Expats and other Exotic Breeds

Travelling alone to Ethiopia was a novel experience.  I have flown alone before, of course, but always knowing that there was something or someone familiar waiting at the other end of my voyage; this time, I was flying into the unknown.  I had the names and numbers of a few Peace Corps volunteers and a couple of Ethiopians from Couchsurfing, but other than that slim assurance, I was (pun intended) winging it.

Having been forced into an awkward flight arrangement by my last minute travel changes, I had an awful 14-hour layover in Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta airport.  I quickly located the one coffeeshop and bar, a branch of Nairobi Java House, and almost immediately fell in with a group of six heavily tattooed and dreadlocked Italian volunteers who had been on my flight from Yaounde.  They had been evacuated from Maroua following the most recent round of kidnappings, and were now headed en masse to Tanzania, to finish their year of service there.  They were a lively group, speaking mostly Italian, but occasionally dropping into French or heavily accented English for my sake, and we traded tales of being evacuated and relocated.

Danilo got a 33 tattoo in commemoration of Cameroon. Definitely better than the baton de manioc tattoo I was planning...

Soon enough they packed off to Dar es Salaam, and I relocated to the bar for my first draft beer in months.  I had barely sat down before I was accosted by the man sitting to my right, Angus, a garrulous fourth-generation Kenyan white farmer with leathery, sun-damaged skin and a large chip on his shoulder regarding race, neocolonialism, and outside intervention in Africa. "I'm an African, born and raised," he affirmed, at least five times.  I barely had to contribute my half of the conversation, as Angus seemed only to need a receptacle into which to pour his various tirades: the "bloody" Chinese, the IMF, poaching.  The only way to save the black rhino, he confided, was to drill into their horns and insert powdered cyanide.  Then, when they were poached and the horns harvested and sold as aphrodisiacs on the Chinese black market... "Is that murder?" he asked, rhetorically, his voice redolent with the twang of Empire. "Well, you shouldn't have murdered our rhinos."

At some point he finally asked what I was doing on the continent, and I fearfully revealed that I was a Peace Corps volunteer.  To my surprise, he nodded.  "I know Peace Corps," he mused.  "You're all right.  About the only ones that are, really."  The UN, on the other hand-- and he was off again, venting his wrath.  I had noticed minutes earlier that a distinguished-looking man with a closely trimmed white goatee sitting on the other side of Angus had been trying to catch my eye. As Angus began sputtering (not without reason) about ineffective aid, he rolled his eyes dramatically, such an unexpected and juvenile response that I burst out laughing, before quickly stifling it.

The damage was done.  Angus frowned, followed my gaze over his shoulder, and turned.  Feeling responsible, I tried to include the other man in the conversation.  "You looked like you had something to add," I murmured, feeling like an instigator.

"Well, nothing really," he responded in French, "except that I work as a project manager for the UN."  Angus frowned again, evidently feeling left out, and Fergus-- as he introduced himself-- switched back to English.  He was Scottish, although after a lifetime of working in Francophone countries he spoke flawless French, and he and his wife had moved to Bordeaux a decade ago. "Scottish?" exclaimed Angus.  "So am I! Well, my family is, originally.  I'm African, fourth-generation Kenyan--" at which Fergus looked like he was restraining another eye roll.

The two, diametrically opposed examples of White Men In Africa, went at it like stags locking horns.  They used me as a sort of battleground, swapping war stories and trying to win more approval.  I should note that this had nothing to do with me in particular; I'm quite sure they would have done the same with any impressionable young idealist starting down the long road to expat-dom.  Angus showed off by speaking Swahili; Fergus showed off by speaking French.  Angus told a story about being pistol-whipped during a stickup by road bandits; Fergus advised me, if ever my house were broken into and I were held at gunpoint, to invite the robbers to sit down and have a beer. "In my case, they were Muslim, so I sent a kid out to buy sodas," he continued, grinning.  "We had a nice chat, I handed over the cash from my wallet, and they went on their way.  My neighbor tried to resist, and ended up duct-taped to a chair in his underwear!"

The two men continued to spar in this way, a thin veneer of polite conversation hiding barely-veiled criticisms of the other and "his kind": white farmers who still lived mentally in the age before Mau Mau, in Angus' case, and white development "experts" who stomped all over Africa with blithe self-assurance throwing money into corrupt, useless projects, in Fergus'.  I tried not to take anyone's side, as I could see the weaknesses of both positions; I will say, however, that I found Fergus to be ultimately more sympathetic.  He seemed to recognize the pitfalls of massively funded aid projects, and responded coolly to Angus' accusations of waste by saying that he had in fact recommended not funding projects in the past, if in his view there was not sufficient infrastructure or local leadership to carry them through to completion.  Angus, although a fun guy to have stand me a drink, seemed incapable of stepping back from his own position.  He was unbelievably opinionated, but it wasn't just that; the things he was saying made him seem antiquated, a relic, as though he had been preserved whole cloth from the era of Karen Blixen.

White expats in Africa are an odd breed.  Perpetually out of our element, we respond in odd ways, sometimes playing the feudal lord a la Angus, sometimes trying too hard to be integrated-- the Dr. Livingstone model-- and sometimes getting stuck in an intensely unhappy place, a state of affairs that just confuses me.  If you so deeply hate everything about the developing world, why stay here?  I've mentally asked myself this after many a conversation with French or American diplomats, businessmen, and even aid workers.

Take, for example, a woman I met my second day in Ethiopia.  I spent the night with a Peace Corps Volunteer in Addis Ababa, a wonderful and generous woman named Carmen.  We went out for dinner with another PCV and several young NGO- or research-affiliated expats, all of whom were funny, talkative, and interesting.  The next morning I took an early bus for Harar, the fourth most important city in Islam, located on the far eastern border of Ethiopia, near Somaliland.

The bus company I took, Sky Bus, was nothing short of luxurious.  There were perhaps ten passengers spread throughout the entire charter-sized bus, so I was able to sprawl my length over two plush seats.  There was a working television in the front of the bus, which alternated between a collection of best-of Lionel Messi clips and Ethiopian blockbusters.  There was working air conditioning.  To my astonishment, an hour into the trip, the ticket tout toured the aisle with a tea cart, dispensing breakfast rolls and hot, sweet tea.
Several rows behind me, I had noticed an older white woman with brassily dyed red hair and a Northern European accent.  When we stopped mid-morning for a pee and stretch break, she sidled up to me, evidently feeling we had a tribal connection.

"First time in Ethiopia?" she asked.  I nodded, opening my mouth to exclaim happily how nice everything was-- the cities were clean; the people were calm, quiet, and welcoming; the bus felt like I was pampering myself-- but before I could get any of this out, she said in a rush, "It's not easy, is it?"

I frowned, taken aback and unsure how to respond.  She went on: "Everything here is so nasty.  You have seen this bus?  You have seen how awful and dirty it is?"  I had seen nothing of the kind-- try a coaster in Cameroon, I thought-- but she was not to be stopped.  "I mean, they could not even stop for coffee!  The little cups of sweet coffee here are so good, but they give us this weak tea made from dirty water!  They don't know how to make anything nice!"

