Rules for Ramadan

Ramadan Journal, DAY 1: My first morning back in Mandama after a 3-week trip home to the States (a wedding! Whole Foods!), followed by a little travelling around Cameroon, coincided with the start of Ramadan.  Having been prepared for the last 6 months by constant reminders that my predecessor Meghan fasted for Ramadan, I couldn't very well refuse, so I dove back into village life with balls-to-the-wall cultural integration.

Today I awoke a little before 5 a.m. with the first muezzin from the mosque next door.  A new imam came up from Mayo Oulo for the holy month, and is incidentally staying in the small house on my compound.  I haven't laid eyes on him yet, but I heard his voice this morning: he projects with much more force than the usual marabout (although he also has a richer chanting timbre, so that's okay).

Although I'm sure my neighbors Howa et. al. had been up for an hour already preparing breakfast, I decidedly had not, and was in no state to go wandering in the pre-dawn darkness begging bouille and beignets, so I stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed what was at hand: an apple, tahini, a liter of water. I sleepily lit a candle and curled up on the futon to munch on my breakfast, listening to the call and response of prayer and inattentively leafing through an Intelligent Life magazine I had picked up at the Brussels airport.  When my eyes started drooping and the water was almost gone, I put myself back to bed.

The second round of waking up was far harder.  Maybe because this was my first night sleeping in my own bed for over a month,  I woke up disoriented, slashing at the mosquito net with one arm before realizing where I was.

I contemplated just going back to sleep, and had indeed fallen into a doze before resolving that I would get up; it was almost 8:00.  Even after hauling myself out of bed, sleep clung languorously to me, and I wandered about in a daze, ineffectively dabbling at my tasks of unpacking and housecleaning.  I finally decided enough was enough; I needed coffee.

I had already determined that I would ease myself into fasting by drinking plenty of water the first week; limiting my water intake the second; and by the end of Ramadan going whole hog (that metaphor seems particularly misplaced, but you know what I mean).  So, I revised my personal version of fasting: coffee and water the first week, only water the second, and so on.  There are perks to not having religious skin in this game.

Thus the first Rule for my Ramadan: BE ENDLESSLY FLEXIBLE. Feel like you're going to faint? Drink some water. Can't pry your eyes open with a multitool? Coffee might slip past the wrathful gaze of Allah, just this once.

DAY 3: As I already broke fast (iftar in Arabic; somtugo in Fulfulde) with El Hadji Moussa's family, the delicate balance of high-school style village politics required that I also do so chez El Hadji Ibrahim.

During my absence, Ibrahim got married, again.  That's right, he of the 36 children (I counted with one of his daughters today) just hasn't had enough.  As far as I'm concerned, he needs wife #5 like he needs a hole in the head, but then, he didn't ask me for pre-marital counseling (which is probably best for all concerned).

Bintou, his blushing new bride, just achieved the ripe age of 14 (to his 65), and as such spends more time with the gaggle of Ibrahim's lycee- aged daughters than with her fellow wives.  I don't blame her.  These latter are old enough to be her mothers-- or even her grandmother, in the case of the senior wife, Hadja Manga-- and accept the role, dishing her unsolicited advice in tones that brook no argument.  As they do the same to me, I can sympathize.  And as much as I like Hadja Kultchi, it's sometimes more fun to hang out with the kids (the same conversation about making couscous, which I will never do at home, wearies after a few dozen repetitions).

So tonight I made my greetings all around, then headed for Bintou's part of the concession, from whence bursts of giggles and delighted shrieks already trickled.

This is the second Rule, learned tonight through drinking deeply of the bitter cup of experience:

NEVER BREAK RAMADAN WITH TEENAGERS.

This is how adults handle iftar: at 6:30, you break the fast with something small.  Tradition dictates that the Prophet Mohammed did so with dates and water.  As a matter of cost, convenience, and custom, Mandamans do so with a cup of red millet bouille.  This is nutritionally not a terrible plan; millet is one of the more protein-dense grains, and if the bouille is made with peanut butter, that ups those slow-burning amino acids even more.  After drinking the bouille, you pray once, then wait.  An hour later is the last prayer, around 7:30; during Ramadan it lasts over half an hour, so it is well after 8:00 before the full meal is taken.  During that essential hour and a half, the metabolism gets a kick start, and because bouille is fairly dense and filling, you aren't starved when you finally sit down to eat.

This is how teenagers handle iftar: piled in an excitable, writhing ring, they take it in turns to produce black plastic bags of whatever they have bought that afternoon.  It turns out there is a pretty penny to be made by tempting starving adolescents during Ramadan with mouth-watering goodies; behind Idi's boutique, a brisk trade goes on from around 3:00 onwards.  One after another, to cries of delight, Bintou and her friends pour their loot into a bowl in the center of the ring.  Eager hands, hovering like so many vultures, pounce. The battle is on to cram mouths full; chaos reigns until the bowl is empty, then the next contribution appears, and the feeding frenzy starts again.

Like jackals worrying a carcass, the girls demolished enormous quantities of fried and sugary treats.  Schooled from a tender age in the agressive hospitality of Northern Cameroonian culture, the girls found time to fix me with authoritarian glares, commanding with mouths full: "Nyamu, Laura! Nyamu!" "Eat! Eat!"

