A Game of Fons

Shiddon for here, my pikins, and I will tell you a tale; a tale of kings and kingdoms, of regents and betrayal, of politics and peril, of lobstered steel and boiled leather. I will tell you the tale of the Great Ashong Schism.

A few years back, perhaps in 2012, no one really knows and it adds to the mystique, His Royal Highness the Fon of Ashong embarked on an extended sojourn away from his lands. Some say he went to Yaoundé, some say he went to America or Europe, no one really knows and it adds to the mystique. A fon is a traditional ruler, somewhere between chief and king, that is responsible for the wellbeing of the people in his village. They exist outside the modern governmental structure of Cameroon while still nominally subjects of the Republic. They were here long before Cameroon and will probably be here long after. Referred to  as “Royal Highness” in the English fashion, “Excellency” in the French fashion, “Sultan” in the Muslim fashion, and “Mbeh” in the African, fons wield a sizeable amount of power and autonomy. It is their responsibility to dispense justice, keep tradition alive, and represent the village as its patriarch.

Being the Father of the Ashongese, His Royal Highness could not leave his flock without a shepherd in his time of absence. Without reserve, His Utmost Confidence officially gave the regency to the lead kingsman who also happened to be his brother. A kingsman or kingmaker is one of a number of village notables that serve as the king’s small council and are often quarterheads, leaders of a quarter within the village. Kingsmen are expected to uphold strict protocol, show loyalty to the Fon, and implement the Fon’s will throughout the village. In a most ancient form of legislation, they represent the people of their various quarters and present their needs to the Fon. For this reason, notables may act as a buffer between the Fon and his people, they interact more closlier with the people of their village.

The Fon’s brother was and is, by all accounts, a gregarious fellow. Beloved by many for his positive disposition and affable nature, people often questioned why the Late Fon had not bestowed his titles on this extroverted son. It must be noted that royal families adhere to the traditional marriage structure and are therefore polygamous. Their many wives produce many sons. Traditional rights of succession call for the fon’s discretion, His Discerning Selectiveness may choose any one of his sons to succeed him regardless of age or social standing. For whatever reason, some say he was more humble and temperate, others say he was a better administrator, the current Fon of Ashong assumed his father’s throne, no one really knows why and it adds to the mystique. Despite lacking his brother’s charisma, His Indubitable Worthiness was regarded as a good choice, serving his people through priority rather than passion.

The royal seals and titles of office were transferred, the District Officer was notified, protocol was observed and the regency of Ashong began. His Impeccable Promptness left for his pilgrimage or sojurn or business trip or vacation and the Fon-In-Residence took the seat of Ashong, long may he reign. His Royal Vicar soon began ingratiating himself to the community. Through lavish parties and more lavishlier gifts, the new regent was celebrated as the joy of Ashong Village. No doubt adjusting well to the trappings of power, His Resplendent Freshness could see that the people loved him and there was much rejoicing.

In the months that followed Ashong seemed as though it were in a dream, intoxicated in its love affair with its new Fon, though love affairs are often silly, fleeting things than end abruptly causing heartbreak and controversy. Word had already reached the village that His Impending Previousness was preparing to return forthwith. Already an idea had been planted in the regent’s mind; that Ashong was better with him at its ruler. The people were grateful for his reign; happiness and prosperity had blessed Ashong in the old Fon’s absence. If the people so clearly wanted him as their Fon, who was he to deny them? No one knows who planted the idea in the would-be usurper’s mind. Some say its genesis lay with the regent himself, fostered by a lust for power or a compulsion to do what he believed was the right thing. Other say a fork-tongued adviser seduced the regent. No one really knows and it adds to the mystique.

There is to be no doubt that the two factions knew of each other’s intentions preceding the calamity that would ensue upon The Return of the King. As in any good story of court intrigue, we can be sure that both parties had the means to obtain information. His Supremely Surprisedness returned to Batibo subdivision most likely expecting the worst. The District Officer advised the Republic of Cameroon that the regency was over, the rightful Fon had returned to his lands and his natural powers were once again bestowed upon him. The transfer of power would not be as easy in fact as it was on paper.

Upon arrival at Ashong palace the royal seal was gone. The Fon’s brother had stolen off to a far quarter of Ashong village, taking the traditional mandate for rule with him. There he built a palace and proclaimed himself to be the Fon of Lower Ashong, while conferring his brother as the Fon of Upper Ashong. Many people moved to Lower Ashong to express solidarity with the self-made Fon, and it is said that the population of Lower Ashong continues to grow as the population of Upper Ashong dwindles.

Thus things became as they are now. The Fon of All (Not Just Upper) Ashong is supported by the Republic of Cameroon and the vast majority of North West Fons. The Fon of Lower Ashong finds his legitimacy in the Lower Ashongese socialites, the royal seal, and several notables. Ashong is one of the largest villages of Moghamo and some say the current situation is preferable to reunification, some think the government will force the usurper out, and some even say the original sovereign should step aside. No one is sure what is going to happen and that adds to the mystique, but the two will surely meet in court if the situation is not resolved personally.

The Great Ashong Schism is hugely divisive, not just for Ashong but more Moghamo as a whole. A few months back I attended a traditional dance in Upper Ashong, invited by the Fon of Guzang who is a “loyalist”. With all the speeches it was constantly and subtly suggested that the Fon in our presence was the true Fon of Ashong, saying things like “This community has 22 villages and always will have 22 villages.” My German friends teach at a school in Lower Ashong and were invited to the counter-dance there, where they claimed they heard similar propaganda in support of the usurper. The whole of Moghamo is anxious for a resolution, and so am I, because this story is great and I want to write “A Tale of Two Fons” next. It’s great to know that stories exist like in reality and that one has to look no more closlier than modern times to find them.

All Roads Lead to China

 There’s a guy that’s pretty famous in Batibo, I pass him almost every time I’m moving along the rough and hilly dirt roads that connect the various villages. Every morning he grabs a wheelbarrow and a shovel and goes to work filling in potholes. Initially he was doing this without compensation as a response to the lack of road maintenance; his indispensable services have since been contracted by the council. Some days he has help, most days I see him alone. I shudder to think of the amount of red dirt this guy has moved over the course of his career, but he seems content to do it. I think he feels secure in the knowledge that his job is hugely important, more so because he’s mainly the only one doing it.

 Elsewhere in Cameroon there are other road projects underway. The past decades have been witness to a remarkable amount of road and infrastructure development throughout Cameroon and the entirety of Africa, unprecedented relative to the decades preceding them. Modern African nations have spent most of their histories in isolation. Colonial superpowers were quick to build railways to transport soldiers and export goods, but these did little to help the local’s freedom of movement. After 20^th century movements for independence, many newly emerged African states opted to tighten their borders as a way to promote internal trade, often creating in-country boundaries to increase opportunities for corruption. While these policies that have stifled infrastructure development are still evident in Cameroon today, it seem like nothing will stop the advance of the tarred road.

