Baffled in Bafut

           During training my friends and I lived in a town named Bafia. I’m currently living just outside Bamenda and have friends surrounding the (noisy and dirty) city of Bafoussam. Their posts include Batie, Bapi, Bassosia, and Babadjou. Notice anything? Many of the towns and cities in the Western Highlands (and parts of the rest) of Cameroon begin with the BA- prefix. As far as I understand, this prefix means “people of” in one of the native languages. This past weekend a few friends and I headed over to Bafut, which is one of the remaining major fondoms (traditional kingdoms) in the immediate vicinity.

            As luck would have it, one of Cynthia’s Cameroonian friends happens to be a Bafut princess and she offered to bring her out to see the palace. She has been making this offer for the duration of Cynthia’s service, and given the rate at which her COS (close-of-service) date is approaching, she finally accepted. Cynthia extended the invitation to a few others, and in the end there were five of us piling into a taxi headed to Bafut. Given the size of our party we were hoping that we could “flop” (fill) a taxi ourselves, but it was of course not to be. We found a taxi with only one other passenger and headed off.

            I had never been to Bafut before, but it wasn’t far at all ($0.80 cab ride/person) and the trip out took less than a half hour. So less time than it takes to get across Bamenda at rush hour. But that’s a different story. As uncomfortable as driving in Cameroon can be, the scenery more than makes up for it (usually). We drove through a few small villages but for the most part the trip consisted of green hillsides, palm trees, and red dirt paths.  

            A local prince and princess met us, although I didn’t learn whether or not they shared the same mother. As it turns out, polygamy is still widely practiced in many parts of Cameroon and particularly in traditional cultures. Many fons take as many as 40 or more wives, and when a fon dies his successor typically inherits his father’s remaining wives. I can’t remember how many wives the fon of Bafut currently has but we learned that the immediate past fon had about 85 and over 500 children. At this point in the tour I began to wonder what percentage of the Bafut population are technically either a prince or princess.  This was not a question that I felt comfortable asking our tour guides, especially after the tour begun. A large percentage of the stops on the tour were former torture sites. We saw the beheading rocks, (there were two: a large one for men and a slightly smaller one for women) the site of sacrifice, (formerly human, changed to animal after German colonial influence) and a few other places of general misery.

            Just as I was beginning to wish I had never come to Bafut, we entered the inner gates and got our first real look at life inside the palace compound. Most of the space was taken up by many small buildings that housed the fon’s wives. If you didn’t know that all these women shared the same husband, it almost felt like any other small Cameroonian village. There were kids scrubbing dresses and women preparing meals. Given that the palace is a touristic site (our guide told us that it is a UNESCO World Heritage site) the children were more polite than I’m used to and not a single one of them yelled “white man!” as we passed. It was a nice surprise.

            The highlight of the tour came when we entered the innermost gate and got to see the shrine to royal ancestors. The square building was covered in totem poles and the roof was made up of the thickest layer of thatch that I have ever seen. We weren’t allowed inside, (the fon is allowed to enter as he wishes and his queens and princesses are allowed once per year) but it was quite stunning from the outside. After this highlight I was ready to head back to Bamenda, but it was not yet to be. We were first escorted through the Bafut museum, where we saw and heard about what must have been every item the Bafut fons throughout history ever touched. Luckily there have only been nine fons (although they stretch back as far as the 1500s), so the tour eventually finished and we grabbed a taxi back to Bamenda.

           

My work projects continue to be moving slowly; I’m beginning to realize that this is typical of Cameroon and trying not to let it frustrate me. In the meantime, I’m trying to stay busy in other ways. I started taking French lessons a few weeks ago (my teacher’s name is Debonnaire-not making that up) and have resumed my tennis lessons after a two-month break following my accident. I’ve also tackled some of the home-improvement projects that I had been putting off. I now have a fully functional dining room (although it’s on the balcony-al fresco dining is in my future!) and contracted a counter extension for my kitchen so I have enough room to cook. This being Cameroon, neither of these tasks proceeded as I would have expected them to, but I’m optimistic that both will be a success.

Another cultural difference: in America, my neighbors take their dogs for walks. In Cameroon, my neighbors take their goats for walks (on leashes).

