so Christy had this wig and some funny glasses...

Our friend Christy, itinerant teacher, had a farewell party before leaving town for six weeks. She had a wig and some glasses at her place, and one thing led to another, and people had cameras, and then Karen made a collage:

I Love Shopping!

For people who know me well, the title of this post may come as a shock. (And for people who follow this blog, the fact that I'm posting at all may come as a shock...) But here in Cameroon, I really do love shopping, specifically for food at Yaounde's main food market, Marche Mfoundi. Julia generally buys all the household fruit, vegetables, meat, etc. there, and once I started going with her several months ago, I never looked back. We go to market about once every two weeks, and it's like the best farmers market you've ever seen, but BIGGER and way more entertaining. Let me describe a typical trip to the Marche, along with some pictures I took there yesterday.

Our first stop is almost always our carrot man, which means he usually ends up changing the large bills that I start with. (The ATM gives 10,000 CFA bills; most of our purchases are 500 CFA or less.) He is very good natured about it, and every once in a while I try to give him some 'small money' instead of the big bills.
Mr. Carrot selects our pile of carrots and puts it in a bag. Julia's pregnant belly protrudes into the picture from the right. In the background, you can get some sense of what a wonderland this place is...
Our next stop was our onion lady, from whom we usually buy our onions and garlic. She said I could take her picture as long as I give her a copy. Hmmm, we use many onions, so I should probably follow through. Here, she bags up our onions.
Onions grow in the far north of Cameroon, and are trucked down to Yaounde in giant sacks. It's onion season now, so they are very inexpensive. Each of the smaller piles (still good-sized onions) is only 100 CFA, or about 25 cents. Yesterday we bought 2 big piles (eight very large onions) for about a dollar fifty.
Then we stopped and bought some beans (we got the black beans near the back in the photo) so that Julia can make her delicious beans & rice with plantains. So cheap and so good!
Our tomato lady bags up our allotment, while a hopeful 'porteur' waits in the background. Part of the market experience is being constantly assailed by young men who want to carry your things for you, either by hand or in a wheelbarrow. There are also lots of young boys trying to sell you extra sacks for your purchases. For some reason, there are also aggressive roving salesmen pushing leeks and black/white peppercorns. Because I'm a whitey, we get about five times the normal attention. Julia is very good to put up with all this!
There are lots of spices and such for sale, most of which I have no idea what they are, let alone how to use them. Some of them smell absolutely amazing! Also, those things on the right that look like rocks...they're rocks. Certain minerals are used in preparing certain foods.
Now it's time for some fruit, non? Look at those fine watermelons and giant grapefruits!
This is our main fruit lady, Maro. She sells great papayas and the most amazing pineapples, which we buy every time we go. She was very amused that I wanted to take photos, and I got this great shot of her laughing.
But really, she is a serious businesswoman. Here she is with her merchandise.
See? We're pals.
Nearby, Julia checks out some impressive avocados.
I'm gonna buy one of these soon, because they're coming into season. In French, it's called a corossol. No idea what it's called in English, but I've never seen these before coming here! It's a fruit, and we once had some tasty jam made from it. I was triumphant to actually discover what the fruit looked like.
The ever-present hot pepper, used in most of the cuisine here. They are so beautiful, and a whole section of the market is devoted almost exclusively to them. They have such a lovely and exciting smell, perfuming all the air around.
Our last stop is usually this woman, for lettuce (so it won't get crushed beneath other purchases) and anything else we've missed along the way. Isn't this a gorgeous picture?
Here is OUR porteur, Emmanuel. He is usually hanging around near where Maro sells her fruits, and once we meet up with him, the other guys leave us alone. You can't see his friendly smile in this picture, because it's hidden by his hat. Take my word for it, he has a friendly smile.

So that's the Marche, really a great highlight of our time here for me. And what you see here is such a small portion of it...the guys holding live chickens upside down by the feet, the piles of mangoes and citrus, the dried fish, women slicing bunches of greens into fine shreds with sharp knives, the dried flowers that we use to make juice, the fragrant heaps of basil and parsley, and my own personal fantasy come true: immense sacks of ginger root! I'm looking forward to showing this amazing place to some visitors later this month, so they can see even more why I love shopping.

Grease at ASOY

Last night we went with the Boyds to attend the opening night of the American School of Yaounde's production of the musical Grease. Watching African schoolkids perform an American musical was something new. The kids had a blast, and the audience was enthusiastic and appreciative. Lots of fun. Here are a few pictures.

Danny Zuko's pals.

The cast sings and dances.