And eat I did. Four types of friend beignet; heaps of fried peanut sticks, ground and mixed with sugar; fried plantains; chunks of raw manioc soaked all day in sugar water; sweet sticky rice cakes; the girls pushed these rare delights in front of me, and I did my best to keep up, punishing my no-longer-adolescent empty stomach.  At one point I took a break and reached for my water bottle.  "No!" scolded Hapsi, my 16-year-old laundress, pressing plastic cups into both my hands.  I was to wash everything down with a) intensely sugared citron, which is more or less Country Time Lemonade; or b) intensely sugared hibiscus juice.  Having long ago learned that resistance is futile, I double-fisted cups of refined sugar like it was a daily habit, ignoring my protesting stomach and growing physical discomfort.

Finally the feasting broke off for prayer.  I sank onto a couch, hoping that if I gave it a moment to settle, my stomach would right itself.  After all, dinner was yet to come.

But the damage was done.  As I stared down the line of bobbing veils in front of me, I became intensely aware that I was going to be sick.  I held myself together until prayers were done, then queasily muttered an excuse and lurched for home.

"You're leaving already?" cried Bintou, aghast. "But you haven't eaten!"

Right.

"Tomorrow," I groaned, and staggered home just in time to make it to my latrine before bringing it all back up.

Lesson learned.

Day 6: I've come to find a pattern, modeled off that of my neighbors, that works well during Ramadan.

Rule the third: WORK EARLY, SLEEP LATER.

After that first morning, I haven't been able to get to sleep after getting up and eating at 5 a.m. This, it turns out, is for the best. There's an inescapable logic to why my neighbors are tromping out to their fields as soon as the prayer is over; it's better to work while the day is cool and you still have energy from that first meal.  Later, when you're dragging, you can lie about in a stupor without worrying that the peanut fields haven't been plowed-- or in my case, that you're a day behind on your Insanity workouts.

Right, I guess I didn't mention: I decided as soon as I came back with a computer, I would put myself on a regime of high-intensity interval training, and determined to be undeterred by the fact of fasting. I was encouraged to see that my arch-nemesis and constant inspiration (it is possible to be both at once), Meghan, left this note about Ramadan: "If you're a crazy person like me and want to be Jillian Michaels, do your sport at 3:30 am BEFORE your 4 am breakfast.  Don't casually try to complete 30-Day Shred in the oppressive 12 pm heat. It ends badly, trust me.  Don't phone this one in."

So there you have it. If Meghan did it, I can do it, no?

But, as my neighbors never cease to remind me, I am not as dedicated as my predecessor, so my schedule is a little more forgiving: wake up at 4:45 or so with the call to prayer.  Make a high-protein breakfast-- my favorite so far has been red beans in peanut sauce. Eat around 5:00 (yeah, yeah, sticklers, I'm half an hour into the day by then. So sue me.) Read and digest for an hour or so.  I'm currently plowing through The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, which is about a family of missionaries in the Congo and seems a little to close to the bone sometimes. By 6:00, begin Insanity workout; if computer has run out of battery, go for a 5-K run. Work in the garden, which is luxuriously, rampantly overgrown through a month of neglect; I cried with happiness (really, not ashamed of this one, there were rivulets of tears) when I saw how the sad desert of my yard had burst into life, then scaled back my joy when I realized most of the seeds I planted had been overrun by weeds. Shoulder-high weeds, in some cases. But still, there's okra and cucumbers and green bush beans and yellow squash that survived my Darwinian experiment in farming, and nothing makes me happier than aching shoulders from an hour of bringing order to the beds and rows in the cool of the morning.

Making the desert bloom (although Ben Gurion probably imagined something involving a little more targeted Round-Up application)

Then: bucket bathe.  Head to the health center for a few hours.  Come back to repose-- an endeavor usually frustrated by the arrival of every small child in my neighborhood for playtime; I swear they post a lookout for my return.  Spend a little time visiting with people in the afternoon, for work projects or simply for pleasure.  Finally, kick all the kids off my porch and settle back into my new Eno hammock (possibly the best purchase I made while I was at home; I love you, REI) to read a magazine or a book, listen to music, or simply watch the sky darken and wait for the call to prayer.

And repeat.

Little House in the Sahel

Next to my house stands a small, single-room hut.  The door opens onto the front of my compound, only recently transformed by rain and errant okra seeds from looking like the business end of a broom to something greener, a little less like the ravaged vista of a battlefield.  In a wealthy family's compound or in a city, this house would be the guard's shack.  Out here in village, it's mostly used for storage by my landlord, El Hadji Ibrahimou.  This incidentally includes the Dickensian storage of surplus children.  Having worked through four wives and spawned, like his Biblical namesake, children as innumerable as the stars, he is presumably running low on space in his own compound across the street, so several boys of the double-digits crowd have taken up residence.  For them, it's like living in a backyard fort; they sleep, as far as I can tell, on unsold bales of cotton, and get to stay up late whispering and giggling.  If you thought teenage boys didn't giggle, you thought wrong.  Dry season, during which we all slept outside, gave me ample opportunity to ponder this, in between calling over the fence to shush them like an irritable elderly relative.  (See all this valuable life experience I'm getting?  I'm now forewarned, and any child of mine who wants to have a sleepover will be summarily banished with tent and headlamp to someone else's property.)

Occasionally, this hut serves a second purpose: as a last-minute guesthouse for my landlord's business acquaintances. El Hadji is a construction kingpin who has snatched up about every building contract between here and Guider, as well as running some sort of vaguely defined "import-export" operation, and if that makes you think of the Mafia, well, your words, not mine.


