November 15

8:30 pm—Sitting on the back porch of our house, listening to the chirping crickets and (for some probably religious reason) the distant sounds of people clapping in unison. Tomorrow, Clara and I head on vacation, our first so far (and probably our longest hiatus from class all year, apart from Christmas break). I’m excited to go—to take a break from Buea, to see something very different, to speak French, and to remember that I am here to experience something new and perhaps even uncomfortable at times. I’m also sure that it will be wonderful to come back to Buea after this 9-day break. For now, I have a few final decisions for the night: what pants to I bring when we go north? Which book? My choices are The Emperor of Maladies (about cancer) or Anna Karenina (about…well, Anna Karenina). Time for an adventure!

-Josh

November 19

8:00 am—In the Peace Corps case (transit house) in Maroua.  After more than 24 hours of straight travel, we’re finally in the extreme north! It took 13 hours overnight in the train from Yaounde to N’Gaoundéré in airplane-style seats with a flickering fluorescent light overhead and frequent stops to let off passengers and let on piles of plantains, long sticks of banana-leaf rapped ‘baton,’ bags of tangerines….then right onto a bus that took 11 hours to reach Maroua due to a flat tire, frequent stops for prayer, pee breaks…. And even before that, there was the 6 hour bus ride from Buea to Yaounde—once there we enjoyed a giant three-cheese pizza, a dazed stroll around a supermarket, an incredible boulangerie, a near-abandoned hotel with bed bugs, and $10 cocktails (yikes!) at the goliath Hilton hotel.

As you travel north in Cameroon, the landscape grows drier, trees more sparse, people and animals thinner.  The houses morph from wood and cement to mud brick with thatched roofs.  It also gets hotter and less shady.  This is the National Geographic version of Africa. 

-Clara

9:00 am—This area is so different from Buea. It is dusty, hot, and feels a little like living on the edge of civilization. By contrast, Buea is almost cosmopolitan. There is just much less available here—less money, less food, less water. It is almost hard to believe that I am in the same country. Even the language has changed. In Buea, I was “white man.” In Yaounde, I was “un blanc.” And here, where they speak Fulfulde, I am an “Asara."

Maroua, our home yesterday evening and this morning, is an interesting place. Lonely Planet West Africa described it as being vaguely akin to “Mos Eisley,” the desert town in Star Wars, and though the connection is silly, I can see what the author meant—it is full of sandy streets and low-lying buildings that whose inconspicuous walls leave you wondering what activities they are concealing. Motos are everywhere, churning up the sand in their wake, and I just poked my head out of our house a moment ago to see a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of dried sardines, quickly followed by a man biking along the road with a half-dozen live chickens strung up by the feet to each of his bike’s handlebars. Maroua is also very poor. By way of illustration: yesterday evening, after I finished a piece of delicious grilled chicken, I left the bones out on a plate, and a child swooped in to grab what I left behind so that he would have something to eat. It is so upsetting to recognize that this country and even this region do possess significant natural resources; the corrupt and ineffective government here seems unable to do anything more than extract wealth from the community without reinvesting it in the form of roads or hospitals or schools or electricity or running water. It makes me realize how privileged I am to live in Buea, let alone how privileged I am to be an American. And it makes me want to find sustainable ways to support this beautiful, barren place. YAN, I hope, represents one possible answer—but ironically, there is so little infrastructure here that even YAN could not be implemented. It puts into perspective the kinds of privileges I have in Cameroon—and the things I truly need to be happy and healthy and safe.

-Josh 

4:45 pm—In Rhumsiki, lying in a hammock, light beginning to turn golden, stony outcroppings bold against the pale, hazy sky.  We arrived around noon after a bus ride from Maroua to Mokolo (bags of fish piled on the roof) and a 48 kilometer moto ride from Mokolo—dusty and terrifying and beautiful.  It feels like we’re somewhere now, after days of travel.  We walked down the road into town a bit ago and on the way back met a boy herding few cows and kicking a plastic bottle.  Quickly, we struck up a game of pass—no language needed.  A little girl joined in.  The cows wandered ahead, unnoticed by any of us. 

-Clara

November 21

7:00 pm—In Maroua, outside of Big Ben drinking Castel beer and waiting for a street salad (no mayo, no sugar) to arrive.  

Rewind two evenings to Monday, Nov. 19.  After street soccer with a plastic bottle, we spent the remainder of the afternoon reading in hammocks and then trekking up a nearby hill to watch ‘the world’s best sunset’ according to Don Quichotte, our host and guide in the area.  It was a lovely sunset over rolling hills that spill unaware into Nigeria.  A group of young children followed us to the top to ask for un cadeau.  Dinner was wonderful.  Fresh bread made with millet, delicately chopped cabbage salad with lemon dressing, a mini pizza approximation with thick onion-filled sauce but no cheese, a plate of ‘Irish’ (French fries) and plantains, oranges halved and sprinkled with sugar, bananas (greenish but surprisingly sweet) and a lemongrass tea finale.  

