Can't touch this.

Mark my year

Ca fait un an au Cameroun. That’s right, it’s my one year anniversary in Cameroon. Wow, one year, although technically less if you count my vacation for 3 weeks in America in July. Technical schmemical… But one year is about 7 months more than I have ever lived abroad in my life. So, whatever I am doing, it is at least not not working, right? And this means I just have another 15 months left until my return to the USA. But at a year, I feel like I should get “it” more than I do. That is to say there is always something that throws me off guard.

Perhaps it is worthwhile to mention the significant role of sorcery. Around here we say it like, “sore celery” as if your celery had a hard run the day before. I talk about sorcery because it plays a significant role in society. Whenever anything unexplainable happens, it is always socery’s fault. I wrote a blog about this earlier, but it continues to amaze me how frequently I hear the word. For example, today this car drove crazily through the center of town, almost killing 3 people on a moto and several pedestrians. I blamed it on “les etrangers.” Those damn strangers. This place is just crawling with them because of all the construction. And they don’t know up from down when they are out here. Or they are mislead by sorcery.

I talked about “le chantier” or construction zone I currently live in. The rainy season has arrived a month late, meaning that the whole region risks famine if the rain does not continue to fall because 2 big rains just does not substitute a whole season of consistent rain. The reason for this irregular rain? Le sorcelery, of course. What else could it possibly be? The elaborate plan in this way is that the construction company hired sorcerers to block the rain (bloque la pluie) so they could finish paving the roads before the rain comes. This gets ever more complicated because we will welcome the agropastoral show, and we will have no produce to showcase because we don’t even know when the show will happen. Additionally, the rains aren’t really here, so we can’t actually grow produce anyway. Major bummer. To make the whole situation more complex, the government is supposed to give out subsidies to encourage farmers to produce. These have yet to be distributed, announced, or even decided. So what will we, the South region, showcase? Will our tomatoes rot waiting for the show to happen? Perhaps that is also the sorcery.

What do I think? I think Westerners, specifically our consumption of all things of the world, are the reason to blame for the changing seasons. Or was it Al Gore who thought that? Either way, we are witnessing a changing climate in one of the most important rainforests of the world. If we can’t do improved agriculture, we will need to further search in the forest for our livelihoods. This might mean we will give our forests to the logging companies in trade for frozen, cheap, imported fish.

I also think that the higher ups are so rarely good in this country. The one fat man I could possibly have had hope for also turned out to be an a-hole. When I refused to spend the night with him, says Judith, I also killed all possibility of helping Serges get a subsidy for his farming. Awesome. In the Good Ol’ U S of A, we call that sexual harassment. Does a law like that even exist here? And why isn’t the holy goddess Chantal Biya doing anything to stop it, instead of running around in her wig praising her good work for the women of the nation? Maybe we can get those mandatory cheesy video sessions for all federal employees? Sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, OCHA, driving safety, and computer policy movies. All the good ones.

So maybe it is true that I am here for curiosity reasons. I keep tally of how many people accuse me of being a spy (Spy for what, I demand? The layout of Cameroonian houses?), how many times personal or public problems become the fate of sorcery, and how many times I have to explain to someone that poverty does exist in the USA. Will this ever get old? I sure hope not, as I still have over a year of it.