TL,DR: Traditional kingdoms still exist in Cameroon and some of them have even been labeled as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. If you ever choose to visit them, be prepared for the likely possibly of practicing polygamists and former sites of human sacrifices. 

Fleeing the Desert and Hitting the Beach

This past week I finally made it to the beach and headed to Limbe in the Southwest Region for the National Girl’s Forum. The event is in its third year and each attending Peace Corps Volunteer brings a counterpart and girl from their respective post. The conference focuses on issues specific to girl children in Cameroon, and this year’s theme was “A Future for Girls”. I travelled down with my counterpart Aisha (also my next door neighbor), and my friend’s daughter, Kelly. In Cameroon, youth are classified as being below the age of 35, but this conference limited invitees to those between the ages of 14-24. I invited Kelly before these age limitations were announced, so at age 12 she was much younger than many of the girl participants, a few of who were older than me. This conference provided yet another example of how different my life would have been had I been born in Cameroon. One of the girl participants brought her 18-month-old child and another was seven months pregnant. The sessions covered topics such as avoiding sugar daddies and delaying sex, (which is why I had thought that a 12 year old was in the intended demographic) topics that don’t quite seem applicable to my peers.

            But the conference and the week in Limbe were a wonderful break from Bamenda and finally provided me with some beach time. Unfortunately, I’m something of a baby when it comes to the ocean (so many waves!), but the water was gloriously warm and we all had a great time splashing around. Many of the Cameroonian girls didn’t know how to swim but I was proud to see that Kelly wasn’t in that category and was quite comfortable in the water.

            As great as our time in the water was, my favorite part would have to be the meals we ate on the beach. There were stands of mamas frying up fresh fish and they brought them right to our table on the beach. It’s been something of a struggle, but I think I’m finally figuring out how to eat a fish that hasn’t been deboned. Hopefully before I leave Cameroon I will have learned how to do it nearly as gracefully as most Cameroonians.

            The only downside to the trip came on the last day, when I decided to brave what looked like gentle surf and head out to swim with my friends. I should have known that the ocean always wins. As I was making my way out I found myself in that terrible part where all the waves are breaking just as a big (well, big enough) wave came in. The next thing I knew I was underwater and although it felt like much longer, I popped out a second later only coughing a little bit. My pride at surviving what had been my big fear all week was quickly replaced by panic when I realized that the ocean had taken my glasses along with my trust. Our search was completely fruitless and I resigned myself to dealing with a blurry trip back as penance for wearing my glasses in the ocean. Of course, I quickly found my contacts that I had brought when I packing up to leave. Too little, too late.  

            On the way back I made a small detour to visit my friend Lauren in Buea, which is the capital city of the Southwest Region and quite close to Limbe. It was great to see her and a taste of Limbe and she even took us to a semi-legitimate ice cream parlor. Sometimes Cameroon is pretty surprising. The trip back was a little brutal, as my friend Rachelle and I braved the car park and found ourselves on a 30 person coaster with 36 or so other people. Each row was supposed to hold four people, but here they hold five. And that’s not even including any children sitting on laps. Children don’t count as people in this country, at least not when it comes to public transport. It was more than cozy, and took the better part of eight hours. Luckily, Cameroon provides ample scenery and the trip passed without incident.

            The day after I returned from Buea marked the first night of Passover. Unsurprisingly, there was no seder in Bamenda for me to attend, but it seemed strange to let the occasion pass without some kind of celebration. Luckily, I have tolerant and adventurous postmates and they let me throw my own mini-seder at their house. We had to make some adjustments-no available cocoa powder meant that we made macaroons instead of flourless chocolate cake, as was the original plan. But the biggest hiccup came when we started our attempt at homemade matzah and found a large population of weevils in the flour. As Cynthia put it, they had created their own little ecosystem in there. There were so many that the standard Cameroonian procedure of sifting all flour through fine mesh was insufficient-the worms and larvae made their way through. But no matter, we had a fine dinner and even managed something resembling a Seder plate, complete with charoset. Why is this year different from all other years…?   

TL,DR: Girl’s forum was a huge success and all the participants learned a lot. Personally, I learned that my fear of the ocean is completely justified. You never know when or how it’s going to strike.

