Super SuperPlus SuperGlue

This week was great, I’ve had legit work related stuff to do everyday and I’ve decided that working with kids is way way way easier then working with their parents. First off if you catch the kids when they’re in school they tend not to misbehave for fear that their teachers will whack them on the head with a stick. Another plus; as of this point no primary school child has asked me to “motivate” them to make them participate. And lastly I think I have a much stronger knack for talking to kids then talking to adults. All in all they’re a much easier crowd!

So to recap on the week, I spent Monday in Tchim, a village about an hour outside of mine, Tuesday in Dekie, about 45 minuets in the other direction, and Wednesday and Thursday in Bankim. In each place I met with class 5 and class 6 students in the primary schools (pretty much the equivalent to 5th and 6th graders) and gave assemblies on germs and diarrhea. The funny thing about the whole week was that in each of the 4 schools (Dekie has 2 schools) the entire day pretty much played out the exact same way. I’d walk in and go through all the protocol with the Principal, and then I would walk into each classroom to great the teachers until I made my way down to where I would be teaching. Upon entering each room all the children would very formally stand up, do a little bow/curtsy thing, and then in the most robot monotone voice you’ve ever heard they would say, “good-mor-ning-ma-dame.” I always responded with a cheerful “good morning!” back at them and then they would look at me like I was crazy.

Once I was actually in the classroom and everything was set up and introductions had been made I would start my lesson off by asking what is a germ, and every time without fail I would get nothing. It’s important to note that I wasn’t getting nothing because they didn’t know, it was more because I was asking them to participate in class. I mean I could have asked, what country do you live in and I still would have heard nothing but crickets chirping. After a bit of harassing finally one brave kid would raise his hand and spit out a textbook response. It’s the response that’s been drilled into their heads but upon further discovery I found that most of them don’t know what they’ve just said. So while yes, in fact, a germ is a tiny organism you can’t see with your naked eye, where germs come from, how they get in to our body, and what they do once they’re in, is something most of the students have never really thought about before, and that's kind of the crucial part of the equation.

So that was my goal for the lesson, and to answer those questions. We did some experiments, sang a song appropriately entitled “Comment es que le caca entre dans la bouche”, and played with puppets and green slime. I have to mention the puppet not only because he’s an homage to my creative genius ;) , but also because he was a big hit in the classroom. His name is Freddie the Fly, and Freddie has bit the dust not once, not twice, but three times this week and yet somehow he’s still managing to hang on. First Freddie was just made out of paper, which was fine until one kid decided Freddie needed to be washed with soap and water to get all the germs off him… I’m sure you can guess how that ended (but hey, at least he was paying attention). After I got back to Bankim I made a few alterations and Freddie got an upgrade to a tape laminated fly with a body of sewn together fabric scraps.
Day two he really held up well until I was on the way back to Bankim and Freddie the Fly literally flew out of my hand and off the motorcycle I was on.

Me: AHHHHHH STOP STOP STOP!
Driver: Hun? What? What happen, are you ok?
Me: Freddie!
Driver: Who? What?
Me: Wait you have to stop!
::moto stops, I jump off, run back down the road to retrieve the fly, and run back to the moto::
Driver: What is that?
Me: It’s my fly puppet
:: Driver looks at me like I am the craziest white man he’s ever met, and did I really just make him stop so I could go pick up a piece of paper?::

Thankfully apart from a bit of my personal dignity, the only thing lost was a few of Freddie’s legs ☺. When I got home I decided to use some pipe cleaner to replace all the legs to make them sturdier and bendy. When I was finished I steped back to take in my handy work and I was pretty satisfied. I figured this was gonna be the finished and final product… but no ☺
When I had finished it was getting late so I decided to hop in the bucket bath and then head to bed, but when I got out I saw that Freddy hat met his match as he was dangling from the jaws of my cute, cuddle, and destructive puppy. At that point I knew it was time to pull out the big guns, and by big guns I mean the Super, Super Plus Super glue (which is actually what was written on the container). It was one of those little bottles where you have to pierce the top with a pin to get it open. Now, I don’t have great lighting in my house so my face was up really close to the glue, and I was concentrating really hard to stick the safety pin in it. When I went to pull the pin out I wasn’t ready for the pressure release and I got superglued strait to the mouth. Unfortunately for me my mouth was open and the glue got all over my front teeth. After the initial panic that my lip was in fact stuck to the front of my teeth was painfully resolved, I got my toothbrush out and tried to get the glue off. I was brushing as hard has I possibly could but alas I couldn’t get the stuff off.
So there I was standing in my living room, toothbrush in hand, contemplating whether or not getting Super, Super Plus Super Glue stuck to my pearly whites was in fact a medical emergency. On the one hand how toxic could it really be if they were selling it on the street, on the other hand the man who sold it to me did pull it off the very top shelf of his boutique and the bottle did have a distinct, bootleg, blackmarketness look to it and what if it ate away at the tooth enamel! Ultimately I decided I needed a second opinion so I call Amanda (volunteer in the south) and she convinced me to just go ahead and call the medical duty phone. I’m gonna go ahead and say that calling up the medical officer (who happens to be bran new and whom I have never actually met) at 10:00 at night to tell him I got super glue stuck on my teeth has by far been one of my more embarrassing moments in this country to date. After I explained what happened he assured me it was probably not a big deal and that the glue would come off after a few days, but that I should try not to swallow any of it when it did start to come off because super glue tends to be toxic when ingested :0 It’s been two days now and it’s pretty much all off, so I think I’m in the clear.

