Now to set the scene for my next two years. In the past three months (I arrived at post on December 1st), I’ve gradually broadened my understanding of the layout of my town and all the villages surrounding it. When I first arrived in Mora, I tried to track down a map to aid my explorations, but there isn’t one. Not even the mayor has one, apparently. So I had to rely on word of mouth, on landmarks, and many long walks, bike rides, and moto rides. It’s been a little like playing Age of Empires- areas of the map are black until you move your cursor or send your troops to new territory.
Let’s start with the bird’s eye view. Mora is cut in half by a ridge of mountains that rise from the desert like the spines of two giant prehistoric fish. I hiked up one of them in my third week here so I could survey my domain like Simba in the Lion King :). [It was funny on the way up because as I walked through the fields approaching the mountain, a little boy collecting millet stalks with his friends warned me “It is very difficult madame! You will fall!” He got increasingly excited the higher I got and kept yelling “Nassara (White Woman)!” and waving. It was nice to have a cheering section.]
The Mandara mountains are huge piles of bare rock, and deserve to be called “mountains” only because the rest of the land around them is so flat. [The fact that I could still hear that little boy at the top shows you that it is not that big of a mountain]. Mora was built in a butterfly pattern around them: The town center is situated in a gap in the mountain ridge, and then on either side of the ridge are residential neighborhoods, nestled against the mountains in two large wings. Mora’s main road cuts directly through the mountain gap, uniting the two halves of the town. It forms an L with the only paved road around, which is perfectly straight and runs all the way from Maroua (the regional capital) up to Lake Chad.
Viewed from above, the town clashes with the barren landscape surrounding it. Mora itself appears to be a mass of greenery- as part of reforestation efforts, the streets were lined with Neem trees that stay green year-round. However, Mora is completely surrounded by tanned desert savannah stretching as far as the eye can see, with no roads and few signs of civilization. This makes for an odd contrast: brown, rocky mountains with miles and miles of absolutely flat, yellow wasteland all around, except for the pool of green that is Mora.
To zoom in to ground level: One of the first things you might notice when visiting Mora is that you can’t see the houses because they are surrounded by concrete walls. The houses- white-washed concrete topped with sheet metal- have their own compounds. Another thing you might notice is that all the roads are sand. There are no sidewalks, there is no pavement anywhere. The result of these two characteristics is that it is very easy for a newcomer to get lost in Mora’s neighborhoods. All the residential streets look the same! A maze of wide, sandy avenues lined on either side by one-story houses hidden behind compound walls. There are no two-story buildings, even in the center of town. Getting lost is also easy because houses do not have addresses, and neighborhood streets do not have names. When you give people directions to your house, you have to give them landmarks to look out for, such as “take a right at the pink callbox, then a left at the green mosque...” I’ve done a lot of exploring and I still get lost. Trying to find a friend’s house in the dark is nearly impossible.
Happily, the bustling town center is an unmistakable orientation point. All commercial activity is concentrated on one main strip. It’s chaos, especially on market day. The first time I walked through the middle of Mora, I had the sensation that I was constantly about to get hit with something. Between the motos honking at you, street vendors calling out to you, little kids running around, crazy men who talk to themselves, beggars, water sellers pushing their carts, piles of burning trash, trucks loaded with merchandise from Nigeria or Chad passing through, and the occasional herd of cattle, it can be quite a sensational overload.
Because Mora is such a commercial crossroads, though, you can find almost anything you need. There are several small dry goods stores, housewares, a lumber warehouse, seamstress shops, electronics shops, butchers, rug-sellers, carpenters, omelette stands, petrol stations, moto mechanics, and barber shops. In addition to storefronts and roadside stands, the town center also has a large market area, consisting of rows of woven straw shades propped up by wooden frames. Mora’s Sunday market is one of the best in the region, attracting farmers and merchants from miles around. Piles of millet, gold jewelry, scarves, fried peanut butter, tables and tables of smoked fish reeking and covered in flies, macabo, igname, potatoes, hand-carved gourd bowls, onions, tomatoes, piles of chopped and dried green leaves, white beans, papayas, mangos, chai, heads of lettuce, cucumber-like things, green and yellow oranges, bowls of salt and flour, pepper powder, piles of peanuts, avocadoes, bananas, corn kernels, yams, garlic, dried follere flowers, sesame seeds, woven grass mats, rugs, pots, pans, spices, cowrie shells, fried cow intestines, soccer jerseys, plastic flip flops, goats, and chickens, among other things.
If you ask a vendor for something, and he doesn’t have it, he’ll often personally escort you around the market until you find it, or send word down the line of vendors to help you. Also, prices aren’t fixed- almost everything is negotiable, so if you can drive a hard bargain, you’d do well in Cameroon. Mora also has a bank, health center, two big mosques, a nearby military training base, police station, post office, several bars, travel agency, primary schools, secondary schools, two high schools, a Catholic mission, bakery, and a very modern-looking gas station. In addition, all the government ministries have departmental offices in Mora.
However, despite its bustling center and sprawling residential cartiers, I think of Mora as a really big village. It gives the general impression of a town that recently went through a big growth spurt but still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of development. It still has many vestiges of village life. Indeed, while there are middle-upper class houses around the town center, as you move outwards the orderly grid devolves quickly back into clusters of tiny villages. Biking only a couple minutes from the center of town, you are immediately in impoverished traditional villages once again. Even in the more upperclass neighborhoods, when I peek into the compounds there is often a concrete, modern-looking house, but several of the outbuildings are mud and clay. Many of the inhabitants grew up in a village and then moved to Mora recently, bringing with them village lifestyles. For instance, there are lots of goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, and ducks roaming the streets, nosing through the trash and eating what little vegetation there is in the neighborhoods. Some of the neighborhoods do not have sufficient water sources, so you’ll see women walking along the main road carrying water buckets on their heads as if you were in a village. Mora thus makes for an odd mixture of new and old, rich and very poor.
Another sign of Mora’s underdevelopment is the fact that there is trash everywhere. Mora is known for its “trash river” that runs smack through the center of town. The rivers and gulleys are dry during most of the year and used as dumping grounds. Plastic bags make up the majority of the trash (Cameroonians wrap everything in plastic bags, usually with multiple layers. Every little thing- you buy an egg, they’ll put it in a small plastic bag and then put that bag in another bag. If you say you don’t want a bag, they give you an odd look.) I definitely want to create a project dealing with trash clean-up!
Many more posts to come on social life in Mora, but as a brief introduction: Mora has a sizable population. The closest estimate I’ve found is around 39,500 (so about the size of Catonsville back home). The largest ethnic group are the Mandara, most of whom are also Muslim. There are many other tribes represented in and around Mora, each with their own language as well, including Mada, Molkolo, and Kanouri. The Mandara language is widely spoken, as is Fulfulde, a regional dialect that is used as a lingua franca for communication between tribes. Islam is the dominant religion and pervades daily life; mosques and Koranic schools are sprinkled throughout the neighborhoods, with the call to prayer ringing five times daily over the loudspeakers (before sunrise, twice in the afternoon, at sunset, and again in the evening).
A final general characteristic of my new home: There is currently no rain. The rainy season lasts only 3-4 months, from about June to August. The other 8-9 months of the year are dry. I put my laundry out at night, and it still dries within a couple hours. My skin is ashy, like it used to get when the heat was up too high during the winter in the US. Sometimes I imagine thunder or think it’s getting cloudy, and then I remember- O yea, I’m a little south of the Sahara desert! To echo a recent complaint of a fellow PCV, “Sometimes I just wish there were some green grass to lie down on…”
yay jessssss!
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