An Afternoon in Bamenda

Sometimes it’s easier to show than tell. I figured I’d take my camera out for a spin and catch a little sliver of what life looks like for me here. Disappointingly, the market was maybe 1/4 as annoying as it normally is, so the true essence wasn’t caught as well as I’d have liked. Nobody grabbed at me, bikes didn’t screech to a halt in front of me, market mamis didn’t beg for my business and block my path. No little boy came up and started a ten minute spiel about how I must find our my mass using his ragged scale. Perhaps I was having an off day and wasn’t looking my best. To be fair, in my worry that people would noticed the shiny camera making a movie from the comfort of my bra strap, I booked it through the crowd and didn’t stop for much conversation. If I had lingered over the passion fruit for a few seconds, I’m sure the action would have picked up.

I filmed covertly in the market to prevent theft of my crappy camera and the change in attitude people adopt when they see someone recording. People can also be offended by filming, or demand money for their image being used, however briefly. I didn’t want to start a riot, but I’m also too poor for all that. I apologize for the slightly tilted shots, walking around an African city does not prove conducive to shoving your hand into your bra and making adjustments for the frame.

The conversations in the taxi were filmed with the prior consent of everyone in the car. II began the foray into permission by explaining that my American family didn’t believe me about the traffic situation in West/Central Africa. We don’t drive on the sidewalks, I explained. They expressed that they thought that was a shameful waste of space.
These talks pretty typical of what I converse about every day. Witchcraft and where to use the bathroom are two of my favorite topics here, partially because they are so different in my world and theirs. Talking about public urination laws and white people’s lack of belief is sure to stir up a taxi full of opinions. Cameroon would not be Cameroon if people did not feel inclined to then share those opinions with me.

An Afternoon in Bamenda

The Beastly East

This week I put on my big girl pants and braved the Beastly East.

Often touted as the South West’s beachless, Francophone cousin, the Eastern region is one of the most sparsely populated places in the country. Much of the area is made up of hard wood forests, a fact that has caught the eye of more than one international logging company. The roads, as in the South West, then suffer the consequences as the unpaved soil gives way to deep ruts, a product of tens of thousands of pounds traversing a region known for their months of endless rain and malleable red clay routes. These were the mirror images of the Nguti roads I endured for nine months. I had hesitations about reliving the stress of jungle life.

Imagine my surprise when the first leg of our trip greeted us with a Celine Dion concert DVD crooning from the fore of the bus, a flip down television screen being put to good use as a crowd-calmer and time-buyer before we pulled out. With scarf settled as a make-shift pillow and air conditioning pointed squarely at my face, I was feeling like I could used to what the East had in store.

That night reaffirmed that I, sometimes, have no idea what I’m talking about. Postmate Kate and I swapped sliced of Hawaiian and Four Cheese pizza at the nicest restaurant in the capital of Bertoua and contemplated watching a movie on the volunteer house’s projector before instead opting for an early bedtime back by rainstorms.

Morning came and we moseyed off to the Batouri car park post-breakfast. We comfortably zoomed out to the region’s second largest city on newly graded roads. Not all are as lucky. Just months ago the road was a pockmarked mess, known for its many breakdowns and near-misses. Sometimes the misses are a little too near, as we saw an hour into our drive. The hefty yellow busses that commute to Batouri, affectionately nicknamed ‘prison busses’ due to their barred windows, sometimes underestimated their luggage and take a tumble on a hairpin turn. The one we encountered had toppled in the night, a product of a bad pothole and overambitious driver. Cameroonians were alongside the van, gathering the belongings they had abandoned in the night.

Our days in Batouri were just as lovely as our days in the capital. The nickname of ‘Wild Wild Est’ struck true as we split boxes of wine around a campfire, nestled under a mango tree as the bats of the area took to the skies on their nightly hunts. Our second night we bargained with moto-men and trekked out to Bogogo, a massive granite deposit known as a local Catholic pilgrimage site. We ate a picnic of tacos and cookies as the sun disappeared over the horizon. We went belly-up when the stars came out and took in the expanse of sky afforded by our relative elevation.

Our only hitch was when, at nine at night, we fought our way back to town. Through the thick of the Cameroonian jungle we zoomed, bobbled headed from helmets that also served us well in dodging low-hanging branches. It was smooth sailing until, as we pulled out, we hit a divot in the massive rock’s slope and I, like the prison busses, ended up ass over tea kettle.

