je ne vends pas ça

yesterday we went to this restaurant for grilled chicken and french fries. the guy promised us that the chickens were already prepared but there was a suspicion as to whether he meant that they had already been captured, or they had already been bled and plucked, or they had already been quartered and washed, etc. there is rarely ketchup at a restaurant but you can get maggi msg sauce in its stead. we had to drink a second beer since it started raining as we were preparing to leave.

since dschang is a border town, haggling is bilingual. i saw on the vcd kiosk a film with the title "THE BIG LEBOWSKI," and i picked it up. the cover featured a man with his short half torn off, sweating and holding a machine gun, another with a knife in his hand and blood, a robot or a tank, all on a backdrop of explosions. it seems that the title THE BIG LEBOWSKI was imposed on the cover of Delta Force X. the discs were in fact those of the movie the big lebowski, but the clever nigerian distribution agents had doctored the cover so as to suit local tastes (anything with steven segal in it). i don't know if this counts as false advertising.

bon soir, mon ami, celui-ci coute cinq cent, vrai?
pas vrai
we be na combi dem...

i'll post the big lebowski cover next chance i get. i think it would be to drake's amusement. buying coconuts:
c'est cent cinquant, non?
trois cent
na white man price o! we di go, you done kosh me (walk away)
three
(continue walking)
two
(turn around)
donnez-moi l'argent

you know you have gotten the right price if the vendor quietly says "donnez-moi l'argent." if the vendor looks intent on ripping you off, you can cut the process short by pulling out the amount you want to pay and shoving it in his hand, say "prennez l'argent" if he closes his hand around the money, the sale is made. fresh coconuts are about forty cents, and pineapples so sweet you can eat the rind are about 75 cents, but where is the rum?

on the avena situation: here in dschang cans of quaker oats are for sale at "the white man store." the directions for preparation in english are for making oatmeal hot cereal, those in spanish are for making avena the beverage. you gring about two tablespoons of oats into a powder then add to a cup of sugared milk, bring to a boil and turn off let thicken, add cinnamon. you can use honey instead.

the avocado mama had a bucket of beignets labeled "ca va se savoir" the mark everyone knows to be chinese. perhaps because everyone knows that americans hate chinese, she told me that she is not one to be selling chinese beignets, which brings me to other facts i have learned about americans:

-we are all honest and can repair any car or computer (macguyver)
-men may be carrying a gun, and have amazing fighting skills (steven segal)
-women cannot get enough sex (porno)
-we have little else to do but sit around with our friends spending money (any syndicated television show)
-we are either a scientist, a doctor, a professor, or a priest (misssionairies and NGO's)
-we do not like children and we abandon our elderly parents (family planning campaigns)

you win some, you lose some

el mismo hecho de interrogarse

these days i spend all of my time staring front of a computer driving to the corner buying cigarettes in the metro with my electric stove i have to wipe the fog off of the mirror in the bathroom this new cleaning product removes oil stains from tupperware i need baking soda to put in my refrigerator look at my online statement separate trash for recycling. other days we drive up the muddy road sitting on laps of women with artificial legs and broken windshields to get the the internet club where the cab driver stops in the middle of the road to buy two cigarettes from the child crossing the street open sewers in bafoussam, sidewalks in dschang, close my eyes and have a song in my head the moment the cold water soaks my hair we wash dishes in a bucket of rainwater with a 400g solid block of soap that also washes your clothes and body this when the water doesn't work you boil everything you left out overnight which is as good as refrigerating and all trash goes in a pile whose smoke on burning drifts over the gentle hills

we have all left mbo now i am in dschang waiting until the roads dry up enough to take the car to lewoh where i can install myself. as usual i will just show up, unload my trunk and suitcase at the bar then wait for someone to recognize me and give me the key to my house, then several children will carry all of my things for me to wherever my house may be. palm wine continues to ferment and within three days or so it is mostly vinegar if you leave it in the bottle too long the carbon dioxide is too much and it is like champagne the difference is we don't use champagne bottles but used plastic water bottles, like we eat roasted peanuts out of used whisky bottles, we eat grilled suya off of used radiators, we drink honey with bees still in it out of coca cola bottles et cetera. there is a university here and a centre climatique, so named because the french set it up since the weather was tolerable to them and they could live there. i am staying in the surgeon's compound on a hill after the valley and the other hills is my area.

