Second-Class Citizens

The train that slowly wends its way once a day between Ngaoundéré and Yaoundé has four levels of comfort available for the passenger, depending on the size of his wallet and his capacity for the physical proximity of strangers.

For those who prefer to travel in the lap of luxury, there are two-person sleeper cars, or wagons-lits.  I have never been inside one of these spacious chambers, but tantalizing glimpses suggest that each room has its own sink, not to mention space for luggage.

The next step down—the upper end of what Peace Corps will typically pay if a volunteer is traveling on official business—is the four-person wagon-lit.  Two sets of fold-down bunks fit snugly in a small room, with space above to precariously shove bags.  These sleeper cars are not at all uncomfortable; the beds are small, but nevertheless beds, and the passenger receives astonishingly good treatment for a country where customer service is an unknown entity.  A perky, uniformed stewardess comes around, slides the door open, and takes orders for dinner to be delivered to the car on a silver tray.  The braised fish and plantains are, expectations of train food to the contrary, delicious.  Soap and toilet paper are provided in every car.  By Cameroonian standards, this is staying at the Ritz Carlton on rails.

For those too parsimonious to spring for a wagon-lit, first class is the next alternative.  In first class there are no beds, only seats.  Sleeping sitting up is of course less comfortable, and the lights are kept on all night.  The legroom, though, is sufficient, and snacks can be bought at every stop off the heads of women and children who stroll up and down the platform calling their wares: Manioc! Bananas! Pineapples!  At several thousand francs cheaper than buying a bed, first class is my ticket of choice for un-reimbursed personal travel.  Volunteer opinions differ, but I am not alone in defending first class. 

No one, however, would advocate choosing second class, the lowest rung on the ladder of comfort and cost.  I had heard enough anecdotal evidence to prejudice me against it—cattle car, some call it, one of the nicer names I’ve heard; others recount horror stories of standing for 16 hours.   I am all for new experiences and cultural immersion, but could have happily completed my service without ever traveling second class.

Until two days ago, when I tried to buy a last-minute ticket to head to Yaoundé and was informed by the stony-faced Camrail employee at the ticket window that the train was completely sold out—unless, of course, I wanted second class.  Second class never sells out, because tickets don’t correspond to single seats.  Tickets correspond to a right to be on the train; how you fit yourself in is up to you.  Women sleep in the aisles, children get shoved under their parents’ seats, pugnacious adolescents quarrel to stretch out in the luggage racks, old men perch on cargo.  Once all the space to slump on the floor is crammed full, unlucky shmucks who get on at a later stop than Ngaoundéré do indeed end up standing until Yaoundé.  The cars quickly reek of urine, sweat, and fermented manioc; moving around is next to impossible.  It is like being shipped to the Gulag, or Hell; and like Stalin or Satan, Camrail can always find room for a few more damned souls.

And thus I found myself shoehorned into a tiny 4-person banquette from 6:00 Saturday evening until noon on Sunday.  The hard plastic benches faced each other, forcing my seatmates and me to zipper our knees in between each other’s legs.  Getting a book out of the bag at my feet required a coordinated three-person shift.

The four of us quickly developed camaraderie, as one does when forced into such situations.  At the first long stop, the portly gendarme across from me leaned out of the window to buy mets de pistache, a Cameroonian snack made of crushed melon seeds and dried fish wrapped in banana leaves, boiled, and then smoked.  He hauled himself back in and fell heavily into his seat, then wordlessly distributed the pistache to the four of us.  I expressed surprise and thanks, commenting that I didn’t often eat pistache; it’s not particularly popular in the North.  At the next stop, my seatmate—a long-faced man with small, even teeth, traveling to Douala with three young nieces—writhed out the window, and dropped a second met de pistache in my lap.  “To make up for the ones you’re not eating up North,” he murmured with a shy smile.

Second class passengers do get second-class treatment; for once, even my white skin bought me no favors.  An hour after the train pulled out of the station, I thought to go while away some of the evening chatting with another PCV traveling to Yaoundé on first class.  I made my tortuous way over and around the crush of bodies to the door that slid between the second class cars at the end of the train and the first class cars in the middle.  As I reached for the handle, a gendarme stopped me. 

“Second class passengers aren’t allowed into first class,” he told me officiously.   I explained that I wasn’t planning on trying to sneak into a seat I hadn’t paid for, I just wanted to talk to my friend—he could see her, I pointed out.  She was the other white girl, two rows back.

