July 27, 2006

I have a stalker.

Jean-Claude, the radio journalist I met when Bec and I first arrived in Cameroon, gave my phone number to his sister, who is visiting during the break from her studies in France. She calls at least once a day. If the call doesn’t come through, then a text message does. I’ve never met this woman before, and I’m starting to get annoyed at the persistence.

I’m also annoyed at Jean-Claude, but not just for this. He’s now decided that I should help him arrange a major conference involving all the journalists in Yaoundé and every government spokesperson. Specifically, he wants me to rent the hall. What?

Jean-Claude has been very helpful and very welcoming, but now the other shoe has dropped. Now he’s started asking me for things – things I can’t begin to give, nor want to.

I was describing this to an American friend who is helping to develop a digital recording studio in Yaoundé. He said that what usually happens to him is that his friends ask him for something, he says he either can or cannot give what has been asked for, and they move on with the friendship. Last night, I met a Cameroonian guy who’s unemployed and has been for a couple of months. He was playing ultimate Frisbee with a group of Europeans and Americans (including me. What’s happened?). He asked me if I had any little jobs for him to do. I said no. We continued talking about how much fun we just had and said see you next week. End of story.

Dennis, my musical friend, says what’s going on with Jean-Claude is abnormal. I think I may have to end the relationship.

….

I should have a CNS story posted soon about a proposed new election law in Cameroon. Big Paul says he’s going to look into making the electoral process more transparent. I’ll believe it when I see it. After all, he is our president yesterday, today and tomorrow.

But I’ve been thinking more about what Big Paul is. Is he the Godfather or is he the figurehead for a group of powerful interests.

I interviewed the head of the Catholic Church’s Peace and Justice Commission. According to Prof. Pierre Titi Nwel, Big Paul is the big man. He’s the one pulling all the strings and the one who makes all the decisions. The professor went so far as to call him “le parrain” – the godfather in French – and held up a book called “Les parrains de la corruption” – “The Godfathers of Corruption.” From now on, I will refer to Big Paul as the Godfather.

So, that’s two-to-one in favor of the Godfather being the Godfather. Two Cameroonians who are in the know say he is the power, the Italian who monitors the government says the Godfather is merely the face of a wider system.

Is it possible they could both be right?

….

I’ve been amazed at how Cameroon, isolated in Central Africa, ends up at the center of world events. It’s sort of like Canadians and Australians. Whenever something big happens in the world, you’ll hear that a Canadian or Australian was somewhere in the vicinity. Usually they’re not really doing very much to be a part of events. They’re just there. For example, I heard this morning that Australia was pulling its troops out of south Lebanon. Who knew there were Australians there? And why don’t they just sit everyone down, by a few rounds and sort this whole situation out over a few beers. What, you say Hezbollah doesn’t drink? Fine, buy them a couple of Cokes. But I think Australians could get Hezbollah to drink beer. They can be quite persuasive.

Anyway, back to Cameroon.

Do you know who the president of the U.N. Security Council was when the U.S. and Britain went through their kabuki production for an Iraq war resolution? Cameroon.

Do you know which world leader was on a state visit to the U.S. when that war had its inevitable beginning? The Godfather.

Do you know the nationality of the head of the U.N. delegation in Rwanda during the genocide – the entire delegation, not just the peacekeeping force? He was a former foreign minister of Cameroon. And he hates Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian (see, there they are) general in charge of the peacekeeping force. He accuses the general of taking sides in the slaughter. Like this is a bad thing.

By the way, at the end of the Rwandan genocide, when the French army was protecting the surviving leaders of the genocidal regime, they cut a deal with Cameroon – and possibly other francophone countries – to give an easy landing to their friends. My Rwandan friends all say that Cameroon is filled with powerful genocidaires. Emmanuel, the AP correspondent I met last week, says at least one and possibly others have met grizzly, unexplained ends here. But no one knows for sure what happened.

I have an idea. The rumor in Kigali, and I have no reason to say this is definitely true or not, is that the Mossad trained the Rwandan intelligence services after the 1994 genocide. They have a little experience tracking down war criminals and taking them out in questionable fashion.

July 24, 2006

There are more signs up around Yaoundé, but two stick out.

