Lots of Entries

Okay. I posted a bunch of entries today and edited a previous one. The new posts are two photo galleries of sights around Lagdo; the all-text entry is about the local soccer tournament that's devolving faster than Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign last February (the devolution - is that a word? - will be written about in a future entry); and I added a couple pictures to the "Waza" entry that I forgot to add last time I was on the Internet. Enjoy, and thanks for the comments!

Photo Gallery - Around Lagdo

Another photo gallery, this time of scenes around Lagdo without other nasaaras.

Around the House

The dog that’s been living in the compound for a long time had three puppies a month or two ago. Who’s the father? He skipped town before we could find out.

My basil plantation

Vers Le Barrage

This is taken on the opposite side of Lagdo from where I live looking down into town.

If you turn around from where I took the last picture, this is what you see. The road ends up at the dam. And, if case I never mentioned it here, it’s the Benoué River that’s dammed up; it flows through Garoua. (“Benoué” is the French spelling.)

A Chinese burial site that’s located down the hill and to the right if you’re looking at the previous picture. The tombstones are in Chinese and French, and the people buried died during the construction of the dam from 1978-1984. I’m not sure if these guys were “grands” or the heavy-lifters.

Government Buildings

The new mayor’s office that’s en train de construction. I think these trees were donated to the community by the World Wildlife Fund, so you can see they’re being well-utilized to make the mayor’s new, expensive office look nice… Also, that’s an Orange cell phone tower in between the two buildings, and the building on the right behind the mairie is the preschool, école maternelle in French.

The new sous-prefecture that, looking out from the front steps of the new mayor’s office, is across the soccer field at about one o’clock. Along with the mayor’s office, their old offices are pretty run down, especially for an important arrondissement like Lagdo, but what a way to spend millions and millions of Cameroonian francs. (The sous-prefecture, I’ve been told, cost at least 40 million cfa.)

100 meters or so down the road from the mayor’s office is the post office, where your email arrives in various states of violation by the lovely folks in Douala, Yaoundé, and/or Garoua. (The two guys who run the Lagdo outfit seem on the up-and-up.) The post office faces the new sous-prefecture, which is across the soccer field.

The salle polyvalente is where nearly all important community meetings are held in Lagdo. Walking from the post office, turn right back onto the road, then turn left fifty meters or so, and you’re there.

So, as you can, all the administrative buildings in Lagdo are all clustered together, or will be in the near future. (The old mayor’s office is on the opposite side of town.) The mayor’s and sous-prefet’s houses are to the left of the new sous-prefecture, so the commute isn’t that long. Will they walk instead of drive their cars? Ha.

From where the last picture was taken, I turned right 90 degrees, and now you see the road curve in the center of town.

Photo Gallery - Rainy Season Visitors

I’ve had a steady stream of visitors, one or two groups per month, since it started raining again in April. Here is a little photo gallery of all those who dared to enter the confines of Lagdo.


Dos de Mayo

Harvard making tortillas

Brad and Leah

Leah took this. She really captures Lagdo at its rawest… Really, though, more standing water, besides more mosquitoes, means more places for pigs to take baths.

Brad and I circling this unsuspecting pork

At the Lagon Bleu. If Brad and I ever had a crime-fighting duo show like Starsky & Hutch, this would be on the billboards.

Matt & Baboons

Matt – health PCV from my stage posted up in Yagoua, where he dodges Chadian refugees and futilely hits on hot Italian NGO workers

Baboons by the dam. That’s where all the monkeys live around Lagdo. Matt saw baboons, hippos, and attended an interminable soccer tournament-related meeting while he was at my house – basically, Cameroon in a nutshell.

First Half

I am the treasurer and the commissaire de match for the Lagdo soccer tournament, which is the most responsibility I've had since I manned the fryers at the Zaxby's on the corner of Old 41 and Barrett Parkway two years ago.

This bizarre situation started a whole year ago, at least the germination of the idea. When my APCD, my boss, came to Lagdo for a site visit last July, we met with the local doctor to talk about possible work collaborations. The doctor has since gone to Belgium to work on some other degree, but one idea he had was to do something for the summer soccer tournament, which I didn't even know existed. By that time, it was too late to get something off the ground, especially because I had only been at post for eight months and didn't know up from down outside of the CARE bubble, but I kept the tournament in the back of my mind for rainy season '08 work possibilities.

