The Gravediggers

To risk sounding like the opening lines of a bad country song, my dog died last week.  [Insert lyrics re: pickup trucks, cowboy boots]. 

It was the puppy, Jacqueline Cousteau.  I had been in Ngaoundere for the weekend to work on applications and catch up on emails, and got back into Mbang Mboum just before 1:30 prayer on Sunday.  My landlord having recently taken a second wife, a widowed mother of five, the number of children in my concession has doubled.  I’m still unaccustomed to the new dynamic, and was a little overwhelmed by the mob that swallowed me as soon as I climbed off my moto, little hands grabbing my bags and tugging on my shirttail. 

“Laura! Laura! Lao Mboum!” they chanted, my actual name and my household name competing as the children called over each other. 

“Yes, yes,” I agreed vaguely, distracted by the difficulty of unlocking my door while juggling two bags of groceries and a motorcycle helmet. 

Nyari, the oldest son, pushed his way to the front.  “Non!” he cried.  “Laura, c’est le sien”—le chien, the dog, his Northern accent eliding a hard “ch”.

I looked at him, not yet understanding.  Nyari’s younger brother Nzika took up the thread.  “Il est mort,” he said, still smiling, his tone matter-of-fact.  The other children pressed closer, curious to see my reaction, as I registered for the first time the small, still, furry body barely visible behind a row of potted plants on my porch. 

Two things flashed through my brain at once.  The first was a stupefied horror at the unexpected nature of the news.  The second was an instant resolve that I could not—absolutely could not—cry in front of the children, not over this.  Their attitude to delivering the news perfectly encapsulates the Cameroonian attitude towards both animals and death: it was worth commenting on—something that happened; news to give—but it was news that could be delivered with a smile.  It rained yesterday.  The corn’s about ready to harvest.  Your dog died.  It was certainly nothing to get worked up over, nothing particularly sad.  I know the family already has trouble understanding my attachment to my dogs, and while they try to make excuses for me as an American, they disapprove, on some level, of me feeding the dogs meat and letting them into my house.  The children aren’t ill-intentioned, but they can be thoughtlessly cruel, and I knew if I showed emotion, they would laugh. They would not be amused by my pain, but amused by the strange thought that someone would cry over a dog.

So I swallowed hard and carried on, putting my bags away as quickly and efficiently as possible before walking to my postmate Alizabeth’s house.  As I told her the news, I began to feel a lump in my throat, and when she immediately pulled me into a hug, I dissolved into tears.  As I wiped them away and took a few deep breaths, Aliz gathered a shovel and an old cardboard box.

Cousteau’s little body was already stiff; Death, the taxidermist, had done his work.  I tried to fold her into the box, and bit back an inappropriate impulse to laugh at the legs that determinedly jutted out, as though she were trying to brake an unexpected fall.  Too late for that, little girl.

The children goggled at us as we carried the canine corpse out to our garden, currently at the height of bloom.  We found a clear spot, behind the sweet potato mound and adjacent to the cucumbers, within sight of a wall of exuberant sunflowers.  Scipio Africanus, Cousteau’s mother and my first dog, came bursting out of the rows of corn; she sniffed the rigid cadaver before losing interest and wandering away, not seeming to find anything in the dead dog that related to her.  As Aliz searched for rocks to build a cairn, I began to dig. 

The sun beat down mercilessly, and I soon stripped down to my sports bra, sweat rolling down my back as I attacked the red clay hardpan.  I fell into a rhythm, the thud of the shovel head matching my heavy breathing.  A half a foot deep.  A foot deep.  I realized I was crying again, although I wasn’t sure it was only over Cousteau. 

My two dogs, while sometimes an impediment to my fuller integration—I have far fewer visitors than my postmate, and neighbors have told me it is because people are afraid of my unchained beasts—have been one of the most important factors in keeping me sane during my service.  In an environment where I am constantly required to adapt to other people’s culture and expectations, having a dog, unpopular as that decision is, is a way to draw a boundary, to push back, to stake out some territory that is mine.  It is my small way of forcing people to meet me in the middle, which doesn’t often happen here.  The relationship between a Peace Corps Volunteer and her community is not one that goes both ways.  We cannot insist that things be on our terms; our communities can and do.  We must try daily to understand a point of view and set of values that may be alien to us; our communities, unaccustomed to this practice, rarely try to understand our core beliefs or why we think and do the way we do.  The burden is on us to bend over backwards in the name of cultural sensitivity.  Knees are inappropriate in a Muslim village, so skirts shorter than mid-calf are excommunicated from my wardrobe.  Vegetarianism is inexplicable and perceived as rude, so I eat meat.  Never would I insist that my village try and understand that in America, we rock booty shorts in public and embrace veganism.  Don’t get me wrong, I think being forced into this kind of humility is an extremely healthy exercise.  It’s something that we don’t do enough of at home, where trumpeting about Rights in a Free Country often drowns out empathy and respect—but it’s wearing, to so rarely feel comfortable asserting what I really think and believe and stand for.  It’s hard to feel forced to subjugate parts of myself, as much as I understand the value of doing so. 

