Fecal-Oral Diet

“You're on the Atkins diet? I think I'm going to try the fecal-oral diet.” Most cases of diarrhea are caused by fecal-oral contamination. Most Peace Corps Volunteers in Cameroon get diarrhea. Draw your own conclusions. Poop may as well be a food group.

We're having our training here in Bokito (a small town of about 10'000 people near Bafia) until early December. We're mostly having technical training about various health topics and learning French (I can conjugate irregular verbs into imparfait now! SCORE!). I don't know where my permanent post will be yet, but we find out on October 26^th so MARK YOUR CALENDARS, Y'ALL! I don't have much of a preference for a region, they all seem to be interesting in different ways. I just hope I get placed in a motivated community.

Two weeks into to Peace Corps Cameroon, things are going pretty awesome. There have been a lot of ups and downs since getting here – feeling pretty bipolar actually – but overall I'm learning a lot, the people are great, my homestay family is really nice, and I plucked feathers off  a freshly beheaded chicken the other day. Skills. I also didn't die when I saw a tarantula eating a cockroach on my living room wall. This is what I call progress.

I have two dogs at my homestay, and I seem to be the only person who pets them. Thus, Los Diablos (they both have the same name) have become my protectors in Bokito. Saturday morning was the first time I left the house by myself to walk to the training center, and the dogs walked with me the entire way, circling around me, and sniffing out anyone who got too close.  Today they tried to again but were chased away by my homestay brother. Since today is market day, they probably would have gotten run over by a car or a moto on the way back from the training center. I love these dogs, especially the three-legged one. Although the other one with its ears half bitten off is pretty cute too. Being a dog here is like being in a war.

Yesterday was a “bring America to Cameroon” day, aka. I fulfilled Peace Corps's 2^nd goal (look it up). I made chocolate cake and stuffed cabbage for my homestay family. Neither worked out great but hey, Peace Corps is all about being resourceful and celebrating the little victories in life. The chocolate cake was made with fake Nutella instead of cocoa, and was sweeter than anything I ever want to taste again. But the family seemed to enjoy it. I also baked it out of a oven I created over a wood stove by putting sand at the bottom of a big pot and butting the cake pan in over that. As for my stuffed cabbage – I would not recommend making this over a wood stove with only a few pots available for cooking, and for a large family of hungry Cameroonians. I definitely under-estimated how much everyone would eat. It took me about 4 hours to make 13 stuffed cabbage rolls for 8 people, and within about 3 minutes they were all gone and we were already onto the leftover rice. I really need to get better at this whole Cameroonian cooking shenanigan. French toast this weekend I think. And cinnamon. Cameroon doesn't really use cinnamon. I'm about to change some lives.