27 months

If you think you’ve got a tough work commute, check out the drive to Nguti here in the SW province. Roland Musi, the director of Link-Up, took these photos last October toward the end of the wet season. He was on a mission to distribute foodstuffs and pay school fees for orphans and vulnerable children in the village through Link-Up’s Guardian Parent Association (GPA). By then, the “road” is little more than a swath of thick red mud cutting through impenetrable jungle on either side. Bush taxis can make the trip during the dry season, but after the rains begin in earnest it’s only passable with the stoutest of 4WD vehicles. Even then, the trucks can get stuck for days or weeks at a time.

Starting in July, I’ll be taking a much more active role in Link-Up beyond my advisory position on the board. One of the many hats I’ll be wearing is coordinator for international volunteers. So here’s my shameless plug: if you or someone you know wants to contribute your talents to an organization that’s doing incredible work in Cameroon, visit our volunteer page or drop me an email. We welcome short- or long-term volunteers with unique skills, but a willingness to roll up one’s sleeves and get involved is just as vital. Link-Up was recently approved as a Peace Corps partner and has received national attention for their work, so you can rest assured that your volunteerism will go toward a worthy organization producing measurable results. /shameless plug

Hans had been more secretive than usual in the past several weeks. My near constant companion in Buea had become conspicuously absent, with clandestine trips to Yaoundé and extended stays in the capital becoming the norm. On the phone he remained vague on the precise nature of his sojourns; his original alibi of having some odd carpentry work had long since worn out. I know Hans well, and it was obvious when he was being evasive. He sensed that I was onto him, too, and would bust into his characteristic belly laugh saying, “Oh, Bill—my bruddah! Don’t bother. All ting de fayn.” I had my suspicions, but didn’t let on to his game.

I knew that Hans’s elder cousin, Kingue, maintained a second house in Yaoundé. Kingue is a bona fide big man in Bakweri Town, with a sprawling, neo-colonial wedding cake of a house and a gated compound to prove it. Once, I was invited for an impromptu visit to his place with some friends and we were received by his fashionably attired wife with snifters of Courvoisier all around. We sat awkwardly on luxurious imported sofas in our t-shirts and sports sandals while Cameroonian men in pinstripe suits, shiny satin ties and alligator shoes regarded the televised soccer match in the opposite corner of the parlor. On other occasions Kingue would host lavish outdoor BBQ’s—African style—and slaughter up to four goats for his guests, along with the requisite crates of bottled beer stacked head-high in the compound yard. For these events Hans was often recruited to procure jugs of freshly-harvested palm wine from his contacts in Small Soppo (see “An Ode to Matango”). Government officials, functionaries, magistrates, police commissioners and other prominent local figures rounded out the guest list. It wasn’t conspicuous consumption of the Western variety, with ostentation and displays of wealth merely for its own sake. This was different.

Kingue belongs to that rare class of made Cameroonians who are able to travel freely between their village and their government jobs in the US. With a posting as a treasurer to the permanent Mission of Cameroon to the UN in New York City, he possesses a diplomatic passport (identified by its brown cover, as opposed to the usual green) with the most sought after item to so many of his countrymen affixed to the inside: a multiple-entry resident visa for the United States of America. Kingue’s two houses in Cameroon, therefore, were not so much status symbols as the just rewards of an African whose ship had come in. And his success, in keeping with tradition, was shared among his extended family back in his village, including Hans.

I met Hans at an outdoor bar on the dusty outskirts of the Omnisport stadium in Yaoundé during my visit there last month. He could barely contain his excitement and I knew there was no need to press him on his secret. He would spill it all on his own. My suspicions from the start had been correct; Kingue had pulled some strings and landed Hans a job at his office in New York City. In a few short days he would have the same diplomatic passport and visa and, not long afterward, a government-sponsored flight to the US with a guaranteed salary waiting for him. For nearly as long as I’ve known him, Hans has worn around his neck a pewter medallion depicting the twin towers in Manhattan—a gift brought back on a visit by Kingue. It was a touchstone for an almost universally held African dream; the prospect of leaving the continent for a better life abroad. Hans’s wish had come true—he was finally a made man himself. I shared his enthusiasm as we toasted with rounds of Castels. At the same time, there was a bittersweet edge to the occasion, since we both knew he’d be leaving his village, family, friends and me behind indefinitely.

