Lessons in Zoological Anatomy

Even before coming into the Peace Corps, I had accepted that being polite and culturally sensitive in the context of Central Africa would probably mean breaking my several-year vegetarianism.

I never anticipated, however, whipping up a batch of fried intestines on a daily basis.

First, a word about intestines: people here eat them.  Not washed and stretched and turned into sausage skin, just straight, grilled on a skewer.  They’re a cheaper piece of meat, like liver, so they’re sometimes mixed in with better cuts; but if you want to save money, or just prefer the taste, you can request them at any streetmeat stand. 

I’ve tried pig intestine, once.  While out for beers in the regional capital with a few friends, one colleague ordered a plate from a pork vendor.  They were heaped into a pile, folded in on themselves in shiny pleats, like flowers made of dirty rubber. My Swiss friend, Alissa, speared a piece with a toothpick.  She chewed thoughtfully.  “I’m trying to tell if I can taste poop,” she remarked, a question one might argue should never be asked of food. 

Although I generally avoid meat when I’m the one directing my diet, I was intrigued, and felt compelled to try.  After all, I thought, when am I ever going to be served intestine again?  My friend Jeff, grinning widely, selected a massive lump from the remaining pieces, and handed it to me along with a plastic bag—“in case you want to spit it out,” he warned, hardly encouraging words. 

Deciding to go all in, I popped the entire chunk in my mouth.  It was the consistency of an inner tube (which makes sense, really), and had a strong flavor—not of poop, nor of grilled meat, but something all its own.  It tasted squiggly, somehow, to risk allowing my description to slide into synesthesia.  I suppose my face must have mirrored my ambivalence, because Jeff and Alissa started laughing, and Jeff urged me to use the bag if I needed.  I shook my head, chewing steadily, determined to force the unfortunately large piece down.  I finally managed to finish it, and washed the taste out of my mouth with beer, glad to think that that was the end of the intestine experiment.

How little did I know what awaited me in the days to come.

My dog, Scipio Africanus, has almost doubled in size in the two months that I’ve had her, and should get about twice as big again before she stops growing.  In some ways, this is good; as she gets larger and stronger, she can accompany me on longer and longer hikes and runs without becoming exhausted, as she did as a small puppy, requiring me to carry her in my arms the last mile or so. 

On the downside, her caloric needs are rapidly increasing, and the diet of milk, scant eggs, and occasional sardines that I fed her as a pup is no longer sufficient.  I got by for about a week allowing her to gorge on rice and beignets, but felt guilty that her diet was hardly equilibrated—so I bowed to the inevitable, and visited the butcher stand across the public square from my house. 

Despite the heat, flies, and charnel stench, this is for some reason a popular hangout spot for teenage boys and young men, who spend afternoons slouching around the stand, blasting a radio and tinkering with their motos.  With Skip at my heel, I made my way to the bloody table, where two young men were hacking up meat with long, dull knives.  I asked if they could save out any of the bad bits—the parts not fit for human consumption, which is a much shorter list of parts here than it would be elsewhere—for me to feed my dog.  They laughed at this, as my devotion to my dog (normal by the standards of any dog owner I know, but bizarre and unwarranted in Cameroonian eyes) is well known in my quartier, and the subject of much mystified headshaking.  But after a little ribbing, they agreed.  Just then, one of the butchers started shouting and shaking his knife at something behind me.  I wheeled to see little Scipio with her teeth buried in a cow hide that had been laid out to tan in the sun, trying absurdly to drag the entire thing, many times her weight, in the direction of my house.  Realizing that she had overstayed her welcome, and all too aware that the butcher probably intended to send her packing with a dent in her skull, I quickly gathered her up and made tracks for home.

But we have an understanding now, these butchers and I, and every day or two a child arrives at my house bearing a greasy brown paper parcel.  Inside is a disgusting mélange of bovine anatomy, which changes slightly by the day; some days it’s almost all gristle and fat, other days stretches of lightly furred skin feature heavily.  Once I’m pretty sure there was a cow nostril, although out of the context of a face, I can’t be sure.  A few times it’s been intestine—although those days I pay more dearly, as this, again, is a legitimate cut.

