I'll have a 'Roon Christmas without you.

Christmas caught me off guard this year. With no television to broadcast incessant advertisements and no radio to bombard me with nonstop Christmas music, it wasn’t until mid-December that I was reminded: ‘Twas the season. In the Anglophone city of Bamenda, sitting down to dinner in a brightly colored restaurant that specialized in fufu corn and jama-jama (cooked huckleberry leaves), I noticed a small imitation evergreen in the corner of the restaurant and realized that the cheesy muzak playing overhead was an ‘80s-tastic rendition of “Angels We Have Heard On High.” Maybe because I’ve never spent Christmas in the tropics before, I was slightly baffled.

I met a third-year volunteer a few months ago who told me that a PCV has three options when it comes to Christmas: spend it in village; spend it with other volunteers; or fly home to spend it with family. Since my friends in Nyambaka are Muslim and I thought it dangerous to return to the comforting, climate-controlled United States so early in my service, I was left with one option, and I have no regrets regarding my decision.

I constantly tell people that one thing Peace Corps teaches an individual is how to improvise, and Christmas Day is a perfect example. In a country that has probably never heard of mistletoe or eggnog, both of these things magically materialized thanks to volunteers’ knack for invention. Christmas morning was spent eating gargantuan homemade cinnamon rolls and watching the classic claymation version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” As for my own improvisations, in an attempt to look somewhat presentable, I wore a dress from “up for grabs,” which is basically a metal trunk that serves as a sort of Peace Corps thrift shop.

Not too shabby, right?

While the other volunteers feasted on macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and other American staples, I took a motorcycle taxi to the home of my counterpart, the censeur (vice principal) of the Nyambaka high school. It was the first time I met his wife and three adorable children, and as we got to know one another in a lovely mix of French and English conversation, we dined on papaya salad, fried plantains, and ndolé (bitter leaves cooked with fish). In a good show of African hospitality I was presented with far too much food, and as a good guest, I ate as much as physically possible, which wasn’t that much, considering I’d been to the hospital the previous day complaining of stomach pains, diarrhea, and loss of appetite. (I can say with some certainty that the Ngaoundere hospital will not live on in my memory as a favorite Christmas Eve.) I would have loved to stay in Roger and Aurelie’s salon talking about our families and listening to hymns on the radio, but I had to be back at the Peace Corps house for my shift.

Yes, after much discussion and innumerable complaints about video quality when a dozen people are using the same internet connection, someone had the bright idea to assign shifts for when people could talk to their families. Initially, I hemmed and hawed about not having an ideal time, but it was certainly worth it to see my dad and his husband, and my entire maternal family. Although I don’t ascribe to a particular faith, Christmas is probably my favorite holiday, since it gives me an excuse to shower the people I love with gifts, and I savored my two hours Skype since I could watch their reactions to opening presents.

Of course, Christmas is a time for traditions, and my first Volunteer Christmas was no exception, bringing with it traditions old and new. The tried and true volunteer favorite of the bean bag toss (called “corn hole” by some) led to a number of heated exchanges as the number of empty beer bottles increased and the number of shirts worn diminished. But as the sun set on the playing field and the sounds of Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me” wafted over us, someone said, “What about karaoke?”

Alex and Drew represent Team Shirtless.

And thus was born Yowaoke. In Fulfulde, “yowah” is something of a catchall term which can express anything from agreement to surprise, and has become a favorite exclamation of a number of volunteers. Since there are no karaoke bars in Ngaoundere (that we know of, anyway), we set up our own, loading YouTube lyric videos on a laptop. We had no microphones, so we depended on our own larynxes as our sound system. (As a result, most participants were a bit hoarse the next morning.) And since we had no charismatic karaoke host, I ran around with a sheet of printer paper and a ballpoint pen and scribbled people’s requests. So it was that karaoke took on a distinctly improvised Cameroonian flavor and became Yowaoke. A great deal of fun was had, and subsequent Yowaoke soirees are in the works.

