Wednesday, March 12, 2008
A funny thing happened on the way to March...
February 11 (yes, I’m a little behind here) was National Youth Day, a chance for the country to honor their future with huge parades, banquets, and parties filling the social schedule for weeks before and after the actual day. In the morning we gathered at the town center, awaiting the festivities and parades. The chief arrived flanked by two chiefs of neighboring villages. His 7 ft tall stature was accentuated by a tent like white umbrella that his armed soldiers carried in front of him. I use “armed” in the loose sense—they were carrying spears of some sort and rifles from circa 19-whenever the first rifle was made. As Celine Dion’s latest (10 years ago) pop hit belted, I couldn’t help but pinch myself to see if this was just another mefloquin dream. The stands on the side of the road were a labyrinth of accolades: members of the nobility, chiefs, government officials, entrepreneurs whose wealth ranks them as some of the richest men in Cameroon, and then…me. We sat for what seemed like hours (read: it was actually hours. 4 of them.), and watched school group after school group parade by. It was a wonderful introduction to the myriad of talents that the students of Bamendjou possess. For example, I did not know that Bamendjou had such a large and active karate club. But now I know that they are well versed in the art of kicking because that’s what they did. For 20 minutes. Just kick.
The evening was filled with musical acts in the town center. The mayor brought in 20 or so amazing musicians, many of them born in Bamendjou, to celebrate. Most of the acts were really just karaoke, but one group, Takam 2 (apparently the all the members of Takam 1 died) was incredible. Dressed in traditional Bamileke garb, the men danced, and sang. The crowd was wild. And, amazingly enough, I had courtside seats…on the stage. It was incredible until my worst nightmare came true. One of the nearly naked men with a spear, who will herein be known as the love of my life, approached me. Shoved the spear in my face. And told me to dance. So I, logically, grabbed the spear and danced on the stage. At this point in time the entire crowd starts screaming, and I’m madly waving the spear in the air, shaking what my mama gave me. I’d like it to be known that I’m the world’s worst dancer, and when people make fun of white girls dancing…that’s actually how I dance. But it was incredible, and made me wish I was part of Takam 2. Maybe I’ll have a shot with Takam 3.
English classes continue to provide endless amusement. In my adult class this week we worked on the family tree. Producing a rather complicated family, complete with multiple wives (the Cameroonians love their polygamy), and divorces, I tried to cover all my bases so that no familial relations were left unexplained. But one of my students raised his hand and asked me, But Miss Nura, what do you call the woman of the husband…not the wife, not the second wife…the other woman? Mistress, I replied. Ah yes, mistress, how could I have forgotten her? He smiled. I continued, and what they’re having is called an affair. The class nodded. Another student raised her hand, but their children, what are they called? I paused, not wanting to call them illegitimate. They’re called the product of an affair. I think I’m going to need an advanced degree to keep teaching these classes.
Seemingly possessed by demons, and thrilled at the fact that I had a free day I, inexplicably, decided to walk with my friend Jessica to Dschang, a lovely quaint college town located not too far from me. And by not too far, I clearly mean that it took 10 hours and 30 minutes to walk somewhere between 50 and 60 km and unless I develop a severe case of amnesia in the immediate future, I intend to never walk there (or anywhere else) again. I give you a range, as I do not know the exact distance we walked. Additionally, no one in Cameroon knows the distance—even those that pass regularly between the two towns. About two and a half hours or so into the walk, we asked a man how far away Dschang was. Definitively he replied, 400 kilometers. Upon seeing the shocked and horrified looks on our faces, he paused. Reconsidered. And said, two kilometers. Thus began the game for our journey: how far are we. Asking mostly children and the elderly for directions (a game we played one Christmas break with my Dad, when he too did the same. Directions went something like go to Chris’ house and then turn…and restaurant recommendations were akin to Chucky Cheese), we received a resounding, surprisingly unanimous answer no matter where we were in the journey: 20 km. Even 1 km outside of Dschang—20 km. In truth, the last 30 minutes were some of the most painful steps ever walked, and I’m quite certain that I’ll never be able to walk properly again.
