In the end, I’m still whiteman
I’ve been meaning to write something about volunteer integration for some time.
It’s a hard subject to tackle because unless you’ve lived like this people don’t really understand the dynamics of living in a developing country. That is not to say that all foreigners tend to live the same way but there are patterns that emerge.
For starters it tends to be that volunteers arrive and profess their love for the local food. It’s human nature to want to embrace everything about your new home.
I have had several expats tell me during my adventures that all their friends are local and they only ever eat the local speciality at some suitably rustic shack.
Then inside six months they can’t face rice anymore and switch to whatever western food is available and they join the (awful) Hash House Harriers. They cringe when reminded of their earlier naiveté.
Alternatively they live in a state of denial where they hide their burger consumption and go on claiming that they live ever so ethnically.
Likewise I knew a female volunteer who, when in Hanoi, got a “cycling suit” made and donned a conical hat and took to her bicycle every day.
In Vietnam they used to laugh at foreigners on push bikes. Why would a foreigner cycle when they could get a motorbike or take a taxi? Of course there’s nothing wrong with cycling to keep you fit or because you enjoy it, but as a way to win respect or integrate- I’m not sure.
When we first arrived in Cameroon we were given cooking lessons. How to grind corn to make fufu, how to make the bitter ndole or prepare jama jama.
Meanwhile, the Peace Corps were handed a recipe book. It details how to make American favourites with locally available ingredients.
I’m sorry I am with the Americans on this one. Every single meal I eat here with colleagues will be, of course, Cameroonian.
Then why would I want to cook it in my own home? How many migrants in the UK go home at the end of the day and make shepherd’s pie?
So the question is: how much should you live with, and like, local people?
Certainly it is a must to be close enough to know how they live.
To this end VSO frequently trumpets that volunteers earn local level salaries and live and work alongside local people.
Well not quite.
Because even my stipend allowance is way more than most of my colleagues.
Even if I compare it with more senior employees then let’s not forget that they are supporting families (and that normally includes several cousins, uncles, aunts etc).
I got lucky with my big pad but you could say that most volunteers live in roughly similar accommodation to a middle class Cameroonians. However, they aren’t for the most part, sharing. And there certainly aren’t three to a bed and people sleeping on the floor.
VSO volunteers all have fridges too – a very large luxury.
A VSO colleague recently told me that she didn’t like Bamenda because it was full of (to use the Cameroonian phrase) whiteman.
And yet I would be surprised if there were more than 20 of us in a town of half a million people.
She feels happier with the African experience rather than the expat one.
While we all wrestle with just how luxuriously we want to live (by spending a little of our own savings) I don’t believe that our main aim is integration. I think our aim is to see out our two years so we can finish our work here to a good standard.
Horribly I have to quote Bono here: “We’re one but we’re not the same”.
Because talk like an African, walk like an African, live alongside Africans and eat only African food and you’re still a whiteman.
And, judging by the amount of people who have mistaken my nationality and told me they want me to take them to the USA – a huge number of Cameroonians wouldn’t even be here if they had our wealth and opportunities
To put it my life here in context: I don’t have a 4×4 vehicle or a driver, I don’t jet off for weekends away, I don’t import my own food, no one shipped my belongings in crates so I could have the comforts of home, I don’t have armed guards at my door, I don’t live in an Embassy compound, I cook on a single gas ring.
Bamenda has no Foreign Correspondents Club/Met Bar/American Club and if it did I wouldn’t drink there.
But… I will continue to do part of my shopping at the “whiteman” store where I can buy such luxuries as tinned tuna and baked beans. I will pay over the odds for a taxi if it means the difference between being left in the dark by the roadside and getting home safely. I won’t quibble over pennies in the market and yes, I do give my shirts to someone to wash and soon I’ll have someone to come and clean the house occasionally.
…and yes I’ll probably pay a little over the odds for that too.
But before anyone adds a comment saying I am lucky to have all these things and they volunteer in an isolated community etc….
I know. You have my respect. I could not do what you do and I know that. It’s urban only for me. Bamenda is as isolated as I ever want to be. I’m ten hours from the nearest airport. I actually find that quite worrying.
If you’re in a small village then I understand that integration is the only means of survival.
But ask yourself this: if a deadly epidemic came or a war, or a natural disaster or if you got seriously sick then that self preservation instinct would kick in. Right? You’d be on the next bus out of there. That community would be left behind.
Because we are lucky. We are different. We have choices. We have support and we have opportunities.
In my experience Cameroonians accept that – just as Hanoians did. We are more embarrassed about our wealth than they are envious of it.
Integration is important but it’s not everything.
Tags: bamenda, cameroon, intergration, volunteering, vso
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November 18, 2008 at 9:06 am
Another great post, although I do think that different people react and enjoy different things. I have a VSO friend here in a small community who sings in the local church choir, makes her own foo-foo etc and loves it. The important thing is she doesn’t expect anyone else to do the same nor does she judge them. She understands this life is for her but doesn’t suit others. Personally I never really made much attempt to “go native”. I’ve decent savings back home so I can live whatever lifestyle I want here. Not that I go mad (not a major option in Tamale anyway) but I’m able have pizza reasonably often.
Your point about choice is crucial. Poverty isn’t just feeling hungry, it’s not have the choice to not feel hungry. If I choose to skip a meal (or live in a town with an unreliable water supply) I have the choice to eat or move. Many people here don’t have that choice and I’m kidding myself if I think my experience is the same as theirs.
November 18, 2008 at 9:17 am
I agree – you can live how you choose to – just so long as you do it with respect for local people.
And like you, I couldn’t “go mad” if I wanted to but I am happy to make things easier for me if I can.