The first time the shack was transformed into a guest lodging was a few months ago, sometime in mid-February.  A few Chinese contractors had come into Mandama to do something related to the electrification that has been promised every month since my arrival (and since the time of my predecessor's predecessor; I'm not selling my stock in candles just yet).

There is a well-established Chinese community in Cameroon, mostly here to work on infrastructure; as is the case in many developing African nations, it is only through Chinese government assistance and French enterprises that roads are paved, dams are built, and rural electrification achieved.  Their presence is viewed by Cameroonians with suspicion and hostility, if not open racism.  In my market town of Guider, where there is a Chinese hospital and therefore a disproportionately large population, even I cannot walk down the street without hateful children running after me, pulling their eyes into sideways slants and yelling "HEE haw, HEE haw, HEE haw!"  I would understand their confusion were I not six feet tall with blue eyes and sun-bleached dreads; as it is, I am forced to conclude that these kids are just ignorant and xenophobic.  Side note: a boy tried this once here in Mandama.  Furious at being so accosted in my own town, on my own stomping grounds, I wheeled on him and thoroughly chewed him out in every language I could call to mind, threatening dire imprecations against the next child who dared to greet me with a donkey noise instead of a respectful salutation.  While I never would have imagined myself as the kind of person who gets into shouting matches with 10-year-olds, losing my temper does seem to have been effective; at least, it has not happened again.

But getting back to our sheep: for some reason, after inspecting whatever it was they were here to inspect, all the contractors but one left Mandama.  The unfortunate crew member who drew the short straw spent the night, and the hut in my compound was duly evacuated of its juvenile population.

I went out to greet him that night, my everpresent shadow Yusufa in tow.  The guest had dragged a woven plastic mat onto the sand, and was seated cross-legged and bare-chested, his erect posture and impassive face (fine, call me racist, too) irresistably recalling statues of the Buddha.

I called out a "Bonsoir!", but his Cameroonian driver, seated in shadow, answered for him: he spoke no French.  I switched to English, and although a flicker of recognition crossed his face, he merely nodded in reply.  Uncertain, I turned to his driver.  "Does he speak English?" I asked in French.  He shrugged, unconcerned.  "How should I know?"

After a few more unsuccessful conversational sorties, I beat a retreat to the darkness of my porch.  "How terrible for him, not to be able to communicate with anyone here," I remarked softly to Yusufa.  Perhaps because of his age, but more likely because he's never been in the position of an alien before, Yusufa did not share my sympathy for the man's isolation.  "Most of them are that way," he replied carelessly, with the unfounded authority of teenagers the world over.  "They don't bother to learn to speak before they come here, and they don't learn while they're here."

The image that remains from that night was aesthetically striking, and has stayed with me: the Chinese engineer, bringing with him the knowledge of infrastructure and development that 50 years of independence have been unable to achieve but whose cost, depending on who you ask, may have been a devil's bargain; this man, starkly outlined in moonlight, folded into himself in complete isolation, his Cameroonian lackey literally lurking in the shadow behind him, as unknowable to his boss as the Chinese are to Cameroonians.


The second guest visit was last week.  I was chopping onion for a mango-avocado salad when the soft music I had playing was overwhelmed by a burst of radio static right below the kitchen window.  I was so irritated by the unneccessary volume that it took a moment for me to register the voice that had resolved out of the crackle: it was a British voice, speaking crisp Queen's English, informing me that Manchester United had played someone or other-- and now turning to the international desk, the volatile relations with Syria--

It was the BBC World Service.

If this doesn't seem like such a big deal, allow me to explain.  Radio waves are the one type of technologial emission that successfully penetrate over the river, through the woods, across the mountain range, and into the isolated enclave of Mandama.  People here have radios, although more often than not they insert a USB full of music pirated from God knows where-- a cousin's brother with access to a computer in Garoua?-- before hoisting their radio-turned-speaker onto a shoulder and swaggering around Members-only style.

Upon my arrival, I almost ran out and bought one, eager for any connection to news and the outside world.  I became dissuaded, however, after experimenting with my postmates'.  We spent a frustrating evening hunched over her radio by candlelight, Becca practically pressing her ear to the side while I slowly turned the tuning knob and adjusted the antennae, breathlessly waiting to hear anything resolve out of the static.  The best we could do was a single, poorly received French-language talk show-- ultimately too crackly to tune into for long-- and two channels bleating the aggressively nasal traditional horn music particular to the North region. 

So I had given up the radio idea-- until last week.

Laying down my knife and wiping my streaming eyes on a dishtowel (onions here, not having been selectively bred for sweetness, pack a punch), I ran outside.  Resisting the urge to simply snatch the radio out of the hands of the traditionally robed man holding it, I began inquiring in French: what station was this?  He haltingly tried a few words of English, so I switched to that language, but it quickly became clear that he was an old-school Daba, fluent in neither.  "Please," he stammered, "I speak English... poor."  Then why on earth are you listening to the BBC?  I wondered, but, sparing my breath, eschewed unanswerable questions.  Lacking any of the requisite vocabulary in Fulfulde or Daba, I felt the hot rush of desperation, and began miming for him to hand me the radio, unconsciously mimicking the motions of Cameroonian beggars.