Some days later Hans returned to Buea and his family’s house in Bakweri Town with passport in hand. I agreed to guard his secret until he’d safely left Buea and visited him often until his return to Yaoundé for his flight out of Nsimalen. He’d spent his final days gathering all the items any self-respecting Cameroonian would take on an international voyage: enough dried fish, eru, bitter leaf, gari, Maggi cube and assorted market spices to fill a large suitcase. He packed just one change of clothes. I wondered what a US customs official would make of the fragrant, exotic cargo upon inspection. We had a small send-off for him in the house with kwacoco, chicken and champagne. And then Hans was off to America.

If you happen to see a short, stocky Cameroonian with his trademark ball cap and easy smile on the streets of Manhattan, greet him for me.

This list comes from a recent Gmail exchange with a Cameroonian friend that was conducted entirely in Pidgin English. If I were to guess, I’d say that AdSense’s semantic analysis got hung up on the monosyllabic Pidgin words in our conversation and, lacking any other intelligible vocabulary, served up Swedish, Dutch and Vietnamese ads. For example, the Cameroonian Pidgin verb “na” (to be) is also a Vietnamese noun (custard apple), a Dutch preposition and a Swedish pronoun, which might explain some of the following:

Sponsored Links

1. Phim Han Quoc
2. Diabetes: Fucoidan Helps
3. Tin việc làm
4. Måla tak med Anza
5. Volvo Trailer Hitch
6. Liquid Fucoidan Seaweed
7. Jelly Jars
8. Hjärtklappning?
9. Kendo Martial arts in NJ
10. Kim Kardashian Is Hot?

Clearly, Google has some work to do before they’re able to effectively cater to this segment of their market (Volvo Trailer Hitch? Jelly Jars?). These Ad(non)Sense links got me thinking about Cameroonian Pidgin as a linguistic animal. Pidgins and creoles usually arise in circumstances with prolonged, regular contact between speakers of different language groups where there is no widespread, accessible interlanguage. Witness Hawaiian Pidgin, Papua New Guinean “Tok Pisin”, Sierra Leone “Krio” or any of the many variants of West African Pidgin, generally. Originally conceived as trade or “contact” languages, they served as a means for effective communication by borrowing simplified elements from different languages. Cameroonian Pidgin is derived primarily from English, but is also heavily influenced by French, Portuguese and African dialects. For example, consider the following Pidgin words in current use and their linguistic antecedents:

Portuguese
pikin — from “pequenino” (child)
dash — from “dache” (gift or tribute)
sabi — from “saber” (to know)
palaba — from “palaba” (discussion or conference)

French
gato — from “gâteau” (cake)
jandam — from “gendarme” (police officer)
kamyong — from “camion” (truck)
katsangkat — from “quatre cents quatre” (old Peugeot 404)
ku — from “coup” (to replace)

English
sidon/shidon — from “to sit, sit down”
husay — from “which side”
kotlass — from “cutlass” (machete)
motofut — from “motor + foot” (tire)
foseka se — from “for the sake of” (because)
lefam so — from “leave it so”

African vernacular
wahala — trouble
kwa —bag
kongosai — gossip
njamajama — vegetable greens
kwankanda — bachelor
nyanga — ostentation
ngondele — young woman, girl
potopoto — mud

It’s not uncommon to hear an exchange that uses vocabulary borrowed from all four of these sources. Reduplication is often used to represent superlatives, such as “smol smol”, “sharp sharp”, “qwik qwik” and so on. To make things even more interesting (or difficult to the outsider), the tones, accent, grammar and sentence structure are heavily influenced by African languages as well. As a result, spoken Cameroonian Pidgin has a very distinct accent or “cadence” that gives it a unique, African sound very much unlike English.

