Cameroon: Crossing the Street

Cars have the right of way here and it’s no surprise. They’re bigger, heavier and traveling way faster than you are. Face it: in a fight between you and a car, you’re totally fucked.

I tried my best to avoid crossing the street but there came a time when where I needed to be was on the other side of a line of angry vehicles. Danger be damned. I was getting to that cookie shop. 

Taking my cue from the locals, I darted in front of two stopped cars. They seemed to be lined up in front of some invisible or implied red light. In-between cars two and three the imaginary light turned green and that’s how I found myself trapped in the middle of an intersection, dodging death and feeling more than a little like Frogger. I never believed this sign until I was in it, I mean, what kind of person would actually plow down a pedestrian?

Amazingly, an SUV aimed itself directly at me. I was about to become that stick figure: arms flailing, blood starburst explosion at the contact point. Do I dive under? Leap the hood ninja style? Pull a Gandalf? I opted for choice three and turned to face the maniac driver, scowling my best shall-not-pass face. But he kept coming; I lacked the power. At the last moment, I sucked my stomach in and turned sideways allowing the SUV to barrel recklessly through the space I had just been standing in. Until now, I always thought the 10 points game was just for kicks. Here, they’re playing to win.

Caution! Crossing is prohibited. And we really mean it.

Cameroon: Getting Wasted

Fitchuk comes in two varieties. The first, they call The Drink of the Gods. You can smell it everywhere in Cameroon, like a smooth honey perfume wafting along on the warm air. It’s a mild drink, more alcoholic than beer but softer against the body and mind. Sharing a bottle or a bowl or a gourd full, you get the impression that maybe you might be able to sip this drink eternally, rising to immortality like a Greek tasting ambrosia. And you must always share fitchuk: the more, the merrier, no matter how short the supply. This is the drink that binds us; this is who we are. Long day on the tobacco plantation and you need a pick-me-up? Here, drink this fitchuk with me, my friend. High blood pressure? Fitchuk will fix that for you. Low sperm count? Put some power in your pump with another cup of fitchuk.

The second variety seems to be battery acid and is invariably served in a plastic bucket by a sideways man with crazy eyes. It’s unacceptable to refuse a drink, though paradoxically, it’s never okay for a woman to appear drunk. The red-eyed demon offers you the ladle and you take it from him. The drink will go down like poison, burning off the lining of your esophagus, searing through flesh and bone and skin until you’re standing on your head debating best practices for growing cacao trees with the moon. And the moon is winning.

That’s why I stayed far away from the bucket man and his danger drink. He lingered on the shadow edge of the market, always in view but lacking substance; a bad omen. I would keep my hands busy with bottles of warm lager and I would keep my eyes away. As painful as not observing was, the morning after, upchucking fitchuk, would have been far worse. 

Ando and I had walked to a nearby village in search of a satellite dish and a few cool drinks. Well into his second year of service, Ando was a local by now and I walked safely next to him. 

Tonight, tensions were high. Cameroon was playing Denmark and everyone within ten kilometers had gathered to witness. Tickets cost fifty cents, a steep price out here, and those that didn’t have the money pressed against the thatched walls to peek in through the cracks. Ando stepped over to a booth left of the bar to pay our entry fee and procure us a few beers.

I didn’t even see him coming, this terrifyingly drunk man who charged over at me and closed my tiny wrist in one of his massive, palm tree-crushing hands. He roared at me in French with a terrible urgency.

“I don’t speak French,” I lied. I do speak French but I’ve learned that I can’t understand their accent and they can’t understand mine. I pulled at my hand, hoping to slip away but he had me like a vice. Ando was gone.

The enormous man squeezed my arm, shook his head and repeated himself louder and faster than before.

“I’m sorry. I don’t speak French. I’m an American. Je ne parles pas le francais.” I used my thickest accent: nasaling the sweet French vowels into ugly American ones and pronouncing the final consonants as if I didn’t know any better.

But he dismissed my protestation as irrelevant and shouted at me again.

I shook my head and tried my best to shrug innocently.

Once more he bellowed, this time in English. “You know what the problem with the French is?” he spat at me, “It’s that they think they can come over here and take our land and our women and our drink and give us nothing. Nothing!”

He was angry, not at me, but I was standing closest, so I’d do.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “That’s not fair. They shouldn’t do that.”

“You’re French,” he informed me, coughing up the word like a lung worm.

“No, I’m American.”

“You come here with a cat and you call it a rabbit.”

Were we insult sword fighting he would have gotten me there. I had no retort.

He pulled me closer, examining me suspiciously through squinting eyes. I could smell the distilled drink on his breath. “You tell them when you go back. Tell them, ‘Go home!’ Tell them, ‘Stay away!’ Tell them from me.” Then he grunted, like a bear when it decides not to chase and maul you after all, and lumbered off.

Without any blood left in it, my hand glowed white in the moonlight.

The woman collecting tickets informed me that my friend had already paid for me and that he had gone inside. I bought a bag of peanuts from her.

