Englishman in New York

Dear friends,

I reached a strange point in this experience abroad. This is the kind of text that will go 5 times through my eyes before I might finally put it online – or not. Blogging is supposed to be personal, but even in this age of Facebook, Twitter, Big brother and I don’t know what else, there’s a limit to what I will share with the “world”, and luckily as well to what the world wants to know from me.

To give an impression of this evening in my family’s house: the numerous mosquito bites on my feet don’t stop itching, ants are collecting the rests of my dinner on the ground (don’t ask why…) and a little moth is flying around the light in my room – I try to ignore the fact that I would love to know the exact species name and somehow it’s a relieve that it reminds me to one the Pyralidae. Little bastards, I assure you... I could spend all day trying to identify them, releasing them in the end without a satisfying result. Some human behaviour is just not explicable :-) I hear many sounds around me: crickets, birds, frogs, television in the living room and Stevie’s Sir Duke. I ignore most of it, only magic Steve deserves my attention right now, my fingers follow the beat…

Hehe, I don’t force anybody to read this kind of useless information, but it must be good to know it doesn’t harm you either. To say something relevant now, the culture shock, mja, I think I finally experience it and it took me some time to realise.

I had a few difficult weeks, it’s not really cool to admit, I know. There was no clear reason, but I just ran out of energy. Strange enough this seemed to happen when I finally started to sleep well again (the anti-malaria drugs I was taking had some unwelcome effects). My mind was flying through Europe: Belgium, Portugal and Belgium again, Germany, Poland, even Estonia… I think it has finally arrived in Cameroon now. What am I doing here? … Oh yes, right, sustainable development on Mt. Cameroon, or at least, that’s what I’ve been saying before. It took me a long time to settle down in the organisation (People EarthWise - PEW), but I believe I can give an update now on what I’ve been writing in January.

Eventually, the project on sustainable development has become one of my secondary tasks here. Most of the time I’m working at a voluntary programme that will allow PEW to receive more volunteers in the future, and I’m applying for funding to set up a decent internet connection and a website. In my opinion, those are the basic needs of the organisation, but there are some other things to say. My boss Benjamin is an inspiring man and he’s doing great environmental work, I still agree with my first opinion about him. However, he runs the NGO for almost eight years and still there are no official salaried staff members, there are no reliable sources of income, no business plan (why should he, it’s an NGO?), the board of trusties is inactive and Benjamin does plenty of other things that are not related to PEW (but necessary to generate his personal income which he unofficially “invests” in PEW), etc… You can imagine it’s not always easy to stay as motivated as I should and I had several discussions with Benjamin – but how do you tell your boss (after 6 weeks of observation) that he’s not managing well? And anyway, who am I to criticise this? I studied Forest management, not Organisation management… So I tried to inform myself sufficiently and involved Benjamin in my thinking exercise, I think we did not too bad after all. The fact that we still talk to each other and that I’m still working for PEW should be an indication for that, although I wonder if anything fundamental will actually change. Fine, I can live with that, I’ll do as much as I want and/or can and after that it’s up to Benjamin.

Back to my “culture shock” now, although it is exaggerated to call it a shock... Another problem I had (have), is the difficulty to communicate with Cameroonians. The first weeks I thought it would be temporarily, but I was wrong. It’s not only the language/accent that makes it difficult; it’s the entire way of communicating. Sometimes I insult people without realising, and sometimes I try to insult someone but they don’t even get it :-) (bert-humor…). No seriously, it’s often tiring and there were plenty of misunderstandings (also at work) that I couldn’t clear out afterwards. But I feel less stressful since I stopped pretending to be happy, or interested, or listening, or whatever… when I’m not. Funny to be listening at “Englishman in New York” at the moment, I noticed many times that I can hear a song for a thousand times without knowing its meaning and then all of a sudden it makes more sense. “Be yourself, no matter what they say…”

Hopefully I can keep the mood up, but I think I will. Stay cool there ;) and enjoy the springtime. If it becomes as intense as the winter you just had, it seems very promising to me!

Bert