 With road development being underfunded throughout most of Cameroon’s history, many stakeholders are desperate to play catch-up. Sub-Saharan Africa currently spends about $7 billion a year paving roads, many economists and nearly all lobbyists say this is not nearly enough. The cost of moving goods in Africa is, on average, two to three times higher than the cost of transporting them in developed countries. All PCVs in Cameroon have seen huge trucks in ditches alongside unpaved roads, if you’re lucky it may have even been a Brasseries truck, that’s a prime example of why shipping costs are so ridiculous in Africa. The World Bank estimated that accidents on Uganda’s terrible roads costed the country 2.7% of its GDP in 2015. To scale it down a bit, everybody knows the okada guy is going to charge you twice as much to go up the rocky hill of death than he is to go twice the distance on a nice paved road. Heavy risk, long wait times, and inconsistency in delivery are throttling Cameroon’s ability to export its goods to a demanding market. Up until recently, Cameroon lacked the equipment and capital to handle its road situation, so what’s changing?

 Enter the People’s Republic of China on the back of an asphalt spewing dragon with bulldozer claws. From Durban to Algiers, Chinese engineers, workers, and equipment are now familiar fixtures of the African landscape and we know that Cameroon is not an exception. China’s need to internationalize its job growth and investments coupled with Cameroon’s need for affordable development of its infrastructure seems like a match made in heaven, but a convenient pairing isn’t always the best. China’s foreign direct investment has been skyrocketing in Cameroon since the mid-2000s and beyond, with funding coming from both the Chinese government and a multitude of Chinese investment banks. Much of this money, diverted through the Cameroonian government, goes straight into the accounts of Chinese construction firms. Although these construction projects create jobs for Cameroonians, most of them are labor oriented, favoring Chinese engineers and technicians over perfectly abled Cameroonians. In many instances this pushes the Cameroonian government into the unsustainable position of creating jobs for skilled Chinese workers building roads with borrowed Chinese money to get to resources that will be shipped to China. It’s easy to see that this relationship is pretty one-sided.

 “The increasing environmental footprint of China in natural resources in Cameroon is due to both direct and indirect investments. Most Chinese activities are as a result of government’s applied funding from China into public projects, others are due to private direct investment from China…Cameroon’s debt to China is fast growing and it is a major cause for concern because the state doesn’t really have the power to decide on the outcomes of Sino-Cameroon cooperation,” - Samule Nguifo, Executive Secretary of Center for Environmental Development Cameroon (CED).

 Cameroon is fertile investment ground for China and with every investment there is a reason and a return. The East region has experienced a proportionately large amount of construction projects due to the timber and mining industries. The roadways connecting the East to Douala harbor and the recently constructed (by China) deep water port at Kribi have also received a lot of Chinese attention. The pattern that emerges should leave no doubt as to China’s aims in Cameroon. Many African economists have been have been weary of China’s role in development on the continent, rightfully so. Short-sightedness will be the biggest weakness to Cameroon as its relationship with China develops.

 I don’t mean to bash on China. Chinese manufactured goods have opened up commercial markets in Cameroon that no one thought could exist before, and even if they have their own agenda in Cameroonian road construction at least someone is doing it. The Anglophone regions have the least amount of tarred road in Cameroon, but most PCVs in those regions will tell you how fast that’s changing. The Trans-African highway is every Batibro’s best friend, and the Kumba-Mamfe road is going to make it easier for everybody in the South West. These roads are making it far easier for farm-to-market transportation on every level; from large organizations now having access to Nigerian markets to smallholder farmers who now have an easier time accessing their local ones. 

A particularly bad day on the Bamenda-Bafoussam Highway in rainy season.

            It’s evident how information technology and electronics are changing the way Cameroonians live, but I think the technology having the most impact on the nation is straight out of the Iron Age. Paved roads are turning geographically isolated parts of the country into major players in the national economy. I’m hopeful that Cameroon’s precarious gamble with China will pay off in the end, with increased access to resources and lower costs of transportation offsetting the debt it has incurred, but it’s too soon to tell. While the economic partnership has been mostly beneficial thus far, Cameroon will have to remain vigilant. With any luck, as time goes on, Cameroon will be more like that guy in Batibo shoveling red dirt; taking initiative and bettering their infrastructure with their own resources.

Living In a Farmer's Paradise

Let’s talk about how great agriculture is for a second. It’s really great. You can put a seed in dirt and with minimal effort food will come out. You can get the best seeds from the harvest and propagate them so that you’re next harvest can be bigger and then just keep doing that until your species conquers every known region of the planet and develops religion, poetry, skyscrapers, and porn. You can clone a plant just by cutting off a section of it and putting it in dirt, making infinite plants because plants are basically immortal. You can plant a tree tomorrow that will feed your great-great-great grandchildren. You can use plants to make other plants better. You can make food grow on food. You can make your food make the soil better so that you can make even more food. You can use the parts of the plants that aren’t food to make more food for your food. You can give your plants to animals to make a whole new type of food.

Speaking of animal husbandry, you can get on the back of one animal and hunt down other animals on top of it. You can train an animal to protect and herd your other animals. You can feed animals plants and use the animals waste to feed the plants that feed the animal. Strap a plow on the back of an animal and it tills the farm for you while fertilizing it. There’s a bird that does nothing but make eggs. You can raise birds from those eggs to make more eggs. It’s unlimited protein. You can use pig waste to make the gas you use to cook a pig. When animals get pregnant, you can milk them.

Agriculture is dirt cheap, we’ve been doing it for millennia, and we’re really good at it. All of human history has been propelled by agriculture. Civilization was built with blades of wheat on the back of a chicken. Danish Vikings wanted a place where their seeds wouldn’t freeze in the ground. Portugal and Spain needed to find a better way to get to Asian spices and accidentally found half the world. The British and the Chinese fought entire wars over a flower that made you feel good. Agriculture is the greatest human asset and will continue to shape the fate of our species to come. The only problem is that nobody wants to do it anymore.

Before coming here my knowledge of agriculture was limited to say the least. Growing up in a suburban environment, the only thing I ever planted was the little tree we got at school on Earth Day. Now my knowledge of agriculture has hit exponential growth. There’s no going back, I’m addicted to how easy and useful this stuff is. So much of my life is now centered on agriculture it would be hard not to appreciate it. I love the way a group of women can tear up a plot of land in an instant and make it a garden. I notice how green corn looks after it rains. I think about how lucrative pepper is right now.

The reason I had never appreciated agriculture is because I’ve never lived in an agricultural environment. That sounds like a stupid thing to say growing up in Ohio where I could walk to my nearest farm, but I think it’s true. In the States, most agriculture is all or nothing. There are a lot of righteous examples of everyday people participating in agricultural activities on the side, but they are few. Most farms are large scale contract farms, plantations, and ranches (or the less nice “cattle facilities”) designed to produce as much food as possible while using minimal labor. There isn’t a lot of room for the old school farmers. With around one percent of the US population involved in agriculture, the vast majority of us don’t participate unless we choose to do so for novelty. I think we should choose to do that more.

