You would not catch your breath and say “It’s beautiful here” in the way that you would for Hawaii or Greece. In fact, my first reaction when I drove into Mora in the semi-darkness was that it was ugly, compared to the lush forests of the South and the waterfalls of the Northwest. That’s partly because the landscape is harsh- just looking at it makes you feel like panting for water. But the desert savannah does have a subtle, understated beauty about it, the sort that creeps up on you slowly. Biking around to the villages I’ve come to appreciate the extreme flatness of the land, the wide sandy roads, and dusty villages. The sunsets are often cotton candy colors, light blue and pink. And during rainy season, everything is covered in a brief flash of green, the villages blanketed by tall rows of green millet. It’s quiet and peaceful en brousse (in the bush) -not even airplanes crossing the sky.
The people themselves are inseparable from the landscape. They truly live off the land, carve out little oases for themselves. Tribal culture is preserved; the way they live fits a lot of the typical photos you see in tourist advertisements for travel in Africa. Passing through you see men making clay bricks for their huts and thatching for roofs. Women cook on fires in small earthen kitchens with low ceilings blackened from smoke. From afar you can hear the rhythmic pounding of women crushing maize with mortar and pestle. Lines of women pass back and forth with babies on their backs, carrying buckets of water on their heads, or bundles of leaves and twigs, or large earthenware vases hardened by fire to sell at the market. Old men repose on tree roots slick from generations of sitting, weaving ropes or straw mats. Bare-breasted old women pick leaves slowly from piles of gumbo plant for sauces, swatting at flies and chewing kola nuts until their teeth turn orange. Little boys tend flocks of goats and shoot birds with slingshots. Chickens peck here and there, lean dogs lope along. Dust-covered children play under lean-tos supporting bales of hay and millet stalks.
I started biking out to villages at the beginning of the hot season. I felt how hot it was already and realized that it was just going to get hotter with no rain anytime soon. As an outsider, the land appeared barren to me, and put me in awe of the people who live in such conditions. I also witnessed dry season millet- miraculous! Planted in the off-season, it yields a harvest without rain. Bright green stalks growing out of fields so dry the earth is hard and cracked! Every part of the millet plant is used, none of it is wasted. Villagers eat it every day, three times a day, and in every form- they’ll boil and stir it into boules of couscous, dry the scrapings of the pot into crusty millet chips, fry millet beignets, put the flour in their tea, or mix it with water to form a paste for nourishment as they work in the fields. The parts the humans can’t eat are fed to animals or used in construction.
On my first trip en brousse, I discovered the Mayo-Plata market. Emmanuel took me off-road on his motorcycle, following sand paths winding parallel to the mountains. After passing several mud hut villages and seeing hardly anyone, we emerged suddenly at a huge clearing with a grove of Neem trees and large crowds of people. It was a market in the middle of nowhere that apparently happens every Saturday. Villagers come down out of the mountains by foot or bike to buy and sell. It was right out of the National Geographic in how traditional it was. I stuck out like a sore thumb; this market is not usually frequented by outsiders. Emmanuel gave me a tour and explained each section. Live animals- mostly goats, sheep, and chickens- are traded in one section. Then there’s a huge meat section that was quite gory to see. Cows, goats, donkeys, pigs, horses, and even dogs were being cut and carved up on the spot! Intestines frying in the sun (pigs sold in a different section out of courtesy to Muslims). This guy walked by me holding a cow head upside-down over his shoulder. Suffice it to say, I learned a lot about animal anatomy that day.
Meanwhile Emmanuel, who has lived near Mora his whole life, was greeted by seemingly half the market. Between his huge family and friends, he knows a lot of people. It’s confusing too because Cameroonians often introduce their friends as their brothers or sisters, so I’m not sure how many brothers Emmanuel actually has. He invited me to join a circle of older men who were passing around a gourd filled with bilbil. There were women with piles of grain and dried flowers and beans and chopped dried vegetables spread out on cloths or in woven baskets. Many of the elders here look centuries old, shriveled and bent as they are by years of work under the hot African sun. There were mounds of secondhand clothing being sold- the cast-offs of the West. That’s found everywhere in Africa. You’ll see people wearing American t-shirts with comical slogans like “I party naked” and the wearer has no idea what it says. Lots of old Lacoste polos and Barack Obama paraphernalia. It’s bizarre to see people in old American clothing all the time. It’s kind of symbolic of how they get the scraps from our table in more ways than one.
