City Life

What do I do when I need a break from post? Head to Maroua! I’m about two hours away. Trips to the regional capital are always a nice little vacation from post, for several reasons.

First, you get to stock up on cash. Everyone does their banking in Maroua. Usually through ATM cards, since for some reason Cameroonians don’t form lines inside the bank and you end up having to battle your way through the mob of people at the cash window.

Secondly, you get to socialize with your fellow PCVs. Our transit house or “case” (pronounced coz) always has volunteers passing through. It’s outfitted with lots of comfy beds, clean sheets, couches, a kitchen with all the kitchenware you could need, a computer room, and supply closet. Each volunteer has their own cubbyhole to get mail, medicine, and other supplies from Yaounde. There is a large library of work and pleasure books accumulated from generations of volunteers that you can borrow. You can usually swipe People or Cosmo magazines and other treasures shared from care packages. And, most importantly, the Case has very fast (for Cameroon) wireless internet! We all have Skype marathons in Maroua. You get to catch up with your family back home and see what other PCVs are up to.

Third, the food diversity ratchets up drastically. You can find smoothies and french fries and hamburgers and even frozen yogurt and stale knock-off Snickers bars! None of it is nearly as good as the real thing, of course. Still, if you’re feeling homesick and in need of comfort food you can find lots of imitations. Maroua has some good sit-down restaurants, although even in the city customer service is terrible. At our favorite restaurant, Belle Vie, no effort is made for speedy service- we wait at least an hour even if we’re the only people there. The exception is Porte Mayo, once of the most expensive restaurant/hotels in the city that caters to rich tourists, offering delicious multiple-course meals. The street food is really good, too- pieces of coconut, pineapples, and papaya pushed around on carts, mouth-watering grilled fish with fried plantains covered in spices, freshly tossed salads, chunks of spicy beef wrapped in newspaper, dried dates, etc.

Another attraction is shopping in Mora’s big central market. It’s a chaotic maze of open-air boutiques. You can track down rare cooking items to take back to post. For instance, cheese. There is hardly any cheese in Cameroon. At post, all I can get is a fake cheese spread called “Vache qui rit.” Kids in my neighborhood didn’t even know the French word for cheese- “fromage”! Maroua has a couple places where you can find cheese though. They’re all right, but since I have been to France and memories of the cheeses I tried there are still fresh and dewy in my mind’s eye, I have a hard time settling for less. Actually, now even memories of American cheddar cheese make me tear up. Also, spices. Spices used in Cameroonian kitchens are limited to “the Cube,” an all-spice made by a company called Maggi. Women use it in everything and it is the butt of many Peace Corps jokes. In certain grocery stores in Maroua though you can find many of the spices we cook with in US at high prices. You can also find Pringles, randomly. Ahhhh, it’s those snacky salty things I miss. Potato chips, cheezits. People don’t do much snacking here. There is no good French translation for “snack,” so that tells you a lot. (As an aside, there is also no good French translation for “excited!” only “excité” which means sexually aroused, so hard to express to people that I’m really looking forward to something!)

Besides food, Maroua has the best tailors, material shops, and jewelry, as well as handicrafts. Most of the handmade crafts are amassed in one building, the Artisanat. It’s a tourist’s dream- carved wooden statues, pretty handwoven baskets, brightly-colored bead jewelry, tribal decorations, and lots of leather goods- sandals and beautiful purses you can order custom-made. There’s this guy named Abou who is always on the lookout for Peace Corps volunteers because he knows we love leather goods and he’ll take you back to his leather workshop and dump out a bagful of brightly colored leather wallets and purses- very hard to resist. I will definitely be stocking up before I return to the US. I really hate going into the Artisanat though because the vendors are vultures when it comes to tourists. It’s hard to get out of there without buying something. They’re experts. They urge you to “just look,” thrust their wares at you, claim they’re giving you a special discount, flatter you excessively if you try anything on. They outrageously inflate their prices too, betting that you don’t know the real price. For instance, for a dress that I could probably get made myself for 7,000, a vendor asked for 35,000 as his starting price!

Then there’s the Maroua nightlife. Rue De Mayo, where our transit house is, is happening. It’s lined with bars blaring makossa, Nigerian and Ivorian pop, and the occasional American Top 40. It’s fun going out for grilled fish and a beer and watching all the activity, calling street sellers over to you for snacks as they pass. Oddly, there’s always kids trying to sell you Kleenex and hankerchiefs- we were all sitting at a bar one night and at least seven little boys came by trying to sell us Kleenex. There are a couple dance clubs, but I haven’t had much fun dancing there yet because there are hardly any women and you get mobbed by single men who all try to dance with you at once and you end up stuck in the middle of an angry huddle.

Sometimes we don’t go out, we just throw parties at the Case. We spend holidays together. We had our own version of White Christmas (the song is just ironic over here since no precipitation of any sort is expected anytime soon in December). My friend somehow cooked lasagna from scratch in a pot (no ovens here) and it was delicious. Another guy brought a DVD of a fireplace and played it in the background on his computer haha. We had a fake tree, watched Elf, had a dance party of course, and exchanged white elephant gifts, accompanied by brownies and mulled wine and mashed potatoes.

I video-Skyped with my entire family on Christmas and THAT was hard to do and weird. It was like being Alice peering through looking glass, or Harry Potter gazing into the Mirror of Erised (sp?). I thought wait a minute where am I again? Why am I not in my living room with everyone else? I felt like Scrooge in the Christmas Carol when the Ghost of Christmas Past takes him to see his old Christmases and he really wants to participate and talk to people but he can’t. My family offered to put the laptop on the table during Xmas dinner haha but I said NO! That would be torture. I felt really homesick after that. Still, not too bad for my first Christmas in Africa! We also had get-togethers in Maroua for New Year’s and Fourth of July.

Another reason why trips to the city are comforting is because the best hospitals are also in Maroua. When you’re feeling sick the Case is a great place to recuperate and relax and commiserate with other volunteers. There are a lot of resources for work in Maroua too. The Department of Agriculture, other government offices, the central offices of NGOs, international organizations, charities, etc. are all found in Maroua.

Basically, I really enjoy Maroua. It has a nice atmosphere. It’s a clean and elegant city for Cameroon, with wide, spacious avenues, lots of things to see and do. Visits to Maroua are a pleasant diversion from life at post.