Lessons Learned:
1. Don’t hold super glue up close to your face with your mouth open.
2. Three supers is two to many for any kind of glue ☺

WHAT DAY IS IT ???...

...(no it's not gameday) It's Global Hand-washing Day WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Here are few pictures of some of the men's group I work with making table cards in French, English, and Arabic reminding people to wash their hands with soap before they eat. Now every restaurant in Bankim has a card and a bar of soap for people to use in honor of Global Hand-washing Day!

The Good, The Bad, and The X-Men

written on Oct 6

::Deep sigh:: Man it feels like it’s been forever since I’ve had a chance to update this thing because I’ve been so occupied these past two weeks. However I’m not complaining because being “busy” is a luxury for Americans living in Cameroon. The pace of life is so much slower here than back home so when that rare moment comes when I can truly claim to be busy I like to relish in it a little. Since I last wrote I’ve been en brousse teaching about cholera (yes the thing that killed little Sarah on the Oregon Trail) as per the request of the district hospital because they’re pushing a big campaign on cholera education. Thankfully we haven’t had any cases in Bankim but that could change very quickly so they’re trying to get everyone prepared. I think it’s a good call because prevention of cholera is pretty standard for all waterborne diseases, and because the look on someone’s face when you tell them you get cholera from eating poop never gets old, I mean never. gets. old. ☺

Things are moving forward really nicely with the mushroom project. I’ve actually just returned today from the west where I met up with a volunteer who showed me how to make the medium they grow in. It was messy but not too hard and I think I’ll be able to handle it on my own now☺ I also met up with The Mushroom Man in Bafoussam. Side note: every time I started to talk to him I couldn’t help but start humming “Do you know the muffin man” except I changed the words in my head to “do you know the mushroom man, the mushroom man, the mushroom , oh do you know the mushroom who lives in Bafoussam” In case you’re wondering, which let's be honest I’m sure you are, the answer is yes. Yes, it is incredibly difficult to appear attentive, professional, and 23 years old with that minorly altered nursery rhyme playing on repeat in your head. In the end I was able to pull myself together, and ended up with a lot of great information and two mayonnaise jars full of mushroom spores. I decided to start a small test run this week with one or two women and if it works go full steam ahead. I know this is an odd request but if everyone could say a special prayer that I have a good mushroom harvest that would be greatly appreciated ;) ( I never in my life would have foreseen myself uttering those words!)

So that was the good part of my Bafoussam visit, but silly me I decided to end the afternoon by eating a street salad. Oh I should have known that was a bad idea from the start but it tastes so good and I never get to eat lettuce so I decided to take a chance. I’ll spare you the details but let's just say it was not my lucky day and I spent the night getting very well acquainted with the bathroom floor… BLAH.

The car ride back home today was pretty uneventful except that I was the last one to buy my ticket so I was stuck in the back row with a family of 6 (three on the seat three on the laps and me, aka 7 people in a seat made for 4). I had the window seat so it really wasn’t that bad 'cause I could stick half myself out the window but about three hours in one of the kids got sick. Now, have you ever seen that episode of the office where Pam’s preggers and Dwight makes her vomit by eating a hard boiled egg in front of her and then there’s a chain reaction throughout the entire office… ya well it was kind of like that. The one girl started it and then the other two chain barffed and no lie, it took every ounce of self control in my body not to keep the wave going…it was gross. I only got a direct hit from one of the three but it was a doozy. Needless to say not one of my favorite memories of Cameroon, but noteworthy nonetheless.

Ok I don’t want to finish this entry on a bad/gross note so I’ll end with this one. Last Saturday while waiting for a meeting to start I was sitting with a bunch of women in someone’s living room watching The X-Men with French voice over. (Keep in mind most of these women live en brousse without electricity, so needless to say they don’t watch a lot of television). We turned it on right around the end of the movie when there’s that epic good-guy bad-guy battle in the Statue of Liberty. I told them that I had actually just seen the Statue of Liberty a few weeks before I came to Cameroon and that seemed to interest them a bit. I answered a few questions about it and then we all kept watching the movie. About five minutes later there’s this other scene where Magneto uses his super powers to fly up to the very top of the statue, turn everyone into mutants, and then take over the world. It was at that moment that the women sitting next to me turned and in all seriousness asked, “Can people in America Fly? Madame Kate CAN YOU FLY?” After I finished laughing for a solid 2 minutes I told her that no I unfortunately can not fly even through some days I wish I could (especially the days I have to do banking in Bafoussam)… I’m telling you, I can’t even make this stuff up ☺