"Cool Temper"

Pidgin for "Chill Out" and otherwise completely unrelated to what I am about to write. But I love pidgin, so there's that.

Anyways, this weekend. Friday night all of us went to Chicken&Beer, our name for the restaurant down the street from the Dickinson apartment that seems to sell, well, chicken and beer. Sure, it's a limited fare, but oh man, this chicken is really worth noting. (Honestly, I should just stop blogging about Cameroon as a whole and really just keep to the food here because, for better or worse, it something else). For 2,500 francs, you get a plate of fried chicken and plantains all covered in green sauce with some raw onion sliced over it all. No clue what the green sauce is but it is fantastic. Then to drink, a giant bottle of beer which costs about a dollar.

As for the restaurant, it is just an outdoor patio with tables and chairs that is right along the main road. When we go to Chicken&Beer during lunchtime it is always completely empty except for maybe one or two customers who are nursing a beer and watching the soccer game on the TV. But Friday nights its absolutely packed with a live DJ and the whole place is really wild. You can't hear yourself talk, so you just take in the scene. It's wonderful, chaotic, and completely Cameroon.

Unfortunately, my Saturday and Sunday though this weekend were shot. I had been sick earlier this week and started taking the medicine this weekend which, I am not kidding, knocked me out. On Saturday, I thought it was just a fluke that I slept for four hours in the middle of the day. But Sunday was even worse. I took the medicine at 9 am and then from 11 am to 4 pm was dead asleep. It wasn't so much asleep as completely immobile. I would wake up here and there, feeling so guilty for sleeping in the middle of the day but just couldn't move. My body just felt so heavy. I ended up calling the doctor and asking if I could stop the medication. In the packet for the medicine, it did list "somnolence" as a side-effect, but this is a HUGE understatement.

On Saturday night though, after my four hour nap, I did manage to make it a short trip to the market with Melanie and help cook a bit. Then at night, my host brother Njako (pronounced Jacko) and I went to my friend Elizabeth's bar (er, the bar of her host family) at Monte Jouvence. We had a real gang there, just five Americans but we all brought our host sibs or Cameroonian friends so that in the end it was at least a group of twenty.

I really feel this deserve its own post, but what I love about the program here is how intergrated Dickinson students become with Cameroonian society. Our host families provided us not only a place to stay, but are the main fixture of our social lives. I was terrifed of living with a host family and pictured myself spending all my time in my room with my door closed and always feeling awkward and out of place. Nothing could be further from the truth, I make a point to keep my bedroom door opened whenever I am there and if, for some reason it is closed, I count on my family to knock and come in sooner rather than later. In America, privacy is the ideal but here, the community is everything and privacy, well, I can't really say it exists. While I may cherish my time alone in the US, here it is wonderful to always be in the company of my host family.