C, F, L, R

This week has been IST, for which I have had three vaguely-stated and simple goals:

1. Make an utter mess of myself using recreational chemicals, preferably alcohol.
2. Have sex with another volunteer [deleted: prioritized list of opportunities sorted by attractiveness and availability].
3. Recharge, somehow, so that I am willing to return to post and continue to work instead of giving up on this country and going home.

This post is the story about accomplishing goal #1. The title, "Déshabillé", means "undressed".

So I kicked off Saturday by clandoing to visit Jenny’s post, and then going into town to see a "concert". That week I had bought a bag of twenty sachets, figuring that Jenny couldn’t be relied on to feed my developing alcoholism. I started Saturday with seven sachets, acted slightly embarrassingly, and crashed at a Volunteer’s post. Sunday morning, me and Jenny had some sandwiches and headed out to IST, the milestone we’ve all been struggling to achieve. ("Just make it to IST," I told myself, "You can do this.") We passed through Douala ("most insecured town" according to the Organization; not sure what that means). Getting to the douche, literally "shower" but also apparently giant fountain, to find a car to the right city involved going past, and naturally going into, a supermarket. Jenny and I went in, with her commenting that it made her so happy to see all this stuff, and how much she wished she had a camera!.. to take pictures of completely normal things like meat, cheese, soy sauce, and ice cream. Wandering down the toys aisle, we saw a "FunStation 3" and boxed SEGA Master Systems.

Eventually we got to the beach and got into the water. This was still Saturday, when I was idealistic enough to believe that I shouldn’t drink too much while in the ocean (or with intent to go into the ocean). The waves were rough and we got tossed around and scratched up quite a bit. Then back to the room for more AC and hot showers. I made crude passes at Allison ("No thanks") and Jessica W. ("I’m not looking for that"). This set the template for the majority of our time in [training]: go to sessions until 17 o’clock or so, using any means necessary to get through them without screaming; then go to the beach; then party with the nerdkin.

Tuesday for dinner we went to a bar we found called "Lotus Bleu" (same name as a bar back in the training village). We had no choice but to eat grilled fish and soya, street meat, while we drank. Then a street vendor came by and sold us magic wands (picture will be coming later). Then they played horrible American pop including "Barbie Girl" and "Boom Boom (Let’s Go Back to My Room)". We found ourselves enthralled and unable to stop dancing. Then we hurried back to the hotel, where we combined Tampico, a very sweet orange-ish drink (somewhat like Sunny D) with gin. This worked perhaps too well. So when we went back to the beach in the dark (not my idea! But somehow we all knew we were going to skinny dip) I found myself singing, aloud, at the top of my lungs, "cancun ’89":

Why can’t we just stay

Where the ocean is warm all year?

Fruit hangs from the trees

Do just what you please

And nothing is the same

The sun rolls down the beach

Sand gets in your eyes

Lean in for the kiss

Tans astound the crowds

Nothing is the same

—world of science, "cancun ’89"

The waves were still too rough on Tuesday, so being naked entailed getting scraped on the sand a lot. And very quickly the alcohol caught up with me. Suddenly I was terrified of drowning and staggering around the sand. After this point, things become unclear; the other people there (whose names are withheld to avoid incriminating them) would have better recollections. I remember calling out to them, afraid that they too would drown. They say that they came out of the water to find me humping a tree (still naked), although the minority opinion is that I was just hugging the tree and unable to stand. Everyone seems to agree that I then fell down. Apparently they tried to get me to put at least pants on, but this required more coordination than I possessed. I am reputed to have said "Hey guys, guess what? I’m NAKED!" This is when the Cameroonians showed up and wanted to know if everything was fine. "Yes," my wonderful friends said, trying to stand between my spread-eagled form and the Cameroonians, "Everything is great."

I rolled a 20 on a coordination check and somehow managed to get underwear on. I had already been wearing the shirt (I think I had been trying to get dressed when they found me). One of my friends wrapped a skirt around my waist and with my arms around two of them, we managed to head back to the hotel. I am told that I said "I think I’m in love with one of you, but I don’t know which one." Eventually they deposed me in the hotel room I was sharing with Timothy, where I commenced to remove the alcohol from my body and to wonder whether or not I was going to die. (I didn’t.)

My friends report that after all the excitement, they all breathed a collective sigh of relief. "What time is it?" they asked. Consulting a timepiece, they learned the terrible truth: 10:30 PM.

