Victory!

So, Cameroon beat Sudan last week and last night went on to beat Tunisia 3-2 in overtime in the Africa Cup of Nations. Watched the game in a bar here in Yaoundé. It wan pendemonium after every goal. When Cameroon won at the end the locals all started shaking their beer bottles and spraying the ceiling, walls, and each other with beer. Wish I'd had a video camera. Truly a sight to behold. Then I fled before they started lighting things on fire.

Throughout the game there was one drunk patron who kept shouting that the Tunisians were terrorists. Apparently the Cameroon-Tunisia match was a major battle in the War on Terrorism® and he kept screaming things like "We must beat the terrorists!" and "Terrorism must be punished!"

The Lions are playing Ghana on Thursday. Woot woot woot!

The Road to Hell is Unpaved

Another volunteer pointed me to this article from the Economist about the hellish state of Cameroonian roads and their impact on the country's economy. One of the roads he writes about happens to be the road to my village, and I can personally vouch for everything he writes: the mud, the rain barriers, the gendarmes, etc.

An excerpt:

The plan was to carry 1,600 crates of Guinness and other drinks from the factory in Douala where they were brewed to Bertoua, a small town in Cameroon's south-eastern rainforest. As the crow flies, this is less than 500km (313 miles)—about as far as from New York to Pittsburgh, or London to Edinburgh. According to a rather optimistic schedule, it should have taken 20 hours, including an overnight rest. It took four days. When the truck arrived, it was carrying only two-thirds of its original load.

The scenery was staggering: thickly forested hills, stretching into the distance like an undulating green ocean, with red and yellow blossoms floating on the waves. Beside the road were piles of cocoa beans, laid out to dry in the sun, and hawkers selling engine oil, tangerines, and succulent four-metre pythons for the pot. We were able to soak up these sights at our leisure: we were stopped at road-blocks 47 times.

These usually consisted of a pile of tyres or a couple of oil drums in the middle of the road, plus a plank with upturned nails sticking out, which could be pulled aside when the policemen on duty were satisfied that the truck had broken no laws and should be allowed to pass.

Sometimes, they merely gawped into the cab or glanced at the driver's papers for a few seconds before waving him on. But the more aggressive ones detained us somewhat longer. Some asked for beer. Some complained that they were hungry, often patting their huge stomachs to emphasise the point. One asked for pills, lamenting that he had indigestion. But most wanted hard cash, and figured that the best way to get it was to harass motorists until bribed to lay off.

.......

Even without the unwelcome attentions of the robber-cops, the journey would have been a slog. Most Cameroonian roads are unpaved: long stretches of rutty red laterite soil with sheer ditches on either side. Dirt roads are fine so long as it does not rain, but Cameroon is largely rainforest, where it rains often and hard.

Our road was rendered impassable by rain three times, causing delays of up to four hours. The Cameroonian government has tried to grapple with the problem of rain eroding roads by erecting a series of barriers, with small gaps in the middle, that allow light vehicles to pass but stop heavy trucks from passing while it is pouring. This is fair. Big trucks tend to mangle wet roads.

The barriers, which are locked to prevent truckers from lifting them when no one is looking, are supposed to be unlocked when the road has had a chance to dry. Unfortunately, the officials whose job it is to unlock them are not wholly reliable. Early on the second evening, not long after our stand-off with the police in Mbandjok, we met a rain barrier in the middle of the forest. It was dark, and the man with the key was not there. Asking around nearby villages yielded no clue as to his whereabouts. We curled up in the hot, mosquito-filled cab and waited for him to return, which he did shortly before midnight.

The hold-up was irritating, but in the end made no difference. Early the next morning, a driver coming in the opposite direction told us that the bridge ahead had collapsed, so we had to turn back.

Bigger Than The Superbowl

Cameroon is a football (soccer) country. Forget the Superbowl, the World Series, or March Madness. You haven't seen sports fanaticism until you've been to Cameroon. Not only do people follow the sport religiously on TV, there are informal teams and matches in every quarter and village in the country. The poverty of the country makes it difficult to build stadiums, but if you were to drive around the country, you'd see makeshift football fields everywhere (easy to spot because of the improvised goals - often just sticks or tree branches jammed into the ground). I hear the rest of Africa is not too different.

