C, F, L, R

Coins. The flash wasn’t quite right on most of the photos I took of them. I ended up taking this picture with the camera upside down to get a decent exposure, and then rotated the picture. The smaller coins are the 5 CFA/10 CFA pieces. In terms of size, the 50 CFA coin is about the size of a nickel, and the "gold ring" 100 CFA coin is about the size of a quarter. The slightly bigger silver coin next to that is an older format of 100 CFA coin. The biggest coin of all is the "big format" 25 CFA piece, which is probably about the size of a silver dollar. On the other side, the 10 CFA coin is about the size of a dime, and it looks adorable after a few months of handling 50/100 CFA coins.

The smaller the currency here, the more useful, with 100 CFA being the most useful and large bills, like 5,000 and 10,000, being a pain in the ass to break. Most vendors you interact with day-to-day work at the scale of 50-150 CFA. (Today I bought two begniets and a caramel for 75 CFA.) In case of big bills, it’s useful to ask "Avez-vous la monnaie pour …?" ("Do you have change for …?") Monnaie can also mean coinage in general, like the word "change" in English.

This is the image of my "compound", the walled complex of buildings I sleep in. It’s pretty small — maybe 30 feet across. This is a panorama taken from my porch. Full size is about 4.4 MB.

A photo of some teachers during our "taking of service" a couple days ago. J-C is wearing the brown suit jacket. In the background, the hills of Hauts-Plateaux.

Here’s another random photo, taken towards the end of training. Depicted are Allison, Jessica (who, though I took five pictures, is eating in all of them), and Peter.

Naturally we noticed that the drinks could be sorted rainbetically [1]:

The sodas are: Top Pamplemousse ("grapefruit", although it doesn’t taste much like grapefruit), Fanta, Top Grenadine (which, although everyone says it tastes like drinking syrup, I am fond of), and an empty Fanta.

Testing something. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Vladimir.

Got my schedule (emploi de temps) today. No big ceremony. 16 hours of teaching, Monday, Thursday and Friday. Could be worse. More on that later.

Today I would like to engage in a bit of Goal Three — sharing the culture here with you who are back home. The subject is ants (les fourmis). Mom asked what they do here about ants (a propos of the ants who found the candy in my suitcase), and I wanted to tell a story about my host family back at training. Mom, you may regret asking..

One day my family found a bunch of ants in the yard and I think in the house. "Attention! Ça pique!" ("Be careful! They bite!") I thought it was just my windowsill and that it was because I’d left out some candy wrappers, but apparently not. Apparently the ants come into the house to eat roaches (specifically I think the eggs/larvae). So it’s kind of a lesser-of-the-two-evils situation. Now, if the question is "roaches or ants", I’d vote for ants. But the ants can bite, whereas roaches are just deeply unsettling, so I guess my family was nonplussed about either.

The done thing in this circumstance is to burn them with oil. You pour on the oil, which is the same oil you use in your lamp, and then you set it on fire. You can also burn paper and drop the paper on the ants. We didn’t have any oil at the moment, so my host father wandered the premises spraying insecticide. I don’t really remember what happened after that — they didn’t all magically disappear — but I went to bed and the problem seemed to stop being there.

I have no desire to burn down my house (despite my efforts in the kitchen so far) so I’m just letting things go for the moment. I hope that now that I’ve removed the thing they’re interested in, they’ll chill out a bit (though it may take a few days).

Some random things that you might be interested in:

• Ripe plantains can be eaten raw. They taste much like bananas.

• I was in a government building at Bafoussam and wandered into the "computer room". Three or four people were sitting at computers, all of which ran Ubuntu and OpenOffice. That was really nice. I can justify teaching OO.o now, maybe even put Ubuntu on the machines when they get fucked up.

• Ryan was at the market in Bafoussam and started chatting with one of the market mommies. He attempted to learn a bit about the local language — hello, goodbye, that sort of thing. Then the market mommy says to him: "OK, now your turn. How do you say ‘Bonjour’ in your dialect?"

  Ryan, lost for words says, "Uh, ‘hello’?"

  The mommy replies, "No, that’s English! How do you say it in your dialect?"

  (I think I would have said something like "Sups!" but naturally dialects, as they exist here, don’t exist back home..)