I have also spent a lot of time since my last entry sitting. Way too much. This was due to the, shall we call them, skirmishes? strife? strikes? that consumed much of the beginning of March. What initially began as a taxi strike against rising gas prices turned into a country wide protest of…I’m still not sure. French impositions? A collapsing government unwilling to listen to its people? Linguistic tensions? Buildings were burned, people took to the streets, and volunteers were confined to their houses. Stir crazy, I spent the week washing my floors, gardening, avoiding men in the streets with machetes, and walking around my compound in my underwear, which prompted my housemate, Jane, to ask me if my money had run out and I needed to borrow money to buy pants. Eventually we were “consolidated” to a hotel where we waited for five more days. As evacuation became a possibility, seconds felt like hours and time’s passage so palpable that it hung in the air, clouding my view of any foreseeable future. That is until I talked to my mother, and she quelled my hyperbolic pangs with her oh so sweet words, Nura, come on. It’s only been five f*cking days! And so that was it. We went home. People stopped rioting. And everything went back to normal. Whatever that is.
Political unrest has only one real solution: pizza. So we headed to the glorious capital of Yaounde for the weekend. There I consumed three pizzas in the course of 72 hours and am convinced that I am now lactose intolerant. Yaounde was a bastion of hot showers, good food, fast internet, and other wonderfulness that causes a surbanite like myself to wonder why exactly I’m living in the middle of nowhere Africa. But then I happen upon wonderful little jewels, like this next story, and it all just seems worth it.
Travel in Cameroon is wonderfully pleasant, and by that I mean that I would rather sit through my college graduation seven hundred times (for those of you that were there, you know what a sacrifice this is) than make my way around this country by bus. As we took our seats, the bus driver almost jumped out of his, looked at us and demanded in English, You have brought the rotten bush meat on the bus? Caught, shall we say, off guard, we stammered, No. Not us. We don’t have bush meat. And we didn’t. The man then smiled, switched to French and continued, Alright, who is the one farting then! This turned into something of a fourth grade all boys party and everyone started accusing their neighbor of producing the wondrous odor. A man in the back of the bus cleared the air, Leave the poor person alone. They are probably sick to their stomachs. I mean, they’re a machine, farting every minute like this! And so we left Yaounde, farting machine and all, in search of Bafoussam.
And it felt like I was finally coming home. Evacuation thoughts aside, I felt my first real pangs of homesickness and a desire to return stateside during the riots. But I’m hoping that that’s passed, and I can still stick this out for a bit longer. Speaking of longer, sorry that this was such a long entry—I’ll spare you all country updates, but don’t think that they’re going away permanently! In true form, I hope you all are well, preparing for the most glorious holiday—Easter—which is logically celebrated with the spreading of chemically colored eggs. Because that’s what Jesus would have wanted.
The evening was filled with musical acts in the town center. The mayor brought in 20 or so amazing musicians, many of them born in Bamendjou, to celebrate. Most of the acts were really just karaoke, but one group, Takam 2 (apparently the all the members of Takam 1 died) was incredible. Dressed in traditional Bamileke garb, the men danced, and sang. The crowd was wild. And, amazingly enough, I had courtside seats…on the stage. It was incredible until my worst nightmare came true. One of the nearly naked men with a spear, who will herein be known as the love of my life, approached me. Shoved the spear in my face. And told me to dance. So I, logically, grabbed the spear and danced on the stage. At this point in time the entire crowd starts screaming, and I’m madly waving the spear in the air, shaking what my mama gave me. I’d like it to be known that I’m the world’s worst dancer, and when people make fun of white girls dancing…that’s actually how I dance. But it was incredible, and made me wish I was part of Takam 2. Maybe I’ll have a shot with Takam 3.
English classes continue to provide endless amusement. In my adult class this week we worked on the family tree. Producing a rather complicated family, complete with multiple wives (the Cameroonians love their polygamy), and divorces, I tried to cover all my bases so that no familial relations were left unexplained. But one of my students raised his hand and asked me, But Miss Nura, what do you call the woman of the husband…not the wife, not the second wife…the other woman? Mistress, I replied. Ah yes, mistress, how could I have forgotten her? He smiled. I continued, and what they’re having is called an affair. The class nodded. Another student raised her hand, but their children, what are they called? I paused, not wanting to call them illegitimate. They’re called the product of an affair. I think I’m going to need an advanced degree to keep teaching these classes.