This time around, sometime in May, I asked Yotti if he knew who organized the soccer tournament because I had the idea that I would find out the teams and do animations with them during their practices. Yotti eventually got me in touch with the main organizer, a guy named Jules who I recognized as a Lagdo political insider, and asked if it was okay to do animations with the teams and if I could get the names of the coaches. He told me he was d'accord with the idea, except that he didn't know the teams and coaches because the tournament hadn't been announced yet. Jules said that they get the teams through a bunch of radio announcements and they wouldn't go out for another couple weeks.

It started creeping into June and I knew the tournament would start in a few weeks time, but still no word from Jules. Eventually, he found me at a friend's call box and told me to come to his office, which is at the sous-prefecture. I went there, and I was surprised by two things: First, he asked me to give a signed letter from him and the mayor to my post mate, who, I saw by reading the letter (it wasn't in an envelope or folded or anything… Gotta love it sometimes, le Cameroun.), was donating some books to the library that the mayor's office runs, including a book I let her borrow months before. I'll give anyone in Lagdo $500 if they read Underworld by Don DeLillo and can explain it to me. (Peace Corps Volunteers are exempt from this offer, and I have half a mind to just steal it back. What was my post mate thinking? Old Newsweek's are one thing, but a Don DeLillo novel?)

The second thing that surprised me was that after I gave Jules my spiel again about wanting to do animations with the soccer teams, he just ignored that and asked me to become the commissaire de match for the soccer tournament. Not really knowing what in the world he was talking about, he explained that it would entail going to the soccer matches, signing some papers, and basically overseeing that some aspect of the tournament was in order. As you can see, I still didn't know what the position was, but I was actually kind of honored because I know how serious people take soccer here. People take it so seriously that even if a bunch of guys are playing a pick-up game, fans on the sidelines will still ridicule players if they mess up. They're like SEC football fans in that way.

So, the whole "I'm here to do health work" thing didn't really sink in for Jules, and I figured I would have to go about working with the teams myself. Ça va. I waited again for the next step, the radio announcements, even though I try not to listen to CRTV when I can help it. (CRTV is Cameroon Radio and Television, the state TV and radio stations. What I really like about it is the news theme music. It's really catchy.) Jules eventually found me again one morning, this time in front of Yotti's (I've become bien integré in the sitting around and watching the world pass by aspect of Cameroon), and asked to meet me to talk about the tournament later in the day, so we decided to meet at 17h (5 PM) at the boutique. When he came up to the boutique later at the designated time (well, around that time), he told me to go to a bar a little farther down the street. I hopped on my bike and came to the bar, which wasn't really a bar at all, just a sand pit with a lone table with three chairs, two occupied by Jules and another politically connected guy, with the third one obviously designated for me. I felt like I was being wooed by someone trying to recruit me for something, which I guess I was. When I sat down, it felt appropriate to say, "I want a fifth year with a no-trade clause or else I'm going to the Yankees."

We got down to business by filling in the organizing commission bureau (cabinet). (I shouldn't say "we," it was Jules and Hayatou, the other guy, naming people they knew. This whole exercise made me realize how out of touch I am with most of the RDPC folks in the 30-40 age range in town.) I counted twelve positions on the cabinet – for a six-week soccer tournament, mind you – and we went through them: President, First Vice President, Second Vice President, Secretary General, Adjunct Secretary General, Treasurer… When we got to treasurer, though, Jules put my name down.

"You want me to be treasurer?"

I wasn't prepared at all for this. Before I had an idea of just showing up to the matches and timekeeping, which is what the commissaire de match essentially does, but now they wanted me to have actual responsibility with an important position like Treasurer. I agreed and laughed to myself, "Of course they want the white guy to be in charge of the money."

Waza

Here's a travelogue of a trip I took up to the Extreme North earlier this year at the end of April…

Waza/Maroua/Mozogo

Day 1

Lagdo to Mokolo direct should take maybe four or five hours in a perfect world. It's only 275 km or thereabouts away from Lagdo. I was traveling with my bike to pedal around Mozogo and Koza, towns 30 and 20 km, respectively, outside of Mokolo, and I had to take a bush taxi to Garoua, and from Garoua, a bus on the luxurious agency Tsanaga Express. I left Lagdo at 6:15 AM and arrived in Mokolo grumpy and disheveled eleven hours later at 5:15 PM. (Mokolo is a major town on the western side of the Extreme North. Maroua is the province's capital.)