The dogs, then, have come to be more than just dogs.  They represent a small but public declaration of my values and my culture.  I cannot come out to people here as an atheist.  I cannot be honest about my beliefs regarding gender and sexuality.  I cannot insist that people show me respect equal to that they would show a man.  I can, however, go running every morning with my two dogs bounding along at my side—and if it makes people uncomfortable, which it almost certainly does, well, that’s healthy for them, too.

 

Obviously I don’t always think of my dogs in these terms; the vast majority of the time, they’re slobbery, dirty animals, who are cute and annoying and loud and eat everything and track mud into my kitchen.  They’re dogs.

But as I panted and sweated and shoveled dirt onto my feet, I felt that it was more than a dead dog in the cardboard box.  It was, for that moment, my right to make decisions based on my internal compass, not on the fear of judgment and gossip from my narrow-minded community.  An Elspeth Huxley quote came to mind: “Africa is cruel.  It takes your heart and grinds it into powdered stone—and no-one minds.” 

If this seems dramatic, it was.  Cousteau was my favorite of the litter of puppies, but she was a dog; she was not a person, and unlike some Americans, I know the difference.  The moment passed, as do all such low points.  I worked my frustration out, the ache in my shoulders cathartic.  By the time Aliz returned, laden with stones, I was in control of myself again, and had settled into a very Cameroonian state of (depending on your point of view) fatalism, or practicality.  She was a dog.  She died, as all things die.  And so we were burying her, and life would go on. 

My favorite friend with my favorite puppy. Rest in peace, Cousteau.

In Which I Get Nosy, Ask Questions, and Learn Things as a Result

In the last three months, I have been training a voluntary Red Cross club in Mbang Mboum to carry out community needs assessment, organize interventions, and monitor and evaluate the effect of those projects.  In short, having long ago given up on making much of an impact myself—and knowing that I will not be replaced, as my site is soon to be a dam flood zone—I’m trying to train 15 local volunteers to be me.  I quixotically hope to leave behind a team of people who can do everything I was trained by the Peace Corps to do, only better: they’re part of the community, they speak the languages (all four of em!), and they will be around long after I’m back in America, connecting to the International Space Station with my iPhone 7S or whatever it is the kids these days do.

It’s slow going.  Adult education carries its own challenges.  If these volunteers went to school at all, it was not to learn critical thinking; it was to be told: swallow. Regurgitate. Don’t you dare ask questions, because I, your dictator-cum-teacher, am the authority and I am to be respected absolutely.  You can imagine that trying to lead a seminar-style class on the scientific method (“There is no automatic right answer! It’s all about constant questioning!  Doubt everything I’m telling you, unless you can prove it to be true!”) put everyone a little out of their depth.  

With time, though, we’re getting there.  Last week I collected the results of a community survey we spent a month completing.  The volunteers were trained in how to carry out needs assessment.  They did practice visits to each other’s’ houses, with me observing (this they clearly thought to be silly, but in fact, given how diffident, confused, or distracted some became, it was a useful tool).  Finally, we split them into teams of two, divided the village into sectors, and off they went, clipboards and malnutrition measuring tapes in hand. 

Now the results are in, and, having discovered that a public health statistics wonk resides deep within me, I have spent the last week piddling away precious charged-laptop hours making graphs and pie charts and Excel spreadsheets of what was found.

Many of the results were unsurprising: most people get water from the free surface-water wells instead of the paying deep-water pumps, and most people have recurring diarrhea.  Some were unreliable: self-reported data would put 90% of the population as regularly attending pre-natal consultations and giving birth at the health center.  As someone who works at the health center and sees our daily traffic, believe me, that just ain’t the case.   Some were mildly depressing: even after exhaustive educational campaigns, 8% of respondents believe HIV can be transmitted via mosquitos.

But some of the data were informative, and so this data I will share with you.  (Lest anyone think all I ever do in Peace Corps is play, here's a boring work-related blog to prove you wrong.)  