Before I tell you those, another correction. In my last post, I translated a sign to say, “The RPDC says no to corruption and misuse of funds.” Actually, a better translation is, “The RPDC says no to corruption and embezzlement.” Methinks thou dost protest too much.

Yesterday, Rebecca and I went with our friend Matteo to the French sports club. Matteo and I played tennis and Rebecca went for a swim. I know, I know. I thought the same thing too. I drink lattes and have tennis dates. Next thing you know I’ll be tying sweaters around my neck. Yes, friends, I am a yuppie.

Matteo is the West Africa regional director of the Publish What You Pay Coalition, which works at getting international companies to clearly state what they pay to governments in the region to make sure that no money is skimmed off the top. As he drove us, I saw a sign that said, “Paul Biya: Notre President Hier, Aujourd’hui, Demain.” That I can translate. “Paul Biya: Our President Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” All the three of us could do was laugh at the sign, which was a white banner spread across one of the main roads in Yaoundé. There was another one on the other side of the roundabout. So much for democracy.

The other sign we saw, which is up all the time, really is a problem. It is an anti-AIDS billboard that is designed badly. The intent is to say the country needs healthy people, so men and women should make good choices. Fine. Except that they way they designed it, the sign actually reads “The Nation Needs AIDS” etc., etc. To top it off AIDS is in massive red letters that dwarf the other smaller, white letters on the board.

But anyway, back to Big Paul. Last week I made him sound like the big power here, the man in control. He may well be. He’s been in power for well over 20 years. They’re going to have to wheel his stiff corpse out of the presidential palace, which looks like something out of Star Wars.

But is he Don Corleone? Or is he actually a simpleton being propped up as a convenient figurehead by powerful interests who only care about their own power, like George W. Bush? Is there a Biyaism? Or is Cameroon simply Mobutu-light? Mobutu was the famously corrupt ruler of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Among other things, he was famous for pink champagne and leopard-skin hats. There’s no word on whether he had a thing for Cadillacs and high-heeled boots with fish tanks in the heels. Biya, it must be said, is a better dresser. He goes for French-tailored suits.

I felt a little sheepish about asking Matteo, who grew up outside Rome, whether Biya was Don Corleone….

One of Biya’s strongest opponents was an author called Mongo Beti. I say called rather than named because he was not given the name Mongo Beti at birth. You’ve got me what the French name was, but I will find out.

Beti was a world-renowned author and social critic who emigrated from Cameroon in the 60s and returned in the 1990s. He became a thorn in Biya’s side until he died in 2001. One of the things he did upon his return to Cameroon was open a book shop in Yaoundé that was intended to distribute the kinds of literature Biya didn’t want sold. Beti was so well known that Biya couldn’t touch him. And he still can’t. I went to the bookstore, “La librairie des peoples noirs” (The Black People’s Bookstore) today. I had a nice conversation with the proprietor, Chantal, and she is working on finding me the phone numbers of the major authors living in Cameroon.

Maybe they’ll be able to answer just who is Paul Biya.

July 21, 2006

Because this blog is all about transparency and honesty, I am duty-bound to provide a correction.

In my last entry I wrote about Bec’s “Patron Saint of Recklessness”. Well, I got the gist of it wrong. What Bec meant is that she knew all sorts of folks in Central Asia who did all sorts of stupid things. But they lived, so she assumed that there was a supernatural being watching over them. Until she started noticing many of them bore scars, and they all had friends and family who didn’t make it when they did the same mystifying thing.

So I didn’t get it 100 percent right, but I don’t think I got it 100 percent wrong, either. Why? Well, if Bec was able to talk to these people and notice the scars, something was probably looking over them as they took incredible risks with their lives simply to get from one place to another. …

Things here are going. I met the Associated Press correspondent for Cameroon yesterday. He’s Cameroonian, and he gave me a good understanding of how little I understand about the country. Basically, Big Paul here is really Big Paul. And if you cross him, bad stuff is on its way. Plus, business is so opaque and corrupt in Cameroon that many Western news agencies don’t even ask for reporting on it, even though there are serious privatizations of public assets going on. In the end, a lot of money ends up in the pocket of a government minister, or a former government minister who has finished his time on “the farm”, if you catch my meaning.

