Food Security and Land Rights

Last month I helped facilitate a two-day food security conference in Meiganga, a city in the Adamaoua close to the border with the CAR.  Several volunteers in the area brought health center staff and care providers who work in malnutrition.  The participant were all from villages in the east Adamaoua, and were about evenly split between Fulbe, Muslim herders who make up the dominant ethnic group in the Grand North, and Gbaya, a smaller Christian minority who tend to cultivate corn or beans rather than investing in cattle and goats.  There is no slight antagonism between the two groups; the Fulbe dismiss the Gbaya as lazy drunks, while the Gbaya feel that the Fulbe are domineering and sly.  Still, trade occurs between the groups, and in this professional setting, none of us anticipated any problems.  Colleen, a volunteer in Meiganga, had done an excellent job organizing the logistics of the conference, and things began smoothly.

My role was to give the practical demonstrations, making enriched peanut paste, soymilk, soy bouille, and tofu with the help of a CARE- trained counterpart, Marie.  But practicums must always be based in theory, and before we could light the propane stove, we had a 2-hour session on nutrition and malnutritions.  We started off on the right foot; it was frankly a relief to be working with health care providers.  As I normally give nutrition sessions to undereducated village women, who struggle with concepts like protein deficiency—or even protein as a distinct food group—it was a pleasant change to be able to open a discussion with people who already had the necessary knowledge to skip straight to talking about causality and possible interventions.

We asked the group to think through why, in their communities, food insecurity exists.  Was it a question of access to certain foods?  Was there consistent access, but poor utilization?  Was it a question of larger system instability, or was there a missing link at the household level?

A health mobilizer from a small bush village volunteered that while cities like Meiganga had access to fresh vegetables and meat on a daily basis, challenges posed by erratic transportation meant his community could only buy produce at a once-weekly market.  Another participant, a Fulbe man named Dahirou from the town of Mbarang, countered by pointing out that individuals could improve access by gardening, thus providing themselves with nutritionally diverse food options. 

Across the table, a Gbaya woman—also from the Mbarang contingent—snorted contemptuously.  “We could grow gardens, of course, if your goats would stop eating them and your cattle stop trampling our fields!”

Dahirou started up, nostrils flaring, his accent becoming thicker and his rolling r’s more exaggerated in his indignation.  ‘My goats? MY goats?!”

And like that, the whole room erupted into chaos, Fulbe and Gbaya leaping to their feet, shouting across the table in their respective patois, pointing accusatory fingers and hurling blame like handfuls of mud. It felt something like this, particularly the part between 1:36 and 2:10:

This was the most open example I had ever seen of the farmer-herder conflict, something anyone who has read about land management in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the Sahel, will recognize.  It had come up before during my service—the Nbororo, nomadic herders who wander the North and Adamoua, are widely disliked, in part because their cattle destroy crops—but I had never experienced such a stark presentation of the depth of emotion tied up in the question of land rights.  Will, the conference organizer and primary presenter, tabled the debate, and the furor finally blew over.  The participants, in typical Cameroonian fashion, seemed to hold no individual grudges, dividing into groups for the next session without complaint or rancor.

The rest of the conference went as well as could be expected.  Will and I ended up spending hours the first night boiling and straining soy curds to make tofu for the next day’s lunch—feeding almost forty people more than sample-size portions is a task not undertaken lightly.  By the end of the night, Colleen’s kitchen floor was slick with spilled soymilk, Will and I were exhausted and filthy, and every pot in the house was encrusted in tofu.  Still, it was worth it to promote soy among the participants, who in turn have the power to disseminate what they learned in their communities.

Hour two or so...

Frying up the demonstration batch of tofu the final day of the conference

Bush Justice

Ryszard Kapucinski notes in The Shadow of the Sun, a collection of reporting and essays from a lifetime spent all over the continent of Africa: “something I had observed in Africa before… the reaction to a thief—although there is plenty of theft here—has an irrational dimension, akin to madness.” 

Kapucinski was famous among foreign correspondents of the era for scorning hotel bars in capital cities crammed with stringers and hacks, instead disappearing into the bush, going to ground, and emerging weeks or months later with unique material.  He was a keen observer of culture and human behaviors, and to read him is to get a measured, thoughtful analysis of a range of African states and conflicts, from the independence years to the early 90s.  For anyone who may wish to understand the much-abused continent today—still, as it has been for decades, “an object, the reflection of some alien star, the stomping ground of colonizers, merchants, missionaries, ethnographers, large charitable organizations”—Shadow of the Sun is as close to a primer as I can suggest.   Many times while reading it, I highlighted a passage, amused or intrigued that Kapucinski’s observations matched my own, even forty years later.

The theft passage in particular struck a note, as this was something I encountered in Mbang Mboum several months ago.  I tried to write about it for the blog at the time, but it was too close, and I still felt too many conflicting emotions, so I let it drop.  Now, though, having been reminded of it (I just finished Shadow of the Sun this past week), I felt it might be time to try and externally process the affair.

Let me set the scene: I returned from a weekend trip to Ngaoundere to a somewhat disheveled house. I had left in a hurry, abandoning dirty dishes in a bucket and leaving mud trails caked in my doorway.  As is my normal practice in such situations, I commandeered the nearest half-dozen or so children, assigned tasks all around, and sweetened their shanghaied service with the promise of crayons and music when they were done.  Between us, we soon had the house in order, and an hour of coloring and listening to The Beach Boys followed.  When evening came I shooed them home, and reached into my bag to confirm if a friend had responded to the text I had sent earlier, while walking from the bush taxi to my house.

 

I groped longer than expected, confused.  There was no phone in my bag.

Frowning into the failing light, I brought over a solar lamp and emptied the contents, checking every pocket in case I had mislaid it.  Nothing.

Assuming I had put it somewhere while cleaning, and knowing from experience how hard it is to see anything in my house by wan candle and lamplight, I resolved to look the next morning when the sun was up, and put the matter out of my mind. 

