So, what's Cameroon like?

I have been reminded that I’ve been jotting down my own thoughts and have not provided a true window as to where I am living. So, I’ll try to help everyone out with that.

It’s like I’m on a big farm. But the farm has the geographic size of a suburb, but a quarter of the population. I go to sleep by the sounds of crickets, or dogs, or frogs, or monkeys. And add in the chickens screaming cock-a-doodle-doo throughout the night – unless it is drowned out by the night club next door – and you’ve got it down.

So today, after messing with trying to call UK and the line not going through and the phone at the office not working because all the credit being used up and after trying to call at the nearby internet / international call place and not believing me when I said that you need to dial 44 first to get to UK and them saying but it’s ringing – so I guess you don’t need to dial the country code, and me saying but how does it know to dial the UK? And they saying because you told me, I needed a drink. One nice thing about Cameroon is that everyone drinks a lot of beers. Especially Guinness Smooth – you can be an instant winner of a free beer or a motorcycle, if the bottle cap has the right picture on it! And they are 50cl large, which is half a liter, which is … definitely bigger than a toll boy. And each one is 500CFA (Central African Francs), which is pretty much $1 – actually less than $1 with the current exchange rate. If Turay would actually pay me for the laptop I brought over I would be doing really good!

Anyway, after all that bullshit I wanted a drink. So I ordered a Guinness Smooth – not a winner – sat down, opened by laptop and started working on SDI financials. In walks a hen, followed shortly by a cock – I didn’t notice until I heard squawking and there he was, gettin his groove on with the hen, who didn’t seem happy. In fact, Sunday there was a meeting with a group of Cameroon NGOs, and in the middle of it a hen with 4 cute little chicks walks right in seeing how things are going.

So blah blah blah, here’s how I will get this blog to the information superhighway. It’s 10:15PM right now, which is 3:15 CT, so after this I’ll try to get some sleep or work on my French. As I write this, the florescent light in my room is flashing, trying to turn on, but it can’t because there isn’t enough voltage to get the starter started. Tomorrow I’ll get up and have some breakfast prepared by Turay or maybe just some bread and chocolate – but always Nescafe! Then I’ll walk down the road that SDI is on called Chief’s Street – because some Chief who I’ve never met lives here. Oh, a Chief is the leader of a tribe, of which there are 260 in Cameroon.
It takes around 5 minutes to get to the end of Chief’s Street, and then I wait on the road to hail a taxi, which are mostly Nissan Sentras painted Yellow. Before one passes it honks to let you know it wants to carry you, and you point the direction you want to go – with a little point if you don’t want to go far or a long thrusting motion if you want to go to the next town. When the taxi stops you shout out where you want to go, and if he is going that direction, you jump in. The people that are already in the car make room for you, and off you go.

Right, these aren’t private cabs. They are very frequent and cheap, but there can be up to 5 people in the cab, in addition to the driver, at one time. And these are stick shifts – haven’t been in the middle yet. Anyway, off I go, and it’s really only a couple minutes to the internet café – called Fatabe House – where he lets me out and I pay 100CFA: around 20 cents. Actually I walked it last time and it wasn’t too bad. I sit down, plug in my laptop and work with the super-shitty internet which isn’t actually all that slow, but it gets stuck constantly, so you have to pause and reload downloads all the time. It’s 200 CFA (40 cents) an hour, so I can’t really complain – especially since I figured out how to get my laptop to connect without paying J. Going back is a stream of cabs – literally almost every vehicle going down the road is a cab honking at you, mostly with 3 or 4 people already in it.

Let’s see … hey my light just went on! It’s been flashing for at least an hour! I say I’m in Buea, but actually Buea consists of a number of “towns”, which are all walking distance from each other. Let me grab my map and I’ll list them ….
Eww, almost stepped on one of those big roaches. This is the slowest roach ever – you think about stepping on it, but it runs away kinda slowly. I’ve never killed one, and there’s only one at a time, so it might be the same one hanging out. I just had some rice, which was sitting in the cupboard from lunch – there is no refrigerator, but it hasn’t been much of a problem so far – and a banana, of which there are always plenty – Chief’s Street has banana trees all over the place.