No worse for wear I brushed myself off and remounted. Night gave way to day, and somehow we found ourselves at the end of our vacation. Bellies full of kossam, a Fulani yogurt that’s thick and creamy, and omelets, generously made for us by our hostesss, my ex-postmate and I again climbed inside a zippy little car that carried us the way we had come on days before. Only this time, we were rested, we were relaxed, and we were just a little more wild.

Kate and I on our way back to Bertoua, the Eastern capital.

Kate and Stephanie, our Batouri hostess, walking to town along the unpaved clay roads. In the dry season, these turn to dust, giving the town a permenant stain even after the rains come.

 

A typical Cameroonian meat market. This one hosts pangolin, monkey, dik-dik, duiker, cow, fish and more on the typical day. We purchased two kilos of meat that came from the cow’s neck. Asking for it ground upped the priced to fourteen dollars, well deserved since ‘grinding’ means a man hacking at it with a machete for half an hour. The beef was well, well cooked before serving.

Are You Ready For America Quiz

A handy quiz made from actual questions I’ve been fielded about America, and how to get there.

Ju-Ju O’clock

As we sat in her living room, eating care-package Indian cuisine, Kristin and I stopped for a moment. Cocking our heads to the side we listened. The thump-thumping of drumbeats was obvious from her house, positioned only a five minute walk from the celebrations. The Jujus had come.

Njinkom’s second class chief had died and in the wake of his passing a massive cry-die had formed. It was the party of the year, in the truest sense. Thousands had come to celebrate the life of Some Old Dude, and I then and there made a note to myself that, should I go anytime soon, a cry-die is how I want to be seen out. Stacks and stacks of crates line the procession to the family compound, filled with empty beer bottles, proof of the intensity and longevity of this shindig.

Foolishly, I wore jeans on my trek to Njinkom. It’s just easier to travel when you’ve got trousers on, and in my attempt at comfort I failed to realize that for such a traditional gathering, perhaps men’s clothes wouldn’t go over so well. Sure enough, on the way into the compound we were stopped. Mamis and moto-men alike directed us back to the house, pleading with us to change before the Jujus spied us and inflicted punishment. We decided they were right, and turned back.

Too late. Yips and yells came from men wearing dirtied potato sacks—palace Jujus sent to police the area for traditional faux-pas, a category I most certainly fell into. As they pestered me I dug through my purse, looking for bribery. Their sticks poked the back of my head as I foisted small money into their waiting hands. Unfortunately Kristin got caught in the hubbub and also gave into paying off the pests. Mamis pitied me and helpfully took my prayer scarf from around my neck. The size of a small blanket, it had no problem fitting around my waist. With a knot they had made me an impromptu skirt, easing the nerves of me, and everyone around me, who had collectively winced when the Jujus charged us.

We eased forward towards the compound, too scared to actually enter inside its walls. We’d been warned that the compound Jujus wouldn’t take kindly to our presence as women, and that we were in for a world a worry if we decided to take the chance and push through the crowd. We instead sought refuge among a grove of banana trees that provided a sliver of sight into the festivities. There we waited.

Jujus came and Jujus went. Some were dancers, entertaining the crowd with the rhythmic slap of ankle-bracelets adorned with nut husks. They perform their routine, a testament of coordination and precision, to pound the spirits from the ground, happy masks depicting people and animals balanced carefully on their heads. Other Jujus were far more intimidating, including Nkor, a Juju akin to the Minotaur, who was restrained by a troop of bare-chested men. They wore traditional skirts and held on tight to ropes fashioned to Nkor’s waist, preventing him from wrecking havoc on the crowd. Nkor for some of his performance carried a goat, alive and kicking, around the compound in his mouth. The goat would later be slaughtered.

Some Jujus have a penchant for beating people, and caught up in the excitement of the day, Kristin and I joined the hundreds running through the tropical forest, hoping to avoid an open-handed smack from a Juju on a power-trip. We hunched behind trunks and bushes, even as those around us assured us that they’d never harm us. Our whiteman magic was our protection.

Our friends, Immaculate and Marvin, proved to be our litmus tests for the day. Calmly they would place hands on our shoulders and tell us when it was okay to snap a picture, or to not worry about fleeing for this particular Juju, usually a lesser one who didn’t have permission to smack a white woman, anyway. When we were too cowardly to sneak in close to the Juju they’d take our cameras and do it for us, steeled with the expression of National Geographic photographer, fearless in the face of danger. Only once did we see them, too, hightail it to the woods. They acted as our interpreters for the day, explaining the background information for each Juju, stories they’d known since they were small.