I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable, as most Ethiopians speak fairly fluent English, and we were not alone.  Not wanting to be implicated in her unreasonable complaints, I tried to change the subject.  "How long have you been living in Addis Ababa?"

"Twenty years," she responded, shocking me.  "I moved from the Netherlands to work here, got married, my husband died.  So I found another man, but he died, too."  She stared into the middle distance, speaking bitterly.  "They die like flies here. It's so hard, when you have let yourself get attached to something--" she broke off, then said abruptly, vehemently, "--nothing here is nice!"

She spoke like a victim of post-traumatic stress, and I longed to ask the obvious question: Why are you still here? Why not go back to the Netherlands? This seemed impertinent, however, so I guided the conversation towards travel.  She brightened considerably.

"I have heard Kenya is nice," she mused, that adjective seeming to nebulously encompass everything she felt her life in Ethiopia was missing. "I think by the end of this year I will move to Mombasa.  I have heard things are nice there.  I will be close to the sea-- yes, there I think I will like it."

I hated to burst her bubble, so I merely nodded, leaving her to her fantasy of beachfront life in Mombasa.  I have never been there, so perhaps she is right.  I have been to Nairobi, though, and if she thought Addis Ababa was a busy, dirty city, she was in for an unpleasant awakening.  If she couldn't be happy in Ethiopia, I thought, there was really no way she would find Kenya substantively different.

About a half an hour later, the bus stopped at a gas station to fuel up.  The tout jumped off, disappeared for a moment, and came back holding a steaming paper cup of hot, sweet coffee, which he carried back to the Dutch woman, evidently having heard her angered complaint about the tea.  It was a considerate and humble act, and I was touched, watching how he went out of his way to accommodate a deeply depressed stranger. At the end of the day, expats or host country nationals, we're all people, and we're all fellow-travelers, in this together.  

National Girls' Forum

Some of you may know, from talking to me or via the Facebooks, that I recently returned from a trip to Ethiopia.  After a whirlwind few days of traveling, I am at long last back up in Mbang Mboum.  It’s been a busy first few days back; my mud brick house crumbles a little more every time it rains, and it’s been raining daily, so sweeping the pieces of my wall off my floor took some time.  The puppies weaned in my absence, and as I still haven’t been able to make myself give them away, I now have four dogs and a duck to feed—no mean task. 

Cassius and Jonas Salk the crippled duck face off over the last scraps of sardines.

There will be several blog posts to come dissecting my trip, telling tales and making observations about Ethiopian culture—but in the meantime, I have not yet posted a blog I wrote about this year’s National Girls Forum at the beginning of the month, so for chronology’s sake (and because my scribbled notes about the trip are not yet in presentable form) that will come first. 

***

I don’t know that I would have considered myself an unusually impatient person before coming to Cameroon, but it is uncontestable that being here has greatly improved my capacity to wait.  It is a trope, but “African time” and normal, chronological time rarely align, and getting just about anything accomplished requires a commitment to digging in your heels, turning off your brain, and waiting. 

Still, there is a limit to even my improved tolerance for indefinite uncertainty, which is how my postmate and I found ourselves spending midnight of my 24^th birthday confined to the grounds of the Protestant hospital of Douala, trying to incite a busload of Cameroonians to rebellion.

This might require some back-story.  Alizabeth and I were among thirty volunteers selected to bring a professional counterpart and a high school girl to a four-day conference on girl’s empowerment held in Limbé—the annual National Girls Forum.  I was particularly excited, as I was allowed to bring a teacher and a girl from my first post, Mandama, and couldn’t wait to see them again, catch up on each other’s news, and maintain my relationship with a community I had come to care deeply about. 

The other twenty-eight volunteers and all of the counterparts had traveled down to Limbé during the day on the 7^th or 8^th to be there for the beginning of the conference the morning of the 9^th.  Unfortunately, Aliz and I are both members of the committee that manages Peace Corps Cameroon’s USAID Food Security budget, and had meetings all day in Yaoundé the 8^th.  As soon as we could leave, we booked it to the bus station and caught a coaster bound for Buea, anticipating that we’d get from there to Limbé around 9:00—just in time for a beer and a late dinner by the beach.

Everything was fine as far as the port of Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital and a giant, sprawling hellhole of a city.  It took almost an hour to drive through, but that kind of traffic is to be anticipated; finally we careened down an off-ramp onto the highway, and were on our way, flying through the night.

I was dozing sitting up, but came instantly awake when the bus reverberated with a loud, metallic thwack.  I spun around in my seat as the other passengers began to loudly contest what had happened.  I looked to Aliz, two rows behind me with a child asleep on her lap.  Her face was drawn and ashen.  “We just hit a moto,” she whispered. 

The driver pulled the bus onto the dirt shoulder and leapt out, fishing under his seat for a small emergency med kit.  He and several of the passengers (ostensibly wishing to help; undoubtedly wanting to gawp) ran back to where the moto was lying in a tangle on the side of the highway.

Twenty minutes later the group trooped back, assisting the moto’s four passengers, including a small girl who could not have been more than seven or eight years old.  No one was too seriously injured, although everyone had enormous patches of road burn covering their left sides, and the driver in particular looked like he might need some stitches.  I watched blood begin to run down one woman’s leg, pooling in the heel of her shoe, transfixed by that particular grisly detail.  The passengers, even the little girl, were silent, but the driver—undoubtedly hopped up on adrenaline—strode back and forth gesticulating and shouting.  His raw, skinless shoulder glistened redly against his dark skin in the orange glow of a halogen street lamp.  

While this was going on, the bus driver had clambered back into his seat to turn the vehicle on.  Nothing happened.  Cursing, he got back out, came around to the passenger door, and removed a section of the floor of the bus, revealing an underbelly of wiring.  He groped around for a bit, his arm disappearing to the shoulder, then called to someone else to key the ignition.  He whipped his arm up just in time; a shower of blue sparks chased it out, scattering on the floor of the bus. At this point I climbed out onto the shoulder, on the assumption that if an explosion were imminent, distance was key to survival.  As the sleeping boy was still draped over Alizabeth’s lap, she didn’t follow.  This whole time traffic continued on the highway, trucks whipping around the bend and rattling past us, a touch too close for comfort.

The driver, explaining obliquely that there was a problem with the battery, assigned a passenger to stand in the hole in the floor, on top of the tangle of exposed wires.  He then put the bus in neutral, allowing it to roll backwards into oncoming traffic to build up momentum as he keyed the ignition repeatedly. 

I felt paralyzed, standing on the shoulder beside a clutch of bloody accident victims, watching—unable to act—as my friend and a busful of strangers slowly eased into harm’s way, other cars and trucks honking as they swerved around.  Finally the engine caught; the other passengers and the wounded moto riders boarded, and we U-turned to head back to Douala and to the hospital.

Five hours later, we were still there.

The patients had been treated, stitches given where needed, topical unguents applied, bandages liberally wrapped.  But then came the question of payment, and thus the interminable delay.