Timothy and I had a heart-to-heart Monday about how Jessica W. worrying about me, and how she didn’t like to see me bashed out of my skull (and how neither did Timothy, come down to it). Wednesday morning, I told Timothy that I think I’d gotten it out of my system. Time will tell, I guess.

Just overheard some fascinating discussion in the teacher’s lounge at the Lycee. People are talking about the recent political crisis in the Ivory Coast, where the election somehow failed and produced two presidents. One teacher in particular made some very cutting remarks. "They’re crazy over there, to elect two presidents. Here in Cameroon, we vote for Paul Biya ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. We don’t have any two presidents stuff. Here, a good president has to hold power for at least thirty years. It’s not like in your country, where yesterday it was George Bush, today it’s Obama, tomorrow someone else again! When are they gonna take their money?"

Also interesting is that the trip that was planned a couple weeks ago that the president was going to make to Bamenda to celebrate the 50th year anniversary of the Cameroonian Army got cancelled because the commander of the BIR (a branch of the Cameroonian armed forces which was being trained by an Israeli national under contract) died in a helicopter accident. The trip is scheduled for this week — tomorrow and Thursday — and since Bamenda is the seat of the opposition party, the Organization is a tiny bit nervous. No crises here in Cameroon yet, but I keep thinking that if the country got evacuated, that would be a really convenient way to stop being a teacher. But our security officer called me today for unrelated reasons and she sounded just chipper, so I guess that’s not a strong possibility..

That’s the current events here in Cameroon. Life goes on, I guess. I really wish I would hear more from you guys, though! For example, what’s Mike Dirolf up to? Who’s this chick Francis is flirting with on Facebook? What about those guys with steady jobs?

I have been thinking lately about doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. Motivation: imagine you are in class and you ask:

Teacher: OK, class. What color is the sky?

Student, raising hand and being called upon, says: Air!

Teacher: OK, good, the sky has air in it. But what color is it?

Different student, too excited to wait to be called upon: Monsieur! It’s air!

This experience repeats itself with a certain frequency. I was going to say everything in this country is like that to some extent, but I think actually it’s only my experiences at the Lycee. I saw one kid restart a machine, watch it boot up, get to the login screen, palpably not know what to do, and restart the machine again, six times in a row, looking increasingly agitated to the tune of "Why won’t this work???" to the extent that he wanted to tear out his hair (which is of course impossible because students at the Lycee are required to have shaved heads).

And it’s really not just the students, either. In the above interaction, the teacher is trying the same question in the hopes of getting a different answer too. This was brought home to me a Saturday or two ago where I spent about ten minutes running through the same "Why does it say 6? What if I change this number to 4? What will I have? .. But I see 2. Why does it say 2? What if I change this number to 10? What will I have?" cycle with a student before realizing that he was not going to break out of the loop himself so it was really up to me to try to get him to realize that the things he was saying were laughably inaccurate and that it was necessary to figure out what was really going on. And I’ve had experiences trying to debug machines or install OSes where I’ve fruitlessly retried the same procedure several times over, possibly with minor variants, out of desperation or complete ignorance. And it never works. The only thing that works is trying something different.

It feels so unfair when you ask a clear question like "What color is the sky?" It doesn’t feel like there’s a better way to ask it. It shouldn’t be something you have to negotiate. Is it a language barrier? Some twisted effect of the Cameroonian educational system or context? Is it important that they learn to answer questions based on what the question is asking instead of what they memorized? The whole thing is kind of a mess.

Today’s word, "reprendre", means something like "to do over".

Exam week. Still have report cards to fill out, but I thought for the moment I’d write up the wedding I was at last week. It was the marriage of J-C’s daughter Solange and some guy I didn’t know. I later found out that the couple had been affianced for five years, and that they’d met at school.

After I got to the wedding, I was seated with the family of the bride. J-C said to be there at 19 o’clock, by which time it was already dark, and I was surprised that things started at almost exactly 19 o’clock. I was seated next to some kindly gentlemen who translated all the local-dialect into French for me, which I have consequently translated into English for you. So, accuracy may not be terribly great. But the first speeches were in French: first, the patriarch of the family (of the bride, I think) gave a short speech welcoming everyone, then J-C gave a speech thanking everyone for coming and because of how important today was, let’s not waste time.