I tip whatever’s in the package into a pot of oil and fry it all up.  Although I don’t often eat meat, I am able to recognize that a steak on a grill, or a roasting chicken, objectively smells good.  This fry job never smells good.  The odor of the abattoir, along with floating particles of grease, lingers in the kitchen air even after I’ve cut off the gas.  It also doesn’t cook the way an actual cut of muscle would: gristle turns into hard lumps; connective tissue curls in on itself; intestines, studded with microvillae, pucker and become almost floral in shape.  The whole mass tends to turn grey, giving me the strange but vivid illusion (particularly with batches heavy on the fur) of stirring up a pot of baby mice. 

Scipio is happy with whatever I put in front of her, though, gnawing on lumps of gristle, pieces of hide, and the rare bit of actual meat with equal abandon.  Despite her bumpy start with the butcher, I think he might have developed a soft spot for her; every now and then she goes trotting out of the concession and returns with an enormous bone, which she proceeds to drag around the house in fits of deeply contemplative chewing, depositing these prizes in corners and under furniture.  I’ve never seen this happen, but I suspect during her jaunts the butcher is quite literally throwing her a bone. 

I’m getting less squeamish, too, as the days go by.  This whole past year has been an extended lesson for me, forcing me to rethink what and why and how we eat, not to mention the fairly picky standards I held myself to back home.  This is another lesson for me, in humility and practicality. 

I do go through fits of guilt—despite the low quality of her food, is my dog eating better than my neighbors’ children, who only get meat once a week, if that?  But even if she is, is systemic poverty any excuse for negligence on my part?  Dogs need protein; I could afford real meat daily, if it came to that, and certainly can afford a few pennies’ worth of offal; and in accepting a puppy, I took on a responsibility to care for her.  These are all questions that probably never haunt dog owners back home, who I assume buy enormous bags of Purina Puppy Chow with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. 

And who also, presumably, never have to visualize what a nostril would look like flying solo.

Governments Don't Have To Shut Down To Be Dysfunctional

Forgive me if I am flogging a dead horse, as I know I have mentioned this in previous posts, but the pace of work here in Cameroon is much slower than anything I was used to at home, particularly in New York.   Take this past week, for example:  I recently got back to Mandama after several weeks in the South training the new group of 54 volunteers who arrived in country in early September.  It was a fun assignment, as I recently celebrated my one-year anniversary in Cameroon—seeing the new trainees discover and respond to food, customs, and language allowed me to re-live that excitement, informed by a year’s worth of field experience.  Green and untutored, they thought me knowledgeable and integrated (which I’m not particularly; no more than they will be in 12 months), and I enjoyed taking them to a cabaret to dance, introducing them to 30-ounce Cameroonian corn beer, and hazing them with the curiously flaccid, sour baton de manioc.

Fellow PCV Katie Ouimet and I meet the new training class at the airport at midnight.

Night out in Yaounde: the trainees show off their moves at the cabaret.

Buoyed by their infectious enthusiasm, I got back to post ready to jump into work.  The whole first week, however, turned out to be something of a wash—this is election week, and anyone who’s anybody is working on the campaign.

I should pause to explain something about Cameroonian “democracy”, or what voting looks like under a dictatorship.  There are two levels of elections that will take place this Monday, legislative and municipal.  President Paul Biya’s ruling party, the RDPC, is on the ballot for all open seats, and there’s really no question that they will win.  In the absence of term limits, a party pick wins a seat and holds onto it indefinitely.  

Furthermore, there are no candidate’s names on the ballot, only the party.  Once the RNDP secures their victory, an appointed board of counselors chooses who will become mayor, or representative, or senator.  The voter can have no idea who he or she is supporting; the cult of personality is such that I have been told several times that someone is voting for Paul Biya, or that Paul Biya will win.  That the presidential elections won't take place for several years seems an irrelevant fact.

This does not mean that the party forgoes the pageantry of campaigning, however.  This whole past week, the RDPC has been using its considerable war chest to hold rallies, distribute shirts, and plaster the village with banners and posters.  Like Mussolini in Fascist Italy, Paul Biya’s benevolent (albeit 30 years younger) face beams down at us, from trees and boutiques and the sides of houses.  Illiterate women who understand politics tenuously at best sport cheap LEGISLATIVES 2013 T-shirts, which remind the wearer and the viewer that the RDPC is “The People’s Choice”.  The fledgling opposition party, the UNDP, also held a rally last Wednesday; by all accounts, it was a poor showing, with a skeleton budget (“There wasn’t even a megaphone,” scoffed an unexpectedly elitist observer in my quartier, “they just had to yell.  Quels villageoises!”), and definitely no T-shirts.  Come the indubitable RDPC victory on Monday, a celebratory fete will be held—but only for those with demonstrated loyalty to the party.  Thus the absence of the majority of educated adults in town, who took a week off to work the campaign trail.  Many of them have been hired by the RDPC to be “election observers” on Monday, a vaguely threatening title with more than a whiff of Tammany Hall. 