And finally, success was mine.  A glance confirmed the station; I mentally noted the time.  At long last I can join the ranks of every good expat in the postcolonial world, and tune in nightly to the BBC.

A NY Yankee in the Lamido's Court

Last week the preschool in Mandama had its graduation ceremony for those tots who will be matriculating to l'ecole primaire next fall.

I'll go ahead and start with the positive: it was cute. Really, the kids were sweet, and they had little mortarboards made out of pastel-colored construction paper, and despite the fact that it was interminably long (even on paper, it was scheduled for four hours; I'm pretty sure my NYU graduation was shorter), I'm glad I was there.

Unfortunately, it also rubbed my face in one of the aspects of Cameroonian life to which I most strenuously object: the despised, classist system of protocol (hence my alternative title for this post, "Why I Hate Fetes and the Fifteenth Century").

"Les invitees", those notables and grands who had been issued actual invitations to the event, were seated under a thatched awning. Everyone else-- including the bulk of the parents, the people for whom this event is theoretically intended-- stood massed behind and around, craning to see the very small subjects dancing and shouting memorized skits in front of the rows of chairs.

About halfway through the ceremony, an abrupt gust of wind swept a sheet of dust across the audience. With only that harbinger as a brief warning, the skies grumbled open, and rain began torrenting down. Anywhere else I have ever lived, this would have been the following scene:

Thunder claps. Rain blows sideways in stinging sheets. Collective shrieks from ensemble.

Extra in the back row: Everyone run for cover!

Chairs are kicked over as entire crowd rushes for covered colonnade, stage right.

But not here in Cameroon. No, before this universal fight for self-interest could be enacted, the M.C. began calling through the loudspeaker. "Will les invitees please pick up their chairs and settle themselves in a seated formation in the colonnade before anyone else takes their places-- make room for les grands!"

I should explain that this was utterly absurd.  Had everyone stood and squashed themselves like sardines in an oil-packed tin, the space in the colonnade might have sufficed to give cover, but it was certainly not large enough to seat 50 comfortably and then squash 100 or so in the remaining liminal crannies.  Spatial reasoning aside, this caused a complete bottleneck, as those who had begun to sprint for cover before the M.C.'s orders paused uncertainly in the opening to the colonnade, only to be plowed into from behind by men hiking up their calf-length boubous with one hand and swinging plastic chairs with the other.  Children, ignoring the priority system altogether, ran pell-mell, tangling themselves into the legs of all involved.

Thinking that this was just stupid, I ignored the M.C.'s directions and avoided the colonnade altogether, joining a group of 12-year-old boys huddling for cover under the overhang of the preschool classrooms.

But this plebian move on my part was not to be. "Madame Laura!" the M.C. barked through the loudspeaker, ensuring that the entire crowd noticed my defection. "Madame Laura, will you please take your place among les invitees so that the protocol can proceed in an orderly manner!"

I shouldered my way bitterly among the crowd of parents who were still milling about in the rain until I found a seat by the lamido and his court.  Who cares if a few pregnant women and grandmothers got soaked through? The important thing is that the grands, the upper classes, those who really matter for undiscernable reasons, are comfortable and dry.  Let the proletariat squash their grubby noses against the windowpanes! We, the notables, will drink our champagne out of crystal glasses and dance the night away! (Okay, fine, that happened in Dr. Zhivago, not in Mandama, but the similarity to pre-revolution Russia-- to any feudal class system, really-- is striking.)

The storm picked up quickly, threatening to blow the corrugated roof off the colonnade altogether.  The rusty shriek of nails being pulled out of their sockets was mostly drowned by the machine-gun spatter of hard rain bulleting the tin sheet.  At this point les invitees were ushered into the safety of a preschool classroom.  We settled ourselves-- in the lamido's case, with comical dignity-- onto toddler-sized chairs, as the Catholic sisters who run the preschool circulated the room with plates of peanuts and bottles of Coke, overdressed cocktail waitresses at our snobby invitation-only party.  Meanwhile the parents huddled against the walls outside, wet and unrefreshed.

I began complaining about all this sotto voce to a friend, a Southerner who is far more educated and exposed to progressive ideas than most in village. He usually takes my side in this sort of grumbling. In this case, however, he shrugged off my outrage.

"It's the same all over," he pointed out. "Even in your United States!" If the president gets shot at, he challenged, who does the Secret Service hustle into the SUVs? The important people. Not the citizen shaking hands with Obama.

I drily countered that rain, albeit torrential, was hardly an assassination attempt, and that however self-important les grands of Mandama considered themselves to be, they could not quite be compared to the Commander in Chief of the United States of America.  But I have to begrudgingly concede his point. Wherever people exist, class systems arise; what was the point of Occupy, if not to point out this discrepancy in American political and economic life?

And I get the lack of incentive to change things from the top down. In some ways, it's nice to get special treatment.  Objectively speaking, I have done little to nothing for Mandama.  Sure, I give health talks a few times a week, but I haven't brought money into the community (nor do I plan to), and I haven't set up any permanent or sustainable projects yet (although not from lack of trying). There's really no reason for me to be honored; I haven't earned the respect of my community by any professional standards.  And yet I got to shelter from the storm and eat peanuts, and it was nice not to be pelted by hail and threatened by thunder.