Then, a relatively aged woman on the groom’s side of the family stood up and said, in the local language, "I don’t know what you’re talking about with today being special. I came here because I heard there was food." And two women from the bride’s side of the family went over to this lady and talked to her, and with a clear air of humoring this old lady, agreed that they would look for some food. So then they went off for a while and everyone just kind of hung out and chatted.

Apparently in the Bamileke tradition, weddings take place between families of brides, who provide foods, and families of grooms, who provide drinks. Also apparently, even though the "negotiations" for the wedding had been settled between the two families, in the interests of suspense and "theater" weddings include a little bit of dramatic re-enactment. Everyone knows this coming in, and expects and appreciates it.

Eventually the women came back with some serving pots and placed them on the table in front of the woman who had complained. But instead of being grateful, she stood up and said "This food isn’t cooked! You need to find a woman to cook it for me!" So off the women went again, and everybody hung out for a while. Eventually the women came back with a fairly old lady, to which the response was: "She’s too old! I want food that’s been cooked by a nice young woman!" And a dude from the groom’s family stood up and said "For the best possible food, we want a beautiful young woman who comes from the country of Barack Obama!" So off the ladies go again, nonplussed, but hospitable to the end. At this point it became clear that the pretense, looking for a woman of high quality in order to get food of high quality, is sort of a proxy for looking for a woman of high quality to marry a man of the family.

They come back pretty quickly with two women, both of whom are covered almost head-to-toe. They present these women to the groom’s family and ask them to pick which one is the one they’re looking for. The idea is that if they can’t figure out without seeing the woman face-to-face, they don’t really know what they want. But after a few minutes of poking and prodding and fervent discussion, the groom’s family decides: neither of these women is the one we are looking for. So they send them both back and the women go off to try again to find a woman that meets the high standards set by these people.

After a few minutes they come back and say things like "The planes aren’t flying to the US any more," and "We need to get visas". The groom’s family responds by shaking the ladies’ hands, saying things like "Oh, thank you maman", but this expression of gratitude is really cover for putting money into the ladies’ hands. (Whether this offers a cultural precedent for bribery and corruption is an exercise for the reader.) So it goes back and forth a few more times, including amusing theatrics from one of the ladies who is pretending to be a taxi driver, with the other claiming that they’re out of gas, or that they got stopped at a roadblock, and each time more money coming from the groom’s family to pay for these unexpected eventualities. And after a few more dog-and-pony shows, the groom’s family picks the right bride. My gentlemen friend observers noted that they went around a few times too many, which means they had to pay more in the end than they really ought to, and that this is poor form on the part of the groom’s family. But out came the bride and she sat down with the groom’s family.

Then the reverse discussion began, with the bride’s family seeking a suitable man for their little girl. Out came first an old man, followed by a kid (probably a student at the lycee), and then finally the real groom (and possibly another?), covered and veiled the way the brides were. The bride’s family picked the groom correctly, and out he popped wearing a shirt that I swear to god looked like the NES cartridge for Legend of Zelda. I’d post a picture but I don’t have the memory card reader right now. With the happy couple united, the bride went off to change into an outfit of the same fabric. They were quite brilliant.

Then was the actual wedding ceremony. This involved reading some stuff from the Bible (P.S. J-C’s family is very Christian), saying some vows, and notably after the bride had finished her vows, she poured some soda into a cup, and after the groom had finished his, he poured a different soda into the same cup. The idea being that, as these two drinks are no longer separable, so it is with this couple.

Then we ate a lot.

Other neat trivia: the groom’s family also decided to go home a little earlier than strictly called for, which was extremely poor form, since this meant they had to hurry the bride out of what is no longer her home and (among other things) wedding photos. My gentleman friend observer called them on this, but they just kind of rudely brushed him off.

Eventually it became 1 AM and I decided I was going to walk home, and my friend Celestin decided it would be prudent to walk me back. Then I had class the next day, but it was just giving tests so it wasn’t impossible.

I thought this wedding was so cool. Like Gus says, weddings tend to have a performance aspect to them, but it’s not often that you find weddings that have a narrative. I started to wonder a little bit what it would be like to have a wedding with an antagonist. How would that have to work? Would people pick up on it without ever having had the cultural background? Would a note like "With antagonist played by Paul Herbig" on the invitation or something like that suffice? Would people get legitimately upset with the people who were "holding up" the wedding, not realizing that what they were seeing actually was the wedding?

