March 16, 2002,

Dear Mom and Dad,

I just sent you all the stuff with Carrie, but it's been a while since I've written those letters and I should catch you all up. Poste is back on and I got a bunch of letters from you and the gang. Kira sent pics of her wedding which will go in my kitchen where everyone can see how pretty my friends are.

It rained hard again today and the living room is half flooded. I can't even get it dried out entirely before it's all wet again. I find myself enjoying other people's floors -- when I watch Kara and Jenny and Tracy sweep, they are only sweeping up dirt, not piles of dead red ants. They can put down mats, or towels on the bathroom floor, sit on it drawing fiches for exposées. I keep the house clean and heat -- there is clutter, for sure -- but at least the place is not a sty like a certain PCV's house I saw recently. Perhaps having to clean up the ants everyday is what's preventing me from living in squalor.

I haven't done anything except grades since getting back from IST, but Monday I am resolved to go to the hospital and arrange to talk to all the staff about Ebola. Wednesday I leave for our girls seminar in Tchibanga, and after that I'm hoping to get to Mayumba to see Pete and Amanda and the beach. Jenny's boyfriend Mohammed is taking his daughter down there right after the seminar so she can hang out with her grandparents and he said he'd give me a ride.

He and Jenny came through Wednesday after I gave an oral exam to a kid who says we lost his test. We all understood that he had just not turned it in to get a chance at redeeming himself, but since we couldn't prove it I had to retest him. "What did you do yesterday?" "Today eez Surzday, ze sirty Marz, Too sousand, too sousand too." "Where are you going for vacation?" "I go to school." Yeah. I gave him a grade close to that of his other test and left. As I went out the gate Jenny drove by and I yelled and she stopped and backed up. "We're going to Lebamba right now -- you got anything to do today?" Heck no. Get me outta here. I jump in and off we go.

We're distributing Girls' scholarships -- girls that get a yearly average of 12/20 and aren't pregnant and are Gabonese are eligible. They filled out all the forms last November -- NDD had 9 applicants (out of 600 girls, only 9 had the average) and 7 got the money -- 60,000 CFA (80 bucks). The college in Lebamba had 8 winners, and 2 in Dibouangui, a small town/village with a big beautiful missionary (Catholic) church, outside of LBB. It was quick, and neat to see the girls get their prize. I made a little speech about good job and next year if you keep working hard and stay away from the boys you can get it again, and the money is yours not the school's or your parents or your boyfriends -- we want you to use it to continue your good schoolwork, etc. After all that it was back to LBB for lunch with Tracy and Julie, who are well but shy, and then back to NDD to get my stuff, for I had decided to continue with them to Tchibanga. We saw Kara and Carrie and Cheree, and the next morning left with Carrie (3rd year FARM -- she's got home leave), passing through Moabi to get to Mouila. There are 2 roads connecting Mouila and TCH -- one goes through NDD (better road, faster, but more kilometers), the other through Moabé (less used, prettier, lots of switchbacks in the forest part near Moabi). I hadn't yet been on this road and was surprised at how pretty it was: cute villages, all with solar panels and some with "Protect the environment" murals, lots of bridges, and a huge Hidden Valley right where the forest/mountain started -- my jaw dropped open. Living in the savannah it's easy to forget that Gabon is beautiful, and the whole time we were in the TCH area I kept saying, "This is what I expected when they told me I was going to Central Africa! It's even on my website -- off I go to green rolling hills, mud, and cockroaches. Instead I get flat prairie and red ants (you can't escape the mud.)" I took pictures of the view, and the bridges -- a long one crossing a big river (NDD's stream is pitiful, another drawback). I didn't get pics of the shorter, broken ones. Bridges generally are only a couple-three meters long: you take a big trunk and slice it down the middle, and lay the two pieces across, tire-width apart. That's the base. Then you lay a bunch of railroad ties horizontal, the length of the bridge. Then you lay planks over that, where the tires will go. The planks are usually in some sort of disrepair and you always have to east up onto them, like going over a big speedbump, because of erosion (remember -- mud/gravel roads!). On a few bridges, though, we were rolling on the base part -- planks and ties had come off half the bridge. If you fall off bridges like these (and in the big river we saw the skeleton of a pickup), you're pretty much screwed. The truck, anyway. The rivers, even when they're wide, aren't deep. I asked Mohammed about crocodiles, but he said he didn't know.