The driver claimed (probably correctly) that the bus company’s insurance should pay.  The father of one of the injured women, who had showed up drunk and boisterous, loudly argued first that he was the victim in this situation, and second that the bus driver should pay.  The moto driver blamed everyone else, throwing wild accusations in order to exempt himself from any financial responsibility.  The hospital didn’t really care who paid, but wanted the money on the spot, not trusting the bus driver’s affirmation that someone from the bus company would show up the next day to settle the matter.

This being Cameroon, everyone—people who were involved, people who weren’t involved, people who had just walked into the hospital—had something to say about the matter, and said it in a shout.  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON, BUT I HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT IT,” could be a national motto.  Aliz and I spent the next few hours alternately diving into the ruckus, trying to moderate it, and then retreating in despair to nap in a heap on a stone bench beneath a fragrant flowering jacaranda.  I paid 10,000 CFA to the pharmacist, willing to absorb the cost of a child’s stitches in an attempt to move everything along, only to inspire my goodwill and open wallet an exorbitant and entirely fictional list of other medicines and treatments that, the nurse claimed, had to be paid for before we could go.

During this purgatorial time, we got to know the other passengers, our fellow travelers having come to resemble the cast of a Camus novel.  There was Nkem, my seatmate from Yaoundé to Douala, a considerate and sensible shopkeeper from Buea.  His sister Anne, a hospital nurse in Massachusetts, was visiting from Boston with her 2-year-old daughter.  She was good-natured, laughing ruefully at this welcome on her first day off the plane and back in her home country (“This is Cameroon, all right!”) There was a pair of engineers, recent university graduates working in offshore oil and in copper mining, respectively.  Aliz and I had a remarkably informed conversation with them about mountaintop removal, tar sands, and fracking; I was chagrined to realize (as I have seen in various iterations all over the world) that the two of them knew far more about American energy policy than do most Americans their age.  Aliz even found a suitor, Jerome, a Dutch- Cameroonian pastor who asked for her hand at least three times.  Trying, I supposed, to win my support for his suit (I could have told him it was a lost cause), he oddly began proselytizing to me, literally shaking a Bible in my direction as he urged me to follow God’s word and change my ways.

Normally, I try to avoid religious conversations, either changing the subject with intentional gracelessness or claiming Judaism, which is an unknown entity in West Africa and therefore gets me off the hook—it’s a religion, which is better than agnosticism, but one that local evangelists don’t know how to broach.  Engaging honestly in the question of what I believe is bound not to end well; everyone leaves that conversation unhappy.  But this time around, I was tired and frustrated and ready to be anywhere other than where I was, and Jerome’s arrogantly paternalistic tone rubbed me in all the wrong ways.  So for once, I engaged.

“Look, pal,” I said, my head snapping up like a hunting dog catching a scent.  “I was willing to leave this alone, but if you wanna dance, we can dance. Open that book you’re thumping.  It tells you that you should live a godly life?  Fine.  You know what else it tells you?  That you shouldn’t eat shellfish.  That you shouldn’t wear clothes of mixed fabrics.  That women who wear pants are an abomination.  That disobedient children should be stoned.  The Laws and the Prophets are full of inexplicable rules that the most religious Christians choose not to apply.  Think about that before you start cherry-picking verses and applying them—without invitation, I might add—to other peoples’ lives.”

Aliz had her hand on my shoulder at this point, murmuring for me to step down.  But to our surprise, this was unnecessary.  Far from being angry, Jerome was thrilled.  “You, too, are a godly woman!” he exclaimed, joyously missing my entire point.  “I am so discouraged that many Christians don’t even know these verses and have not read Leviticus! But in my church, we follow them all.  I do not eat fish without fins or scales, and I only wear 100% cotton!”  He began pulling out his clothing tags to prove his point, and as he contorted his arms behind his back, Aliz and I shared an alarmed look, put off by his zealotry.  I had intended to ask how, then, if he rejected shrimp, he interpreted Peter’s dream of the clean and unclean animals in the Acts of the Apostles, but the more he spoke, the heavier the whiff of fanaticism he emitted.  His church, based out of Texas, appeared to be more along the lines of a cult, and it seemed tactically expedient to disengage.  We studiously found reasons to be elsewhere (“… should probably go check on the driver… bathroom…”).  Despite our best efforts of evasion, Jerome tracked us down again, and spent several minutes crooning hymns to Aliz, a strange combination of wooing and lullaby.  He had a nice tenor, and seemed severely misguided but harmless, so my postmate and I let it happen, relaxing into each other as his voice floated up into the balmy, humid night. 

By 1:00 am, we were becoming delirious.  Speaking with clumps of other passengers, we picked up on discontented mutterings, and began trying to stoke these into a revolutionary fire.

“They can’t do this to us!” Aliz shouted, gesturing grandly.  “They’re holding us hostage!”

Finally Nkem, by now our fast friend, called the police.  “Someone needs to sort this out, and it’s not going to be those inside,” he remarked, shrugging.  We had come to trust his judgment—on his and Anne’s advice, we had stayed at the hospital rather than leaving the compound to find a taxi and go to a hotel (“Two white women with big bags, in this neighborhood, at this time of night?  Too dangerous.  You will certainly be robbed, even in the taxi.”).

The police force in Cameroon is nothing if not corrupt, but also capable of almost comedic hypocrisy.  The officers that arrived laid into all and sundry for soliciting bribes, fraudulently price gouging, and generally holding up the due process of law—never mind that these are all things each of the officers undoubtedly has done.  Soon enough, everyone was browbeaten into submission, and we were back on our way.

Aliz and I arrived at the hotel, exhausted, at almost 3:00 in the morning.  Unable to wake her roommate, Aliz crashed with me and my roommate Kalene that night, the three of us piling into the room’s single bed.   Kalene tried to wake us in the morning for breakfast, but we mumbled and rolled over, still asleep.  She gave up and left us to slumber through the first session. 

Once we joined it, refreshed enough to think coherently, the conference was great.  I had the pleasure of watching the girl I invited, Aissatou, blossom: she went from being big-eyed, shy, and clingy the first day to romping around confidently on the beach with her new group of friends by the last day.  During a session on goal-setting, she and I worked through a five-year plan to get into the University of Buea, and a ten-year plan to become the headmistress of a bilingual high school.  She took the advice about choosing realistic and attainable goals to heart, and tried seriously to think in advance about confronting obstacles, like the almost certain opposition of her family.  Having spent a year and a half in a culture where girls are disempowered, undereducated, and unaware of their own rights and resources, it was a privilege to sit in on sessions where the moderators spoke frankly about sex, love, and personal achievements. 

I found myself inspired by the conference, particularly a panel of strong women put together to speak to the girls about their lives and act as positive role models.  Two of the women, Nafissatou and Martine, I knew; Nafi works for an NGO in Garoua and Martine is a friend.  To hear them speak honestly about their struggles to achieve higher education and the hostility they faced from family members and boyfriends who disregarded their professional aspirations, knowing all the while what phenomenal and accomplished individuals they are, brought tears to my eyes.