But the distinction that I just drew-- the idea of earning respect, of deserving special treatment for some superior work or service (e.g., Obama deserves more security because he does a very important job for the country) is not a distinction that I think Mandamans are capable of drawing.  Many of the grands in that room with me have not earned their place there, either. They are hereditary notables, who may or may not do much actual work for the community; or else they are appointed bureaucrats, who often as not merely view their positions as a way to siphon money into their pockets and squeeze the populations they are meant to serve.

But the average farmer gives them unquestioning respect, because there is an unspoken belief that in some way they are inherently deserving of seats, and of shelter, and that the farmer is not.

And it is this underlying assumption that drives me crazy.  Not to get all Marxist class-consciousness on everyone (although I will point out that I wrote my senior thesis, all 50 pages of it, on late 19th century French socialism, so I am predisposed to this line of thinking), but THIS is why I hate living in the fifteenth century. This is what I know I will never change about Mandama, but long to: the lack of dignity and worth afforded to the subsistence farmers, and the brazen assumption of authority by those born into relative wealth.

Notes from the Peanut Gallery

D'abord, let me thank everyone who responded to my last post, either by comment, email, or Facebook.  I was overwhelmed by the kindness of people who immediately reached out with love and support.  It was incredibly encouraging, especially as blogging sometimes feels like unspooling the thread of your thoughts into the faceless void of the Internet-- so thanks, those who picked up that thread and gave it a tug.  I was also interested to see that I seem to have touched a chord in more than one fellow PCV.  I'm glad to know I'm not alone, and would love to continue the dialogue my frustrated ranting has opened.  If we're all beating our heads against the same walls (and have been doing so for 50 years...), it would seem some re-evaluation of what we're doing and the way we're doing it might be in order.

On a lighter note: two things happened in the last few days that made me happy.  The first was the long anticipated arrival of The Rains.  Not to keep hammering this dry season business, but seriously, I was starting to feel like Simeon awaiting the consolation of Israel, or something-- Lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for after 87 years of waiting mine eyes have finally seen thy salvation. (Or, in this case, a solid torrential flash flood, which seemed pretty Messianic yesterday afternoon when it arrived.)  Thunder had been grumbling petulantly in the distance all day, but the last three times it threatened to rain, it was just a fake-out, so I didn't have my hopes up.  I had walked out into the square in front of the mosque next to my house, hoping to catch Idi, my all-purpose handyman, on a matter of my screen door latch.  Suddenly, and with no warning, the heavens were rent asunder (and yes, this dramatic language is fully justified; it was a dramatic business) and water bucketed-- poured-- thundered-- language gapes uselessly to describe the action of the water that was released as some celestial floodgates swept open.

The square had been buzzing with its usual mix of children selling beignets, other children harrassing their working friends, the men who perpetually lounge outside the mosque, the men who lounge around the moto stand, the men who lounge around Idi's boutique-and-abattoir, and probably some more men lounging somewhere.  Men in village lounge quite a bit.  Suddenly, though, even dignified elders were hiking their boubous to their knees and making tracks.  Cameroonians, like cats, seem to hate getting wet, and there was much shrieking and shoving as the knots of people scattered around the square all tried to shove into the same small sheltered overhangs.  The square turned into a pond before our eyes, the sheer force of the rain after so many dry months totally overwhelming the ground's capacity to absorb that much water.  One child clowned around for a moment under the deluge before losing his footing entirely and faceplanting into the swelling stream; this brought a bigger laugh than any of his previous antics, and he ran off, unharmed and grinning.

In ten minutes it was over, and by this morning the roads were once again dry.  They tell me in village it will be a few weeks still before the rain becomes regular.  Still, to feel the downpour drenching my skin beneath my clothes was a primal sort of release, and I am happier for it.

My second happy moment was this morning, hitching a ride on the peanut truck to my market town of Guider, there to catch the bus to the regional capital, Garoua.  The peanut truck leaves once a week from Douroum, which gave me an excuse to spend the night with my postmate, Becca, and our friend Maimouna. This morning I woke before dawn, dressed in the dark, and slipped out to make the early departure of the truck.  Even with my care, I almost missed it.  The truck, a beat-up Renault, was fully loaded with enormous sacks of peanuts which were in turn covered with two tiered rows of villagers; the whole thing was lumbering into motion when I jogged up. "Guider?" The driver hooked a thumb towards the back irritably. "Climb up, if you're coming!" he shouted back.

As always in Cameroon, there seemed to be no possible room to fit another person; and yet, as always, everyone shifted imperceptibly in turn, and a spot opened above the back right set of tires. I ran around the truck, passed up my backpack, then putting my hands flat against the side of the truck, mounted with one leg onto the enormous tire.  Hands appeared to take my wrists, and between my upward momentum and a judicious heave on the part of the wiry arms that held mine, I popped up on top of the mound of bagged peanuts.  I settled myself the right way around, facing out with my legs dangling over the side a good eight feet in the air.  Someone handed me my backpack, which I strapped on to my front, and with a fug of deisel fumes we slowly lurched on our way.

For a few moments I chatted with the man to my left, a potato seller who knew me by sight from the weekly market in Mandama.  It had not been a good season for potatoes-- he shook his head-- but he did all right.  People in Mandama knew him.  They trusted him to sell them good produce, not to fill the bottom of the bag with half-rotten potatoes like some farmers would.  Having exhausted the conversational possibilities of root vegetables, we settled into companionable silence. 

