The National Agric Show happens (at last)!

I recently looked at pictures of my village when I first moved in over a year ago. The road was paved, but only poorly and only wide enough for one car to pass comfortably. There was a lot of green grass and few buildings. There was very little traffic. It is in stark contrast to the comments of my friends who, upon visiting me for the arrival of the National Agric Show in my village, commented that, “Lauren, I didn’t know you live in the middle of town.” I guess this was an appropriate comment for someone who saw that there were 3 ice cream machines and a man selling grilled meat (strictly a city delight) across the street from my house. This in a place that often does not have power and even more often does not have running water. But I, too, was surprised to see that for a whole week I did not have to leave my village to get supplies. And I didn’t. The Show (the Comice) was a weird trip, and I wanted to soak it up.

The day I walked out of my house and was surrounded by a traffic jam of cars and people all flocking to see the spectacle, I thought to myself, “Well now is as good a time as any to hide in my house.” Even Owondo, my dog, was acting strangely because of all the fast and sudden change to our neighborhood. His territory where he normally runs around freely and undisturbed became the stomping grounds for hundreds of men and women with guns (police, military, etc.), cows, camels, other weird creatures including a lion, thousands of other people coming from all over the country and from other countries (needless to say the number of white people in my village became at least 20xs what it usually is at just me), and a lot of other (weird) things. I felt as though my village had been magically transformed into a weird hybrid of the city of Ebolowa with the usual characters I see around town, mixed with an American county fair, mixed with really strangely unsettling political power trips. Needless to say, Ngalane became Bizzaro-Ngalane for a week that will never again reappear and will never be forgotten by myself or the villagers of Ngalane.

One of the weirder moments was watching a parade of ghoulish figures and African drummers moving down my street. This is the same street where I run- where I would even run in the middle of the road without fear of being hit by a car. And there we were, all several thousand of us watching a parade moving slowly down the road. The parade followed the arrival of the President, which was also a very weird moment. In anticipation of the arrival of the president, the gendarmes blocked off the road. They were uniformed men standing on the sides of the roads holding large rifles and chasing people off the road, even hitting them with their hands or the butt of their rifles to prevent people from “compromising the security of the president.” Often times they were women. The strangest part of watching gendarmes smacking pedestrians with their rifles was listening to the music that was selected to play during the President’s arrival. This music had me convinced that God himself was about to roll up in a Mercedes-Benz. It was like being beckoned to heaven. Even though we had a booth inside the Comice, the reason we saw the show from the outside on the first day was because it was nearly impossible to enter as the entrance gates were flooded with supporters of the RDPC party, specifically Paul Biya. Because RDPC supporters all have distinct pagne outfit it was more in your face than any presidential candidate rally I have ever seen in America.

Once inside, it was fairly easy to forget that you were in Cameroon. There were so many people, many of the middle/upper class, and everything was so (relatively) well organized that it transported you to any fair you’ve been to in America. And except for the lacking of adequate toilet facilities (or lacking of knowledge of Cameroonians of how to use port-a-potties), you could easily imagine, as you drink your tap beer in the beer garden, or eat your cheese sandwich from the dairy cooperative, that you truly were in America. And except for the fact that our booth, as the only booth with a consistent 5 to 9 “white” Americans behind the tables, was the most popular out of all the other booths (likely because people thought the fliers we were handing out must have been dollar bills), it was easy to imagine that you were in a different world.

I guess I can talk forever on how strange it is to experience a complete transformation of your village where you have no running water and no place to buy basic supplies (except beer) to an extension of the city where you still (ironically) have no running water, but where you can get anything you ever dreamed of in a 100 meter walk from your house. But that is development, right? All of the village of Ngalane profited from the temporary boost in economy, but now here we are, back to the same quiet village (thankfully) where you can’t even buy soda at the bar. Only this time we are left will all the trash, human and animal feces, and temporary bamboo structures the Comice brought. Will the Comice mean anything long term for the people here, or maybe will it mean Cholera? Will its effects extend further down the roads to the villages where it is needed the most? Will any of this infrastructure be maintained? There are so many questions that remain and I only have 10 months left to answer them.

Oh, and I haven’t even gotten to the part about how I shook hands with the President and First Lady, Paul and Chantal Biya. After days of anticipating their passage past our booth, they finally surprised us with an unexpected brief visit on Thursday, the 4th day of the Comice. As the organizer of the event, I was the first one to shake hands with them, and as a native to Ngalane (or so I consider myself at times), I greeted them in Bulu. This impressed Chantal so much that she decided to ask me, “Tu est ou? Where are you?” meaning where do you live? I replied, “Je suis ici a Ngalane! I am here at Ngalane!” Upon telling this story to my landlady, quickly everyone found out that I declared my love for Ngalane to the First Lady herself and now all my neighbors love me.

Also, for those of you who remember my, “This is how I got Schisto” blog entry a year ago, during my mid-service check up I requested to get tested for Schisto and the results came back extremely positive. Fortunately the treatment isn’t more than 2 doses in a day, so here I am hoping to stay Schisto free for the next year.