hightlight hallways

reenactment of resident trying to tell me politely that it is unadvisable for foreigners to be out in this neighborhood after dark, me not catching on

resident: bon soir
moi: bon soir, c'est comment?
c'est pas bien...
on va faire comment?
...
...
vous etes en train de pouiller
oui, c'est un peu ça
vous etes en train de pouiller
oui, ce n'est point de problème
bien sur, c'est un probleme, vous n'etes pas regulier ici
on le sait
ils ne sont pas là?
non, ils ne sont pas là.
mais vous etes en train de pouiller
on reste là. j'allais retourner, de tous façons
vous n'etes pas regulier ici, c'est pas bon, vous comprenez?
oui, merci de m'en aviser, en fait on va s'en aller dormir toute suite
ok bon soirée

y'all talk funny y'all from the islands?

we went to the beach one time in november, close to christmas because it was the first cold day. watching the wind russle those salty weeds on the dunes was good enough. we stayed like that for days. another time i dug a hole in the ground and the police found me. at the time i enjoyed sleeping in holes and they assumed i was drunk or had killed myself. after the apparent suicide of my 18-year-old son i stopped going to the beach. tomorrow i'm going to the swamp to get duylinh. i will be equipped with a letter with three different stamps, a business card from some man who ensures cameroon's compliance with the 1991 (or 1994?) montreal protocol, and a carton of menthol cigarettes, should it come down to that.

the train that handed out silver bells

a mother showed up and i took them to the place across the street with grilled chicken, loud music on blown out speakers, and it is not entirely certain who the prostitutes are. she learned how to eat bitter kola despite protests about wanting to go to bed in the near future. the taste stays on your tongue for several hours, sweetening any type of beverage you drink. in fact i´m tired of talking about things you do or foods you eat exclusively in this region. already we were wishing we had worn some more comfortable shoes, walking along all these concrete sidewalks, marble gallery floors, subway gratings and perforated staircases designed to clean the mud from your boots without you knowing it, we couldn´t precisely say we were too tired of walking or that our bodies had grown tired of walking, only my knees hurt and her toes were cramped; the real fatigue was in watching the changing scenery: the crowded barge, the supermarket where we bought orange juice and she made me sit on the fountain ledge next to her for about forty minutes pronouncing and giggling. we thought the last car had left, but there were three other people standing there with confidence. the tubes of light were yellow. in yellow light you have to avoid talking since everything starts to resemble the crucial scene towards the end of an independent film with a minimum of action. talking would be as bad as a viewer amongst other viewers talking during the performance of such a scene. i fell asleep on the subway. we weren´t even drunk, though the timing of reponsibilities, money in our pockets and bright lights should have encouraged us. it such an evening that forgot to order drinks--they would have made you start talking, you realise just now, that was why. yeah as soon as the car took off i was asleep. i was riding in circles not feeling nauseous in a large plaza i realised because i wasn´t on the train, which turned out to be a conveyor belt upon closer inspection. i picked up a small snow globe and put it back, because a wooden box was behind it and i couldn´t disturb its place in line. i hadn´t figured out the rules of this place yet. a woman down the line whose face would change if i tried to remember it picked it up. she had a long black jacket on. a synthetic material with a matte finish. i looked away from her because i didn´t want her to know that it was a look of jealousy. maybe that´s why there was no face. i chose not to look at it. some child was crying. i told the crowd that this was no place for babies. i didn´t want them to know that i was presuming myself the informal leader of the group. i say know because when we think about people we peg down facts not because they have been amply demonstrated but to avoid the unease of having loose ends in our heads concerning matters that we nevere were all that interested in in the first place, really take it i swear i´m not gonna finish it. the train started to brake with that high moan of such constancy that it could be a type of musical instrument that these modern trains... we left the station and had fried potatoes in her arondissement. i smoked a cigarette too so no one would know she was a prostitute.