the best thing about dschang is that the open sewers aren't big enough for you to fall in at dark, the people are more mild-mannered. moto drivers don't yell "woa woa le blanc!" and i don't have to yell back "que puta queres le noir?" there are italians, muslims, an iranian shopkeeper, ubiquitous sourdough bread, cheaper and faster internet, warmer, a sidewalk even on the main street... dont acte

glycolysis

glycolysis
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

"elle dit que non et elle crie, mais tu force" our neighbor scolded my sister for forcing her affection upon some random baby, after she saw it and snatched it up on the walk home from church, the baby protesting all the way. it's not easy to get the babies to sleep, and you gotta go ruin it. two thirds of my math students failed the class. i am guessing this is because their parents enrolled them in the anglophone section so that they would learn english better, then of course they don't undestand half of what i explain. i figured it out when i started off on some polemic one morning about students not taking notes, and i start talking about the young boy in the green shirt, who must know everything since he didn't have a pen or paper out, "isn't that right sir?" he stares at me blankly. i tell him to take out his notebook and pen and get the same response. "sorts ton cahier!" then i gave everyone a lot of homework. the season for bananas, cocoyams, and peanuts is underway. but for now i am preparing for my presentation which is to be in french, "at least 30 minutes." they will let us go so long as we fill that time with anything, though formally it is about cameroonian culture. i am preparing an extensive presentation of varied information of questionable relevance to the topic of "alcool dans la societe camerounaise." it promises to be half an hour of discussion of the processes involved in fermentation and distillation, vapor liquid equillibrium curves, converstion of glucose to pyruvate via glycolysis, the reaction behind those breathalyzers that turn green, then a 30 minute rant against the neocolonialist menace, loosely supported by the arguments of the french agronomist rene dumont's 1965 classic "l'Afrique Noir est Mal Partie," and my experiences watching oliver stone's documentary about fidel castro some two years ago, and finally another 30 minutes or so of my theory on the normalization of alcoholism in cameroun, based on advertisements i have seen and comments made by jean pierre the bartender.

landa ban voya bafoussam douala

jean pierre sat down at the table with us after bringing our drink to have fried pork riblets and liver with plantains the group of men walking by in a festive mood had disposable cups promoting the sale of trente trois beer and some ladies dressed in black showed up, with equal volition to drink. down the road on opposite sides of the street were being held a funeral and a homecoming party for all the natives of bandjoun. it always happens that the day i pick to wash my clothes is a rainy day. from now on i will pick nights. today i skipped the potentially four-hour long french-ghomala bilingual assumption day mass-my mother claimed there would be many priests there-i made myself scarce as everyone was dressing up.

last night i went to a first communion paty. they had the boy dressed in an all white robe ornately embroidered then all the family friends and the priests. for a party here you put chairs lined against the walls, one table full of whisky, wine and beer, one table full of food, then people serve themselves in order of age and societal status. first the preacher, then the elders, then the foreigners, etc. it was a magnificent feast counting much fried fish heads, hard-boiled eggs, batons de manioc, chicken necks and wings fresh bread, and atchu with pounded taro.

morena....

in the internet cafe one can hear hogs squealing as they are loaded atop bush taxis, hog tied and placed in rafia baskets. the chickens are quiet right before they get sold, but only then. it was best when we would wake up in the mornings to potato and cassava peels, lime rinds, pistacchio shells, empty whisky bottles, ashes, a stack of books on the table serving as a pedestal for dishes of crusted over hoisin sauce. the only thing left is to sink further. don mustard-stained trowsers with torn and dirty cuffs, vacuum cleaner over the shoulder. we left early yesterday and ibrahim was there breading a fresh batch of soja. the piment, our lips were burning. c'est plus chaud qu'il ne l'est d'habitude, mon ami oui oui, c'est tres bien, non egalment bien qu'hier, mon pere claiming that something is exactly as perfect as it was yesterday, and not that its matchless perfection is only rivaled by tomorrow's form, is the politically correct way to criticize. jerry and i got some icy milk stouts and i wrote the final examinations for math and chemistry classes. we have decided to encourage the bar to continue having a refrigerator buy bringing them business and arrive in this state with a handful of limes gathered from amongst the empty bags, loose grains of salt, bottles of crema salvadorenha, that old bottle of tonic water, and bang on the door.