Side note, in these modern enlightened times, when you want a wife, you go to the bride-to-be’s grandmother first, and she’s likely to ask you, "So where’s my wood?" And it’s OK to just give money — in Bamileke tradition you pay essentially everyone in the family for the bride instead of being paid by the bride ("dowry"). But in some households it is still obligatory to carry wood on your head to the grandmother in order for her to grant her permission.

It is my opinion that one of the reasons immersion works so well as a language learning technique is not because it forces you to practice, but instead because you already know, 90% of the time, what the other person is about to say, so you can quickly build a vocabulary of words that fit your context. For example, déchirer, which means "to tear up", which is what I did to a student’s paper in 2C today. She came up to me after she’d finished the test and said she’d forgotten to put her name on the paper, and after I gave it back and studiously watched her, she changed some of her answers. This was the third or fourth ridiculous stunt of bullshit I’d had in that class so I just went to the A-bomb of "I am tired of my students’ shit". She seemed pretty shocked. "You changed your answers! I caught you!" I said, practically pleading for her to see sense. "I had thought some more," she responded.

I kept the top half, which fortunately she had finished putting her name on. She kept the rest. And when the other students asked why I had déchiréd that feuille, I already knew what they meant. And when I said that she had changed her answers, they didn’t seem shocked at all.

Lost my temper in a similar way in Premiere over similar outrageous acts of tricherie ("cheating"), like moving to different seats, copying overtly from other students, discussing the problems, stealing blank papers, etc. Screamed at the littlest one for a good twenty seconds. Wasn’t enough. Had a couple students come to me afterwards and say that giving them a zero wouldn’t be appropriate, because it would "dirty their academic record". When I offered, loudly, to discuss it with them and the censeur, they backed down.

Also took a kid’s USB key in the salle today because, like I said, we do not use keys in the salle. They carry viruses. He did that incredibly infuriating "pardon" hand gesture and even started to shed some tears (which, yeah, softened me a bit, but I am more stubborn than I am maternal), and I knew it wouldn’t really be fair to steal a USB key from a student, no matter the circumstance, but I let him stew for a while before explaining why we don’t use the keys and what viruses do ("This computer doesn’t boot any more. It’s a problem with the operating system. Now I have to reinstall the operating system on this computer.") and then giving it back to him. Somehow this seemed to make a big impression on him.

And despite all of this, and despite not getting enough sleep last night due to the wedding (which was awesome — more about that later), I was a fountain of patience when the students in the lab after class started to turn off power strips without turning off computers. "No, stop that," I said, calmly, and then explained why we don’t do that, and how to do it properly, instead of flipping out at them in English like I did yesterday. So all in all I feel like today went pretty well, despite being a neverending shitstorm of disappointment.

Plus, check out this sick burn, courtesy of mom:

so here’s a question for your exam. compare and contrast these two groups (for sufficiently large definitions of group): "But for chrissakes how many fucking times are you gonna win the race-the-moto game before you get sick of it? How many times are you gonna play Spider Solitaire on Easy, with hints?" and "All of which is a fancy way of saying ‘So that’s why I’ve spent a lot of time lying in bed playing Nintendo DS’" for extra points, please explain why "pretend I’m not in a country where "computer literacy" means understanding Caps Lock." isn’t culture shock already.

Yeah, well. Back to Rocket Slime.

Title by request of Julia. Épuiser means to fatigue, or wear out, and I think it comes from the word puiser, meaning to draw water (i.e. from a well). Saying you’re épuisé is therefore akin to saying you’re all used up, all drawn out, or simply worn out. In our discussion on franglais this past weekend, Timothy distinguished this from the word crever, "blown out", said of a tire, which also can be used to say "I’m completely exhausted", but whereas épuisé implies that you’re tired because of working really hard, crevé could just mean something came along and creved you.

Rather than hand-writing the tests on the board this sequence, like I did last time, I decided it would be easier to control the cheating if I handed out photocopied tests for each student. This way, I could replace talking while I was writing on the board and questions about my illegible handwriting, with talking while I was handing out tests and questions about the illegible photocopies. So today I went to the secretary’s office to photocopy my exams for tomorrow, and possibly the day after if there was time, but after an hour and a half I just didn’t feel up to waiting any longer and quit while I was ahead (with the tests for tomorrow). I guess I should be glad our school even has a photocopier (photocopieuse), but it almost turned out to be more work.