The next day, despite a thorough search, there was no sign of it—and by noon my solar lamp, which I had left in its accustomed place beside my house to charge, was also missing.  A few of the kids who had helped me clean were in my Grassroot Soccer club, and as we had practice that afternoon, I pulled them aside during scrimmage.  I told them to come to my house that evening with the others who had been there the day before; once all were assembled, I tried the gentle, liberal approach.  I talked to them like they were equals, calmly explaining what had happened and how that made me feel, and urging them, if they had taken the phone or solar lamp or seen another kid take it, to come and talk to me separately.  There was no need for public shaming; there was no need for punishment.  I just wanted my belongings back.  A line of carefully blank faces stared back at me.  No one would talk, even to implicate another.

                 

At this point, disappointed with the children—I had trusted them implicitly—but unsure how to proceed, I was about to send them all home.  My landlord Djodah, however, had come over to see what was going on.  As I explained the situation, his face clouded with rage.  “You should have told me about this when it happened!” he hissed, before turning to the children and immediately raising his voice, bellowing at them in Mboum and shaking his fist.

I should pause to explain the vast gulf between African and, say, Northern European philosophies regarding child rearing.  I remember explaining to Danish friends once that I had been spanked as a child, and seeing their horrified reactions.  “But that’s child abuse!” they protested, continuing to argue that in Danish thought, there’s never a need to even yell at a child.  They are reasoning individuals, and can be brought to see the error of their ways through dialogue.  Certainly, there is a faction of Americans who believe this, as well—and a faction that believe in the good, old-fashioned character-building method of sending a child out to cut their own switch.  This is why spanking, in particular, is such a controversial subject for many American parents.

Blame it on the colonial heritage of strictly authoritarian behaviors and patterns of thought; blame it on older, traditional social norms that still hold root in villages; chalk it up to what you will, but child discipline here in Cameroon is severe, always physical, and never involves reasoned dialogue.  Parents routinely beat their children, even for relatively minor peccadillos.  It’s part of an entire system of unquestioning submission to authority, and extreme, sometimes arbitrary punishment for transgressing those boundaries. 

It becomes apparent, then, why my carefully worded appeal to the children did nothing to solve my problem.  In my eyes, I was treating them fairly; I was assuming a priori innocence and appealing to their empathy and innate sense of justice to get my phone back.

But here, children are not treated that way by adults.  As many an education volunteer has heard, to their horror: “If you don’t beat us, we won’t respect you.”  In the logic these kids grew up with, I had not raised my voice, so I could not really be upset about it.  The thefts must not be such a loss to me, or I would have been yelling and laying about with my fists. 

Which is, incidentally, exactly what Djodah began to do.  The minute he started doling out slaps, his hand cracking against the sides of heads indiscriminately, the children changed their tune: they all, immediately and loudly, began peaching (so to speak), singling out one among their number.

Djodah pulled this boy out, along with Nyari, his middle son, who was among the children.  It was unclear why he was including Nyari, who had not been fingered by his snitching companions; I suspect he was angry that one of his children should even be suspected of such an act, and was (rather unjustly) trying to teach Nyari a lesson—Nyari, who had done nothing but happen to be in the yard at the wrong time.

As the other children melted away, he forced the two boys to their knees, fetching a long, plastic-tubed section of electrical wire from his house.  This he employed as a whip, bringing it hissing down upon the boys’ backs and arms—they had immediately fallen into defensive postures, covering their heads with their hands—while roaring at them in Mboum.  The boys shrieked as the blows rained down on them, each connecting with flesh with a painful-sounding crack.  Their howls were comprehensible, if only by their tone: denial of any relevant knowledge, and pleading for the punishment to stop.

I milled around in an excruciating state of indecision, horrified by the turn events had taken.  On the one hand, we had been taught in our initial training that this was a cultural norm in which we should not try to intervene.  We were free not to engage in it ourselves, of course—education volunteers are armed with an arsenal of alternative punishments, which shame their students without harming them, relying on that other staple of African collective culture, public humiliation.  And yet, we were warned that this was a battle best not chosen.  We would not change anyone’s behaviors, and would only put ourselves in a socially unacceptable position by interfering in a family in that way.  On the other hand, that’s all fine in the abstract, but I was directly responsible for these children being beaten, and I wanted no part in it.  Once more, as happens so often here, I was torn between respect for cultural relativity, a desire to be integrated, and the sense that I was witnessing something that was objectively wrong, and that I should do something about it.  

Meanwhile, quite a crowd had gathered in the compound.  I had assumed, if I had thought about it at all, that the other children had meant to escape before Djodah’s wrath spread to them as well.  It turns out they were acting as bailiffs, summoning the jury: the entire quartier, who had been mobilized with remarkable efficiency to witness this summary execution of justice.

Enraged beyond reason by the failure of his methods to produce results, Djodah retired the electrical wire in exchange for a black rubber inner tube, much thicker and heavier than his first whip.  Screaming, his eyes bulging, he brought it slashing down on the children, whose screams escalated.  At this, tears sprang to my eyes.  I ran forward, yelling in French and English for Djodah to back down.  “I don’t care!” I cried, starting to feel hysterical myself.  “No phone is worth this, leave it, I’ll just buy a new one!  For God’s sake, stop!”

Barely had I laid a pacifying hand on his arm when my neighbor Rougaya—a round-faced woman with generous curves, but deceptively muscular beneath her bulge—pulled me forcibly back, shaking her head.  “You can’t stop this,” she explained curtly, but not unkindly.  “This is bigger than you, now.  This is about having thieves in Mbang Mboum.  We don’t let that happen.”  When I kept protesting, she cut me off firmly.  “It’s not your decision anymore.”

Looking around at the faces in the crowd, I saw that I was the only one upset by the proceedings.  Everyone else was watching Djodah’s frenzied performance, his normally jovial smile twisted into a rictus of fury, with expressionless faces and arms casually crossed, as though watching a mundane transaction in the marketplace. Occasionally the crowd would murmur to each other or hiss disapprovingly at the boys’ faltering and apparently inadequate responses to Djodah’s interrogation.