Right now we are in the middle of the Africa Cup of Nations, which surpasses even the World Cup in importance here. The 2006 World Cup was being held during my training in 2006, so I got a taste of soccer culture then.

On days when the Indomitable Lions (the Cameroonian national team) play, everything shuts down during the game. At the University, evening classes were cancelled during the last match. Taxi drivers stop driving, stores and restaurants close, and everyone heads for the nearest TV. Bars with TVs are usually packed. When a goal is scored you can hear half the town screaming. When the Lions are playing, the day of the game is always an unofficial national holiday.

As I mentioned in my last post, Cameroon is a country with plenty of divisions, but the Lions are one thing that unites them all. When the national team is playing, everyone is Cameroonian, no matter what their tribe, religion, language, or politics. It's actually a little touching.

Last Tuesday night Cameroon lost its first match to Egypt, 4-2. I watched the game at a friend's house, so I probably missed the full effect. Needless to say, the mood the next day was almost funereal. On the bright side, one of my English students was watching it with us, so it gave me the chance to explain what an "kicking ass" was.

On Saturday night, Cameroon played Zambia. They somehow got their groove back and won 5-1.

This time I watched it with a friend in a local bar, and the patrons and employees all went wild with joy with every goal. I was able to explain the expression "kicking ass" again, but in a more positive light this time.

Cameroon is playing Sudan tomorrow night. It's probably a good sign for Cameroon that Sudan was beaten by Zambia. If Cameroon wins, they will move on to the second round. I can't imagine the celebration that would follow if they were to somehow win the cup (probably unlikely after the drubbing they got from Egypt). Ah well, onward! To victory!

As a side benefit, the government and SONEL (the power company) are working overtime to make sure the televisions stay on during the cup. So, power has been remarkably stable the last couple of weeks. Makes you wonder why they can't manage to keep the power on the rest of the time, but, c'est l'afrique.

Kenya, Cameroon, and the Ilusion of Stability

For those of you who follow the news, Kenya exploded into violence in recent weeks after a disputed election. For those who would like some background, you can read a brief rundown on the country and it's history at wikipedia, a news round up at allAfrica.com, a timeline from Reuters, and a commentary by sociologist-historian Immanuel Wallerstein.

Today the news got even grimmer. The New York Times is reporting increasing signs that the violence in Kenya, which has left hundreds dead and tens of thousands displaced, was planned and premeditated by various political-ethnic factions.

A constant thread I have noticed in all the news coverage is surprise. No one saw it coming. Kenya was so "stable" they all say. The first paragraph in the Times article I linked to above says Kenya was "a country that was celebrated as one of Africa’s most stable."

Personally, I'm not that surprised. Violence like this doesn't come from nowhere. There are plenty of historical precedents in modern Africa. Côte d'Ivoire is probably the best example: for years it was touted as stable and prosperous - until it blew up in civil war a few years ago.

What's happening in Kenya is depressingly familiar in Africa: a toxic mix of poverty, corruption, undemocratic rule, and ethnic rivalry boiling over into violence.

I think it all goes back to the colonial era. Most countries in Africa never would have existed had they not been created by the European colonial empires. When the British, French, Germans, and Portuguese drew their borders, they were drawn for the convenience of the colonizers, not the inhabitants. As a result, diverse and often hostile ethnic and sectarian groups were lumped together under colonial rule, and then found themselves still lumped together in an uncomfortable marriage of inconvenience at independence.

Before independence, the colonial regimes often used a "divide and conquer" strategy of favoring one tribe over another in order to win their support and rule their otherwise unruly colonies. Lacking a strong national identity, this divisive kind of politics has continued and most Africans still identify more closely with their own ethnic group than with the artificial nations within whose borders they live. As a result, most politicians and generals tend to rule by leaning heavily on supporters of their own tribes, sects, or regions. These supporters are rewarded with a bigger share of economic opportunities and government spending than the others. Naturally, this leads to a lot of pent up grievances over time, especially in poor countries where the pie being divided up is pretty small to begin with.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Africa has suffered under a long line of one-party governments, military rule, and various other forms of personal or party dictatorship. Although Kenya has avoided military rule, it has been under one-party rule for its entire history, and its leaders in that party have continued the old game of favoring their own ethnic groups at the expense of others, stealing from the public treasury for their own personal enrichment, and stifling any effort to change the situation.

