The Culture Itch
on Tales from a Mud Hut (Cameroon), 09/Feb/2009 14:33, 34 days ago
It’s now been over five months since I first arrived in Cameroon. When I was in Ecuador, it was at this point that the cracks in my “aren’t different cultures fascinating” smile started to show. The truth is that, after five months of eating unfamiliar food, struggling with a foreign language and providing mirth for everyone around you with the funny way you do things, the sheen starts to wear off the colourful new culture that so fascinated you in the beginning. Difference is suddenly bad – why can’t people simply drink tea and eat sandwiches like they do back home? Why does even the most basic procedure require one to break through layer upon layer of red tape? What’s so amusing about the way I hold my fork?Fortunately, the five-month itch hasn’t bothered me in Cameroon nearly as much as it did in Ecuador. I cite two reasons for the change. Firstly, I went home for almost three weeks in January and therefore managed to get my fill of all things English: tea, Branston pickle, mince pies, tea, Stephen Fry, The Guardian, port, tea, old country pubs, tea… Fausto and I even went to Madame Tussauds, that venerable English institution of wax celebrities that I somehow failed to visit as a child. (I was excited to learn that I’m taller than Robin Williams, disappointed that the same is not true of Tom Cruise, and confused as to whyDavid Beckham is in there twice.)Secondly, I’ve already had my ex-pat illusions of England shattered. In Ecuador, whenever I missed home, I would indulge in British romantic comedies with such English luminaries as Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. Imagine my disappointment upon discovering that life in England is not a perpetual cricket matchof jolly garden parties, easily embarrassed vicars and terribly affable young chaps lounging around country manors drinking sherry. Now every time I miss something from home, I remind myself that what I miss probably doesn’t exist in the form that I imagine and that, even if it does, I probably never ate, drank, watched or read it anyway.David Mitchell (of Peep Show fame) recently wrote in his column in The Observer:“We British love to judge our close class competitors – people incredibly similar to us and therefore most threatening. We're quite tolerant of genuinely different ways of life but, for those very like our own but with just a hint of either the stuck-up or common, we reserve our highest octanevitriol.” I’ve recently realised that this is not only true of keeping up with the Jones’s, but can apply itself just as easily to the British expat. While I’m overly tolerant of most Cameroonian practices, however bizarre I find them, the slightest unusual (and by that I mean un-British) behaviour on the part of my Canadian colleagues is mercilessly ridiculed.Take the David Mitchell article, which was a diatribe against people who hated Christmas. I showed it to my Canadian colleague Sarah as she, like me, believes Christmas is sacred and should be celebrated in as cheesy and ostentatious a manner as possible, whether or not you have children or believe in God. After she had finished reading, Sarah pointed to a word and asked me what it meant.“Bauble?” I asked in surprise. “You don’t know what a bauble is?” When I explained, she said, “Oh, you mean Christmas balls.” Perhaps it’s because I have a mental age of thirteen, but if someone says ‘Christmas balls’, all I can think of is stripping Santas. I eventually discovered why the word ‘bauble’ never travelled as far as Ottawa – try saying it in a Canadian accent. The best you will be able to muster is ‘babble’ or ‘bobble’, the long vowel being rendered completely unpronounceable. Incidentally, I learnt over the course of this conversation that bobble hats don’t exist in Canada; when it’s minus forty outside you have to make do with a ‘pom-pom hat’. Clearly the Canadians need our help.Cultural itchiness aside, things are going well here. I have a 6-month plan that will allow me to finish work by July, so I’m trying to pack in as much sightseeing as possible. On Sunday I and a group of hungover VSO volunteers braved the hot African sun to see crocodiles in a lake outside of Kaele. After around 2 hours of patient grumbling, we managed to spot a tiny brown splodge on the surface of the water which,I am assured, was a croc’s eye. Some children threw stones at the splodge and it vanished beneath the water. Next week is hippos.