rfi's morning report yesterday, which was blocked this morning by radio bafoussam's erratic transmitter that consumes all frequencies, noted that the nigerien president and opposition political party have taken the food shortage to its natural conclusion: a chance to profit by consolidating/seizing power. the president claims that the food shortage is limited to some small areas and is being publicized to defame the government with the direction of the opposition party and the UN. the opposition claims that the government has carefully, surgically manipulated things to bring starvation, that they should resign ipso facto. duylinh's reporting direct from the source: ...was responsible for like 69 villages. so we got up there in this maze of earthen compounds and narrow alleyways to see this chubby man wearing a suit all in white, with a long shiny silver cape, and his guard with a ridiculously long sword. there was an old man who rushed to put the cape back on him whenever it fell off. i got a henna design on my left hand. it should last a couple months, except the fingernails, permanently stained. the kids say henna isn't cool. with my right hand i eat we all sit around on the floor from a comunal dish. it is hard not to make a mess when we have something like rice and beans... doo dah doo dah

that pig keeps squeeling. he is louder than the diesel engine of the beer truck. one time one of them fell out of the back of a taxi, squeeling endlessly as the crowd gathered around. it takes two men to carry them. they are still heavier than the stalk of plantains.

that nests in us forever allied with time and memory

here they stress functional french, that which is needed understand things drunkards yell at me from passing motorcycles, an announcement on a crackly loudspeaker in a noisy room, an eavesdropped conversation. for all this i turn to voltaire, at my tutor's advice, for such versatile quotes:

je vous trouve bien effronte d'oser me parler d'un dessein si temeraire
(i find you quite insolent to dare speak to me in such an audacious fashion)

in other french news, i explained to the francophone students business club that i would suggest they look at newspapers to find financial information such as commodity prices, currency rates of exchange, publicly traded company share prices, labor data... at first it seemed to me that my accent had mangled the message as they looked on inquisitively, but i was reassured when, upon looking at issues of the two major newspapers, i saw that there does not exist such a section...(let's not talk about clouds on a sunny day)

que lama las piedras

ibrahim's son sometimes sits there in his absence with that thin curved blade almost like a filet knife, the burglar-proof caging over the rusty barrel, and his little brother pushes the log in a bit more when he sees us coming up the road. there are the thin slices breaded with corn meal and maggi cube reheated and eaten with spicy oil and cumin, or the brisket kept warm wrapped in oil paper that you can always taste before buying. you want them to be almost too hot to touch, guaranteeing the many fly's eggs are destroyed, but not yet dried out. ibrahim says that bafoussam is better business for a butcher than his hometown of garoua in the sahel- the cool air makes it easier to preserve meat in a place where only beer is refrigerated.

this one guy came here after seven years in the business analysis consulting gig and has resolved to become the next jimmy buffet, stationed in limbe, recording flagrant jimmy buffet ripoffs translated into pidgin, only replacing the word margarita with sachet.

i have informally discovered that there are quite a few cognates between ghomala, spoken here, and ngwe, subject of the aforesaid sociolinguistic survey. they claim that the bangwe are descended from the peoples of the mbo forest, originally including the internet cafe i'm at right driven by famine, finding fertile soils and an excess of clouds. in grassfields languages the prefix 'ba' means "the people who,"

drinking my sachet...

que la suerte sea suerte y no algo que me ha de cansar

everyone just had to laugh when i ordered a sandwich with both avocados and beans together. i was completely out of my mind, all the cameroonians were saying.

got "sociolinguistic language survey of ngwe" from the internet cafe to read the feasibility of translating the bible into ngwe or use the ongoing yemba translation as basis for written ngwe, since there are some dialect groups, such as the Nnock, who can understand yemba better than the Lebang, or central variety of Ngwe. my recommendation will be to commission a translation of naked lunch into Ngwe to facilitate the spread of a mother tongue literacy in the lebialem subdivision. at least this was my suggestion when the secular humanist recommended to me that a book other than the bible would be a good idea so as to not interfere with indigenous religions.