Fun Night improv

I mentioned to a few of my friends back home recently that I missed doing improv. Sam in San Francisco suggested I find a way to do some improv here. A few days later, our friend Christy here in Yaounde suggested to Ann and me that we get together with a few other people and put an improv set together for an upcoming SIL event. Christy has never done improv before, and neither had any of the people she had in mind other than us, but she thought it might be fun. And once we decided to do that, I discovered that there was another alum of River City Improv, an improv group from my hometown that I performed with for years, here in Yaounde for a few weeks volunteering with SIL. There are maybe a dozen of us in the entire world, and another one was right here, right now. It didn't work out for her to join us onstage, since she was flying out that night, and not sure if she would make the show, but it was great to see her, and since it turned out that she was there, she threw us some good audience suggestions.

The event was SIL Cameroon's annual Fun Night, which took place last Friday. This is a traditional part of the branch conference, when SIL people from all over Cameroon come meet in Yaounde for a few weeks. Ann and I don't actually work for SIL, but we've met and made friends with several people who do, including our friend Christy, who travels around the region teaching homeschooled SIL kids for several weeks at a time. One of the slides they showed at Fun Night was a great picture of her and two of her students up north dressed up as pigs for a play they wrote and performed for an audience of two, their parents. The pig play probably would have been a fine contribution to Fun Night, but Christy proposed to Ann and me that we put together an improv set.

So we did. With a grand total of one hour of rehearsal, seven people who had never done improv before in their lives, plus Ann, got up and performed it in front of a couple of hundred of their friends colleagues and family members. And they were great! We got to do two sets, since the other acts ran a bit short on time. We did 20 or 30 minutes of improv, all told. I was the MC for the improv sets, so I introduced the games, got suggestions, and edited the scenes when they finished, in order to keep things moving.

Our preparation and rehearsal was a one-hour meeting at Christy's apartment. I spent some time combing through the Improv Encylopedia online to jog my memory, took some notes, and then came to the meeting with improv games that seemed good for new improvisors, games with clear rules and a structure for who talks when. As we talked about each one at Christy's, people volunteered to try them and then perform them on Friday night. Some people were nervous, but everyone was willing to give it a try, and seemed to like the idea.

These performers weren't actors, but linguists and teachers who work for SIL and for Rainforest School, where lots of SIL kids attend. The format was improv games, which are funny and quick and depend on language and cleverness and a willingness to be silly, rather than acting experience. When our turn came to perform, I asked all the performers to get onstage, asked the audience who had seen improv before (most had not), and then explained that since we depended on them for suggestions for our success, we had to warm them up. We invited them to sing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean with us, and every time a word was sung beginning with the letter B, they had to stand if they were sitting, or sit if they were standing. Meanwhile the performers and me sang lustily from the stage and bobbed up and down ourselves. Then to business.

The first game was Actor's Nightmare. One actor reads consecutive lines from a play script, the other has no script and has to improvise lines to somehow make the scene make sense. Dan improvised and Christine read from the script. I asked the audience for a random page number, and a location in Cameroon for the scene to take place. The location was Lolodorf (not sure on the spelling), which is the village where Dan actually works. The only script I had for this game was one I had borrowed. It was the script for the recent Rain Forest high school play, written by an SIL member here, so I introduced the skit as "deleted scenes from an early draft of the recent high-school play." Dan and Christine did a great job, and the audience was warm and appreciative, and stayed that way the whole show. Then we played the same game again, another scene, with Karen improvising and Margaret reading from the script.

The next game was the only one with all the actors, so we did it second to make sure we got it in, in case we got cut for time; we didn't realize we'd get a chance to do everything we had prepared. This was an advice game, where the audience asks questions. I asked the actors to come onstage in a line. I explained to the audience that I had found a strange snake out on a logging road in the wilds of eastern Cameroon that could answer questions. The snake had many heads, and each head could say only one word. I then fielded questions for the snake to answer, and the actors passed the mic from one to the next, each actor contributing one word to the snake's answer. As usual, this game resulted in a lot of hilarious semi-coherent nonsense that more or less answered the question; the audience loves the consternation of the players themselves as they try to come up with something reasonable.

For the last game of the first set, Chris J. and Christy came onstage and improvised a song based on the audience suggestion of "travel." So these two people, who have never improvised before but are a couple of hilarious over-the-top characters who clearly love performing in front of an audience, got onstage and made up a song about travel in Cameroon, on the spot. They really sold it too, and as the scene went on they got more and more over the top, crooning into their mics and dancing around onstage as people cheered them on.

