What exactly am I up to?
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 21/Nov/2009 06:42, 34 days ago
I normally get up just before six, which is late by local standards, as most people are up for the first prayer of the day at about five in the morning. I have porridge for breakfast, which I make from powdered milk and porridge oats I buy in the province capital at about five times the price they would be in England and which have become my favourite luxury item! I’ll also normally be visited by at least one of the kids on my compound to ask for something to help with their family cooking (this will happen at lunch and dinner time too). This can range from a stock cube to a request for firewood, even though they know very well I cook with gas. There are never two working days the same here; Tchipounama, my local colleague, and I work out of my kitchen and spend most of our time out at the schools or going back and forth between various meetings around Maga. If we’re doing a visit to one of the little villages in the bush we’ll try and leave at about eight so we can cycle before it gets too hot and reach the villages before most of the parents have gone off to the fields. Fortunately the rainy season is over so the tracks to the schools are now usable, but we often have to negotiate our way through large herds of cattle which block the route. If we schedule a meeting for eight thirty it will hopefully (although not definitely) start by ten! At the moment we’re trying to organise a theatre performance, awareness-raising sessions and the visit of a mobile HIV testing unit for International HIV/AIDS day on the first of December. This requires us to co-ordinate with various people at the Inspection for primary education, the lycee, the hospital, the primary schools and the Commune, as well as volunteers in neighbouring villages, and the VSO offices and the Delegation for Health Care in Maroua, the province capital. What in England would be done by email is here done by going back and forwards to visit people who may or may not be in their offices(office hours are not taken very seriously here). During the early afternoon if we don’t have any meetings I try to stay inside, as this is when the sun is hottest. I’ll do various chores like working on my French grammar, writing up notes or washing my clothes. We haven’t had any water on my compound for over a month now, so I buy my water from the water man down the street, who brings it to me in large cartons on his pushcart for 50CFR (about six pence) for every twenty litres. I wash my clothes in a large plastic bucket, and this is always a good task, as it means there will be plenty of dirty water left over which I can then use to flush the indoor toilet! Before it gets dark at six I like to visit the market; this is often very slow, as everyone wants to say hello: neighbours, kids, stallholders and passers-by, and will often get offended if I don’t stop to chat. Saying hello is slow in Maga, as it’s considered a bit rude not to ask about someone’s day, their health, their children, their house, and how they’re finding the weather. Different people also like me to speak different languages: the group of men who sit under a tree on the corner of my street are trying to teach me Mousgoum, the most common language in Maga, female stallholders and neighbours who struggle with French like to greet me in Fulfulde, the more widespread local language which people from different tribes tend to use to speak to each other in the Far North, and others like to have a lengthy conversation in French, often about why I’m not married yet or how the lack of fish in my diet will harm my fertility. One of the stories I tell about England that never fails to get a laugh is that people there often walk around the streets in silence without stopping to talk to anyone! They also ask repeatedly what languages I speak in my village at home beside English; they find it very strange that anyone could get by speaking only one. In the evening I cook on my gas cylinder with a ring on top. The evening is also prime ant fighting time. I think there is a very large colony of ants that lives under my house, as whenever I stopper up one hole in the wall where the ants are coming in they find a new one for the next day. I arrived in Cameroon with very high-minded ideals about only killing ants organically with boiling water, but I soon gave this up and am now armed with a large spray can of toxic Nigerian insect poison. If I contribute nothing else during my stay here I think I will at least have helped developed a new breed of poison resistant super ant.