Then there was club. Hysterics ensue when you open the lab door in front of 40 students. I don’t mind getting pushed around a little bit, but I am worried that one of these kids is going to get damaged. So we practiced entering the lab in an orderly fashion a few times, including a comedic scene in which I yanked the fuses out of the wall, shutting off (almost?) all the computers (and possibly damaging one? It still boots, more or less), until I gave up and handed control over to the officers of the club, who exert too much control for my American taste. And then of course everyone just uses the computers to play games. I guess this is as much my fault as theirs, since they already know how to play games, and if they don’t understand the things I am asking them to do ("Find the software called GIMP"), they’ll just revert to what they know will amuse them. I guess a similar principle explains why, even when they decide they want to draw, they whip out Paint and not, say, GIMP. (Let’s leave aside the question of whether GIMP’s interface sucks. It’s not like they know how to use Paint either.)

I mean, I understand on some level that video games are still new and fascinating to them. But for chrissakes how many fucking times are you gonna win the race-the-moto game before you get sick of it? How many times are you gonna play Spider Solitaire on Easy, with hints? Or is the answer, "We’ll just put more games on the machine"?

And then afterwards, I got a support call from "the boys", who weren’t capable of operating their machine the way Big Brother Boris had set it up, and then a random girl from Première came in and wanted a bunch of English tutoring. She came with a copy of a test — the test that she was going to have tomorrow? — and wanted to know how to turn verbs into nouns — she had started with "to succeed" -> "success" and so I went with that, but towards the end when she started employing gerunds I started to wonder what the hell the teacher was looking for. Vocab? Grammar? Sure enough there was a chapter on gerunds in her notebook, despite her swearing up and down that teacher hadn’t taught anything about verbs or nouns in the time she’d been in class. Towards the end of the two hours I spent with her, I was getting fed up. It is hard for me to accept that a student in première, which is the equivalent of junior in high school, does not know words like "they", "gold", or "talk". Of course, it doesn’t help that they barely know French either. "A rebel? That’s a kind of monster, right?"

A quick glance at the Critical Periods in the Life of an Organization Volunteer chart suggests that I am towards the end of month 6 and moving into months 7-10, so there’s a forecast of "Slow work progress", "Language plateaus", "Cross-cultural frustration", and the long-awaited "Culture shock". That’s the one I’m really excited about.

All of which is a fancy way of saying "So that’s why I’ve spent a lot of time lying in bed playing Nintendo DS". Which, yeah, isn’t as satisfying as working on my "How to teach Python" stuff, or (what I really want to do) sinking into a Nerd Trance for 8-10 days and adding IMAP IDLE support to offlineimap or otherwise just writing code and pretend I’m not in a country where "computer literacy" means understanding Caps Lock, but it’s a lot less work.

Anyhow, I hope all of you are having a happy Thanksgiving, plus or minus. Tomorrow I will be at some wedding or whatever, so don’t worry about me! I definitely have plans and friends and things!

This is what things looked from the balcony in Bangou. Well, it was a little like this, only a million times more beautiful in person. See that mountain off to the right, whose peak is hidden in the clouds? Apparently there are a whole range of them.

Working here as a volunteer with the Organization is a 24/7 job — you don’t "go to work", you "take leave". And leave is scarce. You get 24 days a year "for free"; you get to travel sometimes for committee meetings; you get a week off for training with other volunteers; and there’s a new policy of "mental health days" which maybe gets you a few more. Altogether it’s maybe 40ish days a year, which Respected Directress keeps saying is a lot of vacation, except it’s not vacation, it’s weekends, and it’s hardly any weekends. Which is fine; we’re here with the Organization to suffer, and if things were too easy we’d be unhappy.

Nevertheless, to make up the difference a bit, there’s a volunteer tradition of something called "clando", which means leaving your post without officially taking leave. Apparently the more accomplished volunteers have managed to leave the country without notifying anyone. The Organization tends to frown upon such things, not least because of safety concerns — if there’s an emergency, they need to know where you are fast. But Cameroon’s a pretty safe place, right? So what’s the big deal?

I’ve been hesitant to write about my experiences flouting the rules, despite the fact that this blog explicitly violates the rules, but I just realized that the worst they can do is send me home, So, screw it. Plus, other volunteers are posting fucking Youtube videos!