That was it for the first set, but the MC for the whole evening told me they wanted us to perform again, and we had prepared a couple of extra games just in case this happened, so we were ready to go. The second set started with the mighty Ann playing the alphabet game with Michael. I asked the audience for something you might do in Yaounde while you were in from the village, for the scene to be about, and the suggestion was "buying cheese." So Ann and Michael did a scene about buying cheese in Yaounde; the game was that one actor (Ann) said a line starting with the letter A, then the other (Michael) said a line beginning with B. Then Ann with C, Michael with D, and on through the alphabet up to Z, trading lines. They were hilarious; I've seen Ann play this game before, and she's great at it, quick and very funny, and she and Michael got a huge reaction when Ann switched the scene from English to French on the letter O, with a line starting with "oui", and she and Michael carried on in French for six or seven more lines, without missing a beat. Since SIL is a linguistics organization in a French-speaking country, people just loved this. I've done improv for awhile now, but this was the only bilingual improv game I've ever seen.

The last game was another advice game; one good thing about advice games is you can really tailor them to your audience, so I explained that when I was in eastern Cameroon and found the snake, I had also run across three linguists who had been out there a long time, and had agreed to answer some questions for us here in Yaounde about linguistics. Karen (who really is a linguist), Beth and Christy came onstage and lined up to be the linguists. The game was that Karen always gave a correct, or at least reasonable answer, Beth always gave a completely wrong answer, and Christy gave as crazy an answer as possible. Once again, with no improv experience whatsoever and on one hour's rehearsal, these folks did a fantastic job in front of a crowd that loved them. Beth actually balked when it came time to get up onstage, which is a completely reasonable reaction if you've never done this before; we're friends with Beth, and I was convinced she'd enjoy it if she did get onstage, so I told her to she wasn't getting away that easy, and asked the audience if they wanted Beth to come onstage to play. They cheered her, and she got up onstage and did a great job.

And that was it. I got all the performers up onstage together and had them take a bow in front of the happy audience. Over the next few days, several people told me how funny they had found the show. People really liked it, and most people in the audience had never seen improv before. I wish I remembered more of what was said in the scenes so I could share it here, but that's not how it works. Since I was responsible for introducing things and tying it all together, my brain was taken up with that during most of the show, and although I had a great time listening and watching everyone improvise, it was more with an eye towards when to edit the scene and move onto the next one, and paying attention to the audience reaction as much as what was said.

Ann and I didn't take any pictures that night, but I'm going to try to track some down. Christy says she has a video of the entire evening, and promised me a copy once she transfers it to her Mac, so I may get video and audio. It would be great to have a record of the evening. I've never done or even seen a show quite like it. Some people who performed said they want to continue to improvise, so we might set up a regular meeting to get together and play games.

---

Technical note: for my improvisor friends (hi, Sam!) who may be curious, here's the set list from that night:

• My Bonnie (audience warmup)
  
• Actor's Nightmare 1 (Dan and Christine)
  
• Actor's Nightmare 2 (Karen and Margaret)
  
• Mr. Know It All (all)
  
• Lounge Singer (Christy and Chris J.)
  
• (break)
  
• Alphabet (Ann and Michael)
  
• Good, Bad and Ugly Advice (Karen, Beth and Christy)
  

of elephants and mice

We're in a neighborhood full of missionaries and linguists who work for a Bible-translation organization called SIL. We go to church with them on Sunday nights, use their internet after we set up an account with them, and have lots of friends in the SIL community we see regularly. It's been a huge improvement in our social life; before we moved to this side of town in January, we'd lock the door at 6pm and spend the next 14 hours alone at home, cooking and reading and maybe playing Boggle.

In church a couple of weeks ago, someone asked for volunteers to take notes at the upcoming SIL branch conference, the annual gathering of SIL people from all over Cameroon right here in Yaounde. So I signed up for a 90-minute stint, since I can type, and it seems only decent to contribute something back. It happened to be the transfer of the General Directorship of SIL Cameroon from the man who's had it since 1999 or so to the new man. There were many thank yous and tributes, and then the outgoing director got up to the podium. He talked about his career and self-doubts, expressed some concerns, and told a story:

Elephant and Mouse were best friends. One day Elephant said, “Mouse, let’s have a party!” Animals gathered from far and near.

They ate. They drank. They sang. And they danced. And nobody celebrated more and danced harder than Elephant.

After the party was over, Elephant exclaimed, “Mouse, did you ever go to a better party What a blast!”

