Three little monkeys jumping on the bed…

We all know how this story goes, but why couldn’t my co-workers and I figure it out sooner. Having just returned from a European holiday, I returned to post, much to my dismay still in the rainy season. I knew that usually the rainy season ends by November, and so I was hoping that upon my return from my sisters (very beautiful) wedding, I would be able to have a smooth-ish ride back to post, or at least one that was not interrupted by a mudpit. Yes, the elusive mudpit. In America, mudpits are prized for times when girls in bikinis wrestle in them, but no matter how much it rains in Oregon, unless you come to my town in Cameroon, you do not know what a mudpit is. The word in French- le boulbier- was a word that I did not know until I left Campo a little over a month ago right after a heavy week of rains. People kept talking about “les boulbiers”, and I kept asking them what it is. In my mind I had it translated as a big pothole spanning the road, which often occur on dirt roads and are usually filled with short wooden planks to help smaller cars pass across. A few days before leaving that time, I had gone for a run. In an area where there was a lot of mud, I scanned around for a place to hop to higher ground where pedestrians pass. I looked, trying not to break my running pace too much, saw what seemed to be solid ground, and placed my two feet straight into mud that was shin high. I then quickly pulled my feet out, decided it was better to maybe just keep going on the muddy road, and unfortunately had to run back to my house looking like a melting swamp creature. Not knowing the word, even in English, for what that kind of mud was, it was when I travelled those few days later and arrived at the dreaded “boulbier” that I finally understood. Trucks were lined up on either side of the 1km-long mudpit in the road. Other trucks driven by adventurous drivers were stuck inside the mud, and one pick-up, driven by my friend, had accidentally placed his whole right side of the pick-up in a 3-foot deep boulbier on the side of the road, evidentially achieved when trying to turn around. To cross by foot was not a whole lot different, and I took off my shoes, rolled up my pants, and dove into mud that was, at times, 2 feet deep. Upon crossing the mudpit, you have to take a different car to get the rest of the 50km to town. I met with my friend Abwe, a Congolese/Canadian VSO volunteer, who was travelling to Campo that very day, and I warned him. Since he grew up in the Congo, I figured he knew everything. I told him how bad it was, but that if he walked slowly across the pit, he would be ok. When he returned to Kribi, he recounted the story of how he, too, had placed his feet on what appeared to be solid ground, only for him to fall into mud waist high! This explanation is leading up to my story of last night. When I made it back to Campo after two weeks of Europe eating cheese and fine chocolate and using public transport, I learned that the cell service was down, there was no electricity, no running water, and no food (these last three due to the bad road). I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a while and was sure that the cell service would be out a long time, so I insisted that my coworkers and I use the satellite internet at the neighboring logging town. The WWF car took me and two of my coworkers there and promised to be back soon to pick us up, after finishing work in the forest with the gorilla habituation team. We were sure they would be gone for about an hour, and we were out by 4pm. By 6:30 there was still no sign of the WWF, and I began to debate the merits of taking a moto home the 10km. Had I left at 4 when we got out, I would have been home long before, as there is a good walking shortcut through a wetland, but in waiting for the car, the night had already fallen, and the rain was looming ahead. Finally, at 7pm, the WWF car came, and we began to make our way back to Campo, but 4 minutes into the car ride, our Land Cruiser fell into a mudpit and were seriously stuck. Then, of course, it started to rain, and our driver left to find a truck that can pull us out. At about 9pm, the phone network finally came back and we were able to call people who could potentially help us, but no one could, as all of the trucks were evidently stuck on the other side of the gigantic mudpit on the road leaving town. Finally, we decided to call the other driver to come get us with our other car- a really beat-up SUV. He came, but went to the wrong entrance and the car died right in front of a mudpit, eliminating any chance we had to push the car to jumpstart it. By midnight, Nadege, one of my coworkers, and I were stuck on the side of the road, alone, with three laptop computers. We were not sure what was going on because we were told to wait for the car, but tired of waiting, we decided to begin the walk back to town. Because she wore high heels, though, she had to change into another co-workers sneakers, such that she looked like a little girl wearing her father’s shoes. At 1 am, we finally decided to call another colleague who sacrificed his sleep to come pick us up. When he arrived, we realized that almost our entire staff was stuck at one of three areas around the logging town the entire night. It was only Elizabeth, our very wise human resources staff, who decided to not come with the “rescue” car, and so it was only her that got a good night’s sleep. Everyone made it home by 2 am, on either one of two motos or in one of two cars, but the experience helped me to appreciate even more my new brother-in-law’s phrase that “The Swiss have the watches, but the Africans have the time.” Nothing works in Cameroon, but everything works out (fine?).