I know it will be hard for Aissa to bring all of this back to Mandama—sixteen years of an embedded culture cannot be undone in four days—but I hope she will stay inspired, and begin to think critically about her place in society.  All we can do is plant seeds, and hope that one day they will grow.

Aissatou and Abbo at the National Girls' Forum

As I Went Down To The River

One of the main geographic features that sets Mbang Mboum apart from my old post of Mandama, besides the pervasive red clay, is the presence of two rivers, whose confluence lies just east of the village. The rivers provide necessary irrigation; farmers with motorpumps and piping grow year-round vegetable gardens, producing a bumper crop of tomatoes and peppers even in the dry season.  Banana trees shade the riverbanks, and hiking beside the cool, burbling waters, I have even found pineapples, their red-stained fruits lurking spinily in a bristle of long, serrated leaves.

The river also serves a much more prosaic function: it provides a communal place for women to come together and spend a morning washing endless loads of laundry.

Accustomed to doing laundry in a bucket-- a task I despise-- I continued to do so my first few weeks in Mbang Mboum, resigned as always to the reality that my clothes would rarely really get clean, and that the latter half of what  I washed would inevitably dry stiff from the soap residue that never washes out in the absence of gallons of clean, moving water.

It was not until last week that I mentioned laundry to my postmate, Alizabeth, and promptly got invited to come along the next morning and wash my clothes in the river, a proposition that sounded so beguilingly O Brother Where Art Thou that I could not resist accepting.

Please believe that I do not exaggerate when I say this experience was a game-changer.

We left around midmorning, balancing our buckets of dirty clothes on our heads, out of practicality rather than affectation-- try it sometime and you'll understand.  The spinal column and core muscles are much better suited to the task of balance and load-bearing, it turns out, than spindly, easily-fatigued arms.

As we picked our way across one of the many stick-and-barbed wire bridges that skitter drunkenly over the span of the river, the sound of voices and laughter floated up from the far bank.  We rounded a bend on the shore and walked suddenly into what looked like a clump of giant, brightly-plumed mushrooms: bushes over which had been draped yards of newly-washed pagne to dry.

One of the more structurally sound river crossings

Washing is women's work, and this riverbank between dawn and noon was inarguably a women's place.  Muslim mothers of all ages and sizes stripped to the waist, baring sagging breasts long ago robbed of sexual allure by years of constant breastfeeding.  In the dappled shade of obligingly leafy trees, women alternately worked and reposed, lying back to nurse children.  In formal settings, women often seem constrained and uncomfortable, silently and unquestioningly yielding to men.  Here they were relaxed and garrulous, calling across to each other in Mboum and Dii, joking, gossiping, and opining in equal measure.  The oldest boys present were perhaps seven; they played a raucous game of chicken waist-deep in the water until, chastised by their mothers for splashing too much, they meekly returned to watching a blanketful of babies laid out on the grass.

Alizabeth and I chatted with a neighbor, Doudou, until a space opened up, then tied our long skirts to above the knees, waded into the water, and began.

Here are five simple steps for washing laundry in a river, in case you ever become Amish, or get stuck in in a Gauguin painting:

1. Find a spot where the riverbank is rock, but the riverbed is sand.  This provides you with a work surface while allowing you to sink your toes in for better balance and traction against the swiftly-moving water.  Avoid mud at all costs.

2. Pre-soak your clothes in a bucket of soapy water.

3. Taking an article at a time, rub briskly with a block of soap all over the cloth, beat it several times against the rock (reference importance of step 1), and begin to knead it, like bread dough.  If you have chosen your placement well, the porous stone will act as a washing board, and soap will foam up through the garment.

4. Turning, submerge your clothing in the cold, clear current.  Marvel at how the soapsuds and scum simply fly away!  Try not to think too much about downstream environmental impact.

5. Rinse and repeat.

I was amazed at the effectiveness of washing al fresco, even given my clumsy, unpracticed technique.  Cloth that hadn't been truly white in months suddenly came clean, as though I were in the rural African version of a Snuggle commercial.  Doing laundry is generally only tolerable because I put on a playlist of Radiolab and Planet Money podcasts.  This time the hours flew past, as I was alternately engaged in conversation and people-watching.  The sun beat down hot on my bare shoulders, while cold water flowed around my calves; the juxtaposition was an awakening.

Finally both Alizabeth and I were done washing our clothes and ourselves.  We scrambled up the riverbank, gathering our things and mounting our now much-heavier buckets, the tops of our heads padded with a protective layer of folded cloth.  My hands were red and my knuckles raw, as though I were a big-boned Irish washerwoman in a 1920s musical comedy.  I was sunburnt, but gloriously clean.  As we wound our way home through fields of manioc, I felt a sense of victory.  This was practical integration of the best kind.

Women's Liberation

I wrote this blog post in January, but it got lost in the shuffle of my move and parents' visit.  It seemed appropriate to post in honor of International Women's Day:

Upon arriving in Mandama in December 2011, I discovered that I had inherited an unfinished project from the last volunteer, an incomplete house that was to become a Women’s Center.  The Maison des Femmes soon became a bugbear, embroiling me in the worst sort of proprietary village politics.  Petty power struggles dominated any communal goodwill, and my ignorance of the details of the project (sources of funding, management) left me powerless to intervene appropriately.  I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow—it was frustrating and tedious to live through, and could only be more so anecdotally—but suffice it to say, I washed my hands of the project for a good six months, so stymied was I by local bigwigs’ transparent attempts to hijack the completion of the project for their own self-aggrandizement.

Eventually I got back around to it, as time passed and tempers cooled.  I urged the old volunteer, Megan, to pressure her professional counterpart, Boubakari, with whom I had an antagonistic relationship at best.  With a careful combination of wheedling, coaxing, flattery, and (only occasionally) outbursts of anger, all the involved parties were induced to work together enough to complete the construction.  It was finished over a year past the expected date of completion—but it was finished, and that was enough.

After holding successful open elections for the executive board, we chose a date for the opening ceremony, to be held in January after my return from Yaounde for mid-service training.  It was during midservice that it was decided Mandama would no longer be a Peace Corps post, and that I would be moved.  The opening, then, would also serve as a closing; it would be a celebration not only of the Women’s Center, but of the end of my time in my first post.  It would be my last hurrah.

I take a break from event prep the day of with the women of the executive board.

The day of the ceremony arrived.  As was widely expected, we had invited the mayor and sous-prefet to come from Mayo Oulo; this meant, however, that instead of being able to say my farewells to friends and colleagues in a relaxed environment, I would have to spend the day in the rigidly proscribed world of protocol, the unwritten rules that govern any interaction with traditional or elected leaders in Cameroon.  If I haven’t made this clear enough in previous posts, I despise protocol.  I find it archaic and elitist.  I would posit that it gives unmerited and disproportionate power to a few, while robbing many of dignity and autonomy.  Furthermore, it is entirely chauvinistic; traditionally, a young girl will greet visiting elites, escorting them to their seats and serving them water or refreshments, and older women will literally grovel before the dignitary, debasing themselves in a way that horrifies and offends me.