Of course, a banner on the main Bastos road advertising the ruling party congress being held today says “The RDPC Says No to Corruption and Misuse of Funds”. Priceless…

I’ve noticed that having a Mac is really a conversation piece. Or maybe, as Rebecca says, the entry card to a cult. Basically, whenever I’m in the Espresso Bar, the shwankiest and most expensive Internet café in town (but the only one where a fella, or yuppie, can get a decent latté) and I see another Mac, there’s instantly something to talk about. Usually, it starts out as a question about where to get the thing fixed if it breaks. The answer? Not in this part of the continent: back up all your files and get ready to take it home for care. But like a member of any cult, I’m not going to change computers simply because it would be logical and make my life easier. No, I’m now one of them.

So Bec and I had dinner with a guy who studies fish diversity on a Fulbright fellowship up in one of the far-away provinces. There are electric catfish in the rivers here that will make you look like Don King. He’s a Mac guy I met on Wednesday. Then yesterday, I met a guy who’s starting up a digital recording studio in Yaoundé. He’s a good guy to know since I wanted to report on music piracy here.

Finally, I’ve discovered there are few public toilets in Yaoundé. And the ones you can find you probably don’t want to use. So all the guys just pee on the side of the road, usually with their backs to the thoroughfare and sometimes even with a tree to block the view. I admit I’ve had to do this when out with friends. Women, I assume, have bladders the size of basketballs, because I have no idea what they do.

There is a point to this. As I mentioned, there’s a construction site behind our apartment. There are no porta-potties (or as I used to think they were called, porta-parties), and few trees or bushes on the site. So half the time I go out on our balcony, there’s a guy holding his junk in his hands aand taking care of business. It’s really disconcerting.

Bec says I shouldn’t worry about it. If the guy cared, he would have a) found a bush or b) turned his back to the balcony. Somehow this doesn’t make me feel better.

On that note, have a good weekend.

July 19, 2006

I had hoped to be writing a story all day today. But complications of malaria – someone else’s, I don’t have it – prevented me from doing so.

The interview with the head of the Cameroon Catholic Church national Peace and Justice Commission coordinator was scheduled for nine this morning. That meant finding a taxi to the National Episcopal Commission’s headquarters. When I mentioned the name of the neighborhood, taxi drivers laughed and drove off. Finally one stopped, but I had to pay double the normal fare and he picked up 19 different people along the way. (I didn’t do a hard count. That’s just an estimate.)

Upon arrival, the commissioner’s deputy said my interview subject was at home with the palmudisme, that’s Frog for malaria. Malaria sounds sufficiently Froggy to me, so I don’t know why they need a whole other name just to confuse people. I’d give them malaire, to make it sound authentically Frog. But palmudisme is a word too far. Update: according to my handy French-English dictionary, malaria is malaria in French. Why do we need the palmudisme to confuse us?

Many of my friends in Rwanda used to be aghast when they found out Rebecca and I slept under a mosquito net. I didn’t tell them about the anti-malarial prophylaxis (that’s right. I spelled that word without a squiggly line from Microsoft Word) I’m on for fear of being laughed out of the room. At the same time, most of them said that they got malaria at least once a year.

The ethics of foreigners taking anti-malarial drugs are debatable – for is I don’t get malaria. Against taking them is the evidence that the parasite simply mutates and gets stronger to get around the drugs. I don’t feel guilty and won’t stop. Malaria sucks – but nets are not. Plus, treated bed nets reduce the transmission of malaria exponentially, even for people in the surrounding area not using bed nets. That’s part of what makes me not feel guilty about the malaron, our pill. The other part is that malaria sucks.

Why do people simply accept getting malaria when there’s a relatively cheap, even by Africa standards, and easy way to at least significantly decrease the chance of getting the dread disease? I’ve heard some people say that it gets too hot under the nets. That’s nonsense. It’s a net, and when used correctly it doesn’t actually touch you. I don’t particularly like sleeping under the net. I have a recurring nightmare that I’m a fish caught up in a dragnet. Usually when this dream happens, I wake up to find myself tangled up in the mesh. But at the same time, malaria really sucks.

