mop weh di chop no di talk

ah be wake for six for go for church an' ah check say foseka weti we get for leave so early? papa talk say yi get for play xylophone and wuna fit hellep yi for set up. na preacher from burundi be dey an yi ask we for pray for yi country weh yi done komot for war and yi people dem no fit get for more war dem. we be read book for some fine pidgin word dem friday:

item 11: food and drinks served after meeting
should in case: plastic bag you bring to a party to take food home
come we stay: live in boyfriend/girlfriend
born house: party for a baby's birth
cry die: funeral
country talk: local language
kona kona love: casual sex
no di hear twelve: to be stubborn
ah dey like ah no dey but ah dey daso: though it wouldn't seem so, i am doing fine
when yi hold 'em for hand, pen di laugh: he/she is a good writer
ah di hear ma skin: i am pleased
woman weh yi di cook wo wo chop no like tranja: (proverb)the woman who cooks well will have many friends
mop weh di chop no di talk: (proverb) the mouth full of food will not complain

i talk say weh equally pidgin get tense dem ova gramma. for example:

ah bi chop: i ate (simple past)
ah done chop: i have eaten (past composite)
ah bi di chop:i was eating (imperfect)
ah bi done chop:i had eaten (past perfect)

i was pleased with the notice provided to us via television from the national brewing company that castle milk stout now has chances to win under the cap. drinking beer here is like eating children's cereal. you will win a free beer about one in five times that you open one. we have found a good bar in bafoussam. there is a woman outside who makes roast fish with baton de manioc and peanut sauce and pork soya (suya). a bit up the road is the fulfulde man who makes smoked brisket and beef soya, so after the typical school day we get a few sticks from fulfulde man and perhaps a few slices of papaya then go to the bar to play VC and chop pork soya. the bar is quiet and there is always a group of men playing scrabble. i gave the form two students a math test on friday. they sure were terrified. i had to laugh like hell.

i was asking around about books from my french and pidgin tutor. one prefaces her response with "eh bien, tu sais qu'avec la crise economique..." the other starts off with "now fo' first time yu be fit get plenty book dem for cameroon, but the economic crisis done come and now it no be simple." so i don't know if it is only the educated people who miss books here, but they are not seen often. one issue is that with roughly 250 languages spoken here, most people will not find written material in their mother tongue, unless some linguists have translated the book of genesis. well educated people can enjoy french literature, but there is not much in the way of pidgin literature for anglophones, for whom the line between pidgin and "grammar" english is somewhat blurry. children here have many more chores than american children, and electricity for reading after dark is a luxury for many. during the summer vacation, some children can attend a holiday school (i teach at one) or they can be sent out to sell fried balls of dough, crackers or plantains, bringing home an average 300 cfa/day for the family (~$0.60). the holiday schools cost between 2000-4000 cfa, so not all children can go. some children do not go to public school during the school year either, for the same reasons.

duylinh is in niger now just in time for the pictures of starving children that we get on the news every now and then. there was a locust attack about a year ago and everyone knew they were going to have a famine around this time... i think it'll be a fine road trip come christmas time.

piglets

piglets
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

computers are all the craze here. i went to a meeting in menji of the local secondary school principal. there was a professor whose hometown was menji who teaches african philosophy in rome. he had arranged for the twinning of italian secondary schools with schools in the lebialem district. some principal was going crazy because the italians sent them two computers which were subsequently taken to the district office. the PTA suspected corruption as usual, but the district delegate had a point when he said that the school had no electricity to power the computers. everyone felt better when the professor received a phone call from the italian ambassador and the mayor in sequence, then announced that the government in rome had agreed to his 196,000 euro proposal to fit 14 schools with internet work stations in the area. the catch: you have to have electricity.

form 5 classroom

form 5 classroom
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

the plantains arrived and i was informed that i would need 500 cfa to pay the fee of carrying them, then i gave another 200 to a boy with a handcart to take them to the bafoussam motor park. the chargeur for the bafoussam bush taxi called it a fair deal that he would carry my plantains in exchange for not giving me my change... the plantains seemed to be my demise, but my sister informed me that i got them for about 1000 cfa cheaper than they can be had in bafoussam. cost neutral. i hope they fry them tonight.