There was, however, a system at work; while I did not understand what I was seeing at the time, with Rougaya’s help the next day, I put together the pieces.  Two older women, one the sister of the chief and one the grandmother of the accused, had positioned themselves closest to the boys, now writhing on the ground, clutching at their welts and covering their faces as they shrieked.  They had been wordlessly acknowledged by everyone present (everyone except me, as I understood neither the familial connections that awarded them these positions nor the underlying traditional structures of justice that were at play) as, respectively, judge and advocate.  Djodah, driven to Kapucinski’s irrational madness, dropped the inner tube and picked up an enormous tree branch from the firewood pile beside the outdoor kitchen.  As he ran towards the boys, hoisting this log over his head—with what intention, I’m not entirely sure, only that it was beyond any reasonable reaction—these two women finally intervened.  One, the grandmother and acting counsel of the thieving boy, put herself bodily in Djodah’s path, putting out her arms to restrain him and interceding rapidly in Mboum.  The other gently took the wood out of his hands, laid it on the ground, and addressed first Djodah then the crowd, who immediately began to disperse.  It amazed me that women could have that kind of influence in a generally misogynistic, conservative Muslim society; I imagine this traditional system of village justice may predate Islam, but here I am straying into conjecture.  It is interesting, however, that the imam was not called to judge the proceedings, while the absent chief’s closest relative—woman though she may be—was.  

The gist of her decree was that the matter should be adjourned for the evening, and that the boy would receive further punishment from his family until the stolen objects were produced.  His grandmother confirmed, Rougaya translated, that they would not spare the rod, and frog-marched her wayward progeny out of the compound.

And as quickly as that, it was done. 

Two days later, Djodah happily presented me with the solar lamp.  The phone, it was eventually determined, had been sold on a subsequent market day to someone from Ngaoundere.  The boy, I assume, was punished again—although what became of his ill-begotten gains, I was never told.  I bought a new phone. I laboriously tracked down my contacts again. The affair blew over.

I worried that Nyari and his older brother Nzika would despise me for my instigation of the punishment, but to my relief they didn’t seem to hold any resentment towards me at all.  As Rougaya had tried to explain, this was never understood to be a personal problem; it was a problem for the whole community.  In a village where no one locks their doors—if, indeed, their mud huts have locks, or doors for that matter—theft cannot be tolerated.  There are no police here; and at any rate, no one was thinking of this as a question of law.  This was a question of basic social structure and the natural laws that must exist for men to live together, and if I sound like I’m getting all Rousseau on you, well, it passed through my mind in the weeks following the incident. 

I’m still not comfortable with the thought that I instigated the brutal lashing of two children, even if one of them was confirmed to have been a burglar.  The kids may not have seen the affair as being at my bidding—a theft had been identified; of course the community had to act as they did—but I wonder if I shouldn’t have intervened earlier, or made stronger my objections.  After all, I was the plaintiff here; could I really not have forced Djodah to cease, if I had thrown myself in front of him?  I might not have gotten my solar lamp back, if I had obstructed this frontier justice from its path—but I wonder if any physical possession was really worth the pain I inadvertently inflicted on a boy.  Where do cultural differences end, and questions of basic human rights start?  On the other hand, if this is how justice is always meted out here, and if it works for this community in this setting, who am I to step in and say what should or shouldn’t be done? “ Spare the rod, spoil the child”?  Do I really have a better solution?

I remember reading somewhere—I think in a New Yorker fiction piece—the quotation, “Life is an unanswered question.”  It struck me as pretentious at the time, but I’m becoming more comfortable with it as a philosophy; or at least with the slightly modified, “Life is a series of unanswerable questions.”

Mudwoman

Not a particularly new, expansive, or thought-provoking blog post-- mostly reporting on the weather, and repeating themes regular readers of this blog will have encountered before.  Frankly, there's not much else I can bear to talk about for the moment; I'm trying to handle wrapping up my service, closing my post, grad school applications, job applications, and planning a two-month backpacking trip, which is more than enough.  The next six weeks will be quite busy, but I'll try to write up some more definitive thoughts about the end of my service and my impending COS.

We’re nearing the end of the second, shorter rainy season, and I can’t say I’m sad to see the monsoons go.  When the first rainy season began, back in April, it was pleasant; as no one dares exit their huts in a downpour, I could take the excuse of the rain to make endless cups of coffee and consign myself to my indoor hammock for the afternoon.  There was the problem of omnipresent mud, but once I accepted that my floors would never really be clean and that my shoes would always have inch-thick layers of red clay adhering to their soles, I was able to achieve a certain level of zen regarding my mud.  It was part of me, and I it.

Upside of all the rain: riotous morning glories on the fence between my garden and soy field

July and August brought a short respite.  While it still rained off and on, many days were mostly sunny.  It was nice to have that vacillation between wet and dry.  I could run outside most mornings without sinking ankle-deep in mud.  I could—and did—spend days working in my garden and soy field.  I completed four murals, my painting interrupted only a few times by persistent drizzle.

But now the rains are back, and with them pervasive damp.  Everything is starting to mold: a leather pouf I bought from the artisanal market in Ngaoundere was covered with grayish fuzz, the old clothes and fabric scraps I had stuffed it with musty and dank.  I gave it to the children in my compound to clean, but they came back shaking their heads sadly: it was a hopeless case.  In my office at the health center, the stacks of paperwork I shelved in a closed cabinet let out a fusty odor.  A journal I use for tracking family planning home visits was covered with a light green dusting of mildew.

The effects are the most vivid in my kitchen.  It is a constant battle under the best of circumstances to keep food in some semblance of edibility; in the North during dry season, the biggest challenge was fresh produce, which would almost instantly shrivel or sublime in the extreme heat.  The solution was to rely heavily on dried goods: dried fruits, beans, pulses, even the ubiquitous dried leaves every family eats daily in sauce.

Here, I have the opposite problem.  Produce stays fairly fresh, because temperatures are moderate—but the constant damp is deadly for anything not vacuum-sealed, which is to say everything else on my shelves.  I dried moringa leaves during a food security formation a few months ago, and had kept them in a Ziploc to use in cooking later on.  The other day I picked up the bag, glanced at it, and dumped the entire thing into my compost, horrified.  The Ziploc had not kept the leaves from slightly rehydrating, and therefore rotting.  The same went for shredded coconut I had bought while down South.  I popped a handful into my mouth, then immediately spit it out: the stale, fetid taste was overwhelming.