This was why I found myself in a heated battle, fifteen minutes before the ceremony was slated to start, over seating arrangements.  After a year of putting up with Northern Cameroonian culture, this was not just a question of where to put chairs.  This was a question of where we, as a community, put our values.  Emboldened by the fact of my imminent departure, I cared far less about causing offense than I did about taking a stand.

To set the scene: I had left the setup of chairs to Boubakari, Megan’s counterpart, who was the emcee for the event.  When I came to check on his progress, I noticed he had put nametags on the first three rows of chairs, reserving them for invited notables and grands and their entourages.  As I scanned the names, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach.  The only two women in the entire first section of chairs were Howa, the female mayor of Mayo Oulo, and me.

I looked over at Boubakari, speaking calmly at first.  I knew this could only escalate, as I could feel a year’s worth of frustration boiling up.  Steady, I thought to myself, as I asked where the executive board was to sit.  I had envisioned, I added, that they would occupy the front row.

Boubakari waved a hand vaguely at the back rows of chairs, still unoccupied—rows of chairs jammed in between trees and market stalls, where the view would be terrible and the speeches barely audible.

I clenched my hands into fists, trying to breathe deeply.  “Surely we can put the women who were elected by their own community as leaders on an equal footing with the grands?” I had aimed for mild, but my voice was sharp.  I plastered on a tight smile, trying to keep things convivial, although I was ready for battle.  “I think some of the names in the first row could be put in the second.”

Boubakari sputtered protests.  “But you’ll upset the protocol!”

And that was when I let loose with a torrent of rapid and piqued French, my accent becoming more Parisian and my grammar worse the angrier I got.

“This is a day to honor and support the women of Mandama.  We tell them we will build a women’s center, we elect an all-female board of executives, we ask them to do the work to organize a fete, and when their day arrives, we put a bunch of men who are not from this community and who have done nothing to support this project up front and relegate the women to the back?  What message does that send?”  The boubou-clad grands around me began to grumble, and I held up a hand.  “This is non-negotiable.  The board is sitting in the front row with the sous-prefet and the mayor.” 

Boubakari angrily butted in.  “Here in Cameroon, we don’t do things like that!”  I smiled widely, disingenuously; I might go so far as to say venomously.  “Well, lucky you.  Peace Corps is here for cultural exchange, n’est-ce pas?  Today we do things à l’Americaine.”

There is value to being culturally sensitive, adaptable, and humble.  There is also value, however, in the Quaker tradition of speaking truth to power.  Every Peace Corps volunteer goes through periods of existential uncertainty—what are we doing here, if not some post-modern version of cultural colonialism?  We come stomping in and try to change the way people do things, but who are we to tell them our way is better?  It doesn’t necessarily seem to be working out so well for us; how can we look developing nations in the face and tell them to emulate our mistakes? 

These are valuable questions, and this kind of navel-gazing can be fruitful.  Too much of it, though, is paralyzing—because at some point one loses all sense of relativity.  It is true that some aspects of culture are merely different, and should not be assigned superior or inferior value.  Other things, though, are just wrong.  Oppressing women, although culturally acceptable in northern Cameroon, is wrong.  Limiting education for over half the population is wrong.  Relying on entrenched, classist systems of protocol to determine people’s worth is wrong. 

The grands of Mandama whole-heartedly supported the construction of the Maison des Femmes, because they saw its potential as limited.  It was a place for those women whose husbands gave them permission to learn to sew, dress hair, and maybe even embroider.  None of these professions cross entrenched gender lines.  None threaten the existing male hegemony, economy, or ego.  Constructing the women’s center allowed wealthy men, whose power in this society is both unlimited and unchallenged, to give lip service to progress and modernity, while in fact patronizingly corralling the women of Mandama into strictly defined and gendered boxes.

The battle over the seating arrangements ended in a compromise.  I could see how furious the invitees were when I began pulling nametags off seats, and while I can be fairly bullheaded at times, I try not to be unnecessarily stubborn.  Having made my point, I put the nametags back, and asked Boubakari to add another row of seven seats to one side, perpendicular to the front row.  In effect, we created a second front row, so that no one was evicted from their protocol-determined place, and the elected board was assigned seats of honor, set apart.

After we had settled the question of protocol, the event went smoothly.  The notables arrived several hours late, but so did the population of Mandama.  The speeches were fine, even my impromptu address on women's empowerment; despite having specifically told Boubakari I was not giving a speech, he called me up right after the mayor.  But I made it through, and while I don't think I said anything groundbreaking-- I tamed the fire, having truly spoken my mind before the event-- I got an affirming round of applause.  The reception afterwards was lovely, and the women outdid themselves on the food.  I took pictures with what felt like about every woman in Mandama.  It was a fine going-away party, and more importantly a successful opening for the center.

There is a quotation I came across two years ago while researching my thesis on 19^th-century French socialism.  When confronted with the radical behavior of Gustave Hervé, an extremist element in his party, Socialist delegate Jean Jaurès replied, “Every wave that makes it to shore must first break its foam upon the sand.”  I think that day, in a very small and undoubtedly petty fashion, I was that foam.  The women on the board followed my insistence that they take certain seats, but they were uncomfortable doing so; had I not been standing there glaring sternly at everyone, they certainly would have apologized to those who feathers were ruffled and returned to their original places in the back of the audience.  The men were certainly not converted by my passionate soapboxing, at least not to judge by their disgruntled muttering for the next twenty minutes—people often (conveniently) forget that I do have a fair amount of Fulfuldé at this point.  I was not bearing Mandama with me in a wave of feminism.

But perhaps, in breaking myself and the women of the board on the sand, I begin to herald the arrival of that wave.  These were small gestures, and seemingly unimportant battles upon which to spend so much time and energy—but the little things are the things within my capacity to change.  I can’t abolish the protocol system of Cameroon.  I can’t force men here to begin to respect women and value their education and empowerment.

But I could make sure that all of Mandama—because the entire village turned out for the event—saw the elected board sitting on equal footing with the sous-prefet.  It’s not much, but it’s symbolic, and symbols are important.

As it turned out, Howa (the first female mayor of Mayo Oulo, to my right) only brought awesome, strong, professional women in her entourage, so we were doubly represented.  Get it, sister.

The obligatory photo de famille after the event, posed in front of the Maison de Femmes.

All Creatures Great and Small

An unexpectedly good follow-up to my last post:

This past week I visited the Anglophone Northwest region of Cameroon, winding an intentionally tortuous route back up to the Adamaoua and my new post.  I met up with a friend from training, Michael, and traveled with him from the regional capital of Bamenda through the verdant mountains to his post of Mbengwi.

On the way, he mentioned that his cat, Dee, was very pregnant. "We might come home to a pile of kittens," he warned.

Instead, we walked into his house to find Dee prone on the couch in a puddle of kitty vaginal secretions. Michael bent over her, then straightened up quickly.  Something was very wrong. The tiny tail and one leg of a clearly dead kitten had been delivered, but the rest of the body remained lodged in her birth canal.  Dee was no longer having contractions-- in fact, she was no longer moving-- and from the almost-rotten stench, it seemed the stillborn kitten might have been there for hours.

