A Day Without Rain

I wanted to make a blog post about what I do here on a regular basis but realized that is impossible because there is no regular basis. The first thing to note is that everything I do here is pretty much dictated by the weather. In the dry season, I had to constantly memorize the fluctuating water schedule so I could be back at my house in time to fill my buckets. Now that it is rainy season, water is still the limiting factor.

When it rains, everything shuts down. Rain comes without warning and screams its sudden arrival thunderously on corrugated metal roofing. It could last for two minutes, two hours, and apparently even two days, but it is almost always intense. If it didn’t rain yesterday, you can be pretty sure it’s going to rain today. If the last rain was comparatively light, you can be sure this one is going to be heavy. Other than that, there is no rhyme or reason to when the rains will come. This is either the best place to be a TV weather man or the absolute worst. When the rains do come, you can gauge fairly accurately how long that particular storm will last. If you’re awoken to what sounds like machine gun fire and the sky looks like East Cleveland in February, you probably aren’t going out that day.

If it’s raining, especially in the field of agriculture, you really can’t do anything. Most farmers will feed their pigs and hurry back inside for a cup of white mimbo. It really is a “rainy day” in the oldest sense of the term: when it’s raining in America you know it will end soon and even during you can still hop in your car and go about your business. In Cameroon a rainy day just shuts down society, much like it has for most of human history in the tropics. You get a lot of vacation days as a Peace Corps Volunteer, but if you factor in rainy days it gets pretty crazy. Ashia, American tax payer, what else can we do? I make up for it on the days without rain.

Unlike more regimented Peace Corps programs, mine leaves me free to develop my own schedule. I usually try to do one solid agricultural thing per day and one solid regular cultural thing per day. I wake up around six in the morning, oddly enough of my own volition. Sleeping in isn’t a common practice here, mainly because it’s almost impossible to do. Pigs, roosters, goats, pikins, and mamas will all ensure that your sleep cycle is tuned to the rhythm of Mother Africa. Half passed seven is considered well into the day and it isn’t uncommon to be receiving visitors at that time. Many times I’ve thankfully managed to eke out one more hour of precious sleep only to be woken to canon-fire on my metal front door accompanied by some guy yelling “Mr. Shan! Mr. Shan!” I still stay up late. I will always be a night owl but now I’m an early bird as well, it’s a precarious balance that’s working alright so far.

If today is a day where my counterpart is in town he will usually pick me up at my house and we’ll bike around doing various things. Mainly we will visit farmers that are part of our ongoing projects on honey bees, soil fertility, and poultry. Different farming groups meet on different days and there are so many that there are several every day. We often do follow-ups with these groups that we’re working with together, though I’ve done them alone sometimes too. While I’m working with my individual farmers for the Peace Corps Small Holder Integrated Agriculture stuff, it’s nice to have my counterpart there for communication purposes but I usually do this myself. We’ll break for lunch somewhere in the market square if someone hasn’t already fed us by then, maybe discuss some programming for later on, do some activities related to the tree nursery or demo farm then go our separate ways. My counterpart is the greatest, but he lives in Bamenda and is the Chief of Post for agriculture in another village up the road so scheduling is always difficult. Most of the time I’m left to my own devices.

If my counterpart isn’t there I’ll make it a slow morning; make eggs, check news on phone, maybe read something. Around eight I’ll either head down to the market square to see who’s there or I’ll call up one of the farmer’s I’m working with. By eight most of the farmer’s routine chores are done and they have some time to talk or do some cool stuff with me. We usually discuss the farmer’s situation and farm management plans, but also just shoot the shit. Cool stuff can comprise of mixing pig feed, spraying tomato fields, building a new poultry, or making a compost. Sometimes I’ll wake up super early and go do some regular farm chores with a farmer just to be friendly and “grow closer”. It also gives me a good idea of what the life is like and that’s one of the big points of the Peace Corps.

Some days I finish at noon with no other things to do, those are nice days. Other days I’m dragged about helplessly for fifteen hours attending farmer’s meetings and cry-dies. Some people like to program things in the morning, some like to program them in the afternoon. Either way I usually have a big chunk of free time during the day for movies, Pokémon, Crusader Kings 2, and delicious, delicious books. This is a very normal Cameroonian thing (minus the video games), it’s almost like a siesta. It gets really hot during the middle of the day, especially during the dry season. Most farmers are done with all their work by noon and most people in general don’t want to be outside at that time. It’s a pretty decent schedule, in my opinion kind of optimized for humans. Short hours, decent pay off, plenty of free time to pursue other endeavors.

Most people will drink palm wine throughout the day and while there are unacceptable times to be drunk there is never an unacceptable time to have a beer. My primary means of socializing in the community are walking down the street until someone calls me over to share a drink with them. It happens every time, especially when you don’t want it to happen. A morning trip to the market can easily turn into a 7:30AM beer and that’s just fine here in Cameroon. You drink to give you strength for the day ahead, you drink to relax and have a respite, and you drink to enjoy at the end of the day and celebrate a job well done. There’s obviously a negative and a positive way to look at this but regardless life’s been this way for a while. Even the guy that complains about how everyone is drunk and lazy will still pound one at the end of the day, or in the middle. With the amount of palm wine in Batibo and its ritual consumption at every meeting, the average Cameroonian farmer spends most days mixing business and pleasure.

Some of my projects take me out to places around my village, like the fish farming cooperative I’m currently working with. It’s great to work with dynamic groups because they expand your portfolio of serious farmers really fast, it’s pretty much ensured that I will always have something to do. While working with farmers we work together to identify what resources they have and how we can use those resources to move forward with their agricultural enterprises. We try to find solutions to problems that the farmer might not even think are problems. If a guy is buying chemical fertilizer because his pig farm and tomato farm are too far apart, you might want to try and develop a green manure or on-site compost thing with him. You save him money on fertilizer and now he knows this cheap, environmentally friendly way to increase his soil fertility. I’m working with three farmers now to develop bio-gas systems to attach to their piggeries, saving the farmer a shit ton of money, the forest a shit ton of trees, and the earth a shit ton of natural gas. Seriously, if every household in America just had two pigs this whole fracking thing wouldn’t even be an issue and we would have pigs! It’s pretty simple. But more on that in the next blog post.

So that is basically what I do when I try to discuss/work with farmers. We’re just looking for magic bullets that improve the sustainability and profitability of their systems. Having an American walk around an African village counseling farmers sounds weird, but I think it’s actually working and that this project will be successful. If you have some annoying whiteman hounding you all the time reminding you that you still have to buy the bamboo for the new poultry, and that the government’s having a fish farmers meeting tomorrow, and that the fertility of this manure would skyrocket if you got those micro-organisms going, you tend to do all those things.

I’ve got some regularly patterned off days too: once a month I’ll clean the hell out of the apartment, once every two weeks I’ll go to Bamenda for banking and good food, and I hang out with other PCVs often. Those days are a really nice break from the slowness and monotony of village life, but I’m finding village life to be very agreeable with me. It feels like the slower time moves the less anxiety you have. That is a very important lesson I will take from the Peace Corps, a simple life is a pretty good deal. There’s an attitude that things can be done tomorrow so anything that doesn’t get done is still fair game, it doesn’t matter when it will get done because it will get done. So enjoy life with whatever is happening in it, be proud of what you did, and look forward to what you’ll do tomorrow.