Anyway, the deputy pointed out that my shirt was filthy before continuing. The seat belt in the taxi must have been covered in dirt, because there was a line from the right color to the bottom left of my stomach.

Later in the morning, Odelia was busy cleaning in the house when she saw my shirt. She asked what happened. I said it was from the seat belt. “You know why that is? We don’t really use the seat belts here,” she said.

Again, much like the bed nets, why not? Thousands of people die on Cameroon’s roads every year. It has one of the highest rates of automobile death rates in Africa, which means in the world. Surely a seat belt would save at least a few of those lives. And it’s right there in the car already. It doesn’t even force people to drive safely or fix the headlights so they work at night, which can be expensive.

Another plus for Rwanda is that the government recognized this when they came to power and put in a seat belt law that is rigorously enforced. Burundi did the same thing, but it is less rigorously enforced. Here? Nothing, and nobody seems to mind. Again, it’s a little thing. I don’t understand.

Rebecca often talks about the Patron Saint of Recklessness who watched over Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Forgetting the fact that both those countries are Muslim, she says that it was the force that guided Kazakhs and Uzbeks, well-educated, intelligent people, to drink way too much and then drive like Formula One racers, among other totally stupefying decisions. Maybe that patron saint is looking over Cameroon, a country full of intelligent but not as well educated people, as well.

The day was not lost. Justin, the deputy, gave me a lift to Bastos, where he was headed anyway, and we talked about his commission and what it does. It wasn’t the interview I wanted for my story, so that’s going to have to wait. But it’s a start, and I got a copy of the commission’s last election monitoring report. That’s important background for next year’s parliamentary and local government elections.

Plus, a Canadian friend cooling his heals in Toronto and who has taken a great and unexpected interest in how I’m doing, found me the contact information for the Associated Press correspondent here. I’m meeting him tomorrow night. As Blake, my friend, said, hesitation is the bane of the freelancer.

Now the obvious question is how Blake in Toronto found Emmanuel, the AP guy in Yaoundé, and your intrepid foreign correspondent did not. The answer: There’s a whole lot I don’t know about what I’m doing. I’m learning, but it’s slow.

July 17, 2006

New cultures are hard to understand.

Take, as a case in point, a concert that Rebecca, our friends Ruth and Charles and I went to on Saturday night. One of Bec’s coworkers is a recent graduate of the University of Buea, in Cameroon’s Southwest province. She was also a member of the choir, which was launching a new CD in Yaoundé this past weekend. Who says no to a free concert?

The invitation said 5:30 p.m. So we got there at 5:30 p.m. The crowd didn’t start showing up until after 6:30. At 7 a young man made an overly dramatic apology for starting late because of some unforeseen delays. Why put 5:30 if that’s when the sound crew is just starting to set up the amplifiers and keyboards?

It may be oversimplifying things, but I think that part of Africa’s development problem is that no one is ever on time. And it’s rarely 10 or 15 minutes late. Sometimes it can be days. Rebecca said in a hopeful tone maybe Africa will catch up to the rest of the world. Fortunately, I have a new outlook on life that keeps this cultural difference from driving me crazy.

The choir was fabulous. They opened their set with selections from Handel’s Messiah, I got confused about the date because we haven’t really had seasons for the past year, plus I hadn’t consulted a calendar that day. The singers mastered the notoriously difficult song structure; their voices hit every note just right. Their accents did make “breaking the bonds” sound like “breaking their bones” (Bec had misread the program and got that into all of our heads), but we knew what they meant.

Intermission did not live up to the standards set by the singers. First off, they kept playing the radio commercial for the performance – complete with the admonition that the program would start promptly at 5:30. Second, the launch party was doubling as a fundraiser. The UB choir is apparently in financial difficulties, so no problem there. The guy who apologized for the program’s tardiness got up and said that if he called someone’s name, that person was expected to publicly show their support for the choir.

“They’re gonna call on us,” I said to Rebecca, noting that our group of four were the only white people in the room.

The guy started out with some high-powered government ministers and academics, who were apparently caught off-guard by being called up to donate money. But they each came through and offered sums ranging from 25,000 francs (around $50) to 75,000 (around $150). “Are they going to call up everyone in the room?” I asked Rebecca.