I have been invited to several of these campaign events, but motives would be read into my presence, even as an impartial spectator.  Political involvement of any stripe is a dicey proposition, not to mention morally reprehensible (depending on the party), so I have been absenting myself from public life this week.  Instead I’ve been spending time with my friends who are too poor or illiterate for the parties to bother with them—that is to say, women and children.  The end of September has brought the red millet and peanut harvest periods, so “spending time” means working in the fields.

Saturday I spent the day in my friend Asta’s peanut fields, harvesting alongside her sons, Ilyasou and Youssoufa.  We left shortly after sunrise, and for the first hour we worked, a cool breeze wafted over the hills to our northwest.  As the sun climbed higher in the sky, however, the air stilled, and soon we were sweltering in a dead heat, the sweat rolling down my nose bringing sweet whiffs of sunscreen.

The peanuts were not planted rows, but instead scattered about at random.  The fields were poorly weeded, complicating the task at hand; at first I had trouble discerning which plants I was to pull up, and dallied behind, pulling up everything and examining the roots for clusters of groundnuts.  I quickly learned to identify the characteristic clumps of thick-stemmed, oppositely leaved peanut plants, cropped low to the ground by Asta’s goats.  It had rained most of the day Friday, so the plants came up with no resistance.  Ilyasou and I divided the field roughly into rows, doubled into a crouch, and worked our way steadily forward, tossing the peanut plants into piles every few meters.  Youssoufa began the task of laboriously sifting through the turned earth we left in our wakes by hand, searching for any peanuts that had become detached when we yanked the plants out of the soil.  When we reached the end of our rows, Ilyasou and I turned back and helped Youssoufa with his painstaking labor. 

Around mid-morning, a group of girls from the lycée sauntered by, returning home from working in their own fields.  I recognized several from nutrition classes I have given, and they stopped, startled and amused to see me hunched over and drenched in sweat.  They teased the boys, and me, then set down their baskets and joined us in our work.  This spirit of communal responsibility, labor, and ownership is something I’ve come to admire here—although nebulous ideas of personal property do have their drawbacks. 

As we settled back into our rhythm—pull, beat twice on the ground to shake off clods of earth, toss onto the pile; pull, shake, toss—the girls began to sing.  This startled me, as music is not an important part of culture in this region, and I have been continually disappointed by the lack of songs or dance, even during festivals. 

We paused around 11:00 for a meal; more women had arrived by that time, bringing with them thermoses of corn gruel, or bouille, corn couscous, and stewed okra.  Youssoufa and I threw ourselves on the ground gratefully in the shade of a spreading tree, gulping water and letting the dappled light play over our eyelids.

Then back to finish the last field, before heading home in the heat of the day.  I crashed for a nap that afternoon, only to be roused by clapping outside my door.  It was Youssoufa, bearing a woven plastic market bag of raw peanuts from his mother—the payment for my labor.  They are still wet and green-tasting, the shells difficult to crack; I will dry them in the sun for several days to make the nuts drier and the shells more brittle, then tote them along to someone’s concession and spend an evening sitting, talking, and shelling peanuts.  Once shelled, I will roast them and grind them into homemade peanut butter, because Africa makes foodie hipsters of us all.

Thank God for REI

Allow me to set the scene: a steamy evening after a day of rain in dirty, mosquito-dense Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon-- known to some as the armpit of Africa.  I was snuggled into the front seat of a taxi beside a ponderous momma in a formless pink kaba, the window beside me rolled all the way down to let some air (albeit muggy air) circulate.  In the back seat sat two of my closest friends from training a year ago, Brian and Bryant.  It was nearing the end of a long two weeks of preparing to train the incoming stage, and we were all tired.  We had dined sumptuously on roasted chicken in basil sauce (them), a tower of sauteed vegetables and spicy piment (me) and fresh tropical fruit smoothies (all the above), and were headed back to our transit house for the night.  

About halfway to our destination, traffic snarled into an impenetrable jam-- hardly unusual in Yaounde, where traffic lights are but suggestions, and taxis often turn off their engines in anticipation of the wait to cross an intersection.  We sat at the bottom of a hill, breathing in unfiltered exhaust and watching the red brakelights that formed an unmoving, hypnotic pattern above us.  In the back seat, Brian and Bryant were once again talking about video games, a conversation to which I was unable to contribute, so I gazed out instead at the wet, broken pavement.  The evening was still young, and the sidewalk was full with foot traffic and mommas squatted at grills, hawking plantains and African prunes. 

