C, F, L, R

Jenny‘s gallivanting off in the States right now, and I’m catsitting for her. Her cat’s a little dude named Aristotle (her rationale being that in Cameroon, she needs the assistance of the Father of Logic) and he’s pretty sweet now that we made it back to post. Pets and kids are a good combination, though (as with my presence) the novelty’s bound to wear off eventually. In the mean time I’ve learned a lot of cat-related vocabulary: griffe, "claw"; griffer, "to claw/scratch with claws"; un chaton, "kitten"; and of course, ronronner, "to purr". Not to be confused with ronfler, "to snore" — a distinction that is important both linguistically and biologically. (Personally I prefer the English "to purr".)

He’s an outdoor cat and it’s been a bit of a compromise figuring out how he can have free passage in and out of my house without it compromising the security of my house. Every window in my house has a giant metal grate on it, and in theory he should be able to sneak in and out, but he doesn’t like it. On the other hand, I’m not comfortable leaving my door open for him at night. He likes raw eggs (and I guess cooked ones too) and it’ll be interesting to have him here for a few weeks.

So that’s personally. Professionally I still have way too much to do and not enough time or motivation to do any of it (i.e. that’s why I’m writing this now). Partly that’s due to it being exam week, and needing to proctor exams. In French the word is surveiller, "to watch (over)", but in Anglophone they say "invigilate" (which, yes, sounds like a medical condition). It is hands-down the worst work a teacher has to do and borders on capital punishment. The job is to watch students take exams and make sure that nothing, nothing actually happens. You are condemning a person to being intentionally bored this entire time. Performing this duty for four hours in a single day is rough; six or seven is a Herculean effort that leaves you blurred and crushed, too épuisé to even think. Towards the end of the day, I tried to strike a delicate balance between trying to look attentive and secretly working on mind candy like how I’m going to write my solution to Project Euler problem 11, the product-of-numbers-in-a-grid one, in a functional manner. (Tentative solution: repeated indexing, none of this fold/filter/map nonsense.)

I’ve also spent a certain amount of time people-watching. I’ve been in classes this week that I don’t normally teach in, so I get to see students that I normally don’t pay attention to. Some general observations:

• Each class tends to have one or two students with glasses. Wearing glasses is a tacit admission that you have mal aux yeux, ("eye pain"? "bad eyes"?), so Cameroonians don’t wear glasses unless they really have to. Which is a shame; in my culture, glasses are the norm and they are a tacit admission that how you think is more important than how you look.
• There’s also one or two per class with slightly lighter skin coloring, with astonishing calico eyes, or gray. I have no idea of the genetics at work here.
• From the shoulders up, students look terribly similar, especially since boys and girls are obligé to have shaved heads (the principle being that if you don’t have hair, you can study instead of arranging your hair). Even telling the gender can be a bit of a problem. At my lycée, you can glance at a student’s thighs — light blue means a knee-length dress, so a girl, and dark blue means a pair of slacks, so a boy. But some lycées put the girls in light blue blouses and dark blue skirts, or have other, more complicated color schemes (I’m sure I’ve seen all black, as well as tan top, purple bottom). A clue that seems to work pretty well is to check for earrings. Most, but not all, girls wear earrings, and no boys do.
• One girl in one of the 5e classes reminds me soooo muuuch of the little girls back home; glasses, braids along the edges of her head, and a very studious look. She’s just missing the little barrettes and maybe a set of braces. Adorable. Not sure how she got around the head-shaving rule; maybe it’s because it’s the end of the year?
• One girl in one of the 3e classes today had the word "LOVE" on her arm — but it didn’t look like it was written in pen, it looked like a scar (cicatrice) from a burn.

I just finally got my Internet back yesterday, so that’s another reason why I’m not doing any of the stuff I should be. I know I owe Rita an email, plus a kind of time-sensitive one to Chiz — I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll get to it soon. But in the meantime I still have seven classes of exams to grade that I haven’t even touched yet, so don’t be surprised if it takes me a little while..

