Finding a New Normal

There’s a sweet moment that comes a few weeks after you arrive somewhere new, once the culture shock has subsided and you’ve more or less acclimatized to the idiosyncrasies of life in that particular place. When your daily activities start to take on a routine quality, a certain normalcy. When you’ve figured out how to get around and where you’re going, where to get the things you need. When you’ve lost the deer in the headlights look and you start to run into people you know when you are out and about.

How can you not love living in a neighbourhood that looks like this?

For me, this moment came some two and a bit weeks after arriving in Cameroon. It was mid-evening, but well after dusk and the power went out (again). Retreating from the cave-like recesses of my dark bedroom, I found myself out on the back steps, in the company of John and Pavel, the two young men who live and work out of the house. Though we had exchanged good mornings and similar pleasantries since my arrival, we had yet to have a real conversation. As I joined them, they began to pepper me with questions, largely beginning with “Do you people…?” They were especially amazed by our food, how we produce it (or don’t) and purchase it, what we do and don’t eat.

I've taken to calling the back steps "The Gathering Place". 

We sat for a long time, just talking in the utter darkness, each of us little more than a shadow against the dirty white tiles of the alcove. The slightest of breezes wafted, giving momentary prickles of chill where beads of sweat had gathered on my brow and upper lip. The shine of innumerable stars was visible through the palm fronds overhanging our line of vision. As we sat there, I realized that nothing about my day had left me overwhelmed or anxious. From the cold “shower” from a bucket that morning to the wandering neighborhood chickens chasing little lizards and disturbing my workout in the front yard to the broken skin at my knuckles from hand washing my laundry to using the necessary protocol for hailing a taxi– it had all just become my new normal.

Why is it the little lizards don't scare me at all, when everything else did?

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you no longer see the novelty or humor in things like goats tied by ropes to cinder blocks, left to graze in the grass and weeds along the side of the street, or the hen and her chicks pecking in the garbage scattered in and around the half barrels that pass as dumpsters along the main road. Nor does it mean that you cease to notice the things that might offend your own ingrained cultural notions… in some cases you become better informed, and learn to see things through another perspective, and in others you just kind of reach an acceptance about them where they no longer make you visibly cringe.

♪ Plantains roasting on an open fire, sweat drops dripping down your nose ♪

This is particularly true with regards to local standards of hygiene. Rinsing one’s hands briefly in a bowl of water, especially before a meal that is eaten with the hands, typically passes as handwashing. With no running water in most bathrooms, I don’t want to dwell too much on what handwashing habits might be in there. There are no qualms about preparing food on the floor, even on the ground out by the fire—indeed, having a “real” kitchen is a luxury many people here don’t have. I’ve eaten plantains covered in ash, because they were grilled directly IN the fire. I’ve helped pick up peppercorns that fell into the dirt off the stone slab on which they were being ground and watched them get thrown directly back into the mix without so much as a cursory blow to get the dirt off. I’ve watched my host take a knife that had just been used to butcher a chicken and proceed to immediately use it to cut up a papaya, after splashing it with water to remove the blood.  Mind you, the scrubber that is used to wash dishes looks to be about 10 years old, the drying cloth is filthy, and the soap chunk is regularly swarmed by flies, so perhaps actually washing it might not have been much better.

Once killed, the chicken are dipped in the pot over the fire to facilitate plucking, and then they are prepped for freezing or sale right on the back steps.

The chickens are plucked and gutted directly on the tiles of the back steps, and they sit in a pile attracting flies until all are done. Then they are rinsed in a 200-litre barrel and put into thin black plastic baggies which are tied at the handles before being put in the freezer. The back steps are rinsed with the same bloody water that the chickens were rinsed with, and an old t-shirt, dirt-crusted from being used as a mop, is used to swab the decks. I sometimes have to consciously will myself not to think about the lurking bacteria when we are sitting out on those very steps later and the flies are still swarming certain spots. Bleach is about the only cleaning product that is readily available in the village, so that’s what I use to clean my room and bathroom, along with torn chunks of the old sheet I had brought for the hostels in Europe (you know, seeing as how I don’t have any old t-shirts here to commit to the cause).

All that being said, while I am vigilant about using hand sanitizer myself regularly throughout the day, I have been eating with my hosts for weeks and have yet to contract salmonella, e-coli or any other particularly unpleasant bugs (knock on wood), so by and large it also makes me wonder if we aren’t a little germophobic in “the west”, if don’t go a little overkill on our cleanliness standards. Kids here are definitely hardier. They may have names like Precious and Blessing (true story), but they are far from the coddled, overprotected, over-scheduled little prizes they are back home. On the one hand, it is refreshing to see kids who are actually expected to chip in and help out with chores, like I was as a kid. On the other hand, it is disturbing from my own cultural perspective to see a full grown adult give a child a full force smack on the head, especially when they are not that child’s parent. Nevermind the way the kids wail on each other and the constantly and casually tossed threat, “if you… I’ll beat you”.

Watching these kids laugh and play, though, I find myself overjoyed that I see such contrast to the sad images of Africa that I grew up with. Sure, I see tattered clothes and runny noses and poverty so real that soccer is played on a dirt patch with an empty soda bottled and a balloon or a pack of playing cards is a prize worthy of innumerable hours of entertainment. But the image of a skeletal child with a distended belly, too powerless to swipe a fly off of his own face (I’m looking at you World Vision) does not exist here.

There is no sadness in these eyes. Mischief, maybe :)

And yes, I hear the yelling rows of the compound behind me—there are an obscene number of people/families living in very close quarters. But I also see a tremendous communal spirit. Everyone is “Aunty” or “Brother”. They share supplies, share food, share work. One of my favorite things to observe is when one of the nearby water sources is flowing, and everyone, from the youngest child on up, grabs buckets and receptacles in sizes relative to their own and sets out to collect. I couldn’t help but smile watching three of the littlest ones struggling together, clutching the sides of a burlap sac filled with individual bottles refilled at the community tap. Watching the young men, each carrying two of the large jugs—jugs that must weigh about 50 pounds each—I see why people here don’t need gyms to be ripped. Let me tell you, it is an effort to lift these jugs to put water in your bucket, let alone carry them 300 plus meters over rocky, uneven terrain. It’s like the ultimate farmer’s carry exercise.

From the research perspective, during this time period I completed recruitment and held the orientation sessions for my two main groups—one of which will be participating in a photography exercise, and the other in a journaling exercise.

My photography participants doing a mapping exercise.

So for now, the only problem is that after that moment when your new normal is established, time enters a warp and the days fly by. Suddenly six weeks could never be long enough, and the prospect of having to leave so soon after getting comfortable is just plain sad.