But Mouse did not answer.

“Mouse, where are you?” Elephant called. He looked around for his friend, and then shrank back in horror.

There at Elephant’s feet lay Mouse. His little body was ground into the dirt. He had been smashed by the big feet of his exuberant friend, Elephant.

This made me sad. But given the significance of parables in the Bible, the choice of this story for a speech in a mission organization struck me on several levels. So I thought I'd pass it on. As someone with big feet, I've been thinking a lot about it since, about how uncomfortable this story made me at the time, and how out of place I feel here in a missionary community, in Africa, and often just in the world.

I wonder -- can the elephant decide not to be an elephant?

We come home is less than six months. Going to Africa is the sort of thing that looks great on paper, an adventure, a chance in a lifetime. And it is. But part of the reason it is goes way beyond the scenery, and comes from the difficult questions you have to ask yourself if you're a person from a rich country living far from home among poor people you can't easily communicate with. If you're an elephant.

photos from Douala

We arrived at the Procure Generale des Missions Catholiques guesthouse in Douala in the late afternoon, on the second day of our road trip. I took a few pictures of their beautiful chapel, and a few portraits in the late afternoon light that show some of the city of Douala in the background. The guesthouse itself was the most architecturally comfortable place we've been in Cameroon, for us -- a no-frills, rambling place with big verandas and comfortable furniture, high ceilings, and plenty of light and space. The Cameroonian sense of space, and architectural use of light, is very different -- houses tend to be much darker and more full of furniture than back home, and often have more residents as well, at least in our limited acquaintance. This place felt European. The fact that Christi and the Belgian Catholic brother who checked us in were speaking Dutch probably had something to do with that. After dinner we sat outside in the warm Douala night drinking beers and talking late.



The chapel, with afternoon light streaming in.

Chapel windows.

A chapel statue.

This is Isaac, who drove for us on this trip, on the veranda at the guesthouse. He said he had a good time.

Me and Ann.

Ann.

Christi. You can just see a bit of the pool through the rail behind her, but we didn't swim.

This is Douala, a small slice of it anway, looking toward the ocean from the veranda. Ann said it looked like West Oakland.

Self-portrait with stiff upper lip.

The veranda upstairs. There were two, one atop the other. The one downstairs had more shade and more comfortable lounge furniture. It was so nice up here, at the end of the day, that I just said in a chair and read, in spite of the hot sun.

Christi, Ann and Isaac talking as night fell, looking at the lights across the water.

the 100% guilt-free blog

No fewer than three of my friends from the US have apologized to me recently, via email, for not following this blog or emailing faithfully enough.  So I want to make something clear:

Ann and I have no expectations that anyone will or will not be reading this blog or emailing us while we're in Africa.

The blog is on the internet for all the world to see, so it's available, but whether you look is up to you.  Our families and a few friends expressed an interest in keeping up with us while we're away, and it's nice for us to have a record of our experiences, and plus it's fun to write, so that why it's here.  

It might be the kind of thing you like, if you like this kind of thing.  If you have other things to do and want to catch up with us once we get home, we're fine with that too.  We love you just the same.

incidental fauna of Cameroon

Cameroon has a diverse animal population, some of whom we met on last week's road trip.

We had to pull over to make some room for these guys.  

They took up two lanes.  We pulled over.

One of the fruit dryers had some neighbors with a small piggery, containing four or five residents.  It happened to be siesta time when we visited.  Unlike the typical Iowa hog farm, which admittedly is somewhat larger, this operation did not smell bad at all.

They were interested in us too.

They also took an interest in the camera.  

We have lots of these multicolored lizards in Yaounde too.  

This guy lived was watching us from the top of the wall in a drying operation in Douala.   The span of his legs was maybe four or five inches.  He also had a small neighbor to the right, just out of the picture here.

When Presbyterians attack!!!  (Note helpful danger warning at left).

The restaurant in Douala had a pet cat.  It kept lookout towards the road while we dined, and patrolled the roof.

New Life

[A couple of weeks ago, our pastor at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco emailed us to ask whether we might like to write something on the topic of "new life" for an upcoming church service. Ann and I worked on it together, and sent it off, and yesterday Ann's sister Miriam read it aloud on our behalf. It's about our life in Cameroon, and it's a joint effort, so here it is. (Image: chapel of Catholic Procure, Douala, Cameroon)]

Greetings, First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, and we sure do miss you! From our vantage point in Cameroon, we figure we’ve taken the concept of ‘new life’ to a whole new level. For one year, we’ve literally chosen a life that is completely new to us. New country, people, culture, language, weather, foods, work, and everyday surroundings. This halfway point in our year is a perfect time to reflect on what we’ve been noticing around and within us, and we thank you for the invitation to do so with you. If you want to respond to this in any way, feel free to email us!