décalé décalé décalé décalé

the most popular songs here make no sense. who cares. the music videos are either filmed in paris or in a vip douala night club. about 45 women lined up shaking their asses in unison, one or two guys throwing money onto the floor, smoking a cigar and the mc repeating a word or phrase. surrounded by mirrors and smokey disco lights or on the banks of the seine. when you buy cooked meat it's try before you buy, so you get to taste any type you want before deciding which you will take. i tried a piece of chicken breast with rib bones suitable for chewing and swallowing deciding it was for me; a drunk comes and gives me the usual two minute long handshake, "bon soir le blanc, on n'aime pas les blancs," imitating a popular song, which happened to be playing then and there at an intensity that blew out those public event speakers around the same time the cd got scratched enough to routinely skip and no one notices (the belgians ruined it for everyone), asks me for a beer i say "n'y a pas" and he shakes my hand for another minute staring off into space the grilleur apologizes and says his sister is inside. but as long as i'm at the local restaurants and not cutting off anyone's hands for not having met the rubber harvesting quota i'm making an IMPACT.

i read the new york times article about the girls not having proper latrines, girls dropping out of schools for their period. one girl watches out for the other when they do their business in the bushes. shit, if i let two girls out of the classroom at once they come back 30 minutes later holding hands and laughing so i ban them, only one at a time. insensitive, holding back the progress of rural africa, which is tied to the development of conditions for girls, as the article notes. we have two raphia frond urinals for older and younger students, and an earthen-brick pit latrine somewhere on the hillside. we had a meeting of teachers in bamenda and they brought up the poor performance of girls in higher grades. the consensus: girls and boys stop caring about school when they start having sex, but the girls start earlier than the boys, 13, 14 years or so. this, perhaps, is a corollary issue. the article mentions pressures to get married and growing household duties, which mostly involve grinding, pounding, digging, stirring, gathering, balancing, climbing, upon whose completion you have breakfast.

information consultant

#10: ndala legem

one thing that people take for granted is the standardization of weights, measures and monetary exchange. distances on the road are measured in kilometres or miles, depending on which province you are in and when the road was constructed, goods are sold by the handful, the pile, the spoonful, the amount of petrol burned, pièce, and occasionally by the kilo. if something is bought using an informal measure, it must include a cadeau (gift); a few peanuts, an extra tomato, one more bite of beef, just one street further, i beg. a road that was constructed in the areas and in the times in which british were administrators has mile markers which serve as landmarks. a business-savy league of merchants, cab and bush taxi operators has decided to make the mile 4 sign post outside of limbe an informal market/transit hub. the haggling coefficient (the number by which you divide the stated price to find the true price) varies from region to region, the time of day, the personal finances of the vendor, and the appearance of the buyer, so not only me but someone from another city can pay the wrong price. prices are quoted differently depending on region and your age. in the local dialects of the anglophone regions a price is quoted in pounds "poh"(1pound = 1000cfa, from the conversion rate established in 1962 and long since abandoned) or the necessary number of 5 cfa pieces ("ndala" in lewoh, perhaps from the word dollar and the fact that it just doesn't sound right to say a d without an n in front of it), which don't really exist anymore due to inflation. in the north prices are quoted in the number of 5 cfa pieces, and in cities you say the actual number of cfa. possession of foreign currency is restricted, so black market exchange rates are determined through supply, demand, actual market rate, time of day, etc.

first you feel frustration, then the allure of a wide network clandestine operations, then propinquity amongst those that know the ropes

más joder, que ganas tenemos

i've repaired the archive links

with angelic host

#9 puff puff
i passed through herr geraldo anasazi's hometown to survey the scene. we went to hollawood bar on the historic market square to eat grilled mackerel and consider solicitations from prostitutes and geraldo's female students. in the morning we ate beans and puff puff at a tournedos amongst the del monte rubber and banana plantation houses. it looks so strange, those identical concrete houses packed so closely together. tenants get free rent as long as they are working. if you want to retire and still live in the house, your children will have to be workers too. we went to pa's house and madame had pa's daughter and some random cousin cook breakfast for us. geraldo mentioned that the daughter had been feeding him almost every day since he got there, so i suggested that he should just marry her. she's university educated. this proposition proved to be not so simple, as there were various other women around the area bringing food over for geraldo, perhaps with similar intentions. even the waitress at the country club seemed to take a similar attitude in serving him his fried chicken and chips. cameroon has restricted the importation of frozen chicken, so most chicken you eat will have been freshly killed, very juicy, not much meat, and bones soft enough to eat. munka scholastica came to the house one evening (i still haven't figured out which if any of the children in the compound are hers) and asked me privately who had brought the fufu and ero for geraldo, with guarded envy. i explained that he was perfectly capable of collecting the two types of leaves needed to make the ero from the forest, prepare them with red oil and spices, peel, soak, cook and pound the cassava, and arrange it attractively in two pots all by himself. laughter