My boss just walked in with the fittings for a hot shower – it costs about £30. Now why would anyone volunteer deny themselves that? Why shiver through cold showers for a year or get up 40 minutes earlier to boil water for a bucket bath?
Regarding choice, for the record when people were planning their evacuation from vetnam because of the bird flu epidemic I told them if the worst came to the worst I would stay.
I have choices – I can go or stay. While we have those choices we will never be the same.
November 18, 2008 at 11:24 am
Good to hear the honesty in the taxis at night and 10 hours from the airport. Now I feel I know a bit more about what life there is like, in among the other things that make up the day.
November 18, 2008 at 11:30 am
Very reflective and honest post, Steve. You touch on so many good points here. You’re grappling with many of the same issues I dealt with after I arrived in Buea. Just as you are now, I spent a lot of time trying to reconcile Peace Corps’ desire for me to “integrate” with my African community with the obvious fact that I’m a white foreigner from one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Who’s kidding who, right?
It’s funny you mention the Peace Corps cookbook; I’ve mastered a number of those American “comfort food” recipes made from local ingredients. The section on traditional Cameroonian dishes? I tried one…once. It was a disaster. I spent 2000 francs and 2 hours trying (unsuccessfully) to make a dish I could buy for 150 francs across the street. Never again.
In the end, I settled on a compromise with my identity in Cameroon—I’m a hybrid, and that’s the best it’s going to be. Yes, it’s true that after two years the majority of my close friends are Cameroonians. Those friends have given me a local name and traditional outfits to wear. I’ve grown to crave traditional Cameroonian dishes (not all of them, mind you) the way I crave pizza or Thai food. Cameroonians love talking pidgin with me, and I can get by with my French. But the fact remains that I’m a white American first, and no amount of enculturation or time spent here will ever make me a Cameroonian. I’m okay with inhabiting a grey, in-between zone. The director of my NGO has taken to calling me a “Camerican” which I like.
Here’s my version of your “I’m still a whiteman” post I wrote awhile back:
http://www.27months.com/2007/02/the-myth-of-integration/
Hope to see you write a follow-up to this post in a few months.
November 18, 2008 at 11:38 am
David, you’re welcome. Still not sure if the fear of crime equals the reality but better safe than sorry.
Billz – thanks for your comments as always and I’ll read you post.
I think there is another issue for me – I have been an expat before. What’s more I have been an expat in a place where there were 10,000 of us.
I know the people who try to cook their own fufu will largley fall by the wayside. I know that we all think we can be locals when we first arrive.
Experience has probably meant I have skipped that step. I think it doesn’t always sit well with fellow volunteers. But they’ll come around.
Expats can be deeply unpleasant people – they can become racist and lazy and have an over inflated sense of their own importance – because everyone runs around after them.
I would hate to get like that but I think there is middle ground.
Choosing to live with some home comforts and not integrating entirely may not be the most VSO way to live – but I do believe it is the most honest.
November 18, 2008 at 11:53 am
Steve, great post. You capture it exactly. It can be a challenge to meet and hang out with locals I think, Crucial, but not always that easy, particularly as a woman in an insecure or Muslim environment. But then again, that’s all part of the fun of trying to fit in, without going overboard.
Got a care package Glenn sent from Australia. So exciting – 6 cookbooks and several new, fun novels. I’m really looking forward to knowing how to cook more dishes with tuna, and teaching myself to cook Persian. I never learn to cook the local food – why would you, the local restaurants and friend’s Mums do a much better job! Although now that I’ve left Vietnam I wish I had learned how to cook pho – would kill for a bowl right now!
November 18, 2008 at 11:56 am
billz – just read your post – beautifully put.
November 18, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Excellent post on a complicated situation that I think all expats deal with, some more honestly than others. Interesting perspective.
November 18, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Good post. If you are interested in the psychology of it all
a) The culture shock graph
b) The idea that migrants settle best when they “walk both sides of the street” – keep strong links to their own community [John Berry]
c) Expatriate psychology – Stuart Carr, Prof of Psychology at Auckland University, Massey campus.
And in the meantime, what can we do to entertain you?
November 18, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Nail on the head again! It’s the constant debate for anyone from the developed world working in the developing world… but achieving that middle ground is tricky and it’s easy to fall into the pretentious category at either end of the spectrum. Ah well, someone’s probably laughing at you somewhere, as you either pound the fufu or go for a jog with the expat running club.
If you haven’t already seen these I found Francis Nyamnjoh’s papers really good at getting this just right (http://www.nyamnjoh.com/) He talks about the local Cameroonian students bemusement / scorn at the ‘Peace Corps’ types who insist on walking in their torn jeans, when they could certainly afford the bus… These are the two articles I remember clearest:
http://www.nyamnjoh.com/2005/09/images_of_nyong.html: “Images of Nyongo amongst Bamenda Grassfielders in Whiteman Kontri”
http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/405/607: “Whiteman Kontri and the enduring allure of modernity among Cameroonian youth”
November 19, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Good post; good points. I’m always looking for thoughtful writing and comments from West Africa. Thank you.
November 20, 2008 at 9:01 am
Mike – thank you. People keep saying I am honest on this post – as if there was something I did wrong but at least I’m ‘fessing up. Not sure what it is I did ;o)
Jo – Thanks so much for the links – they are fascinating.
Kerry – Thank you – will be reading your blog too when Blogger gets its act together and decides to open.
November 22, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Ourman,
That was a really great post. I am going to post it on my Outlook.
And I’ll also post a response: being black and being and expat in a black country. I had written the stuff for a while now but kept it in the cooler. You’ve spurred me to get it out now.
Keep the stories coming.
Gef