Cardboard Boxes

We stumbled into a Cameroonian national team soccer match yesterday. The Indomitable Lions played the Rwanda national team in Garoua of all places as part of an African Nations Cup qualifier.  I first heard about it Thursday afternoon in Lagdo when the club sante responsable came over to my house to have a meeting about making a meeting and mentioned it to me because I told him I had to be in Garoua Saturday morning for an Arts for Life meeting.  I had a passing thought that if there really was a big soccer match, hotel rooms might be hard to find...

 

We bought tickets at Super Restaurant - they were also sold at the supermarche, the Asian supermarche, and who knows where else (no Ticketmaster booths in Garoua) - and then we found space for the ten of us at the fourth hotel we looked at, Club Fantasia, which wasn't as sketchy as it sounded.

 

The game started at 3:30, and when we, quite the spectacle because we were nine white people, got to the game at 2:15, the stadium was already packed. We found some space in our 2,000 cfa section fourth row up in front of the corners.  The seats were just cement rows like a high school football stadium, and after about one minute, I realized cement is really hot after being exposed to the sun for hours.  It's so hot that people actually sell pieces or cardboard boxes and newspapers around the stadium just so you can sit on them to make it more comfortable.

 

The game itself was a foregone conclusion before it even started, even if Cameroonian god Samuel Eto'o wasn't playing (he was playing a match for his club team, Barcelona, who actually won their game but ended up losing the Spanish league to Real Madrid).  I mean, it's Rwanda.  It was 1-0 at the half, and after Cameroon scored the second goal within the first five minutes of the second half, Cameroon just killed time, even after Rwanda got a goal.  The final score was 2-1 Cameroon.

 

The atmosphere wasn't as crazy as I thought it would be, but it was still raucous, which might have something to do both with the importance of the game (not very) and the opponent.  There was more energy in the 1,000 cfa seats on the other side of the stadium, and people without tickets were climbing up the stadium wall and jumping in.  There were a lot of gendarmes and police people around the stadium and on the field, and the field itself was surrounded by a fence with barbed wire.  The halftime entertainment sucked; the Cameroonian team's main sponsor, the cell phone company Orange, got a group of high school kids decked out in Orange gear with white pom poms to shake the said poms poms while another kid juggled a soccer ball for five minutes.  Where are my acrobats and light show?

 

In other news, the Peace Corps director, the Peace Corps director in Washington, is going to be coming through Lagdo tomorrow to visit an old volunteer in the village on the other side of the dam ("old" meaning over 50; there's a new initiative by this PC director to recruit older volunteers.  Apparently, having experience has become something PC Washington is looking for in recruits), and myself and the other PCVs near Lagdo get to have lunch with him, the PC director of Africa, and the PC director of Cameroon at the white man hotel (the whole entourage is in Garoua tonight having dinner with other PCVs from the Grand North).  My streak of eating at the Lagon Bleu for free continues.