des nuages

des nuages
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

the chemistry teacher and i spent the morning preparing a periodic chart to replace the one that never existed for the chemistry students. we wanted to make five of them, but we ran out of glue. i had breakfast at his house and called the principal to tell him i would not be coming for breakfast. he insisted, so i ate a second breakfast and turned on the computer in his house to confirm that the hard drive was broken. the physics teacher and i spent the better part of friday getting an old pentium computer up and running. he was excited to learn the various functions of microsoft excel. we tried out some old 386 computers that had no chance of working but i had to keep up the positive attitude while one of the students used a program to learn to type. some of the children speak french but most people only speak pidgin and nweh. leaving this morning his daughter carried the 20 kilos of plantains i bought the day before as an exercise to amuse myself and bargain for fun calling the boy over to the bar as he carried him down the street. the plantains wouldn't fit in the clando (a four door 80's model sedan holding about ten passengers and their luggage), so they got thrown on the back of a pickup going in the same direction. i had to wait around an hour for the truck to arrive, since it went slower so as not to throw out the passengers standing in the back

enfante

enfante
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

it is because of this child that i have a smaller selection of photos to post. she was so fascinated by the camera that she made me take her picture seven times and she did the same for me and various pieces of furniture in the house. in english the card suits are (black-spade, cassava-club, square-diamond, red-heart), in french, respectively macabo noir, trefle, faux carre, macabo rouge. the child cheated at cards but i finally beat her one time by cheating as well. we will play again when i return in late august. madame served me a stew with yam fufu that had a meat that smelled like pork and had the consistency of dried beef. 'that is bushmeat, we get it from the forest' lewoh is surrounded by hills and clouds, and the kids all want to get rich quick by farming cacao up in the hills. there is an old farmer we call englishman, since he was schooled in colonial days takes pride in talking in pidgin rather than nweh amongst friends. the pidgin here is based, in addition to english and indigenous languages, on french and italian. they have the gallicism "equally" meaning also, and the loan word from italian parola, taken to mean something that someone has said. englishman drinks gin as a proper englishman and gives away kola nuts and discusses with the other old men the great riches coming from a bucket of a certain breed.

suavamente lo hago yo

we got into marche B early in the morning and took a bush taxi to dschang. it took about 90 minutes to fill up, start the motor, go get gasoline. we got out in tongo fongo motor park in dschang, only to be informed that the motor park for fontem had been recently relocated to a site in the general direction of a hand gesture and a muddy road. upon reaching each intersection i asked the first mommy i saw which way to the park. i ended up in a market dedicated to sales of live chickens encaged in woven raffia baskets. this was quickly cleared up and we got to fontem motor park where it took only two hours to fill up the bus. i was assigned to the front seat for PR purposes--the gendarmes didn't hassle us in any serious way. in the rainy season the fare goes from 1500 to 2000 to make up for the lost time and possibility of getting stuck in the mud. we crossed the ouest-sudouest border and the rusty signs indicating government opposition to AIDS immediately changed to english. we pass Alou, which is the word for clouds in the local language (there you often will not see someone passing on the street three metres away for the low-lying clouds). they let me off in lewoh. i walked down the road and stopped at the first house with a man on the porch.

bon jour, vous parlez anglais?
ah no di hear you o
good. i am looking to meet the headmaster...

a police officer visiting the village, his home village, escorted me to the principal's door...

i wanna go to UniPort, to get nuff' educa shun

we went a few miles up the road into bangou with several members of the press. perhaps twenty women all dressed with the same sort of pagne came around to talk to us and inspect the girls. the head wife approached becky, saying to all of us elle est bien jolie. peut rester ici avec nous. surely she had the best child-bearing potential amongst all of us. some dancers from the village came out and raised up a bunch of dust, or they would have if it hadn't been raining every day since i got here, and then the chief came out flanked by two men wearing cafe do brasil burlap sacks adorned with cowrie shells and horns, to ward off evil spirits. the doctor told us that each of us must remove our hats (except for him, who was a kingmaker), and bow slightly, clapping three times, to greet the chief. it was very important not to touch the chief. the chief, through the honorary american prince Lorne, told us that he would grant us the opportunity to take a picture with us, and that he was very pleased for us to come visit him. he is a progressive chief who fights against rural exodus and has a proposition for our ambassador.

all dances stopped and a group of men wearing masks made with frightening carved wooden faces or quilts of cowrie shells and red beads, all with dreadlocks made from the hair of those who danced the dance since generations back, hundreds of years, bamboo seed pods were tied up and down their legs to make a sound like water as they danced. even the chief may not enter their preparation room, for they are the secret society. all of the young dancers had replaced their fathers recently in the society.