This should come as a surprise to no one, but class structures exist, even in rural villages, and wealth makes health.  There is, it turns out, a 1% in Mbang Mboum—those families of marabouts and hajjis—and they skew the data enormously.  One of the questions on the nutrition section of the survey asked how many times a week women and children in the household eat meat, one of the best locally-available sources of protein and iron.  The average was once a week.  Two families, however—one that of traditional chief’s sister—reported eating meat daily.  More troubling were the self-reported data on mosquito nets, which should be distributed annually to every family with a pregnant or nursing mother, or a child younger than five (which stipulations here in the Adamaoua translate to, every family).  Only one household reported not having any bednets; the vast majority had two—although whether or not they’re used is another question entirely.  Two is actually a reasonable number, as even in large families, there are limited sleeping spaces; children tend to be piled together on a floor mat, and a mother will sleep with several of her babies and toddlers in bed with her.  The data would have put the average at two, then, except for one outlier that skewed the set: the family of a local notable who works at the health center reported having ten.  This surpassed the number of people in the household by two.  This is hardly shocking (someone working in the public sector in Cameroon is gaming the system to line their own pocket?  Never!) but, given that these are the people I work with, it’s a little disappointing.

The most interesting of the results were the ones that I didn’t expect.  One of the questions asked, “Who decides how many children the family should have?”  I was prepared to see le mari, the husband (which was the most common answer).  I was prepared to see Allah (this is, after all, a pretty conservative Muslim community).  I was not prepared for the written-in answer: ce n’est pas une decision, it’s not a decision, which a whopping 30% of respondents independently came up with.  Pregnancy just happens!  It’s not something you control!  This actually tells me a lot about attitudes towards family planning, in that I may have been focusing on the wrong angle: instead of assuming women need education about their contraceptive options, I should probably spend more time educating men and women about the fact that contraception is an option.

Having become obsessed with gender since being here, I also found it revelatory to break down the data by household demographics.  I was interested to see that 37% of surveyed families declared a female head of household.  This was a much higher number than I was expecting, although there are explanations.  Divorce is not uncommon here, and is not nearly as stigmatized as I had expected it to be—most divorced women will get remarried within a few years, either to that same husband a second time, or as the second or third wife of another man.  In the meantime, many move back with their families, but some live on their own, perhaps sharing a compound with a relative and her children.  Widows, particularly those with grown children, often become matriarchs; the family that lives across the street from me is just that, a grandmother with an ever-changing and indiscriminate brood of grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.  Finally, men who work as anything other than farmers will often move away, to the city or even farther, in search of job opportunities; these men—teachers, nurses, clerks, construction workers—don’t often bring their families with them, instead sending money back occasionally and visiting once or twice a year.  In this case, in the absence of the husband and father, a woman becomes the de facto head of household. 

Whatever the cause, these female-headed households had demonstrable differences in health knowledge and behaviors from their traditional, male-dominated neighbors.  100% of female-headed households reported giving birth at the health center, versus 72% of male-headed households.  I have already mentioned that this is a suspect statistic in either case, and that I am quite sure at-home births are being underreported.  However, given the need for a husband’s permission in order for a wife to leave her concession, it is not unreasonable to anticipate that a woman relieved of that burden would be more likely to go where she pleased, instead of sending someone to find her husband when labor pains began in order to secure his approval to go give birth in the maternity ward.

54% of respondents in female-headed households reported regularly using condoms during sexual intercourse, compared to 16% of respondents in male-headed households.  63% knew at least two methods of family planning, versus 45% of their male-dominated counterparts.  The list goes on.

What’s the takeaway from all this?  Obviously, that men are the worst.  (Haha! Just kidding! Kind of!)  In all seriousness, I am looking forward to sharing the data with my Red Cross team at our next meeting, and seeing their reactions—in particular, I want to see if they can help explain to me some of the responses that I found contradictory or slightly bewildering.  As much as poring over the surveys immediately inspired about 12 project ideas, I’m reining myself in: this is for the volunteers to do with as they will.  Based on the results, they’re the ones who will choose what health issues to address, and (with guidance, although hopefully not too heavy-handed) design interventions. 

Fasika in Addis Ababa

After my adventurous stay in Harar, I spent Easter, or Fasika, with an Ethiopian Orthodox family in Addis, hosted by Liya Berhane, a girl I met through Couchsurfing.  I met up with her near her house in the affluent Bole Tele neighborhood Saturday morning, and we dove into conversation about her father and aunt, with whom she lived; her university studies in Toulouse; and her imminent plans to move to Maryland to rejoin her mother and brother.

