kar0ling

Word for word, this blog is taken from lasselantha. It's hilarious and true and I wish I had thought of it first: Our weird and wacky language...with a twist English is full of homophones. You know, homophones... those words that they make you practice spelling over and over in elementary school... the ones that sound the same but are spelled differently. Those confusing words like... "leave" and "live" "sheep" and "ship" and most especially... "hat" and "heart"

The description of the family’s financial affairs was something to that effect in an article on young football players in Cameroon. I read it unblinkingly, conjuring the usual thoughts of “oh the destitution! That she should be consigned to that for survival.” Then, it hit me. Wait a second, I know better than that! All these years journalists have been creating these sob stories—and don’t try to tell me it wasn’t on purpose—around a perfectly normal way of living. EVERYONE sells fish, or plantains, or even shoes off the sidewalk. That the way their whole microeconomy works in Cameroon. It’s not a sign his mother is poor or unable to find a proper job, it’s a sign she’s a normal woman with an entrepreneurial spirit! It’s just another example of how we in the West picture “the poor Africans needing aid”—which is one of the reasons the poor Africans are still needing aid after all these year and nothing is improving. They’re people, just like us. They have their seemingly bizarre, cultur...

I am thoroughly confused by the Oroko/ Bantu/ Cameroonian/ African (pick your generalization) approach to children. On the one hand, children are very important. In the village, it is more important for a woman to have proven her fertility than that she be a virgin when she gets married. It’s not at all unusual for high school girls to be pregnant, and thoroughly it’s normal for the bride to already have children on the wedding day. The only couples without children are ones who are physically unable to produce them—there’s no such thing as choosing not to have kids. So important are children, that adults are identified by their names of their children. Friesens (and everyone else in the village) call their neighbours Sanga Grace, and Nyanga Grace (meaning father of-, mother of Grace—their oldest daughter), rather than Matthias and Judith, or Mr and Mrs Mosongo. That’s the “children are very important” part. But then there’s, well, everything else—which is where I get confused. Kids ru...

“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.