Being a health volunteer in Cameroon, one inevitably encounters medical emergencies in less than ideal conditions, and learns to deal with them as efficiently as possible.  Within minutes, Michael and I had washed and gloved up and constructed an impromptu veterinary operating theater with a deep plastic tub, an old pair of pagne pants, and a Maglite weapon-grade flashlight.  As I balanced the light and held Dee down, Michael gently worked the body out of her birth canal, easing the second back leg around before pulling the upper body out in a gush of foul-smelling fluid.  We phoned Julie, a volunteer veterinarian, who recommended the correct dosage of antibiotics to combat possible septicemia; Michael fetched a syringe and gave Dee a subcutaneous injection of saline solution to ensure that she rehydrated as quickly as possible.  As I gently stroked the camel's hump of saline wobbling over Dee's shoulderblades, I felt sad for her trauma, but proud of us.  We had handled the situation.

There was, however, a mystery that remained: what had happened to the rest of the litter?  Michael was sure he had felt at least three kittens kicking in Dee's belly, but searching in and around the house turned up nothing.  We concluded that they must have also been stillborn, and that Dee had eaten them (this being, it seems, something that cats do).

The next day we spent with Caitlin and Emily, the other volunteers in the Mbengwi cluster.  We hiked up a mountain to get a view of the town spread out below us, buildings interspersed with lush palm and eucalyptus groves.  It was a lovely spot, and we spread out a picnic of fresh bread that Michael had baked the night before, buttery avocados, and bananas.  Hiking back down to a bar, we met up with some friends and colleagues of the three volunteers, and drank and danced into the evening.

Once back at the house, Michael and Emily found their way to bed, but Caitlin and I stayed up talking.  Suddenly we heard a clattering in the kitchen, followed by a chorus of piercing mews.  We turned to see Dee trotting into the salon, something gray and wriggling in her mouth.  Mouse! I thought at first, then, horrified, Dead kitten!

It was neither; Dee, it seemed, had successfully birthed at least one of the other kittens, and hidden it away somewhere in the brush behind Michael's house.  Once sufficiently recovered from her exhaustion, she had apparently remembered her kitten and fetched it again.

The kitten, eyes still shut tight, was mewling frantically, but seemed unable to nurse. We tried to guide it several times to one of Dee's six nipples, but each time it crawled blindly over her body, a little ball of writhing need.  Dee was no help, purring contentedly but seeming not to know what to do with her own offspring.

Caitlin and I, again thrown into the role of impromptu vets, mixed powdered milk and made a makeshift nipple out of a plastic bag.  We drippily fed the kitten until it quieted down, then tried again to guide it to Dee.  This time it found a nipple and clamped on, kneading Dee's stomach with its tiny pin-prick claws.

And once again, I was proud of us.

Is it bad that I want to name this guy Adolf?  Maybe we can compromise on Charlie.

When Childhood Dreams Come True

Growing up, I wanted badly to be a large animal vet.  This was entirely inspired by James Herriot books and a vaguely romantic idea about stomping around barnyards in Wellington boots and birthing cows— which could probably only seem romantic to someone who, like suburban pre-adolescent me, had never actually seen a cow up close. 

In time this was discarded, to be replaced by subsequent desires to be a novelist, a Broadway star, a singing waitress (let it never be said that I don’t adjust my expectations realistically), an Egyptologist, a socialist historian, a Peace Corps volunteer (arguably the ultimate way to put off knowing what you’re doing with your life) and now, in what will hopefully be my last pivot, an environmental conservationist.  (Or a writer for National Geographic.)

I bring this up because I finally got the chance to live the dream, so to speak, when my bush dog, Scipio, passed the six-month vaccination mark and simultaneously went into heat for the first time.  I had been half-heartedly planning to take her in to the nearest vet in Guider for her rabies shot for several weeks, but the thought of trying to transport an almost-fully grown dog on a moto for an hour was enough to encourage my procrastination.  That changed when she started getting lethargic and drippy, emanating a musky smell so strong even I noticed it—as did every male stray in Mandama, to judge from the rustling and whining around the back door each night.  After three straight nights of being woken around midnight to Scipio howling in the salon, and the successive check of windows and doors to assuage my paralyzing dread of Boko Haram, I decided it was time.  Skip and I both needed for her to be fixed.

So into Guider we went, Skip squashed onto my lap on the moto, head resting on the driver’s shoulder—a more intimate but equally windy version of the head-out-the-window.  I took her to the Délégation d’Elevage, the Ministry of Animal Husbandry, an officious name for a peripatetic large-animal vet, or Guider’s very own James Herriot.  The walls were plastered with posters advertising various bovine prophylaxes, vaccinations, and vitamin supplements; all featured glossy photos of glowering cattle and smiling herders.  Beside the office door, a notice warned against avian flu.  “THE SALE OF DEAD BIRDS IS HIGHLY ILLEGAL”, it blustered unnecessarily (really, who would buy an already dead but not cooked chicken in 105-degree heat?  This isn’t the Safeway freezer case we’re talking about).

The vet, a kindly man with small glasses and an unexpectedly professional air, had to rummage through his cabinet to come up with the rabies vaccine.  He didn’t get many dogs, he explained—sometimes cats, but mostly his clients were goats and bulls.  I asked about getting Scipio fixed, and his face fell.  Ah, yes—well, there was no surgical theatre on the premises, and that was a fairly intrusive procedure.  If this were a male dog, no problem, he could do it right here in his office (this accompanied by a snip-snip motion of the fingers), but no, he could not help Scipio.  Was there such a thing as canine birth control? I asked.  Some shot, or pill?  At this he laughed heartily.  “If you need family planning,” he chuckled, “go to the hospital.”

And so I did.  I tied Skip to a tree outside, hoping that none of the moto drivers lounging around waiting for clients would harass her, and walked up to the font desk in the triage area.  “I’d like to buy Depro,” I announced, knowing from my own health center that the three-month contraceptive shot would be widely available.  The nurse immediately shushed me, leaning in to whisper, “If you need family planning counseling, go down the hall to the second office on the right and ask for Dr. Abdoulaye.”  It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be the assumed recipient, and while I was glad to see the staff treating a topic so taboo in Muslim culture with sensitivity, I felt a need to correct her misapprehension.  “It’s not for me,” I told her, realizing as I did so that this was about as plausible as “I got this black eye walking into a door”.  She nodded, and smiled knowingly.  “Right.  For a friend?”  Sensing that this might not be the time to introduce my menstruating dog into the conversation, I agreed, and went in search of Dr. Abdoulaye.

The doctor, head of family planning services in Guider, ushered me into his office and closed the door tactfully behind me.  Feeling a little embarrassed by the thoughtful yet unwarranted level of discretion being shown, I introduced myself, then launched in: “I want Depro, but not for me, I already have an IUD.  C’est pour mon chien,” my dog.  Dr. Abdoulaye frowned, confused.  “Pour ton… chef?”, your boss?  “No, no,” I corrected him, “mon chien.”  He looked startled, glancing under my chair as if he thought I might have smuggled a dog into the office beneath his notice.  “She’s outside,” I explained, hooking my thumb towards the entrance.  “Should I bring her in?”  The doctor considered this, then shook his head uncertainly.  “Umm… tell you what, I’m just going to sell you the medicine and a syringe.  You work at a health center, you know what to do.”  In fact, I didn’t, having expressly avoided being trained in administering shots; I’m not certified to give clinical care, and had felt uncomfortable being asked to do so.  I didn’t press the point with Dr. Abdoulaye, however, relieved that he had not ordered me out of his office in anger. 