He repeated his interdiction, staring straight ahead.  I tried again, keeping my tone light; he could watch us through the door if he wanted, and if I seemed like I was staying too long he could come fetch me back.  I would pinky promise not to go anywhere beyond the third row.  He didn’t crack a smile.  I kept at him—more out of boredom than a real burning desire to chat with the other PCV—and finally he conceded slightly.  “You can write a note,” he told me grudgingly, “and I’ll deliver it to your friend.  But you stay here.”

In first class and wagon-lit, uniformed conductors in peaked caps come around once to punch tickets—a standard practice.  In second class, there were multiple ticket checks, and several national ID card checks, carried out not by train conductors but by armed police.  Every few hours I was shaken roughly awake for one check or the other, and around 2:00 in the morning a few passengers in the next car over got hauled off the train.

By the time we reached Yaoundé, I was exhausted and cramped.  My legs were aching, and I was ready for a hot shower, an actual bed, and a good meal.  Still, I’m glad I had the experience.  I understand a little better how Cameroonians who are not wealthy expect to travel and to be treated.  I’m glad I could rely, like Blanche DuBois, on the kindness of strangers.  If nothing else, any other form of transportation I take from hereon out will seem infinitely more manageable, because at least I’m not being shipped to the Eastern Front in a cattle car of plantains and peed-on people.

Just don’t expect me to be buying a ticket for second class again any time soon.

A friend and fellow PCV, Dale Wahl, escaped second class by using the fifth, unofficial option: paying off the conductor for a seat in the cafe car.

How I Earn That $200 a Month Government Salary

My last blog detailed the collapse of the Mandama Health Center as a functioning clinic.  Despite this serious setback, I have found some work to occupy my time: I just launched an independent malnutrition screening with the help of three volunteer mobilizers, during which I hope to collect hard data about rates of malnutrition in Mandama, as well as a specific breakdown of the types (wasting? Stunting? Kwashiorkor? Anemia? Vitamin deficiencies?). Through analyzing these indicators, I can plan more specifically targeted interventions.  I’m also having monthly meetings with the group of nine women I am training as community leaders in a moringa project I began in May.   By next spring, these women will be certified (by me) experts in the cultivation and care of moringa as a crop, as well as its nutritional benefits and how to incorporate it in traditional foods.  (Side note: If you’ve never heard of moringa, it IS the new quinoa / acai / hitherto undiscovered superfood, so when you see it in Whole Foods five years down the road, feel licensed to be a moringa hipster. You heard it here first.)

But weekly screenings and monthly meetings are not, when you think about it, very much work.  In this I am limited by the fact that rainy season is work season, during which everyone spends their days cultivating their fields.  I have had to accept that this is normal for Peace Corps volunteers, who can only work as much as their community is motivated to work with them; in a culture where expectations of work and output are much, much different than in America, I just have to adjust my personal standards and adapt as I can.

So here it is, the list of things I’ve been doing in place of work:

1.     1.    Preparing elaborate meals.  As I have nothing but time, and everyone comes back from the fields at noon sharp, I spend entire afternoons learning three ways to prepare cowpeas, or how to make hot piment sauce from scratch (this latter at the expense of burning hands and an inadvertently rubbed eye that I couldn’t open for 20 minutes).

As baby Zoiratou looks on, Mairamou shows me how to grind raw hot peppers into paste, the first stage in making fiery piment sauce.

Salman helps me wash petits pois for a slightly sweet, hummus-like breakfast dish.

Sundays, when I switch from faking Muslim to faking Catholic, follow suit.  As the two older Polish nuns at the Catholic Mission in Mandama are on home leave all summer, the two Cameroonian sisters are currently holding down the fort.  The youngest, Francois, is particularly enjoying freedom from the martenitism of the full chapter.  No longer is she the Myrmidon of her Achilles, the Mother Superior, bound to subordinate uncomplainingly to a million tiny tyrannies of kitchen and table.  Do we want to fritter away Sunday afternoon chatting and eating jam with a spoon?  We’ll do it!  Why not?  There’s no Soeur Pauline to come by and silently reprove us with a gimlet-eyed stare until we hastily put the jam away and go back to doing dishes.  The dishes will wait!  This is heady rebellion.  