Special ♥ to my parents, whose package included Peeps snowmen as well as hearts — vital medicine when, as they say, "The spirit wasn’t really willing any more, but the flesh was very very strong".

Haven’t had much in the way of Internet access lately. Can’t tell if it’s just Camtel’s usual bag of suck or if there’s a proximate cause — weirdness at the Camtel office yesterday that is too trivial to really go into.

Suddenly the end of the school year is upon us. I knew it was close, but I thought I still had like a month, since the 6th sequence started only a couple weeks ago when we got back from spring break, but apparently finals start Tuesday. I’m falling behind on basically everything — still have to calculate grades for the fifth sequence, fill out bulletins, etc. — and it still hasn’t been regular about raining. I have to write the comprehensive exam for 4e; my AP (head of department) wrote them for all the other levels. Writing a comprehensive exam is way easier than any particular exam, because there’s enough actual material over an entire year to pick from that you don’t have to struggle to find questions.

Without Internet I’ve been watching more Chuck (and ♡ Jenn and Johnny for providing me with some missing episodes) and cooking a little more. This is supposed to be mushroom season, but I never see any in my podunk little village — but in town yesterday I bought 2000 CFA worth, a plastic bag full of mushrooms with caps like dinner plates. Mushrooms are the best rooms, FYI. Times like these I wish I was a real cook, but I was just so happy to have real mushrooms that didn’t come from a can!

Today I’m experimenting with soybeans, which are really easy to find dry — three liters is about 1000 CFA — and apparently it’s pretty feasible to make your own tofu! They sell tofu in the north, and it is awesome, so it’d be great to have some here too. Some other volunteers in the West have taught mommies to make it the way they make grilled meat brochettes or beignets, little balls of fried dough, but it’s not quite here yet in our village. My postmate has the technique down and she’s going to do a demonstration this weekend. Trivia: apparently the French name for tofu is "viande de soja", soy meat. Also: normally you’d strain out the soy solids from the soy milk using cheesecloth, but we don’t have any here so we’re using couches de bébé, diapers (that have been boiled to be on the safe side).

So here I am waiting for my soy milk to coagulate! I didn’t measure anything so I’m sure it’s gonna be a disaster but what the hell, you only live once. (Actually the first batch came out OK — my soy sauce has gone bad though, maybe during my trek through the Extreme North?)

Affecter means "assigned", and sometimes "reassigned". Thus, teachers are "affected" to schools, and because teachers are technically civil servants, that’s where they go.

We’re not technically civil servants, but we’ve been assigned to our posts too. Well, for the most part. There are so few ICT volunteers that we get a little bit more leeway. And there are some terribly, terribly sweet ICT posts. One in Bangangté teaching at a university in a house with a hot water shower. One in Beua, just an hour from the beach. Just unbelievable stuff, and they’re being vacated by the "big kids", the "seniors", the guys who got here a year before us (in some cases, younger than us).

We talked amongst ourselves for a while via email. Who gets dibs on which post? Having a graduate degree makes me eligible for the Bangangté post, but to everyone’s surprise I wasn’t really interested.

Why? It’s not like my post is great. The people are annoying and rude. The patois is difficult, bordering on impossible. The students are mediocre and we’ve had numerous instances of stuff disappearing from the lab. I have highly specialized skills that aren’t being put to use here. So why stay?

In a word: progress.

They say that your first year as a Volunteer is just an utter mess. It takes you that long to get the hang of what you’re here for and how to do it. I’m only finally getting the hang of it just now. Being a Volunteer is new and strange, but even beyond that, getting used to the community and their getting used to you take time. When I first got here, I didn’t have anything but hunches about most of the people around me. Now I’ve got history, reputations, precedents, grades. And whereas before they didn’t know what to make of me except an easy mark with cool toys, these days I feel like I’m finally doing some good. I’ve put a lot of energy into getting the hang of this community, learning a few words in their patois, learning to recognize faces and the layout of the village and making friends with the vendors, and changing post now would put all of that to waste.

