Getting the Picture
on Notes from Quite Far (Cameroon), 27/Jan/2010 23:40, 34 days ago
We VSO types have quite a strange outlook on life at times. Once you get over the initial novelty of things looking so different, they all start to look the same, and daily life becomes mundane. Today I saw: a vast array of farm animals wandering freely around what I loosely label“streets”; a man taking a dump in a field; a handful of nude or semi-nude children playing with empty tin cans; a lizard running around my boss’s office; about 30 men hanging off the back of a pickup truck loaded with chickens and a lycee student drinking water from an empty bleach bottle. I mention all of this not because I found it particularly interesting. Quite the opposite in fact. These things happen every day and I no longer find them surprising or worthy of note. And sometimes this is what in fact surprises me most. I’ll pass a boy pushing a wheelbarrow full of heads, horns andskins from slaughtered animals, and maybe five minutes later I’ll think “Surely I should have found that more weird”.Anyway, none of that is news. But here is something that happened for the first time ever this week, which somehow makes it more interesting than any of the other stuff. It started with a dead hornet. I had been cooking a meal and nipped into my house to grab a spoon. Inside the house said hornet (still alive at this point) was in a complete frenzy. So I sprayed it with Oro (bug killer). Normally if you do this for a while they get the hint and fly outside, but this one wasn’t going anywhere except round and round the living room via the light and occasionally my face. So I’m afraid I sprayed it until it died. Sorry but there it is. Come and live in Cameroon as a Zen Buddhist if you like, my own preference is to kill everything I don’t like the look of. (Incidentally, if you plan on using Oro at any point, according to the label “smooth and discontinued pulverisations are more effective.” Just a little tip for you there.) So, as a result of getting sidetracked with the hornet (dead at this point), I ended up leaving a wok full of oil on my gas stove, and in my absence the oil got too hot and caught fire. So I got back to the kitchen to discover my wok full of burning oil. It was quite a fierce fire with the flames rising perhaps up to a metre high. For the time being the fire was contained in the wok, and my kitchen is a concrete box, so it wasn’t too dangerous, but at the same time the cooker is fuelled by a canister full of gas, which is I suppose not the best scenario in which to have a fire. Anyway, I did what you’re supposed to do and threw a wet towel on the flames. I did um and ah for a while first, thinking the towel looked prettymeasly compared with the massive fire it was supposed to put out. But it did the trick and (apart from writing off both towel and wok) no real damage was done. I decided against stir fry after that and made beef bourgignon out of a packet instead (Tesco’s finest - thanks mum and dad!)When Grahame came round for tea, obviously the first thing I said to him was that I had had a fire and told the story in such a way that it sounded more dramatic than it really was. And immediately he asked a question that volunteers, and I suspect only volunteers, would find appropriate at this point. Before asking me if I was ok, how I tackled the blaze or if there was any damage done, Grahame asked me if I got a photo. After two years as full-time tourists, it seems we now view everything as a photo opportunity first and a real situation second. For my part, the moment he asked me that question I kicked myself. I had extinguished the fire that was raging in my kitchen without even the presence of mind to take a picture, and I duly apologised.We had our tea and Grahame gave me some photos of Grand Ka and the student co-operative day from my last blog. Here they are, along with a picture of my ruined wok (but minus a picture of my fire, for which I cannot apologise enough).(3hours later...)Forgive me if i just leave these as pile of random, distorted and unexplained pictures for now. I think if I continue trying to edit this post at the moment. I will lose the will to live.