Danny meets the new and improved Sandi. Danny was the one American in the cast.

The cast performs the closing number.


The show runs today and closes tomorrow afternoon. They worked on it all year. The performance was at a theater in town, and even had a live band. It seems fair to assume this is the one student production of an American musical that we'll be seeing on this trip. But you never know.

commuting by taxi

I thought it might be interesting to share a bit about our commute. We wrote about taxis once awhile ago, I think, but the subject never gets old. Plus it's an almost-daily part of our life here.

We take a taxi into our office two or three days out of the workweek. We chose not to own a car here, because of the expense and the potential legal complications in case of an accident; my friend Paul has a brother who got into a car accident in Spain many years ago, and when the police arrived the crowd sided with the other guy and they took Paul's brother to jail. His parents had to wire him a stupendous amount of money just so he could come home. This story has stuck with me.

I'm not sure my parents would send the money.

(Sorry Mom, I couldn't resist; just wondering whether you're reading the blog.)

Anyway, since we don't have a car, we do what lots of people here do, and take cabs. Our friends the Boyds have warned us that they consider this unsafe, and recommend we find a regular driver we know and trust. But we've talked to other people who have taken cabs (during daylight hours, as we do) in Yaounde for years without any trouble; one single woman who teaches at Rainforest has been doing so without incident for 10 years. So we decided to travel the way most people do here, instead of being apart from Cameroonians in one of the few ways we can choose to share in life here a bit more.

It's been very interesting. Cabs are shared here, among random people. Someone who wants a cab will just flag one down; the cab slows to a crawl, and the person calls out their destination, and maybe an offered price as well. Standard cab fare in Yaounde is 200 FCFA, about 50 cents US. If the rider wants any other price, either becuase it's a short ride, or they want to get a really far ride that costs extra, they'll call out a price along with their destination. Getting downtown is 200 FCFA from where we live. Work is about twice as far, so we offer 800 FCFA for the both of us. So there we are, in quartier Mvan where we live, at the side of the road in the morning, both with our backpacks, flagging down a cab. Often there are one or two other people in the shade where we stand to do this. The cab slows, and one of us calls out "Etoi-Meki, deux place, huit cent" -- carrefour Etoi-Meki by where we work, two of us, for 800 francs, or about two bucks.

This is a lot of money, even though it's a long way, and we usually find someone pretty quick. Coming home is another story; there's a lot more traffic at the end of the day then there is at the late-morning hour we usually wander into the office, so it's harder to get a cab, especially up in the busier neighborhood where we work. So if I'm flagging down the cab, I offer a thousand francs up front. This is all of an extra fifty cents, but it usually gets us a cab pretty quick. Otherwise we can stand there trying to flag one down for ten or fifteen minutes.

The cabs themselves are banged-up Japanese cars, almost exclusively. I assume that people buy them used; Valery told me that you can get a used car here for a few hundred dollars. They are always yellow, if official; I think there are official red ones too that are for longer-haul operation, but we always take yellow ones. The driver's official license with picture is always suspended from the rear-view mirror, and if you're in one after dark, the cabin light is always on, and frequently disco-colored. The cars range in size from an old Toyota Carina, which in the US is a Camry, down to a Toyota Starlet, which may be the Tercel. These are 80s models, judging from their boxy shape; definitely not the roomy middle-age person's Camry of today. So there is often not much headroom. Combine this with some drivers' penchant for dropping the seat way back in what I cannot help but think of as a gangsta lean, and you end up with very little space in the back seat sometimes. I am often folded up pretty tight, my knees up, my upper body folded downward over my heavy computer backpack as I look sideways out the window at Yaounde going by. It's often better than this, though; today there was little headroom, but lots of legroom, so I could just slouch. There are three people in the back seat, in a full cab (keep in mind this may be the back seat of 25-year-old Tercel), and another three in front, in the bucket seats. The two in the front are stacked on top of each other, literally. No space is wasted. Nobody seems to mind, and often the cabs aren't full.

We go a long way, so people get in and out for shorter rides as we make our way across town, a trip that takes us anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, but usually somewhere in between. People often fall into conversation in the cabs, and it makes me wish I could understand more French than I do, the real fluid French that francophones speak with each other. Today the woman in the back with us got into an animated conversation with the two guys up front about schooling, but I couldn't follow it. They were giving her some opinions and advice.

The drivers are collegial with each other. We've never once heard a cab driver actually yell, ever, at anyone. They murmur (it's not even muttering, being free of hostility) when cut off on the road by another cabbie, or by someone deciding to merge across their nose and hold them up. Sometimes they'll pull up next to another cab and borrow a few francs, or say hello.