I arrived in Garoua just fine, and the bus to Mokolo loaded up faster than I expected. All of the luggage and my bike were on the boat, but it was only until after the bus had been sitting there all morning that they realized something was wrong with the tire. Once we got on the road an hour later, it took 6 ½ hours to get to Mokolo because of a massive road construction project between Garoua and Guider. The guy next to me was perhaps the most boring person in the history of buses. He was speaking in Fulfuldé to his buddy next to him, and I was crying on the inside with boredom only understanding about 15% of his conversation. He also wouldn't fully sit back or forward, creating maximum discomfort since we're squished in five to a row designed for four. (He was talking about how it took him 12 hours to go from Garoua to N'gaoundéré once, an event that requires about two minutes to describe, not fifteen.)

Nevertheless, I arrived in Mokolo in one piece, and Brooke, posted in Mokolo, and Marcel, posted in Mozogo and my co-conspirator in the bike riding plot, met me at the agence. The original plan was to go directly to Mozogo from Mokolo, but racing against the sun, Marcel and I only made it to Koza, Katy's post. (Brooke stayed in Mokolo and met us in Mozogo the next day.) The ride was relatively easy. Koza is located on the bottom of a massive hill, a six-kilometer descent, perilous for me because the road was rocky and it was nearly pitch black by the time we coasted into town directly to the bar/restaurant where Katy was waiting for us. After a couple beers each at the bar and a bottle of wine back at Katy's house, we slept soundly until 5:30, when Marcel and I pedaled out to Mozogo, 10k down the road.

Day 2 – "60 meters to Nigeria"

Marcel and Katy had an animation on the importance of soybeans to improve nutrition only a couple hours after Marcel and I got to his house Friday morning. Katy would meet us there – she would bike – and Marcel and I shared a moto to the far-flung village on the Nigerian border through the Mandara Mountains. Going à deux was perhaps a mistake, the road was particularly uncomfortable and the distance long for sharing one moto, but the views were amazing. The people in this area have terraced the sides of the mountains that are peppered with large boulders and live in relative isolation despite the close distance to a major city like Mokolo or the black market haven of Nigeria. These places have also seen major development project interventions, and the health center was nicer and bigger than the ones that surround Lagdo.

After the animation, which was for women, Marcel and I headed out, and I noticed a sign that posted the distances to nearby towns. Mora was 30 or 40 km away, Mokolo the same distance the other direction, and straight ahead? Nigeria. 60 meters. 60 meters to Nigeria, only a dry riverbed separating two villages on opposite sides of the border. On the moto ride back to Mozogo, Marcel pointed out all the natural landmarks in the landscape where other PCVs from our training group live, showing how densely packed villages in the Extreme North are but become so far away because of poor roads.

Day 3 – Fried Goat Cheese

The next morning, Marcel and Katy had the same animation to do at another health center, this time located more conveniently on the road towards to Mokolo, our eventual destination in order to catch a bus and head out to Maroua in the late afternoon.

Hungover again, Marcel and I pedaled back to Koza at the break of dawn, where Katy was sick so couldn't come to the presentation. Luckily, the health center wasn't too far outside of Koza, but unluckily it was back up the steep hill we sped down 36 hours before. We actually stopped at an artisan shop/bar a few kilometers before the village, where we met Brooke, who took a moto to the shop. Marcel took the same moto to do the animation while Brooke and I drank soda, read People magazines from a few weeks ago (how'd she get them so fast?), and gossiped about other volunteers while overlooking the valley Mozogo and Koza were in and glad we weren't working like Marcel after too many rum and cokes the night before.

Marcel came back and Brooke took the moto to Mokolo as we struggled up the hill. (Brooke took the moto because she has a visual impairment and can't ride a bike and she was porting our bags; I'm a light packer, but even I couldn't fit four days of clothes in a normal backpack.) I followed Marcel's uphill secret, drop to the lowest gear (like I wasn't already there) but then pedal slowly, almost comically slowly, expending as little energy as possible. It worked for me, and an hour later we were back in Mokolo, where we had lunch then took the bus to Maroua. ("Comically slowly." Can you use an adverb to describe an adverb?)