Rolling through the bush al fresco affords all sorts of advantages over conventional travel.  The press of bodies, usually accompanied by heat and odor, is mitigated by the cool morning breeze.  Instead of falling into the usual half-dazed stupor that envelops me in an overpacked bush taxi, I felt alive and alert to the world we were passing through.  To the east, the last strains of dawn echoed faintly, like violin strings bowed at a distance.  I watched attentively as we rolled through hamlets: here two men were holding a cow down while a third prepared a knife for halal slaughter; there a child squatted behind an acacia to take his morning toilet, doubtlessly spreading cholera or typhoid or some other water-borne illness.  I watched as a baby goat landed feet first in a pile of ash, and sneezed; later we startled a bird out of a tree, and it winged swiftly away in a flash of sapphire wings and forked tail.

The ride was over soon enough, and I made my way to the bus station in Guider, where my early arrival allowed me time to savor a cup of chai, the hot, sweet, milky tea children sell, before boarding for Garoua.  It was a pleasant morning, and a pleasant change from the normal stress and chaos of travelling in country.  I do believe I'll be buying my ticket for the peanut gallery from now on.



A boy expertly pours chai (no relation to chai as we think of it, just tea) from one glass to another to cool it before handing it over to his customer.



A Longish (and Slightly Scatological) Cathartic Rant

The last few weeks have been rough.  I have twice been totally blocked regarding projects I hoped to launch during that time frame.  The first concerned a Women's Center the last volunteer found funding for, but was unable to bring to completion. My attempts to continue her work have been continually stymied due to dirty village politics and the dishonesty of a nepotistic minor government employee, who is attempting to use the project to leverage his own petty power trip.  He is corrupt, he lies to my face, he tries to turn villagers against each other-- and the worst part is, there is no way for me to hold him accountable. Go to the chief? His older brother. Go to the mayor? His uncle. The feudal politics of Mandama mean, much like irreponsible nobles in the 14th century, bureaucrats and grands like this man can follow their own code of conduct, at the expense of the peasant class-- in this case, the uneducated women of Mandama.

The second project was a compost project. Again, it had been initiated by the last volunteer, so it should not have been difficult for the agricultural collective involved to replicate. Remember what you did last time around? Do it again. Rinse and repeat.

But here I ran into a problem I am continually butting heads with: the extraordinary lack of initiative of a group of men weaned on a system of religion, foreign aid, and ineffective government development initiatives to expect everything to come from outside or above. The men initially sought me out, saying this had worked well last year and they wanted to do it again-- so the will, it would seem, was there. The pit had already been dug.  The men knew when they should have begun filling it: during the first week of my absence for my In-Service Training.  They knew what they needed to collect: millet stalks, cow poop, and a little sprinkling of ash.  They had sheets outlining in excruciating detail and with large splashy pictures exactly how to layer these items, and how much and how often to water the compost pit.

On my return from IST, none of this had been done. The group gave vague and unsatisfactory answers as to why, but to me it was clear: I was not there to hold their hands along the way.  I tried to re-initiate it (albeit a month late for the planting in June), but again, the men's dilatory attitude crippled the project. There was no water, they said. The well handle was broken.  I asked if they could all chip in money to fix it, a recourse often used in village; they could, but refused to. It was the job of the mayor's office to send a mechanic.  These men have a lifetime's worth of experience to tell them that government money almost never gets where it is needed or asked for, but they would rather risk the certainty of failure then try to work towards success.

Much like the women who come to the health center who know what a safe pregnancy requires, but who refuse to invest even the smallest amount of money to ensure a healthy birth, these men were paralyzed by Disincentivizing Development Disorder.  If it's the will of God-- or if the government will send the money-- or if the Red Cross or UNICEF or Peace Corps will recognize our plight and come do it for us-- but if not, naught but shrugs, folding of hands, and the rhetorical question, "On va faire comment?" "What can we do?"

Following on the heels of these dramatic episodes (and with the Daba, there is always drama; for a people who live without television, it is remarkable how much everyday life resembles a daytime soap), I came down with a sudden and violent case of bacterial dysentery.  It kept me laid up for a few days on my stick bed, hourly sprints to the latrine notwithstanding.  To make it worse, there were bats in my latrine (not actually threatening, but not encouraging when your pants are around your ankles and liquid's gurgling out of your... well, you get the picture), and the ambient temperature inside my concrete solar oven of a house was at least 104.  The second and worst night I awoke from a fever dream in which Hilary Clinton was telling me I had nothing to fear but fear itself (in a Winston Churchill 1940's radio voice), rolled over, vomited into an already partially filled bucket, and vowed that as soon as I could get to a computer without pooping my pants, I was buying a plane ticket to America and going home.

Luckily, things really were better in the morning.  My cooler self prevailed once day finally-- mercifully-- broke, and I got myself cleaned up. I moodily sucked down an oral rehydration solution (Gatorade's far less tasty, all-business-and-no-fun older brother) and took a serious look at my situation.

The fact of the matter is, I've hit a rut.  It wasn't just these projects; it wasn't just the dysentery (although that was pretty bad; I'm not ashamed that I actually wept at the thought of an air-conditioned room in my parent's house, with a fan on and a washing machine to clean soiled sheets and clothing and my nurse mother in attendance. Call me a baby. I'll take it.).