solo voy con mi pena

#8 the last twenty minutes

we were in the shah house, or the house that is the shah house once every eight days. a pig that is fattened mostly on grass will have a reasonable amount of fat, but one that is fattened on leftover rice and soup will become intolerably fat. you test by grabbing a fistful of its flesh. a piece cut from the flank of a grass-fattened pig should have about one inch of meat, one inch of fat, and the skin. we ate some pieces of such a pig and i even felt so brash,
"sista ge, add me kwinja"
my sources within the shah house informed me that an optimist could easily catch a car. a car passed and he ran out of the house and yelled dschang after it. i realised i didn't have my luggage so i collected it and left it outside of fwefoolezhang's shop so an irresponsible child could delay a car while i settled my accounts and ran down to the road. not ten minutes later we heard a hilux engine and yelled dschang after it. all happened as planned and i managed to settle, in about 25 seconds, the issues of whether a foreign passenger such as myself would increase the pots-de-vin and pourboires expected of the driver, what to do with my students' report cards, and whether or not my electricity bill, madame shah and saddam hussein would be paid.

bounce rock roll

#7 the prince:

upon learning that the best model of our employer's management is a group of well-meaning communal livers that decide to raise children as a group without regard to its filiation who long ago had a messy divorce but still resort to sending information to eachother via the now cynical children that console themselves by playing one side against the other, we went to bamenda's historic commerce street to eat pizza and hamburgers because we thought they would taste good and damn the price, which we kept telling ourselves was worth it because it was a hamburger. i didn't actually go, but then again i'm rarely present at any of the scenes i mention. we met a highly educated chubby young prince from the suburb and an old man from the neighborhood who decided that because he had studied in london as a young man he would go out of his way to locate and have delivered to me at the correct black man price a bottle of shah. the next evening the prince invited us for mbongo chobi and grapefruit soda. those poor bastards with their pizza. also i bought a pair of leather house slippers that i broke in by getting lost on a mountain. i entertained ideas of search parties and hypothermia, discarded them and followed the woodcutter's path to bamindangkwe. everyone else had also gotten lost and i arrived before them, so i didn't get teased.

del monte

i dreamed that i was asleep on a train:
we got invited to a wedding reception for a young couple. after it became clear that non-bangwa attendants would not understand dialect, and the elders would not understand grammar english, the pidgin was established as the language of procedure, since the only one who would not understand would be my guest, mlle. xiaodang guitierrez. the evening's speeches.

the groom made a toast:

"i was one of 69 children to graduate from class seven [~sixth grade] in 1984, along with two others you will see here in the room. since then, twenty two of them have died, averaging one per year..."

next one of the principals made a toast:

"and my sister was married. the man was married to her for eight nears, and he only gave her one child. he made love with a woman from his work. he gave her seven children. this woman died. my sister took care of the children..."

the dry season is the time for funerals. pigs are raised so as to be mature around this time. so many people die throughout the year that once the rain stops, there is an endless successsion of death celebrations. if food and drink and dancing are supplied to the community with compliments from the dead person, the deceased's general likeability will make him or her less likely to come back and haunt or play tricks on people.

