kar0ling

“The printer isn’t working.” “Did you try it in the oven?” In a land where relative humidity is around 80% even during dry season, and there is no glass in the window to make climate conditioning possible, the pilot light turns the oven into a perfect hot box. It’s a warm, dry place to dry out electronics…or straighten candles? We don’t know if Mike’s strategy to straighten crooked candles in the oven worked, because he left them there, without telling anyone, then departed for a week of meetings in Bamenda. Christy didn’t look in the oven before putting the bread in. We were all outside harvesting groundnuts when Christy came out from checking the bread, asking if smoke should be coming out of the oven. Becky and I looked at each other and chuckled, wondering what the poor pre-teen had done wrong, but when Becky went to find out, she encountered a kitchen filled with billows of smoke rolling out of the oven, caused by the paraffin which had melted all over the inside of the range. The...

Walking down the street was a vendor pushing a small cart—picture the Dickie Dee’s cart, sans bike component, add a vertical display—loaded with socks. It just seemed an odd thing to be selling in Bamenda to begin with, nevermind from a mobile cart plying the streets.

It’s very convenient to have a white man in the village. White man provides cell phone charge, offers typing and printing service, is a possible buyer of exotic animals found in the bush, can be called upon to patch up minor wounds, has lots of books and a wide knowledge on a variety of subjects, and has cash on hand thus is able to provide money lending service and to turn large bills into smaller, more spendable currency.