What Cameroonians don’t understand about dogs

To Cameroonians, dogs are either good for “le chase ou le guard;” They are either hunting dogs or guard dogs. And every dog that gracefully herds a pack of village goats to some random destination gets grouped into the hunting category. After having lived with Owondo for a year now, I think it is safe to say that many village dogs here in Cameroon are neither good for hunting nor guarding. But they are amazing herding dogs, and if properly trained could be great additions to the Haoussa men who walk alongside cattle trying to keep the beef from messing too much with vehicle traffic.

In the heat of a 2pm sun, Owondo and I took our bazillionth walk down the road, past the site of the Comice. I let him off leash as usual and, as usual, thought how stupid I was to let him off leash ‘cause the damn dog never comes when I call him. Today, he ventured down a footpath right to where some short and browned grass in a perfect square remind visitors of where the longest standing tent from the Comice stood until just a few weeks ago. Owondo, usually too distracted by the flocks of tiny brown birds that perch on the ends of grasses and scatter in perfect waves when he leaps too close, stopped dead in his tracks: off to one end of the browned patch of earth, he saw cows! Cows and goats, maybe 10 of each, grazing together, unwatched save for our eyes. This is the closest he has come to a cow, and certainly the first time he has encountered a free range cow in his entire life.

I watch him from 10 feet down the footpath as he contemplates how to handle this situation. He often sees goats, as villagers keep a steady stash of them for emergency purposes like to pay for funeral costs or wedding celebrations (though the goats usually grow too old or die before they become financially useful). Sometimes I like to let him off leash to watch him chase the goats, partly because I love seeing Owondo at his happiest and partly for the sense of empathy I feel for all the villagers who’ve lost crops to stupid, useless goats. The goats are usually just barely faster than him, even the month-old babies, and I’m not sure if he even wants to catch one or just nip at its heels for a while (which might also explain his obsession with feet). It seems he makes his decision in a split second, and runs after a group of 4 goats grazing together. He successfully herds them back with the other animals grazing off in a patch of tall grasses to the side, though he seems too afraid to try to keep the few stray big cows tucked in with the larger group.

I move in closer to him. Part of me is afraid he is going to try to herd the cows and get his skull crushed, and the other part wants to try to encourage him to interact with the cows. It is only in moving close that you can hear the animals chomping away at the tall grasses, and the sound, combined with the movement of the grasses in the slight breeze, reminds me of the ocean waves. Owondo, if trained, could be like a boat cutting through that ocean, redirecting the waves momentarily until they get back to a regular, calm movement. Instead, after watching the cows for a while, he backs down, maybe realizing they are too big in number and too big in size to mess with. I bribe him to let me put his leash back on, and start the walk back home, though I have to pull Owondo part of the way because he can’t stop fantasizing about the cows (or the beef).

How do you say Happy Mother’s Day to the woman who has been stealing your water bill payments for months on end?

I find myself in a weird state of existence. This was partly spurred by the visit from my mom and sister who were brave enough to come visit me, though (one can say) stupid enough to spend their vacation days fighting it out in Cameroon. I think I can safely say that they both greatly disliked the country as a whole, though they enjoyed the company of my friends. What I learned in the transition from my 1st year as a PCV to the 2nd is that there is a beauty in forgetting what the Western world is like. In re-creating all that you know as a functional society, living here becomes simple, though particularly so as a PCV when you know that your salary is coming at the end of every month on time and in predictable amounts. It is the contrast of what Cameroonians call “the white world”, though particularly America, that makes the transition into society here difficult. I can’t even fathom why someone would want to come here as a tourist, and the entire function of being a tourist here certainly tries to keep people away (from the airplane ticket costs, to the visas, to the malaria, communication barriers, lack of electricity and consistent water problems, to how tourists are treated by people who want to make a dime and the authorities). So, that being said, who wants to visit?

The whole inspiration of this blog, aside from the recent visit from family, is my landlady. As you can tell from the title of this entry, she has apparently been stealing the whole compound water payments for quite a while. On my return from the beach (a place I never wanted to leave in the first place), Mama Anastasia started to tell me a story about why there is no water in the house. When she told me that the water company brought a bill to my landlady, I couldn’t even comprehend the amount that she said was in back payment. Cent soixante dix sept mille cinq cent. Knowing that water is around 1 thousand a month for me and because numbers in French are always difficult for English speakers (100 60 17 500), it took me a good 5 minutes to understand the complete amount that is due to the company. I mean for the 4 families that get water from the same counter, generously assuming that each family uses about 5.000 in water each month, we arrive at 20.000 per month, which means that she has been doing what, exactly, with certainly over 9 months of water payments? The volunteer I replaced would always claim problems with her water and electricity bill. I figure the math is always right, and even if she is getting a few hundred extra CFA from me each month, it is worth it to not have to stand in line to pay my bill at the water and electricity society. Plus, she is a God-fearing Jehova’s Witness! If anything, God will get her at the end. I have yet to confront her to find out the story from her side (or the story she wants to tell me), but the fact is, the water company removed the water counter, so there will no longer be any water in my house. And that really sucks.