A youngish man, not badly dressed, shuffled up to the open window.  He communicated nonverbally with ten fingers bunched at his lips, then spread open beseechingly: the universal sign language of begging.  I shook my head, avoiding his eyes, and when he didn't leave, I glanced up.  "I'm sorry," I said firmly. "I have nothing for you."

He continued to hover, and I began to feel trapped in the immobile taxi, all too aware of how open the window was and how close he was to me.  "Please leave," I warned, then more sharply: "Degages-toi!" Disengage yourself; go away.  He inched closer to the taxi, and Brian-- similarly uneasy-- reached his arm out of the window from the backseat, trying to ward him off.

He was now looming into the window, filling the entire frame, and my stomach fell.  Time started doing strange things, every second stretching itself across moments.  I suddenly knew before he moved that he was going to lunge, and flashed through several possibilities-- rolling up the window?  No time, he'd be in the car before I could fumble my way to the manual roller.  Opening the door into him?  Same problem.  All I could do was instinctively tighten my grip on my bag, a canvas REI tote foolishly slung over my right shoulder-- the one closest to the door.  

Like a coiled spring released, he sprung, snatching the bag from my lap.  Had I not kept it hooked onto myself and presciently grabbed the handles he might have swept it cleanly out the window and booked it down the street-- but my anticipatory instinct meant he hauled me halfway out along with the bag, clocking my head against the top of the door in the process.  The bag is REI's reusable tote, which turns out to be of better quality than anything sold in Cameroon, as evidenced by the amount of strain to which it was submitted without ripping.  We began a game of tug-of-war, sawing my right bicep back and forth over the window frame.  I yelled the entire time, a guttural bellow ripped from our primate past, with no distinct aim other than drawing attention or scaring my aggressor away.

Meanwhile, Brian had scrambled his way to the door handle and flung the door open and into the thief, who danced sideways with the force of the blow, allowing me some slack to reel the bag closer.  One point, Team White Man.  I should explain that Brian, who introduced me to both the P90X and Insanity high-intensity interval training systems, works out daily.  He can hold a plank position for five and a half minutes (to my minute and a half).  His pectorals and triceps are not so much defined as explicated in multiple volumes, with an annotated bibliography and concordance.  

All this to say, my assailant was either driven by desperation or mad tenacity, because he still did not let go.  I thought when the bag didn't pop out of the taxi, and I resisted, he would drop it and run.  He didn't.  I thought when I started my full-throated scream-- which did draw the attention of quite a number of bystanders, not that they did anything but sit back and watch the show-- he would run.  He didn't.  I certainly thought that when Brian got out of the taxi and this punk saw how sticky the situation was soon to become, he would do a quick cost-benefit analysis, cut his losses, and get out of dodge.

He didn't.

He and Brian locked eyes, and for what felt like ages (although again, unruly time; it was probably less than seconds) they simply stared at each other.  Then Brian moved towards him, fists clenched, and he finally dropped the tote and scampered.  The crowd of bystanders infuriatingly parted to let him pass-- having seen the entire debacle, knowing exactly what he had been trying to do.  Brian got back in the taxi, we rolled up the window and locked the passenger doors, and thankfully the gridlock loosened up enough to let us ease up the hill.  The driver was clucking indignantly.  "Quel villageoise!" he scoffed-- what a peasant-- a label that amused me in its unfounded prejudice.  A villager would never have this kind of audacity; he couldn't get away with it in a place where everyone knows everyone and trust is so essential.  It is exactly the urban anonymity of Yaounde that allows crime to thrive.  

But all was well.  The canvas tote had twisted in our grapple, keeping everything in it contained inside, so I had miraculously lost nothing.  The momma beside me patted my knee with no-nonsense Cameroonian sympathy: "Don't cry. You're fine."  And she was right, I was.  My underarm was ripped and bruised, my right temple was going to have a goose-egg in the morning-- but my belongings and my person were intact.

Thanks, REI. 

Brian and Bryant (not on the evening in question) enjoying real coffee in a real coffeeshop in Bryant's vacation dreamland post, Dschang. There are also paddleboats, and cloudy mountains, and a pool. I am moving immediately.

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.