Le palu encore

The symptoms of malaria and bacterial dysentery are remarkably similar.  Fever and stomach difficulties, for starters; malaise and, quoth the PC Cameroon Medical Manual, "people with bacterial dysentery often feel as if they were run over by a Mack truck," as well.  Check, check, check, and check.

 

It all started on a quiet Monday morning, quiet because spring break has started and the little urchins at the elementary school next door were nowhere to be seen or heard.  Clouds were in the sky, real clouds, and the haziness from the dust the last few months seems to have been lifted.  I arose, ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, and prepared myself for your basic Lagdo day during the James Clarence Fisher reign of this pastoral arrondissement seat when I have nothing of any consequence to do: run some errands, talk to Yotti for a while at his boutique, yada yada yada.  As each day passes, I consolidate my empire.

 

So I go to the bank and get some ceede ("money" in Fulfuldé, pronounced cheday), talk to the carpenter about fixing the shitty couch he made me, and then chew the fat with Yotti, which is sometimes, not always, a treat.  This fateful Monday morning, he was on top form.

 

The conversation zigzagged through a couple main topics.  First, he's trying to find me, a white guy, a wife so I won't leave Cameroon.  Two, he thinks that the white man, me, has killed African culture.

 

"But, Yotti, I'm a white man in Africa.  I am right now killing your culture by talking to you.  And you want me to marry a Cameroonian?"

"No, no, no, it's different.  You're here to help."

"Yeah, that's what they all said at first, then the next thing you know you're wondering why some nasaara started talking about a guy named Jesus and how you got onto this boat."

(I didn't actually say that last line.)

 

I gave him my criteria for a wife, very difficult to meet in the Grand North: hot, 25-years-old maximum, and has a university degree.

 

"Where you gonna find me one of those, hot shot?  And who says I'm gonna stay in Cameroon if I marry a Cameroonian?"

 

First, he answered these questions.

 

1.  "Give me the money for transportation costs, etc., and I'll find her."  (He is a happily married man with one wife and four or five kids, I lose count, by the way.)

 

2.  "Once you have an African woman, you'll never want to go back."  They have a rhyme for that in the States.

 

3.  "You don't want a girl who went to university, they're all whores."  (More on this in a second.)

 

4.  A couple stories about Cameroonian women in France.  The first was about one woman who spent six years in France for school, then came back because she never felt truly comfortable in Europe.  Well, maybe she'll like white guys if they're on her continent.  Where is she?  Oh, she's married now in the Adamawa.  I roll my eyes.

            Story number two seemed more like an urban legend to me.  A Cameroonian goes to France with her new French husband, an older gentleman, so that means creepy.  When they get back to his town and his apartment, the girl quickly realizes that this man is a fraud with no job and no prospects.  He has in fact started whoring her out and has become her pimp.  Yotti says it was one of the mail-order bride things. 

 

Yes, yes, immigration and assimilation is difficult, but what about my bride?  And why are university women whores?  (He really said whore, not prostitute, so it's not just me talking like Scott Britton – a sailor, that is.)  And you would actually find me a university-educated woman to marry if I paid you to find her even if you think she's a whore?  And did you know I like to ignore the grammar rule that states you shouldn't start a sentence with a conjunction like "and"?

 

Here is the answer I was expecting: Women at university have somehow made it through the Cameroonian high school system and a culture where teenage girls are forced into a "sugar daddy" relationship with an older, most likely married, man, where many trade sexual favors for material things like new purses and shoes, or into a simple prostitution scenario.  In addition to that pressure, girls are sexually harassed (raped could be another word) by their teachers, where they have to sleep with the teacher in order to do well in class.  One teacher at the Lagdo lycée is even marrying a current student; she hasn't even graduated yet.  The situation for female students at high schools is dicey enough that some families even hesitate to send their girls to school because they know what might happen.  And it's not like any of this is a secret.  (Another PCV tells this little story: A teacher at their high school was proud of the fact that he – earmuffs – "only fucked one of his students" in his whole teaching career, or so he announced.)

 

Here's the answer I received:  Women at university are whores because they have no morals and are free to do whatever they like.  They have no supervision and wear provocative clothes.  It's like another world at university.  There are even homosexuals, men who have sex with other men.

 

"If you have a problem with that in Cameroon, you're head would explode if you came to an SEC tailgate on game day or Gay and Lesbian Week on any campus."

 

I've accepted since I arrived here that I associate with misogynists, wife beaters, homophobes, adulterers, and polygamists.  And with Yotti, for a Muslim, he generally leans to a more Western attitude towards marriage and women, but he's also very up front about not wanting to marry a white woman because she would be bossy and refuse to do housework.  (He also thinks homosexuals are an abomination, but I haven't really broached that subject.  Another example of how you can't really debate with someone who uses the "God said this" or "Mohammed said that" argument.)  He kind of makes a face like he ate something sour when he imagines a household that in his mind would inevitably be controlled by a woman. 

 

Basically, I think his opposition to what women become at university and to marrying a white woman is because of a lack of control.  He knows in both scenarios that he wouldn't be able to boss around a white woman or a daughter away at college like he could do with a Cameroonian.  Here's a tissue, Yotti.  And you hear that?  It's the world's smallest violin.  (I believe he is for the education of girls, but he is against what he believes to be the extracurriculars of college life, if you get my drift, and I think you do, therefore all university is bad for women.  Or at least you don't bring a college-educated girl home to meet the parents.  Either way, he outlines a hypocritical argument and one that would cause a lot of American women to get all huffy and puffy.  Technically, he's calling my good friends, girlfriends, and family to be of ill repute, too.  And ain't no one gonna talk 'bout my mama!  Hold me back!  Hold me back!)

 

While this conversation is going on, I'm realizing how tired I'm feeling.  My head has begun to pound a little bit and my stomach is getting all fluttery and not because my future Cameroonian bride has sashayed past the boutique.  When I finally get home around 11:30 (Another day's work done.  God bless the Peace Corps, and God bless America.), I know something is up.  The heat is tiring, but not this much when I walked a 25-minute loop through Lagdo with a three-hour rest in between.  The aforementioned side effects came on in full force, in addition to the malaria-specific joint aches.

 

"Shit," I say, and I get ready for it and it hits me like a hurricane.  I was lying down by 12:30 PM and was having a fitful sleep until I woke up for good nearly 18 hours later at six the next morning.  I would wake up every hour or two feeling absolutely awful and dead to the world and not sure where the weird and/or scary dreams I was having stopped.  (Two of the dreams included a sort of strange parlor game in which a shotgun is involved and I'm not sure if I'm the target, and another in which I'm reciting the history of Ann Arbor, Michigan.  When I was feeling better, I was thinking it would be really odd to see me in the middle of some fever dream where I'm mumbling about French Canadian fur trappers.)

 

The next morning, I was deciding what I should do by flipping through the PC Medical Manual.  Obviously, malaria was one option.  The second option I narrowed down to bacterial dysentery because I was mainly waking up during my sleep to run to the bathroom, and of all the various kinds of diarrhea, the symptoms matched the big dys.  I followed the advice under the malaria section where it says that all flu-like symptoms should be assumed to be le palu and one should begin the treatment Coartem, which consists of 24 pills over three days.  I took the first dose and I started to feel better and my stomach calmed down, as well as its initial hissy fit, so I officially ruled out the dysentery and hunkered down for several days of waiting out the fatigue.