Expectations

As I’ve been back in the US for about a week, I’ve been answering a lot of questions for friends and family about what life is like in Cameroon and how different life is between the two places. (People also ask what it is I do over there, so apparently this blog was not as well advertised as I had thought it was) People want to know if I’m going through a lot of ‘counter-culture’ shock, like is it disorienting to see so many cars or such huge markets or so many white people all at once. To answer briefly, it is. To answer the question a little more comprehensively, it’s not as though I forgot what life was like in the US but I certainly got used to living a different way.

I am realizing that when I return to Cameroon, I am going to be re-entering with a very different set of expectations than I first arrived with. Landing in Africa, I was probably expecting something out of Gulliver’s travels. People walking on their hands or talking hippopotami, perhaps. When you start off expecting such oddities and are really only faced with a few different ways to cook and eat corn, some creative (or old-timey) solutions to living without electricity/running water/personal transportation, or variations on the theme of ‘existing power structures’ (which essentially amount to, some people have it [and want to keep it], some people don’t [and want to have it]) the relative bizarreness gets downgraded.

Additionally, by the time I left the US in 2011, I had gotten my life to a point where I felt pretty comfortable with my lifestyle and carbon footprint (then I got on a plane...) and I had already shunned or tried to do without many of the modern conveniences my friends and family figure a person would miss most. Seasonal food choices were already a part of my life; if I wasn’t renting a fairly small apartment I probably would have had a composting toilet; I used public transport and/or craigslist rideshares to get just about anywhere; I got most of my clothes from the Salvation Army (and the clothes market in village is essentially the same thing). So I was maybe a little less disposed toward the initial shock.

That being said, what jumped out at me soon after arriving back in PA is the aesthetic choices that are taken for granted here but do not hold the same prominence in Cameroon. The appearance of lawns, flower beds, paintings on the walls, furniture, architecture styles, public green space, and so on are all choices that people make on a daily basis with an eye towards form as much as function. The range of options available is wide enough to let anyone express themselves (though most people stick to a pretty conventional pallet). From what I have seen in Cameroon people would make interesting and unique choices but are very limited both in time and materials. Occasionally you’ll catch someone dressing up the area around their home with some trees and flowers just for the sake of a little color, just not as ubiquitous as I’m seeing now. Similarly, everyone in Oku is happy to get their hands on a new calendar or photo to put on their wall to liven up their living room, but a print or oil-painting is pretty much out of the question. (Incidentally, I did pick up a few oil paintings from a Kumbo artist named Jean Samuel Mfikela and they have gotten a good reception from friends and family)

On the flip side, I got a few good reminders that frustrations are not unique to the African continent. In the past week, my parents have been going through a series of complicated hoops to make settlement on a new house. A complicated process, no one would argue that, but when I hear that the process is being held up because a document in one lawyer’s office needs to be signed by another lawyer, both of whom have internet connections, mobiles phones, fax machines, and access to three private document delivery services in addition to the United States Postal Service, one gets the feeling that it isn’t just a question of technology when it still takes a few days to get that signature. In a similar vein, my sister’s fiance (an Irish bloke) was navigating his own immigration adventure at the US embassy in Dublin recently and got pushed back a full day because he didn’t bring a self-addressed postage paid envelope with him to his morning meeting with the officials there. So for as many times as I and my friends and co-workers get into a snag and want to throw our hands up and say, ‘well, that’s Cameroon for you,’ it was nice to be reminded that maybe we ought to just say, ‘well, that’s living in the 21^st century for you,’ instead.