tu me propose le condom, tu n'as pas confiance en moi

#5 apathy:
i was at hot spot when i saw jorge, the aragonese trader from three corners. he suggested we go find seats. i bought his bear then he secured a seat for the two of us in the third class seating section, an area reserved for rich people, foreigners, notables (nkem), and teachers. second class was for quartier chiefs, and the four chairs draped in leopard skins sitting behind a table adorned with bottles of whisky, red wine and elephant tusks hunted before the ivory ban were for fons. if a fon walks anywhere in public, he must be shaded by a huge twirling umbrella, surrounded by dancers, and preceded by jujus. one man from the chief section fired about fifty rounds from his semiautomatic shotgun over the course of the ceremony. someone made an announcement, which was translated as "please, be careful when you fire guns. some people may be allergic to gunshots." jorge suddenly took me to the second floor, as a network of invisible symbols had communicated to him that the food was unveiled. i filled my plate with goat meat, pork, egusi pudding, rice, baton de manioc, a boiled egg and a cow's hoof. at the drink table i was given an entire bottle of wine. a man met me outside and gave me a bag of tomatoes as a gift and asked me for advice on his pending application to some british graduate school. at next opportunity i will upload pictures of the event, including the fowl that we butchered for the fon's aunt and then secretly ate part of.

tao linda tao linda

#4 dramatization of dialogue overheard during my most recent twenty minutes in lewoh, excepting that one day i was there:

ndek, o fuht le?
mm
you are welcome
i give beans for how much?
enke moht fi bo eta'a kari be bieh
you are hearin very fine
mami you want go for fongotongo? you get fowl dem for sell?
meh'mfaht ngweh sa'a fongotongo
ca ne va pas demarrer
essayez
allons-y
some man want for go, he bag dey dey
now dis pikin why he delay we so
irresponsible children
irresponsible children
motoboy na weti?
le pays va mal, tu sais

time to unwind like december

i will summarize my last four weeks in twelve easy to read steps

#1: some old man from minnesota founded this internet cafe with a simple vision: to teach people how to get rich off of computers. something about jesus and the rotary club as well. we're in bamenda where a rumor whose source i can no longer recall has told me that i can buy good white fowls, suitable for grilling at one five, down from the dschang price of two five, surely less than the occasional lewoh price of three five, (a source tells me that bangwa people will only fry chicken if they have it, not sell it, least of all to you. the same goes for cocoyams) so i plan to bring an armful of fowls with me to the gabon-equatoriale guinea border town of -----(removed at the insistence of publisher's lawyer) (sans cuidado), where i will begin a goodwill mission that ultimately fails on account of my out of control drinking. the fowls are a different thing. i have been contracted to kill a bafang fowl in february, but the bangwa have warned me that the bamileke may poison me or cause a snake to bite me if i cross them, so i will proceed with caution.

#2: in this place known as the fire inside of the forest, we marvelled at how fat the girls for, and coach said with a hint of jealousy that it was because they can eat all of the carrots and beans they want. all the same, their admirable bodies did them no good when they were defeated in the lewoh-________(name removed to discourage lonely planet editors from including it) girls handball game; a game which the referee threatened, emptily, not to allow to proceed until i payed him a four dollar bribe. he caught up with me on the walk home and requested the bribe, but we had already played and won. i was chaperone to the event and i walked with the students five hours uphill until we arrived into one of the miasmic markets typical of the region where those of the fotabong fondem (mine) could not hear all of the dialect of the mmock fondem (theirs) and reverted to pidgin when communication became difficult. the typical greeting there translates to "you have started?" instead of "has day come?," though with the same words. upon finding that their pidgin was too heavily mixed with dialect, i decided to speak only in french, which worked better than you would think

#3: having finished my chaperone duties the night before i woke up and met with coach on the road, who told me "i have passed the night well, as i slept with this my beautiful wife," indicating a woman that probably was not his wife. the occasional tourist or foreign consultant visiting would suspect foulplay on coach's part, but it's not that simple, when you consider that it is common courtesy for a man to refer to any unmarried woman past puberty as "my wife," and that "sleep with" means to be an overnight houseguest, of course the same words would be employed in discussing coitus and the woman you are married to.

#4: the fons of fontem, lewoh, mmockmbie and some other place were present for the death celebration of the...

i was a fool to think i could type these twelve up in 10 minutes. salut