See, there’s visible, tangible progress. Students getting better at working in the lab, at manipulating the things I teach them. One of my students in Premiere got 15/20. This is the class full of lazy delinquents and moto-drivers-in-training. There’s the fact that the prestataire, yeah, OK, he isn’t providing the things the lycée needs, but he knows now that I can help him fix machines in other schools, and we’ve already been to Foumbot twice. One of the teachers I teach has really gotten the hang of spreadsheets and says she "loves them".

The Boys have started saying "mi di fo ka" ("motherfucker"), which is bound to get me in trouble one day. It’d be fine if they weren’t 10 and 12. They also started saying "Gosh" and "Whoops". We’ve had discussions about economics, HIV, and lots of other stuff that kids just don’t get the opportunity to talk about.

The kids in the lab are starting to get into Mario Teaches Typing, which I put on the machines way back when. They seem to be getting the hang of the semicolon (they thought it was a lower-case J first) and the idea that errors are bad and to be minimized. They’re also starting to mess around with Number Munchers. Both of these are antique DOS games that I must have downloaded back in Philadelphia or something, and they’re in English, so it’s kind of fascinating that they find them so compelling. I feel a little like a dungeon master, like I’ve loaded informatique with traps and treasures and they’re slowly exploring the labyrinth, facing the monsters and slowly, as a school, getting the hang of it. I think it’s that feeling more than anything else that keeps me here.

When it comes right down to it, this is why I came here: to make the world a slightly better place. To have the maximum positive impact. And maybe I’m not waving a magic informatique wand and solving everyone’s problems, but things are happening. Bien tôt, I’ll only have a year left. And with that year, I think I could do some good here.

[Retcon: Zhenae is now spelled differently, so as to be pronounced in English. I’m also thinking about the changing the human language to not be English, like let’s say "Panlac". This chapter’s a little weaker; it’s just to get towards the next chapter, which is considerably juicier.]

The less said about that night before we left, the better. I woke up on Cherry Drop’s couch, which implies that I must have peeled myself off Cherry Drop’s bathroom floor at some point. It was late o’clock local time and Cherry Drop was asleep so I took a shower, then I occupied myself submerging into the past few days’ information backlog. Tracking the signal in the noise is something of a way of life for us, you could say. I contributed a little signal, a little noise while I was at it. I couldn’t sleep.

Praying for us is like looking at a walkthrough — a little like cheating. If God wanted us to do exactly what He wanted, why did He give us free will? I was desperate for direction, though, so I gave it a shot, and got nothing but stony silence. I couldn’t tell if that was disappointment with my conduct or just a steadfast refusal to give advice. Either way, I was left to my own devices for a few hours.

We got up too early, so we could catch the bus to Grace’s Action, sneaking out of town like bandits to continue the party somewhere else. Buddy met up with us at the bus station. Cherry Drop was talking to a Zhenae. Cherry Drop’s Sumi is hilarious — it’s like a fruitcake, littered with raisins of delicious chewy English slang. "You are travelling? So, we also travel. You travel, like, where? Wow, cool!" Buddy found a Little Egg Person for breakfast, but I didn’t feel much like eating. Then it was time to board.

So it was that we escaped under the cover of darkness. The first leg of the trip was difficult, because I was afraid I was gonna throw up, but I closed my eyes steadfast and I managed to make it through. Cherry Drop showed me and Buddy the picture she took of me passed out on her bathroom floor — OK, it’s true she was there when I needed her to be, but that woman seriously does not care about other people. Buddy broke out some of his offworld candy and I feel like that replenished me somehow. I felt even more better when we stopped for a brief layover at Grace’s Point (which, yeah, confusing, but it’s Grace’s Point and then Grace’s Action) and grabbed a River drink. The Zhenae in front of us got ice cream, which prompted Cherry Drop to get some too.

That same Zhenae had studied English, which I found out when Cherry Drop let loose a "Shit!" and she fired us a dirty look. We struck up a conversation at the next police checkpoint, when the bribe-taking process started to take a little too long.

"What are they doing?" Buddy asked. (You have to admire his deftness. We were on vacation, but you never really stop being an offworlder or even a Missionary.)

"It’s a checkpoint," the Zhenae said. "They are taking their money."