I could get into the practical reasons for having a home garden or keeping some animals. Mainly it’s healthier, cuts down on transportation, and you’re sticking it to the man. But the most important reason is that it’s fun and feels great. It feels like you’re tapping into your human potential, mastering the landscape by coaxing the earth into making food for you. You keep some chicken friends and give them nice, happy, fat lives before nature takes its course. You eat that meal with pride knowing that you stand at the pinnacle of the known universe as a self-reliant being with control over its surroundings. Man, agriculture is great.

I’ve seen people here take a plot of land no bigger than the average US lawn and make it their sole source of income for the year. Fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, honey, and milk can all be produced in a space the size of a suburban plot of land and for a cost that’s insignificant to the average American salary. Nobody goes in for these things though and I find it really strange. I appreciate a nice green lawn as much as the next guy. And if I get off an eight hour shift I don’t want to go feed pigs. But I also think a suburban neighborhood fitted with full scale gardens would look nicer than lawns. And I submit that it’s easier to take care of pigs than it is dogs, but not many Americans have a problem doing that.

Here in Cameroon, with eighty percent of the population involved in agriculture, nearly every village has a Ministry of Agriculture representative. This is a guy that any farmer can go to, for free, and solicit advice. He or she is obliged to go to that farmer’s land for consultation, inform them of government support programs, and help mitigate any factors that might lead to a bad harvest. The Ministry of Livestock has a post in almost every village as well, offering free and low cost veterinary services to farmers as well as purveying veterinary drugs and donating them when they can. Of course it’s customary to tip these guys, but these resources are tax-payer funded and can be pretty indispensable to families whose livelihoods are dependent on good yields.

How cool would a service like that be in the States? I know we have extension agents but not on the level that the Cameroonian government has. Our government puts a sad amount of emphasis on agriculture. I bet you can’t even name the Secretary of Agriculture, you filthy commie. I think the Minister of Agriculture of Cameroon is in the same political weight class as the Secretaries of State or Defense are to America. It would be great if the Department of Agriculture got an influx of funding to promote home gardening. Ideally we’d have some guy walk around with the mailman inspecting all these front lawn gardens saying “Blight’s coming around, Marge. I’ll bring some fungicide by tomorrow if you want.”

That won’t happen anytime soon but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have something like it. I’m a realist. I’ve gotten used to my Cameroonian neighbor’s pigs but if I had my own I don’t think my American neighbors would appreciate it. However there should be no reason why I can’t tear up my lawn to start planting corn and quinoa, and I shouldn’t be worried about how it looks or ruining the neighborhood aesthetic. Roosters are noisy but hens are quiet, easy to take care of, and delicious. Greenhouses are pretty easy to construct. There’s a lot of things people in suburban environments can do that aren’t going to disturb their own lives or their neighbors, so why not? You’ll feel really good about yourself.

Gardens improve United State food security and help to liberate you from a dependence on a globalized society. They increase our commercial agricultural surplus to be exported to other countries and reduce the food burdens of cities. Some gardening programs give new skill sets to ex-offenders and others offer chances for inner city families to help improve food security for their neighborhoods. The reintroduction of native crops can be beneficial to local ecology. You can just grow stuff for fun and donate it to a homeless shelter. Either way, you’re just the greatest and America will thank you.  Growing food is like fighting terrorism and nursing a bald eagle. Just like Cuba did after the embargo, and Britain did during the war, by home gardening you’re showing the world that America is a strong independent woman who don’t need no food imports.

I never would have been this jazzed about agriculture had I not come to Cameroon, which shows that the whole development thing is a two way street. There are lessons America can learn from Cameroon and this is one of them. So come now America, help fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a shining republic helmed by strong and rational farmers participating in a vibrant agrarian economy.  I know the next lawn I own shall not be a lawn for long.

Bonus Annoying American Agricultural Thing (BAAAT): If you live in a desert, don’t have a lawn. We should all be cool with using what water sources you guys have to grow food but if it’s just to have a nice green lawn then what the hell are you thinking? Then you use gasoline refined from shit we took out of the ground to cut the damn thing down every week like some sick god creating a creature where it shouldn’t exist and then tormenting it ritually. You can drain the Colorado River if you want to grow onions or something but not so your dog has a toilet. Besides, sandscapes are awesome and it really brings out your neighborhood's regional southwest flavor.

A Day Without Rain

I wanted to make a blog post about what I do here on a regular basis but realized that is impossible because there is no regular basis. The first thing to note is that everything I do here is pretty much dictated by the weather. In the dry season, I had to constantly memorize the fluctuating water schedule so I could be back at my house in time to fill my buckets. Now that it is rainy season, water is still the limiting factor.

When it rains, everything shuts down. Rain comes without warning and screams its sudden arrival thunderously on corrugated metal roofing. It could last for two minutes, two hours, and apparently even two days, but it is almost always intense. If it didn’t rain yesterday, you can be pretty sure it’s going to rain today. If the last rain was comparatively light, you can be sure this one is going to be heavy. Other than that, there is no rhyme or reason to when the rains will come. This is either the best place to be a TV weather man or the absolute worst. When the rains do come, you can gauge fairly accurately how long that particular storm will last. If you’re awoken to what sounds like machine gun fire and the sky looks like East Cleveland in February, you probably aren’t going out that day.

If it’s raining, especially in the field of agriculture, you really can’t do anything. Most farmers will feed their pigs and hurry back inside for a cup of white mimbo. It really is a “rainy day” in the oldest sense of the term: when it’s raining in America you know it will end soon and even during you can still hop in your car and go about your business. In Cameroon a rainy day just shuts down society, much like it has for most of human history in the tropics. You get a lot of vacation days as a Peace Corps Volunteer, but if you factor in rainy days it gets pretty crazy. Ashia, American tax payer, what else can we do? I make up for it on the days without rain.

Unlike more regimented Peace Corps programs, mine leaves me free to develop my own schedule. I usually try to do one solid agricultural thing per day and one solid regular cultural thing per day. I wake up around six in the morning, oddly enough of my own volition. Sleeping in isn’t a common practice here, mainly because it’s almost impossible to do. Pigs, roosters, goats, pikins, and mamas will all ensure that your sleep cycle is tuned to the rhythm of Mother Africa. Half passed seven is considered well into the day and it isn’t uncommon to be receiving visitors at that time. Many times I’ve thankfully managed to eke out one more hour of precious sleep only to be woken to canon-fire on my metal front door accompanied by some guy yelling “Mr. Shan! Mr. Shan!” I still stay up late. I will always be a night owl but now I’m an early bird as well, it’s a precarious balance that’s working alright so far.

If today is a day where my counterpart is in town he will usually pick me up at my house and we’ll bike around doing various things. Mainly we will visit farmers that are part of our ongoing projects on honey bees, soil fertility, and poultry. Different farming groups meet on different days and there are so many that there are several every day. We often do follow-ups with these groups that we’re working with together, though I’ve done them alone sometimes too. While I’m working with my individual farmers for the Peace Corps Small Holder Integrated Agriculture stuff, it’s nice to have my counterpart there for communication purposes but I usually do this myself. We’ll break for lunch somewhere in the market square if someone hasn’t already fed us by then, maybe discuss some programming for later on, do some activities related to the tree nursery or demo farm then go our separate ways. My counterpart is the greatest, but he lives in Bamenda and is the Chief of Post for agriculture in another village up the road so scheduling is always difficult. Most of the time I’m left to my own devices.