Snowsuit in April

A little over a year ago, my friend Scott and I braved the coldest Minnesota night in order to blow soap bubbles and watch them freeze. That doesn’t happen unless the temperature drops below -12 degrees. Today, I came home to find the daughter of my next door-neighbor wearing a full-body snowsuit (without a hint of irony). It couldn’t have been colder than 60 degrees.

Although this latest incident made me stop and laugh (not helping my relationship with said child), it also made me realize how much of my life here already feels normal, despite its relative newness. Today wasn’t even an atypical day, but I’m chuckling to myself just looking back on it. Some highlights of today included:

• ·      Attempting to explain and commission a set of cookie sheets from a team of welders
• ·      Accepting a ride up the mountain in the pouring rain from a man who happened to be leaving the Alliance Francaise right before the daily monsoon began (but don’t worry, he was vetted by the director of the AF)
• ·      Grudgingly taking said man’s phone number (everyone wants to share their contact!) and then immediately needing to use it when I realized I forgot my cookie sheets in his car. Oops.
• ·      Accompanying my counterpart to a new village and very nearly getting stuck in the mud. Then quietly sitting and listening to counterpart and his friend discuss the “wild people” that also inhabit said village. On our way out we watched a team of pre-pubescent boys jump in the bed of a pickup as a means of helping the driver extract the truck from the mud.
• ·      Learning that none of the three local stores near my house will sell me a tub of margarine, but all of them are willing to wrap any amount of my choosing in paper for me to take home.
• ·      Greeting an entire school of children and potentially getting roped into teaching computer classes when the current teacher goes on maternity leave next week.
• ·      Teaching my landlady how to make cookies and learning that she had seen cookie sheets in secondhand stores before but had no idea what they were used for. And then we proceeded to make cookies for the neighborhood!
• ·      Watching my water begin to dribble out of the faucet and getting overly excited. Only after I took a celebratory shower did I fill up a bucket and notice that the water was browner than I have ever seen it be.

Regarding life in Cameroon, my friend Anna likes to tell me that, “there’s never a dull fucking moment” (Anna was with me when I visited my first Cameroonian hospital a few weeks ago…).  Truer words have never been spoken.

When I was visiting the school this morning, I went to the head teacher’s office as a way of following protocol. After I introduced myself as a Peace Corps Volunteer, she looked up in recognition and said that she knows about the Peace Corps, and knows that we’re here to teach Cameroonians how to develop. That’s an attitude that I really have trouble with, so I responded with what has sort of become my standard reply: “Well, I like to think that we’re here so that we can learn from each other”. And as maddening as life can be here sometimes, I’ve realized that my instinctive reply is becoming more and more true the longer I live here.

TL,DR: Sometimes life here is a little crazy, but the craziest part is how normal it is beginning to feel in the moment. Does that mean I'm beginning to integrate?

Not Thirsty Yet.

I want to talk about water. I’m sure that few of you will be surprised to learn that prior to coming to Cameroon, it wasn’t a subject that I thought much about. Sure, as an Environmental Studies major I had the option of taking a few courses focused on water, but I bypassed them in favor of classes that seemed more relevant to my life and interests. And of course, Plant Biology. So upon graduation I had a sense that water accessibility is a problem in some places, but I had no way of visualizing it.

            Growing up, there were occasionally summers that my county was officially “in a drought”. But other than dying grass and the lack of rainy days, there wasn’t much evidence to support this claim. After all, water always came out of the faucet when I turned it on, and I even caught my neighbors watering their grass, much to my confusion. Weren’t we supposed to be conserving water?

            So with these experiences I came to Cameroon, blissfully ignorant about the situation I was about to face. I even decided not to purchase a portable water filter, confident that the Peace Corps would provide me with the necessary tools for survival. The first sign that the water situation was more dire than I had imagined came within the first few minutes after we stepped off the plane, when we were all handled bottles of water and told that under no circumstances were we to drink the water at the hotel. We had been traveling for about 36 hours at this point, so I accepted the bottle and focused on more pressing issues, such as ensuring that my suitcases had made the trip with us.