Despite being labeled as “broken English” or “bush English”, Pidgin is not English but rather its own language, rich with parables and African wisdom (see “More Pidgin Wisdom”). Pidgin English is usually treated as a curse by educators (see photos from the University of Buea campus, below). I’ve heard unsubstantiated claims of teachers beating students who use Pidgin in the classroom which, given the role of corporal punishment in the Cameroonian educational system, isn’t tough to believe. However, some notable Cameroonian linguists are bucking the conventional wisdom and suggesting that Pidgin is, in fact, an appropriate pedagogical language in urban centers.

I thought of reproducing some of the email conversation that begat this post, or a sample Pidgin dialogue, but it wouldn’t really capture the language accurately. Ideally, I’d make a recording with some of my Cameroonian friends talking over drinks at the bar near my house and post it. I don’t have a decent recorder, but I may be able to use the voice memo feature in my phone and transfer it with Bluetooth to my laptop. Stay tuned.

Having ready access to music, I’ve found, is key to weathering any number of trials in Cameroon. Over the last two years my trusty iPod has performed faithfully and helped me to maintain a measure of sanity through the worst of times. Stuck in the back of a sweltering, overcrowded bush taxi for eight hours? No problem. No running water, electricity or cooking gas for a few days, while your house is periodically flooded by torrential downpours? Meh. Rioting and police tear gas forcing you to remain indoors for awhile? Bring it on, I say.

The iPod has taken more than its fair share of abuse over the last two years here. The last trip up Mt. Cameroon (see “Mt. Cameroon Redux”) was especially rough on it. I suspect that all the jostling on the trail and subfreezing temperatures at Hut 3 marked the beginning of the end. Some time afterward the internals began making a perturbing noise, sometimes known as the “click of death” followed shortly by the dreaded iPod sad face. I ran several hard disk diagnostic utilities one of which revealed, in graphic detail, the bad news:

Well, only 89.5% of it is damaged, so I guess I should consider myself lucky. My 60GB iPod is now, in effect, a 6GB iPod—but not really. The disk is so full of errors that it spontaneously reboots and seeks through bad blocks so often that the battery dies in no time.

Fortune shined upon me, though, as PCV Debbie Schuld in Tiko got a free trip to South Africa on a medical leave (she’s fine) and brought me back a handsome little 4GB Nano. Good times are back again.

Regular visitors to this blog are surely aware by now that I harbor an obsession with bicycles which borders on the pathological. The fact is, I respect bikes of every shape and form whether they be workaday mules, neglected beaters, hand-built jewels, resurrected dumpster finds, vintage showpieces or average junk. Like pit bulls, there are no bad bikes—only bad owners. This obsession is not a profitable one, as it usually leads to good money being spent on things whose exchange value is often substantially less than their intrinsic value. Still, a bike is a bike—and in my book every bike deserves a fair shake.

So I got to pouring over my photos and realized that I had enough shots of bikes taken from enough interesting places (to my mind, anyway) from around Africa to warrant a bicycle-centric gallery post. So here it is. I’m actually pretty excited about this, since it represents bikes photographed in four different countries on opposite ends of the African continent: Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Bicycle aficionados will note that a fair number of these are variations of the ubiquitous black Chinese-built singlespeed. It would be absurd to claim this as any sort of canonical representation of Africa’s two-wheeled, human-powered transport. Rather, it is merely a sampling what I’ve found in my personal travels thus far (excepting Uganda—thanks Jessica). Enjoy.