If my counterpart isn’t there I’ll make it a slow morning; make eggs, check news on phone, maybe read something. Around eight I’ll either head down to the market square to see who’s there or I’ll call up one of the farmer’s I’m working with. By eight most of the farmer’s routine chores are done and they have some time to talk or do some cool stuff with me. We usually discuss the farmer’s situation and farm management plans, but also just shoot the shit. Cool stuff can comprise of mixing pig feed, spraying tomato fields, building a new poultry, or making a compost. Sometimes I’ll wake up super early and go do some regular farm chores with a farmer just to be friendly and “grow closer”. It also gives me a good idea of what the life is like and that’s one of the big points of the Peace Corps.

Some days I finish at noon with no other things to do, those are nice days. Other days I’m dragged about helplessly for fifteen hours attending farmer’s meetings and cry-dies. Some people like to program things in the morning, some like to program them in the afternoon. Either way I usually have a big chunk of free time during the day for movies, Pokémon, Crusader Kings 2, and delicious, delicious books. This is a very normal Cameroonian thing (minus the video games), it’s almost like a siesta. It gets really hot during the middle of the day, especially during the dry season. Most farmers are done with all their work by noon and most people in general don’t want to be outside at that time. It’s a pretty decent schedule, in my opinion kind of optimized for humans. Short hours, decent pay off, plenty of free time to pursue other endeavors.

Most people will drink palm wine throughout the day and while there are unacceptable times to be drunk there is never an unacceptable time to have a beer. My primary means of socializing in the community are walking down the street until someone calls me over to share a drink with them. It happens every time, especially when you don’t want it to happen. A morning trip to the market can easily turn into a 7:30AM beer and that’s just fine here in Cameroon. You drink to give you strength for the day ahead, you drink to relax and have a respite, and you drink to enjoy at the end of the day and celebrate a job well done. There’s obviously a negative and a positive way to look at this but regardless life’s been this way for a while. Even the guy that complains about how everyone is drunk and lazy will still pound one at the end of the day, or in the middle. With the amount of palm wine in Batibo and its ritual consumption at every meeting, the average Cameroonian farmer spends most days mixing business and pleasure.

Some of my projects take me out to places around my village, like the fish farming cooperative I’m currently working with. It’s great to work with dynamic groups because they expand your portfolio of serious farmers really fast, it’s pretty much ensured that I will always have something to do. While working with farmers we work together to identify what resources they have and how we can use those resources to move forward with their agricultural enterprises. We try to find solutions to problems that the farmer might not even think are problems. If a guy is buying chemical fertilizer because his pig farm and tomato farm are too far apart, you might want to try and develop a green manure or on-site compost thing with him. You save him money on fertilizer and now he knows this cheap, environmentally friendly way to increase his soil fertility. I’m working with three farmers now to develop bio-gas systems to attach to their piggeries, saving the farmer a shit ton of money, the forest a shit ton of trees, and the earth a shit ton of natural gas. Seriously, if every household in America just had two pigs this whole fracking thing wouldn’t even be an issue and we would have pigs! It’s pretty simple. But more on that in the next blog post.

So that is basically what I do when I try to discuss/work with farmers. We’re just looking for magic bullets that improve the sustainability and profitability of their systems. Having an American walk around an African village counseling farmers sounds weird, but I think it’s actually working and that this project will be successful. If you have some annoying whiteman hounding you all the time reminding you that you still have to buy the bamboo for the new poultry, and that the government’s having a fish farmers meeting tomorrow, and that the fertility of this manure would skyrocket if you got those micro-organisms going, you tend to do all those things.

I’ve got some regularly patterned off days too: once a month I’ll clean the hell out of the apartment, once every two weeks I’ll go to Bamenda for banking and good food, and I hang out with other PCVs often. Those days are a really nice break from the slowness and monotony of village life, but I’m finding village life to be very agreeable with me. It feels like the slower time moves the less anxiety you have. That is a very important lesson I will take from the Peace Corps, a simple life is a pretty good deal. There’s an attitude that things can be done tomorrow so anything that doesn’t get done is still fair game, it doesn’t matter when it will get done because it will get done. So enjoy life with whatever is happening in it, be proud of what you did, and look forward to what you’ll do tomorrow.

The Flaming Lips

There are an estimated 237 languages in Cameroon. The original Bantu Expansion began on the border of Nigeria and Cameroon, placing me pretty much at the linguistic epicenter of Africa. Bantoid groups have been migrating across the country continuously for millennia, settling in small isolated fondoms. With a surplus of mountains and a shortage of roads these different tongues diverged from each other rapidly, creating a patchwork of similar sounding dialects in different pockets of the nation. The language my people speak, Moghamo, is really similar to Meta; the language people speak in the neighboring community of Mbengwi. If you go just down the road, even closer to me then Mbengwi, you get to Bali which speaks a language completely different from the two. Through different periods of migration, displacement, warfare, and trade, the various peoples of Cameroon have created a linguistic quilt that seemingly has no distinct pattern. Unless you attempt to study the migration histories which are very poorly recorded, why couldn’t you damn Bantus have had a written language? Cameroon has the second most number of languages of any country. The country with the most languages, Papua New Guinea, beats them by miles with over 1,000 languages that were developed in a similar fashion and for similar reasons.

There are an estimated 237 languages in Cameroon and I feel like I can’t speak any of them. I remember writing in an older post about how happy I was to be going to an Anglophone region, one of the few places in the world where a Peace Corps Volunteer can speak English. I think I even used the term “King’s English”. What a fool I was, I take everything back. The word “English” doesn’t really describe what’s going on here well enough. I sometimes think that I would have been able to communicate more effectively in a Francophone region.

Any Frenchman will tell you that French is the greatest language humanity has ever devised. They may or may not be right, who’s to say? Regardless, France loved French (and being French for that matter) so much it wanted to export it to all the people it happened to be sovereign over. Especially in Africa, certainly in Cameroon, there seems to have been a more concentrated effort on behalf of the French to sew their language into the fabric of the nation. The best way to alter a people’s culture or a person’s outlook is to change the way they communicate about life and the world, the French seemed to take this to heart. People in all 8 Francophone regions speak their local dialects also, and Cameroonian French is not the same as French French, but I’ve never heard of Pidgin French. France used their language as a means to knit its African colonial subjects together and the result is the pretty unadulterated version spoken in Cameroon today. The emphasis on language is also presently evident in the names of the “ghosts of empire” international associations; whereas the British have the Commonwealth of Nations, the French have Le Francophonie.

