August 11, 2006

I can’t believe I did what I did last night. It was one of those last-ditch, desperate efforts a journalist trying to meet people in a new country has to do. It made feel a little dirty afterwards, like I wanted to brush my teeth non-stop or wash my hands until they bled. I almost didn’t want to tell Rebecca about it.

I attended a meeting of the local Rotary Club.

At journalism school, they told us that sitting in on one of the meetings is a good place to meet new people of some influence in the community. They also told us that on the boredom rating, it was somewhere below the meeting of the city council, village advisory board, school board or tenants’ association, but above being assigned to cover the opening of the new shopping mall. They didn’t say what it was like when the meeting was conducted entirely in French.

It wasn’t so bad. First of all, they said the meeting started at 7 p.m. My experiences in Cameroon so far have been that that means around 7:30, 8 or 8:30. These guys said 7, and they started at 7:10. Plus, they were genuinely welcoming. Sure, I had to sit and listen to a speech about the crisis of falling membership or something, but I got what I was after: phone numbers. The president of the Bastos Collines chapter is the director of studies at the Bank of Central African States – the common central bank for Cameroon and its neighbors. One of the members is an economic analyst for the government. Yet another is a presidential spokesman. C’est le but. (Goal.)

This week hasn’t been quite as busy as last. That happens. I think it’s more likely that my time here will be somewhere in between last week – when I had three stories published and was running around the whole time – and this week, where I had a conference to go to on Monday and then I sort of stumbled around for the rest of the week. An editor at an American paper dinged a story idea because they have a story on the same topic from Liberia coming up, so I’ll send it elsewhere. Plus I might have a different story to do for the same editor. I’m not going to jinx either of those, but by the end of next week I expect to have a good idea how the next month or so will look.

I was supposed to travel to Buea, in Southwest Province, for a journalists’ training on Wednesday and stay there through tomorrow. But a couple of things got in the way. One, the trip wasn’t confirmed until Tuesday morning, so I made other plans for the week – including the Rotary and getting started on one of my story possibilities. More importantly, I was just pushing back my Annual Intestinal Invasion. I didn’t want to be in a car for four hours with danger lurking around every turn, if you catch my drift. So I said I couldn’t go.

I was just planning on going to meet people, talk to them about life in Buea (pronounced Boo-ya) and twiddle my thumbs. Apparently the organization I was going to go with had other ideas. I’m not sure what they were, but here are two monkey wrenches for them to consider next time. First, I’m not doing a journalist training session for anyone unless I sign a contract and get paid. Not to sound mercenary, but I did my free training for African journalists already. Second, I won’t do any paid work for them because if I do I can’t write about them for CNS. It’s just not worth it, because this organization gets involved, somehow, in almost every single church development or human rights project in Africa. It’s not worth it for a one-off training session.

Apparently me being ill was not a good enough reason, so I got a phone call telling me how annoyed the organizers were. I thought about offering the aggressor the opportunity to come to the house and take a stool sample, but have decided to take a more mature revenge. The guy who bugged me doesn’t get into any stories. Ever.
…

My friend Dennis was describing what one of his teachers called moral economy. Basically, what it was describing was the zero-sum nature of human relations. It’s applicable in Africa – if someone else succeeds, it means that I’m failing, and if I’m failing it’s obviously because someone else is succeeding – as well as many other parts of the world. Bec likes to tell an (I assume) apocryphal story from Russia. A peasant sees that his neighbor has a new cow that’s producing a lot of milk. A second neighbor comes to ask the original peasant what he thinks. The original peasant says he’s jealous. So the questioner asks if the peasant wants a cow to produce milk. No, the peasant responds, I want to kill my neighbor’s cow.

Dennis, who is doing a master’s thesis on Cameroonian music, was telling me about a band he knows that a French producer wanted to sign to a contract. The producer went to the band’s manager, who proceeded to ask for the equivalent of around $40,000. The producer said they’re good, but not that good. The band stagnated. This is another example of the zero-sum social relations that I think make development in Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world particularly difficult. It’s even starting to make its way into American politics.

If someone else’s success necessarily means your own failure, what interest do you have in working with other people? And at the same time, what incentive do you have to not take money from your government/business/NGO and use it yourself?

It’s extremely easy for me to moralize like this. I’ve never had to wonder where my next meal is coming from, or if there would be another after that. But economies only work if there’s a certain amount of trust, even if regulatory bodies like the FBI and SEC enforce that trust. But if the trust isn’t there to begin with, than those institutions can’t develop. How does a country and economy develop if everyone is not only out for number one, but would almost rather see someone else step in number two?