Part One
It was time to visit Sarah and Ryan in Bibemi. In my half-assed quest to visit everyone's post in the North province, I had yet to visit Adoumiri and Bibemi, the most en brousse PCV posts in the province next to Douroum in the Guider/Mayo Louti/Nigeria area. (Adoumiri is another PCV village about 10 km from Bibemi.)
The decision to finally go happened at a bar in Garoua. I realized time was running out before the non-paved roads (and paved roads, too, actually) turned to muck in the rains, so I had to come by May at the latest. At the bar – Metropole, in case you were wondering, home of the best beef brochettes in Cameroon – Sarah and Ryan were there, so I whipped out my cell phone's calendar after beer number two to find a suitable date. (Beers are huge here, 0.65 liters each with over 5% alcohol content, so the second Cameroonian beer is the equivalent of 3 or 4 americaines, depending on your tolerance.)
The best day to go to Bibemi is Thursday because of the Adoumiri market, which is the site of one of the largest cattle markets in the whole of West Africa. It's the only day I'm sure of that has a car that leaves from Lagdo, otherwise you have to take a moto that is considerably more expensive. Because there is practically no cell phone reception in the two villages, I had to choose a day and stick to it while Sarah and Ryan were in my presence, so April 17th it was.
The carrefour where the Adoumiri car is on the opposite side of Lagdo and is about a 10-minute walk from my house. The car leaves at approximately around 8 AM, and I was out of my house by 7:15 just to be sure. The morning was cloudy, and it even rained hard for two minutes while I was getting ready, raising my expectations that it would be a cooler than usual day, expectations that would be crushed soon enough. The ride was only 1200 cfa, which is what I pay to go to Garoua. Amazingly, the bush taxi left at 7:45, even though they did a really annoying thing that both bush taxis and legit bus companies alike do: You spend 30-45 minutes sitting in the car waiting for it to fill up, get the luggage on, find the driver who has of course wandered off somewhere, and after finally leaving to start your journey, you stop 20 feet down the road to get gas. Guys, why don't you have the gas stand dude walk the 15 seconds and put in the gas while we're dicking around not going anywhere? (The only real gas stations with pumps are in cities, everywhere else it's a table on the side of the road with bidons – 20-liter plastic jugs – and reused 1-liter cooking oil bottles filled with gas.) Despite the early pit stop, our quick departure from Lagdo made me worried that I would actually be early, something that hasn't happened in the history of Cameroonian transportation.
(Get out your map of Cameroon.) The road to Adoumiri and Bibemi is located on a road that circles around an eastern section of the North province. Starting from Garoua and going north-ish, it goes like this: Leave Garoua northbound on the main highway that connects N'gaoundéré and Maroua for 15 km until you get to Pitoa, which is where I had my training and lived with a Cameroonian family. Turn off the paved road onto a dirt one, and that is the road where Bibemi and Adoumiri are on. If you keep going on that road in that direction from Bibemi and Adoumiri, it eventually circles through the rice fields and crosses over the dam, where the pavement starts again, and into Lagdo. (In case you're wondering, from Lagdo, it's about 20 km until it runs into the main highway 45 kilometers south of Garoua.) It was well into my first year when I figured out we were all on the same road. Who knew?
So we pulled out of Lagdo soon enough and crossed the dam, saw the hippos that hang out in the water and baboons that live in the hills, and drove through the rice fields, which now enjoy an irrigation system that the CARE project help resuscitate and improve. Another part of the CARE project was the improvement of the road – no pavement though – in the project area, which spreads about 5 km I'd say past the dam. However, once you get past those villages on that section of the road, suddenly you're in the middle of nowhere. The majority of the road between Lagdo and Adoumiri is the broussiest brousse I have ever seen. ("Broussiest" is an actual word in French, look it up.) The road was rocky as opposed to the relative smoothness around the rice fields and the landscape was filled with scraggly trees instead of dormant fields. The only thing between the CARE villages and Adoumiri were a couple gendarmes who were supposedly are escorts.
("Forgot" to mention this until after I went there. The road to and from Adoumiri on market day is one of the most dangerous roads in Cameroon. A consequence of the cattle market and the lack of a checking or credit card system is that an enormous amount of cash changes hands every Thursday. The average cost of a good head of cattle is around 250,000 cfa, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of cows that are being bought and sold each week. There are men who come and leave Adoumiri with bags filled with money, making them an obvious target for road bandits. Luckily for me, the Lagdo car going to the market in the morning isn't a likely target, but we still had to pay 200 cfa each for a gendarme to escort us the rest of the way to Adoumiri. The gendarmes of course didn't move or follow us after we continued on. Road bandits and shitty gendarmes, sometimes the two are intertwined, is a whole other subject I can touch on at another time.)
