radio silence

Not much to post lately. We are in a routine, such as it is. We go into work a few days a week, via a 45-minute cab ride through town. We work there. We come home. Our social life is active now; we haven't had a dull evening in some time. Last night we went out with a few SIL people in the neighborhood, including a Brit, to watch Manchester United and Chelsea battle out the European football championship. I had meant to take pictures but forgot the camera. The Cameroonians in the bar were raucously enthusiastic, and we had a lot of fun. Tonight we're getting together with a few people in the missionary community to play and sing some bluegrass music. Tomorrow we go into the office again. I'm writing a videogame for the Presbyterian Church's assembly next month. Ann is working on articles and setting up the fair trade program. And we're both working on some changes to RELUFA's website. There hasn't been much new to tell lately, but we'll be doing some traveling next month when Ann's folks come to visit, to the mountains in the west. And I'll try to get some pictures up soon. There is plenty more excitement to come.

church, braids, beasties links

I stayed home, a little under the weather yesterday morning, while Ann went to church with Karen. Karen got some pictures and wrote up a blog post about the experience. So if you're curious about Ann's trip to church yesterday, check it out here.

Also, Mandi is a SIL pilot here. She recently participated in an airborne wildlife survey, and got some fun pictures. That's here.

She also got her hair braided, a five-hour procedure here that a few other friends have gone through as well. That's here.

Fellow ultimate frisbee player Brad really liked Mandi's hair. I'm encouraging him to get his done, along with his beard. He'd look like a Babylonian king.

internet outage

My family had a moped when I was a kid, a yellow Motobecane (a French brand) that looked like a little 50cc motorcycle. It had wire side-baskets. My Mom used it to go to the grocery store sometimes, a brown grocery bag in each basket as she zoomed home in a white 3/4 "jet-pilot" helmet. A few years later I used it for my paper route. You couldn't really get all the Sunday papers for the route in those 2 baskets, but you could jam quite a few in there, and it sure beat carrying all of them on your back. My Dad (who to his everlasting credit would get up on Sundays and help me out with deliveries) has a friend who thanks his years working for the postal service for his back trouble; I sometimes wonder if my slouchy posture owes something to the Sunday edition of the Grand Rapids Press.

The moped developed a compression problem with its little one-cylinder, 2-cycle engine. You had to pedal to start the thing up, and eventually it wouldn't start. But I discovered by experimenting with it that I could still get it started if I rotated the flywheel with my hand to the point of maximum resistance. No idea why this worked, but it did.

I was thinking about that moped today. I got up here to CTC to use the internet, and the proxy server is down. My browser tells me that the proxy server is refusing connections. This has been a problem on and off here for several days. Email still works, so I'm posting this via email. But the net is down.

Or mostly down, anyway. I immediately tried bypassing the proxy server and connecting directly to the net, but that didn't work. And then, on a whim, I tried connecting to facebook.com with https instead of http. And it went through. So, oddly, http won't work with the proxy but https will. Almost nothing on the net that I use requires https (a higher-security protocol most often used for passwords and purchases), but it turns out that a little bit of facebook does.

Rotate the flywheel a bit. Who knows? It might work.

two recipes

A propos of nothing in particular...

1. Egg sandwiches, as sold up the street by a Senegalese guy who runs a little store. No idea if any Africans eat these, but he sells lots of them to the expats who work for SIL nearby.

ingredients:
- cooked spaghetti noodles
- one or two eggs
- large hamburger roll (aka "gateau" en Francais)
- Maggi seasoning cube (a combination of MSG, spices and perhaps some dried bouillon)

to prepare:
- reheat noodles in a small skillet with a little oil
- crumble Maggi cube into noodles
- break eggs into noodles and scramble together
- when eggs finished, scoop final product onto roll

wrap in small black plastic bag, sell for 400 central African francs, a bit less than a US dollar.

Very tasty. Size varies a bit; the guy working today makes them a bit smaller, about the size of a big restaurant hamburger. The usual guy, who I think is the owner, makes them about the size of a Chicago softball.



2. Folere smoothies

ingredients:
- 1 liter folere (a cold sweetened beverage made by boiling dried hibiscus flowers with sugar)
- 2 trays ice cubes (made with filtered water)
- 1 cup sweetened ginger beverage (contains lots of pureed ginger, sugar and some water)
[update: also 1 mango, diced; thanks for the reminder, LR!]

to prepare: mix in blender and serve

These are really, really good. We found the ginger beverage at Mahima, the grocery store downtown. Julia makes folere every week or two. It's pronounced fo-luh-ray, and actually has accents on one or more of the e's when correctly spelled.