But here is my weird state of existence: Nothing surprises me like it used to. I feel like I should be angry that my slumlord has been eating my money that should have been going all along to the water company to ensure that I have even the luxury of running water in my house (even if it is unreliable at best). As if the 30.000 she gets every month for a poorly constructed apartment isn’t enough… When I think of all those months I lived without running water, and how there were days when all I wanted to do was cry because I was so tired thinking about water, I get upset knowing that I am going to face that again. But here is what is weird; One year ago when the road construction company started building the road and cut our pipes, I raised hell to anyone who would listen, and 10 days later (oddly enough with the help of my landlady) some random people helped us out by fixing it. Then a few months after that, my pipes were destroyed again. I had to wait 6 months to get water back in the house, and even then I passed by the water society every day to talk the boss into fixing our problem. And now I am here, feeling some strange sense of apathy about this problem. Maybe it is because I have yet to reach the end of my reserves, or that I have faith that it will all work out in the end, or maybe it is just my subconscious resignment to move to another apartment. If I were me one year ago, I would be up in arms. I think my time in Cameroon has done nothing but mellow me out, or jump on the “On va faire comment (what are you gonna do)?” boat with all the Cameroonians who feel, and essentially are, powerless.

I noticed this even with my family, particularly when they would get upset about how things work, or suggest alternatives to the realities of life here. Living here, fully immersed (one can say “drowning”) in Cameroonian culture, it becomes easy to forget that there are alternatives. People here cry “poverty” so much that even the word has become a sickness. Poverty is the reason for how everything functions in this society, and I wonder whether people ever start to realize they lack of creativity because they can’t even imagine a way out. Maybe they should use the word “powerless” instead because then, at least, they would be handcuffed to the word and its meaning. And when we talk about development, which is theoretically the way out of this supposed poverty, probably the landlady should at least be paying the water company, and then pocketing the little extra she has been charging us. This way, the water company, Camwater (which I endearingly refer to as Scamwater) can make their money, and I can have my water, and the Camwater employees can have their salaries, and my slumlord can build more slums.

Maternity

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a Cameroonian mother, soon-to-be or new. Last week I went with Karla to grind some soy, and the woman whose shop we were frequenting was drinking a beer (mind you, it was 11 am). Then I saw the 6 month old baby. I asked if she was still nursing and she said yes, at which point it became my duty to inform her that nursing moms need to be careful about what they ingest because, well, they’re eating for two. The idea that a beer could stunt the development of her child was taken very lightly, as she acknowledged me with a sort of blank nodding stare. She was probably thinking, “Look at my son,” the little 9 year old boy who was charged with running the mill. “He doesn’t have any problems.” Well, maybe, but he is also a 9 year old who should be in school. Let’s talk about stunting your child’s development… The likelihood that this woman drank while pregnant with her fat little baby and her 9 year old soon is also high, so maybe whatever damage that wasn’t done during fetal stages of development can be made up for in their real life? Even PCVs all joke that Beaufort light, a low calorie Cameroonian lager, is a pregnant woman’s beer of choice. It is light, after all.

This also interests me because my neighbor, a devout woman who doesn’t drink, is approximately 1 month behind on her delivery date. If I were her, I would be at the point of panic, but it doesn’t even phase the Cameroonians as abnormal or worrisome. The entire world that is set up for us Americans just doesn’t exist here. I asked her husband this morning, “Are you worried for your wife’s health?” He said no, because due dates are unreliable. Well, due dates that are unreliable in America are a week or two off, and as long as you’re getting proper check-ups, sonograms, tests, etc., you’re going to have a relatively good idea of when he’s gonna pop out. And if he’s seemingly a little too late, doctors will likely induce labor (like with fetal me). Here women get pregnant and they likely never see a doctor, even the ones living close to town. It is probably only those who fall ill who get a chance to see a doctor. Or a marabou, the local witch doctor. So my friend keeps getting bigger, and maybe the doctors were way off with the due date, but no one but me seems to be panicking for her. I guess I just need to throw my standard of medical care out the window and accept that the due date for a woman in village here is just a general indicator of when she should probably think about not going out to the farm by herself anymore.