What foreign observers often call "stability" in countries like Kenya is really just a situation where the current ruling powers have managed to freeze the political situation in place so that no one can remove them. The problem with this is that the rulers of a one-party system have no incentive to actually address mounting economic or social problems or to try to defuse the ethnic tensions bubbling under the surface. These tensions are there even if they are hidden, and the longer they go unresolved the more the frustration of the people builds and builds until finally, some event triggers an explosion. I am friends with a married couple at my school who are originally from Kenya, and they have told me many stories about the mounting frustrations in Kenya at the absence of any real change.

I can't imagine what volunteers in Kenya are going through right now. Volunteers live and work in communities and form close relationships with their neighbors and coworkers. Now they are watching these same communities many of them have no doubt grown to love tear themselves apart. It must be heartbreaking. According to the Peace Corps, all volunteers in Kenya are safe and accounted for. Some are still at their posts working, while others have been temporarily consolidated at safe locations in hopes things calm down. (In case any PCVs in Kenya happen to read this, you are all in our thoughts here in Cameroon. Stay safe.)

The scary thing is, I think Cameroon is a lot like Kenya. An artificial nation made up of many different tribes that often have very little in common and ruled over by an insatiably corrupt one-party government. And foreigners like to praise the country for its "stability."

As an outsider, it's hard for me to tell where things are going, but I hear things.

I hear volunteers in the north of the country tell me their friends are saying if the next President of Cameroon is not a northerner they will go to war. I hear volunteers in the Anglophone provinces tell me friends openly wish they could form their own country. I hear Francophone Cameroonians saying that if the Anglopohones ever revolt they'll be crushed. I hear stories about how the Bamileké (one ethnic group in Cameroon) were chased out of my village by machete-wielding mobs in the 90s. I hear seething anger at wealthy politicians making fortunes by stealing from the people. I hear a good friend telling me "I have nightmares. We're going to be like Côte d'Ivoire or Rwanda."

Yet through it all, I constantly hear Cameroonians telling me "We're peaceful! we have no wars here! No wars!" but often with a hint of quiet desperation in their eyes - hoping that if they wish it and proclaim it loudly enough they can ward it off.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope Cameroon never knows the kind of violence that has torn apart Kenya or Rwanda or Côte d'Ivoire. But if it does I will not be surprised. It will be a hard day if it does come. I have lived with Cameroonians, worked with Cameroonians, taught Cameroonians, been friends with Cameroonians. They are not abstractions to me. They are not statistics on the news like they are to other Americans. They are friends and colleagues and the thought of them turning on each other is unbearable. If it happens, most Americans won't even notice. Those that do will say something banal like "isn't that terrible" and then forget about it.

For my part, I will weep for Cameroon and for my friends. Sometimes that's all you can do.

Seka Seka

This is one of the biggest popular hits right now in Cameroon. By the Congolese musician Mareshal, "Seka Seka" can be heard blasting from half the bars in the country on any given day. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can blast it in your house too. So crank up the volume and enjoy some top notch African pop music, preferably with a cold beer in hand.

Vacation

Yes, I know it's been a while dear readers, and I humbly apologize for being such a slug about posting, but, well, you get busy, or you lose power or your connection, or you're traveling through villages with no cyber cafes. You know how it is...

Right now I'm sitting in the Peace Corps office in Yaoundé catching up on emails, news, and (I hope) this blog. I just returned from two weeks of travelling in northern Cameroon with another volunteer. It was a great trip and I enjoyed seeing the north, which is like a different country in many ways. I will write up the details of my trip, pictures, and my observations about the north at a later time. I will also post some pictures from Christmas - I spent the holiday with my Cameroonian host family (volunteers live with host families during training), so I will write a bit about that as well.

Stay tuned!

