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.