When they started calling up the original “chair people” – the ministers and academics mentioned above – and demanded that these people call their friends up, I thought we were in the clear. We didn’t know anyone but the CRS people who were there, and they certainly weren’t going to get hit up. I didn’t have that kind of money on me, anyway.

I was wrong. As I sat with my head in my hands, wondering when this spectacle, which included an annoying computerized horn riff that the soundboard guy played after each sentence, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Can you give me your name?”

“I’m not giving you my name,” I said without turning around.

The solicitor seemed surprised. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to,” I said, reaching back to the glory days of childhood arguments. Apparently, “Because I don’t want to” is the argument that trumps all others in every culture, because the guy walked away.

“Well done,” Rebecca said.

I didn’t feel like we were in the clear yet. I was convinced that if the guy saw me in the crowd, he’s say something like, “I want to call up my white friend to find out how much he’s going to support us.”

“They’re going to call on me. I’m going to the bathroom until the choir comes back in.”

I bumped into Mamadou the driver in the lobby. He had stopped to watch a boxing match on the giant television during the fundraising. I explained what happened, finishing with “Qu’est-ce que c’est ca?” (Roughly translated, “what’s that all about?”)

“Bien sur! Vous etes un invitee!” (Roughly translated, “Damn right. You’re just a guest.”)

As I chatted with Mamadou, my party came out. They were leaving. But not before Rebecca said someone had gone up and said that she wasn’t going to say what she was going to give.

Karine, Bec’s coworker who invited us to the concert, stopped us on the way out. We explained that we were hungry and were sorry that we were going but we needed to eat. We did arrive at 5:30, after all. We then offered to buy a CD because we were missing the traditional African portion of the concert. They didn’t have one for sale at the official CD launch.

As we walked out, Charles said he kind of expected something like what we just witnessed to happen so he brought extra money. Why hadn’t he warned us?

But that brings me to my new way of dealing with things here. I no longer get mad. Serenity now. Hot water heater broken? Serenity now. People 90 minutes late? No longer angry. Serenity now. Being called blanc in the market? No problem. Serenity now.

“What have you done with my husband?” Rebecca asked when I told her about my new policy. I think she fears serenity now may turn into apocalypse now. But so far it’s working.

I’ve found people that I can expound on this with. It turns out that my friend Jean-Claude, an exhausting Malian radio journalist who wants me to write out the words to the Star Spangled Banner for him (I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t remember them all), is a Buddhist. There is a community of about 1,000 African Buddhists in Yaoundé. They meet in a house by the airport. There’s also a place where people to do Tai Chi from 7 to 9 in the morning. I find this terribly interesting, since I know that Peace Corps volunteers are told not to do Yoga in Cameroonian villages because they will be accused of witchcraft. ….

Our apartment is still in process. We took a trip to the market with Odelia on Saturday. First she took us to the Cameroonian equivalent of Costco. There was nothing terribly notable about Niki, except that the awnings of each of their stores have life-sized statues of The Blues Brothers, Jake dancing and Elwood on the harmonica. No one knows why.

We made a few more stops and then into giant Mokolo market, where we were greeted with stares when we offered to put what we bought into our crunchy cloth bags. One market-stall proprietor even said that he couldn’t give us the metal spoons we wanted without the plastic bag. We could then put it into our big bag, he said. Plastic bags litter the landscape here….

Rebecca let me use power tools yesterday (a drill which couldn’t get through our super-reinforced walls). “I thought she was smart?” my Mom said when we talked on the phone last night.

July 12, 2006

Apparently Cameroon was not entirely pro-Italy during the World Cup Final. According to Matteo, many of the Cameroonians he was watching with were supporting France.

Well, maybe supporting France isn’t the correct phrase. Matteo kept trying to reason with the Cameroonians about their rooting interests. He pointed to colonization and support for the corrupt government currently in power as reasons to root for Italy (it was apparently very important to him). The Cameroonians replied that they weren’t necessarily rooting for France. They were rooting for Africa and the Africans on the team.

For those of you who didn’t watch the World Cup – as I said, we didn’t watch the Finals, but we saw a France game in Paris – most of the French team was black. “Are there any white people on the team?” I remember Rebecca asking while we watched the France-Spain match.