"What money?"

"He wants a bribe to pass. Zhenae are a corrupt, dishonest people." She was shaking her head in disgust. "We have resources for improve our world, but the corruption prevents. The policies of dictators supported by Sumi."

Ah, right, that’s why she’s speaking English. The Zhenae hate their former masters, much though they all speak their language. It’s too late to cry over that particular spilled blood, but they do it all the same. At least she’s man enough to admit that it was Zhenae manning that checkpoint.

When we got into Grace’s Action, it was dusk, nearly dark again already. Grace’s Action was lit up like a Roman candle. You take for granted the absence of light pollution back home, but it’s alive and well on Zhen, just like the promiscuous advertising in Capital City. This is the kind of thing the Zhenae was talking about. People live on this planet, and it seems to work well enough, but it really could do a lot better, if only.. what? No idea, really. I don’t think blaming the Sumi or even themselves is the way to go, but how do you communicate that in awkward bus-ride half-interactions?

"How can you change it?" I asked. Silently: take some action.

"How?" she repeated, tasting the word. "Uncertain. The Sumi need to leave us alone."

I counted to ten, as I had taught myself to do in training. I considered my options — couldn’t browbeat her, couldn’t get mad. And anyhow, who was I to say she was wrong? I was just tired of stasis, an entire population doing isometrics on this planet.

We got to the Mission House in Grace’s Action with no great fuss. Travel on Zhen is either boring, or terribly, terribly interesting, so all told I guess we lucked out.

Maroua is the capital of the Extreme North region, which (together with the North and the Adamawa regions) are called the "Grand North". The first, best way to access the Grand North is via the train, which goes from Yaoundé to Ngaoundéré, and then buses from there as normal. As you take the bus to Maroua, you can’t help noticing the climate. Outside is not green, as in the Grand South, but instead sandy and beachy. It’s hot in the bus, but assuming you convince a Cameroonian to open a window, the wind blowing in from outside is even hotter, hot and dry, like a blast furnace. Even cold drinks in the Extreme North don’t "sweat" condensation like they do down here; there just isn’t enough moisture in the air. I wish I were able to use words like "Sahel" and "Harmattan" convincingly here, but I’m not. It’s just so hot and so dry. We went through bottle after bottle of water on our trip to Waza National Park (see previous picture), which we saw from the top of our van (!). Jenny took the picture, btw; that’s her in the checkered kerchief at bottom of the picture.

Music was a theme for this trip, starting on the train up to Ngaoundéré with trash80 – "pain fade down" and Ballboy – "I Lost You, But I Found Country Music". I was tasteful with my portable music player, but Cameroonians often fill the silence with music, especially music from their telephones, which prompted Austin to fight back on the bus to Maroua with music from his. We started with the wonderful "Fuck You" by Cee-Lo Green, and then some stuff by Tupac I think. Austin said this song starts with a sample from Star Trek 5, or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, once he shared this bit of information, he told us that he had "broken a Knowledge Egg on your head-piece".

Similarly, on the way to Waza, we felt a need to break into song. Turns out Yaya has some sort of battery-operated portable speakers. First song: La Roux – "Bulletproof". This is the song that kind of got me into all this mess, way back in stage, and so I guess it was fitting that it get me out too. Ashes to ashes and all that. There’s a bunch of other musical selections too. I’ll make you a mixtape sometime. TL;DR: Oh radio! You’re so good at simplifying my complex emotions!

Consensus is that I’m suffering from "[Organization] goggles", a phenomenon where your vision is limited to the 150-200 Americans in the country with you rather than realizing that in fact, there are plenty of fish in the sea, plus other aquatic life if you get really desperate. Sure, maybe. Doesn’t matter what it really is. In the meantime it’s housekeeping, closing all the windows I left open and trying not to feel sheepish or nonplussed, sweeping out and throwing away all the things that mattered to me and replacing them with safe, unimportant things. (Is that too sanitized for you, Esther? I thought it was pretty clear. Send me an email and I’ll translate.)