I had worried for a brief moment that Christmas in Cameroon would be something of a disappointment. It doesn’t feel like the holidays without snow, I heard one person say. It just isn’t the same without my family, said another.

And that person was right. It wasn’t the same. But it was just as good.

Lydia joins the Peace Corps Club

An older, wiser volunteer once told me, "in Cameroon, every fart is a gamble."

Well, I gambled.

Today, I lost.

World AIDS Day

posters put up at the high school

December 1 is World AIDS Day, or, if you’re a wordy francophone, Journée mondiale de lutte contre le Sida (Global day of the fight against AIDS). I had previously organized some small events for the day back in the States when I was a student organizer for the ONE Campaign at the University of Iowa, but it’s far easier to organize an event when you have access to things like photocopiers, movie projectors, and Facebook. Regardless, another teacher and I decided in late November that we would have a small informational session for the students. Then she called me Monday morning (about six hours before the session) to let me know that she was on a bus to the capital, so it would just be the students and me. Oh, dear.

I should have been more excited than nervous about the students taking charge. After all, one of the most lauded goals of Peace Corps is sustainability, or what some in development have called “working yourself out of a job.” Essentially, we should strive to make sure that in our absence, the education and improvement we have begun will continue without us. And although many people told me when I came to the Adamawa that the majority of people were too conservative to discuss HIV/AIDS, the younger generation is more open to discussion, and there is already a small but self-motivated group here in Nyambaka, the high school health club.

I can’t take any credit for the success of our “formation,” or session. It was towards the end of the school day, and I expected the students to head home as early as possible, as they usually do, but something prompted between 60 and 70 of them to stay. Maybe it was the charismatic Terminale (Senior) student Crépin, maybe the discipline master intimidated them into attending, or maybe they were just curious what the white teacher would say about a disease that some people here believe was created by whites to kill blacks.

Either way, the classroom was full when I walked in, and I was impressed with the amount of knowledge they already possessed about HIV. Sure, in theory they have a unit on HIV/AIDS every year in school, but the majority of teachers don’t complete their syllabi, partly because of absenteeism among both faculty and students. If I’m to be perfectly honest, I was envious of Crépin’s ability to maintain both attention and order in the room, since this is something I still struggle with, but I consoled myself with the thought that all of the students there had made an active choice to attend, unlike in English classes.

The ages of the students in the room varied from early teens to early twenties (many students are held back multiple times as they continue their high school education, including one 25-year-old Junior) so reactions to the material presented differed accordingly, even before the presentation began. When informational posters were dispersed among the classrooms, the students of sixième (sixth grade) refused to have one posted to their door because it mentioned condoms. Then there was a group of three young girls who sat in the front row but made disgusted faces whenever male genitalia were mentioned. The older students handled it with a little more decorum, and some young men were able to ask specific questions on the application of condoms.

Since the students were clearly already well acquainted with the facts around HIV—methods of transmission, methods of avoidance, etc.—I thought it might be useful to do a condom demonstration, but the discipline master immediately vetoed the idea. “If we give the students condoms, they’re going to use them,” he warned, and I thought to myself, Isn’t that the point?, but said nothing. Certain mentalities know no nationality: I remember hearing the same rhetoric from my middle school nurse.

I wish I were proud of my involvement in the day’s activities, but honestly, I played an almost negligible role: I just provided prizes (pens, not candy) during a sort of Jeopardy at the end of the session and corrected a few bits of misinformation. (Hopefully at least a few of the young women in attendance will remember the nassara frantically running to the front of the classroom to interrupt Crépin, shouting “IUDs do not protect against HIV! They prevent pregnancy, not STIs!”) I will say, however, that I think it was largely successful, and certainly informative for me, as I was able to see the students’ reactions and their preexisting knowledge of the disease. Here’s hoping that some of them will take the information to heart, and that next year’s event will be even more successful.