"Paris a tout prix": a cinematic experience

saw a movie tonight at the university of yaounde's amphitheater. only $1 (500cfa), sponsored by the sociology department and the european union (interesting in itself?), "paris a tout prix" ("paris at any cost") is a film directed, written by and starring a cameroonian actress. the film portrays the main character's life of poverty in yaounde; her struggle to get out of it through escape, betrayal and prostitution; her success and arrival in paris; and finally, her misfortunes and return home. the amphitheater was pretty full -- films aren't shown that often on campus, maybe once every three months according to my friend aziz, a soc. major. the sociology dept. has been promoting this for a while, but it's not a campus-wide event. we got seats on the wooden benches and listened to an announcer ask trivia questions while music blared behind him. as soon as the lights went down, a big round of applause went up, only to become wild appreciation when the first frame of the intro credits came on the screen -- overhead helicopter shots of yaounde! our town! for the first ten minutes, almost every new camera angle got applause and whoops of laughter: a nicely dressed young woman walking through her slummy neighborhood, calling a motorcycle over to get to work, arriving and interacting with her boss, a customer in a business suit buying johnnie walker whiskey. the entire two hours were spent in fits of hilarity, confusion, agreement or disagreement, anger, frustration when the projector image broke up or the sound cut out, all at the decibel level of a lively american basketball crowd. it was a truly collective experience in a way that film is not in the states. such unabashed passion from all members of the crowd! man, what a trip. i cant wait to go to the theater next time i get a chance.

Taxi!

here i am in yaounde, a week into the independent project process. many things to write about my experiences, but at the front of my mind i am now constantly focused on research: meetings, interviews, finding libraries and professors, creating schedules and lists etc. that makes it sounds like im incredibly busy, but in fact this past week has been a nice change to the usual chaotic quality of traveling. now im settled here, and its nice to find a routine so i can find time to do the things i want to do. i can exercise, i can hang out with my family, i can explore the town and see friends, and i can do these things while a huge project is going on. its pretty cool.

im slowly starting to find out more of yaounde this time around, geographically, historically, and socially too. its hard to get around here unless you take a taxi, and it's easy to get swindled price-wise when you dont know which destinations are two blocks away and which will take a half hour. not to mention everyone in a hurry around you. unlike a big city in the states, though, people will stop whatever they are doing to help you if you're lost or need an answer. this has been my experience without fail. all you have to say is "bonjour," and immediately a whole bustling metropolis is your friend. i cant say how many times a stranger has helped me out in the past 2.5 months, not to mention the generosity of those who have taken me, a complete stranger, into their homes to live as a part of their family. the kindness i have experienced here is unfathomable.

i have had some interesting experiences in taxis, though, to the credit of my own cluelessness. heres the system for taking taxis in yaounde:
1) stand on the side of the road with your arm down and one finger raised. watch out! there are motos speeding by close enough to sideswipe you, and if you hold your hand in any other way (a fist, for instance) this can indicate a price. finger counting is different here: if a taximan sees you making a fist or all five fingers touching, that means "five hundred" ($1); making the OK sign without fingers splayed means "three hundred", and grabbing your index finger with your other hand means "six hundred". ive had some price mix-ups because of this.
2) pay attention to your accent and pronunciation. i once asked for "alike sono," a neighborhood near my house, and was taken somewhere on the other side of town.
3) there are two universities and two supermarche mahimas and two congolese embassies (drc and brazzaville), and if you dont specify which you will probably end up paying for your mistake. sometimes you might think one thing is near another if they have similar names...not always the case...
4) when yelling at a taxi to take you, one of two things works: yell the price before the destination, or yell the destination before the price. if the former, be prepared to watch your self esteem drop lower and lower every time you get passed up until you'll pay any price to go anywhere. if the latter, be prepared to barter while you're being driven to your destination, at which point you no longer have much leverage as far as price is concerned.


all for now, internet minutes up. chao!

fickle, and putting me in a pickle

so the internet has been down all over cameroon since my last blog post. it will work for about 5 minutes, then take literally 1/2 to one full hour to load a page. i am physically affected by the anxiety i feel -- i actually get heartburn as i wait for that one page to load. especially when that one page is a letter from a friend or an important correspondence for next semester. what does this say about me as a human being? i dont know, i'm just glad the internet is working today.

spent sunday to wednesday in the extreme north -- the "chicken head" of cameroon, as my friend matt likes to call it. IT IS HOT THERE. i mean the kind of hot that is dusty and sweaty and dry -- it's in the sahel region of the sahara desert, after all, that strip of land that encircles the largest desert in the world. maroua has been affected by western tourism and has large tourist markets where you can buy crafts, and also smaller markets where you can find less touristy things like pagnes and traditional northern garb. there are a lot of beggars, too, i would say more than in any other city i've visited. this is also due to tourism; children and the unemployed end up begging instead of going to school or finding jobs because it's more lucrative.

we camped outside waza national park on monday and tuesday night. tuesday was spent on safari! 15 students, seven staff, and two guides piled into the back of the SIT pickup truck and braced themselves on top of the van's cargo grate and we took off into the savannah. we only got halfway to the halfway point of the park's diameter on a six-hour tour -- that's how big the park is. in many places the grass was burned down so to make viewing animals easier. we started at 6:30am and didn't see much til mid-morning, just a few wildebeasts and some brush hens. then, as we came over a small rise, we saw something against the trees in the distance: GIRAFFES! we stopped right across the watering hole from them -- there were about 21 in the first group we saw. what a crazy-looking animal. when they run, it looks like they're in slow motion with their huge legs loping along and their long necks hurtling forward and back. altogether we saw 72 giraffes that day! no lions, no elephants, but a parkfull of giraffes. it was cool.

it's now my last day in ngaoundere. tonight we take the train to yaounde, where i will start my independent research project. i'm scared, but moreso really excited to start!

for dad : backtrack to yaounde

i realized, in looking back on this blog, that i never really wrote about yaounde. thats not really fair, because 1) yaounde was an amazing part of the journey so far and b) it is chronologically innaccurate to talk about kribi after dschang as if there was no in between. in fact, kribi was more of an inbetween from yaounde to ngaoundere, if that makes sense. so...back to yaounde.