Also with regard to music:

I’m not the boy I used to be

And although I’ve more or less accepted it

Although I’m no longer trying to change it

I still regret it

I regret it every day

—Ballboy, "I Hate Scotland"

I was startled to find that I didn’t feel that way any more. I don’t regret who I am. I’m more or less exactly who I want to be (for the moment — despite what I said earlier that maybe this isn’t who I want to be). Actually? Honestly, I kick ass. For once I don’t feel like a confused little boy, lost in a world too big to understand. I feel like I understand exactly what’s going on and I am prepared to deal with it.

Other stuff: Red Dwarf episode 103, "Balance of Power". I have all these tests I have to grade, but I keep watching episodes of Chuck (and hey, blogging). Outside, it keeps flirting with rain, and lord, do I need a rainstorm, but at the last minute it always turns away coyly. Turns out I have a hirondelle, "swallow" nest on my veranda. Business as usual, no?

P.S. All my love to Adam, Jen, Jenn, Suzanne, my parents, Aunt Jeanie, and all you wacky characters from back home. I miss you.

One thing I utterly love in French is the verb se tromper, "to make a mistake", but literally "to fool oneself". Be careful because tremper, "to soak", sounds almost exactly the same. Mnemonic: "trompe l’oeil", which we adopted into English, means "fool the eye", or idiomatically "optical illusion". It’s dangerous to argue from etymology, of course, but I love the sound of it, "fooling yourself", so much more willful than the English equivalent. I love the careful way Brondon sometimes finishes a thought with "si je ne me trompe pas","if I’m not fooling myself", "if I’m not mistaken".

There is a student named Annick, a young lady with the same kind of twitchy tic and the same quiet, muttering-to-herself cadence that my first boss did. She invited me to see a local museum, but I was still on spring break and couldn’t make it. It’s hard to navigate these situations; does she just want me to appreciate her culture? money? marriage? Today she cornered me in the lab, and after haltingly discussing it for a while in French (I will go some Sunday), she saw me lend my USB key to Parfait, having loaded it with software (including some games).

Annick: You are really kind.

Me: [Soft, sad smile.]

Annick: Unless I am making a mistake.

Me: Yes. You are fooling yourself. [Exit stage right.]

OK, better get back to grading tests. Only five classes left! Sigh.

Spring break is almost over, and I’m on the long journey back to post. It’s been a long, strange trip and overall I’d count it as a success. I hope to write about it later, once I figure out how to leave out all the important parts. For the time being, here’s a picture we took on our for-realz African Safari.

The GPS trail would probably tell the story better than I could. I’ve seen it overlaid on a map of Capital City, and it doubles back in lines and knots, tangles like my hair on a sweaty day. Also like my hair, I’m perversely proud of it. It’s a scar on my informational life like the ones on my corporeal one. But GPS tracks don’t tell the whole story, so I’ll have to see what I can do to fill in the rest.

I caught the early Chameleon down to the lower level of Capital City. I had a long trip before I got to Up Station. I wanted to make sure I had my ticket as soon as possible, since I wanted to take the shuttle with two other Missionaries next month (which turned out to be a bad idea, but that’s another story). I caught a taxi going south.

"The Station."

"Traveler’s Station?"

"Uh, maybe.. for the shuttle."

And off we went, the driver weaving through the light-but-manic traffic with the polished ease of long practice. On the GPS map, this is the first set of smooth curves as we swerved over to the sidewalk to canvass other passengers and dodging the big-porters and fat-porters carrying their numinous cargoes. We picked one up for Central Post, and one for the Palace of Justice. Try not to judge that last one. She’s probably not actually going to the Palace of Justice, it just makes a convenient landmark. Meanwhile I was untangling my emotional mess with the same practiced ease that I was untangling my hair. Start at the top; what’s the problem? Run your fingers through until you find it, a knot. Then, what’s causing all this fuss? Tease individual threads out, one at a time, resolving each one into an atomic, indivisible factor and cancelling it from the equation. Eventually the knot just disappears; it’s just yourself, in an inconvenient configuration. It’s the same with emotional stuff, but it takes longer and it hurts more.