There were a couple of white French players on the team that I can remember – the goalie and one striker. Zinadine Zidane is of Algerian descent, but born in France. I’m not certain where the rest of the French team was born – I’m sure some of them were born in France – but most of them appeared to be African.

Anyway, back to my story. Matteo then pointed out that on top of exploiting all of the other resources Africa has, the French were also stealing the football talent. That didn’t matter. France was now an African team.

But I don’t doubt that many Cameroonians were pulling for Italy. I think, however, rooting interests might have fallen along linguistic lines. Charles, the other writer husband in Yaoundé, pointed out that France was the power behind the decision to change Cameroon from a federal republic to a unitary republic in the early 1970s.

Cameroon was two separate colonies – one French, the other British – after Germany lost control of its African colonies at the end of World War I. The French colony was granted full independence first, in 1960. British Cameroon followed in 1961. The colony had a choice to join either Cameroon or Nigeria. The southern, mostly Christian half chose Cameroon in a referendum (Charles, who was in Cameroon at the time, says it was because British Cameroon was so far from Lagos, then Nigeria’s capital, the Anglophone Cameroonians banked on getting better government services from Yaoundé. Northern British Cameroon, which is mostly Muslim, stuck with Nigeria). The two Cameroons agreed to a federation, with a fair amount of autonomy for the former British colony.

A referendum in 1972 made Cameroon a unitary republic, which meant that Anglophone Cameroon lost its autonomy and began to lose much of its status within the country. Money stopped and services dropped and Anglophones have been pissed off ever since.

So why does this mean Anglophone Cameroon was rooting for Italy? Even after colonization ended, until recently, the French were in control here. (Now the U.S. is the most important country to Cameroon, much to French consternation.) French troops were actively involved in fighting against Cameroon’s one full-fledged insurgency, from 1961-63. They actually won!

Yaoundé and Douala, the commercial capital, are sort of model cities for the French to show off their good works in Africa. For a long time, no important decision was taken in Cameroon without French consent. Often, the ideas came directly from Paris. So it is likely that the French had a large hand in the 1972 referendum, and the Anglophones know this.

My theory is that French foreign policy is mostly based on stopping the spread of English as the dominant world language. That’s why I think they supported the genocidal regime in Rwanda (the RPF rebels, now government, were Anglophone). But an even better example of my theory is Cameroon. They actually changed the country’s constitution to make sure that Anglophones in the country did not gain more power. An Anglophone may have won the first contested presidential election in the early 1990s, but President Paul Biya rigged it, probably with French support.

Odelia, by the way, is Anglophone, from around Bamenda, the largest city in the northwest part of the country. That’s the former British colony. She was cheering for the Azzurri, not Les Bleus.

July 10, 2006

We’re in.

The move is done. We got all of our clothes, computers, books, dishes we liberated from our old apartment, the remaining food and a mattress over to the new place in two trips. Since I’ve beaten “The Grapes of Wrath” to death, we were the Clampets. Now here’s a little story about a man named Ev…

Our apartment is a lovely space, white walls, high ceilings. Check that, they appear to be high ceilings. But Bec and I are munchkins in comparison with the rest of the population, so anything I don’t bump my head on is a high ceiling to me. There’s a spare room for an office for me, plus another that is a combination utility/storage/guest room once we get a bed for it. We’re not taking the one from our old place. It squeaks so much that if one of us rolled over in the middle of the night the other woke up from the noise.

The kitchen needs some work. There’s precious little storage space, just a few cabinets under the counter. So we’ll get ourselves some cupboards and storage units. When are they going to open up the Yaounde branch of Hold Everything? Also, the sink, for some reason, does not allow hot water. You’ve got to turn the handle and lift it to get water pressure, and turning the handle in the direction of hot turns the water off. We’ll figure that one out.

On the plus side, we appear to be winning the War on Bugs. The apartment was empty for a few weeks, and so the roaches and ants had the run of the place. We found this out our first night in the place when, after a night at a jazz club, I went to pour myself water. It was like the passage to the Temple of Doom, when the bugs are crawling over everything. Normally I’m not all that bothered by bugs, but it was way too much for me. Ants got into our breakfast for the next day (yummy raisin rolls that weren’t to be) and roaches were scaling the wine glasses. I was half expecting to see Kafka’s giant roach sitting at the dining table.