In the darkness of the bar, I found Ando in the corner, balancing on a slim wooden plank suspended a good four feet off the ground. This place had stadium seating. 

“Looks like you made a new friend.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Cameroon: Getting There

       Clearly, this was not a good idea.

       I’ve been lost before. Hell, I’ve made it a standard practice. I wander the world directionless, shifting through an endless maze of crowded bodies and coiled streets, signs only sometimes written in a script I recognize. I’ve learned to love losing myself, descending into city and popping out again where I least expect to find me.

       I’d been warned.

       “Public transportation is never safe at night,” my guidebook read, “If you must go somewhere after dark, stay in a group.”

       “That’s a red zone,” Dorothy whispered, voice so low it shook, “We don’t go there anymore.”

       Even my country’s reckless government kept its volunteers away; I stood alone at the brink of needless hazard.

       I arrived deep in a starless night. The sky was an ink spill leaking through the seams of the horizon, soaking into every blackened blade of grass. My eyes squinted through the scuffed glass into the emptiness that the ascetamine glow of the one working headlight failed to banish. Blind, I dug into my purse, searching with the my fingertips, digging through the damp tissues, around the cookie crumbs, and under the wallet that refused to get out of the way. I fought the illogical urge to dump everything out upside-down, and letting out a frustrated breath, grabbed hold of the cell phone at last. Midnight.

       A part of me felt secure holding the soft weight of the phone in my hand, reporting in with a friend now five hundred kilometers away. A smarter part of me knew indisputably that if the shit went down this could be my own story’s climax.

       Despite my growing sense of dread, I’d done my best to make friends with the man pressed against my left side. We’d been squished together that way for the past eight hours, four passengers in a row of three. Each of us spoke just enough French to have something to answer each other’s questions with but neither of us knew enough to understand the questions correctly. He’d made me his charge, though, which I appreciated even as I kept my trust clasped tight in one hand, hidden away from him. I didn’t know this man but I needed him.

       ”I have to go here,” I told him, pointing on the map, “I need to go to this hotel. This is where my friend is waiting for me.”

       “Ah, of course. I know that hotel well and I know what you need to do to get there. You will need to get off at the second stop, you know. [I nodded.] Yes, don’t worry though, I will help you get off at the correct bus stop so that you can go to your hotel,” he told me using a complicated mixture of French, Cameroonian, facial expressions and pointing.

        At least, I hope that’s what he was trying to tell me.

       We stopped at the north edge of town.

       “Is this my stop?” I asked in English.

       Everyone shook their heads, the next one, I understood in their pantomime, and so I leaned back from the night and allowed myself to be carted further into the center of the red zone.

       At once, all heads but mine turned to look behind us.

       We just passed your stop, that was it there.

       Shit.

       A few kilometers further down the road the bus rolled to an incomplete stop and my keeper bounded out of the car, yanking me along, handing me off to a rickshaw driver and showing me which colorful bill I was to use to pay him with. Do not overpay, give him only this much.

       I had already loaded my backpack into the cart when there was a change in my plans. My guardian snatched me back up, pulled me and my bag away from the army of rickshaws that lined the late night streets and put me back on the bus.

       Most of the passengers had gotten out, and I found myself now seated next to a man about the same age as me.

       “It’s better to go in the car,” he told me in English.

       “In the bus? But they passed my stop already.”

       “No, to go back. Better in the car.”

       “The bus?”

       “Yes.”

       We had already left the city limits and were crawling around and around the black alleys before I realized that he meant his own personal car.

       My caretaker got out. He will take you back to your hotel.

       As the passengers disembarked and the night deepened, the drivers shifted the cargo from the top of the van to its interior. I sad amidst the bags of rice, charcoal and live poultry, protected by a fortress of mislabeled 50 kilogram sacks. A goat sat on my left, his legs tied. If I’d been the humming sort, I would have started humming here.

       A few stops later and the man who offered to take me back stepped down off the bus, holding up a hand to stop my approach, “It’s late. I have to go now.”

       “Wait, how am I getting back to my hotel?”

       But he was gone and I was alone with the four bus drivers and the goat.

       “Are you taking me back to my hotel?” I tried, first in English, then in French, forcing my lips back and up into a mockery of a smile.

       None of them turned my way.

       I asked again, louder, in French and twice.

       No response.

       I touched the goat in the eye, just to make sure I still existed. He blinked; stared right through me.

       I texted my friend with another late-night update.

       “That’s weird,” was all he wrote back.

       I turned my eyes back out to the universe, soaking it in, filling myself up with the darkness around me. If this was going to me my final adventure, I was going to watch each moment roll along outside, even if all I could see was black. In the night outside my window, I pictured the cityscape, watched families sleeping next to a softly glowing fire pit, the deep orange embers cozy and familiar.

       But that orange glow was real, and arched up along a vertical surface taller than two of me standing one above the other.

       And the glow curled along a soft cursive French word, and the word was familiar.

       We screeched to a full stop in front of the neon sign.

       “Hotel,” the driver told me, and giving the goat a playful pat, I bounced out of the van and into a hot shower and a soft bed.