After a toasty night in our Boukarou (a small, round structure with mud walls and a thatched roof), we woke up to a breakfast of more fresh bread, local honey, omelets, and fruit—the perfect breakfast to prepare for a day of trekking around the area.  And an excellent birthday present.  Even better though, were the messages from family and friends—collected, organized, printed, and laminated in secret by Josh—that I got to read throughout the day.  What a wonderful, strange, and somehow magical juxtaposition to fields of millet, rolling hills in shades of brown interrupted only by the occasional green acacia tree (or any other spiny plant that has managed to survive the hunt for firewood), and the stark stone pillars characteristic of the region that look as if they’ve been planted in the earth…stone seedlings growing into stone giants?  One such pillar is Rhumsiki—town namesake and the site where locals came together to defend their land and animist beliefs from the ‘crusading’ (pardon the misplaced adjective) Muslims that arrived ~100 years ago. 


Our trek around the Rhumsiki landscape with Don Quichotte took most of the day and brought us briefly into Nigeria.  Although he didn’t talk frequently, we learned bits and pieces about our surroundings during our hours together in the sun.  The local language in this region of the country is Kapsiki.  To greet someone, you must say maskunqua.  Ousa is ‘thank you.’  Long ago if a mother died when her baby was till breastfeeding, the father would mix water with baobab fruit and use it as milk.  Once a year, there are initiation ceremonies for young men of 18—a long trek through the mountains followed by months of instruction on how to behave as a man.   We stopped at several remote boukarou compounds to look at locally crafted art—necklaces of baobab seeds, small stringed instruments, hollowed out gourds, carved women in ebony (always pregnant or carrying a young child, always with a basket on her head).   We also stopped to eat groundnuts (peanuts) just pulled from the ground but still hanging from their dried stalks. 


In the afternoon, we crossed back over the main road and headed towards our village destination for the night.  It was so dry you couldn’t feel yourself sweating, but when you liked the corners of your mouth, you tasted layer upon layer of salt.  We stopped at a market to eat big chunks of tofu—dyed orange from the palm oil they had been fried in.  It felt as if everyone in the area was there, crowded under small wood structures with roofs thatched for shade.  On one blanket, a pile of cellphones were being charged by a generator.  Dried fish was abundant.   Men smoked or snorted dried tobacco. 

Back to Maroua now—our salads have been devoured (mine with a topping of 2 hardboiled eggs) and Josh made short work of half a roasted chicken.  Remember, the animals are thinner here in the north. 

-Clara

November 22

7:30 pm—Never pave a road with no intention of up-keeping it—the fastest part of today’s trip to the Parc National de Waza was when we drove off the road onto side tracks through the dusty fields of millet.   Even though Waza was no Kruger, I’m very glad to have visited.  It left me both happy to know there is some part of the Cameroonian Sahel that still belongs to birds, giraffes, antelope, elephants and the occasional lion…and overwhelmingly sad about how forgotten conservation is when poverty and corruption occupy the forefront of a nation’s consciousness.   In general, Waza exudes a feeling of neglect—not in the way of something untouched and pristine but rather as if the whole park was abandoned bit by bit and left to wither away.  We were the only car in the park all morning—haunting and lovely and yet sad.  The roads are overgrown ruts or newly created tracks through the burnt grass.  Our guide was set on pointing out only big animals that tourists must all ask to see.  For us this amounted to a cloud of ~25 giraffes—lovely and loping and alert to our presence as we exited the car (explicitly forbidden according to park signs but encouraged by guides)—and several species of antelopes.  We drove for hours through charred desert (they burn regularly so that it’s easier to spot wildlife).  Apparently there are parts of the 165,000-hectare park that are much more populated by African megafauna, but they are inaccessible due to folding and lack of roads.  I’m glad their there through (if they really are there).  Unable to explain to the guide that I was actually interested in birds too, and in the trees, and in the landscape, I relied on Josh to translate my questions and enthusiasm into French.  Is the burning here natural or artificial?  How long have you worked as a guide?  Is there poaching in the park?

-Clara 

November 22

9:00 pm—This evening was Thanksgiving in the US. It was, I think, the first one I have ever spent away from New York City—and certainly the first I have ever sent away from my family. For a treat, Clara and I went out to a lovely hotel in town, where we sat out on a patio and approximated Thanksgiving dinner with our own version: a steak with French fries and green beans for me, cheese pizza for her. It ended up being a really nice Thanksgiving, even if my family was some 5,000 miles away. And there is so much that I am thankful for today—the opportunity to be here, the privilege to travel with such an excellent companion, and the chance to return to a familiar place with people and a language that I recognize, reenergized and ready to dive back into teaching. Goodnight, Maroua. Thank you for being such a wonderful host this past week. Perhaps we’ll see you again.

-Josh