The crowd, who had all day been hootin’ and hollering in the spirit of celebration, changed their tune when the most senior and grave Juju in Njinikom came to pay homage to the departed chief. He was a Juju who, in times past, was charged with slaughtering those who had done wrong and deserved to die. Occasionally he would toss the offenders off a local cliff, until one day a fugitive instinctively grabbed at the Juju, taking him over the cliff as well. Now the Juju’s ancestral spirit resides in a different corporal form, of course, and that guy is taking no chances and sticks to killing only livestock.

By the time the sun started heading over the mountains surrounding Njinkom, our group was ready to retire. We had spent the last four hours standing, with the exception of crouching and bowing to the Killer Juju in an effort to not be his next victim and a brief stampede caused early in the day by a Juju vs. Villager scuffle that left me crab-walking in the banana grove’s muck, a large Mami sitting on my knees, as she too had been caught in the crowd’s fleeing.

The party continued without us, as every Juju and groupie in the area made its way to pay respect, as their absence would mean their banning from future events and performances. We let them go on without us, and instead turned in early, exhausted. As we curled up in bed we could still hear, not even a five minute walk away, the thump-thump of the drums welcoming the Jujus in the night.

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That one time I held an ape (which is totally not the same thing as a monkey)

Somewhere along the line I missed the mothering instinct.

I don’t see small children and remark on their teeny tiny feet, or how I could just eat them up. Kid antics don’t make me smile, they make me cringe. The thought of one of those tiny jam-handed hooligans making any sort of bodily function near or on me nauseates me.

In summary: children, at least right now, are just not for me.

I’ll tell you what is for me, though. Chimps.

A visit to the Ndawara tea plantation this past weekend was
fascinating, mostly because I knew I’d get to hold a chimp at the end of it. I was willing to fake whatever interest I had to about tea leaves and their tendencies if it meant someone would be hoisting a widdly biddy ape into my arms by sunset.

And they did.

I don’t even have fancy words or funny jokes to put in this post. Don’t expect some sort of wit to come shining through, because for what has amounted to one of the best moment of my entire life, I have nothing pithy to say.

I think I now know what it must feel like to hold your baby for the first time, because looking into Billy’s eyes was like seeing my future, my past, and myself ( and maybe a tinge of God) all at the same time. It was life affirming. Any doubts I have had about absolutely having to work with animals as my career are erased. Any worries I have had about the lifetime I’ve spent studying animals (instead of figuring out how the hell to interact with people) are quelled.

If I could, I’d give five year old Georgia the biggest high five, even though her hands are probably sticky from god only knows what and her clothes are filthy from playing in the creek. She totally called it: animals are the friggin’ best.

Nailed it

Seriously, what the hell is even happening right now?

We all know fashion trends vary around the globe. Japan’s got it’s own brand of weird that I can’t even begin to get into, America might be the only place where ‘camo’ is a fashionable category of clothing, and I assume Norway holds a special place in its heart for Viking-inspired sportswear (but who really knows what Norwegians do, anyways?)

Cameroonians manage to bring together Western wear and traditional wear and most of the time, I get it. Throw on some jeans and a wrappa top. Sport your fular headwrap while rocking a mini-skirt. Don some heels and sashay away in your caba and fake prada purse. You don’t go out in a un-pressed shirt or unshined shoes, unless you want to be seen as poor. Holes and stains? Not okay, unless you’re a village mami or manual laborer headed to the farm.

One fashion trend still leaves me scratching my head, though. Somehow, someway, Cameroon fell victim to the coke nail.

Once only know as a trend among American pimps, the coke nail has risen anew in Africa in Miniature. Despite living in a place filled with garbage, people relieving themselves by the side of the road while I pass, and horrible mistreatment of much of its population, Cameroon’s coke nail problem is the only thing I’ve found here that has chilled me to my core. I cannot physically bring myself to look at one without feeling a lump rise in my throat, like I’ll soon need to hurl.

The coke nail is typically a male thing. Sometimes they choose to grow the pinky nail, other times, the thumb. Occasionally, you’ll see variety, but you can almost guarantee these two nails as the nails of choice. The length these nails reach make fake acrylics look humble and demure. Because it’s Cameroon, everything over time become soiled and tinted the color of the dirt that surrounds it, the coke nail being no exception. While it starts a normal color, it gradually transforms into something akin to the color of fly-paper. The thickness ain’t much off, either.