The family’s white-gated house was charming, with a lovely front garden shaded by an enormous spreading acacia tree.  The neighborhood was quiet and leafy, and palpably breathed wealth, from the manicured lawns and high walls to the scattering of embassies and consular residences. 

I was greeted by two German girls, Johanna and Lisi.  Volunteers from Kenya, they were returning to Germany to continue their university studies and similarly Couchsurfing along the way.  The last guest was Bez, a family friend of Liya’s from London, back home in Ethiopia for the Easter holidays.

We spent the day wandering Addis, chatting energetically over fresh-squeezed juices in a sunken beergarden.  I found the other girls, international and articulate, a pleasure to spend time with.

Liya’s Aunt Babaji, who had accompanied us through the morning, left around 3:00 to take her place at church.  Although the mass wouldn’t start until evening, it would be impossible to secure a space inside the cathedral past the early afternoon.  Resigned to spending the night outside the walls of the church, we opted to wait until after nightfall to walk over, and spent the afternoon and early evening napping and drinking coffee and tea to prepare ourselves for a night-long vigil.

Around 9:30 we finally roused ourselves and dressed.  Liya lent out white headscarves and traditional shamas, gauzy tunics, as needed.  Acutely aware of the cold—night on the Abyssinian highland felt frigid to a body used to Cameroonian equatorial heat—we bundled into thick white gabi, wool blankets that doubled as outer robes.  We joined a stream of similarly-muffled faithful heading to the enormous Holy Medhedaleim Church, where candles in abundance flickered valiantly against the night.  Worshippers stood, knelt, and slept in bundled heaps against the thick stone outer walls of the cathedral. 

Lisi and I deposited our gabis outside with the other girls, left our shoes in a pile of footwear outside the doors, and slipped barefoot into the women’s side of the packed church.   We picked our way cautiously through the mostly grounded crowd, threading up a staircase until we found perches just below the balcony.  From there we had a clear view of the priests in the nave of the cathedral, arranged in a tight circle of beards and robes.  They chanted lugubriously, accompanying themselves with clanking iron clappers.  To a slow rhythm set by a deep drum, they stepped into and out of the circle, throwing their arms back and forth, that motion setting off the metal bells in a sort of funereal Hokey Pokey. 

As I listened to this mournful dirge, I let my eyes wander across the women’s side of the church, spread out below me.  Individuals had been swallowed into anonymity, as everyone was dressed uniformly in a thin white shamas and matching headscarf.  Only about a quarter of the observant were sitting up, awake; the rest (presumably reaching hour seven or eight of this marathon service) were sprawled in the pews or aisles, asleep, still tightly swaddled in layers of white cotton.  I had the sudden, inescapable impression—perhaps influenced by the nature of the holiday, the late hour, and too much incense smoke—that I was gazing over a chamber of corpses in funeral shrouds, awaiting resurrection.

After another hour and a half or so, the heat and the overcrowding on the staircase escalated from irritating to unbearable.  Lisi and I nodded to each other, rose, and negotiated our way to the door.  A blast of cold midnight air greeted us; we hurriedly found our shoes and made our way back to Liya and Johanna, gratefully accepting the proffered gabis. 

We spent the next three hours cycling through an interminable sequence of prayer: standing, rocking, kneeling, and genuflecting, our foreheads to the ground.  Once Johanna stayed in that position for quite some time; I thought she was feeling particularly worshipful, but as she straightened her neck with a wince, I realized she had fallen asleep, prostrate.  Liya, kneeling behind me and Lisi, reached forward to tap us when it was time to stand, whispering descriptions of the prayers being sung and the sacraments being offered—several baptisms and a wedding among them—in a rapid hiss.  When parts of the service were in Amharic, she translated directly.  The scripture, however, was in Ge’ez, the ancient and now dead language of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world.  During these portions she shrugged helplessly. 

Tired, but powering through the service.

Finally the service was over.  We made our way through the celebratory crowd to the front of the church to find Mr. Berhane and Aunt Babaji, brimming with a sort of elation.  Once home, we divested ourselves of our many layers of white cotton, talking and laughing as animatedly as though it were evening and not 4:00 in the morning.

Presently Aunt Babaji brought out a huge platter of sour, fermented injera covered in red lentils and soft white cheese.  During the fast of Lent, Orthodox Ethiopians eschew all meat and dairy, making Easter day a long-awaited, anti-vegan embrace of all things animal.