The bush taxi got to Adoumiri at 8:45, amazingly only an hour away. Really, I was this close the whole last 18 months? Why didn't I come out here before? I had a lot of time to think of a response to these questions as I found a tree to sit under and wait for Ryan and Sarah to come from Bibemi to meet me. Our plan was that I would get to Adoumiri between 9:30-10 – none of us blancs really knew how long it would take to get there or when the Lagdo car would actually leave – and Sarah and Ryan would meet me at the main carrefour where all the cars go. From there, we would go to Andrew's house, the PCV there, hang out for a little bit, faire le marché, then go to Bibemi, where Andrew and I would spend the night. S & R – sounds like a railroad company – found me staring off into space working on my "second-year stare" at about 9:30-ish and off we went.
Part Two
Adoumiri is hot. There's hardly any shade to speak of, especially within the market. I don't think I've sweated as much in Cameroon as I did for the couple hours we walked around the market, ate, and waited in the bush taxi to go to Bibemi. It was the height of the dry season, and one thing people do to find water is dig down into the dry riverbeds. In the case of Adoumiri, S & R and I had never seen so many deep holes dug in a river before, a visual symbol of what eventually happens when it doesn't rain for half the year and a town's infrastructure is especially inadequate.
As for the Adoumiri market itself, it's what I wish the Lagdo market would be, at least meat wise. The Lagdo/Djippordé market's butcher situation isn't very good. It's really hard to find filet de boeuf (the best/most edible part of the moo-cow butchers sell here), but in Adoumiri it's an embarrassment of carnivorous riches. In addition to beef, what most Cameroonians snack on meat-wise is goat meat, which is delicious. Adoumiri even has a special area dedicated to selling cooked goat meat, sliced up with onions and dipped in a pile of piment powder. The cow herders come and order thousands of francs worth of meat, which fills up the ubiquitous black plastic bag, and inhale it in a few minutes then continue on with their day.
When we got to Bibemi, the temperature hadn't subsided, but the streets were tree-lined, which makes a huge difference. It's almost like Adoumiri and Bibemi are different like Garoua and Maroua. The towns are basically the same, but a little care in the appearance improves the feel of the place immensely. (Maroua is a lot more organized and cared for than Garoua, even though I'm forced to defend G-town from the inevitable disparaging remarks from ENers.)
I was really looking forward to going to Bibemi, especially because S & R are Peace Corps success stories on both the work and integration in the community levels, Sarah's one of my best friends here, and their stories of the different people in their village describe a free-wheelin' social life not really found in the Grand North, a result of having a nearly entire population of Christians and being in isolation from the rest of the province. Of course, it's all relative. Bibemi in general is just as laid back as most Grand North towns, it just has a bar and bil-bil scene that a lot of PCV posts don't have, or at least isn't as socially accepted as it is in Bibemi. (I've never really figured out how socially acceptable drinking is in Lagdo. There are a few real bars, but they're never that busy, and it's usually the same people. Bil-bil, the locally made alcohol from fermented millet, is designated in the Christian quartiers.)
After a brief tour of the town and a tortilla dinner Chez Ryan, we headed to a bar near Ryan's house for the evening, where we were eventually joined by a loud gentleman who we met earlier and a few of his friends. The loud gentleman, a teacher, was drunk of his rocker and speaking way too loud. Although not a Muslim, he was speaking Arabic and was dressed like Tony Soprano with a potbelly covered by a wife beater and an unbuttoned short-sleeved shirt and faux gold chains around his neck. He would descend into noises and grunts that sounded like the old Budweiser commercials. Whenever he would sound like a caveman, I turned to Ryan on the other side of me and went, "Whaazzzzuuuupppp!" The gentleman also told me several times that he was going to Lagdo soon by suddenly turning his head to me and getting in my face and yelling, "On va aller à Lagdo!", startling me each time. He would also command us to drink our beer by assuming a military persona: "Prennez la bouteille! Buvez la bière! Déposez la bouteille!" (Grab your bottle! Drink your beer! Put down your bottle!) Just your usual strange night in a Cameroonian bar.