Weevils are abundant these days; somehow they make it through sealed plastic Tupperware, leaving me to feel like a sailor on an 18^th-century warship, sifting infested flour to make hardtack.  I’ve put aside the unsalvageable staples—millet and, sadly, oatmeal my grandmother sent me—to make dog food with.  I mix the oatmeal (weevils and all) with a handful of flour, boil it to death, and beat in oil, milk powder, and a raw egg.  This slop I dole out morning and night, as though I were the matron of a Dickensian workhouse, and Scipio my little Oliver Twist.  Luckily she seems perfectly happy with her gruel—at least, she’s never asked for more, which I suppose is not quite the same thing. 

Aliz and I give a visiting PCV, Elijah, a brief garden tour between rain showers.

The Garrison Keillor Effect

About a half a year ago, my six-year old Macbook finally kicked it, joining two Nooks, an iPod classic, and a supposedly rugged, shock-proof hard drive (I want my money back on that one) in the litany of electronics that, thanks to Cameroon, are no longer with us.  I suppose the bush taxi travel took its toll, as did, I have no doubt, pervasive dirt and damp; but causality aside, this was more than a minor inconvenience.  Without a Macbook, I have no way to update my iPod—which means for the last six or seven months, I’ve had a limited and unchanging menu of podcasts and audiobooks.

I should mention that this may soon become a moot complaint, as my iPod itself recently suffered a violent accident while I was out making sport (damn you, burpees performed on a rocky slope!)  The screen is now shattered, and every now and then the music stops altogether, replaced by a mechanical robot voice badly mispronouncing the names of the songs in the order they appear.  I like to think of these moments as my own personal episodes of Stephen Hawking Presents: Your Playlist.

But getting back to our sheep: like many Peace Corps volunteers, I acutely feel the lack of intellectual stimulation in village life.  Most of my friends are uneducated women; our conversation is limited to updates about the children, the fields, the corn harvest, and what sauce they’re preparing to eat with couscous that day.  Men are, for the most part, little better.  I cannot count the number of times I’ve found myself entrapped in an inane argument, such as, “Did someone’s goat die because of sorcery? It’s up for debate!” or, “Did Obama personally fake the Libyan uprising so that he could kill Qaddafi, a hero of Africa and in no way a violent and oppressive dictator? Probably!” or, “Does poverty exist among white people? Or course not! Mais ici chez nous en Afrique…”

This is what makes podcasts, second only to books, so vitally important.  While I probably could spend all day in my hammock reading, I’d feel guilty doing so—but podcasts are forgivingly portable, and much of my life in village involves mindless manual labor.  Whether I’m scrubbing layers of mud from my floors, working in my garden, harvesting soy, hand washing clothes, or cooking, I can turn on my speakers and listen to Ira Glass’ distinctive voice recount something quirky on This American Life.

Now, though, I’ve worked my way through everything, multiple times. I listened to all four audiobooks.  I listened to V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, twice.  (Spoiler alert: it’s just as depressing the second time around!) I can now anticipate every joke on twelve episodes of The Dinner Party, a culture show that gives you everything you need to win at this week’s dinner party (what? It’s their tagline! It practically comes in the same breath, now that I’ve heard it enough!) Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, I adore Radiolab, but I no longer wonder how a mantis shrimp sees color, or where bliss comes from, or what it’s like to rocket through the earth’s shadow from outer space.  I know all these answers.  I’d like you two to ask new questions, please. Same goes for the interviews on Point of Inquiry and Inquiring Minds, two fantastic podcasts hosted by Chris Mooney.  Freethinkers and science-lovers out there, let me recommend both of these—assuming you listen to them like a normal person, not like a deranged fanatic.

All this to say two things: 1. I’m really looking forward to America, where electronics can be repaired or replaced instead of consigned to the elephant graveyard that is my backpack, while the living remnants of their dwindling herd look increasingly sparse on the bookshelf; and 2. I’ve spent much more time than I anticipated wondering things like: Am I in any way qualified to work in public radio?  How do you spell Chana Joffe-Walt, anyway? (Before you get impressed, I just cheated and Googled it.) And, most relevantly for this blog post, does Garrison Keillor really improvise every episode, or does he kind of have, like, an outline with rough body paragraphs when he gets on stage?  And why does A Prairie Home Companion hold such a nostalgic grip on my heartstrings, anyway?

I spent a while pondering this last one earlier this week, as I scrubbed guano out of the corners of my bat-infested house and listened to the antics of Dorothy at the Chatterbox Café.  I think part of it is for purely personal reasons: growing up, my family listened to A Prairie Home Companion every Sunday.  It would be playing right as we piled into the car from the 11:00 church service, and my mom would turn on the radio in the kitchen once we got home and she was preparing lunch.   By the time the Guy Noir: Private Eye segment came on, we’d be sitting down to say grace.  It was practically a ritual.

But I think, especially while I’m here, the content of the show has a lot to do with my sense of wistfulness, too.  I have no desire at this point in my life to move to anywhere like Lake Wobegon.   And yet—and yet, knowing very personally how miserable small-town gossip can be; knowing how stifling is the lack of exposure to culture and ideas (see above); knowing how quickly one can tire of an inbred social group—even knowing these things, Keillor makes life in small-town Minnesota sound, well, ideal. 

There’s an expression one hears bandied about among volunteers: “Cameroon.  Nothing works, but everything works out.”  It’s a useful mantra, particularly on those days when the bus got stuck in the mud, and then the second bus had an engine stall out, and everything smells like fermented manioc, and there’s a baby of undetermined origin snotting onto your lap and it’s 110 degrees and you don’t have a valid ID, because the gendarme wouldn’t stamp your papers because he wanted a bribe so you’re just hoping there aren’t any police checkpoints ahead.  Nothing works.  But, at the end of the day, things will work out.  It might not be what you expected, and it might involve some harrowing delays, but you will, eventually, make it to your destination, and have a great story to tell your friends over cold beers.

