Quelque Chose Interessant

Today it really started. Each of the Small Enterprise Development (SED) Volunteers was assigned a small local business to pretty much consult. I met with them today and looked at their store. I am pretty scared to tell the truth. My french is not good! So they will start telling me about their accounts and the like and I won't really understand what they are talking about. I know that they don't expect me to turn them into Bill Gates or anything, but still I am really feeling the pressure of it all. Which is a good thing I guess.

Anyways, thus far my days are broken into segements of classes. I have language classes, technical classes , and cross-cultural communication classes. I find the X-Cultural classes especially interesting. The other day we had a conversation about Gender roles in Cameroon. Before we came and during our orientation in Yaounde we were told over and over again about the male-dominated culture that exists here in Cameroon. In my host family and while observing the social attitudes I have seen this. The men and women are definetly constrained to their perspective roles (for the most part, I can't say that for ALL Cameroonians). We were also told that as a women we may have hard time being taken seriously and respected in our workplaces. We did a little exercise taht taught me a lot about how women are viewed in Cameroon and/compared to how women are viewed in the U.S.

Our teacher broke us up into four groups all the American men in one group, the American women in another group, the Cameroonian men and the Cameroonian women. We all went to our respective flip charts. We were told to write the words th at come to our mind when we think of the word 'Woman'
This is what we all wrote (punctuation the same as well)

American Men:
legs!!!
feminism
smells good
manipulation
harder life
little feet
bra....lol
Victoria Secret
smile
strong
athletics
emotional

American Women:
the song "American Woman"
strong
organized
independent
undervalued
self-sufficent
liberated
mother
multi-tasking
tough
caretaker
friend
sexual object
vulnerable

Cameroonian Men:
Maternity/child bearing
beauty (physical)
sensitive
weak
tender
domestic chores
kitchen
sex(#1)
patient
respect
submissive
crying
faithfulness
artifical
demanding
materialistic

Cameroonian Female:
mother
beauty/elegance
education
protector
sensitive
fragile
maternelle
manager of the house
attentive
lots of babies
ambitious
feminist
shapes the childrens future

Okay, they wrote the last one in french so something might be lost in translation. But, you get the general idea. This is very interesting to me and disappointing at the same time. Look what the American men wrote! These are all educated and fairly mature men and they wrote about almost entirely sexual things and they said that they were tring to be politically correct! The only sexual thing that the Cameroonian men put on theirs was the word SEX. Alos intersting is the firs thing that they put was child bearing as where the american men put legs!
American women obviously think of themselves as very liberated but obviously the men don't seen to really think so. I think that it is interesting how the Cameroonian men and women have almost the same woman in mind. All around I thought that the Cameroonian men's depiction of a women was more kindly then the American men's. Why are the American men and women's view of women so different? Why do men in America think of Vicotira Secret when they think of women? What is wrong with that picture!? Of course this is not a conclusive study, but it is interesting to me.

This is becoming a very long post. I will try to keep you updated as I keep trekking on!

Yesterday I saw papa johns pizza in a commerical and almost tried to eat the TV screen! haha! The cravings are starting to kick in...

Anyways, au revoir!

Autumn