Oh me, ohm ayo

Since I’ve moved to Campo, there has been one person who’s looked after my dog probably more than me. His name is Ayo and he has some sort of mental disorder. Some days he’s more lucid than others, and some days he’s just strange. He walks faster than a New Yorker rushing to catch a train and he is always wearing his Paul Biya (our beloved president) t-shirt and hat. The first time I met him was after a big dry season rain. He used to clear the grasses in front of my house, said my landlord, but because he was incapable of distinguishing between plantain trees and weeds, his machete devastated everything and my landlord had to find a responsible teenage boy who’s obsession with clearing the land has left me crying over ruined squash plants.

That first day I met Ayo, he had just come to tell my landlord that people had been burying Paul Biya. Because the elections had come and gone, life-size Paul Biya posters had been left hanging on all of the houses. Now, several months after the victory, and with the first heavy rain of the new year, Ayo finds posters ripped from their walls by strong winds, strewn on the ground, and covered by dirt from the erosive droplets hitting bare earth. To Ayo, this “burial” is an attack on the president himself, may his soul always be elected in eternity, and must be spoken of to someone who can do something about it.

While sometimes the things he says are strange, sometimes he is painfully honest (probably because people underestimate his capacities). The former doctor in the Campo Hospital used to pay him to clear the grasses. One day, the doctor decided to “borrow” the generator to bring to his village for the funeral of a family member. I don’t think it would have been a big deal had the generator returned to Campo immediately after use, but of course it stayed in this other village for quite some time. It was Ayo, who somehow knew the whole story, who told everyone he met in town the story of how the doctor stole the generator. This resulted in a) the generator being returned to Campo, and b) Ayo losing his work with the hospital (at least until the new doctor arrived).

Ayo also happens to be in love with my dog. He comes by my house sometimes at 6 am and whistles in the windows so that he can talk to Owondo. Sometimes he comes by and calls my name, circling the house to see if maybe I’m out back. When I don’t respond (I’m usually in bed), he eventually leaves, probably disappointed. Owondo will see Ayo from a distance and run up and greet him, and sometimes Ayo leads Owondo away with him, either to the beach or to town, and then always returns him to me. One time, I left Owondo with a co-worker’s children when I went away for work. When I came back a few days later, I found Owondo outside their house, but there is no chain! The kids said that when they went to bed he was chained up, and when they woke up he was gone (and so was the chain). The next morning, like clockwork, at 6 am, there is a knock on the door. It is Ayo returning the chain. Here’s where reality and Ayo reality sometimes get confused- he said that Owondo hadn’t been fed and it wasn’t good that he was chained up there. I know they had been feeding Owondo, and I can’t figure out why the kids were deemed unfit parents according to Ayo law.

When Ayo visits me at my house, I never know what to expect. One time he made a throat slicing motion to me when we crossed paths and was telling me a story about a girl getting killed. I didn’t completely follow the story (as I never really do), until he came to my house with two heads of white dolls. One was a life-size doll and one was small, they were both blondes, and they both came with upper thigh pieces, too. So, there’s Ayo standing outside my house holding a large white doll head and telling me a story I can’t understand, and then he starts to leave (and leave me with the dolls appendages). Even though I’m not a believer in sorcery or black magic, this freaks me out and I make him take the doll pieces away. Apparently he had taken the doll pieces to the mayor and said it was me. Mike, an RPCV who stayed in my house while I was gone for a few weeks, said he had come to the house, again, with the doll pieces.

Ayo’s always a little more lucid when he’s being looked after, and everytime I see Ayo, I’m reminded of how important it is to look after mental health. In a society like Cameroon where people are often undernourished, where physical health comes only as an afterthought, mental health doesn’t even have a standing. Here, there’s really only one word for mental disorder: “Fou”, which means crazy. Vocabulary is essential for humans to be able to better understand and describe what we see, and I hate that when people don’t know his name, I’m forced to use the word “fou” to describe him. I know that when people don’t know my name, I’m described as “la blanche.” Or maybe they just pick up the decapitated head of the life-sized Arian doll.

America, the beautiful

I have been lacking in updating my blog lately. I think part of this is that I am trying to keep myself busy with work, not reflect too much, not think about time.

