Locked Out

The other day I was heading back to post after spending the weekend in Maroua. I had had a successful weekend, eating good food, spending time with friends, getting some work done. That morning I had bought phone credit, gone grocery shopping, and was feeling like a successful, prepared volunteer as I crammed myself into the bush taxi. We made great time and didn't make a single stop (it's normal for a car to stop several times on the way to village, for prayer or to show identification to gendarmes or because you break down) and I was enjoying myself thinking about how I would spend my time in village this week (visit the chief, swing by the Catholic mission, start planning lessons, try and practice some Mandara...). We arrived at the turn-off for my village in no time at all, and as I climbed out of the bush taxi I saw my favorite moto driver, Amada, waiting for me. He grabbed my bags and I put on my helmet and climbed onto the back of his motorcycle. Everything was going perfectly, until halfway down the three kilometer dirt road I realized I had left my house keys in Maroua. Shit.

We arrived at my house and I went about trying to locate a pair of spare keys. I always leave my house keys in my cubby in Maroua, not wanting to carry anything superfluous in case my purse gets snatched. Super paranoid about getting locked out, I had also planted spare sets of keys in strategic locations to avoid a situation like this. My postmate – who had just left for the south on vacation – had a copy at her house in a nearby village, there was a spare in my box at the Peace Corps house in Maroua (currently sitting next to the originals) which I had intended to give to another volunteer, and there was a spare securely locked inside of my house. As I sat down on my stoop next to a goat I realized that all my elaborate back-up plans had led me to do an excellent and thorough job of pranking myself. Plan C? I called my principal.

“I'm locked out of my house...do you know anyone in village with a spare key?”
“Of course not. You have all the keys. No one else should have copies of your house keys.”

This is true. That is incredibly unsafe...and in every other situation, it would be very reassuring...but I had kind of been counting on a key magically materializing. I proceeded to text my postmate, who was en route to Ngaoundere, to see if the guy watching her house could find my spare key and send it to me. As I waited for her response, I called him myself.

“Le numero que vous avez compose n'est pas disponible pour l'instant...” His phone is off.

Fortunately, everyone in Cameroon has two phone numbers (there are two main cell phone providers here, and one will have better reception than the other in certain places, so most people have both), so I tried the second one. Indisponible. I began running down the list of phone numbers I have for people in her village (which turned out to be quite a few). Indisponible. Indisponible. Indisponible. I was getting pretty desperate as I made it all the way to the bottom of the list, calling the second phone number of my Mandara tutor. It rang! And he picked up! I explained the ridiculous situation, and asked if he could get in touch with Claire's housesitter.

“Oh Bello? He's out working in the fields. He won't be back until tonight.” Shit. I hung up the phone to find a text from Claire, informing me that my key was securely locked in a trunk in her house. Awesome.

So I made one last phone call, to my moto driver Amada who had just picked me up from the Maroua car, asking if he was willing to pick me up again to take me back to Maroua. His French isn't that good, but I managed to get across that I wanted him to come pick me up, and he said he was getting on his moto immediately (in fact, he would spend the next half hour hanging out at his house and presumably taking a nap (it was hot that afternoon), before coming to get me). I passed the time at my neighbor's, sitting on a low stool in the mud-walled entranceway to their compound with four of the older women (ranging from probably late thirties to sixties). My neighbors speak approximately three words of French, but coupled with the approximately fifteen words of Mandara I have learned, we got by okay. And when I say “got by okay” I mean we both just said things to each other that the other didn't understand, and then everyone laughed a lot. They asked me what was happening, and I explained in Frandara (Mancais?) that I had left my keys in Maroua. There was a lot of discussion and each woman seemed to have a different interpretation of what I was trying to say. Then Tata – one of the mothers (rather than grandmothers) I know best, who is a typical big African mommy, missing a couple teeth and always with a giant grin on her face – asked me some more Frandara follow-up questions (“Cles? Baka? Haa Maroua?”). Her eyes widened and she shot off in rapid-fire Mandara to the other women. This was followed by everyone bursting into fits of laughter. I had made myself understood.

Forgetting one's keys is stupid in any location, but the idea of “locked out” is I think particularly ridiculous here, where there are usually at least five, and up to twenty or thirty people all living in the same compound, so there is ALWAYS someone at home. The idea that a house would be empty and everyone would be gone long enough that it would need to be locked up in the first place must have seemed pretty bizarre to my friends in village, making my predicament all the sillier. Oh, the goofy things that white people do.

After the laughter died down and normal conversation resumed, Tata pointed to her shirt and said two words in Mandara that I *did* understand: “Patele. Shagra!” 'Patele' means pagne/fabric/clothing/etc., and 'shagra' is a versatile term that means 'it's good'. The other women echoed her sentiment, and as I looked around the little room I realized that all the woman there were wearing my old t-shirts (which I had given them after cleaning out my house a few weeks ago), and were really excited about it. As we were all laughing about this (and I was attempting with my limited vocabulary to find a way to say “You're welcome! I'm glad you like them!”), Amada finally pulled up and I began my return to Maroua.

We stopped at the “gas station” (a wooden crate on the side of the road filled with old water bottles that now contain gasoline; you pay an eight year old and he funnels it into your motorcycle) before heading out, and I was starting to chill out a bit. Then, approximately five minutes later, the moto sputtered to a stop.

“Umm...what's going on?” I asked.
“Oh, it's no big deal. I had like NO gas in my moto when I came to get you, so it just hasn't gotten down there yet.” This did not make a lot of sense to me, but I got off the moto, Amada shook it back and forth a few times, it started back up, and we set off again sans probleme. About an hour later, we were starting to get close to the city and I was letting go of my frustration, when the moto sputtered to a stop again. In the middle of nowhere.

“Umm, Amada, what is the problem?” Amada inspected the moto, laughed, and said:
“Hmm. Maroua is far, huh? I guess I should have put more gas in!”

I climbed off the moto and looked to my left, then to my right. Fields and mountains and a few cows. No “gas stations” in sight.

“Well...what are we going to do?”
“Il n'y a pas de probleme,” Amada reassured me with a smile. It seemed to me like there definitely WAS a probleme, and like we were going to be walking to Maroua, when Amada climbed back on the moto and once again performed his magical moto shaking moves, and somehow the moto sputtered back into life and we were able to ride out the last few drops of gasoline to make it to the next gas station.

We made it into the city hot and tired (and sunburned...I spent a lot of the ride picturing my sunscreen, safely locked away in my house in village...) but uneventfully, and as Amada dropped me off at the Peace Corps house I decided to take this whole experience as a sign from the universe that I should spend another night eating ice cream, taking showers, using a toilet, and enjoying the internet. And so that is what I did.

Often in Peace Corps, you will have days where everything you try to do – no matter how simple – will just fail completely. In fact, most mornings as I leave the house, even if I am just planning to visit a friend or go to the market, I try to remind myself that it's pretty likely that things will not work out at all as planned, and that that is okay. One of my favorite things about Africa is that no matter what you try to do (easy or complex, normal or new), absolutely anything can happen to you. Sometimes these things are incredibly frustrating (like getting locked out), but even the frustrating things usually lead to funny and wonderful situations (like hanging out with friends and eating ice cream). And at the end of each day – whether or not you can call it a success – you almost always end up at the very least with another ridiculous Africa story.