The eating continued for much of the day, interrupted by what in fairness should be called a nap rather than a night’s sleep.  Breakfast was thick, delicious, focaccia-like bread, called dabo, made from sourdough and traditionally cooked for Easter; spicy stewed goat; and tella, acidic homemade beer.  The two German girls left for the airport, and Bez, Liya and I whiled away the morning roasting, grinding, and brewing our own coffee.

Green coffee beans

I learn to roast

Bez grinds the coffee with a mortar and pestle like a pro

Our finished product: the most satisfying cup of joe I've ever drunk

We lazed around for much of the afternoon, reading and going for a long walk to Khaldis, Ethiopia’s Starbucks-inspired fancy coffee chain.  As though we needed any more dairy, we indulged in ice cream and large, goopy caramel lattes, an unexpected taste of corporate America.  I continued to be impressed by the level of development I was witnessing, at least in the Bole neighborhood: we passed a mall, a movie theatre, an upscale cupcake bakery, and not one but two Pinkberry-style frozen yogurt joints.

The eating continued when we got back with a large Easter dinner.  Family from Liya’s father’s side came pouring in as we feasted on shredded chicken dripping with butter and studded with whole hard-boiled eggs, more of the goat cooked with slices of injera and green pepper, soft cheese, more bread, more injera.  We waded in meat and dairy, and washed it all down with another round of the curiously sour beer and tej, a potent local liquor. Aunt Babaji delighted in feeding everyone gursha, “little bites” wrapped in injera and popped directly into another person’s mouth.  I laughed self-consciously as I opened my mouth, feeling like a chick, but I could feel the love behind the gesture, and was thrilled to be included in the family in such a complete way.

I chatted for a while with Mr. Berhane, a lawyer and an intelligent and well-read man.  We talked Ethiopian and U.S. politics; as he had lived through the Derg, the Communist regime that ruled Ethiopia with an iron fist from 1974 to 1987, his lucid commentary on that period provided a nice counterpart to what I had already read and heard.  My first day in Addis Ababa I had stopped by the Red Terror Museum, established by victims of the regime to record the crimes carried out under the Derg.  There I had entered into a long conversation with Frey, a docent who was imprisoned for eight years with no trial and no idea upon what charges he was being detained.  “They were targeting the young and the educated.  I had not even finished high school, so I was not educated,” Frey told me drily, “but I was young.  That was enough to put me under suspicion as an enemy of the revolution.”  He spoke of the constant horror he felt at the possibility that he might now run into his jailors and torturers on the street; all had received amnesty under the Western-supported Tigray government that took over after the Derg collapsed.  I was interested to hear that Mr. Berhane’s analysis of the current and in some ways equally repressive tribal government echoed that of Frey and of Jamal, a young engineer and my bus seat partner on the way from Harar: the choices for an educated person are to lay low, to join the regime, or to flee the country.  Opposition is not an option.  The current government under Hailemariam Desalegn may not carry out open assassinations of its citizens the way the Derg did, but it’s hardly a democratic alternative; the media is controlled, ethnic conflicts have been not only tolerated but encouraged, and people are still thrown into prison without trials or a writ of habeas corpus.  All three stressed the support this government continues to receive from the U.S., where it is viewed as an ally against Islamic extremism, a threat posed in the region by Al- Shabaab.  As Jamal bitterly told me, taking the sting out of his words with a sad smile, “You fight your War on Terror at the expense of the Ethiopian people.”

Liya’s father and uncle cleaned their plates, then brought out the choicest parts of the goat.  These had been kept aside, raw, to be sliced, dipped in spice, and eaten as a final course.  On their insistence, I joined them; this was my second time in as many months eating raw goat. I was coming to find it surprisingly appetizing, despite—or perhaps because of—its evocatively muscular mouthfeel. 

I tumbled into bed that night full, sleepy, and transcendently happy.  I had arrived in Ethiopia a solo traveller with a few contacts and no solid plans, and had found by the end of the week an adopted family and several new friends.  I had struck up conversations with strangers, been invited into the house and life of a Muslim gang lord, gone to a wedding, been jumped on-- but not savaged-- by wild hyenas, and spent the Easter holidays with one of the kindest and most effusive families I’ve had the fortune to be welcomed by.  It was the least-coherently planned vacation I’ve taken, and subsequently the best.  I can’t wait to make it back to Ethiopia for a longer stay.

Expats and other Exotic Breeds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Girls' Forum

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five hours later, we were still there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aissatou and Abbo at the National Girls' Forum

As I Went Down To The River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the more structurally sound river crossings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Rinse and repeat.

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

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

Women's Liberation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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