Seemingly possessed by demons, and thrilled at the fact that I had a free day I, inexplicably, decided to walk with my friend Jessica to Dschang, a lovely quaint college town located not too far from me. And by not too far, I clearly mean that it took 10 hours and 30 minutes to walk somewhere between 50 and 60 km and unless I develop a severe case of amnesia in the immediate future, I intend to never walk there (or anywhere else) again. I give you a range, as I do not know the exact distance we walked. Additionally, no one in Cameroon knows the distance—even those that pass regularly between the two towns. About two and a half hours or so into the walk, we asked a man how far away Dschang was. Definitively he replied, 400 kilometers. Upon seeing the shocked and horrified looks on our faces, he paused. Reconsidered. And said, two kilometers. Thus began the game for our journey: how far are we. Asking mostly children and the elderly for directions (a game we played one Christmas break with my Dad, when he too did the same. Directions went something like go to Chris’ house and then turn…and restaurant recommendations were akin to Chucky Cheese), we received a resounding, surprisingly unanimous answer no matter where we were in the journey: 20 km. Even 1 km outside of Dschang—20 km. In truth, the last 30 minutes were some of the most painful steps ever walked, and I’m quite certain that I’ll never be able to walk properly again.
I have also spent a lot of time since my last entry sitting. Way too much. This was due to the, shall we call them, skirmishes? strife? strikes? that consumed much of the beginning of March. What initially began as a taxi strike against rising gas prices turned into a country wide protest of…I’m still not sure. French impositions? A collapsing government unwilling to listen to its people? Linguistic tensions? Buildings were burned, people took to the streets, and volunteers were confined to their houses. Stir crazy, I spent the week washing my floors, gardening, avoiding men in the streets with machetes, and walking around my compound in my underwear, which prompted my housemate, Jane, to ask me if my money had run out and I needed to borrow money to buy pants. Eventually we were “consolidated” to a hotel where we waited for five more days. As evacuation became a possibility, seconds felt like hours and time’s passage so palpable that it hung in the air, clouding my view of any foreseeable future. That is until I talked to my mother, and she quelled my hyperbolic pangs with her oh so sweet words, Nura, come on. It’s only been five f*cking days! And so that was it. We went home. People stopped rioting. And everything went back to normal. Whatever that is.
Political unrest has only one real solution: pizza. So we headed to the glorious capital of Yaounde for the weekend. There I consumed three pizzas in the course of 72 hours and am convinced that I am now lactose intolerant. Yaounde was a bastion of hot showers, good food, fast internet, and other wonderfulness that causes a surbanite like myself to wonder why exactly I’m living in the middle of nowhere Africa. But then I happen upon wonderful little jewels, like this next story, and it all just seems worth it.
Travel in Cameroon is wonderfully pleasant, and by that I mean that I would rather sit through my college graduation seven hundred times (for those of you that were there, you know what a sacrifice this is) than make my way around this country by bus. As we took our seats, the bus driver almost jumped out of his, looked at us and demanded in English, You have brought the rotten bush meat on the bus? Caught, shall we say, off guard, we stammered, No. Not us. We don’t have bush meat. And we didn’t. The man then smiled, switched to French and continued, Alright, who is the one farting then! This turned into something of a fourth grade all boys party and everyone started accusing their neighbor of producing the wondrous odor. A man in the back of the bus cleared the air, Leave the poor person alone. They are probably sick to their stomachs. I mean, they’re a machine, farting every minute like this! And so we left Yaounde, farting machine and all, in search of Bafoussam.
And it felt like I was finally coming home. Evacuation thoughts aside, I felt my first real pangs of homesickness and a desire to return stateside during the riots. But I’m hoping that that’s passed, and I can still stick this out for a bit longer. Speaking of longer, sorry that this was such a long entry—I’ll spare you all country updates, but don’t think that they’re going away permanently! In true form, I hope you all are well, preparing for the most glorious holiday—Easter—which is logically celebrated with the spreading of chemically colored eggs. Because that’s what Jesus would have wanted.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
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