And this is what Keillor sells, about the American existence.  As someone who has spent two years employed to promote our national values abroad, I can’t help but feel cynical when I get into civilization, tune into the news, and find out what my nation’s actually up to.  Congress continues to unquestioningly fund Israeli defense, despite major human rights concerns about the deaths of hundreds of Gazan civilians.  Corporations are now considered people, to the extent of having religious beliefs they can impose on their employees.  People we elected to govern us seriously advocated setting the National Guard on children coming across the border as refugees, because they were illegal immigrants. (And yes, I am a month or two behind in the news cycle.  I’m sure as soon as I catch up, I’ll be just as horrified.)

But Keillor reassures me: everything works out.  In Lake Wobegon, nothing ever goes seriously wrong.  It’s been a quiet week, after all.  There are mishaps, and awkward social gaffes, but we laugh at them—and at the end of the day, we’re back at the Sidetrack Tap, listening to Pastor Liz say something folksy.

This is what I need to believe about going home.  We all fundamentally want to believe that our fellow men are good people, because that means we’re good people—even if we suspect we’re the curmudgeonly Clive Bunsen of our community or group of friends.  Keillor eschews national politics, indeed any politics, concentrating instead on the minutia of everyday life: a small-town business like Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery and the fate of the local baseball team, the Whippets.

And this helps balance my priorities.  When I go home, I’ll be going home to my family.  I’ll be going home to the town where I grew up, where our version of the Krebsbachs and the Magendanz’ will still be there.  The important thing, in the short term, won’t be some meta- thought experiment about What It Means To Be American; the important thing will be connecting with people, going back to Captain Buzzy’s Coffee for a Colon-buster, eating dinner with my parents at the same Italian restaurant we’ve patronized for years, where the same two middle-aged waitresses have served tables since I can remember.  It’s a comforting thought.

Thanks, Keillor.

The Gravediggers

To risk sounding like the opening lines of a bad country song, my dog died last week.  [Insert lyrics re: pickup trucks, cowboy boots]. 

It was the puppy, Jacqueline Cousteau.  I had been in Ngaoundere for the weekend to work on applications and catch up on emails, and got back into Mbang Mboum just before 1:30 prayer on Sunday.  My landlord having recently taken a second wife, a widowed mother of five, the number of children in my concession has doubled.  I’m still unaccustomed to the new dynamic, and was a little overwhelmed by the mob that swallowed me as soon as I climbed off my moto, little hands grabbing my bags and tugging on my shirttail. 

“Laura! Laura! Lao Mboum!” they chanted, my actual name and my household name competing as the children called over each other. 

“Yes, yes,” I agreed vaguely, distracted by the difficulty of unlocking my door while juggling two bags of groceries and a motorcycle helmet. 

Nyari, the oldest son, pushed his way to the front.  “Non!” he cried.  “Laura, c’est le sien”—le chien, the dog, his Northern accent eliding a hard “ch”.

I looked at him, not yet understanding.  Nyari’s younger brother Nzika took up the thread.  “Il est mort,” he said, still smiling, his tone matter-of-fact.  The other children pressed closer, curious to see my reaction, as I registered for the first time the small, still, furry body barely visible behind a row of potted plants on my porch. 

Two things flashed through my brain at once.  The first was a stupefied horror at the unexpected nature of the news.  The second was an instant resolve that I could not—absolutely could not—cry in front of the children, not over this.  Their attitude to delivering the news perfectly encapsulates the Cameroonian attitude towards both animals and death: it was worth commenting on—something that happened; news to give—but it was news that could be delivered with a smile.  It rained yesterday.  The corn’s about ready to harvest.  Your dog died.  It was certainly nothing to get worked up over, nothing particularly sad.  I know the family already has trouble understanding my attachment to my dogs, and while they try to make excuses for me as an American, they disapprove, on some level, of me feeding the dogs meat and letting them into my house.  The children aren’t ill-intentioned, but they can be thoughtlessly cruel, and I knew if I showed emotion, they would laugh. They would not be amused by my pain, but amused by the strange thought that someone would cry over a dog.

So I swallowed hard and carried on, putting my bags away as quickly and efficiently as possible before walking to my postmate Alizabeth’s house.  As I told her the news, I began to feel a lump in my throat, and when she immediately pulled me into a hug, I dissolved into tears.  As I wiped them away and took a few deep breaths, Aliz gathered a shovel and an old cardboard box.

Cousteau’s little body was already stiff; Death, the taxidermist, had done his work.  I tried to fold her into the box, and bit back an inappropriate impulse to laugh at the legs that determinedly jutted out, as though she were trying to brake an unexpected fall.  Too late for that, little girl.

The children goggled at us as we carried the canine corpse out to our garden, currently at the height of bloom.  We found a clear spot, behind the sweet potato mound and adjacent to the cucumbers, within sight of a wall of exuberant sunflowers.  Scipio Africanus, Cousteau’s mother and my first dog, came bursting out of the rows of corn; she sniffed the rigid cadaver before losing interest and wandering away, not seeming to find anything in the dead dog that related to her.  As Aliz searched for rocks to build a cairn, I began to dig. 

The sun beat down mercilessly, and I soon stripped down to my sports bra, sweat rolling down my back as I attacked the red clay hardpan.  I fell into a rhythm, the thud of the shovel head matching my heavy breathing.  A half a foot deep.  A foot deep.  I realized I was crying again, although I wasn’t sure it was only over Cousteau. 

