Through the East!

I’m currently about to embark on the last leg of a rather epic journey down to Yaounde for my COS (Close of Service) conference, where they will hopefully teach me and the other 40 volunteers from my training group that arrived almost two years ago how to act like normal Americans again (see previous blog post for details on how weird we are). While I’m still hoping that topics will include such things like “resume writing” (mine still lists “waitress” and “wrangler” rather prominently…) and “proper American hygiene” (which I’m guessing involves wearing deodorant and washing your hair more than once a week…), the e-mails we’ve gotten to date from PC admin are not encouraging. We’ve got a stack of forty or so forms that range from “Waiver Promising You Will Fly Home on an American Airline” to “What Airport Do You Want Us to Send You To?”

To mix things up a bit, a couple of my more ambitious Extreme North companions and I decided to take buses down through the East this time, instead of the usual overnight train. This is a part of the country none of us had ever been to before, but where one of our closest friends lives, and so we decided since it was really our last opportunity to see where she lived, we would go all the way out to her post (on the border of the CAR) in a circuitous route to Yaounde.

The East is extremely different from the Extreme North. Usually, when we travel down south, we get on the train in the cooler (but still dry) climate of Ngaoundere and wake up in hot, busy, humid Yaounde. This time we took a bus from Ngaoundere to Meiganga, then an epic eight hour bus ride from Meiganga to Bertoua, the regional capital of the East, and were able to watch the desert shift slowly into jungle. Only about half of the major roads are paved here, and the rest are covered in about an inch of thick, red dust which gets all over your clothes and bags, not to mention in your ears, up your nose, and all over your body so that you look like you have a cheap and horrible tan. Everybody seems to have a different philosophy as to the best way to prevent getting covered in dust: some people demand that ALL of the windows be closed, wherein the bus becomes a hot, rank, stinky box of miserable humans, and you start to sweat so much that the dust trickles down your legs in red rivulets. Others demand that the windows be pulled all the way open, as this somehow is supposed to funnel all the dust to the back (I guess we are not concerned for the poor people crammed into the back row), but still involves you being coated in dust, and having to wrap a filthy scarf over your head and around your face. With sunglasses on, the only part of you that is visible is your nose and eyebrows (which still get incredibly dirty).

After finally reaching Bertoua for the first time, one of us used an entire bar of soap trying to get the dust out, and the lather from my shampoo was bright red, as if I had just dyed my hair.

But it turns out that Meiganga-Bertoua is maybe the easy part of our journey. The next day, we began our journey eastward, nearly all the way to the border. It’s almost entirely thick jungle out there, except for a couple big towns which look like they’ve just been plopped down in the middle of nowhere. Again, the roads are unpaved so we were still dealing with the same dust situation, but now instead of being in a bus, we were riding in what Peace Corps volunteers lovingly refer to as “prison vans” – from the outside, they kind of look like a shortened school bus. But then you climb inside, and notice the metal grate separating the driver from the passengers, the five rows of metal seats (two benches on either side, plus one seat in the middle that folds down. This seat may or may not have a back, as poor Liz discovered on our first prison bus, when the man in front of her sat in her lap the whole way). The rows are so close together that you are inevitably poking the person in front of you in the butt with your knees, and being poked in the butt by someone else’s knees (throw a few children onto people’s laps and things start to get REAL crowded). The only door for the passengers is in the back of the bus, so theoretically the people in the front row should be the first people on the bus and the last people off. This is not the case. As soon as the bus stop, people begin climbing out the windows. But they can’t get back on through the windows (they’re too high up) so they have to go in through the back. The last person to get onto the bus at any given stop (to pray, for a flat tire, to buy bananas (we stopped regularly because the driver seemed to be hungry; basically of an American bus driver doing a detour to take all his passengers through the drive thru)) was inevitably someone sitting in the very first row, who had to climb over several rows of angry people (remember: the aisle has disappeared into folding seats), claiming to not understand why everybody is mad at him. In short: it is an adventure.

Not only is the climate in the East pretty different (those of us adjusted to desert living were all sweating bullets as soon as it got the least bit humid…and it was extremely humid pretty much all of the time in the East), but the culture is as well. People in Bertoua definitely spoke French with a much different accent in the north (although I wondered if this was just because they were perhaps native speakers who used French at home too, rather than people who mostly spoke mother languages and had learned a semi-functional version of French at school like in the north), although there is still a LOT of Fulfulde too, as well as of course a whole different stock of local languages.

The East is pretty famous for being one of the most “social” (for lack of a better word) parts of the country, and we found that this translated into people being either incredibly friendly, or incredibly rude. You get a lot more “nasara” calls down here – yes, I am aware that I am white. Thank you for brining my attention to it. I also got a couple glimpses into how much we had assimilated into the quiet, polite Muslim culture of the north when on a particularly crowded bus ride, a couple of us ended up with men putting their hands on our knees or in our laps. Men in my village don’t even shake hands with women, and these ones were touching my leg! How inappropriate!

Our first morning in Bertoua we had a delightful time at a sandwich shack with a bean momma who chatted us up, smiled at our weird accents and weirder orders (spaghetti omelette sandwich with tomatoes, onions, beans, piment and mayonnaise? Check!)…then walking home from dinner a couple days later, a guy tried to run us off the road with his car, then pulled the car over and said the Cameroonian equivalent of “Hey baby, whatchoo doing?” That’s totally what I look for in a man: someone who drives a piece of shit car, tries to hit me with it, then spouts a super cheesy line. Basically, everybody talks to everybody all of the time, whether they know them or not, and whatever their intentions…

We found this attitude rubbing off on us pretty quickly when we were stranded at a bus station for four hours waiting for a car to fill. A teenager selling cigarettes and Kleenex packets was sitting on the bench across from us, taking a rest. We were sprawled about, already covered in filth, reading or complaining or eating bean sandwiches, when we noticed the kid staring at us, and then pulling out his phone to take pictures of us.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Liz called to him. He looked down and frantically pretended to be dialing a number on his phone.
“Yeah, a picture costs 100 francs,” I joined in (in more touristy areas, people demand payment for having their picture taken…we figured the same thing would work in reverse, right?).
Meanwhile, the surrounding Cameroonians have taken an interest and all started to laugh at this kid, who was now pretending his cell phone had just rung.
“Oui, hallo?”
“Who’s there?” Liz counters, and everybody starts to laugh, including the kid. Then we bought some tissues from him and the whole thing was resolved…but needless to say, my heckling skills have been finely honed – another thing they should probably try to unteach me at COS conference.

All in all it’s been a weird and wonderful trip through the East, and it is now time for me to throw my filthy clothes back into my filthy backpack, and jump on one more bus, which will thankfully will deliver me to the Peace Corps house, where there are both showers and a washing machine. Deluxe!