I realized that the majority of my blog posts tend to focus on such chaotic themes as malfunctioning computer labs, confusing exchanges in Fulfulde, frustrating teaching incidents, and outrageous episodes involving neighborhood children. I don’t mean to give the impression that the entirety of my interactions in Cameroon can be summarized by a series of mildly-comical cultural clashes; these just tend to be the anecdotes that stick out most in my mind—and that I think are the funniest slash most interesting to share—when I sit down to write. But, lest you think everything is screaming children and communication blunders here in Cameroon, I have compiled a list (because what would a blog post be without a numbered list?!) of good/nice/heartwarming/lots-of-very-warm-and-fuzzy-adjectives things that I have observed/witnessed/experienced during my half-a-year thus far in Cameroon:
1. The first is a picture, which is a bit hard to read, but it’s of an English exam that I gave at the end of the second sequence. At the bottom of the page, one of my 5e students wrote, in very elaborate, swirly letters: “Thank you for the exam.” Sometimes, I leave class with my head spinning from hour upon hour of irritating accusations like “Il a volé mon Bic!” (“He stole my pen!”) and “Elle me dérange!” (“She’s bothering me!”) being hurled at inappropriate volumes across the room, while I attempt to dispense my lesson to a room of unlistening ears. But then my students do nice things like thank me for an exam, and I remember why I wanted to teach, in the first place.
2. Inadvertent hitchhiking: I’m not sure if I’ve outlined the transportation situation in Garoua, but it’s basically the inverse of most cities in the United States, as far as frequency and means are concerned. Which is to say, motos comprise the overwhelming majority of vehicles, with the occasional car thrown in to mix things up; and the majority of the population relies on moto taxis and taxis to get around, with a few private vehicle owners thrown in to mix things up. So, anytime I want to go anywhere, I look for someone wearing a green or yellow vest (which signals that he is a moto taxi driver, and not just a guy with a moto), flag him down, tell him my destination and agree on a price, and he takes me there. (I say “he” and “guy,” because I have yet to see a female moto taxi driver, and because even a woman with a moto in general is a rare sight.) Sometimes it’s easy to find a moto, but other times—such as every couple months, when the police camp out on the road and demand registration papers from all passing vehicles, which most passing vehicles are unable to produce—it’s a bit more difficult. On numerous occasions, I’ve been waiting, roadside, for a moto, when someone passes by on or in a vehicle and kindly offers me a ride, refusing to accept any money in return, just to be nice.
3. “Just pour te saluer”: In Cameroon, phone service is set up differently than in the U.S.; rather than selecting a single provider and signing a monthly contract, you buy a SIM card and then purchase minutes as-you-go from roadside “call boxes,” which are everywhere. The two main providers here are MTN and Orange (with a third, Camtel, being used occasionally, mostly by businesses). As is the case in the U.S., it’s cheaper to make calls from MTN-to-MTN, or from Orange-to-Orange, etc. Because of this fact—and because of the fact that “réseau,” or service, isn’t always very reliable— people often have two or even three phone numbers (my cell phone, for example, like many cell phones here, is dual-SIM, so I have both an Orange number and an MTN number).
All of this is to say that making phone calls in Cameroon is, relatively speaking, very expensive; gone are the days of hour-long phone calls and entire conversations carried out via text. Instead—at least in my experience—phone calls rarely exceed a few minutes in length. Yet, despite the brevity of phone exchanges (or, perhaps, because of it) a lot is said in a little bit of time. Every day, at least a couple of Cameroonian friends call me just to say hi. Each conversation lasts less than a minute, but it’s just a nice gesture – to show me that they’re thinking of me.
4. Neighborly love: Along the lines of phoning just to say hello, it’s also common for neighbors to drop by your house, in person, just to say hello. One morning, I was in the middle of doing dishes in my yard, when a friend about my age, who is in his final year at the lycée, stopped by with his ten-or-so-year-old sister. In order to be hospitable, I put the dishes aside and sat down in order to talk with them. This small attempt at hospitability backfired, however, when his sister, seeing the stack of neglected dishes beside me, offered to wash them. I laughed and declined her very generous and thoroughly unnecessary offer, but she insisted—and continued to insist, despite my protestations otherwise—until, finally, I conceded and let her (“let her” seems like the wrong wording for a favor someone does for you, but that’s pretty much what happened) wash them for me. Just to be nice.
Dropping by to say hello, of course, goes both ways; the neighbors who live across from me (Haoua’s family) are some of my favorite people I’ve met since being in Cameroon, and they have become somewhat like a second (or third, if you include my host family in Bafia) family, here in Nassarao. If I go even two nights without visiting them, the next time I show up at their house, they ask me where I “disappeared” to and tell me not to do so again. And every night, when it’s time for me to go home, they insist on accompanying me to my door, waiting outside my gate until I close and lock it behind me, to make sure I arrive safely – even though the entire walk home takes somewhere around thirty seconds. Just to be nice.
This is only a small selection of the numerous examples that I could write about re: why I’m fortunate to call Cameroon my home for the next year-and-eight-months. Every time something frustrating happens—such as a mass of children pounding on and scaling my gate at seven in the morning, yelling “Ouvre la porte!” for hours on end, without pause—something else wonderful happens to counteract it—such as those same children coming over to my house with chalk and books in hand (two books, to be exact: an elementary school French textbook, and an old Peace Corps bike maintenance handbook that a previous volunteer left behind, neither of which the children understand a word of) for me to write out math problems and read to them.
And so it is that my life in Cameroon—a strange jumbled mass of encounters, events, and everyday and not-so-everyday occurrences—is also, in turn, my blog.