My two dogs, while sometimes an impediment to my fuller integration—I have far fewer visitors than my postmate, and neighbors have told me it is because people are afraid of my unchained beasts—have been one of the most important factors in keeping me sane during my service.  In an environment where I am constantly required to adapt to other people’s culture and expectations, having a dog, unpopular as that decision is, is a way to draw a boundary, to push back, to stake out some territory that is mine.  It is my small way of forcing people to meet me in the middle, which doesn’t often happen here.  The relationship between a Peace Corps Volunteer and her community is not one that goes both ways.  We cannot insist that things be on our terms; our communities can and do.  We must try daily to understand a point of view and set of values that may be alien to us; our communities, unaccustomed to this practice, rarely try to understand our core beliefs or why we think and do the way we do.  The burden is on us to bend over backwards in the name of cultural sensitivity.  Knees are inappropriate in a Muslim village, so skirts shorter than mid-calf are excommunicated from my wardrobe.  Vegetarianism is inexplicable and perceived as rude, so I eat meat.  Never would I insist that my village try and understand that in America, we rock booty shorts in public and embrace veganism.  Don’t get me wrong, I think being forced into this kind of humility is an extremely healthy exercise.  It’s something that we don’t do enough of at home, where trumpeting about Rights in a Free Country often drowns out empathy and respect—but it’s wearing, to so rarely feel comfortable asserting what I really think and believe and stand for.  It’s hard to feel forced to subjugate parts of myself, as much as I understand the value of doing so. 

The dogs, then, have come to be more than just dogs.  They represent a small but public declaration of my values and my culture.  I cannot come out to people here as an atheist.  I cannot be honest about my beliefs regarding gender and sexuality.  I cannot insist that people show me respect equal to that they would show a man.  I can, however, go running every morning with my two dogs bounding along at my side—and if it makes people uncomfortable, which it almost certainly does, well, that’s healthy for them, too.

 

Obviously I don’t always think of my dogs in these terms; the vast majority of the time, they’re slobbery, dirty animals, who are cute and annoying and loud and eat everything and track mud into my kitchen.  They’re dogs.

But as I panted and sweated and shoveled dirt onto my feet, I felt that it was more than a dead dog in the cardboard box.  It was, for that moment, my right to make decisions based on my internal compass, not on the fear of judgment and gossip from my narrow-minded community.  An Elspeth Huxley quote came to mind: “Africa is cruel.  It takes your heart and grinds it into powdered stone—and no-one minds.” 

If this seems dramatic, it was.  Cousteau was my favorite of the litter of puppies, but she was a dog; she was not a person, and unlike some Americans, I know the difference.  The moment passed, as do all such low points.  I worked my frustration out, the ache in my shoulders cathartic.  By the time Aliz returned, laden with stones, I was in control of myself again, and had settled into a very Cameroonian state of (depending on your point of view) fatalism, or practicality.  She was a dog.  She died, as all things die.  And so we were burying her, and life would go on. 

My favorite friend with my favorite puppy. Rest in peace, Cousteau.

In Which I Get Nosy, Ask Questions, and Learn Things as a Result

In the last three months, I have been training a voluntary Red Cross club in Mbang Mboum to carry out community needs assessment, organize interventions, and monitor and evaluate the effect of those projects.  In short, having long ago given up on making much of an impact myself—and knowing that I will not be replaced, as my site is soon to be a dam flood zone—I’m trying to train 15 local volunteers to be me.  I quixotically hope to leave behind a team of people who can do everything I was trained by the Peace Corps to do, only better: they’re part of the community, they speak the languages (all four of em!), and they will be around long after I’m back in America, connecting to the International Space Station with my iPhone 7S or whatever it is the kids these days do.

It’s slow going.  Adult education carries its own challenges.  If these volunteers went to school at all, it was not to learn critical thinking; it was to be told: swallow. Regurgitate. Don’t you dare ask questions, because I, your dictator-cum-teacher, am the authority and I am to be respected absolutely.  You can imagine that trying to lead a seminar-style class on the scientific method (“There is no automatic right answer! It’s all about constant questioning!  Doubt everything I’m telling you, unless you can prove it to be true!”) put everyone a little out of their depth.  

With time, though, we’re getting there.  Last week I collected the results of a community survey we spent a month completing.  The volunteers were trained in how to carry out needs assessment.  They did practice visits to each other’s’ houses, with me observing (this they clearly thought to be silly, but in fact, given how diffident, confused, or distracted some became, it was a useful tool).  Finally, we split them into teams of two, divided the village into sectors, and off they went, clipboards and malnutrition measuring tapes in hand. 

Now the results are in, and, having discovered that a public health statistics wonk resides deep within me, I have spent the last week piddling away precious charged-laptop hours making graphs and pie charts and Excel spreadsheets of what was found.

Many of the results were unsurprising: most people get water from the free surface-water wells instead of the paying deep-water pumps, and most people have recurring diarrhea.  Some were unreliable: self-reported data would put 90% of the population as regularly attending pre-natal consultations and giving birth at the health center.  As someone who works at the health center and sees our daily traffic, believe me, that just ain’t the case.   Some were mildly depressing: even after exhaustive educational campaigns, 8% of respondents believe HIV can be transmitted via mosquitos.

But some of the data were informative, and so this data I will share with you.  (Lest anyone think all I ever do in Peace Corps is play, here's a boring work-related blog to prove you wrong.)  

This should come as a surprise to no one, but class structures exist, even in rural villages, and wealth makes health.  There is, it turns out, a 1% in Mbang Mboum—those families of marabouts and hajjis—and they skew the data enormously.  One of the questions on the nutrition section of the survey asked how many times a week women and children in the household eat meat, one of the best locally-available sources of protein and iron.  The average was once a week.  Two families, however—one that of traditional chief’s sister—reported eating meat daily.  More troubling were the self-reported data on mosquito nets, which should be distributed annually to every family with a pregnant or nursing mother, or a child younger than five (which stipulations here in the Adamaoua translate to, every family).  Only one household reported not having any bednets; the vast majority had two—although whether or not they’re used is another question entirely.  Two is actually a reasonable number, as even in large families, there are limited sleeping spaces; children tend to be piled together on a floor mat, and a mother will sleep with several of her babies and toddlers in bed with her.  The data would have put the average at two, then, except for one outlier that skewed the set: the family of a local notable who works at the health center reported having ten.  This surpassed the number of people in the household by two.  This is hardly shocking (someone working in the public sector in Cameroon is gaming the system to line their own pocket?  Never!) but, given that these are the people I work with, it’s a little disappointing.