After that we visited several more villages to greet Emmanuel’s friends or to see projects completed by CADEPI in the past. In the first, his uncle was the chief, but refused to crack a smile when I greeted him. We looked at a recently constructed building for storing grain, and a nursery of mango and neem trees. We of course had to drink more bilbil along the way :). We visited the house of CADEPI’s president, and he sent me off with a large gourd as a present. We also stopped by a Catholic mission, set far back in the bush but with surprisingly modern buildings, and three nuns from India who run a girls’ school for the villagers. That was my first adventure en brousse.
Another way I got a taste of village life in the North was by taking several bike trips to visit Liz Loftus, another agro PCV. She’s posted in a poor village along the “highway” to Lake Tchad, and both the sights en route to her house and tours of the villages she’s working with gave me a sense of rural living. Huge herds of cattle lumber across the road, their ribs jutting out. Termite hills dot the plains like sand castles on a beach. Every now and then tourist vans heading for Waza National Park whip by. Huge trucks overloaded to the tipping point with goods from Nigeria or Chad take up the whole road, the workers riding in nooks on the side and blowing me kisses.
The long stretches of hot pavement surrounded by desert were tough to bike during the day. It was a relief to arrive at each tiny village because they all are shaded with groves of Neem. Thank the lord for Neem. Honestly, if the species hadn’t been introduced the heat here would be unbearable. Most of the other tree species native to the North are stunted, knobbly, thorny things (mostly acacias), with tiny leaves. And those thorns are sharp, let me tell you! I thought the raspberry briars in my backyard at home were bad! All the shrubs in the savannah are covered in thorns. Some are as long as a sewing needle and just as sharp, others short and hooked so that they gouge out your skin.
I had to collect thorn branches once for my tree nursery and it took me forever because it’s very hard to even touch the branches without hurting yourself! Gloves didn’t help. Once I got the branches cut, I couldn’t bundle them up, and once I bundled them up and tied them to my bike, they kept cutting into my back and pricking my butt, making for a very uncomfortable ride back. I must have looked crazy, the nassara on the side of the highway wrestling with thorns haha. Villagers use the thorns all the time for fencing, to protect fields or gardens from animals. I don’t know how they manage to collect large quantities of that nasty stuff. The fact that thorns are plentiful also means you become an expert at patching your bike tires. I think I could work for Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France equipment team now I’ve patched my tires so many times. One time I got 13 punctures in one day! And that’s with an extra tire lining. The thorns are so sharp they go through mountain bike rubber like paper.
So most of the trees are as rough as the landscape, and not very shady or welcoming. Neem trees, on the other hand, are tall and evergreen, with thick layers of leaves and large, cool spaces of shade underneath. In Mora, everyone chills out on mats under Neem trees during the hottest parts of the day. Walking under them, you feel the temperature immediately drop. They are the go-to reforestation species for the Cameroonian government. They are planted in settled areas, leaving large steaming spaces of no-man’s land between. Neem has a bunch of other uses too, such as insect repellant. You should Google it- I won’t go on an agroforestry tangent now. Of course, the introduction of neem has hurt biodiversity in the region. It’s not native to the region, and it’s taking over other tree species. I mean literally in towns all you see is neem. But in terms of quick heat relief, neem sure is effective.
During these bike rides, I was also struck by the lengths villagers are forced to go to when they can’t afford proper transport. Sweating in the sun, I thought I was uncomfortable. Then I saw an old man struggling to pedal with his wife seated on the wire carrier on the back. If I’m uncomfortable on my nice bike, they’ve got to be SO uncomfortable! I passed another man whose bike had no seat. He was sitting on the back and pedaling with his arms and legs stretched out. Another guy’s bike was way too small for him and he was pedaling with his knees up by his ears, sitting on his school books which he had strapped down as a seat. He still passed me easily!
That’s not the worst I’ve seen. Ridiculous feats of transportation are routine sights in Cameroon. I see teenagers pedaling bicycles with no pedals that have towering stacks of cookie boxes roped high on the back! Moto drivers will pile bags over their handle bars until they can barely see or steer and somehow manage to drive off. Or they’ll stick five heavy bags of grain or six tubs of water on the back so that they have to sit far up on their handlebars with their legs sticking out over the front wheel as they drive down the road. Over long distances and terrible roads too! And, as far as transporting livestock goes, animal rights activists would have a field day here. Poor goats! I’ve seen one guy juggling four goats in his lap while driving a moto. Three goats bawling on the roof of a safari van zipping down the highway. Dozens of chickens hanging by their legs from moto handlebars at the market. A car covered in ropes of chickens, swinging into trees and buildings.
