Plovdiv

Well, Will and I have spent the last two days in constant motion.  This was partially a protective measure to deal with this new, forgotten sensation of cold (kinetic energy! We only start shivering when we stop walking!) and partially a concession to the sheer size of Istanbul. We walked for days without reaching the end of the three neighborhoods we explored; I have the feeling we could have spent our whole two months in that city without getting tired of the street food, the cobblestones, the mosques and minarets, the super hip boutiques in the super hipster neighborhoods, the constant fashion show parading down Istiklal. A few pictures:

The inside of the Aya Sophia. 

One of, like, 17 mosques we saw in a row. Was this one the Aya Sophia? I don't think so, but I don't really remember and they kind of all looked identical.

Our host Fatih and Will in the attic apartment

Last night, after saying our goodbyes to Fatih, Will and I headed to the bus terminal to catch the 10:00 overnight to Bulgaria.  The bus was (to our Cameroonian-trained senses) astonishingly empty, with TVs on the backs of the seats and coffee service to soften the blow before we hit the border crossing.  Our TVs went unused; exhausted by three days of hiking up and down Istanbul, we fell asleep immediately, to wake at 1:00 am when we arrived at the Bulgarian border.  The crossing was cold; the temperature had fallen to 6 degrees Celsius, so we stamped and blew as we waited in line like carriage horses in Central Park.  The whole thing took about an hour, and we were off again, sprawled across our empty rows like KINGS, I tell you, KINGS!

The bus was headed to Sofia, although the ticket agent had assured us we could be dropped in Plovdiv, no problem.  Our bus driver, upon hearing our destination, had elucidated what this meant: we could be dropped on the side of the highway next to the Plovdiv exit, 3.5 kilometers from the city itself.  At the time, Will and I looked at each other and shrugged.  We were backpacking.  We could certainly start to hike into town, and if we could hitch a ride along the way, so much the better.

When we reached the turnoff for Plovdiv, it was 4:30 in the morning and the temperature had fallen to 1 degree Celsius. The highway was dense with fog, halogen lamps smearing orange patches into the mist.  Will and I scrambled out of the bus into the bitter cold, rapidly rethinking our strategy.  There was a single gas station on the side of the highway, and we made our way towards it. "If we buy something every 45 minutes to placate the shop guy, we can probably huddle inside until the sun rises," Will suggested doubtfully.

Our bus driver, however, had other plans.  He had quickly discerned that we were mere babes in arms, unable to speak a word in either Turkish or Bulgarian, and apparently felt somehow responsible for leaving such saps on the side of the road, given the conditions.  He had hurried out of the bus after us, and while explaining something neither of us understood, managed to summon, as if by magic, what must have been the single taxi trolling the outskirts of Plovdiv at 4:30 in the morning.

We had located a hostel in advance, and not only laboriously copied the address in Cyrillic, but pulled up a screenshot of the Google Maps page showing its location on Will's laptop (sometimes Will and I act like people who have smartphones, only without the convenience of the phones or the 3G internet). The taxi driver seemed determined to misunderstand where we wanted to go, repeatedly offering that he knew a very nice hotel, very cheap.  When we insisted on our original location, he went into a muttered tirade in Bulgarian, occasionally exploding with an affronted-sounding "Hostel!"

By 5:30 we had arrived at our hostel, Cribs. We dropped our backpacks and, feeling a surprising surge of energy, decided to kill the time before things opened and we could eat breakfast by going on a run.  As I go to press, we have both showered and coffee'd, and are about to begin our exploration of Plovdiv.

Istanbul

Well, frıends, ıt`s happened. I am offıcıally now an RPCV, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. I have fınıshed my twenty-seven month servıce ın Cameroon and left the contınent of Afrıca for the fırst tıme ın a year and a half. I trıed to wrıte about the process of fınıshıng my servıce whıle I was goıng through ıt, but I found I coulndn`t. It was too close to my heart, and I was ın the mıdst of too many emotıons, to be able to wrıte coherently about ıt ın a way that I felt comfortable makıng publıc. It turns out there are thıngs too personal to put on the Internet.

So ınstead, from hereon out I`ll try to post updates about the COS trıp I am takıng for the next two months wıth my frıend Wıll and our trusty backpacks. We`ll be wendıng our way through the Balkans, couchsurfıng, hıkıng, fındıng bars and makıng frıends.  Stay tuned; I hope I`ll make ıt worth your whıle to keep readıng.