the chief then invited us down to his palace, where several artifacts were laid out. his cultural advisor explained to us that the copper virgin mary and jesus meant that they were a christian village, after which he proceeded to an illustration showing the course of evolution of men from chimpanzees, saying that we are connected to the animals. he said that the chief had granted him special permission to get near a certain chair in order to explain its function to us. carved in black ebony and lined with cowrie shells, it had a globe at its bace, upon which two lions stood. on the backs of the lions sat a man, who made the seat of this throne. the chief is "the one who cannot be hunted, so he sits on the back sof the lions" the arms were carved to resemble scaled dragons, representing the attack of the white man on the chief, the ones who felt that they could hunt the chief. the man who makes up the back of the chair holds the necks of two other men, representing the european's strangulation of the africans. the chief may only sit in this chair when he meets with a king from another village.

the reason he had invited us, he began to explain, was that as americans, we were half-brothers of his people-he would explain why shortly-there were some 200m off two separate squares which hundreds of years back served as auction squares for slaves. in one square, people of bangou were secretly sold to traders to be exported to the united states via Limbe, and in the other, the bangou people bought slaves from other lands to maintain their own population, in light of the loss due to slaving. so he sent greetings to the children of the village who now live in the united states, using us as proxy, and told us his intentions to build a monument to the slave sales of times past, as a way of asking forgiveness of the mothers of the villages whose children went to the united states. for this, he would like the support of our embassy.

then we were showed his habanero plantation where he produces a commercially available pepper sauce as a condiment(he orders the people to grow habaneros since they make more money than coffee and they will allow the young men to build a house here with their earnings), and then we went in for a small snack, which turned out to be a rather extensive feast prepared by his wives.

plantains frites et des haricots

plantains frites et des haricots
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

they cook in here and the smoke always gets into my eyes. i should convince them to make a chimney for the children's health. this weekend we will visit a cheferie in a nearby village. we have all pitched in to buy a case of french wine for the chef and 30 kilos of rice for his many wives. our pedagogy instructor has four wives with two children each and he always wears a crumpled hat like a new york cab driver cerca 1980's. i am woken up every morning by roosters. the relief won't come until new year's, when we kill all of them and finally get to sleep in. i say bonjour to the same people on the road each morning. the man with the box full of bread on the motorcycle, the old women with plantains on their head, the cafe madame who calls her establishment cafe la japonaisse, the soldiers sleeping outside of the cement warehouse, jean vierre the bartender. la japonaise gave me her phone number yesterday so i can text her in advance what we wish to eat each day and how many people to expect. her type of restaurant is called a tournedos. an unlicensed taxi is called a clando. the northern terminus of the railroad system is ngoaoundere. jerry's sister proudly showed him the certificate of HIV negative and then asked him if white men every marry black women in the united states. jerry has five sisters. my sisters prepare a roasted ear of corn for me each evening and an omelette in the morning. i think we have had 20 consecutive days of rain in mbouo. we have to iron our clothes even socks and underwear because the mouche will lay its eggs and the worm burrows in your skin. avocados, 25 cfa, pineapple, 250cfa, wheat flour, 350 for a kilo. flour is imported but everyone is addicted to bread so they pay a lot for it.

cati! sors!

eplucher le manioc
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

i found out that brasseries du cameroun produces a stout beer at the suggested bar price of 475cfa, admittedly higher than the 425cfa "33," but it is smooth enough to drink all in the ten minutes between lunch and afternoon language class. here my mother and sister are peeling casava to make the farine de manioc. we had a fouth of july party. i went to the "every eight days" market in bandjoun. we bought a kilo of farine d'oegle, a kilo of dried corn, and a bag of salt. all the children are on vacation from school so there are so many extra vendors. i bought a cup of salt for 25cfa from a little kid, making sure to taste it beforehand to see that it wasn't msg. oegle means wheat here, that because the factory that mills the wheat that often gets exported to cameroun is called Oegle. i got nowhere asking for farine de ble. we got the dried corn then this kid offered to show me to the ecrasseur, where we could get it ground into flour. he had written in chalk on his door "5L mais ecrasse 150CFA" i got him to grind my little bag for 50cfa, then we went back to the kitchen after being convinced of the futility of trying to get, within 20 minutes, an old hubcap for use as a grill, since the kid with us refused to take up the mission even with the 100cfa prize for its location. then i went with tim and took him to the same flour guy since he gave me a good deal when i didn't have change, and i realized we didn't have lard. we descended into the charcutier's row and i asked ten butchers in wooden stalls stained dark red with blood and flies swarming with pieces of pork cut up, the skin and fur still left on some parts so they could be put on the hook more easily, and they all said they had just ran out of fat. well rather it took a long discussion to figure out the camerounian word for pig fat. it wasn't saindoux, as the dictionary said, it wasn't gras pronounced the normal way, but something sounding like graise. as i turned to leave, the butcher in the corner yelled to me and pointed to a pile of bloody fat lumped between adjacent bamboo poles on a table. you got a deal, buddy.