But then . . . I decided to spend a semester of my junior year studying abroad in Cameroon, which is a country about the size of California on the west coast of Central Africa. I went to Cameroon for all the wrong reasons. I knew that they spoke French, and I wanted to work on my French. So far, so good. But I also wanted so badly to be different - to live a life that was other than everything I had known - that it hurt. Everyone went to Paris or Aix or Switzerland (the privilege! I know, I know) - so I was going to go to AFRICA. Also, my parents hated the idea, which made it even more attractive.
I knew nothing about Cameroon. I didn't know about its complicated history of colonialism and civil war, about the hundreds of language spoken there, about the diversity of landscape or religion. I knew nothing of its staggering beauty, its incredible food, its exuberant, hospitable people. So I got on a plane after a tearful and dramatic goodbye with my boyfriend, and landed many hours later in a place that seemed like a foreign planet to that sheltered little girl.
After a couple of days of orientation - mostly lectures on all of the diseases we would certainly contract - we were sent off to our first month-long homestay. I nervously arrived at a good-sized house with a corrugated tin roof, accompanied by Elvis, my homestay brother, a charming and handsome 16 year old boy with a life-size cut-out of Beyonce tacked up above his bed. (The names in that family! They had an Elvis, a Prince, a Jeanne D'Arc (which I quite like, actually)). The house seemed quiet. The first room I saw was an empty formal parlor, with a dozen matching chairs upholstered in green velvet, and potraits of the Cameroon president and my homestay father on the walls. Next we passed through a narrow hall, which opened up into a kitchen filled with more people than I had thought could fit in the small room. It seemed like dozens of faces, all smiling and welcoming me in rapid French that I could barely follow. Soon it was made clear that these were all siblings. 20 of them.
20 children. My parents are each the youngest of six, so I thought that I knew about large families. But this? I had Elvis write down everyone's names on a sheet of notebook paper, and it soon became clear that there were three wives in the family. (Oh, Cameroon has polygamy? I had no idea. None. Seriously, I should have read at least ONE book about the country before moving there.)
The culture shock was intense, certainly. But even more so was my crushing homesickness. I felt ill, constantly on the verge of tears. Everything was awful, I had made a huge mistake. Making it worse, the kinds of things that I was good at at home- schoolwork, field hockey- were useless to me in Cameroon. I had thought my French was passable; I still couldn't follow half of what was said to me. I didn't know how to wash my own clothes using rocks to beat out the stains; I didn't know how to cook over a fire or tie a headscarf. I had always thought of myself as competent, if nothing else. In Cameroon I was useless, a child. I was flat-out scared, and I wanted to go home.
I wanted to quit, but do you know what saved me? Those children. One child in our family, a little girl, about two years old, had severely bowed legs. I imagine that in the West she would have been fitted with leg braces and been fine, but in Cameroon she walked with a limp. She was my favorite. When I got home from university I would pull her on my lap, play little games and sing songs with her. She never teased me about my French (she mostly spoke their native patois anyway) and she seemed to like me. She braided my hair and taught me how to say hello and goodbye in her language.
Other times I held infants (so many infants! Almost every woman had one strapped to her back all day) so their moms could tend to something else. One day I walked home with a young mom whose husband was away with the army. I carried her tiny newborn, wrapped in a blanket, as we walked through wild fields and over a bridge no wider than a single board. I was so terrified that I would drop that bitty, perfect thing. Here was something I could do, and do well. I could help take care of the babies. I clung to those children and their unquestioning acceptance of me, useless and lost as I was. I found my footing and made it through.
Those children- their happy faces, their loud songs, their little chubby arms around my neck, those little content infats bouncing on their mothers' backs as they went about their work - I wanted it, all of it. International travel, money, a fancy career - I still wasted a few more yearsstupidly chasing all of that when I came home, but underneath it all was a longing for babies. I started counting the days until I could start my own family. Ten years later, there I was, driving a minivan full of babies to a playgroup. I am so glad that I was so wrong.