So we’ve set out the traps, cleaned every surface and are diligent in the continuation of that cleanliness. There are still bugs. Much like the wars on terrorism and drugs, the War on Bugs in a tropical climate cannot be won. But you can establish a manageable level of bugs.

There are a few other slight problems in the place, but I stress slight. One is that because the floors are white they’re hard to keep clean. We’ll do our best. A second is that for some reason, the French didn’t bring shower curtains to Africa. So we don’t have one in our apartment (and we didn’t in Kigali either. Damn Belgians.) That lack of a shower curtain, which Rebecca, Yaounde’s answer to Bob Villa, vows to fix, adds to the problem of the white floors. Plus, the showerhead doesn’t have a hook high enough to stand under the water. Why did the French like that arrangement? But the new bathroom is definitely better than the brown walls, floors and fixtures, compounded by bad lighting, in our old place. I guess the brown was meant to be evocative and help aid the process. I’m not sure that worked, but it definitely made the room dark.

The final problem is that our hot water heater broke. That can be fixed fairly easily, but Paul the super hasn’t showed up yet.

One of Bec’s co-workers, an Italian named Matteo, lives in the building. I’m not sure if he’s awake yet following his country’s victory last night. We didn’t watch the game because, well, France-Italy wasn’t that interesting to us. And I just can’t stomach penalty kicks deciding the World Cup champ. That is the lamest thing in the world, and the best argument against soccer. They should do it like hockey – keep playing until someone scores. I don’t care if you’re there all night and into the next day.

Anyway, after we heard Italy won, we heard screaming outside. Happy screaming, don’t worry. And then we heard the Doppler-effected horn of what we suspect was Matteo’s CRS-issued vehicle, going up and down our street.

Anyway, when I went out earlier this morning, Odelia, who cleans our place and Matteo’s, was sitting outside. Monday is Matteo day, and she said she didn’t want to disturb him. Then she showed me where he parked, outside on the street. It looks like the rear driver-side tire is in the drainage ditch that runs along the roads here. I’m not sure if it’s all the way in, but the truck is on a funny angle, and the other tires appear to be straining. Forza Italia!

I walked by the Italian Embassy, which is around the corner from our apartment. There was a long line of Cameroonians waiting to get in. There were lines at the Spanish and Swiss embassies, also neighbors, but they had decreased by the time I came back an hour later. That wasn’t the case with the Italians.

In case you’re wondering which former colonial power Cameroon was pulling for, Odelia says it was Italy. I can’t say that I blame them. First off, I think most of humanity outside of France, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya (read your history books about Fascist Italy to understand what I mean) and Zinadine Zedane’s hometown was rooting for Italy. Second, French rule in southern Cameroon wasn’t all strawberries and cream. Or even bananas and palm wine. It was nasty, brutal and entirely too long. The government the French left behind isn’t much better, but does have support from the Hexagon. I can understand why Cameroonians, if Odelia is right, were rooting for Italy.

July 7, 2006

We’re getting ready to move. We have the keys to our new apartment and we’re ready to go. We even bought a refrigerator, stove, bed and dining table this week. In Yaoundé, even when you rent, you’ve got to buy your appliances.

But that was easy. The real adventure was buying the bed and dining table. It certainly wasn’t like going to Ikea. We bought both pieces of furniture at local woodcarving shops near the Mokolo market, Yaoundé’s biggest outdoor market. We saw the work being done right in front of us and the showrooms were the streets around the market. I’ve never been rained on shopping for furniture before. Each bed was put on wood planks because the bed district (each piece of furniture is built by neighborhood. I’ll be going to the desk district next week.) has dirt – actually mud – roads. The table district is built into the side of the hill, with the workshops down-slope and the finished products on the street. So the tables and chairs were also supported on wood planks, but this was to prevent them sliding down the hill.

