Dry Season Browns

The dry season is in full effect in Cameroon. In my part of the country this means that it hasn't rained a drop since the beginning of November.

Here's a picture of part of the campus during the rainy season:
And here's a picture of the same area (from another angle) in the dry season:
So banish any images you may have had of me living in a steaming jungle from your mind. It's really really dry right now. And dusty.

Nanga Eboko is located on a heavily traveled road. A heavily traveled DIRT road. In the dry season this means dust. Lots and lots of dust. It would be dusty with the dirt road anyway, but with herds of cattle and big logging trucks passing by daily, we get tons of dust from the road. When you come back from a trip into town your clothes have all turned brown. There's spots on the road where it's like walking in a few inches of snow - but dust instead. The foliage along the road is covered with dust so thick it looks like autumn back home - all the leaves are dark brown.

And the dust doesn't stop at the road. The wind blows it in from the main road over the campus, so even in your house you start noticing dust everywhere and a thin brown film forms over your windows.

Traveling is also much dirtier in the dry season. It's dirty in the rainy season too, but the dry season has introduced me to new levels of filth. It mixes real nice with the sweat produced by a 6 hour bush taxi ride under the hot sun.

With all the dust in the air, everyone here comes down with colds. I have developed a mild cough that comes and goes and have a bit of a sniffle most of the time from the dust.

Power outages are also more common in the dry season. I had expected the opposite, figuring that without heavy rains and lightning there would be fewer outages. Wrong. Because it is so dry, and because the locals practice slash and burn agriculture and burn their garbage, there are lots of forest fires in the bush between Nanga and Yaounde. The fires take out power lines all the time. Apparently, the dry season also lowers electrical output in Cameroon because most of the power here is hydroelectric. So, when the water levels in the rivers drop during the dry season, the dams have trouble keeping up production.

The dust is also a maintenance nightmare for the school's computers. There's no air conditioning in the computer lab, so you have to keep the windows open during daytime classes or it gets too hot inside (for both the people and the computers). But keeping the windows open lets the dust in, which of course permeates the machines and can damage their innards. Two months ago we had 18 working computers in the lab. Now we're down to 11. not sure how much of that is the dust (as opposed to power problems, heat, or students messing things up) but I'm sure it's a big part. I'm going to start doing some research with Peace Corps into funding sources to buy an air conditioner for the lab so we can seal it to keep the dust out as much as to keep it cool. When there's electricity of course.

As an added irritant, several weeks ago the University was doing maintenance on the water system and somehow dumped a large quantity of debris into the water system. This produced a roving blockage that periodically cut off water for several days on parts of the campus while the crud was gradually pushed out of the system. Now the water runs again (usually) but it's full of silt or sand, or dust, or some other kind of crud. I've taken to putting a sock over the faucet to strain it out.

The dry season has also seen some interesting temperature shifts. At the beginning of January it got cold. Cold. Yes, in equatorial Africa. When I left the house for my 7 AM classes I could see my breath. After months of sleeping with just a sheet, I suddenly needed a blanket at night. I switched to washing in the early evening because I have no hot water and it was too cold in the morning. And if I was cold, my Cameroonian students and colleagues all looked like they were about to die of hypothermia. The cold lasted about two weeks, then suddenly we had one perfect day where the weather was mild and comfortable from sunrise to sunset. Followed the next day by scorching heat. Since then it's generally been pretty hot in the day, with the heat gradually rising. I'm told February and March are generally the hottest months of the year here. Still cooler and much less humid than August in New Jersey. On the other hand I had air conditioning in New Jersey. During the day I usually just stay in the shade if I don't have class, so it doesn't bother me too much. My house doesn't get a lot of sunlight in the afternoon and has a lot of shady trees around it, so it stays pretty cool.

Before the dry season, when it was raining heavily every night and the ground was often a sea of mud every day, I was looking forward to not having to walk around in the mud all the time, but now I can't wait for the rains to start again.

I was going to call this post "Dry Season Blues" but in the dry season here everything just sort of turns brown, so I guess you could say I've got the "dry season browns" instead.