This had been in the works since I returned from my prolonged absence from post.  I'm integrated into Mandama well enough to identify the things about the cultrue that I will never be able to change (misogyny, corruption, greed, casual violence towards or neglect of children; all that nonsense about "they-have-so-little-but-they're-so-happy" is utter poppycock).  I find these things morally repugnant, and yet I have to accept them and work with them.  I know people well enough to know their flaws, some of them quite serious, and have no recourse.  There is no accountability, legal or cultural, for the behaviors that repel me the most.  An 8-month-pregnant woman comes into the health center with a fat lip and one eye swollen shut because her husband beats her? Well, so does the chief of the health center, if he's in a bad mood.

And so I began making less and less of an effort to integrate (what was the point? I don't want to be like them) and started distancing myself from village (when was the last time, before the dysentery, that I ate dinner with my neighbors, instead of preparing food I like and want to eat that doesn't have the consistency of warm snot?).

Taking a critical look at myself, I rememebered a conversation I had before leaving for my service.  I got coffee with my old headmaster and former Peace Corps Volunteer and admin, Dan Frank.  He had warned-- as, indeed, Peace Corps training materials had warned-- of this almost inevitable emotional and ideological low point. I dug out the graph (really, it can be plotted) and referenced the point at the base of the parabola, which aligned with the 6-month mark at post.  I could have been reading a psychiatrist's notes about me: [and here I quote] "characterized by irritation and hostility to the host culture; insignificant difficulties become major problems; exhibits withdrawal" -- on and on it went, with me guiltily checking each listed item.  I remembered, too, something Mr. Frank had advised: "You'll get to a point where you think you're at the end of your rope. You're not. It's a really long rope, and you can just keep going down as long as you want. It's up to you to choose to stop your descent and start the climb back up."

I'm not going to claim I'm magically cured of my blues, because that would be disingenuous.  But I'm not leaking explosively out the back end anymore; I'm letting go of the compost project; I'm putting myself out in the community more, even aimlessly, and have found a few promising contacts that way.  I did a successful tree-planting project with a local elementary school.  I started giving health talks to a women's group, and have already cleared up several misconceptions (eating green mangoes leads to premature birth, HIV comes from very small worms in the stomach, homosexuality is a contagious disease).

Call it physical training for the climb ahead.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I returned to Mandama a week ago to find my village sweltering under the oppressive regime of high hot season.  Having been gone a full week and a half longer than I had originally planned, I spent my first two days back shuttling sweatily between my high-strung neighbors, reassuring them that I had not moved back to America and reigning in their penchant for hyperbole ("I was NOT gone for three months, Yusufa, that would mean I left in mid-December.")

Everyone appeased, I settled into the new rhythm of life in a 109 degree furnace.  I wake, dehydrated and unrested, before 6:00 A.M.  This is the last cool part of the day (cool being a relative term).  I often step onto my front porch to enjoy it as I guzzle a 2-liter bottle of water to try and coax my swollen throat and leather tongue back into some semblance of function.

Anything that's going to happen occurs now, in the early morning; by 10:30 A.M. everyone's back inside.  Having broken fast early, they lunch early, at 11:00 or 11:30.  The next three hours or so-- the dead heat of the midday sun-- are spent laid out on the ubiquitous woven plastic mats used to cover earth floors.  It's a strange sensation, walking around the village between noon and 1:00; the place is a ghost town, and glimpses through doorways of compounds reveal only bodies sprawled out, as though the village had ben stricken with a plague.  People conserve energy, dozing, talking quietly, or merely staring with a fatalistic patience, waiting for the heat to subside.  Animals have equally succumbed to the drought.  Goats hunker into the shade of trees, panting; cows are gaunt, ribs poking through skin like frame through canvas.

These seasonal restrictions in combination with severe supply chain ruptures to the health center have made working next to impossible, so I find myself once again with ponderous amounts of time on my hands.  I while away most afternoon siestas reading on my stick bed; I tried napping, but finding it singularly unpleasant to wake in a pool of sweat, I tend to eschew daytime sleep.  I broke out some oil paints one afternoon and began abstractly blending colors until I realized I was dizzily painting ocean breakers, over and over.

Certain rituals become intolerable in this kind of heat-- running, hot coffee.  I have begun taking hikes in the morning and the late afternoon, when the sun's glare is tempered.  I started doing so to stay active, as I am battling the very real fear that once I stop moving in this heat, I won't start again until the rains come.  I continued hiking, though, because there is beauty in the stark asceticism of bare piles of rock, colored only by rainbow-hued lizards who scuttle erratically from one sunning spot to another, pumping their biceps up and down like unfortunate recruits assigned pushups.  There's a certain satisfaction to reaching the top of a peak and gazing back over the dry fields spread out below like so much parchment, the far horizon obscured by dust that hangs heavily in the atmosphere.

Tempers are short in hot season.  When I do hear my neighbors raise their voices to address their children, their tones are squabbly and discontented.  I think of Camus' The Stranger, the scene where the protagonist, driven to desperation by the blinding Algerian sun, shoots a man.  A college French lit professor read this as deep allegory and misplaced psychoemotional connection indicative of the character's place vis-a-vis society.  At the time, I was inclined to agree.  Now I think maybe this professor had just never been farther south than Toulouse.  There's nothing allegorical about it; I'd shoot a man in this heat.

Things smell worse these days.  Everyone sweats more and bathes and launders decidedly less, as water is a scarce commodity; two of the three wells in town have run dry.  As for my latrine-- well, you can imagine.  120 degree heat does no favors for an already-noxious pit of putrifying poo.

