on some nice walks. Staying up till midnight on New Years was a feat since we are all used to going to bed around 8 or 8 (okay sometimes 7:30), but we made it and had our own countdown by lamp light. We woke up at 6 to search the radio waves for Dick Clark, but for some reason the ball dropping doesn’t make it on the radio in Africa. Chadians celebrate the New Year by getting drunk and yelling “Bonne Annee” and kids go around asking for cadeaux so we spent most of New Years Day in the house. Then Monday morning, Cat and I departed and spent the whole day on the road because our first taxi-brouse broke down every 30 minutes. We ran into our friend the driver from the trip there in Pala, and he bought us cokes. We also made friends with a woman who works in N’Djamena and wants us to call her when we are there to hang out. That’s one of my favorite things about being here. As much as Chadian culture can aggravate me (it takes forever to get anything done here), people are so friendly all the time. A lot of them do want things from you (money and sex seem to be the most prominent desires), but a lot of people are just interested in getting to know you. And maybe (probably) that’s just because I’m white, but it is an experience/opportunity to share who I am with a greater part of the world. So back to the taxi-brouse, we broke down for good outside of Pala and had to wait for a truck to show up and take us. We luckily got a place in the cabine so we weren’t on the bed of the truck. In Kelo, I found a car leaving for Mondou right away so I was home just as it was getting dark.
But my day to day life here is not nearly as eventful as traveling. Household chores, cooking, cleaning, and laundry, take a lot longer than they do at home. Getting my water is usually a 15 minute excursion because it involves walking to the water tower, getting the guardian to turn on the faucet, filling one bucket, carrying it home on my head, and going back with the second. Usually I use about two buckets of water a day, but laundry day, it’s more. So most days I go to school, come home and rest a little, hang out with the family, maybe go to market, cook dinner, listen to the radio, and go to bed. Entertainment doesn’t really exist in the forms one is used to in the US, and I only teach 13 hours a week so there is a lot of down time. It’s hard for me because I am so much happier when I do feel productive, but I am creating a lot of craft projects and real projects for myself to occupy the time.
But as much as I sometimes wonder at my value here, I do see myself growing in this experience already and know that this is the best way I could be spending these two years. My loneliness and boredom seems to be a fair exchange for what I am learning in terms of culture, language, development, and myself. (I know that sounds incredibly cheesy.) The things that make this hard for me are not living without the luxuries I’m used to (though at times I do dream about lying on the couch, watching a movie, and eating chips and salsa), it’s adapting myself to such a different culture and way of life. The scariest thing is the possibility that as much as I try I will never really be able to relate to the people in my community and understand their experience, that I may never have real friends. But I am not going to give up trying on that front.