Like most federal agencies, Peace Corps has a predilection for using an abundance of acronyms (RPCV Lindsay Miesko has catalogued the most common ones on the sidebar of her blog). The acronym “COS” has a double meaning: close of service and continuation of service. This was the focus of a weeklong conference held in Yaoundé for all the Volunteers who entered Cameron in June of 2006. For us, this meant a brief departure from village life to enjoy the luxuries of a 4-star hotel in the heart of the capital. Outside of sessions we indulged in buffet meals, hot showers, spring mattresses, free WiFi and other long-forgotten amenities impossible to imagine at post. Sessions were geared toward bringing closure to our two years of service and preparing for our eventual return to the US. Mostly, though, they involved wading through a huge collection of forms to be filled out before our final processing in June. One of the APCDs remarked that “getting out of Peace Corps involves more paperwork than getting in.” He wasn’t joking.

Back in November of last year I paused to contemplate my future (see, “Top 10: After Peace Corps”). During that time I gave even odds to setting off on any of ten vastly different paths after my service. Since then, the post-election civil unrest in Kenya has put my plans to settle in Nairobi on hold, at least temporarily. So here’s the big news: I’ve done a great deal of soul-searching over the last few months and have decided to extend my Peace Corps service for a third year. I’ve also applied for an open Peace Corps Volunteer Leader (PCVL) position here in the southwest province. The PCVL serves as a liaison between administration and Volunteers in the field. I interviewed with a panel of senior staff members in the Yaoundé office last week and should hear back with their decision by next week.

On top of the PCVL job, there is a lot of exciting potential for new projects during my third year. At least one is already in progress but I’ve elected to hold off on blogging it until later. All the same, I look forward to keeping you, dear reader, abreast of my goings-on here in Cameroon through 2009.

P.S. - 100th post!

The other day I was strolling off the tarred road in Bakweri Town and happened across this sign. It’s common to see the message “food is ready” written in chalk on scraps of plywood or on the sides of small containerized shops. More specific variations may include things like “goat pepe soup is ready,” “kwacoco is ready,” “achu is ready” and so on. I often use these signs to find some excellent home-cooked traditional dishes. Food prepared with love by a mama is almost always better than the finest restaurant meal. After nearly two years in Cameroon I thought I’d seen them all. This one made me do a double-take:

I snapped the photo under poor light conditions with my camera phone, so the quality isn’t the best. Later, I showed the photo to Hans who made a flapping motion with his hands and said, “Ah, yeah—bat. No, bat is good. You want to try it?” I told Hans if he could find some bat fried with love I’d buy us each a plate.

It’s hard to believe that it was June of ’07 when I blogged the network installation at the Teachers’ Resource Centre (see “The TRC Gets A Network”). At the time I noted that the benefit of a local area network in the absence of Internet connectivity was abstract at best in the eyes of many of my coworkers. All the noise, dust and disorder we created should surely be for more than the ability to “see” other machines on our tiny internal network. Of course, the big news for my computer training program was that this enabled us to store the Video Professor titles on a central machine and avoid the hassle and inherit risk involved with constantly swapping CDs from a locked cabinet.

It was during my leave in Seattle that I’d learned that Lucas Agwe, an inspector of computer studies, had located the critical piece of hardware we were missing to finally bring Internet to the TRC. High speed Internet via ADSL, while available in larger Cameroonian towns like Buea, is prohibitively expensive and well beyond our means. A popular compromise offered by Camtel, the national phone company, relies on a modem-like device with an antenna called a “fixed wireless terminal”. The service is relatively new and offers reliable speeds of around 115 kbps which is often shared by up to six PCs in a networked environment. This method is used by the vast majority of small cyber cafés operating around Buea, like the one my former student Simon is currently managing (see “A Web Designer in the Making”). So many, in fact, that Camtel experienced a nationwide shortage of terminals and Lucas had to pull every string at his disposal to find a used one.