While the French liked making Frenchmen, the British liked making money. The British Empire was always more like the British Empire, Inc. and instead of exporting the culture of their homeland they wanted to import the wealth of their colonies. (Not like the French didn’t but the British seemed to be more overt and direct about what they wanted from the whole colonial situation.) Instead of developing the infrastructure for regimented teaching of English to the populace in once clean sweep, English was grafted on to existing linguistic structures in many places over a stretched out period of time. Why teach everybody English when that one guy speaks it well enough? The others can pick up as we go along. If the French sewed themselves into that linguistic quilt I was talking about, the British just kind of embroidered over it. British association with its Cameroonian holdings was so indirect that the colony was governed from Nigeria, a colony itself passively ruled by the British and far away from the Southern and Eastern nucleus of British colonialism in Africa. Being the “colony of a colony” probably curbed the dissemination of English in Cameroon too, but who knows?

Pidgin started developing as soon as the Portuguese arrived along the coasts of West Africa; it was developed as a trading language and is still used as such today. Coastal tribes would barter with Europeans for weapons and goods in exchange for slaves they had taken from interior tribes. Coastal languages began to adopt foreign words over time and the languages learned directly by foreigners were augmented with local words and flavor. Eventually this developed into the strange lingua franca I speak regularly, Pidgin.

Pidgin technically isn’t a patua of English; it’s an African language with African structure that has gradually adopted words from different languages. Even so, English has had the largest influence on Pidgin by far and to any average listener it sounds like broken English. Looking at some words though, it’s easy to see the living history that pidgin represents, and I think that’s pretty awesome:

Pikin – means “child”, from the Portuguese “pequeno” meaning small. [Small pikin yi cutlass na sharp for morning time.]

Sabi – means “to know”, from Portuguese “saber” meaning to know. [My name na Sean. You sabi me, no?]

Shwine – means “pig”, from the German “schwein” meaning pig. The Germans were here for a while and basically invented Cameroon. So far this is the only word I know that they left behind. [Pa yi di build small small house for shwine.]

Massa – means “husband” or “my dude”, from the English “master”. This is probably the most evident example of Pidgin’s origins in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. [Massa, I tell you, it’s not easy.]

Okada – means “motorcycle”, from I don’t know where meaning I don’t know what. [Okada! I want reach market square, two-two hundred!]

Mbanga – means dried fish, marijuana, at least two dishes, a village, and I’m pretty sure a type of fence. Mbanga means like twenty different things in Pidgin. [Dat man yi comot Mbanga fit smoke plenty mbanga so yi go for chop plenty mbanga dem.]

Dey – means the conditional “do” and “there” from English. [How you dey? I dey fine! Wuside Pa dey? Pa dey for house.]

Chop – means “food” and “to eat”. From English, not sure why. [Tonight we go chop fine]

Comot – means “from” or to go someplace, literally “come out”. [Wuside you comot? I comot Guzang. I comot for Bamenda.]

Wuside – means “where”, literally “what side?” [Wuside wuna go for mimbo?]

Jesus, these sentences keep making me think of more words.

Wuna – means “y’all”. [Wuna, good afternoon.}

Mimbo – means “booze” (generally palm wine) but can also mean soda. [Dat man yi di tap fine white mimbo]

My personal favorite word, and I think that of many other volunteers, is “ashia”. Literally “I share”, it’s used as a greeting, as a way of saying sorry, and just as a form of acknowledgment. I’m pretty sure it’s the most empathetic word in the world, no wonder it’s in an African language. I use ashia sarcastically a lot but I try to think about how cool the word is regularly and take stock when I hear and say it.

By now I’m really getting the hang of Pidgin. I understand it perfectly if it’s annunciated well. I’m sure most westerners would say I speak it well, but most Cameroonians would say I don’t. Just like every language there’s a level of understanding you just aren’t going to obtain unless you were born into it. There’s the added factor of embarrassment; it’s a variation of English so my tongue is really shy to change words, structures, and inflections. My brain keeps detecting “wrongness”; it recognizes it as me speaking English poorly rather than me speaking Pidgin. To tell you the truth I hope that doesn’t go away, my English is starting to suffer as it is. Either way, I try to speak pidgin when I can. I definitely speak pidgin when I have to. For everything else, there’s “special English”.

Special English is probably the most popular way for non-West Africans to communicate with West Africans in English. Basically you avoid contractions, simplify your language, and add an African accent. In a lot of ways it sounds more proper than American English. There are also a lot of grammar changes and focusing on different subject pronouns; “What do you want?” becomes “I should give what?”  “Do you want more?” becomes “Should I add?” It might sound irregular to an American because African English is derived from British English. Actually in the countryside they always add “-o” to every greeting (e.g. Morning-o! Afternoon-o! I salute-o! Ashia-o!) and it always reminds me of “Cheerio!”

Picture a big ol’ Nigerian guy speaking to you in English. Better yet get on YouTube and watch a Nigerian film. That’s special English, to me at least. It’s more aptly called West African English.

I try to avoid special English whenever I can, I feel condescending using it. You wouldn’t go to Australia and start speaking in an Australian accent so people would understand you better. If you had a Japanese friend learning English you aren’t going to speak English in a Japanese accent so he feels more comfortable. You’ll slow down your speech and annunciate clearly, sure, but not change inflection. Alas, it actually helps and most Cameroonians seem to encourage you to talk in their accent. But if I say “water” and not “wata” you should be able to understand me, right? Come on, guys.

Which brings me to the predominant linguistic predicament for any Anglophone volunteer: you have three types of English, when do you use which? I actually haven’t talked about this much with other PCVs but I think its nightmare. Most people in the country and the city speak Pidgin; if they’re talking to their friends they’re talking Pidgin. The people who only speak Pidgin will only speak to you in Pidgin so you must speak to them in Pidgin. No problem there, I get to practice a new language and they get a kick out of it because whitemen don’t speak Pidgin. Those are usually really young kids and really old adults. People who speak Pidgin and English will also know that whitemen don’t speak Pidgin and will speak to you in English, facilitating the need to speak in special English so the everyman can understand you well. That’s fine, I get the benefit of speaking Pidgin sometimes, you get the benefit of speaking English sometimes, but I can still tell a lot of people would rather just speak Pidgin to me. And they can because I understand it. But they don’t know I know. Or they want to make me feel more comfortable. So I don’t get the practice I need with Pidgin to speak more effectively to the people that only speak Pidgin.

The third group, and I think the worst of all, are the people that can understand you perfectly in your American accent. People that have been abroad living in the US or UK, the Middle East or Europe, people that have a high level of education or have worked with Western English speakers extensively, public officials. People like my counterpart, a few friends I have in the city, and a few friends I have in village I know can understand me well so there’s no problem. So why is it the worst of all? You never know who is going to take offense to you speaking to them in Pidgin or special English. I’ve met a few people like this and as soon as I picked up a hint that they felt insulted I switched to speaking normally, one lady called me out on it too.