Poverty, AIDS, war, famine, corruption…the news most Americans get from Africa is not exactly brimming with resurrection and hope. But good news doesn't sell newspapers, as the saying goes, so maybe this says more about the media than about Africa. Where are the signs of new life in Cameroon, whose government is consistently recognized among the most corrupt in the world? The joke goes that they were voted the most corrupt country in the world, but paid to be moved to second place.

We're happy to say that in actuality, we see signs of resistance and resurrection here every day. Yaoundé, the capital city where we make our home, is bursting with new life and hope. Our neighborhood is near the southern edge of town, where the hillsides are dotted with half-finished houses, places where people hope to establish themselves and their families, each one a concrete investment toward the future. People flock to the city from surrounding regions, and from the dry deserts of the Far North, all hoping to find a better life in Yaoundé. There is a shadow side to this new life, as the city becomes increasingly crowded, crime increases, and there is never enough paid work for all. But the hope and determination that draw people here are beautiful, powerful forces. Like many others in Africa, Yaounde is a city of dreams.

We also see new life in the green and growing things that cover the immensely fertile regions of Cameroon. The markets spill over with fruits and vegetables and spices grown in the soil here, and even our urban area is sprouting with mango and papaya trees, banana and plantain trees, the huge leafy plants in the swamp behind our house, the riot of orange flowers in our backyard. Boys hack away roadside grass with sharp machetes, and land owners burn tangles of brush, but it all grows back eagerly. Even now, the rainy season is starting, and nature is staging an extravagant show of new life all around us. The glorious explosive rolls of thunder we lie in bed and listen to, so rare back home in San Francisco, remind us of our childhoods in Michigan, and herald new growth all around us.

The people we meet and the work we see going on here also resist the forces of death and discouragement and create more signs of resurrection. The neighborhood where we currently house-sit is full of expatriates and locals working together to translate the Bible into over 250 local languages. While we might not agree completely with the theology that motivates them, their work is important and empowering for the speakers of all these languages, as they work with local people to teach literacy skills and to capture African languages for the future, often writing them down for the first time. New life is breathed into each language as it is studied, written, preserved, dignified, and used in new ways. And those who do the work seem to find real fulfillment and positive collaboration in what they do.

RELUFA, the network of Cameroonian non-profits with which we work, also engages in numerous life-giving projects. We have some amazing and visionary colleagues determined to work for justice in their country, even when the odds seem insurmountable. Meeting beneficiaries of RELUFA’s micro-credit program, we’ve been impressed with their creativity and resourcefulness, and the way access to small loans gives new life and hope to people’s activities and aspirations. Granaries in the north help villages save their millet harvest to eat during leaner times instead of selling it off to speculators and then buying it back at a huge markup when times are lean. Lawyers and other advocates work hard to hold logging, mining, and oil companies accountable for how they treat the land and its people by confronting them with the human cost of their activities, and by persuading them to open their books to international public scrutiny. These truly are small resurrections in the face of death-dealing forces like poverty, hunger, injustice and exploitation.

Of course, the new life we notice here in Cameroon is not only around us, but within us too. As volunteer workers in a culture with a very relaxed attitude toward time, we find ourselves removed from the constant feeling of hurry that’s built in to our San Francisco life. For the most part, it’s been really lovely, allowing us to take time to read widely, cook meals together, explore the reaches of our neighborhood on foot, and (perhaps for the first time in our adult lives) get enough sleep – all the time! This unique opportunity to slow down for a year is definitely very renewing for us. We hope to bring home some enduring lessons about the value of living slowly.

Another effect we notice is our ability to be more present in our interactions with others, and to truly take time for conversations and social interactions. Everyone does this here, even foreigners, and people aren’t always thinking about rushing off to the next thing on their agenda. Although it took us time to get used to it, we now appreciate the fact that building relationships and interacting with others is an important part of life here, even of work and business.

Our relationship to each other also gets more time here, and consequently more growth. Here our work, home life, and social activities overlap almost completely, so conflicts and communication issues which would be easier to ignore in our busier and more divergent lives back home are pulled into the light. It’s hard work sometimes, but also a wonderful opportunity to face and deal with these things, getting to know each other and our marriage more fully in the process.