Day 4

Four days in a row of waking up before 5:30. This time we had to be up to wait for our rented van to Waza, Cameroon's best (it's all relative) safari, to pick us up at 5 AM. The six of us going were out there, and the guy was 45 minutes late, a surprise this time around because the guy is apparently always on time.

Waza is only two hours north of Maroua on a paved road, and we were at the park's entrance by 8:30. We stayed in our own rented rust bucket van and picked up a guide, an old man who hardly spoke French. When I saw the guide, who didn't introduce himself or say anything to us, get in the car, and we rolled into the park, I knew this wasn't going to be all that it could be.

Talking with Marcel later that night back in Maroua, he touched on a good point about Cameroonian tourism, whether it's in Waza or the opposite side of the country at Mount Cameroon. No one tells you the best way to go about things. You, the tourist who doesn't really know what's going on who's money local people are relying on and trying to squeeze out of you, are left thinking of all the ways to improve on the experience as you're heading back to wherever you're sleeping for the night. With Mount Cameroon, a better explanation about arranging your packs and the difficulty of the adventure; Waza, the ability to rent a car at the park and spending the night, making it a 1 ½ day trip, instead of having to rent a car not designed for safaris in Maroua and having to be rushed because you have to get back to Maroua before dark the same day, would make things so much better.

We saw some animals, although not the big two: elephants and lions. We saw a few warthogs, birds, one jackal, some ostriches, too many gazelles, and spent most of our time traversing the poor roads and trying to stay awake. The most excitement in the morning came from a possible elephant sighting, where the guide, the driver, and Marcel – because Marcel does things like this, pretending he knows how to track elephants – stood on top of the van and saw that the elephants were… trees. Back in the van. (We saw all the evidence of elephants throughout the day, large tracks, trampled grass, poop, even a skeleton, but no actual elephants.)

The entire time, the guide hardly said a word. Sometimes we even pointed out animals before he saw them. I was so desperate for any information about the park, I would have listened attentively to facts about a scraggly bush or something. Some of the land was burned, and we asked if there were bush fires here, and the answer we got back was that it was either poachers or sparks from antelope fights. Um, antelope fight sparks cause fires that spread in perfect rectangular patterns? In addition to that kind of sketchy answer, it was like we were just driving aimlessly around the bush, which we were, but without savage beasts. This isn't to say we saw nothing, it was just a little disappointing. On our way out of the park, after seeing nothing but gazelles or empty space for a couple hours, we reached a fork in the road. The guide turned around and asked us if we wanted to see giraffes or just go back to the entrance. Well, let's see. Let's go see the giraffes.

We turned onto the left fork, prong really, reenergized, and after about ten minutes, the guide spotted our first giraffe, who was munching on some leaves from a tree and looking at us curiously before going behind the trees. They really don't like cars that much. We went on a little further and found a group of 12 around some trees, even though we could only see two at first; their camouflage is actually pretty good. We stopped the car and got out to take some pictures before they went away, and after we headed to the park entrance, the giraffes made the trip worth it.

PAJ

First, I just realized I didn't have a permanent link to Phil's blog, a college friend in Kazakhstan in Peach Corps as an English teacher. (I just spelled "Kazakhstan" correctly without spell check for the first time ever, by the way.)  So, click the link and read it if you have the chance, and I'll put the permanent link on the right side of your computer screen sometime soon so you can have constant access to the glory that is Phil's broken collarbone.  Back to Cameroon…

 

PAJ

 

A lot of details have been clarified for the girls' education project, so full steam ahead.  It's going to be the major work-related thing I do through early September, with a three week vacation/COS conference thrown in there.  (I'll talk about my congé and COS Conference in future entries.)  It's going to entail a lot of running around and talking to grands and a lot of unnecessary worrying on my part, but it'll turn out fine.  If only I could get my hands on the Peace Corps Partnership link so y'all could finance it for me.  (And Passive Aggressive Jay has made his first appearance of the entry.  Will PAJ show his face again?)

 

I had an annoying conversation with a teacher at the local lycée in front of Yotti's boutique the other day.  There was another teacher there as well, but the one that got under my skin was well dressed and tall and talking out of his ass.  He wasn't making me mad, but he had an attitude of "whatever I say is true, and my lack of interest in anything you tell me is going to be shown through an alligator smile."  That's my move, buddy.  My move.