And on that mental image, I bow out.

Bony cattle being led past a dry river bed in search of water and food. Game over, boys. This is what global climate change and overgrazing inevitably lead to.

All the World's a Stage

My introduction to the East region of Cameroon was an aggressive one. A colleague, Jon, and I took a car to Mvan, the area in Yaounde where agence buses congregate, fill up, and take off-- a sort of rowdy watering hole for badly abused vans and overcrowded buses.

As soon as the car stopped, my door flew open. A man reached in, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me out; meanwhile, his friend had popped the taxi trunk and was hoisting my backpack with one hand while hefting Jon's suitcase with the other. Cameroon has taught me nothing if not how to fly into a towering rage at a moment's notice, and I let the two have it, screaming back as they yelled at me and manhandling my backpack off his shoulder and firmly onto my own.

Jon was not so lucky. Still caught up in trying to pay the driver, and burdened with more bags than I, he did not move quickly enough, and his suitcase vanished across the street without him.

We took off after it, yelling, only to find the culprit calmly putting the bag into the luggage space below a bus.  Far from being thieves, as I had first imagined, these were employees of the bus agency, their job to convince customers by force to choose them over the competition. It's a form of persuasion, I suppose.

Our decision made for us, we got on the nearly empty bus, where we proceeded to spend four hours in the stifling heat waiting for the bus to fill up and leave.  When it finally did, the departure was a garrulous one.  Passengers yelled at the driver and each other, almost coming to blows over whether or not to open the window, or if the crackly sound system should blast Bob Marley or Trance Top 40 (to my delight, Bob Marley won out).  I thought wistfully of the polite, quiet Fulbe in the North, who seemed almost orderly in comparison.

A bit of backstory, to give some context to this departure from my normal state of affairs: due to security concerns in the wake of Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram kidnappings of French nationals in the Extreme North, I ended up with  an extra week away from post while I await a final decision about my status. As I was already in the Grand South for a training, I fell in with friends whose posts have been closed and who are awaiting reassignment and spent several days at the beach in Kribi.  Our vacation finished, I headed out East to visit two friends at their posts and do a little proactive post-shopping.  The timing worked out for me to celebrate International Women's Day with my friend Laura at her post, Diang.

I had heard Women's Day hyped for the last few months at my post in the North, but was unsure what to expect in the East, given the vast differences in culture between the two regions.  In some ways, women in the Grand South are much more liberated than women in the North; they can wear jeans, leave their compounds, hold jobs-- in fact, the mayor of Diang is a woman, an unimaginable feat in Mandama.  In other ways, though, women in the East are still just as subject to social forces that actively suppress them.  While they may not be married off at fourteen like girls in the North, they often begin bearing children that young; in fact, my friend Laura explained, for a woman to land a good marriage before the age of twenty, she should have one or two children already (paternity irrelevant), as a sort of test run to prove her fertility.

All this information swirling in my head the day of the fete, I settled into a seat on the dias-- reserved for grands, an uncomfortable position, but one that I've had to accept-- to watch skits being performed before the parade.  The women who walked out to perform were diffident; once the show began, however, they transformed, throwing themselves into their roles with a determination that was hardly amateur.

The first skit dealt with an abusive husband.  A young woman cross-dressed in a man's suit swaggered across the clay patch of a stage brimming with unmistakably masculine bravado.  It took a moment to register that her borrowed shoes were clownishly large. She treated the actress playing her wife cruelly, punishing her arbitrarily before stalking back across the stage to harass and catcall the other actresses with an accuracy that brought howls of laughter to the audience.  The wife's neighbors arrived and clothed her in International Women's Day pagne, helping her to her feet in a corny, but effective, show of solidarity.

The second skit was less cheesy, and if anything more bold, as it lampooned local officials.  In Cameroon power is often arbitrary and subject to a strict hierarchy; unelected officials demand and receive unquestioning allegiance, despite the fact that they may be corrupt, inefficient, and downright lazy.  Political appointees in Cameroon can divert enormous amounts of public funds for personal use and generally turn the law on their lathes without any fear of repercussion, or even loss of face. Given the cultural context of blind submission, these actresses were doing more than fishing for a cheap laugh; they were staging an audacious protest of the system as it exists.  Adopting immediately recognizable accents and patterns of behavior, they mercilessly mocked the mayor's harsh verbal abuse of her hapless assistant, Jean-- appearing in the sole male cameo as himself-- the police commissioner's alcoholism, the school board director's womanizing.  I glanced over at Laura, who knew and worked with all of these officials. Her face registered shock, but as she turned to me, her eyes were shining in delight.  "This is brilliant!" she whispered gleefully. "Although I think Jean might get an earful on Monday."  I glanced down the line of notables on the dias.  The mayor's face was a carefully composed mask; the commissioner looked thunderous.

The actresses wrapped up the skit by opening beers and toasting themselves, then scampered off, laughing, to roars of approval from the crowd.  The requisite parade began, village women tottering by in perilous formation, their would-be military precision hampered by Jersey Shore-worthy stilettos and Women's Day uniform pagne dresses.  Their eyes straight ahead, they swung their arms slightly out of unison as they sang an anthem to the country's Orwellian dictator: "Paul Biya, Paul Biya, notre president!"

So change comes slowly; but it does come, even if the Jeans of Cameroon have to be its scapegoats.