Equally so the choice of the Sunday menu:  Soeur Aquila is not here to impose the same meal she has chosen every week for 35 years (chicken, potatoes, A Boiled Vegetable).  We’ll make Cameroonian food and Western food!  There happens to be yogurt Francois made herself; get Greek and add tsatziki!  Sure, it doesn’t go with anything else in the meal, but the point is no one’s there to summarily ban her from doing it.  Soeur Agnes, although less excitable than the vivacious Francois, seems amused more than anything, and so the last several Sundays have seen us preparing 4-course meals and collectively ignoring the noon Angelus bell that would normally delineate lunch hour.  2:00 rolls around and finds us still at the table, comparing the size of our food babies.  There are few things more bizarre than seeing a nun pat her habit and whisper confidentially, “I think I’m about 5 months!”

2.    2.      Writing and illustrating Fulfulde comic strips.  I got bored of flashcards, so I decided to drill vocab through the Adventures of Amadou and Hanna, two ethnically diverse children in the North of Cameroon.  Their actions are sometimes unusual, depending on the vocabulary I’ve recently learned; the strip got fairly dark after I went to three wakes in a row, and in general the protagonists use far more cooking vocabulary than children of their age have any business doing (see #1).  Still, it amuses me to draw them, they are useful as pedagogic tools, and who knows?  If Fulfulde suddenly becomes a critical language, I’ll make a textbook out of ‘em and retire early.

3.      3.     Scrubbing my floor with bleach.  I recently got a puppy, Publius Scipio Africanus; while she’s generally endearing and I mostly adore her, housetraining her has been a challenge.  Enough said.

4.     4.     Babysitting.  As school is out, most of the kids in my neighborhood are either hard at work in their parents’ fields or bored out of their little skulls.  Most days see me playing Ultimate Frisbee, or building cardboard dinosaurs (my claims about Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Mesozoic Era were mostly met with disbelief), or hosting a spontaneous dance party, or getting peed on.  This last is inspiring me to abandon all other work and exclusively devote my energies to promoting the use of diapers in Mandama.

Cool Hand Habiba, the winner of one rainy day's egg-eating contest.  Competitive eating, it turns out, is a little twisted once you start to explain it to third-world children.

5.     5.     Working in the fields.  When in Rome, right?  Everyone else spends the hours of 7 to noon farming, so it makes sense for me to, too—although I love it, so I probably would in any case.  I planted a field beside my house in soy, and about half as much behind my house in cowpeas; the latter were sadly dug up as soon as they poked their bent little necks out of the soil (see #3, particularly reference “generally” endearing puppy whom I “mostly” adore).  

      Kids have been helping me with the soy, but I draw the line at letting anyone into my home flower and vegetable garden.  Mandamans have a pathological inability to see a plant that is not Useful in some quantifiable way without instinctively wanting to pull it out of the ground.  In their books, which are carved in stone, Crops are Good in Fields.  Sand is Good in Compounds.  Compounds should be Swept Clean (= Free of Anything Other than Sand).

I, on the other hand, despaired in the days when my yard looked like a post-apocalyptic moonscape (in my neighbors’ terms, Clean).  It was overly weedy when I got back from almost a month in America, true, but I selectively took out the worst offenders and left it in a state of minimally organized chaos.  There are five raised beds for vegetables, three big clumps of riotous flowers, a gaggle of okra, and a smattering of corn.  The rest I left with a groundcover of long elephant grass, which rustles beautifully in the wind, and some pretty twining vine which has run up the papaya trees and blooms in tiny yellow trumpets.

My landscaping decisions have given everyone who sees them fits.  They gasp, flutter their hands nervously like Mrs. Bennett complaining about her nerves, and urge me to let them send a few kids over to clear the place out.  Ignoring their delicate constitutions, I flatly refuse.  “But these flowers, there are too many of them!” they tell me, eyeing my garden longingly, imagining it razed to the ground.  “Leave a few, but let us pull out the rest.  Even one afternoon would suffice, we can have this place clean in no time!”  This difference of opinions culminated in a standoff with my landlord’s middle wife when she led two goats over, dismantled part of my fence to herd them in, and let them eat their way through a clump of elephant grass and half a row of squash plants—for my own good, she argued.  I like her, and I didn’t want to fight, but then again, this is my yard, and my fence she so casually took apart.  I threw a big enough tantrum (the best way, I’m finding, to have people take me seriously; a calm voice indicates to Mandamans that what I’m saying is not that important) that people have finally stopped volunteering to clear-cut my garden.