This past weekend I was at a party in Bangou, followed by a cultural ceremony called the Zeuh Dance, which is apparently "performed" exactly once by a chief to honor his departed father. I say "performed" despite the fact that it wasn’t a thing he specifically did, but maybe something he put on. A large number of people danced while more-or-less walking around in a circle, and other people fired guns. (Traditional guns. This seems to be a pattern here in the West.) It was a lot less impressive than I was hoping it would be, but maybe I was just too tired from being up too late the night before.

Wrote to myself that night, the night of the dance party:

19 nov 2010

Party at Bangou. All the Cameroonians are gone. It’s 1 AM, roughly 3:30 AM in the Cameroonian context. Mostly sober now. Music is still going on, still loud, and a few PVCs are still dancing to it.

Stood on the balcony here at Xxx’s. Looked down for a while at the bobbing and weaving below, the Americans spinning and dancing to a jazzy swing tune. Four of them, two nominally attached. Looked up at the horizon, where there were maybe a dozen points of light, few enough that you could count ’em. A fluorescent light maybe at a lycee or something, a radio tower with blinking red lights, maybe a private residence here and there. Looked down again, saw the four Americans again. Realized that for better or worse, they’re my family now, so better get used to it.

Which isn’t like "man, fuck these guys for being in my family". It’s more like a recognition of an existing fact. Then there was more drinking and a few aborted attempts at dominoes — it seems like actually finishing a game of any kind at a party just doesn’t seem to work — and then I went to sleep on my sleeping pad, which has a leak or something, but did the trick. Dreamt about something warm and pleasant, perhaps failing my students. Woke up with the other volunteers. Watched the ceremony. Risked traveling at night to get home Saturday night instead of Sunday morning. Collapsed, woke up Sunday due to "the boys" knocking at my door.

There is a video that some people talked about at the party. It’s pretty funny to me. Not sure what you will think of it. You know you’re an *Organization* volunteer in Africa when… My favorite line is: "Spiders are no longer your enemy, but your trusted ally in the constant battle against bugs."

Other news: the poule de Dieu stopped by for a visit again today. She scratched around a little for crumbs, and "the boys" chased her out after she tried to sit on one of the armchairs. I’ve been thinking about what the logistics of keeping her would be, what that would even mean. Could she stay in the other bedroom? Should I build a coop for her, like mom thinks?

It’s past my bedtime, otherwise I’d post a panorama of the view from the balcony in Bangou, or write about how amazing the well was. Later, I guess…

It’s officially the saison seche, dry season here in the West, and the change is stunningly simple and distinct. The week before last it rained every day or two, enough for me to gather water to bathe with and even do dishes. Last week it rained once, hard, cutting power. This week it isn’t going to rain at all. Instead me and the "boys" went down to the marigot to fill my fût. This past weekend their family, as well as Madame Dorothé (and possibly children of her family too? Not sure) were down there straightening it out and it really shows. Where before there were mud pits, now there are cailloux, stones, thet have been collected from god knows where and laid out in a relatively stable arrangement. The marigot itself has also gotten some work; the kids did the equivalent of mucking it out to make it a little more smoother flowing. It’s a lot more pleasant and the water that comes out of it is a lot cleaner — it’s still a little green, but there’s less obvious dirt floating in it.

I don’t have any pictures of the New Marigot, but here are some of the kids working on it.

Marie Chantal, who is the mother of "the boys", is behind Dorothé here. I think the girls in the background are Ma-Cha’s kids.

Muck, muck, muck.

A hundred liters, bitches.

I also tried to cook sweet-and-sour cabbage wedges yesterday. It didn’t work great, but it was edible, and it’s a little better today. Maybe next time I should follow the recipe more exactly.

So it turns out that Bonheur’s name is not actually Bonheur, it’s Brondon, which isn’t relevant to the story except that he says a few things and I’d like to have his name right.

I think this happened Saturday, after we got back from the deuil — which I haven’t written about, but I was a little tipsy and it was hot, so I was sitting on a chair and trying to rest. Suddenly I hear Brondon hissing, and I look to see that in the doorway is a black chicken. Brondon was trying to shoo it out. It didn’t look hostile, just confused, self-conscious, perhaps hungry.

"Une poule," he said ("A chicken"; interesting grammatical side note on the difference between poule and poulet, which is the same difference between "pig" and "pork").

"What is it doing here?" I asked.

"She’s looking for food."