Another important area of growth for us has come through the challenges of adjusting to our ‘new life’ in Cameroon. We are certainly out of our comfort zones in various ways, whether it’s our inability to communicate well in French, the constant attention that comes with being a racial minority, increased safety concerns, personal requests for money and favors that would be out of place back home, or any number of other adjustments to an unfamiliar culture. While the everyday struggles of most Cameroonians serve as a good reality check, making our problems seem petty in comparison, it has been good for us to acknowledge our own struggles and accompany each other through them, widening our horizons in the process.

On a broader scale we are faced with gaping disparities of wealth every day, with the harsh realities of how many people of the world live. Our privilege is supported by complicated systems of exploitation that contribute to the misery of the poor, and the lack of simple solutions and clear courses of action is painfully clear. But even hard truths like these are laced with resurrection for us, in that we don’t want to give up. Being here has brought to life for us how important it is to engage with our world, and to act out of hope so that hope can remain alive. It's said that we can truly change only ourselves, so educating ourselves is a gift to the world, because from this can flow a lifetime of informed engagement and hope.

Finally, stepping out of our usual surroundings and into this new life has sharpened our perspective on what we’ve chosen to leave behind for a year. The relationships, the natural beauty, the food, the cultural opportunities, our spiritual home at First Mennonite, and the general vibrancy of San Francisco (as well as a mean temperature of about 60 degrees, as far as Chris is concerned) …our appreciation of all this grows deeper across the distance. There is much that we are excited to return to! When we do return, shaped by our experiences here in Cameroon, we hope to find ways to hold these new thoughts and spaces that this year is opening for us, to bring new life to the way we live and maybe to our community too.

We love you. Peace.

fruit dryer photos, from the road trip

These are pictures of the fruit-drying operations we visited on our road trip last week. They are all run by small groups of 3-6 people who are members of TerrEspoir. The drying is done in large wooden ovens filled with racks on which fruit is dried, heated by the same gas (propane?) that everyone runs their stoves and ovens with here. All the dryers have received training and startup funds from TerrEspoir, who also sets the prices at which they buy fresh fruit and sell dried. TerrEspoir places orders, conducts inspections, and handles delivery of the fruit to Switzerland. There is very little market for dried fruit in Cameroon, because of the cost.

In uniform, in front of a dryer. That small white hose runs into a gas container you can just see behind her.

The inside of that same dryer, with bananas on the rack. Normally all the racks are filled, but this is the tail end of a drying order, because we visited towards the end of the week, and deliveries are on Friday.

Dried bananas. In a bucket.

A larger dryer at another group. These are three of the six members we met. Note gas cannister again. The inspector from TerrEspoir recommended putting the cannister outside, so this group in working on running a line for that, and constructing an enclosure outside the building.

The inside of that big oven. Bananas again.

Work uniforms, hats and a scale from one of the operations.

That red circle on the right is a chute by which fresh fruit comes into the building. The drying facilities are separated into different stations, so that the fresh fruit does not come into contact with the dried product.

Christi, our coworker, who works with RELUFA on behalf of the Presbyterian Church USA.

Another group of dryers. This is the other side of that red chute from a couple of pictures ago. The TerrEspoir inspector also recommended those glass louvres in the window, which also has mosquito netting. The concrete sinks are for washing fruit.

A small digital scale, and the sealer used on the bags once they are filled with fruit. TerrEspoir ships in these bags from Switzerland, and all the dryers use them. They label the back with a lot number, a date, and the name of their group. The front part of the bag has a window that displays the product -- this one, obviously, is empty.

Tools of the trade. That doodad next to the blue glove is for coring pineapples.

Two members of another group, and a daughter, along with two drying ovens.

Your intrepid bloggers, traversing Africa to bring you the latest from the front lines of dried fruit production. Ann is working with Christi on fair-trade research, and took notes during this trip, so I was on photography duty.

A member of another drying group. You can see a basin and some gas bottles behind her. That item at the lower right is a stainless-steel work surface.

Here she is again with some of their products. Those plastic buckets are filled with various dried fruits yet to be bagged. They sent us on our way with some dried pineapple and mango. Dried mangoes are the best, and it's almost impossible to find them in the US with no sugar added, which essentially turns them into candy. The eventual goal of the fair-trade research is to sell them in the US market under a fair-trade label, and as far as we've been able to determine, there is no competition yet.

If you've never eaten a mango, it tastes like a combination of a peach with the smell of a pine tree. The dried version is chewy and tastes even more intense.