I worked on that for a while — the hair, the meditation — as we made our way through the intersections and traffic circles. We let the guy off at Central Post. We passed fruit stands and hardware vendors and billboards written in Sumi or, puzzlingly, in English. "Study in Ukraine!" Advertising is advertising, of course, but you get trained in letting it roll off your psyche like water. And it’s hot, it’s always hot in Capital City, but the taxi windows were open and when we got up to speed, the breeze just carried the heat away. On balance, it was all very pleasant. That’s when we got hit by the first big-porter.

It just swept in from the right, trying to merge with us at the cobblestone intersection. The hoverpad slammed into the driver’s-side door. No religion has a prayer to cancel inertia; ours has come close but we’re still not yet there. So the whole car skewed off the road and into a bar, which was convenient enough because it gave me something to do while I waited for the Police to show up and assign blame.

Three bulbs of wine and a box of Hello Cookies later I was free to go so I picked up where I left off. I could have taken a moto if I thought it would have made a difference, but I figured to do the taxi thing again since I was increasingly unconfident in my ability to remain from falling off of a moto. Hailed a taxi again, specified Voyager Station directly this time, and off we went.

It’s good that I didn’t take the moto, because the second big-porter would have probably taken me right off the thing, and wearing a helmet is about as effective as wearing a head of cabbage in that sort of situation. Not a pleasant way to go. Instead, the front half of the taxi crumpled up like a whiskey sachet and me and the other passengers in the back got thrown around like livestock. The driver was hurt really badly, crying in pain and praying in Sumi and another language I didn’t recognize, I guess his tribe’s. There was a lot of blood and I didn’t really know what to do. We have Health missionaries who are former nurses or doctors. Me, I’m in Education. I can’t do much beyond call for help in mediocre Sumi. And even that wasn’t really necessary; other Zhenais were already scrambling to tear the vehicle open, stop the bleeding, sending for professional medical assistance. The Church of the Universal Stochastic encourages to find the signal in the noise, and two accidents in one travel was probably a Hint. But it could have been a challenge, too, a gauntlet that I needed to run to show how badly I wanted this.

We fool ourselves into believing all kinds of things.

Soon enough I was on my last taxi, the one that broke down a few hundred meters from Up Station. I was dirty now with the effort of even this little bit of travel, and my hair didn’t seem any less tangled than when I had started. I was dizzy and sore and I was thinking about going to a White Market to get some soy sauce or something to make myself feel better. I was trying to ignore the telltale taste of glueworm in the back of my throat and I am sure the Zhenais at the train station thought I was a sight.

"Bedroom for May shuttle. Supplication."

"It’s possible. Five thousand Sum."

"Here." I paid with a crisp new bill, and he gave me my reservation slip. "Gratitude."

"Trust."

We’re all unique quantum events but at that moment, stuck in the middle of Capital City having accomplished what I thought I wanted, I felt more utterly unique than I ever wanted. Ever feel alone in your own head? It was like that. I had a bad feeling that I’d find myself at the end of the night in a dark corner at the bottom of the bottle of soy sauce. It’s been like that for most of my life. The moral of the story is that sometimes you get exactly what you ask for — and it usually turns out to be not what you wanted at all. But that’s why I came here, to make that kind of mistake, to throw away the prudence and put my faith in the randomness of experience.

I’d had enough for one day, so I decided to go back to the Mission.

Decided I’d walk it, though.

Last night I heard the tell-tale noises of mice again and this time I caught two — one who was just kind of standing there deer-in-headlights as I dropped a tin over him, and the other one running around in the bathroom trying to climb the wall, I think in an effort to escape. This morning I shuffled them out, sliding their prisons along the floor until I could get them outside, whereupon I deposited them into this bucket:

Life is sacred, but I didn’t want it in my damned house, so I carried the bucket down the road for a few minutes before dumping them out in the dirt on the side. I expected them to scamper away for their lives, but instead one just hid under a leaf and the other just lay there. I have a feeling that despite my efforts, I killed them anyhow, but maybe they’re just tired after the stress of being cooped up like that overnight.