In Moabi we took Ora's valuables out of her house -- she's in the states after breaking her wrist at IST--she'll be back the end of April. Her house is HUGE. Moabi is roughly the size of Ndende, but less cool because people don't pass through that often. They have a hospital but not a lycée, and their market looked smaller. It was cute, though, a little hilly and lots of roads. Apparently you can walk there from NDD in a day, though no Gabonese would ever do this.

This was the day I got really sunburned, riding in the back of the truck from 9 am to 3 pm, using what I suspect was expired sunscreen. Not any worse than a frisbee tournament, though. Kira had sent me a Valentine's card with clippings from the Olympics -- a picture of the women's hockey team as they trounced Germany 10-0. I got all nostalgic and longed to be able to step out on the ice and shoot pucks against the wall and battle with people and do quick turns and pass and receive and score, or alternatively, shut down some punk winger and deflect a wrist shot with my blocker. I really miss hockey. More than frisbee. But I miss that too.

In Mouila we washed up and I called LBV to see if they had found my missing box of condoms, which they hadn't, which means I am out 50 bucks. I think they were left in LBV and Charles thinks he packed them on the truck but they are not in Mouila and never were. I don't think any PC person stole them, but covering your ass is an art form here and if Charles left them somewhere he will never admit it (until he finds them). Pauline, our boss, said she was 100% derriere everything and the box would be found. I am not getting my hopes up.

Carrie and I went out for bush meat (gazelle) and she talked about the village and why she left for Tchibanga -- to help with the FARM project there and because a guy was bugging her all the time in Doungui. She took a 9 year old girl with her to TCH, Ito, who's cute. Carrie was her mom, but now she's back in the village with her real parents. It seems not that unusual for PCVs to want to adopt kids here -- about as often as marriages. You don't have to worry about me in either department.

Anyway. Vampires.

I think I've already mentioned how vampires here do not have capes and fangs and live in castles. No. These are ghosts, or people haunting places, or living people consciously or unconsciously going around at night and causing illness, accidents, and death. Ndende has a lot of vampires. (My Cameroonian bush-taxi driver, Les Bonnes Choses, said to me, "Ndende, c'est la jalousie, c'est la haine. C'est une mauvaise ville.") Jealousy and hate are the food of vampires. Someone is jealous of your success; he sends you diabetes. A man wants your wife -- he makes you impotent. Death is unnatural and always caused by vampires (usually someone in the family, which is why during funerals there's always screaming matches about who's to blame.) This all your traditional vampirism.

Last Saturday I had seven kids show up for a class (it was not yet vacation, but we'd already turned in grades, so what's the point of coming?) and I was set to teach slang -- Yo! Wassup, homie! -- to annoy our TEFL volunteer next year. They wanted to discuss the dictatorship of our principal and how things were better last year when you could wear rings and nail polish and hats and sandals and not have to get your hair tressed every week -- you could braid it, simply, or have little pom pons, or whatever. I wanted to get a student angle on the Ndende Phantom of 2001 -- so far I'd heard girls were getting pregnant, and having fits in class, that the phantom was ravishing them during class, that the school was exorcised by a Congolese nganga (traditional healer), and (from the nurses) that the girls were all smoking weed given them by a prof and a surveillant (discipline guy) to make them smarter.

The kids said:

"Yeah, people say girls were crying in class 'I want it!' and shaking uh-uh-uh and falling down. It happened over in that building. Also that a guy, his skin was transparent, he walked in to the principal's office and said he wanted to take the BAC." Mm, yeah, the others said, "Christian."

"Who's Christian?"

"He was a student in terminale who died a few years back. People say he comes to the terminale classrooms and sits down with his cahier ready to take notes. That's those who have the sight. Others, their skin prickles and their hair stands up. People say his dad killed him."

Then we got into more general things. "This one time my friend was biking home at 5 am and he got to the Carrefour (the famous Carrefour de Bonheur, home of the 9 roads -- 5 of which are 'real') and all of a sudden he wasn't moving, he was pedaling but not moving, and he looked down and saw he was floating." More stories -- shirts being tugged/blown up by playful ghost; hearing voices while playing hide and seek at the lycée; if a sorceror blows on a baby's belly button he'll be a vampire. Some of this was in the same tone we use to tell scary stories around campfires, and was responded to with glee and doubt, same as in the States. But there was also a lot of seriousness in it -- maybe someone is making up a story, but vampires are there and bad stuff is their fault and don't be joking about it too much.

Sorry for the abrupt ending -- it's April 19 and I'm back from LBV after only barely making my flight (I had to bribe people).

Love,

Hannah