I have been back in Cameroon for nearly a month after having spent my month of home leave. I left Cameroon in a different place than I returned to Cameroon, and I’m not really sure why that is. My trip to the Airport in Yaounde was scary for me. I remember thinking that I hadn’t left Cameroon for nearly two years! How could I even remember how to navigate the airport? And after messing up with the protocol several times (forgetting to pay my exit tax, almost getting tricked into wrapping my bags in plastic, etc.), I finally made it to my gate to find, fortunately and coincidentally, my friend, a former Bangladesh PCV making music in Yaounde, taking the same flight as me to Brussels. It calmed my nerves to talk to her about the return to America. She had, after all, spent a long time outside of America, living in India, studying in Europe, and now a year and a half making music in Cameroon. My panic did not really set in until my connection flight left, and I realized my return to America was not, in fact, a dream.

When I arrived in the airport, my newly acquired line-cutting skills came in handy to get me through customs and out of the terminal faster than the others. I remember having a sense of paranoia, that the government is watching me, that they are filming me on CCTV, and that the drug sniffing dogs will find something on the bags I brought back, packed by other people. But I made it, and the millions of cars at the airport, the lack of pedestrians, the rules… the rules… it was all so shocking to me, like I had been on a distant planet for so long that I had lost my old sense of time, and watching my watch tick away the seconds made me remember something from a memory.

And then my month started. Driving through the suburbs with all the neat little houses and sidewalks and stay-at-home moms pushing their babies in strollers; going to the grocery store and seeing a million different kinds of bread, of cereal, of off-season fruits; going shopping for Cameroonians, because god knows the last thing you want to deal with is explaining to someone why you didn’t bring them something back (because you’re insignificant to me, you insult me, you just called me fat, and because you have done nothing nice for me ever!); hot yoga classes with people who can take a few hours from work to take care of their mental and spiritual health; loneliness sitting on a bus, listening to your ipod, not wanting to talk to anyone knowing that no one wants to talk to you (which is the exact opposite of Cameroonian bus rides where joking and making small talk with your neighbors, or listening to the guy trying to sell some Chinese gonorrhea medicine is the only way to pass the time)… Those moments felt so empty in a lot of ways. Yes, it’s nice to eat cheez-its after two years, but the lack of human interaction required to do so, the facility with which we can engage ourselves in self-destructive behavior (like eating an entire box by myself in one sitting) is alarming after living in Cameroon where you’re responsible for yourself, your neighbors, your family all at the same time.

But I think being back and being with my friends and family was what made it hard to return. These interactions are much easier than here in Cameroon. And it is in coming back to Cameroon that I feel such a weight everytime I have to leave my house and interact with most people, even the ones I consider my friends. I thought, before I had left, that I had reached a good place with Cameroon and Cameroonians, but upon returning, I realized how loaded my interactions are with most people. I thought I could spend forever being the only Westerner I know in village, but it gets tiring. I miss easy interactions, ones where I feel like I’m home, not ones that remind me constantly of who people think I am (mostly limited to white, rich, a woman).

I remember thinking that volunteers who extend have to be a certain kind of selfish- a self-absorbed, self-centered sort of outlook. And I think that is how I feel about ex-pats living in Africa in general. We all came here to do good, but after a certain period of time, I think some of us stay because we like being thought of as a savior, we like being self-righteous… we like being stared at, called pretty not because we’re pretty but because we’re white. I see myself falling back into it. My presence in America is relatively insignificant. There are thousands of young white women, just like me. But here, there is only me. People come to me with all of their problems in the world, expecting me to solve them. I often say that I can try to help by looking up information, but they are usually looking for more than that, which I know I am incapable of giving.

I will be ready to move on at the end of the year. I will be ready to have some of the luxuries that come with life as a Westerner, not as a poorly paid Peace Corps volunteer. I don’t want to embrace all of the lifestyle- I want to be a pedestrian, I want to have flexibility in work and be told at the end of the day, “Thank you for your hard work, Lauren”, I want to eat good food and know who grew it or who cooked it, I want to drink gallons and gallons of tap water each day, I want to be able to buy a cappuccino and sit at a café and pretend that I’m a nobody. I’m ready to be socially active, to speak out and not have my opinion sound so far-out-there (What?!?! Gay rights? Animal rights? Human rights?), rather than the drudging through of speaking with officials as though you’re communicating with god herself. Mostly, I want to be a participating member of society, where it is not contested whether or not my voice counts since I’m not “from here”. Long live “les etrangers”! Long live perspective, travel, personal growth, and working for something better.