            The next morning the situation became much more real when I woke up and turned on the shower to discover that nothing more than a cool breeze came out. I still wasn’t quite ready to deal with what this could mean, so I took a baby-wipe bath and decided to proceed with my day. Unfortunately, this was the day that we got our ID card pictures taken, and my photo still stands testament to my decision that morning.

            When we got to Bafia, I was exposed to a different sort of water problem: there was no running water in the whole town. Many of the homes that my friends and I stayed in had piping and water fixtures, but it was more of an archeological relic than a practical system. Bafia had running water as recently as the 1980s, but (as the story goes) the residents and town government didn’t maintain the system and it fell into disarray. What this meant for my friends I and was that we were suddenly reliant on the array of forages and wells that scattered the town. I was particularly lucky; my family had built the best forage in town right outside the front door about ten years prior to our stay and I had access to it whenever I wanted. Some of my friends were less fortunate: they either had to haul water a great distance or wait on line at 6:00AM to use my family’s forage (it was locked for most of the day). As much as carrying water was a chore, it was at least a consistent one. The water never ran from the taps and it was always available from the forage. My family’s forage had the additional advantage of being covered and therefore clean-my host family members even drank from it without any apparent problems.

            When we all got our post assignments and talked to our predecessors we quickly became aware of the various ways that people in Cameroon obtain their water. My friend Anna’s town has running water, but only between the hours of 6:30 and 7:00AM. To me that sounded pretty terrible (I’m not a morning person), but she and her postmate disagree. To them, it’s a consistent system, and they’re not left guessing when the water will run. Many of the people in my stage have no running water at all and most of them hire children to fetch water from local wells. I think the going rate is somewhere around $.20-.40 per bidon of water (maybe about 20 liters). And as inconvenient as that can me, it’s consistent at least. Until a few weeks before IST, I thought my water situation was pretty perfect. By some minor miracle my host organization managed to find me an apartment with both consistent electricity and running water. I didn’t even know that was possible here. I was so confident in the consistency of these services that I invested in a water heater for my shower and endured the grueling process of having it installed. See a previous post for more details on that. But the installation was successful and I took a few blissful hot showers. But a few days after the heater was installed, I had a new problem. My water heater installation coincided with the end of the dry season, and water was scarce everywhere. My water stopped flowing from the taps. At first I was confused, and assumed the problem was temporary. But a day passed, and there was still no water.

Given that I had previously had no problems with water, I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I should be and had very little water stored. My neighbors were much better prepared. It turned out that the water usually came on in the early morning hours and my neighbors took the opportunity to fill up every available water container. Despite my abovementioned status as a non-morning person, I did what I thought I had to do. I woke up early and tried to fill my buckets while the water was flowing. This worked great, for exactly one day. After that, the water stopped flowing at all. I didn’t know what to do. Luckily, this crisis came right around the time of IST and I dealt with my water problems by abandoning my apartment for two weeks.

The main point of this post is to attempt to portray how stressful semi-running water can be. I’ve found that my mood is fairly directly correlated with the current status of the water, which is not something I’m comfortable with. My coping mechanisms are varied; I’ve caught myself delaying bathing and planning my meals around the number of dirty dishes that they will create. Today started off as a good day-I woke up to running water and ambitiously decided to tackle the mountain of laundry that had been accumulating since IST. My luck continued throughout the task and I was even able to replace dirty rinse water with clean (which is in no way a promise that my clothes finished the process clean or free of soap…). I accomplished the task and (feeling proud of myself) even cleaned the floor of my balcony. Nothing left to do but take a well-deserved shower. Of course, when I turned on the water and prepared to get a fresh start to my day, I discovered that the water had been cut yet again. What a soul-crusher. At least we are in the early stages of wet season (meaning we’ve traded endless dust for mud) and a consistent water supply is hopefully in the near future. At least until next February/March.

On a similar note, I was in Main Market a few days ago and found those “jellies” sandals that many of us had as children available for sale in adult sizes (you can find anything in Main Market!). I couldn’t help myself. I bought a pair. Among the best $3 I’ve spent recently. And all my neighbors tell me how well prepared I am for rainy season!

TL,DR: Water is currently a pretty serious stressor in my life. Hopefully the advent of rainy season will change this soon.