thursday:
normally i don't tolerate spontaneous disruptions of my class and i'm the type to say nothing to see here people keep moving. but they so rapidly forgot the class and ran out the door it had to be something important. a rat mole was sighted. all the boys ran and surrounded it but then it managed to burrow down amongst some plantain trees and elephant grass. it was on the side of a steep hill, so it had the upper hand. if you catch a rat mole, you can sell it to a rich person like me or another teacher, so the common knowledge goes. they are the easiest wild animal to catch, especially with the aid of a dog. you can get good money with them. the meat of one rat mole (value ~$2) can give enough money to buy ten meals at a local restaurant without meat. one of the most elusive animals is the bush fowl, which is famous for its "sensitivity." a bush fowl will always inspect its surroundings before reaching down to pick a piece of food, so it rarely falls into traps. a proverb in the local language is "as sensitive as a bush fowl," meaning careful and perceptive in one's dealings.
anzoeh:
thursday was also anzoeh, market day. next week anzoeh will fall on a friday. you can buy at the taxi park a little booklet that tells you the traditional day and western day for each day of the year. here in dschang the days are called differently, they speak yemba. anyhow today is amina and it is market day in dschang. i will use the logic of a shopping-addicted woman: there is a big sale. since i will buy these pineapples at 30% savings (which i wasn't going to buy in the first place), i can use this 30% to justify the purchase of a bottle of rum, in order to make proper pinha coladas. (the cost of the rum is the same as that of 35 pineapples, 70 pineapples if i were to get them in belua) on anzoeh i spent my last 200 cfa on a plate of beans, fried bread, and an avocado for breakfast, then ate corn meal pancakes for lunch. i had to turn my head away from the pineapples and tell myself that the season is barely starting, and it will continue until february. the ones that you buy now are surely underripe. the women come in from the west province and sit in a line with table cloths and their carefully stacked piles of tomatoes and onions. the prices are almost standardized so there is little bargaining to do, all in french. facing them are older women with 20L containers of palm oil and raphia wine. these ones bargain with the old men that always like to pitch in on a whole drum like alcohol consumers throughout the world and the bargaining will be in ngwe with all numbers in french. they did not kill a pig this time. last time i bought a kilo of ribs. my friend sent it to his younger sister to burn off the hair and then transshipped via a student who delivered to me and chopped up into pieces suited to stewing with my machete. the word for bacon in ngwe can also mean the number eight, or HIV.
friday:
the last time i was in bafoussam i woke up and turned on a television and i saw the short film
vinil verde, in portuguese with french subtitles. i could not understand how it could make it onto the bafoussam television station, but i still watched it. it is an adaptation of a russian fairy tale in which a young girl listens to the record she is not supposed to even though she had an entire package to choose from, and her mother dies one day at a time by losing arms and legs, bloodlessly it seems. the moral of the story: never wear green gloves, and fall in love and have your own children, filha.
the song contained in the green vinyl is gripping:
nós somos as luvas verdes
a gente vem te pegar(we are the green gloves, we're coming to get you)
anzoeh gi moht:
there will be a large crydie. the fon will even come and his foreign visitors in their prados and land rovers. they will probably kill 5 pigs and 50 crates of guiness. there are different drum beats for different things