Tracking the trackers

This weekend, I slept in the forest for my very first time. I entered the forest with one of two gorilla tracking teams on Friday and left with the rotating-out gorilla tracking team on Saturday. Since my work is with the communities, it isn’t every day that I have the chance to go into the forest. In fact, the forest that I usually see is old fallow- land where people have cultivated in the (usually recent) past- so this forest was more pristine (although debatably so, as it was logged over not too long ago).

On Friday, I took the opportunity to go to the camping site of the gorilla tracking team. Because this park is of interest for gorilla habituation/eventual eco-tourism, the early stages of gorilla habituation require very keen trackers as the gorillas are still at the “scared as sh*t” stage of human interaction. Most of the trackers, or rather most of the reliable trackers, are young Bantu (usually Bulu) men from neighboring villages. However, the best trackers are usually the Bagyeli pygmies. There are some who are really experienced trackers. These trackers, when in village, are successful hunters. But no matter how good they are at their job, half of the battle seems to be getting them to show up to work.

As much as I want to romanticize the experiences of working with indigenous populations of Central Africa, working with the Bagyeli is really freaking difficult work! I learned this when we were trying to get into the truck and one of the most experienced Bagyeli trackers, after getting drunk from his 5.000 cfa advance payment, refused for no obvious reason to get in the truck to get to the forest. There are two young female scientists who lead the tracking team, and the newest one had to jokingly (although not jokingly to him) seduce him, as “his wife.” This is apparently a running joke, but his wife doesn’t think it’s funny, and after listening to how he talks about her, I realize that, to him, this marriage isn’t a joke. I was just glad that it wasn’t me.

We finally arrived at the entrance to the park at around 5:45, and the Bantus were quick to pack up their bags and head out into the base camp in the forest. It took a great deal of cajoling to get the Bagyelis loaded up with gear. By the time we headed out into the forest, it was 6:30 and the sun was setting. Good thing I brought my headlamp because the forest gets dark! We arrived at the camp somewhere around 8 or so, and it was only a miracle that I didn’t trip and fall once on the way. We set up our tents and after tiring from listening to Bulu banter I went to lie down to read some of the book “The Forest People” by Colin Turnbull. This book is an account (one that is extremely romanticized) of the author’s experiences living with the pygmies in the Congo in the 1950s, and reading it in a camp with about 5 pygmies (2 of whom were drunk and 1 of whom was dancing to my very least-favorite Cameroonian pop songs) made me realize that the pygmies he wrote about are not the same as the sedentary pygmies, the disempowered, marginalized, drunk-from-cheap-liquor in sachet pygmies who live in village. Maybe his account was too glossy to be true, but there were some characteristics that held true about the Bagyelis- mainly that they don’t really see the point in working hard or in money. As Nadege, the experienced female scientist said, they show up because they want to. If they decide when they wake up that they don’t want to come to work, they just don’t show up. Talk about an unreliable work force!

I saw, the next day when gorilla tracking, that the Bagyeli tracker, Kabila, glided through the forest, much as described by Colin Turnbull. He was so lithe and fast despite being so tiny, slightly aged, and likely hungover. It felt like a near run just to keep up. And he was really good at seeing the traces of the gorillas—broken hollowed twigs, poop, footprints. He was, for the first few hours, the first one to see the signs. I just felt like we were wandering aimlessly around the forest, and then one of the trackers would point out a sign that I never in my entire life would have seen on my own. This is an ability that only comes with growing up in the forest, living the forest, breathing the forest. As Colin Turnbull noted, the Bantu are afraid of the forest, hence their never ending obsession with domesticating it- turning it into farmland, developing it into cities, beating back the bush to avoid living in the forest. As such, it was one of the Bantus that walked with the machete to beat away any tangle of vines (and as the white, I stayed close behind him because walking through the forest on path is VERY different from following no path at all), while Kabila needed no help to move gracefully through the jungle. But after a few hours, his dedication to the cause seemed to have tapered off, and he wasn’t really even seen for a while.

The goal in gorilla tracking is to start with the last known nest (usually from two nights ago) and arrive at where they spent the last night. This work can take from a few hours to all day, and sometimes, if you're unsuccessful, you have to start from scratch the day after not successfully finding the most recent nest site. This is the early stage of gorilla habituation, just to know what the gorilla population is, where the range is, etc, with the eventual goal of finding a few good sized populations that are conveniently located to habituate them to human contact just enough. When their last night’s nests were found, I was with the three Bantu trackers, with Kabila nowhere to be found. The nest smelled occasionally (depending on the wind) like a very sour horse stable, and the nest was a very large flattening of shrubs and trees, a sort of bush mattress that makes the ground soft enough to sleep. There was feces scattered randomly (hence the smell), and it really gave an impression of how powerful gorillas are. We stayed for a while, taking fecal samples and GPS coordinates, and investigated in which direction the gorillas likely headed off in in the morning. I was disappointed and relived to not have had an encounter with a gorilla.