Poisonwood Bible

Has anyone read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver? This book is about a missionary American family that moves to the Belgian Congo in the 1950s, right around the time of independence. The family experiences a lot of things that many volunteers in the South, at least, find amusingly relatable. For example, the mother brings a Betty Crocker cake mix for her oldest daughter’s 16th birthday, only to discover on the day of her birthday that humidity has completely turned the mix into an unusable block. I can say that despite packaging 60 years more advanced, drink mixes often suffer the same fate in my kitchen.

Her incredibly spot-on description of the peeling, soaking, and pounding of manioc (what she describes as “full of nutrition as a brown paper sack”) into baton de manioc is a good reminder of why food likely became so pureed out here: lack of dentists means few teeth that are still good for chewing. The idea of fruit as a luxury item is definitely accurate across all of Cameroon, though more pronounced in the rural areas. In the later years of Leah’s life (one of the daughters of this missionary family), Leah, who has remained in Congo with her revolutionary Congolese husband, focuses her community development work on soybean farming to help improve nutrition for families. Needless to say, we are still fighting the same battle.

One of the more critical parts of the book takes place post-independence, when the father has decided that the family will stay with or without help from the church (without, as it turns out). The entire village is suffering a crisis drought time, and the reader thinks, “things can’t possibly get any worse”. One morning they wake up to pounding on the door and screaming from the village: an invasion of ants has flooded the village. The author’s description of how the ants enter into all the houses and kitchens as unstoppable seas, cleaning out all cupboards spotlessly, completely removing all the meat from the bones of anyone left behind, leaves you with a haunting image of a force of nature that is too powerful. Her point is to highlight the work of missionaries in “bringing God” to poor Africans when the Africans already know about plagues of insects (which has generally been left behind in Biblical times to the Westerners) and the capricious balance of nature (which, in my experience, is all the more pronounced in the tropics), but they just might not name that force “God”.

This ant invasion I found especially relevant as I woke yesterday to an army invasion of ants in my house. They were hard at work, and if you interrupted their path, you became their target instead. So, hoping around the rivers of ants at 5 am, I managed to climb into the kitchen where most of their work was being done. For an instant, mostly because I had become their momentary target, I regretted not having insect spray to kill them. But then I looked closely. I saw their puissance in numbers, specifically how they could make so much noise by moving plastic bags and from eating cockroaches. I could hear the ants crunching through the carapaces, almost instantly killing any cockroach that got caught by these shifting seas. They moved these bodies across the floor like crowd surfers at a concert, and I instantly became a fan of their work. You could even see the surviving cockroaches hiding from imminent death on my curtains, with what I am convinced was a look of fear in their antennas. True, some of the dumber ants managed to crawl into my acidic kombucha culture to their death, leaving me no choice but to start new cultures, but earlier this week I was just noticing how my cockroaches were getting out of hand despite my careful cultivation of house spiders and other lazy people’s methods for natural pest control.

I decided that I would let the ants live, let them clean my kitchen of any meat I refused to eat, and then I found out my neighbors were having the same problem. The Jehova Witnesses recommended petrol/water spray as a solution. Here I am, a fallen Jew, living in a part of the Congo that regrets that it is helplessly a part of the Congo, and my neighbors, the God-fearing, recommend a solution to kill God’s creation. I politely declined the exact recipe, insisting instead that I will just leave my house for a few hours. And when I returned to my house, there was no evidence of an ant invasion; Only a kitchen that was silenced from the eerie disappearance of my usual company of cockroaches.

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.

Random slice of random day

In what may be a sign that life in Cameroon has become something resembling “normal,” and having been inspired by a visit from two PCVs, stagemates who I haven’t seen in a long time, I am dedicating this blog entry to a cleft-lipped baby and wooden demonstration penises.