I laid my head back down and considered this for a while. The next day I would discuss eggs with Cristina, and she would tell me that instead of buying the standard eggs for, e.g. 1700 CFA for 30, or one-at-a-time for 75, she preferred to buy the oeufs du village, "eggs of the village", which tend to be a little smaller and with a much brighter yolk, for 125 apiece. The brighter yolk, she would say, indicates the better health of the chicken, which are the free-roaming chickens that you often see in villages in Cameroon. The eggs you buy by the alvéole, literally "pit" but also the cartons that hold 30 that they use to transport eggs, tend to come from chickens in giant wooden buildings who don’t get a lot of sun or love, and probably only get what they need to survive, so the eggs are lower quality.

Brondon returned to cooking or doing dishes or eating or whatever it was he was doing and so it came to pass that as I sat and looked wonderingly at the doorway, the chicken came back. It was a little more insistent this time, standing its ground as Brondon shooed it away with short lunges and sweeps of the arms.

"Why is it here?" I asked. "Where did it come from?"

"She’s a poule de Dieu," Brondon said. A chicken of God. "She was probably used in some ceremony and then they let her go."

Which, I guessed, meant that she belonged to God now. "Do I have to feed it?" It seemed awfully rude to show no hospitality to God’s chickens. Does it bring good luck to feed God’s chickens? Is it like praying?

"It’s only that you don’t have a place to keep her," Brondon said. "If she stayed, she’d shit all over." Indeed, the chickens that my host family kept back in stage stayed in a little closet near the kitchen, and on my first night there I stepped in their chicken shit. I mulled this over, considering the possibility and concluding finally that he was right.

But the idea of a poule de Dieu stuck in my head for a while. What must it be like to be a poule de Dieu? Assuming you weren’t sacrificed or eaten, of course. Your existence had only really been intended for one thing; afterwards, what did you do? Of course it was hungry — it was unemployed. And increasingly desparate. At this point it was trying to get in through the glass pane in the door.

Somehow I began to feel a kinship with this chicken. I’ve had this goal, to be in Africa teaching computer science, for a long time. That it’s actually happened often seems like a giant accident, but sometimes (in the words of Neal Stephenson) that the events of my life "are wood behind the point of a spear". But then what? What do you do after your life’s work is over? One day I will have to come to terms with this. One day soon, I will be a poule de Dieu too.

I left then to try to find the chicken. I got to the courtyard in front of my house, looked around a bit, but she was gone. The courtyard is pretty empty right now, not a lot of plants or anything, so a chicken can’t really hide anywhere. She’d flown the coop, so to speak.

"She left," Brondon said. He’d come out to see what I was doing.

"I wonder where she went?"

"Maybe she’ll stay with someone else."

I looked off to the right. The sun was setting, and the clouds were all red and yellow. There was nothing for it, so I went back inside.

I don’t know where the chicken is now, but I hope she’s doing all right, supplying some lovely oeufs du village to some neighbor or maybe living free, like the feral chickens Gus told me about in Hawaii. Apparently they get by; they can flap up into a tree or something if a situation looks dicey. I know it’s unconventional, but somehow I hope for something like that for her — a life free of convention for a liberated chicken.

Gosh! Haven’t written in almost a week. Partly that’s due to not having power; it rained Wednesday and power went out during club, and then steadfastly didn’t come back for the rest of the week, nor the weekend either. Strangely enough, power was back in the rest of the village, but not here at my house or the school. It finally just came back in my last hour of 4e.

During this time I gradually used every single electronic device I had until it was completely out of power. In English we have a clumsy phrase "out of power", but in French you can just say "déchargé", discharged. Whereas the English word "discharged" brings to mind all sorts of other meanings — "I discharged my duties.. as a soldier in the Army of the North!" .. "The patient presents with a variety of discharges.".. etc.

It’s kind of fascinating the kinds of social structures that exist here for the unreliable power situation. You can ask a storekeeper to charge your cell phone for a while, or leave it with a friend, or go over to their house to charge stuff. I ended up going over to Cristina’s, she’s the other volunteer here, she lives about an hour away, for four or five hours to make an attempt to charge everything, mp3 player, handheld game, electronic ink reader, laptop, spare battery.. I didn’t get everything, but I got enough to make it to here and now, so I guess that’s enough.

Being without power for a period of time like that is a very interesting experience. I became lethargic, unmotivated. I have five classes of quizzes to grade but all I wanted to do was lie down or go to bed. I don’t think it’s just me, either; Marie-Chantal said something about how when the power is out, you just want to sleep, you don’t feel like working.

There’s a lot of other stuff to write about, but it’ll probably be a little while..