What is this thing they call African time?

Better Late than Never

Starting four months into my current
expedition may not seem the most prudent course of action, especially
for those of you interested in a dynamic step by step discourse, but in
all honesty it has taken me this long to find an appropriate comfort with the technological offerings of Cameroon.
Rather than attempt an awkward chronology, I am categorizing my venture up to this point into
relevant themes and random recollections. There will be no witty titles
to these entries. They might also be awkward. If you don’t like them,
you don’t have to read them, I will read them to myself and laugh at my
own jokes alone. It is your choice.

What you missed is; I am
officially a volunteer, that is, I endured the tribulations of a
convalescent training, meant to dissuade the wary. I have landed
myself in the notoriously diverse country of Cameroon. Peace Corp
service has gone interrupted here for 45 years; they have also had the
same president for 25 years. A brief German occupation abruptley halted by
the consequences of World War I left its (Deutsch) mark in the
lingering breweries and oversized beers to its predecessors from France
and England. Ensuing independence was not without the title
establishment of eight francophone provinces and two anglophone,
towering over the multitude of local dialects and customs.

The first eleven weeks after arriving in country I lived in a training village in
the west province known as Bangangte. Being the tail-end of an
uninhibited rainy season, the biggest challenge proved walking to and
from the training center against a saturated, sticky red-iron earth.
From an equatorial standpoint, the west was cool and fairly
mountainous, supporting even aged stands of temperate species of pine,
juniper and eucalyptus, the native forest an unresolved mystery.
My habitation was the master bedroom of a small, chic apartment, with what
I figure to be Cameroon’s first generation of yuppies. My mother and
father both teach at the highschool and have one son, who attends the
more expensive catholic elementary school. All families have to pay
about 18,000CFA a year per child to attend school. This is under
50USD, but still enough to keep many students from graduating,
especially in rural communities. My little brother was lucky to go to
a private school, where the student teacher ratio was closer to 40:1,
opposed to 80:1 at l’ecole publique. Mon petit frere and I became the
best of friends, mostly because we would take sauntering walks
together, which gave him respite from treacherous homework exercises,
enforced upon him by overbearing parents, and sometimes, if the mood
struck me I would buy him a bon-bon too. My petit frere is someone I
would like to keep in my life, but at seven he isn’t much for phone
conversations, so we will have to find other ways to communicate. I
will surely dwell further upon him in future entries.

As an agroforestry volunteer, in a predominately francophone country, my
training consisted largely of conversational French, Cameroonian style
and sustainable farming techniques for subsistence farmers. In the
mean time, I picked up the proper way to pluck, gut and prepare a
chicken, how to discreetly down a shot and a half of whiskey from a
palm sized plastic sac, and bartering in the market became routine.
And somehow I managed to pass my French proficiency exams, (by flirting
shamelessly with the examiner, no doubt) and not get sent home for
violating the plethora of binding rules by which I was obligated to
abide.