Speaking of transportation nightmares, right after the cotton harvest in February, I would see lines of motos disappearing into the brush on either side of the highway in the middle of the night, loaded with bales of cotton. They were taking side paths, trying to smuggle the cotton across the border into Nigeria. Apparently, Nigeria was offering much higher prices than Sodecoton this season. Sodecoton is a company 60 percent owned by the Cameroonian government and 40 percent owned by French investors. It has a monopoly on cotton, but also has a huge influence on agriculture in general in the North. It lends fertilizer, insecticide, and seeds to cotton growers on credit, then buys the cotton from them at fixed rates. Farmers usually end up in debt, since cotton is incredibly labour intensive and quickly depletes soil nutrients. This year, Sodecoton’s prices were much lower than what Nigerian buyers were offering. A lot of farmers were so desperate to make a profit that they were willing to risk sending their harvests over the border, even though Cameroonian authorities confiscated any smuggled cotton they caught along with the motos.
Transportation here is crazy. I feel like saying you can’t possibly get to your destination like that it’s crazy. We can’t go on each day riding a bike like that. Actually, I feel like saying that about a lot of aspects of rural life. That’s crazy, you can’t live like that, it isn’t sustainable! But somehow they get by, day after day. While the rural North is where you can see tradition and culture preserved, it's also where the poverty of Cameroon’s population is most evident. It’s survival. There’s little room for error. People rush to get their seed down as soon as the rains come. If your timing is off, there won’t be enough rain for the crops to finish their growing cycle and your family won't have enough food. And they work so hard for so little, coaxing food from the desert. It’s back-breaking work. I am an athletic person, and it was hard for me working with a hoe all day. For my field school, it took eight of us all day to weed one quarter hectare of millet. You have old people and kids doing that on multiple hectares all day for weeks. You’ll see kids whose hair is tinged with orange, a sign of malnutrition.
In other words, people are just getting by, scraping together enough to make it to the next season. Perhaps they are a little better off than other more destitute parts of Africa, but you can see how they are walking a fine line, and how quickly it could all unravel if there was a drought, for example, as there is now in Somalia and Eastern Africa. Many families here already suffer famine at the end of the rainy season, as their millet stores get low just before the harvest. Not to mention water problems. Taking a look down some of the wells during dry season really scared me. The water is a small dot at the bottom, and everyone in the village has to go there and wait in long lines while it’s brought up one half bucket at a time?!! I’ve seen them constructing the wells themselves, all the village men massed around a large pulley, lowering heavy cement rings deep into the hole one at a time with ropes. A man rides down on the ring, positions it on top of the last, and then they pull him up. In the mountains, I saw one constructed without the cement rings- the tunnel as deep as a two-story house was dug and lined by hand with rocks.
Biking around to villages, I sometimes feel a little sad that I’m missing out on the experience of living in a village. That was how I originally envisioned Peace Corps in my head- living in an isolated village. I don’t get to live in a hut, go into the field every day with my neighbors, sit and help them weave straw mats, thresh grain, carry a water bucket on my head from the well, etc. Living in town, I’m always just a visitor in the bush. I’m not forced to live off the grid or really live as they live. On the other hand, no PCV really has the pure experience I imagined. For instance, no PCVs are living in a mud hut in Cameroon; our country policy mandates more permanent structures. Also, PCVs living in villages say that life can be preeetty slow for a two-year stint. Takes even longer to get things done. I like being busy, getting things done- maybe I would go crazy without the hustle and bustle of a town. Also, electricity, running water, and proximity to health services are hard to argue with. Still, for the placement of my successor, I may suggest to my director that he find a village on the periphery of town rather than a town house. That way you’re closer to the land, and the people you’re socializing with are the people you’re going to work with too.
field of millet
mountain village
Emmanuel with friends at village wedding
friends of Emmanuel
wedding celebration in mountain village
mountain village
some of field school attendees
weeding our demoplot
not much shade!
start of barrier against erosion
village leaders invited to a CADEPI workshop
Where are the pictures of crazy transport?! I feel cheated!
ReplyDelete