Swamped

The last few weeks have been a bit overwhelming. At the moment I'm in the capital doing some banking (money ran out) and running numerous errands. I haven't posted in a while because I've just been too busy the last few weeks. Here's a quick run down on what' has been going on:

• My dean is trying to jam in most of the classes I teach this semester in order to finish them before the second semester. As a result I have been teaching two English classes and two computer classes simultaneously. On the schedule, this has meant I've had twenty-eight hours of classes for the last three weeks straight. 10 AM to 10 PM with an hour for lunch and two hours for dinner, four days a week. (I actually let the students in my night class go a bit early, so it's more like twenty-four hours., but still...) As you can imagine, I'm pretty exhausted and constantly busy. Quite the contrast to last year. The depressing thing is that even with all these hours I may not be able to finish on time. My poor students...
• Had a quiet Thanksgiving with friends. Turkeys exist in Cameroon happily, so I was even able to arrange a nice (if pricey) Turkey dinner.
• Just planned out my holiday vacation schedule. Going to spend Christmas with my host family from training in the town of Mblamayo, then going to visit Bill in Buea for New Year's, and then I'm meeting up with Volunteer Kirk in Yaoundé for a seventeen day trek to the north of Cameroon, which promises to be very different from my post. We are going to visit Waza National Park in hopes of seeing some giraffes or lions or other cool animals. Haven't seen too many yet outside the national zoo here in the capital. (And they were even sadder looking than most animals who live in zoos.)
• In preparation for the trip I've started studying Fulfuldé, the dominant language in the north. More widely spoken than French apparently. So far I've learned that "jam na" is how you greet people, "jam" is the proper response to this and just about every other greeting and most questions, and that "Nassara" means "honkey." (I hear that one in my village all the time. My friends from the north are very excited I'm trying to learn their language (well, was before I got overwhelmed with classes) and have started trying to speak to me in Fulfuldé a lot. I just smile and say "jam" a lot.
• I'm working with a former student from the university to put together a series of health education activities for Nanga's schools and hospital around February or March, so we sat down today and started working out a budget, plans, etc.
• While going to the bank today the motorcade of the President of Cameroon (Paul Biya) passed by while I was standing on the curb. A long black limo and an escort of police cars and motorcycles whipped past at high speed. Surprisingly, since their were police and security everywhere, the windows were open and I got a fleeting glimpse of the Big Man, and his wife Chantal, and her very very very Big Hair.

So that's where things stand at the moment. I'm taking the train back to post tomorrow night. I still have a lot of errands to run but if I have time I will try to write one or two more posts before leaving Yaoundé and diving back into the grind.

The XO

So I see that Nicholas Negroponte's XO project (the "One laptop per child" or $100 laptop as it was billed) has finally come to fruition.

In a comment to one of my previous posts, one of my friends asked what I thought. Having never touched one it's difficult to say. As a toy for affluent western geeks like me it's obviously cool. As a means of spreading information technology know-how around the world I'd say: it depends.

If the laptops are as rugged as they've been billed, and if they can survive the heat, dust, humidity, and unstable power that most poor countries present for a few years, they could be a valuable educational tool for some of the kids who get them. Technically it seem like a neat project.

Heck, given my power problems I wouldn't mind having one.

However, I see some potential problems:

• Many people won't have a clue how to even turn them on at first. You'd have to have people charged with distributing them and providing some minimal level of instruction for how to use them or they'll just sit and gather dust.
  
• Lack of technical people to maintain them if things go wrong. They'll be nice until they break down, or start having virus or driver problems (although not running Windows may save them from some of the virus problems.
  
• Who is in charge of distributing them? How are recipients selected? If a corrupt government (the kind they find in, oh, I don't know, some place like Cameroon) is in charge of handing them out, many or most will go to the children of government officials or their friends (or for that matter the officials themselves).
• What will they be used for? I can see people using them primarily for entertainment - movies, music, games - but that won't really change much in terms of international development. A poor village with no electricity, no running water, dirt roads, and a generally uneducated population may have trouble finding other uses for them.

For all of these reasons I have a suspicion that things may not work out quite the way they've been planned.

Another approach might be to donate or sell them cheap to adults or institutions in poorer countries. Just looking at my own village, there are hundreds of students just at my university who could use a low-power laptop like this to do work during the weeks when we don't have power. Students could bring their own to the lab and I could teach computer classes and not have to worry about power.

Aside from students, teachers and staff here could also use them to keep the school running when we lose power.