After being in a small town like dschang for 5 weeks, at first yaounde was a little like Disneyland. Mahima is a supermarket with flashing fluorescent palm trees in the parking lot and aisles of organized whites tiles with air conditioning like january in minnesota. i almost threw up the first time i went in there. the supermarket in dschang didnt have lights, much less white tiles. i had forgotten the smell of clean linoleum. i didnt miss it. it wasnt so bad the second time, but still not a place i would frequent when given a choice.

we met with several different national and international non-governmental org.s which have offices in yaounde (WWF, FAMMCameroon, World Bank), as well as national and international government org.s like Peace Corps and the US Embassy. as american students who've studied development in cameroon now, we came in as big skeptics to the world bank and the us embassy. there have been so many failures in development strategies here that sometimes it almost seems like the welfare of cameroonians is last on the list of priorities (for instance, check out any info you can on the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline, esp. at the world bank website and the WWF website. One of the most horrible mistakes in development history according to many). however, after talking to the people who work on development issues and methods every day, there is much thats being done that is hard to see. corruption makes funding very difficult, and progress comes in bits and pieces. what seems to me to work best are true national NGOS like MUFFA, a women's micorfinancing group, and foreign aid objectives through peace corps and the embassy that create a viable work force of cameroonians who can start development projects of their own on a micro or macro level. in retrospect, i am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to interview so many leaders in cameroon’s development, and I don’t think I would have had this chance with another program. Thanks SIT!

sandy beaches and pink ladies

i'm in kribi, a resort town on the southern coast of cameroon. we've been here since monday, and our stay has been truly relaxing -- the first unscheduled days of the program that i can remember! this is a little slice of paradise -- clean, sandy beaches and warm atlantic waves, calm and quiet (its not tourist season yet). i walked along the beach to a waterfall and hiked into town to shop for souvenirs. we had lunch seaside yesterday and ordered pina coladas and pink ladies! i, too, have turned quite pink -- the equatorial sun was too much even for my SPF 70. it's been so nice to hang out here and just chill.

to emphasize the varitey of cameroon's landscape, tomorrow we leave to board a train in yaounde for ngaoundere in the northern desert-savannah region. more when i get there!

tant de choses! (so many things)

well there's a lot to catch up on in this blog, i have gotten behind because of time and logistics. i am now on the road again with the group, staying in the capital yaounde for 8 days. after that we'll go to the coastal city of kribi for three days and then head north to ngaoundere and maroua where we'll learn about muslim culture and visit a nature reserve ( thats right, on safari -- i never realized i would do that here!).

since last entry, i have really experienced too many new and interesting things to explain them all. i will do some quick bulletpoint updates:

--> stayed at a chefferie, the home of the traditional bamileke cultural leader. there are several around dschang, situated in each neighborhood and surrounding village. i stayed the weekend in the small chefferie of fonakeukeu with one other student, and we basically followed the chef around to see what his life is like. "our" chef wasnt more than 40yrs old, was very intellectual and very well-read. we went to a funeral, had dinner with him, talked about a lot of different subjects including american eating disorders and the war in iraq and polygamy and cameroonian agriculture, and went to a soccer game. pretty sweet.

--> baked sugar cookies for my family. sugar cookies are pretty much the easiest thing ever to bake, correct? WAH WAH, think again! the oven in our house doesnt work, so we only use the oven on the balcony, which is essentially a small woodburning metal trash can with a grill. i took the big cast iron pot and put the cookie sheet inside it, covered the top and checked every five minutes. they actually turned out really well...plus people dont bake cookies here so it was a treat. i decided to try one egg next time instead of two, and to remember to use my headlamp when uncovering the pot after it gets dark on the balcony -- i have a distinct little burn from the cast iron on my forearm. woodburning stoves get hot!

--> went to the *only* night club in dschang with all the students. really funny, really fun. along with cameroonian music, they also played such favorites as "umbrella," "beautiful girls," and akon's new one. which by the way are played everywhere and every second in restaurants, bars, the street, the cybercafe, peoples houses...it gets a little ridiculous, one of the three is always stuck in my head.

thats the interesting stuff. im also doing homework and getting ready for my research project, but i think about that too much as it is. at this point, my plan for the big research is to study marriage as an institution in the bamileke culture, probably focusing on polygamy in the chefferies. i have a lot of questions about this part of the bamileke culture that continues as the instance of polygamy descends in other cameroonian communities. is this an important part of tradition to the chefs, to the wives? can women who are part of a polygamous relationship have autonomy, equality, power, independence? what do these terms mean to these women? that's a start at least.

time to get back to the mission we're staying at -- dance class tonight! i love experiential learning. i will leave you as the cameroonians do, by saying "j'arrive", which literally means "im coming" but in cmr french means "seeya later" (it can be very confusing).

j'arrive!

this was about my adventures at the chefferie & the last week in dschang, until...

i just wrote a long, interesting blog for you all to read, and it was deleted when the power went out. i feel like crying right now, communication is frustrating as it is but this is ridiculous!!!!!!!!!

cant even look at the computer to start again, i just want to kick it off the balcony...

i wanted to say thanks for all the emails i have received from family and friends, you guys are the best. the advice and stories make me feel so happy and loved!

i promise to rewrite this soon. thanks for your patience.