Taking taxis to work has been a fun, if sometimes uncomfortable, way to get to know Yaounde, since they'll take a few different routes between our home and work. And it's fun to pass through the streets almost unnoticed, this way, in contrast to all the attention and stares we get sometimes when we walk around on foot. Nobody here with money walks around on the street. Our Cameroonian friend Isaac told me once that when people see us do that as foreigners, they just assume we're too cheap to pay for a cab.

Taking pictures of taxi drivers and their passengers we don't know seems like a bad idea. So here, instead, is a picture of a pizza we made recently, modeled by Ann and our friend Karen:

Cameroonian Literature in English, and brief news

Every so often someone who doesn't even know us but has an interest in Cameroon finds our blog. So this is for you, if you're one of those people, or someone we know who is also interested in Cameroon in general.

There is a blog about Cameroonian English-language literature! You can find it at http://anglocamlit.blogspot.com

I found it via the news feed for the term "Cameroon" that I set up on Google News, which fed me a link today to a story about it.

I haven't yet spent much time reading it. Caveat lector. But at first glance, it looks interesting, and certainly relevant to Cameroon.

* * * * *

It's raining. I'm at CTC, across the road from our house, checking email. We're having a few people over for music tonight, including Phil and Cathy one last time before they leave town tomorrow. I'm working today on writing a videogame called ScholAfrica, which we hope to present at a big Presbyterian Church USA meeting next month; if we manage to get it online, I'll post a link to it here. Then I need to polish up the Microsoft Excel training session I'm presenting (in French, ulp) at the Eglise Presbyterian Camerounaise (EPC) in a couple of weeks, with help from Jeff and Ann. Tomorrow Jeff and I go into the EPC offices to check out the machines we'll be using. Other projects in the works include finding a server for the microfinance database application I wrote, and some redesign work on the RELUFA website at relufa.org. We've gotten busier with our volunteering, that's for sure. Tomorrow night is the high-school musical at ASOY, the American School of Yaounde. We're going with the Boyds, our friends and coworkers, and their kids. The show ASOY is doing is the American musical "Grease".

Ann has some great pictures of a couple of recent interviews she did with people connected with RELUFA; one is with a lady who dyes cloth, another with a lady who provides a lunch service in the quartier where our office is located. If you know Ann, consider sending her an email asking her to post these. :)

And here's a picture of Ann a friend of ours shot. It's blurry, but I love it anyway:

ultimate!

We play a weekly Ultimate game here in Yaounde with people from the SIL community, on their field. Here's a few pictures from last Sunday:

Steve, Marta and Ann.

I love this picture and wish I could publish it bigger here, but you'll just have to ask to see it blown up when we get home. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get an action shot of an Ultimate game with a little snapshot digital camera, because of the shutter delay.

Karen, who injured her knee playing a few weeks ago but gamely showed up to watch, and Regan.

Beth (married to Steve), Harry, and Ken (married to Marta), with teenage friend.

Anna, Amy and friend. These were some of my teammates that day; we had so many people that we played three teams of six (this was the most players ever) and rotated teams every three points; I got these pictures when we were on the sidelines waiting our turn.

music nite!

We got together with friends last night for some music. Here are a few pictures.

Ann cooked Thai peanut sauce and roasted eggplant last night before we left. Note whiskey bottle at upper right, with yellow label. We are not big whiskey drinkers; this is actually a peanut bottle. For some reason, all the peanuts in Yaounde are sold in old whiskey bottles. Someone here is drinking lots of whiskey.

This is Beth. She hosted last night. Her apartment is near our place, in an apartment complex called Cabtal.

Phil and Cathy. Phil can play anything, and Cathy can sing it. We met them last month, and had them over to our place along with another guitarist named Dan, who has since returned to the village where he works. That first night was mostly bluegrass, but we sang all sorts of things last night: Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Beatles, blues, hymns, and lots of old-time gospel numbers from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, with Cathy and Ann singing beautiful harmony. Alas, Phil and Cathy are leaving Yaounde next week and won't return til after we leave the country. We may get one more music night together before they leave, if they have time.

Karen. She hurt her knee a couple of weeks ago; thus the borrowed crutch. It doesn't seem to have gotten her down though.

Me and Ann.

Pam, Phil, me, Ann and Cathy. Pam also hurt her leg. She has the other crutch from the set Karen's came from. We met at Beth's last night so she and Karen wouldn't have far to walk, since they all live at Cabtal.