Dealing with languages in Cameroon is weird, but it isn’t necessarily bad. I just think that these are really unique problems that pretty much only exist here so I have to learn as I go. It’s hard to complain so much when I realize that Cameroonians also have to deal with these unique linguistic problems, and for a lot longer than two years. Being an officially bilingual nation looks great on paper. In theory you should have an entire citizenry able to communicate more effectively, by default, than that of the majority of other nations. Sadly, that’s almost never the de facto situation. It looks pretty good in countries like Canada and Switzerland, but in Cameroon bilingualism is more like a novelty title that gives a neat historical head nod to its split colonial past. “The country is bilingual, but the people are not bilingual” is a phrase heard commonly. There are a very large amount of bilingual schools at every level of study, and the government continually places emphasis on the importance of bilingualism. Even so, Cameroon mainly exists as a nation with two provinces that speak “English”, eight that speak French, and a central government that uses English and French letterhead. With holidays like Reunification Day and Bilingual Day, there is no doubt that each region of Cameroon identifies with the national structure as a whole, but the national linguistic divide still remains largely unsurpassed. This has probably been the primary cause for political strife within the nation throughout its independent history, especially owing to the fact that a far greater majority of Cameroonians speak French. There is no doubt that the government is overwhelmingly dominated by the French speakers, leaving an Anglophone minority feeling historically underrepresented. Still, relatively recent gestures towards liberalizing the political structure seem to be good steps towards fair representation. And with a push on bilingualism that never really lets up, maybe one day the people of Cameroon can be as bilingual as their country.

And the really crazy thing about Cameroon is that everybody really is bilingual! They just don’t speak two western languages. One thing that certainly accounts for the variations in Cameroonian English and French is that they are almost always learned as second languages. Unless you live in a big city, and your parents grew up in that big city too, the first words you will learn will be in your local dialect. I can’t have a post on language without a little bit on Moghamo, the name of the people in my area and their language. It’s a Bantoid language and sounds African in every sense of the word. Accents on so many different parts of words, vowels flying everywhere, random breaks and pauses, intonations that are so strange you can’t follow the sound of the voice to follow the sentence structure (i.e. what sounds like a definitive statement could be a question or a bitter tone could be sympathetic). It sounds really cool though. I kind of mentally file it under Asiatic languages because it sounds as foreign and unattainable. Still, I’m making progress. I can at least give em’ the old “Hey, how are you?” (Ano, masaiagoh?) People in the community seem to have this crazy unrealistic expectation that I’m going to be fluent in Moghamo by the time I leave. As nice as that would be, I think if I’m ever actually fluent in another language it will be something more…relevant. I broaden my Moghamo when I can, try to learn a new phrase when I have the opportunity, and I have a nice spreadsheet with a ridiculous amount of translations that I use to brush up with or surprise someone by saying something new. They’ll have to be content with that for now.

Moghamo is by far the most widely used language in my village. I think that’s great. No country ever went through the same style of colonialism and sadly some were a lot harsher than others. Whereas the British were content to make money off their African holdings, for some reason they really wanted to wipe Aboriginal Austrailian culture and language off the map. In the Americas as well, both the English, Spanish, and later Americans went out of their way to destroy the languages of the people they conquered. Today, most indigenous groups in the Americas have to actively work towards remembering their native languages. The vast majority certainly do not speak their native languages on a day to day basis. For some reason, maybe it was a weird European attitude towards Africa as being a more familiar part of the “Old World”, the intentional destruction of indigenous language and culture never really took hold in West Africa. Sure, they took people and individually destroyed their languages and cultures, but for the most part left the homeland intact. It’s sad to go to places like the Blackfeet Reservation and see that the native language is not widely known and almost never used on a day to day basis among the general population; it’s really nice to hear the streets of this village constantly alive and teeming with an African babble I can’t understand.

There are an estimated 237 languages in Cameroon. The Bible says that when man was banished from Eden, Satan (or God, I forget, they had similar personalities back then) separated man with different tongues as a way to confuse him. If that’s the case then I’m glad he did, it may be confusing but it’s a lot more interesting. Africa is the real Eden, if there are this many languages here it’s probably the natural condition.

Bonus Linguistic Coolness (BLC): The word for “elder brother” in the dialect is “ni”. In pidgin, when you want to ask how someone is doing, you just say “how?” So whether I’m in Guzang or Beijing I can greet you the same. 

At Post

Disclaimer: This post was not proof read.

Hello internet, it’s been a long time. I have mixed feelings about our reunion. On the one hand it’s been almost relieving to not be tethered to you as I have been since grade school. On the other I’ve felt so deprived of communication, Wikipedia, news, Reddit, and all the other glorious bounties you bring. I still don’t have you at my new home in Guzang, but you’re only 1000 francs away in Bamenda and I suppose that may be for the best. I still haven’t given up on you though and hopefully soon I will bask in your warm glow on the comfort of my own couch.

There’s been so much that’s happened since I last checked in! I apologize for the delay in updating this blog for those that were actually waiting for a post; I know there are at least five of you, maybe even more.

I am at post. Guzang. Batibo sub-division. Momo division. Northwest region. Cameroon. My home sweet home for the next two years and thank the gods I like it because it would be a rough two years if I didn’t. There is a wonderful paved road leading from Guzang to Bamenda, the Trans-African Highway. I can get a car or a bike from the market any day, any time, no problem. I’m just connected enough to the outside world to have access to shawarma, internet, nightclubs, supermarkets, and other whiteman things. I’m just isolated enough to where I feel I’m getting a true Peace Corps experience; surrounded by jungles, mountains, chickens, goats, and Cameroonians. There are two German volunteers in my village who I’m becoming fast friends with and today I saw a white guy I hadn’t seen before (I was on a bike going to the next village, didn’t get to say hi, just waved. Who were you white guy? What were you doing here? I will never know) but other than that it’s Africans for days, naturally.

I’m integrating into the culture pretty well I think. I have my contri bag and contri cup (drinking horn) courtesy of my fellow Batibo volunteers, and I have my contri cap courtesy of my counterpart. I move around with the cap to let people know I’m trying to integrate into the culture, sometimes it makes me feel like I’m one of those Taino Indians brought back to the court of Isabelle and Ferdinand, dolled up in 16^th century European regalia to let people know that I too can be civilized. But I also think the hat stylish as hell so it evens out. I move around with my contri bag to hand people cola nuts and to carry my contri cup and contri toilet paper. The cup is for palm wine. The toilet paper is also for palm wine.

Ahh palm wine, sweet sweet mimbo. I drank it with some elders the first night I was here and I haven’t stopped since. Not out of my own volition, but not necessarily against it either. Palm wine is tapped from the raffia palm and is probably the largest cash crop in the whole of the Batibo region. It is tapped in the morning and in the evening and is alcoholic straight away.  Early on it is sweet like nectar and not very alcoholic, it ferments very quickly with time and by the end of the day it’s very alcoholic. By the second day it’s liquor. By the third day it’s flammable. Unfortunately this natural fermentation process means that it also takes place in the stomach after consumption. This leads to a tumultuous collection of gas and who knows what else forming in your innards throughout the day and the end result ain’t so pretty. I don’t know how most locals aren’t running to the bathroom every couple hours, it’s probably (hopefully) something you get used to. When locals talk about the miraculous drink that is palm wine they always end up saying “It’s natural!” I now repeat this mantra whenever I just barely make it to a toilet. But my verdict: palm wine is awesome. It’s a great social drink, it brings people together, it tastes great, and the buzz is mellow. It’s natural.