And thus I pass my days.  I'm finding myself happier in Mandama now than I've been since I arrived.  I realized this one night after dinner, lying on my back in the sand with two of my neighbor's children pillowed on my shoulders and a third sprawled at my feet.  We were staring up between the fronds of a date palm at the immense span of stars spilling across the sky.  I pointed out the Milky Way, and tried to explain the size of the universe (a fool's errand in any language).  The oldest boy, Salman, laughed when I told him he'd be an old man before he could reach Alpha Centauri, although I'm not sure if he was amused by the incomprehensibility of galactic distances, or the mere idea of space travel.  I lapsed into comfortable silence, and as little Saliou fell asleep beside me, I realized there was really no place I'd rather be.

General Health Clinic

Way back in Bokito, I found it bizarre and amusing that my host family-- like much of Cameroon-- was addicted to soap operas.  Night after night, the boob tube pandered to a fixated nation: first Coeur Brise, where Rodrigue convinced everyone that he was his own twin brother with the careful application of a fake mustache; then some weird Bollywood one involving a family curse and a fated love triangle; then one where the main character, for inscrutable reasons of her own, wore a metal Phantom of the Opera-style half mask.

In Mandama, people make up for the lack of television with actual, home-brewed drama, and I am beginning to understand why my host mom found the convoluted plots of Coeur Brise believable: Mandamans could give the writing team of Days of Our Lives a tip or two.  Truth, it turns out, is far more dramatic than fiction.

Unfortunately, this is directly affecting my work at the health center. I returned from my month of leave in July to find tensions at the already dysfunctional clinic running dangerously high.  Our sole nurse Benjamin, it transpired, had gotten into a fist fight with the president of the volunteer health mobilizers.  Depending on whose version of the story I listened to, my Choose Your Own Truth options were:

A. The president of the mobilizers, Santos, attacked Benjamin, because Benjamin would not give him extra nutritional supplements on the sly to take home to his (not malnourished) wife.  Turn to page 3.

B. Benjamin attacked Santos after Santos confronted him because there are no prices posted anywhere at the clinic (this is true) and Benjamin has been systematically gouging patients and pocketing the extra (wouldn't surprise me, but this is the first I've heard of this accusation). Turn to page 7.

C. Santos caught Benjamin loading up a moto with boxes of UNICEF-donated supplements, which he was taking to Guider to sell on the black market.  Turn to page 12.

D. Santos attacked Benjamin after discovering there were secret liasons between Benjamin and Santos' wife.  Benjamin wooed her with (you guessed it) nutritional supplements. Turn to page 15.

PAGES 3, 7, 12, and 15: However we wound up here, this was the situation as I found it: All but 4 of the volunteer mobilizers had resigned in protest.  Benjamin was refusing to work, also in protest, and had lodged a formal complaint against Santos at the prefecture in Garoua.  Tilirou, the alcoholic chief of the health center, decided the best way to avoid taking sides would be to absent himself altogether by tooling off every day to Mayo Oulo, where rumor has it he holed up in a bar.  Average health services provided on a daily basis: 0.

Although I wanted as little as possible to do with this whole situation, I did take over the distribution of the infamous nutritional supplements, with the help of the 4 stalwart remaining mobilizers.  There was a certain vigilante feel to the otherwise deserted health center, me crouched over boxes of Plumpy Nut with my pocket knife, ripping them open for the mobilizers to give out to mothers and tiny, undernourished babies-- but Tilirou was fine with it, as long as we expected nothing of him.

Then the crisis hit: Benjamin's complaint worked its way through the system.  Police showed up at Santos' house and arrested him, because in Cameroon irritating details like investigations and habeas corpus are dispensed with.  "I saw Goody Proctor with the Devil" is about all that's required.

Now with the arrest, public opinion turned.  Until now Mandama had been feigning indignation, although actually titillated; now Benjamin had crossed a line, and people got angry.  As an outsider and a Southerner, Benjamin is already mistrusted.  In the days after the arrest I heard dark mutterings against him, and wondered if I was actually going to watch him get driven out of town.  There are no pitchforks here, but I'm sure hoes would do in a pinch.