Anyway, the map. I live in Bomaka, which is on the road to Kumba. Just a couple minutes down the road is a roundabout called “Mile 17”, because I guess it’s 17 miles from something -- a mile down the road is “Mile 16” and a bit more down the road is “Mile 14”. If I turn right at the roundabout there is Molyko, which is a fairly large town that contains the University of Buea. Inside Molyko is a place called “University Junction”, which is just an unnamed road that leads to the University. There are no road names, and no addresses either – except for being relative to some other place.

Past Molyko is Bonduma, and then Great Soppo, but in between is Suppo Market (not quite supermarket, although there is a market fairly often), which I have a picture of if I can get them working. Keep going straight and you arrive at Alliance Junction, and if you take a right you go towards Clerks’ Quarters (pronounced like Clex quarters). There is also Bokwango, Moyamovia, Muea, Mutenganae, Lyngo Village, and finally Buea Town (the picture) at the foot of Mount Cameroon – which has an Ecotourism center I need to visit!

It’s really hard to remember these names. One of the girls who does some of the cooking is named Moloka, which I always get confused with Molyko (pronounced mo-lee-co). I’m still confused why these girls come over to do cooking, eat in the kitchen, and then leave. Turay seems to not want them around, but he doesn’t complain too much. Teenage boys come over too – one of them likes to whistle loudly and play solitaire while he waits for Turay to get home – one of the reasons I have decided to hang out at the bar next door.

I have not seen a single white person since last week Monday when I arrived. Most people simply ignore me, except young boys and girls stare. People are generally polite treat me mostly like anyone else – I haven’t noticed people trying to charge me “white man’s price”, although I haven’t done a lot of shopping either. While I was walking today, an older man on the other side of the road actually saluted me saying “Ho chief!” or something like that, which I admit was pretty weird. But overall, everything is very laid back.

Oh, my living quarters! I live in a 3 bedroom place along with Sulaiman Turay (in a different room of course!). My room has a double bed, a table and chair, and a leopard-print upholstered chair. The bed has a thin foam top as a mattress, which is really hard, and I can feel the wood slats all night. But surprisingly, even though I wake up often throughout the night, my back feels better than it has for months! Also there is a wooden box with a lock that Turay said is for my valuables, but I just keep my dirty laundry in it – I mean, come on! if someone breaks into my room, do I really want to have all my valuables in a box that someone could easily carry away and get into with an axe? I keep my door locked (with an old-fashioned keyhole-type-key) whenever I’m not there anyway.

I also have my own Western-style bathroom, complete with a toilet and shower! However there is no running water, so there is a separate big plastic basin on the floor which I fill with water whenever the outdoor faucet actually works. With the basin I wash my hands, flush the toilet, and take showers / baths – no warm water for me! Fortunately at this time of the year it’s pretty temperate, so it’s really not too bad.

Water purifier is working just fine, even though the water I drink tastes a bit like chlorine and bleach. And my eye had a little sore on it – from the purifier, which I read later said that you need to wash your hands thoroughly after using it because you can damage your eyes – oops! But definitely nothing too bad, am healthy and actually definitely well-fed – better fed than I need to be, actually.

Food involves a lot of fish – whole fish, with bones – and I’m getting better at picking them out before I actually eat them. There are lots of bananas and plantains for dessert, which are yummy. Rice is also common, mixed with the fish, along with tomatoes and peppers. Breakfast consists of a couple hardboiled eggs with tomatoes, pepper and a lot of oil, or instead du pain avec chocolat. They also have French fries! With extra grease! Actually, everything has lots of oil – I was told a liter of oil lasts around 3 days here, which seems like a lot, right???

FYI, I don’t re-read my blog posts, so if there are grammatical errors, you will just have to live with it. That’s all for now! Keep up the comments and email me – I read them all, and it’s so nice to hear from back home!

shawn.