kar0ling

Sunrise shortly before six. Sunset shortly after six. Every day. Advantages: Your circadian rhythm can really get some perpetual motion happening--if you coordinate waking hours with sunlit hours you’ll get lots of sleep. I marvel at regular class hours at high school starting at 7:30; most university students I know thought the “early” 8:30 class started at an ungodly hour. Disadvantages: Electricity interferes with these good intentions. We can extend our evenings long after the sun has gone done, thus we’re not quite so eager to be up with dawn’s early light. Simon, Scotts’ yardworker, thinks 5:30 is a marvellous time to get work done: sharpening his cutlass and cutting grass outside my window, or pounding the new clothesline posts into the ground. I am less than impressed. But, in the end, no doubt he’s the one getting more sleep and enjoying the fresh air before it gets too hot. It’s an accomplishment for me that I’m up for breakfast at 7:00 every morning.

Banana plantations, cocoa farms, rubber plantations. You see them everywhere in Cameroon. Bananas, mangoes, citrus (oranges, grapefruit, pomelo—which, to my surprise, is called “shaddock” in Encarta), avocadoes, pineapples. We eat a plethora of them in season. All these tropical plants we find so normal; none are native to Africa, much less Cameroon. Banana – South East Asia; mango – India; cocoa – South America; pineapple – mostly tropical America; citrus – South East Asia, rubber – South America. What did Cameroonians farm before these? What did they eat without these? Oroko doesn’t even have a word for orange, grapefruit, or lime—it calls them all “bangnasari” (itself probably a borrowed word from another language), meaning “citrus”—because the plants aren’t native to the area. Since introduction, however, some of these plants have worked their way to becoming essential to a Cameroonian’s life. Plantain (relative of banana) is a staple food for villagers, villagers whose cash crop i...

I surprise myself by how happy I am to see city lights and hear traffic. Not to say that I don’t enjoy the quiet of village life but I am equally able to appreciate the hustle and bustle of a city. Mostly I have seen but a tiny corner of Yaoundé. RainForest International School (close to where I’m staying) used to be at the edge of the city, but now buildings have grown up on all sides of it. Nevertheless, the area is not densely populated: in every direction I look, pockets of green separate the rooftops. There are even small cornfields between houses. The Yaounde I’ve seen seems relaxed, sprawling and affluent—only the second, no doubt, is true for all of town. I have no illusions that we’re in an ordinary part of town here. The houses, according to the standard of the village, or even what I’ve seen of Kumba, are palatial. It’s wonderful to see multi-story buildings again, showing an attempt at architecture. (Most buildings in the villages, even in Kumba and Bamenda, exist to be bui...

Comprehensibility is not the greatest goal in communication; status is. Complicating the issue further, Cameroon is an officially bilingual country: French and English. French is the dominant language with only 2 of the 10 provinces speaking English. Bilingualism in Cameroon is much like bilingualism in Canada—it exists mostly on paper. The French areas speak French while the English areas speak (mostly pidgin) English and even the culture of the two areas differs. Big Bekondo is in the English-speaking part of the country so I was surprised by how often I’d be greeted in the village with a French “bon soir.” When I asked Lisa if people spoke French here she said no. People like to use that greeting on white people because it connotes status; it makes them look educated. Next in rank is English; that is, “grammar” English; proper English as taught in school. Even this strikes my ear as quaint at best, poor at worst. They never use contractions, the stress patterns are different, (besid...

How could I forget to mention the culverts? The rigors of the road are becoming old-hat to me; that, and with less rain it’s becoming more easily navigable, so I may not have any more observations to make on adventures of the Bekondo road. But, there are still the culverts to describe. It’s a wet place, this rainforest is, so no one will be surprised that the occasional culvert is necessary to direct a stream underneath the road instead of across it. Only no attempt whatsoever has been made to bury the culvert. More accurately, the road goes over the stream rather than the stream under the road. You’ll be chugging along the severely rutted but otherwise relatively flat road, when suddenly a culvert rears its head. You screech to a crawl (from your lightning speed of some 20 km/h) to scale the 1.5ish metre-high obstacle. Besides not burying the culvert, they haven’t even graded it to the road. The gradient on both sides of the hump is practically vertical. Fortunately, there’s only two ...

By car. I look on cars here with incredulity, unable to comprehend how they can get people from point A to point B. Well, I guess they don’t necessarily: Dan drove us from Big Bekondo to Kumba, but from there Elsie and I hitched a ride to Yaoundé with the SIL translation consultants in their car. The most noteworthy part of the first leg was the mudhole by Kake. With no apparent trigger factors, there was an enormous hole in the road—the tracks led down into a muddy depression two humps long—then the road continued merrily on its way. At the bottom of this hole, the mud came up to the windows—on Dan’s jacked up 4X4 Toyota Hilux. Persistent washboard and plentiful potholes plagued the road from Kumba till closer to Douala when suddenly all was paved and wonderful, though the first section of paved road was spotted with enormous speed bumps that seemed to occur every 100 metres. I’d size up Urs, the driver, as a European practiced in Cameroonian driving. He was a speed demon wherever the...