My supervisor, Martha Ndipchot, and I spent an afternoon jumping through Camtel’s hoops and were poised to announce the long awaited arrival of Internet at the centre. Then the taxi strike happened (see “Tense Times for Cameroon”) and Buea was plunged into chaos. Suddenly Peace Corps was consolidating its volunteers in preparation for an evacuation from the country, if need be. I began to wonder if it was all for naught. At night while rioters clashed with police, I imagined staying behind if only long enough to see the Internet project through. Luckily, the strike ended and Lucas and I made haste to finish the connection. I’m extremely glad to say that this week, to the cheers and congratulatory handshakes of every inspector who entered, the TRC at last has Internet! This has been near the top of everyone’s list of requests to the Ministry of Secondary Education since I arrived. The best part, from a purely developmental view, is that the project’s success depended upon the skills of many Cameroonians and relied on not a single penny of outside funding. The sense of ownership is high, and the inspectors have agreed to a moderate monthly subscription fee to ensure sustainability of the service.

At the moment, I’m using the TRC’s Internet connection to post this blog entry and every available workstation is occupied, some with two or more people. Inspectors are using the network for pedagogic and academic research while my students delve into Video Professor lessons. Lucas and I will be arranging a seminar to address methods for effectively using the Internet for research—the first of its kind at a TRC in Cameroon. Simply put, I could not be happier.

After the bloodshed, fear and uncertainty of the previous week, I thought it an appropriate time to pull a lighthearted photo post from the archives. This is a sampling of eye candy taken from Zanzibar—the legendary spice island, exotic jewel of the Swahili Coast, birthplace of Freddy Mercury and multicultural trading mecca once ruled by powerful Sultans—during my visit to Kenya and Tanzania last October. I made the trip with three other PCVs on a too-short vacation break. I meant for this to be part of a much more detailed trip report, but events of late last year prevented me from doing so. So, apropos of nothing, I give you Zanzibar.

The maxim, “hope for the best but prepare for the worst” won out—for today, anyway. Like many of my Cameroonian friends and neighbors, I took advantage of the weekend lull in the rioting to stockpile food, water and essentials in the house. It was rumored that this week might bring a resumption of the deadly violence that had paralyzed much of the western half of the country since the general taxi union strike began last Monday. When asked about their plans, the Buea taxi drivers I spoke with said they were adopting a wait-and-see attitude with regard to continuing the strike. Most of my Cameroonian friends agreed that, while the strike succeeded in sending a message to Yaoundé, they were eager to resume their normal lives in the absence of tear gas, bullets and uncertainty.

I woke up early this morning to a chorus of taxi horns which, given the circumstances, was music to my ears. Not long afterward I received a call from Justin Fomanka, a close colleague, that my students had returned to the centre after the weeklong hiatus. On the streets you could sense that Buea—and much of the country, I suspect—was breathing a collective sigh of relief. This was due in no small part to the large military presence that had deployed all over town the previous evening. Soldiers with assault rifles were present in numbers along the main road, with troop carriers and jeeps parked at major junctions. A truck that had rear-ended a big man’s silver Mercedes was the scene of the largest gathering on my way to work.

At the Delegation, many of my coworkers from around Buea and nearby Limbe confessed that they, too, had been prisoners in their own homes while the violence raged outside. Mr. Alfred Meende, the centre’s librarian, lives in Great Soppo, site of some of the worst rioting that occurred in Buea. He related stories of witnessing police using axes to enter homes in their search for “rascals”. I also learned that palm oil, applied topically, works well for countering the effects of tear gas. Good for the skin too, I imagine.

I’m thankful that, at least for now, Cameroon has avoided going the route of so many other African countries in recent history. It may be argued that many of the preconditions which might have led to prolonged protests, escalating violence and even a Kenya-esque power struggle were present here. Cameroonians often take pride in the fact that theirs is a peaceful country which stands apart from their civil war-torn neighbors, which is true. Last year we observed 45 years of service here—among the longest continuously running Peace Corps programs in the world. For the moment, Peace Corps administration seems to be holding to a position of guarded optimism. After being on the brink of evacuation, the word from Yaoundé is that volunteers removed from their posts might return next week if the situation remains stable.