There's a sweetened yogurt beverage here, also sold at the egg-sandwich place, called khosam. Next time we'll probably throw some of that in the smoothies too.

Food is love. Or a kind of love, anyway.

Ann and Karen enjoy folere-ginger smoothies
photo credit: the Laughing Rover

portraits from the north

Here are a few of the people we met up north on our recent trip.

friendship

I finished reading all of African Friends and Money Matters, by David Marantz, which Kate, Brian and Dave were kind enough to include in their January shipment to us of things we neglected to bring. It was published by SIL, but nobody here had a copy handy.

The book explores lots of topics, but the title gives some clues about where Westerners often run into trouble in Africa. It's been helpful to me in understanding some unfamiliar and difficult things. If you like the book, you can find it on Amazon. It was recommended by a friend who worked in Zambia for awhile as the one essential thing to read before living here as a Westerner. I second that.

Interpersonal relations between Africans and Westerners in Africa may be friendly and even cordial, and typically are, but developing significant friendships on a personal level requires considerable effort. For many Africans it is difficult to forget history, the relationships of power that the white man represented and still represents, the economic disparities, the color of skin, and perhaps above all the great cultural differences. Of these the most significant one is the important place that material resources are given in African friendships.

25. [for Africans] A network a friends is a network of resources. A disinterested friendship is something without sense. It is only natural to expect material benefit from friendships. To a Westerner this comes close to buying friendship, or of seeking and having friends for what one can get out of them.

25W. Disinterested friendship is the ideal in the West. Any friendship that includes material considerations is suspect.

It is helpful to consider several factors that lead to the [Westerner's] doubt about relationships. First, when these questions arise, it is good to remember that the Westerner and the African live on very different socioeconomic levels, with the African considering the Westerner to be rich and himself to be poor, with much cultural behavior flowing from these differences. Second, many Africans are ready to use casual meetings or acquaintances as a means to gain personal profit.... Very different relationships can be built with [affluent Africans] as socioeconomic equals. In these relationships it is often the African who represent higher economic and social classes than do the Westerners.

-- however --

28. Visiting [by Africans] is concentrated on friends and acquaintances who are actively part of a person's economic network.

and

29. Most [social] networking [by Africans] is done horizontally or "up" and seldom "down" socially or economically.

So opportunities for egalitarian relationships, which is to say a real personal friendship in Western terms, are rare.

This may seem cold written out on the page like this. But it's a fact of life here, and something I've been struggling with a lot lately. Ann doesn't, much, except on my behalf. We have very different personal boundaries, and some of what we want from this trip differs as well. Plus I'm male, 6'4" tall, my hair buzzed short for comfort in the heat, and older than she is, so perhaps we elicit different expectations. People who look like me have the power and the money, to be blunt, and Ann is a woman, which here tends to mean not much of either, alas.

I'm clear on why I'm here and what I'm doing, but I'm often unclear on how to respond to people on an individual level, especially people with whom I don't already share a work or social context. People here have lots and lots of friends, according to Maranz, and are always trying to enlarge their circle of acquaintances, especially upwards as clients to patrons from whom they can benefit materially, relationships then maintained by frequent and unannounced home visits (something mercifully rare in our experience). I tend to take my time getting to know people past a certain point of cordiality, I value my privacy, and I avoid people who take advantage of my friendliness to impose on me.

I am a bad fit for Africa. The positive way to formulate this insight is that I have a lot to learn from living here.

None of this is a shock to me. I have been to Africa before, and I at least skimmed Maranz's book before we came here in October, so I had some idea of how it would be. Our work relationships at RELUFA are friendly partnerships free of these misunderstandings. And Ann is untroubled by this. But it's still perplexing for me to know how to just accept all this, and to know how to deal with people when it comes up. But if the Devil's in the details, God is too.

quotes

We do a lot of reading here, especially me; you can see the list over on the right-hand sidebar if you scroll down a bit. It wasn't really the point of the trip to come here and read, but we have a wonderfully flexible schedule and more time here than at home, and it is one of the best things in life, after all.

Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice. (Beryl Markham, West with the Night, 1942)

Our friend David recommended Markham's memoir and loaned it to me. He and his wife Danielle have just left town. We were just getting to know them, and were sorry to see them go. They went up north, and are not planning on returning to Yaounde when they leave later this year, so we may not get to see them again. The transient nature of the SIL community is like our urban San Francisco church, where people come and go like this, sometimes (it seems) in almost no time at all.

Some of our friends back home are having a rough time right now, and one of them mailed something around that I really liked:

When we honestly ask which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness... makes it clear that whatever happens in the external world, being present to each other is what really matters. (Henri J.M. Nouwen)

Whatever else we're accomplishing here, or not, we're present, for a little while anyway.