I paid for the needle and small vial of birth control, and was about to turn and leave when he hesitated, seeming torn by some internal struggle.  Finally his highly trained bureaucratic instincts won—Cameroonian doctors are above all civil servants—and he flipped open his register.  “What is your dog’s nom de famille and prénom?” he asked formally, and thus Mlle Scipio Skove officially joined the Guider Regional Hospital Family Planning Services Depro program, with a return visit scheduled for April. 

I got back to Mandama and immediately sought out Benjamin, our emotionally volatile nurse.  We are good enough friends that I figured I could bully him into doing me this favor, although I was sure he would mock me for days about it.  Unfortunately, he had left for Mayo Oulo.  The chief of the health center was already at the millet beer cabaret, deep into a calabash of bilbil.  Wishing I had agreed to take shot training after all, I read the tiny print on the bottle, uncapped the needle and vial, and loaded the syringe with milky medicine.  I was surprised how much resistance the vacuum created by the empty syringe and sealed vial gave, and nervously faltered, letting bubbles into the syringe.  Cursing, I finished drawing the liquid up out of the vial and pulled the needle out, pushing the plunger gently down to force the excess air out.  When a white drop of Depro appeared on the tip of the needle, I shook it off and took a deep breath.  It was as ready as it was going to be.  Glad this was an intramuscular administration rather than an intravenous one, I pinched up the skin on Skip’s left haunch like I had seen the vet do with the rabies shot, slid the needle in, and began to push the plunger.

Beads of white liquid appeared on Scipio’s side, sliding down her long hairs.  I had slid the needle into fur, but failed to pierce the skin.  Thinking how much easier this seemed in theory, I readjusted the needle.  This time Scipio yipped, and I knew I had hit my mark.  She began to squirm, and I used my left elbow to pin her down while I finished giving the shot at a steady pace. 

This presumably won’t solve the problem of Scipio going into heat, but at least I can feel less like a father with a teenage daughter, hovering around the porch yelling at the strays to bring her straight home, and no fooling around in the car.  I don’t think I realized how much maternal instinct having a dog was going to bring out in me; every time she trots off to chase guinea fowl in the bush, or disappears to hunt out fallen cow horns, I worry about her.  There are so many things that could go wrong!  Angry cattle!  Angrier herders with machetes!  Roving bands of feral dogs!  Honestly, how do people ever survive having children?

The End of a Chapter

Tuesday, January 14.  The inevitable finally happened, in a poorly ventilated office in Yaoundé.  In a security meeting about the Guider satellite posts, the country director of Peace Corps Cameroon pronounced four calm words that would shape my service and those of the closest volunteers to me, Becca and Debbie: “Your posts are closed.”  Mandama is no longer to be my home.  My half-completed work here is now, by dictate, done. 

In a way, we brought this on ourselves.  In response to the release of Père Vandenbeusch, the kidnapped French priest, Becca and I requested a meeting with the embassy RSO—regional security officer—and associated Peace Corps staff to discuss what this meant for our safety in bush villages abutting the Nigerian border, and to express our growing unease about our isolation and the impossibility of communication.  Jack, the economic development volunteer in Guider, called me the day before the meeting.  “You realize that just by asking for this meeting, by drawing their attention to your position, you’re increasing the probability that they’ll close you,” he cautioned.  I paused, then voiced for the first time what had been brewing at some semiconscious level since the priest was kidnapped.  “Yeah, I know.  I think that’s the point.”

Since being released from consolidation, my apprehension has become markedly worse.  During the day, I’m fine; I have work, I have friends, and Mandama drenched in sunlight looks like the sleepy village it’s always been.  It’s hardly a dangerous place, and I don’t feel I am at risk.  But nights… well, nights are hard.   As soon as I come back from my neighbor’s compound, I lock all my doors, and endure until the morning comes and brings with it some relief.  I don’t sleep well.  I’ve taken to keeping my dog in the house (or sometimes even in the bed) with me, because it’s a small comfort to wrap my arms around her every time I hear a moto speed by my house coming from the direction of Nigeria.  I’ve had a few stressful false alarms; there was the time I walked out after the last call to prayer to buy eggs for Scipio’s dinner, and heard a group of strange men in the carrefour speaking Hausa.  I panicked, almost running back to my house, where I armed myself uselessly with the biggest knife in my kitchen and sat on the floor of the salon, waiting to be kidnapped.  It turned out they were innocent Nigerian cake-bread deliverymen, who had intended to come in the afternoon but were held up by a flat tire. 

Or worse: tired of being alone in my house, I spent an evening with Dieudonne, an Anglophone friend who teaches at the bilingual school.  Around 9:00 I reluctantly decided I should go home, and he offered to walk me there.  We were ambling down the road when a moto roared up from the other direction, slowing and turning into his compound.   Dieudonne paused, looking back.  “They are looking for me?” he mused rhetorically.  “Who could that be at this time of night?”  Evidently seeing the locked door, the driver turned the moto, and as the headlight swung around I could clearly see that the passenger was armed.  Boko! I thought, throat constricting with fear.  They came by my house first and someone told them where I was!  I didn’t speak—I couldn’t—but Dieudonne must have sensed my terror, as he motioned me off the road, trying to shield my body from view with his as the moto leapt towards us.  Just as I was tensing my legs to sprint into the bush (turns out I’m a flight kind of girl), the passenger waved his semi-automatic rifle and started shouting in Pidgin English.  Dieudonne visibly relaxed, laughing and shouting insults back.  This was a friend of Dieudonne’s from Bamenda who had recently been sent to Mayo Oulo as a BIR, a member of Cameroon’s elite military force.  He had a night off, had gotten tipsy in a bar, and decided to come visit his brother in the bush.  They escorted us the rest of the way to my house, my presumed assailant becoming my very own armed guard. 

These fears are provoked by my overactive imagination—in no cases have I had any hint that there was real danger—but still, these are not entirely unfounded.  Boko Haram’s presence in Cameroon is growing.

I’m not much of a poker player, but the game provides a handy metaphor: you’ve got to know when to fold.  Being in Mandama is a losing hand, no matter how the rest of the game plays out; the question is how long I’m willing to keep upping the ante.  In the worst-case scenario, the game ends with me or Becca kidnapped.  The RSO felt that this was not likely—Boko Haram is involved in not only an ideological but a financial gambit, and the American government is known not to negotiate with terrorists—but neither is it unthinkable.  A second scenario: in a month, or three or six, someone else would be kidnapped, in which case Becca, Debbie and I would be shut down immediately; three strikes, the RSO told us, and we’d be out.  We’d be evacuated and only allowed back with a military escort to gather our things.  At that point, we’d have mere months in a new post, or the similarly unappealing proposition of heading home on interrupted service unexpectedly early, with no time to line anything up for when we got there. 