When heading back to the camp, Kabila somehow showed up, and helped direct us quickly back onto the path, but fell behind at some point, probably because he got distracted or had to pee. When a tree fell in the forest right behind us, crackling like a lengthy gun shot, the other trackers seemed far from worried that Kabila had been caught by a "widow-maker". They called his name, and despite having no response, kept us moving quickly back towards base camp. I have no idea how far behind Kabila was, but he showed back up to base camp not long after we did.

I returned to base camp dripping wet from the humidity and from having walked at a quick pace for 5 hours all morning. My socks were drenched from falling into the last creek crossing, and I was exhausted because, well, god knows when was the last time I did that much activity… It was already noon, and I had another hour and a half of walking in front of me just to get out. We made it back to find the work truck waiting for us at around 3 pm, and after having been eaten alive by many, many ants, I was ready to leave the forest. It isn’t the most hospitable place, especially if you are used to seasonal forests where most things die or hibernate during the winter. And the work, especially the work with the Bagyelis, is not exactly the easiest work to accomplish.

“The Forest People” can transport you to a place where the forest is good and giving, and Collin Turnbull would likely argue that my proximity to the Bantus and the fact that I live in society, outside of the forest, is reason enough for me to view the forest as a place to be happy to leave. I can romanticize the forest because it is beautiful, fascinating, and calming, but when you’re picked apart by ants and hungry and tired, a real house with an indoor bathroom is a lot better than bathing in the river and sleeping in a house made of leaves.

Kony 2012

It’s a story that’s been told time and time again. The white man rode in on horseback to save the poor, hungry, powerless African, or to attempt to conquer the unconquerable savage African landscape. In the recent online debate of Kony 2012, Uganda, international press, international intervention, aid, I’ve come to ask myself if I, too, am this middle class, well-educated American who wants nothing more than to solve the “problem” of Africa. Do I count in this group of white saviors? When my dad gave me Earnest Hemingway, I couldn’t swallow more than a few pages. How many times do we need to be fed the image of the rugged white westerner who’s come in a safari vehicle to work as a doctor, to feed the hungry, to stop the poachers, to become romantic with some young, attractive local? This is all so overplayed and trite. And yet all too accurate.

The Kony 2012 debate has just recently caught my attention. I’m not sure if Cameroonians are talking about it, but it seems that the complacency of Cameroonians of living in “peace” is a sort of response to the existence of other African nations living in constant war. I am a critic of this kind of peace that the people of Cameroon have sacrificed for development, living wage, education, community health, gender equality. Even educated Cameroonians will tell you that they are culturally used to rule by social dictator (the traditional chef of the village, the head of the house, etc.), so, “Let us live out the end of his life.” Then they will take a new ruler. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this idea. Not all societies must be democratic; The American is born with the belief that each and every citizen has rights that are undeniable. People here, too, know their rights, but the acceptance of social order trumps all. The ability to eat and drink at the end of the day is the only important human right.

So why is it that white Americans, white westerners believe that there must be a different reality for Africa today? Can we as outsiders even begin to understand the pain and the tragedy of life in war-torn Africa? Or the complexities and lack of transparency of governing bodies? And does this mean that what we are seeing is not wrong? Complexity and lack of transparency is even seen on a family level that I can’t even begin to comprehend most times. And is it up to us to determine who is just, who is evil? The White Industrial Savior Complex (as written about in The Atlantic) is a very real character complex. I was told to read a Time’s article about the war in Rwanda and write a mid-term report on it for the 7th grade. I couldn’t understand the extent of the war then, and was rewarded with a D- on my report card. To this day, I still can’t understand the war in Rwanda, and as Aidan Hartley wrote about in “The Zanzibar Chest” even the journalists on the ground couldn’t then and can’t now completely understand the extent of the situation. I’m from one of many generations raised to see Africa as a Feed the Children campaign, portraying dirty black children with bloated bellies and flies on their faces. In this way, it becomes simple to see who is doing right (us, the whites), who is doing wrong (obviously the government, which is hard to separate from the people themselves), and who is victim (poor black people).