 

When I first got to Yotti's, I was only listening to the guy talk, whose subject was America and what America was like.  I could tell right away by the way he spoke and carried himself that he was educated and thought he was hot shit, and eventually I found out that he was a Spanish teacher at the high school.  At another point he said he wanted me to help him go to Canada.  Spanish teacher in Cameroon and half-jokingly asking to be taken to the West.  Two strikes, mon ami.  We'll tackle Canada first, damn Canadians.

 

The whole "wanting to go to <insert America, any Western European country or other rich, white country here>" thing I get every week or two, and I usually just brush it off because it's a Cameroonian's way of asking what America or the feasibility of an immigrant experience is like.  I told this guy my usual response:  Give me $10,000 for your plane ticket and to set you up for a month or two then be sure to have at least another $2,000 per month ad infinitum to be able to survive, although even then, you'll be the poorest of the poor.  And don't even think of getting a job.  You won't be able to.  It's a little harsh, and the whole thing is done in jest, but I hate hearing Cameroonians say that they want to leave for a mythological country that doesn't exist.  Don't believe the hype.  Americans struggle just like Cameroonians, it's just a different grind.

 

(I should also add that he wanted to go to Canada to study sociology for a couple years, so not only does he want to go a random place, he wants to study fluff...  I majored in a social science, too, so let's be real for a second about this.)

 

When I found out he was a Spanish teacher, and only taught Spanish, a thought flashed before my eyes, a tempting thought given that I didn't like the guy.  The thought is this:  Spanish in Cameroon is simply pointless.  Students can't even speak the official languages of the country correctly, French and especially English, and they're given the opportunity to learn Spanish and German, too?  Why, oh why, when nearly all the students are farmers and the only opportunity to speak Spanish in Cameroon is to walk down to Equatorial Guinea, a place in shambles, or to get on a boat in Morocco and hope to make it across the Mediterranean?

 

So, at some point, I just asked him, most likely out of boredom, "How can you justify teaching Spanish when students can't even speak the official languages of the country?"  I knew what his response was going to be, his livelihood is based on teaching Spanish after all, but I couldn't resist.  PAJ.

 

The conversation was all over the place, with Noam Chomsky and American independence making appearances (I think this was his way of trying to prove how smart he was.), but concerning the educational system, we were at polar opposites.  As a teacher, he blames students for their poor attendance and poor performance.  He even thinks that the system functions well.  On the other hand, I see the bureaucrats and administrators within the system as the basis for the state of Cameroonian public education.

 

(I don't understand how anyone with knowledge of how poorly the Lagdo lycée is run can say with a straight face that the common knowledge that the school's principal steals money that's allocated for students' extracurricular activities and even has dipped into teachers' pay doesn't have something to do with students not giving a shit.)

 

Also, Yotti and others of his generation have told me that educational standards have gotten worse in Cameroon since they were students in the early 1980s.  He says that he was better educated after not finishing high school than current students who have received their diplomas.

 

Another point of his is that he simply likes speaking Spanish and Latin American culture.  I'm not dismissing that, it's nice and rare in Cameroon to see someone who has been able to turn their interest into a paying job, it's just that on a general level, the practicality of a language besides French and English in Cameroon is nil if the vast majority of students never leave their village. 

 

Furthermore, A common thread in his monologues was the way capitalism and the Western system of governance has been forced upon Cameroon and poor countries in general.  True, 100% agree with you.  However, Cameroon's educational system, which you champion, is just the French system.  In the Anglophone provinces, they cut-and-pasted the British system, as well.  Basically, Cameroon has two colonial educational systems in the same country despite 45 years of independence.

 

He responded by saying it wasn't the French system because it wasn't in France… Umm, it's the exact system, same numbering system and everything, that they use. 

 

After I just refused to respond to anything he would say because he wouldn't let me finish any thought – PAJ – he just kept on spouting off random facts about this and that.  He was obviously smart, but he was a smarmy know-it-all, and I recommend to the Canadians that they should figure out why someone who's proud of his Spanish-speaking and never grasped English (even though the system works…) wants to go to an Anglophone country before they let him in.  (He didn't know that French was spoken there.)