I guess I should catch all you good people up on what I’ve been up to this past month. The rest of training went by very slowly, everyone was ready for it to be over and I was one of them. It was basically reiteration, more language, and free time. We had some good times though to end our being together on a high note, especially the Halloween party. Three weeks ago we piled into a bus, decked out in our graduation pagne, a sea of orange, red, and gold, and made our way to the American embassy in Yaoundé for the swearing in ceremony. It went down without a hitch and we all became official Peace Corps Volunteers. The next day we said goodbye to our host families and goodbye to our friends going to different regions and boarded smaller buses destined for our new homes. The PCVs in the Northwest were waiting for us at the headquarters in Bamenda and we all went out for legitimate hamburgers. During the festivities my new clustermates singled me out to give me my contri cup and contri bag which was touching to say the least (thanks guys). We all went out for drinks afterwards and then to a nightclub where we proceeded to shake skin until the wee hours of the morning. The next day I woke up to a call from my clustermate Colin the Indispensable, he would earn that name this day.

We went all around Bamenda with a giant trunk and giant bag, getting my bank account open, eating some shawarma, and then catching cars that would take us to Bali Park and then Guzang. We said our goodbyes in Guzang market square and then I was on my own. My community host (a real nice guy) met me in the square, we went to meet my landlord (another real nice guy), and I entered my new home. It’s pretty fantastic. Second floor, furnished, two bedrooms, living room, big kitchen, front and back balcony. I’ve lived in worse places in the States as some can attest to. I have running water sporadically at best, I mainly use the outside tap to fill my buckets, but that’s only because it is dry season. But the electricity has only gone out on me once which is pretty damn unheard of around these parts. A father and his son live directly next door, a nice (but very evangelical) teacher lives below me, and diagonally below there is a clinic run by a nice lady.

The day after I arrived was Guzang market day. My village has the second largest market in the Northwest. Talk about being baptized in fire. My cup was full of mimbo from 10AM to 5PM. It was a great day though, I finally met my counterpart who is a really wonderful guy; enthusiastic, motivated, and welcoming. He works for the government agriculture ministry in a village called Widikum but operates his own NGO in Guzang, his hometown, called the Community Initiative for Sustainable Environment and Gender Development (CISEGD). He’s been doing really great work and I’m excited to be helping him with it. In the coming months we have a beekeeping project, mushroom cultivation trainings, and are going to try and add some stuff to the demo farm across the street from the office.

My next few months in the Peace Corps will primarily involve identifying farmers who are trying to improve their systems and are receptive to new ideas. I’ll take one or two of these farmers and develop a farm management plan for them in order to integrate various components of their system and help them run their farm more like a business. I’ll also be conducting a community needs assessment which takes the form of a giant Microsoft Excel report that at this point seems pretty daunting. So far though, my counterpart and I have been identifying groups of yam farmers for a project through the Presbyterian Hunger Program in which groups are given 100 chickens to utilize their manure as fertilizer while receiving training on planting nitrogen fixing trees in their fields. After six months the group agrees to buy another 100 birds and gives them to a different group free of charge, making the program cyclical and sustainable. I think it’s pretty awesome and it seems like the perfect way to hit the ground running and has introduced me to a lot of farmers in the Batibo area while giving me hands on training in addressing farmers in Pidgin.

That’s another thing. Remember when I was so happy that I got posted to an Anglophone region? Yeah, turns out it’s going to be a little bit harder than I thought. I’m getting by with using special English and changing my inflection and accent but some people only speak Pidgin and some only the local dialect. So far I can understand a lot better than I can speak but I know I’m going to have to double down on learning how to speak if I’m going to integrate and talk to farmers effectively. I’m also still trying to keep up with my French, if I didn’t like Guzang so much I would almost say I’m sad I didn’t get posted to a Francophone region, it would probably be just as difficult. But boy do I like the Northwest.

Other than the yam meetings my first few weeks have been filled with protocol; meeting all the officials in the area and presenting my documents to them. District officers, agriculture and livestock officials, the mayor (who is great and has been a huge asset to me), and gendarme commanders. And of course the Fon. His Royal Highness the Fon of Guzang is a really magnanimous individual and welcomed me with open arms, going so far as to call me his son. He and the traditional council are going to be a great resource for me, everyone seems very proud that there is now a Peace Corps volunteer in the village and they have all done their best to make me feel at home. It isn’t every day that you get to drink with a king and kingsmen. He also told me to quit smoking, so did the prince, maybe when royalty is demanding that you quit your bad habit you should quit your bad habit.

Yesterday was a very important cultural day in the village. There is a tree planted in the middle of the market. Six hundred years ago, when Guzang was founded, seven slaves were buried alive under this tree to give the land power. The government has tried to move this huge market many times but has never succeeded, the market has deep roots in Guzang and some say it’s because of the sacrifice. Of course it’s probably just tradition and there is an actual history as to why the market is located in Guzang but pretty cool story, huh? Anyway the Fon, who is never seen in the market by tradition, and the traditional council make a sacrifice to this tree every year to rejuvenate its power. I served as a guest to the Fon and followed the council and some jujus into the market. I had already drank a lot of palm wine when CRTV decided it was a good idea to interview the whiteman. I will be appearing red-faced and sweating into thousands of Cameroonian living rooms soon so that’s great. I hope Peace Corps doesn’t send me home for that, I don’t think it was too bad.

Other stuff I might have missed: Thanksgiving was awesome here with a big celebration in Mbengwi, but it was sad not to be at home. The day after we went to the funeral of a dear friend that was taken too soon. It was sad but an amazing cultural experience, funerals a pretty joyous occasions in Cameroon. My third day here I gave a speech in Pidgin to a Presbyterian congregation of hundreds of people which was nerve wracking but now I hear “Sean!” everywhere I go. The kids that live downstairs from me are really great and love giving me high-fives, they were the first to start calling me Sean and not whiteman. I still hear the “whiteman whiteman whiteman” jingle everywhere I go, sometimes I scold the kids and they start saying “Sean Sean Sean” but there are so many of them it’s hard to bother, so petit-au-petit I’ll probably stop hearing it so much but I don’t really care, I am a white man after all and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. It isn’t meant to be insulting anyway. Everyone here is super religious and I get a lot of blowback if I don’t show my face in church on Sundays so guess who has to go to church every Sunday for two years? This guy. It’s funny how things come full circle. I’ll probably just end up going into the same trance I did as a kid all those moons ago. A lot of people have tried to “save” me, including my neighbor. It’s a lot to deal with, and it sucks having to feign faith, but it’s not so bad. I listen to black metal a lot and I’ll probably sacrifice a goat to Frey somewhere during mid-service, does that count as a cultural exchange? Moghamo is the local language and the name of the people around Batibo, I’m trying to learn it as best I can but African languages don’t bounce off this tongue so easy. There was a giant wasp’s nest in my bathroom when I arrived here. I burn my trash. I have a lot of downtime.