The most interesting of the results were the ones that I didn’t expect.  One of the questions asked, “Who decides how many children the family should have?”  I was prepared to see le mari, the husband (which was the most common answer).  I was prepared to see Allah (this is, after all, a pretty conservative Muslim community).  I was not prepared for the written-in answer: ce n’est pas une decision, it’s not a decision, which a whopping 30% of respondents independently came up with.  Pregnancy just happens!  It’s not something you control!  This actually tells me a lot about attitudes towards family planning, in that I may have been focusing on the wrong angle: instead of assuming women need education about their contraceptive options, I should probably spend more time educating men and women about the fact that contraception is an option.

Having become obsessed with gender since being here, I also found it revelatory to break down the data by household demographics.  I was interested to see that 37% of surveyed families declared a female head of household.  This was a much higher number than I was expecting, although there are explanations.  Divorce is not uncommon here, and is not nearly as stigmatized as I had expected it to be—most divorced women will get remarried within a few years, either to that same husband a second time, or as the second or third wife of another man.  In the meantime, many move back with their families, but some live on their own, perhaps sharing a compound with a relative and her children.  Widows, particularly those with grown children, often become matriarchs; the family that lives across the street from me is just that, a grandmother with an ever-changing and indiscriminate brood of grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.  Finally, men who work as anything other than farmers will often move away, to the city or even farther, in search of job opportunities; these men—teachers, nurses, clerks, construction workers—don’t often bring their families with them, instead sending money back occasionally and visiting once or twice a year.  In this case, in the absence of the husband and father, a woman becomes the de facto head of household. 

Whatever the cause, these female-headed households had demonstrable differences in health knowledge and behaviors from their traditional, male-dominated neighbors.  100% of female-headed households reported giving birth at the health center, versus 72% of male-headed households.  I have already mentioned that this is a suspect statistic in either case, and that I am quite sure at-home births are being underreported.  However, given the need for a husband’s permission in order for a wife to leave her concession, it is not unreasonable to anticipate that a woman relieved of that burden would be more likely to go where she pleased, instead of sending someone to find her husband when labor pains began in order to secure his approval to go give birth in the maternity ward.

54% of respondents in female-headed households reported regularly using condoms during sexual intercourse, compared to 16% of respondents in male-headed households.  63% knew at least two methods of family planning, versus 45% of their male-dominated counterparts.  The list goes on.

What’s the takeaway from all this?  Obviously, that men are the worst.  (Haha! Just kidding! Kind of!)  In all seriousness, I am looking forward to sharing the data with my Red Cross team at our next meeting, and seeing their reactions—in particular, I want to see if they can help explain to me some of the responses that I found contradictory or slightly bewildering.  As much as poring over the surveys immediately inspired about 12 project ideas, I’m reining myself in: this is for the volunteers to do with as they will.  Based on the results, they’re the ones who will choose what health issues to address, and (with guidance, although hopefully not too heavy-handed) design interventions. 

Fasika in Addis Ababa

After my adventurous stay in Harar, I spent Easter, or Fasika, with an Ethiopian Orthodox family in Addis, hosted by Liya Berhane, a girl I met through Couchsurfing.  I met up with her near her house in the affluent Bole Tele neighborhood Saturday morning, and we dove into conversation about her father and aunt, with whom she lived; her university studies in Toulouse; and her imminent plans to move to Maryland to rejoin her mother and brother.

The family’s white-gated house was charming, with a lovely front garden shaded by an enormous spreading acacia tree.  The neighborhood was quiet and leafy, and palpably breathed wealth, from the manicured lawns and high walls to the scattering of embassies and consular residences. 

I was greeted by two German girls, Johanna and Lisi.  Volunteers from Kenya, they were returning to Germany to continue their university studies and similarly Couchsurfing along the way.  The last guest was Bez, a family friend of Liya’s from London, back home in Ethiopia for the Easter holidays.

We spent the day wandering Addis, chatting energetically over fresh-squeezed juices in a sunken beergarden.  I found the other girls, international and articulate, a pleasure to spend time with.

Liya’s Aunt Babaji, who had accompanied us through the morning, left around 3:00 to take her place at church.  Although the mass wouldn’t start until evening, it would be impossible to secure a space inside the cathedral past the early afternoon.  Resigned to spending the night outside the walls of the church, we opted to wait until after nightfall to walk over, and spent the afternoon and early evening napping and drinking coffee and tea to prepare ourselves for a night-long vigil.

Around 9:30 we finally roused ourselves and dressed.  Liya lent out white headscarves and traditional shamas, gauzy tunics, as needed.  Acutely aware of the cold—night on the Abyssinian highland felt frigid to a body used to Cameroonian equatorial heat—we bundled into thick white gabi, wool blankets that doubled as outer robes.  We joined a stream of similarly-muffled faithful heading to the enormous Holy Medhedaleim Church, where candles in abundance flickered valiantly against the night.  Worshippers stood, knelt, and slept in bundled heaps against the thick stone outer walls of the cathedral. 

Lisi and I deposited our gabis outside with the other girls, left our shoes in a pile of footwear outside the doors, and slipped barefoot into the women’s side of the packed church.   We picked our way cautiously through the mostly grounded crowd, threading up a staircase until we found perches just below the balcony.  From there we had a clear view of the priests in the nave of the cathedral, arranged in a tight circle of beards and robes.  They chanted lugubriously, accompanying themselves with clanking iron clappers.  To a slow rhythm set by a deep drum, they stepped into and out of the circle, throwing their arms back and forth, that motion setting off the metal bells in a sort of funereal Hokey Pokey. 

As I listened to this mournful dirge, I let my eyes wander across the women’s side of the church, spread out below me.  Individuals had been swallowed into anonymity, as everyone was dressed uniformly in a thin white shamas and matching headscarf.  Only about a quarter of the observant were sitting up, awake; the rest (presumably reaching hour seven or eight of this marathon service) were sprawled in the pews or aisles, asleep, still tightly swaddled in layers of white cotton.  I had the sudden, inescapable impression—perhaps influenced by the nature of the holiday, the late hour, and too much incense smoke—that I was gazing over a chamber of corpses in funeral shrouds, awaiting resurrection.