And the problem is that this oversimplified image is often what brings White Industrial Saviors to Africa. As to not entirely exclude myself from the category, but as to distinguish myself as someone who is not entirely inside, it is worth noting that there is a very real reality of life for white people here in Cameroon. They see life as simple here. They believe that they’ve earned the car that they drive around in, that they’ve worked hard for the expensive imported food they eat, that their elitist education means that they understand what it means to be an African and that they understand the problems the Africans face. They see poverty as a problem that can be solved by international aid, through continuing to believe that the IMF and the World Bank fund good work on the ground, that the environmental protection of the forest can be bought through REDD+ policy design. “If only we could keep Africans away from themselves” seems like such an ingenious international policy. Only it doesn’t work.

And yet we keep playing this game over and over again. Politically, how many times in 2011 did we see the West intervene in African politics? It is a strange reality when you see a political injustice happening in live time, but the Africans around you tell you that revolution needs to be organic, it needs to come from the heart itself, in order for any real change to happen. Look at Idi Amin. Tell me that he wasn’t the chosen leader by the West, the carefully selected and trained hopeful for Uganda’s future. Had the revolution happened once organically, maybe 30 years after it was forced, it would have been effective, just, and democratic, and maybe Kony wouldn’t even be a political player in today’s arena?

But the nuances are so detailed. White people want leaders in Africa that align politically with the West. Western donors, for example, like seeing that I, a white girl, live in Campo and work with the WWF. Other westerners trust me and my sense of reality so much more than the Cameroonians working here. The fact that I believe that perdiem is ridiculous and that I’m not really sure I trust the local NGOS that work on the ground with money is information that western donors LOVE to get from me. And sometimes I have a superiority complex. For example, I laugh when I see the social science research that these guys do. Why would you even consider a survey as being helpful when all you get is to check the box yes or no for 5 simple questions? But I’m a snob, and even though I have the salary of an elementary school teacher here (and can therefore claim to “live like one of the people”), I have a superior education, and I’m a super critic of the analysis of the situation.

I continue to believe, however, that we can judge this reality. We can see nothing but poverty, famine, child soldiers, and war zones, but there are complexities we are missing and will never be able to fully understand. What has drawn me to Africa and continues to hold me here is that so much of what I see is unexplainable. Life is hard for some, so hard. I can try to explain everything I see with science, but the truth is that for people here, so much of life is unexplainable. Black magic, sorcery, power, family… these are some of the major influences that rule the perception of existence. No matter how educated someone may be, no matter how religious or urban, there is always this side of Africa that will continue to be a major determinant in who eats and who goes hungry, in who goes to school and who works at home, in who becomes ruler of a nation or an army and who becomes the enslaved.

In forcing our god on the people of Africa, they have evidently taken it with a grain of salt. I can say that they are more religious than we are, though it may be strange to think of a god-fearing individual as one who believes that their sickness was caused by sorcery. To us, this does not look like a Christian. And to us, these political actions do not look like democracy in action, a country in the process of development. I do not believe it is right to imprison innocent children, to make them into soldiers, to indoctrinate them with the belief that the world is against them. It is so wrong and there is no end in sight when poverty keeps getting worse and power keeps growing continually off-balance. But who are we to believe that it takes a White Industrial Savior to make real change? Yes, we are enlightened. Yes, we are better than them because we stand up for what is right in the world. BUT we know that we take oil from these countries and yet we continue to drive our cars knowing that it is fueling the power and social injustice, but also feeding the nation. The world is complex, it is more than “the bad guy” versus “the good guy”, and while I appreciate the efforts to end the taking of child soldiers in Uganda, this is a bigger problem than Kony, this is a bigger problem that East Africa. This is maybe a question of world racism, of power, of ingrained corruption, of hopelessness… The end of Hitler did not mean the end of Nazism. We need a bigger world view, and we need more critical responses and critical (and importantly, equitable) dialogue on the ground to spread ideas to intrinsically change the world.

Caged bird.

It’s difficult sometimes to understand why and how things happen the way they do. Three Sundays ago I got a call from my old neighbor in Ebolowa, Papa Billy, who was with the husband of my Russian friend, Nadia, who had come to Cameroon shot-gun style after getting knocked up by her Cameroonian then-boyfriend. Nadia’s husband is a pharmacist, is wealthy, is off his rocker. He’s an exceedingly abusive husband who has money (which results in power over just about everyone, including and especially the police) and likes to drink and sleep around. Anyway, Nadia and I became friends a year ago in May. I liked her because she was friendly and, despite having two children, liked to drink beer. It was shortly after this time that I began to learn the realities of her life as an abused wife.