Attraper, to catch, works in a lot of idiomatic senses that it really shouldn’t — you can attraper le rhume for example, catch a cold, or catch a car en route.

Haven’t been writing as much as I should be lately. There’s a post coming up soon but I don’t know when, exactly, I’ll get to it. This is the last week before Spring Break (Congés de Pâques, Easter Break), and I have one exam to give today, two tomorrow, and two more Friday, and then I leave on an epic clandoing journey of discovery, companionship, redemption, and finding out what it means to be ourselves. It’s two weeks worth of break, but really I’ve only got about six days worth of plan. Sounds about right so far.

Here is a recorded session of me trying to learn patois via French. It is taken with Pegap Anatole, colloquially referred to as "Pa-Na", who is a surveillant at the lycée. It is about 32 minutes long. I recorded it on the inbuilt mike on my D2 (personal music player), so it is very quiet and somewhat noisy. I amplified it but parts are still very quiet, and when I amplify it more it starts clipping badly.

I’m not gonna try to transcribe the whole thing — but you’re welcome to if you like. Here’s some liner notes.

• 00:00-01:58: A student is here to justify her absence. She’s spent the entire fourth sequence in the hospital. She’s in one of my classes so I have to correct the grade I already wrote in her bulletin. Pa-Na asks why she took so long to justify her absence, and she replies "Je devait sortir de l’hôpital pour venir ici faire quoi?" ("I had to leave the hospital to come here and do what?")
• 01:58-03:56: Pa-Na asks me about how I spent my weekend. You can probably catch the word "week-end", which is borrowed into French and also patois. ("Because weekend, we don’t have that word in patois," Pa-Na says.) I went to le carrefour, one of the other landmarks in this village. He went to Bafoussam. These sentences start with pronouns: "Nge" is I, present tense. "Ou" is you, present tense. "Nke" is I, past tense. "Ou ke" is you, past tense.
• 03:56-05:47: Pa-Na shoos some students from trying to distract us. He receives a phone call? I consult my notes. Mostly silent. I probably should have edited this out.
• 05:47-07:30: We discuss how to ask/give names. A word-for-word gloss of the phrase is something like "Name his who is it?" "Eh", falling tone, is patois for "yes". "Ngang", rising tone, is patois for "no". "Oo you, non?" means "You understand, right?" and the response is "Nge you", "I understand". M. Teukeu, probably my favorite person at the lycée, walks in around 7:20, and I try to form a sentence saying what his name is.
• 07:30-08:00: I try to address M. Teukeu in patois, and he responds with something I have never heard before (shot down). Apparently it is yet another way of saying "I’m fine".
• 08:00-08:30: M. Teukeu wants to know if there are patois and maternal languages "chez vous", in your house, meaning in the States. I try to explain that the answer is no, but that immigrants bring their languages with them.
• 08:30-11:10: Pa-Na is walking me through the conjugations of "Name his who is it" for each form: me, you, him/her, etc. Some higher-level students walk in and laugh at me, but we soldier on. 09:07: "Po suku", "élève", "student", from "po" meaning child, and "su-ku", school. (Aside: patois have these linguistic relics adopted from English, despite their current French context. Timothy has mentioned this about his patois too. I don’t know why.) Pa-Na gives the name of each student. 09:16: "Yiy", to see. Pa-Na is pointing at a name embroidered on a student’s uniform. ("You", to understand, comes from the verb to hear.) 09:54: "Ze zi", he sure sounds like he’s emphasizing low tone, high tone. Tonal language or just an intonation? 10:43: "Di suku", classroom, from "di", room, and "suku", school. 11:00: "Ze zap", "ze", name, and "zap" the possessive for "they", which is "wap".
• 11:10-12:00: I ask the students if they wanted to see Pa-Na or what, and they deal with whatever while I review my notes. Pa-Na wants them to come back during "the grand pause", the half-hour break from classes.