On my way home from a short, mid-day, obscenely hot walk with the dog, I return to my family compound. I cross over a cement bridge traversing the open sewer that has just been put in, and hop onto a 4x8 wood plank that serves as an extension bridge over the awkward walkway that has yet to be touched. Having added another mark to the score of Lauren vs Bridge in what has become an ongoing battle, I hop down safely on the stolen cement walkway that lasts about 20 ft. About 3 months ago my compound members stole cement from the road building crew, the cement that falls to waste when the hot tar is already laid, and made a nice little walkway. This walkway was helpful during its first few months in existence, but then during the rainy season just became another part of the mudpit walk to and from the road. Anyway, on our return to my house, we pass first a monkey, a drill, in his cage, chowing down on boiled manioc. His name is something obscurely amusing, like Pappy or Pepe, and he is always doing something strangely human. Last week, for example, he was sitting up with his legs sprawled over and through the bars of his cage, like a man reposed on the couch watching television. Today he was too distracted to do anything mean to my dog who tried to touch him through the cage. As Owondo unsuccessfully tries to play with the monkey, 2 year old Stephen walks up, seeing only monkey. As soon and Stephen catches Owondo’s attention, Stephen flees, terrified of a pursuit by a now attentive dog. Stephen flees, however, with an empty gin sachet in hand, and a cigarette butt dangling from his lips. I proceed to remove the butt from his mouth, and smack him a little, enough to bring attention to his family of these vices learned too young. I, on the other hand, leave the gin sachet in the small child’s hand, figuring that you have to pick your battles.

BRAINS!!!

I have now officially been to the saddest place in Ebolowa. The morgue. What can I say about it? Well, for starters, it is conveniently located next to the regional hospital. This means that no matter how sick you think you are, you just look out your window and think, “Well, at least I’m not there.” It was also incredibly poorly designed, specifically because there is no “bright side.” The very same place where dead bodies are dropped off, the mourning come to the body viewing 2 weeks after their beloved has passed away. Combining the mourning with the grieving is just not a good idea. I will say that the reason I have somehow managed to avoid the morgue for so long (1 year, half of my service) is that I have no been personally affected by someone’s death thus far. I made my way over there this morning not in mourning of a friend, but in support of a friend who finally lost her long-sick husband. I showed up with Serges a little bit early, which gave me plenty of time to see that the morgue is, in contrast to what I said before, also a good place to socialize. This I can say safely because I knew quite a few people there, including my tomato momma. Her story was that someone’s husband from her village was hit by a car in Ebolowa, a tragedy marked by the fact that his young wife has a 6 month old and herself is widowed at the age of 20.

In the midst of all the mourning, the crying, the moaning, the fainting, the socializing, there also arrives grief. Today, grief arrived in the form of a transport bus that usually holds around 40 people that was empty, save for a passenger, the driver, and a limp body covered by a bloody sheet. Trying to imagine that it wasn’t in fact a dead body, I briefly convinced myself that this bus was a transport bus for people to return with the casket to their village for the burial. As two men who evidently worked at the morgue carried out a gurney to the bus, I realized that this was, in fact, a dead body. As the driver directed the two employees to the body, detailing the story, the bus started to roll forward towards one crowd. He clumsily ran back to put the E-brake on, and I stared, wide-eyed, as these two employees pulled out the corpse, also clumsily because there is evidently not a smooth way to relocated a limp corpse. Soon enough the corpse, a woman, started to spill out brain as she was lifted up and onto the gurney. I saw brain emptying out from this woman’s skull! It was, at once, disturbing and depressing. Making this vision even more depressing is the story of her arrival at the morgue.

Although I am not sure of how this story can be recounted, being as there were no witnesses, apparently this woman was on her way home from the field, on foot, and was walking on the good paved road between Ambam and Ebolowa where cars have been known to go too fast. A moto, probably also going much too fast for the hilly curves, hit this woman, throwing her to the pavement, and then ran off. The results were equivalent to as if she, herself, had been on the moto and flown off upon collision, smashing her head on the pavement. A bus filled with passengers returning from Ambam saw this woman’s body, and amongst them, made the space on the seat, and collected money to send her body to the morgue. So, by the time she arrived, her brains were a pale yellow soup. After removing her body, the young female passenger who remained with the body throughout the process also handed over her 3 machetes and sharpener, probably an important identification (as who carried their ID when going to the field?) for her family. I did I all could to not break down right at that moment, though I could not help but imagine her family at home wondering where mom is, not knowing that mom didn’t return from the field because she is dead at the morgue.

To make matters worse, I had to sit through a church service for my friend’s husband. My friend, although her husband had already been dead for 2 weeks, proceeded to faint/pass out, delaying the service, and eventually returned with an IV drip because… well… because Cameroonians LOVE IV drips. So, I basically marginalized her loss because I was so focused on this way more tragic death that had just happened. After the service was over, I skipped out on every other activity to go the bar. 2 beers in at noon, I was at last able to return to my house where I lost it. It turns out that if there is in fact such a thing as the death season, it really makes me sad.