Meanwhile, Santos had been taken to a holding cell, where there was a 3-day window before he was to be transferred to full prison, where he could spend upwards of 20 years in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic purgatory, waiting just to go to trial.  These 3 days were officially to allow the accusation to be rescinded, if Benjamin were suddenly smote by conscience or brotherly goodwill.  The unspoken subtext was that the 3 days were to allow family and friends to put together enough money to make the problem disappear.  As your average gendarme has a moral center that would make Boss Tweed blush, the question on everyone's lips was not whether Santos could pay his way out, but rather who was footing the bill.

The third day, to collectively bated breath, El Hadji Ibrahim-- Mandama's uncontested Don Corleone-- made a dignified departure for the prefecture.  That night the news made its way around  town: "El Hadji gave Santos justice."  I was told this sincerely, with no trace of irony, no indication that anyone realized what a mockery of justice this entire circus constituted.

The Santos Affair seemed to have blown over, but revenge is a dish best served cold, and Benjamin's gloriously public destruction was far from through.  A week later I was back at the health center, again distributing Plumpy Nut.  Suddenly a moto roared through the gateposts, its rider an avenging angel in purple weave and lurid orange pants painted onto thunderous thighs.  My four mobilizers stopped what they were doing and stared, stricken.  "Benjamin's wife!" one whispered hoarsely.  Pulling my village idiot act as usual, I was puzzled-- why should this strike terror into all and sundry?  Why was her demeanor so grim?  How nice of her to visit, all the way from the Littoral; was Benjamin not expecting her?

Several things happened in rapid succession: the mobilizers sprinted off to warn Benjamin, who was in the office.  His wife headed straight for the house next to the health center that Benjamin and the chief, Tilirou, share.  Benjamin came barreling out of his office, the mobilizers hot on his heels, as screams erupted from the house.  The Plumpy Nut was totally forgotten, as the crown of women there for the distribution shifted en masse to have a better view.  All they needed were tubs of popcorn and 24-ounce Cokes to make this a perfect afternoon matinee.

The one mobilizer who had stayed behind explained the situation to me as it played out before its rapt audience: The house is split between four people, he informed me.  Tilirou and his second wife use one side, and Benjamin and the village chief's daughter Rafiatou use the other.  Seeing that I still wasn't getting it, he hinted, "Rafiatou? Benjamin's... fiancee?", the more respectable term prudish Mandamans use to mean "lover".  Santos had threatened to call Benjamin's wife and spill the situation, but everyone thought he was just angry, no one thought he'd really tell on Rafiatou.

As though on cue, the chief's daughter appeared, barefoot and being dragged by 2 mobilizers with the help of hastily fashioned cloth handcuffs.  I half expected to see a scarlet "A" emblazoned across her chest.  Feeling that this was taking things quite a bit too far, I told the mobilizer next to me to at least fetch the poor girl's shoes, and to drop the pointlessly dramatic fake handcuffs.  He did so, and she was bundled offstage to the chief's compound, leaving the spotlight trained on Benjamin, cowering beneath a rain of shrieks and blows.  Hell hath no fury like a wife betrayed, and fury hath no more emotive actor than a Southern Cameroonian.

I had no intention of getting involved in the fisticuffs, but the undisguised glee of the rubbernecking crowd appalled me.  I snapped at the health mobilizers that this was none of our concern, asked them to please act professional, and began reading names from the register in an unnecessarily loud voice.  I was largely ignored.  Eventually the purple-haired wife made a stormy exit, leaving Benjamin to take out his anger by alternately throttling and drop-kicking an unlucky goat.  This might have been stand-up comedy, the way the women laughed, but animal abuse is apparently slightly lower on the public entertainment scale than the death throes of a troubled marriage.  Everyone gradually turned their backs on the hapless goat's bleats of pain, and I was able to finish the distribution.

Benjamin made himself scarce that afternoon, and I have not seen him since, which I thought was his choice.  In fact, I was later informed, his wife lodged a complaint, and Benjamin was arrested, on what grounds I'm not sure-- infidelity? spousal abuse? Both happen so routinely I assumed there were no laws against them, although maybe there are, it's just culturally unthinkable for women to hold their husbands and masters accountable for domestic violence.

As of this writing, I have heard Benjamin payed his way out of jail, but is not planning on returning to Mandama anytime soon, and has requested a transfer to a different health center, preferably far away from the Grand North entirely.  This will leave our health center with 0 nurses and a single absentee chief.

Top that, General Hospital. 

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.