We went accompanied by Mamadou, one of CRS’s drivers and a man who is known to get things done. (As an aside, when changing money in the developing world, if a local you trust says he knows a guy who will take less of a commission than the bank, go with the guy. Also, do your best to find the good Muslim moneychangers. They’re far less likely to cheat you.)

Anyway, Mamadou was our negotiator. He’s the guy who picked us up from the airport when we arrived, and is just generally fun. Both Bec and I have soft spots in our hearts for him. He handled everything for us, except paying. He knew everyone in the bed district and is a masterful negotiator. His style is a sort of, “Hey, it’s me, Mamadou. That’s not your real price is it? That’s disappointing.”

And it works. We got a bed with side tables built and varnished right in front of us for less than we had expected to pay. Getting it back to our new apartment was tough. We were three people in a little Toyota RAV-4, plus a bed that had been taken apart. The bed took up the entire trunk, and the back seats needed to be folded down, so Rebecca and I had to share the front passenger seat. It’s a good thing I like her a whole lot, she’s small and she smells lovely. I don’t think you’d get far driving around like that in New York.

But Bec and I sharing a seat in the front of a small SUV, as amusing as that was, was nothing compared to getting the fridge, stove, giant fan, table and chairs delivered to our apartment on the back of a standard-sized pick-up. Jean-Pierre, CRS Cameroon’s chief of transport and a man who carries himself with great authority, accompanied us on this trip. He drove us to the appliance store, where we witnessed his negotiating style. His is, basically, “I’m not going to pay that. This is what I’m going to pay.”

And it works, too. The guy with the truck – in the developing world deliveries are always done by that random guy with a truck – wanted us to pay 7,000 francs, around $14, for him to get the stuff to the apartment. The Indian guy at the appliance store started yelling that we shouldn’t have to pay that, was the guy with the truck overcharging us because we’re foreigners, you can’t do that to my customers, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, JP simply said we’re paying 4,000. And that was it.

We also had to enlist someone from the appliance store to come with us because we were picking up our table and chairs afterwards. This guy was forced to stand in the truck’s bed, holding on to the tabletop as they thundered over water-filled potholes and up steep hills. Everything else was tied down, but the tabletop extended out the back of the truck. To top it off, the guy had to help us get the stuff up the stairs, including the fridge and the stove, which he carried up by himself.

The truck would sometimes get a bit ahead of us, at which point Bec would say nervously from the back seat, “Where’d our furniture go?” But it was easy to spot the truck on the way back, between the fridge standing tall and the guy holding on for dear life. Remember when I described the luggage-filled zippy black Peugeot, with Steve Stich saying the Joads didn’t drive a zippy black Peugeot. Well, they might have driven this truck when they escaped Oklahoma for California. And the pile of stuff did look like something out of The Grapes of Wrath.

But everything is there and we begin the official moving process tomorrow. We’ll bring over our mattress and our clothes, as well as other personal stuff like computers, movies and music. Next week, we’ll borrow the living room furniture we’ve got now and then buy some new stuff as we settle in. Bec’s really ready to get into a new place. And while I will now have to pay to read about hockey online, I am too. And I’m glad Bec will have some distance from her office.

I hope everyone had a good Fourth of July. We went to a party at the US Embassy, which required me to wear a sport jacket. Others were there in suits. And it was in the middle of the afternoon, so no fireworks. Frankly, I was enraged at not being able to wear shorts and a T-shirt to an Independence Day barbecue. What kind of Commie Fourth requires proper clothing? But my rage over the dress code was assuaged when the American ambassador said that getting dressed up for that day went against American instincts in his speech. As long as he acknowledged our great sacrifice….

But still no fireworks. Stinky.

A few days before, we went to Canada Day at the Canadian High Commissioner’s house. There was only one guy in a Team Canada hockey jersey. I immediately screamed, “That’s awesome!” and went to introduce myself. I also managed to find someone to play hockey with. He only lives about five hours away, but you’ve got to make sacrifices. It’ll be street hockey, but no rollerblades because the roads in Bamenda aren’t smooth enough. I’m going to go when he does a hockey clinic for missionary kids, as well as some Cameroonians. “Invariably, the Cameroonian kids start using their feet,” Walter told me.

July 2, 2006

My last Rwanda story finally got published in DaMN. Get your hankies...