I think that about covers it.

I hope everyone is safe and well, I know I am. Hope to have the internet here soon. In the meantime feel free to message me on Facebook or my old cellphone if you want my Cameroonian phone number and have a good international plan or a lot of money to waste. Speaking of money to waste, if you want to send a package of delightful American things (I only say this cause people were wondering, I’m seriously fine so no need), you can send them to Sean Potts, Peace Corps, BP 837 Bamenda, NW, Cameroon. Letters would be pretty cool too! I don’t know how many stamps to put on them though…

All my love! We are together!

Two Weeks in Mbengwi and the World's Your Oyster

Countries are not nations, nations are not states. I’m feeling more and more lucky to be in “Africa in Miniature”, especially as someone who had previously never been or wanted to go to Africa, as it really lives up to its name. The regions of this country are diverse beyond belief and the cultures stand in sharp contrast to each other. Though the state is Cameroon, the nations change from village to village and the countries change from region to region. There is no typical Cameroonian landscape and there are not typical Cameroonian people. Nothing taught me more about this than the recent two week trip we took to Mbengwi.

After what I could only describe as a “cultural field day” where we used our French in different pretend scenarios, my fellow Anglophone volunteers and I loaded our stuff onto a junky bus and began a two day voyage to the Northwest. For two weeks we would be training at a fish farming station in the village of Ku, located in the small city of Mbengwi. The trip was long and cramped but the wind in my face made it all worth it. Sweet white Jesus do I miss fans.

After what felt like 20 gendarme road blocks, being desperately hounded to buy oranges and bananas at each one, and our bus hitting a moto, we reached our hotel for the evening. It had hot water. I wish I could tell you more about it but all memories of the evening have been superseded by the shower I took. Also the only thing I can remember about the shower is that it was hot. The tears of joy streaming down my face were washed away by the liquid warmth. I drank some beer, watched some Vikings, and went to bed.

We loaded back up, drove for three hours, and arrived at the frat house where we would be staying. We were greeted by an amazing PCV who became our facilitator during our stay there. We drank the white mimbo (palm wine), ate dinner, and passed out. The next day we woke up, got shifted into groups, and started all our farm chores: gardens, fish, and pigs. The station itself is pretty cool, it was started by the Cameroonian government and the Peace Corps in the 70s to produce fingerlings to sell to farmers and act as a training environment for local farmers to learn about fish farming, animal husbandry, and farming techniques. It’s in pretty bad shape now but that just made for more intensive training. The system they have going now is anything but integrated; the pig shit goes in the pond for nutrients and that’s about it. We all developed plans for improving the system at the end of our stay.

The garden I made was bomb, all of ours were. Starting from overgrown fields of weeds and hacking them down with machetes we made beautiful beds for cowpeas and sweet potatoes (I hate sweet potatoes but whatever). The fish were easy to feed but were the worst of the chores due to the shaping and dredging of an old fish pond. Pigs were the easiest and the most fun.

More about the Northwest though. The temperature is so much better due to elevation, the mountain scenery is beautiful, English (if you want to call it that) is spoken, and the people are incredibly friendly. You do have to deal with kids trailing behind you singing “whiteman whiteman whiteman” but I got used to it after a while. I’d rather be called whiteman any day over “le blanche”. The people of the South are so stoic, it’s hard to find a smile shot your way, but everyone loves greeting each other in the Northwest. The disposition is the main difference. Our groundskeeper was a real amazing person, and the mama that was our landlady was one of the most animated people I have ever met. She taught me a lot of Meta, the local language and the name of the tribe in the area. The place I’ll be living for the next two years is extremely close by and populated by the same people so I was happy to learn all that I could. It was difficult to come back to the South after the amazing time we had. I know my host family was happy to see me but I can’t wait to move out, end this training, and start working and living in a place of my own.

We met plenty of other volunteers in the Northwest, a real good group of people. My post mate is a great dude and got me excited for what’s to come, even told me a bit about the house I’ll be staying in. I’ll be living in the palm wine capital of the world, for better or for worse, and every 8^th day we host the second largest market in the Northwest. We all took a hike up a pretty sizeable mountain. I took plenty of pictures but Nikon is a foolish company and has their own micro-micro USB cords so I can’t transfer them to my computer. So that sucks for you guys because the scenery was fantastic.

The second week culminated with a pig roast. I killed the pig. By kill the pig I mean I punctured its throat with a dull machete and then an old-timer took the blade from me and started sawing at its aorta. It was pretty brutal but I’m glad I got to experience it since I eat so much pork. The process could have been a lot cleaner and a lot quicker. The machismo in this country is palpable and everybody thinks his way is the best. The slaughter has to be drawn out so everyone gets the chance to show how badass and skillful they are. I just wanted it over as fast as possible, it took a while to bleed out and die. Then the real work started.

We shaved him with boiling water and dull knives, hauled him up to the house in a wheel barrel and rubbed him down with salt. The next morning was hell on earth with the size of the fire we made. We made a makeshift oven of cinderblocks and corrugated metal and slow roasted him until the meat was falling off the bone. We had all of our trainers and new friends over for dinner and damn was it good. His Royal Highness the Fon of Ku even showed up.

We met the Fon three times during the course of our stay which I guess is testament to how much he enjoyed our company. The first time was during the International Day of the Girl Child, we had an introduction ceremony, drank mimbo, and sat in awkwardness for a bit before seeing the traditional dancing that was planned for that afternoon. Three days later he came to our house for dinner, complete with more mimbo and more awkwardness. He was pretty relaxed by the time of the pig roast so it was a much more casual affair. I don’t mean to depict the Fon as a strange dude; there is just a lot of pomp and tradition surrounding him. Never turn your back to him, wait until he’s seated then clap three times before sitting down, politely avert your eyes, and never cross your legs. All in all he was friendly; a student of history and an Arsenal man who likes to play table tennis. It was good to share a table with royalty.

We left the day after the roast, stayed at a less nice hotel that didn’t have hot water (but did have a fan), and made the long trip back to the jungles of the South were we’ve been for a week now. I’m back to speaking French and getting sick of training, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and boy does it look good. I write this during my lunch break; about to go to French class and then weed my garden so the Ambassador will have something pretty to look at when he comes to check on our progress on Sunday. He’s curious as to our thoughts on how technology is affecting Cameroon and probably to brief us a bit on the troops that were just sent to help with Boko Haram in the North. That will be great, I like the Ambassador, he’s a good guy, but it would also be nice to have a day off. Oh well, this is Africa.

I’m sorry about the no pictures. I’ll find a way to get around that. But thanks so much for reading! I’ll try and post more regularly. Everyone is missed, all my love.

PS: I’ve gone from speaking no French to being placed in the Intermediate High category. That’s some pretty cool news to report but I don’t know where I would have fit it in to this post. Too bad I’m going to lose it all again when I get to the Northwest.