This third way, then, seemed the best.  Because the impetus was coming from us, and not from the RSO, we were not being forcibly evacuated.  In fact, we were able to negotiate the terms of our departure: a month to close out projects, explain to friends and neighbors what was going on, find counterparts to carry out unfinished work in our absence, and transition to the next stage of our Peace Corps services.  In an ideal world, it’s not what I would have wanted, but it’s more than most volunteers whose posts have been closed have gotten, and for that I’m grateful.

As the meeting came to a close, I realized I needed to figure out my next steps, and fast.  I took the train north that night, plotting in my rickety bunked cot as the train swayed back and forth alarmingly, and spent the next two days site prospecting in the Adamaoua.  I quickly settled on Mbang Mboum—yes, pronounced BANG! BOOM!, like the written sound effects in a Batman comic—a small village an hour north of Ngaoundéré.  It is slightly smaller than Mandama, and has a similar lack of amenities; I’ll be holding on to the satellite phone, as cell phone service is minimal at best, and selling my hastily (foolishly?) purchased refrigerator and fan.  Electricity, you were a cruel three-month tease. 

I’ll have an actual postmate, this time around; although I always referred to Becca as my postie, she was in a separate village 10 kilometers away.  Alizabeth, an agriculture volunteer from the most recent training group, will be my next-door neighbor.  A thoughtful, slender blonde from Spokane with artfully messy hair and a penchant for mismatched skirts and blouses, Alizabeth made us a candlelit dinner of lentils and white wine, and we spent hours talking about environmental impact studies and the dam slated to be built just above Mbang Mboum in 2018.  I have the feeling we’ll get along swimmingly. 

Although not far from the North geographically, the Adamaoua does have appreciable differences in terrain, tillage, and vegetation.  Instead of sand, Mbang Mboum is built on red clay, which in dry season becomes a thick, pervasive dust.  After an afternoon of walking around town, a layer of red earth had settled into every crevice of my boots.  If Guider feels like the Wild West of the gold rush, Mbang Mboum feels like the Kentucky of Daniel Boone.  The Adamaoua, while far from lush, is more fertile than the North; I couldn’t help exclaiming every time we passed a banana tree, and was thrilled to hear I’ll be arriving in high avocado season. 

Alizabeth and I walked out of the village to the south just before sunset the night I spent in Mbang Mboum.  The view was breathtaking, and unexpected; we passed the last mud-brick huts on the main street to see the land fall away to either side.  Before us spread gently rolling fields sloping down to the distant confluence of two rivers, the spot of the proposed dam.  We couldn’t see the rivers themselves, but their presence was betrayed by ribbons of emerald green snaking through dry fields of cornstalks and thorny acacia trees.  It looked like perfect territory to go for a run, a bike ride, or a long thoughtful walk. 

I met the chief of the health center, Engelbert (like Humperdinck, and if anyone gets that reference I’ll give you ten bucks).  He came highly recommended from the last health volunteer, also a displaced Fulfuldé speaker, although from the Extreme North, and also named Laura.  Confusion among the general population expected.  Engelbert was eager to show me around, answering my questions transparently and proudly showing me his records, which were neatly filed in clearly labeled cubbies.  I felt like I could cry.  After fourteen months of dealing with Tilirou, the health center chief of Mandama—he of the unwarranted aggression and inexplicable secrecy, he of the fictionalized, never-submitted supply reports, he of the grimy storeroom stuffed with dusty knee-deep drifts of records and unorganized sheaves of papers—this was like making it to the Promised Land. 

I also met my landlord and concession head, Jodah, who was bursting with excitement and pride to get another volunteer, tripping over himself to show me around, answer my questions, and buy me a heaping platter of beans for my breakfast.  “He’s super nice, and very helpful,” Alizabeth whispered, “but you have to rein him in sometimes.”  I took a cautiously optimistic liking to Jodah, but am wary that this might be the biggest adjustment I’ll have to make.  I currently live in a lovely, light-filled house with a large back yard and garden, and while I sometimes complain about the innumerable children who seem to permanently inhabit my concession, in truth I have a fair amount of privacy.  In Mbang Mboum, I will be living directly in Jodah’s compound, in a much smaller and darker house mere feet from the other houses in the concession.  When Jodah’s wife starts banging dishes at 5:00 in the morning, I’ll hear it.  When I have diarrhea, they’ll probably hear it; my latrine is inside my house this time around, a choice that seems odd to me (who would want that in their bedroom? Won’t it smell?  The hole’s also about a third of the size of my current one, so I’ll need to really up my aim).  The goats and ducks I spotted will doubtless become an intimate—or at least immediate—part of my life.  I asked Jodah about bringing a dog, and he said it was fine, but I’m anticipating that Scipio could cause strife.  I don’t want to make too many assumptions yet, as I’ve only seen the place once, but this is the aspect of Mbang Mboum that I am the most hesitant about. 

On the other hand, this will force my integration into Mbang Mboum, or at least into one family, quickly.  The blessing and curse is that I only have ten months there; if given the choice to hide out in a house withdrawn from public view, I might be tempted to default to introversion and end up making little headway in the community.  As it is, I’ll have children to play with, always; a potential friend in Jodah’s wife; a garrulous Cameroonian Pops in Jodah himself.  And if it’s frustrating?  Well, it is only ten months.

It’s been rough to close out Mandama; although most of my projects were at a place that allowed them to be wrapped up or passed on easily, I hate the look that comes into people’s faces when I tell them I’m abandoning them.  The hardest was the first people I told, my neighbors.  I spent almost an hour surrounded by wives and children, dandling baby Oumaiatou on my lap and chatting casually, before I worked up the courage to break the news.  Djoulaya, the youngest wife, continued stoically kneading a great ball of peanut butter to ease out the oil.  The children, who hadn’t really understood the implications of what I was saying, kept playing, grabbing my limp hands for another clapping game.  But the two oldest wives, Howa and Mairamou, silently turned away from me, pulling their pagne capes over their heads.  Anguish stabbed my heart.  Were they angry with me?  How could they blame me for this?  I wanted to keep explaining, to lay all the responsibility at the embassy’s feet, but then I realized they hadn’t turned away in anger; they were crying.  Fulbé culture values a sort of Spartan strength—women give birth silently, something I thought impossible before seeing it happen—and so my friends had covered their faces to hide their tears from me.  I handed Oumaia to her sister and pulled Howa into a hug, my own face wet with tears.

But as I tell more and more people, I get used to explaining it, and it seems a reality to be accepted rather than raged against.  By the time I told Tilirou the health center chief—who, far from crying, smiled broadly and then leered at me, asking mockingly, “Are you afraid?”—I was able to baldly state my departure as a fact.  My pragmatic side has taken over, organizing my parent’s impending visit to Cameroon and Mandama, the move to the Adamaoua, and the grand opening of Mandama’s Women’s Center, which will also act as my blowout goodbye party. 

And then, at long last, the next chapter of my service will begin.