• 12:00-17:30: More random crap. 12:00: Using the verb "kie", to read, in sentences. "Mwa anye" can mean a book or a letter. 12:30: "My mother sent me a letter." 13:10: "Tcha", to send. 13:22: A complicated sentence: "She told me to greet the students." 13:35: Pa-Na gets snippy with me; "Écris!" "Write!" 14:05: "Tcha eze", to greet. I cannot tell, listening back, whether it is the same "tcha" or a tonal difference? 15:00: "Mbem tcha zu", "I also greet you". "Zu" here definitely relates to "ou", since it changed from "tcha ze" to "tcha zu". 15:28: Pa-Na pulls out an analogy in English: if someone says Good morning, you also say Good morning. I respond "Yes". 16:00: Pa-Na admits that "ze" changed to "zu", to mean "you". "Tcha ze" is like an infinitive. It sounds like he’s saying "zu" is a compound of "ze" + "ou". 16:30: I try to apply what I know productively to form "Nge tcha zi", I greet him. I sound very pleased. 16:50: Patois for "I greet you, ho!" "Tcha ze wei", from "tcha ze" and "wei", you-pl. 17:12: "Mbo!", at the end, is just an exclamation.
• 17:30-19:25: I ask whether patois has the idea of using you-plural to show respect, as in French. It does not. 18:18: "Ngang!" Pa-Na explains you can show respect by starting with "Mr. Principal". 18:47: Pa-Na translates "ou tcha za" as "you greeted me", in the past tense, despite the fact that I wrote up above that "ou" is present. He then walks through the possible conjugations: greeted him, greeted us, greeted them, etc.
• 19:25-19:50: Pa-Na shoos some kids away. They are too little to be his department; the other surveillant takes care of the younger kids. I review my notes.
• 19:50-19:58: I am trying to formulate a question: which constructions take "mbem", meaning me, versus which constructions take "za", also meaning me.
• 19:58-24:05: Pa-Na says hi to a lady passing outside the window. Then, J-C walks in and they begin speaking patois. You can get a sense of what’s going on: 20:23: "argent", money. 20:48: "vignt mille", twenty thousand. 22:08: "C’est elle qui a commencé!" "It’s her who started!" 22:53: "Ça coute cher, ça coute cher." "It’s expensive, it’s expensive." 23:04: J-C addresses me, first I think a half-question in patois (which I couldn’t catch at all) and then immediately in French, "Did you understand what was said? Were you able to trap little bits and pieces?" Pa-Na repeats the full question in patois, and tells me that I’m able to already translate it. I’m completely overwhelmed, and Pa-Na gets a little frustrated. J-C parts or has already left. 23:45: Another student tries to bother Pa-Na, but he refuses to deal with her: "We’re busy."
• 24:05-25:30: I reform my question: why "mbem" in one case, and "za" in the other? 25:17: Pa-Na finally understands the two cases I’m trying to contrast, and says, unhelpfully, "It depends on what you want to say." 25:25: Another student. "We are busy. Way!" ("Way!" is like an exclamation of annoyance, not always directed at the annoyant.)
• 25:30-32:03: The German teacher walks in, we exchange salutations in patois, and tells me that I am already very good at patois. This motherfucker speaks English, French, German, patois, and probably something else that I don’t even know about, so it’s kind of like he’s humoring me. I try to express that Pa-Na just scolded me for not understanding what J-C said, which prompts us to study the phrase that he used for pretty much the rest of the lesson. 26:30: J-C wants to know what time the next hour starts. 27:00: Turns out that "you", to understand, has become "jou", in what J-C said. 27:13: Also, "mbe" is like a question word, "did you". 27:30: Also, the verb for to speak has changed from what I will write as "rhom" to something like "ngom". 27:50: The last syllable, "ai", may be part of the verb "ngom-ai", or it may be "a question mark", as Pa-Na says. 28:12: "jou" is apparently used in imperatives as well as questions, and you cannot use "you". 29:50: It sounds like "ngom-a" may actually be the verb to speak? 30:50: And it’s necessary to change both verbs when asking this question. So it wasn’t strictly speaking possible for me to translate the question at first.

So, yeah, patois. An eternal struggle. But probably the most fascinating thing going on here.