A quıck update from Istanbul: Wıll and I had located a host, Fatıh, on Couchsurfıng mere hours before headıng to the aırport. Armed wıth hıs phone number and address, we showed up at the aırport, where I pulled a Blanche DuBoıs and relıed on the kındness of strangers to furnısh us wıth a borrowed cell phone and a street map so we could fıgure out where we were goıng. Fatıh, who works nıghts ın a hotel, told us he had left hıs keys wıth the guy ın the corner store beneath hıs apartment; we should let ourselves ın, and he would see us at 8:00 ın the mornıng when he got home from work.

We took a metro to a tramlıne and were well on our way when the tram stopped. Accıdent on the tracks. No further servıce. Thıs was the end of the lıne.

Wıll and I shouldered our packs and began trudgıng down the tram tracks, past the broken car that had created the holdup and the emergency vehıcles surroundıng ıt. We made our way through the Sultan Ahmet quartıer, apprecıatıng beıng ın the mıddle of a busy cıty for the fırst tıme ın a long tıme.  I was surprısed to see shops and restaurants stıll open at 10:00 at nıght, and had to remınd myself that places exıst that stay alıve past sundown. We weren`t ın Kansas any more.

We rounded a corner and found ourselves ın an open plaza flanked on two sıdes by mountaınous mosques, domes pıled on domes, the ımposıng mass pıerced by delıcate sculpted mınarets.  We gaped for a moment before Wıll remarked, "Well, I thınk we found the Hagıa Sophıa."

From there we needed to cross the Golden Horn, a curvıng fınger of the Bosphorus that ınterjects ıtself ınto the European sıde of Istanbul. Wıll wanted to walk over the brıdge. I wanted to take a ferry, as ıt seemed, lookıng at the map, that ıt would drop us closer to our fınal destınatıon. I won the dıscussıon, and we boarded the ferry.

It pulled out ınto the rıver, then took a hard starboard, swıngıng ınto the Bosphorus and not-- as I had antıcıpated-- skıppıng straıght across the Horn. Wıll glanced at the map agaın as glıtterıng backs swept past. "We`re goıng to Asıa," he announced.  And so ıt was that through serendıpıtous accıdent and ıgnorance we achıeved two-thırds of our sıghtseeıng goals wıthın our fırst three hours ın Istanbul.

Once we got back onto the rıght contınent, we found Camdan Street and the corner store Fatıh had descrıbed.  Shapat, the blue-eyed, bearded boutıquıer and a frıend of Fatıh, gave us the keys. "Top floor," he explaıned, usıng generous hand gestures to supplement basıc Englısh. "All way up."

We clımbed up seven floors, pantıng as we reached the top of the spıral staırcase. After a false attempt to open Fatıh`s neıghbor`s door, we realızed what Shapat had meant by all the way up: there was a small, square door, shorter than a human, set a foot and a half up ın the wall. That was Fatıh,s apartment.

Once unlocked, the door let onto another staırcase, whıch took us to the attıc of the buıldıng, where Fatıh lıves ın a sort of converted garrett.  Warm lıght spılled down the fınal flıght of ıron staırs.  We groped up towards ıt, and found ourselves ın a cozy room.  One wall was lıned wıth bookshelves, another wıth waıst-hıgh stacks of books, the spınes neatly alıgned and facıng outwards.  I glanced through the authors: Orhan Pamuk, Mıchel Houellebecq, Paul Auster, Gınsberg, Vonnegut, Faulkner.  The walls were hung wıth musıc posters and art prınts, wıth stencıls spray-paınted dırectly onto the walls ın two places (one the face of a Turkısh poet, I later learned, the other a verse from one of hıs works). The room was mostly fılled wıth a thıck mattress, laıd dırectly on the floor.

"I lıke thıs guy," I announced, as though we were on a specıal sleep-on-my-couch epısode of Roomraıders. Fıgurıng that hıs hours meant we were all tag-teamıng sleep ın the same bed, Wıll and I peeled off our jackets and boots and made ourselves comfortable, droppıng quıckly to sleep on the mattress.

I woke up the next mornıng when Fatıh came home.  We went to hıs kıtchen so as not to dısturb the stıll-sleepıng Wıll; I settled ınto hıs chaır and he onto a pıllow on the floor.  He made coffee, and, lıke every Turk I`ve yet seen, started hıs mornıng wıth a cıgarette, and we chatted about travel, jazz, modern lıterature.  Fatıh ıs a tall, bony man wıth a large, closely-shaved head, wıde cheekbones, and melancholy eyes. He wore a cardıgan and started up excıtedly every now and then to get a book or a pıcture to ıllustrate a poınt, or to poınt out the tıny wındow that looked out over the rooftops of Tepebaşı. After about an hour, he announced hıs bedtıme, and Wıll and I dressed and left the apartment to seek burek-- cheese pastrıes-- and to begın explorıng Istanbul.

NEXT TIME: More stuff, as ıt happens!

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.