I'm Going Back, Back to Lagdo, Lagdo-- Jan. 5, 2013

New Years brought me back to Lagdo, where I was for xmas.  A PCV who is in her last year invited all of the people from my Stage in the North to her house.  Most people in the Grand North went up to Maroua for a huge party, but since we’re in our first three months we aren’t allowed to travel outside of our region.  I didn’t realize before how different the rules are in all of the Peace Corps countries – my friends in Morocco and the Philippines just aren’t allowed to travel out of the country, but can go anywhere within it.  On the other hand, Cameroon is one of the only places PCVs are allowed to ride motos.  Both of those people are also living or lived with host-families for their first few months at post, while we don’t have to (get to?) here.  I’m sure I wouldn’t want to, but it would definitely help with language skills. 

As I said in my last post, Lagdo is a nice little lakeside town.  Fairly small, so not a lot of options at the market, but it has a couple of good bars and a little place to eat.  Plus, like parts of Guider, there are these little mountains of made up by huge boulders.  They look like a giant just made piles of rocks everywhere.  Those will come into play later. 

New Years was fun.  We all got into town at different times, but I was able to travel all the way from and back to Guider with people from my stage.  Each of us came with different ingredients for a big dinner together.  My job was to get the ground beef, which meant I had to go to the meat section of the market in Garoua. 

I really hate the meat section of the markets – just hunks of beef sitting in the sun all day covered in thousands of flies.  It looks gross and smells worse.  I even brought a George Foreman grill all the way here with plans of cooking meat fairly often.  I know that I’m eating the same meat when I go to a restaurant, but I just don’t want to see how the sausage is made, if you know what I mean.  I have still only bought meat the one time and don’t plan on buying it too often in the future, maybe for group dinners with people I guess.  Whenever I get a craving I can just go by some from a stand. 

Our hostess and a few other people made a very tasty meal while I started to drink with some of my stage-mates.  Talking, listening to music, drinking, and general merriment was to be had by all. 

Around 4 AM, a group of us decided that it would be a good idea to climb one of those small mountains I mentioned earlier that was close to the house we were partying at.  Although it was fairly dark, we made it all the way to the top, scrambling up rocks, going through bushes, and at one point I even held the ankles of one guy so he could pull up another person.  One of the people we went with wasn’t even wearing shoes (I found out later that she thought we were just going to the lake), but still made it the whole way.  I was pretty proud that we made it to the top – I even led the way! 

Afterwards we all tried to find places to sleep – I ended up on the couch of another PCV posted in Lagdo, but who is in America right now.  Speaking of which, I have been talking with friends and family and I might be heading back for a quick visit in June.  We’ll see how things work out. 

I was planning on staying in Garoua for a couple of days afterwards, but there were a lot of people there.  One of the really frustrating things about the Case in Garoua is that there are only 3 beds, even though there are 23 people in the North and others often stay there on their way between Maroua and Ngoundere.  That happened to occur the night I was there, so there were 10 people from my stage, plus another five passing through, so my friend and I decided to hop on a bus back to Guider.  While on the bus, we watched these bats go by.  There were literally hundreds of thousands of them if not millions; the whole sky was full of them.  They just kept coming and coming like a never-ending wave until it was so dark out we couldn’t see them. 

Now it’s time to start getting some actual work done.  Schools will be back open now, so I will start heading to them and the youth center on Monday.  I’m going to try and start going to language lessons too.  I’ve already started on the Needs Assessment that I have to have for both IST (inter-service training) and my paper for grad school, but I need to start interviewing people involved with kids to get their perspectives.  My counterpart should be good for information, as well as school administrators.  That leaves tomorrow to get ready for this sudden flurry of work, meaning laundry and cleaning.