I don’t want to get into all of the details, but I can tell you that it was bad. There were times when she would call me at 1 am from her bathroom, hiding from her husband who was trying to break down the door (all in front of his own mother). I’ve suffered for her, just knowing what she has put up with. I would often wonder why she doesn’t just run away. Get divorced. Request that her embassy send her back to Russia with the children. She made several half-hearted attempts like this while I still lived in Ebolowa. Once, upon her request, I tried to take her to Yaounde to show her where her embassy is (because a sign of an abusive husband is apparently one who doesn’t let you register as an ex-pat with your own embassy), only to have her crazy mother-in-law step in just in time to steal and hide her passport. And then I moved and I worried for her, as all her “friends” in Ebolowa are easily bought by her husband’s green affections.

A few Sunday’s ago, I got a phone call that she ran away with the two young kids. I was so elated! Finally, I thought. Finally, she has planned her get away so carefully that she wouldn’t even tell me. I was grateful to not know anything because when her husband asked, I could honestly say I have no idea where she is. The thought crossed my head several times that maybe he murdered her, but more often than not I imagined her living under a new identity in Douala, or taking a plane in the middle of the night back to Moscow. I thought she finally had come to her senses, she had finally found her inner strength to leave a bad situation.
And then the phone calls from her husband happened. “If Nadia calls, tell her I’m not angry. I just want to know she is ok. I just want to know the kids are ok.” Uh, yeah, right. Why would I ever be so crazy as to try to cajole her to going back to her abusive husband?
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Two Thursdays ago, I was woken up by a phone call at 10pm. “Hello, this is the morgue. I’m just calling to tell you that Koyot is dead. Please contact the family.” In a state of sleepiness, and the bizarreness of the situation of having the morgue call you from a number that you don’t have registered makes you think it’s a practical joke or a dream. I tried to wake myself up, to sort it out. I tried calling some people in Ebolowa to find out if my mototaximan is in fact dead.

What makes it worse is that I realized that even though it had been maybe 5 months since we last spoke, he still had me saved in his phone as “my wife”. The last time Koyot was supposed to help me out, he was supposed to come to my house at 5am. I called the night before to arrange the ride. I called him again at 4:30 am to verify that he was on his way. He told me yes, and I waited for him until 5:30, when I finally gave up and took a different moto. I can’t say I was devastated, more annoyed because what good is it to have a mototaximan’s phone number if he’s completely unreliable? After that day I kept waiting for him to apologize. He never did, and I avoided all contact with him because, apparently, situations like this turn me into a middle schooler again.

It was the morning after the potentially-prank phone call from the morgue that my Ebolowa neighbor, Papa Billy, called to tell me that Koyot is, in fact, dead. Hit by a car just 100 meters from my house. It was when I arrived at my old neighborhood last weekend that I saw the blood stain on the road from where his head hit the pavement. The car that hit him, apparently, had only one functioning headlamp, causing Koyot to think that it is another moto. The car, an old beater that wore the impact of a head-on collision with a moto, was sitting in from of the gendarmerie, with Koyot’s moto, now missing the handlebars, sticking out of the trunk. My neighbors described how Koyot’s ears had blood spilling out, how his skull was completely destroyed. And while I wanted, in theory, to make it to the removal of the body from the morgue, I think I subconsciously intentionally arrived 30 minutes too late and only got to see the parade of motos accompanying Koyot’s body to his village for burial. I’ve never handled the Christian tradition of showing the body, and no matter how good of a makeup artist they had, I’m pretty sure Koyot’s face would have been intolerable for me to look at. Better to guard the image of Koyot happily talking to his passenger on his moto driving to the village.
Koyot had a moto helmet- he just never wore it.

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This past weekend, while on my tour of Ebolowa, I got the news from a mutual friend that Nadia had come back. I keep thinking that Nadia is like my bulimic friend in college who I tried so badly to help. I wanted her to stay because she was my friend, but her depression caused her to transfer to a school closer to home. I was really sad to have lost her as a friend, but only after did I realize it was for the better- for me, mostly, because the amount of energy I put into that friendship was wearing me down. I wanted so badly to help Nadia help herself. I wanted her to see the light and run away, far away, and I wanted to rest here knowing that she was in a safe place with the kids living the life she has been dreaming of. Only now do I think that maybe this is the life she’s been dreaming of; an abusive yet needy relationship, a moto that you ride without a helmet knowing that potentially one day you may get the same fate that many others have suffered.