And everyone can use them for diversion at night - a rural African village at night with no power can get real boring.

So, for students, professionals, and other educated types who may have some level of technical knowledge, or at least interest, and who are in rural environments where cyber cafes and the like are not available something like this could actually be a great resource. This might bring a quicker return on the investment than only giving it to school children.

Maybe I'll write Negroponte a letter suggesting that he explore this possibility. If I had an XO I could even write it in the dark.

Well, that was amusing

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to Yaounde just to work on the computers there, print stuff, etc. I got about half my work done on Saturday and intended to finish on Sunday before taking the train back to Nanga in the evening.

Of course, I woke up Sunday morning and found that the power was out at the Peace Corps office and in the whole quartier. They have a generator but for some reason it was on the fritz. Tried finding a cyber cafe but all the ones I knew were also powerless. The only cyber I found that had power wanted 300 Francs a page for printing (normal rate is around 50) which I wasn't willing to pay, so my work went undone. Oh well. Oh the irony...

Bill happened to be in Yaoundé over the weekend as well by chance, and we got to meet some of the new agroforestry trainees on their way back to training from visiting their posts, so that was fun. Sunday it was just he and I sitting around the case de passage with no lights, no phones, no motor cars, not a single luxury. So, after a fruitless search for a cheap and open cyber cafe we grabbed pizza and beers at a nice little restaurant before I took the train back to post.

Fortunately, SONEL somehow got its ass in gear and fixed our power, so it came on the day before yesterday, then went out again all morning, and then came on again in the afternoon just in time for me to teach in the lab today. How's that for better luck?

Lights Out

Nanga Eboko at Night

OK, I disappeared for a while there. Power has been out in Nanga Eboko for the last two weeks. Lack of power has a tendency to reduce blog activity, hence the lack of posts recently. At the moment I am in Yaoundé taking advantage of the power and Internet access offered by Peace Corps to try to do some work.

I've managed to keep teaching my computer classes by giving theoretical lessons on the blackboard that require no electricity. I learned my lesson last year and this time around split my course material up so that I would have a bunch of lessons ready for days without power and so I could spend all my time doing practical lessons when I do have power. So the last two weeks I've been explaining terminology in more detail, talking about binary, explaining how disks store data, opening up computers and showing students the various parts, etc.

One of my English classes is scheduled in the evenings, so that has unfortunately been a wash since without light in the classroom I have to let the students go.

The private lessons I wanted to give to local teachers are obviously on hold as well.

Since the pumps are electric, the power cut also means I've had no water. Fortunately, I had a number of water cans and buckets filled up when the power went, so I've found that by being careful and cooking less I was able to make it last and even stay relatively clean for two weeks. just before I left they hooked up a portable generator to the school's water pump and got it going so people on campus would at least have water in their houses. I promptly refilled all my containers so now I'm set for another two weeks when I get back.

Sadly, the University's generator, out of commission since March, has still not been repaired, so I've been burning a lot of oil and candle wax the last two weeks. They are trying to fix it at the moment and have assured me it'll be working by the time I get back, but I've heard that before. They tried fixing it several times since it died in March without success, but this time they have some newly acquired spare parts so maybe it'll actually work.

The school has also ordered three portable generators they plan to use to run the offices and some classrooms. They are powerful enough that if one is hooked up to the computer lab I'll be able to run most of the machines and get back to teaching the course properly. They were supposed to have arrived yesterday (while I was en route to Yaoundé) so we'll see what happens when I get back. Even if I don't have power at home, at least I'd be able to teach, which will keep me busy and make it bearable. Forget about getting a cold beer in town though.

Whether they fix the big generator or put the smaller ones in place, they'd better pull off one or the other, or both, because SONEL (the Cameroonian power company) is telling us it will be two months before they can get the lights back on.

TWO MONTHS.

Assuming they actually do turn it back on around New Year's, that would be right around the time the regular dry season outages begin. So I can expect to be without power in my village all or most of the time until about March or April (if I'm lucky).

(WARNING: Offensive language to follow. Children and the easily offended should stop reading now. I never said this was a family friendly blog...)

Fuck. I mean, FUCK. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking fuckity fuck fuck. This blows.