Oh, the thickness. It’s so fragile, this nail, that when my taxi driver guided his car over bumpy roads, the nail wavered and bounced along with the vehicle’s springs, the vibrations making their way the whole two inches from bed to tip.

Should he have chosen to, this driver could have patronized the closest Chinese eatery and forgone the chopsticks they’d have offered him with his meal. Just his ring finger and thumb would have been all he needed to delicately hoist each rice-y bite to his pie-hole.

Not that you’d want these things anywhere near your pie-hole, or any other mucus membrane for that matter. I imagine these nails being a near-perfect match to a Komodo dragon’s mouth. Nothing in this country is sanitary, and certainly nothing from a Cameroonian taxi man’s overgrown and underwashed nail bed. People here are not exactly know for their adherence to hygiene—Peace Corps alone has been foisting hand-washing stations upon people for the last 50 years, and yet, most people you encounter assure you that they need neither a hand-washing station nor toilet paper on their trips to the latrine. The likelihood of a be-coke-nailed man purell-ing on the daily is slim to none.

I understand their origins—what better way to prove to their world that you live in the lap of luxury than a disgustingly discolored nail hanging off you finger like a threatening talon? You see this claw? This knife of a nail? That is how little I have to work. Who could hoe a row with a thing like that digging into your palm (though, let’s get real, that thing could plow for you…)? In what world would that mass of keratin be conducive to keeping up the farm? Though the coke nail is a male-dominated game, the females are nowhere near innocent. They instead focus on their own symbol of high-breeding: the toes. Painted and primped, they proudly display via sandal little piggies whose nails reach well beyond the tips of their toes.

The country has no mercy for my gag reflex.

Poster Child

Looking into my own eyes, printed onto a several foot poster and glossed over with laminate, turns out to be a bit unsettling.

Even though I’ve become accustomed to the poster as it hangs in the midservice conference for Cameroon’s Grand South, my first interaction with the advert was a mixture of pride and shame.

Prideful for obvious reasons, ones you could likely guess without my prompting. Though tens of volunteers were on display thanks to these regional posters, and even though these posters were only on display in a tiny conference room in the Western capital of Bafoussam, and even though the only eyes on these posters were fellow volunteers and counterparts, you can’t help but feel pangs of satisfaction when you see yourself, representing the Peace Corps name in full color.

The secondary part, laced with shame and self-doubt, arrives when you realize that to the world, this glamorized image of well-integrated and helpful volunteer is quite literally the poster child of an average Peace Corps man or woman.

I often speak on the daunting task of tearing down the stereotype of Rich Whiteman during my service here. Constantly explaining that, while I am from a wealthy nation, I get paid a stipend that places me alongside the typical middle-class family as far as earnings. I live comfortably, but only due to a well-maintained budget and good head on my shoulders. I cannot take your child to America, just as I can’t afford to fly myself to the motherland on a whim. I am not a dollar sign. I am not the messiah.

Seldom do I realize the label placed on me from the other end of the spectrum, the population on the other side of the pond. People often confide in me that though it’s a nice idea for me, this ‘service’ thing, they simply could not do what I do. Men and women, older and younger, tell me they admire my work and that I must be out changing the world, towin’ along that big ol’ bleeding heart of mine through the muck and grime of development work. I am called brave, courageous, fearless and other code words for “that chick is crazy to be going there”. What I don’t think people realize, however, is that…

Well, I’m not.

I’m not any of those things. I’m fearful. Sane and fearful and cautious and far from a risk-taker. I stay inside. I wish for seat belts. I chastise drivers for going too fast and shake my finger at children playing too close to danger. I’m a plan-maker. I enjoy a good schedule. Better than that is a good schedule filled with nothing.

That’s right. Though I hate to disappoint, there are more moments where I’m not doing work than seconds of the day where I am. I have bursts of activity punctuated by massive pauses. Downtime defines my week. I am not a visionary. I am not even a very good teacher. And when I’m angry at this country and tired of its challenges, I’m a poor excuse for a humanitarian. Some days my high point is making a grocery list. Some days I don’t step outside. Some days I sit and wonder how everyone got this impression of me that seems so backwards from the person I’ve become here.

The real accolades go the people back home. The ones who faithfully write letters and the ones who ask how they can help. The serial package senders. The enthused emailers.The worried mothers who let their babies go and the dads the keep tabs from timezones away. The things you do take more gumption than anything I do here. If they made a poster for the big-shots in my life, it’d be you gracing it, bright and shiny and a beacon of hope.