Torture of the Marines

Ok, so it is true that after I accepted my extension, I first learned the word for sea turtle: La tortue marine. As you can imagine, I immediately thought someone was asking me if the WWF works in the field of torture of the Marines. I was very confused. Needless to say, after finally understanding that it means marine tortoises, I could say, “Yes.”

The WWF worked a great deal in the past with the conservation of sea turtles, but because of funding (something I am learning about huge NGOs like WWF) they had to stop several years ago. We follow the hot trends in conservation. Whatever is in mode in the conservation world is where money can be found, and that is how the WWF determines its work. Right now gorilla tourism is the hip thing to investigate, and sorry, turtles. Sorry fishermen. But all the work up until now (at least 5 years of work) is all you’re going to get. Don’t even look at the fact that behavior change towards conservation (particularly in parts of the world that live hand-to-mouth off of their natural resources) takes a REALLY long time. There is just no money.

This week in Cameroon marks the national holiday of “Youth Day.” It seems odd from the Western perspective where it is the youth (defined as anyone under 45ish) who rule the world, as we forget the aging because, well, wrinkles are just not attractive. But there is a holiday for the neglected, often over-worked, underpaid, powerless youth. As part of these festivities, I’ve been working with a local group of (exceptionally educated) fishermen who are interested in sea turtle conservation. We went to some coastal primary schools to give some lessons (ok, I really just sat there and watched as they gave their lesson). In the schools we learned that 100% of the school kids have eaten turtle and turtle eggs. So clearly we know that the efforts put forth in sea turtle conservation are not working. I would say that it isn’t necessarily bad to eat sea turtles and their eggs for these very low technology fishermen, but everyone’s effort counts, right? I keep coming back to images from the film “Sharkwater” where these huge trawlers pull out shark from the ocean, cut off their fins, and then throw them back into the water, still alive, only to sink down to the bottom of the ocean floor to await a starving death. All of this to the soundtrack of Portishead. Yep.

Here, fishermen eat shark, too. But these guys have small wooden canoes carved from a tree trunk. They push them out from the beach with much effort, tie them up in the water until take off time, and then in the late afternoon or early morning, swim out to the boat, hop in, and take off for days at a time. When they catch a shark, they might sell it. But Cameroonians eat all parts of the shark. They love that the shark is rich in oil (less cooking oil they have to use), and they always thank God for their catch before chowing down. It is the same thing with sea turtles. While there is (I imagine) a niche market for wealthy Chinese who want to eat turtle eggs/turtle meat, these fishermen won’t chase down a turtle that is coming to land to nest. They’ll probably eat their eggs, but will certainly leave the turtle alone. But if a turtle got caught in their net in the water, they are fair game.

Last night I attended a meeting with the fishermen, and as a representative of the WWF (fortunately a new one) I learned how tense some of these negotiations can be. There is so much resentment towards an unfulfilled promise of compensation for turtle by-catch. They even believe that the WWF was using them for personal profit. And I can’t blame them. Turtles are listed species, and so technically it is illegal for the fishermen to kill the turtles. But I keep coming back to my Wolves in Yellowstone grad school class with Cristina Eisenberg. Even wealthy American ranchers need motivation to not kill the wolves that have killed their cattle. So why shouldn’t these already hungry fishermen demand compensation for releasing their by-catch that potentially has damaged their fishing net and that could feed their family for a few days? There isn’t sufficient law enforcement to patrol the beaches (let alone the park), so what do they care that it is illegal? They will never get caught.

And I keep thinking that we are accusing the wrong population. The new development of a (Chinese, of course) deep-sea port taking up to 40 kilometers of coast just north of us possibly has a much larger influence. Not only will this increase the population greatly with workers (many of whom are coming from outside and who have no idea about the importance of sea turtles or the ecology of the ocean), but the sheer magnitude of destruction is unthinkable! The EIA for the sea port declared that its impact on sea turtles will be minimal because there is the stretch of coast to the south where sea turtles are known to nest. Hilarious, right? Way to put the pressure on the fishermen to a) release their by-catch when their families are hungry, b) become the eco-guards to stop poaching by outsiders (Cameroonians and Chinese) who could care less about the quality of the oceans life, and c) never develop their own livelihoods because of the expectation that nothing will change over the next 50 years in terms of the quality of life of the local population. When EIAs like this get approved and projects are pushed forward for the sake of development, the legal code of this country is compromised. Why even have laws?

Needless to say I will continue to work under the assumption that, much like we see in America, collaborative governance works. The locals can be interested in conservation for the sake of better fisheries management and the WWF will continue to try to work based on the long-term impact, not the hottest trends in the world of conservation funding.