Blogging by Gaslamp

I went on site visit, it was fantastic, I don't even know how to start writing about it, so I am not yet.


Other random events from Africa:

Dish Washing:
I wash dishes with my family almost every day. It was more, but now I am using my mornings for last minute lesson planning, so I haven't been quite as useful. A few days ago I helped scrub all the big pots, and I wanted to share how it is done.

First, you get your pot wet. Then, you scrape the soap block (liquid soap is an unknown concept here) with the steel wool. Once you have your steel wool nice and soapy you pick up a bunch of sand with the steel wool and start scrubbing down the pot. This removes most of the black char marks. We want the pots shining like new, so the next step is to rinse off the sand, and get the steel wool soapy again. Then you scrub the pot down again. Then you switch to the finer grain steel wool and sand combination, which gets it still shinier. Then you use just the finer grain steel wool with soap. FINALLY you use a normal sponge and soap.

Oh, and we drew water from the well a few times to replace what we used.



Cows at School:
There are always beautiful/interesting photo ops whenever I don't have my camera with me.

There is a herd of cattle that is grazed (as far as I can tell) wherever there is grass. Property lines don't seem to matter much, though I was told that the cowherd probably has an arrangement with the people. So, every day a herd of cattle is walked down the main street in search of pasture. One of these pastures is the school where we teach and take french classes. So the other day when I was staring out the window (or wall?) I got to watch a bunch of bulls pick their way among school buildings, a man following them, and a group of cattle egrets following everything. The bulls and the cattle egrets are white, and the sun
reflected off of everything made it look surprisingly clean.

On one hand it seems like an efficient use of space.
On the other, we have to walk around cow poop when going to class.



Teaching Cards:
I have been teaching the kids in my family different card games for a few days (1 per night, we will see how long I can keep it up). They call me shuffling cards "White man magic" and I think they play cards with me just to see it. I am trying to teach the kids how to, which is difficult in any country, and they keep getting discouraged because they think they can't do it. (As a side note, no one sits indian style here, when I did they were amazed that I could bend that way and asked if I did yoga)

Some differences: Diamonds are Biscuit, Clubs are Groundnuts (what they call peanuts), Hearts are Macabo Rouge, and Spades are Macabo Noir. Just this is a good example of Cameroon's bilingualism.

I taught them poker (without betting) because they asked on the first night. I don't
understand how it is interesting sans chips, but they like it.

The second night I taught them Spoons. When I asked them to get me spoons to play a card game I had to repeat myself a few times because they thought I was messing up my French again.

Tonight I taught them Bullshit (though I called it "tu ment"). They actually are very quick at picking up games, which I appreciate, because it is hard to teach games in a foreign language.

They told me today that none of my American games use the jokers, and I am wasting the cards, so I will have to remember a game that uses them. I plan on teaching them blackjack tomorrow, and maybe Kent if I can remember the rules on the next day. Other games in the lineup are: gin rummy, solitaire, hearts, spades

Please suggest more! (preferably ones without rules that are very complicated or involve hitting)




On another side note, I just looked over my blog, and I don't feel like I have said anything of my experiences here. I may have only been here 6 weeks but so much has happened. I hope I don't forget the novelty of everything and forget to tell interesting stories!