Once again translation week and a "Friesen week" have coincided for me so I get to eat "country chop" with the translators at lunch. We hadn't had waterfufu yet this week, so I was expecting--but dreading--that for lunch on Wednesday. Before leaving for lunch I thought to myself, I dearly wish lunch would be plaintains or something. Imagine my delight when it was indeed boiled plaintains with a red sauce and cabbage. A healthy fire burned in my mouth from the first bite and I avoided scooping out any meat with the cabbage but otherwise the meal was excellent. Today Lisa and I were sharing our dread of waterfufu and our earnest wish that we would not have to eat it today. Finally, the ladies brought the food and our suspense was ended as one of the translators lifted the lid and exclaimed in consternation: "we had this yesterday!" (Actually he said it in Oroko, but that's a paraphrase of my understanding of what he said.) Lisa and I looked at each o...

One of the few fruit trees along main street in the village, the shadok* tree spreads its branches widely above the mud. Not a very tall tree, its long arms, weighed down by the enormous orbs hanging like oversized Christmas decorations on an Charlie Brown tree, need to be propped up with sticks to keep them from breaking under the weight of the slowly ripening shadok. The unique (and gigantic) citrus has slowly been finding its way to our table. (*Shadok is the word used for pomelo in this area. It is not widely known or used. It seems to be a pidgin word, though what its origins are, no one can tell.)

The million tiny stars were so high in the vast dome of the sky, while just above the horizon, beyond the dark silhouettes of palm trees and the verdant hill overlooking the edge of town, behind and between the puffy cumulus clouds flashed pink, yellow and orange lightning. In the dark African night, the colours of sunset peeked out from behind the pillows of the sky. Another evening, the flashes were so white and so complete that they lit the landscape as though it were day. They stayed longer than an instant-enough to hold in your hand, yet not enough to hold on to. Just when I thought I could see everything and could turn off my flashlight . it was dark again.

The team here is binational: One half of each couple is Canadian while the other is American. As a result, instead of celebrating Thanksgiving twice, it more often happens that Thanksgiving is neglected altogether. This year, Canadian Thanksgiving was upon us before we noticed it and American Thanksgiving looks to be a busy time, so we arbitrarily selected a date in between and to ensure we celebrated it. Wednesday, November 7, 2007 was the day. Our feast consisted of chicken pieces, mashed potatoes, homemade stuffing, a lettuce salad, and mango pie (hey, the colour is right) for dessert. All the elements of the traditional meal were there, just not exactly the way we're used to them. Both families ate together for the noon meal; the kids in the kitchen at the supper table while the adults ate on the coffee table in the living room. One of the girls was running a high fever, so the rest of us--who'd been dragging with sniffles and cold all week--were thankful we weren't sic...

The 7 Baptist churches of Mbonge North Association came to Big Bekondo for Mini Bible Conference, October 26-28. "Cameroonian Time" According to the schedule, the conference started sometime on Friday. The sound system made some noise that day but I don't think much happened till Saturday when Becky and I attended the morning session. The teaching session was supposed to start at 9, the message be given around 10:30, followed by greetings, and choir numbers ending just before lunch at 12:00. We arrived after 10--the session hadn't started yet. I snuck out after the sermon (around 1:30), wolfed down some lunch before bringing the girls back to sing our "English choir" numbers shortly before the congregation adjourned for lunch break just after 2. The afternoon session-rescheduled to start at 3 instead of 2 as the program dictated-started a good hour late and ended later. Interestingly, there was a designated "time-keeper" for the conference. I don...

In Canada, if internet service is down for a few hours, people get antsy. In Cameroon, we're a bit more phlegmatic about things. Here in the village, we don't have internet at all-we send email through the radio to Yaounde where another missionary converts it to internet-if he's not home, or if there's any kind of glitch in the system, we simply go without. So we weren't overly concerned when a few days went by without email (though we were feeling the loss of contact with the outside world, email being one of our only media). Then Dan and Mike returned from a weekend of meetings in Kumba with news that internet is out everywhere.or so they say. People were reporting internet was out over the entire country. One report was that a fibre optics cable had been cut in Douala. Elsie, coming to visit us from Bamenda reported some places in NorthWest had it, others did not. We're not sure what the real story was, but if you're reading this, it's back up and run...

The day had been sunny and warm. The thermometre in the schoolroom measured above 30 C, though I found it difficult to believe it was that warm. Some convincing thunder was beginning to rumble around suppertime, so to be on the safe side, though feeling slightly foolish as I passed some villagers, I wore rubber boots and brought my umbrella along with my flashlight as I went over to Friesens' for supper. Better safe than sorry--after all, it would certainly rain before I returned home and the boots would ensure that I wouldn't arrive home at Scotts' with 10 pounds of mud on each flipflop. It did, in fact, rain off and on all evening. After a nice peaceful interlude, the deluge began again as we neared the end of our Triple Yahtzee game. I needed to get back before too late, so trusting in my preparations, I braved the rain. The first surprise was the small river previously known as the path. The boots kept my feet dry, but a few steps in I realized my skirt was skimming the...