After another hour and a half or so, the heat and the overcrowding on the staircase escalated from irritating to unbearable.  Lisi and I nodded to each other, rose, and negotiated our way to the door.  A blast of cold midnight air greeted us; we hurriedly found our shoes and made our way back to Liya and Johanna, gratefully accepting the proffered gabis. 

We spent the next three hours cycling through an interminable sequence of prayer: standing, rocking, kneeling, and genuflecting, our foreheads to the ground.  Once Johanna stayed in that position for quite some time; I thought she was feeling particularly worshipful, but as she straightened her neck with a wince, I realized she had fallen asleep, prostrate.  Liya, kneeling behind me and Lisi, reached forward to tap us when it was time to stand, whispering descriptions of the prayers being sung and the sacraments being offered—several baptisms and a wedding among them—in a rapid hiss.  When parts of the service were in Amharic, she translated directly.  The scripture, however, was in Ge’ez, the ancient and now dead language of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world.  During these portions she shrugged helplessly. 

Tired, but powering through the service.

Finally the service was over.  We made our way through the celebratory crowd to the front of the church to find Mr. Berhane and Aunt Babaji, brimming with a sort of elation.  Once home, we divested ourselves of our many layers of white cotton, talking and laughing as animatedly as though it were evening and not 4:00 in the morning.

Presently Aunt Babaji brought out a huge platter of sour, fermented injera covered in red lentils and soft white cheese.  During the fast of Lent, Orthodox Ethiopians eschew all meat and dairy, making Easter day a long-awaited, anti-vegan embrace of all things animal.

The eating continued for much of the day, interrupted by what in fairness should be called a nap rather than a night’s sleep.  Breakfast was thick, delicious, focaccia-like bread, called dabo, made from sourdough and traditionally cooked for Easter; spicy stewed goat; and tella, acidic homemade beer.  The two German girls left for the airport, and Bez, Liya and I whiled away the morning roasting, grinding, and brewing our own coffee.

Green coffee beans

I learn to roast

Bez grinds the coffee with a mortar and pestle like a pro

Our finished product: the most satisfying cup of joe I've ever drunk

We lazed around for much of the afternoon, reading and going for a long walk to Khaldis, Ethiopia’s Starbucks-inspired fancy coffee chain.  As though we needed any more dairy, we indulged in ice cream and large, goopy caramel lattes, an unexpected taste of corporate America.  I continued to be impressed by the level of development I was witnessing, at least in the Bole neighborhood: we passed a mall, a movie theatre, an upscale cupcake bakery, and not one but two Pinkberry-style frozen yogurt joints.

The eating continued when we got back with a large Easter dinner.  Family from Liya’s father’s side came pouring in as we feasted on shredded chicken dripping with butter and studded with whole hard-boiled eggs, more of the goat cooked with slices of injera and green pepper, soft cheese, more bread, more injera.  We waded in meat and dairy, and washed it all down with another round of the curiously sour beer and tej, a potent local liquor. Aunt Babaji delighted in feeding everyone gursha, “little bites” wrapped in injera and popped directly into another person’s mouth.  I laughed self-consciously as I opened my mouth, feeling like a chick, but I could feel the love behind the gesture, and was thrilled to be included in the family in such a complete way.

I chatted for a while with Mr. Berhane, a lawyer and an intelligent and well-read man.  We talked Ethiopian and U.S. politics; as he had lived through the Derg, the Communist regime that ruled Ethiopia with an iron fist from 1974 to 1987, his lucid commentary on that period provided a nice counterpart to what I had already read and heard.  My first day in Addis Ababa I had stopped by the Red Terror Museum, established by victims of the regime to record the crimes carried out under the Derg.  There I had entered into a long conversation with Frey, a docent who was imprisoned for eight years with no trial and no idea upon what charges he was being detained.  “They were targeting the young and the educated.  I had not even finished high school, so I was not educated,” Frey told me drily, “but I was young.  That was enough to put me under suspicion as an enemy of the revolution.”  He spoke of the constant horror he felt at the possibility that he might now run into his jailors and torturers on the street; all had received amnesty under the Western-supported Tigray government that took over after the Derg collapsed.  I was interested to hear that Mr. Berhane’s analysis of the current and in some ways equally repressive tribal government echoed that of Frey and of Jamal, a young engineer and my bus seat partner on the way from Harar: the choices for an educated person are to lay low, to join the regime, or to flee the country.  Opposition is not an option.  The current government under Hailemariam Desalegn may not carry out open assassinations of its citizens the way the Derg did, but it’s hardly a democratic alternative; the media is controlled, ethnic conflicts have been not only tolerated but encouraged, and people are still thrown into prison without trials or a writ of habeas corpus.  All three stressed the support this government continues to receive from the U.S., where it is viewed as an ally against Islamic extremism, a threat posed in the region by Al- Shabaab.  As Jamal bitterly told me, taking the sting out of his words with a sad smile, “You fight your War on Terror at the expense of the Ethiopian people.”

Liya’s father and uncle cleaned their plates, then brought out the choicest parts of the goat.  These had been kept aside, raw, to be sliced, dipped in spice, and eaten as a final course.  On their insistence, I joined them; this was my second time in as many months eating raw goat. I was coming to find it surprisingly appetizing, despite—or perhaps because of—its evocatively muscular mouthfeel. 

I tumbled into bed that night full, sleepy, and transcendently happy.  I had arrived in Ethiopia a solo traveller with a few contacts and no solid plans, and had found by the end of the week an adopted family and several new friends.  I had struck up conversations with strangers, been invited into the house and life of a Muslim gang lord, gone to a wedding, been jumped on-- but not savaged-- by wild hyenas, and spent the Easter holidays with one of the kindest and most effusive families I’ve had the fortune to be welcomed by.  It was the least-coherently planned vacation I’ve taken, and subsequently the best.  I can’t wait to make it back to Ethiopia for a longer stay.