• Went to Baham to buy some bamboo chairs and stuff. Less expensive than the armchairs — these little stools (tabouret) were 500 CFA each, and the bookcase (armoire) was 15,000, less than half the cost of one chair. The dude who sells the bamboo stuff was a grizzled, bitter old little dude, and I took a liking to him immediately. He didn’t haggle at all: he started the sale at the above prices, and refused to even budge 1,000 CFA. Every time Boris tried, the dude would just say, "No, I said 15,000! .. You’re short 1,000 CFA!" He told us in great deal how much effort he’d put into the bookcase, how it took him 2 months, and the amount of craftsmanship that went into it, including gluing parts together and all kinds of things. Boris was taking a tack that tended to work on other vendors, which was brusque and borderline impolite; I tried awestruck respect and humoring his bitter grizzliness. I end up doing this good-cop-bad-cop thing whenever I go shopping with a Cameroonian.

  The old dude didn’t seem the slightest bit surprised or interested in the fact that I was white; he didn’t charge an outrageous amount; I walked away with a pretty cool piece of furniture. Pretty satisfying.

• Tried boiling small potatoes in their skins for a "new potatoes" kind of effect. Turned out terribly; most of them were bitter somehow and even burned my throat. I spent a certain amount of time not feeling wonderful but not being actually sick. The hope was that I wouldn’t have to peel the little fuckers, but it seems to have backfired. Would not recommend you do this yourself.

  Today I boiled four or five bigger ones after peeling them, and that worked fine. So it’s either the fact that I left them in their skins, or the fact that they were petit. I foresee a lot of potatoes in my future.

• Figured out why there were so many ants in my house! They had found the candy in my suitcase. Guess that means I need to be eating this stuff faster.

OK, so since last we’ve spoken, I’ve started cooking. I bought a plaque à gaz ("portable stove"; wc?) pretty much the second day I was here — Ryan made fun of the packaging, which proudly proclaims the "world’s most number of automatic features" — and yesterday I finally got it hooked up to the tank ("bouteille", bottle) of gas (I think it’s propane?). I did this with the help of my new friend Kamgo Boris, who I met in the car to Bafoussam. I’m not sure if it’s just the goodness in his heart or what, but he’s been way more helpful than he has any right to be. He’s a farmer, I guess, and among other things he produces quail eggs.

Boris managed to figure out how to connect everything up, with the negligible assistance of the included "The Using Direction". We immediately cooked a celebratory round of French fries using (a small fraction of) the 1500 CFA of potatoes I bought (7 or 8 pounds?). I want to make salad with the cabbage, but that’ll take some preparation (special precautions are required for food that you aren’t going to cook before eating, and those precautions can be summarized with "bleach").

I also bought a bidon ("jug") for carrying water (20 L) because the nearest source of drinking water is 10 minutes downhill by foot, and carrying water back is approximately 20 minutes of suffering. I made the trip once with both buckets, just to see if it could be done. It can, but it sucks. It’s better to take a moto, and in order to take a moto you need a vessel that closes. The bidon does.

I put too much bleach in my bath water tonight, and I also tried the trick of heating some water first and adding it. It felt tepid to my hand but it was much, much nicer than the cold water I would have had. Actually the result was a little like a hotel swimming pool and I kind of loved it. I guess this means I need to try to set up my solar shower — need to find a place where something is unlikely to get stolen from. The volunteer who used to be here swore by the tepid-water shower; she said it was too cold up here to shower without, and it didn’t make sense to suffer.

I also have an armchair! J-C helped me haggle for it; it was 30,000 CFA (which was still too much, according to Boris, and I kind of agree). Getting it home from Bafoussam was a huge pain in the ass; we didn’t pay 600 CFA for a taxi and instead ended up paying 700 CFA for two motos (one to carry the armchair, and one to carry J-C). That was a moto ride I will not soon forget — the road was under construction and traffic was totally fucked, and we ended up merging across a lone or two of traffic. But once we got to the point where we normally take a taxi to Batié, it was pretty late and we had a hard time finding any. We ended up getting in a pickup truck with a bunch of other people and finally hiring it to drop off the chair at my house (2,000 CFA total; normal transport for two would have been about 1,200). I get to repeat the whole process Saturday morning because for some reason I decided I wanted two?

The last step, through the front door, was a fairly serious challenge, since it’s way too narrow and doesn’t open all the way. Somehow I made it through — rotating it this way and that way and finally just using brute force. Today I explained this to J-C and he chuckled lecherously as he is wont to do, and then he says, "So did you sit in it last night?" Well, not all night. "So did you sit in it this morning?" Yeah, I sat in that bitch! Am I right bro??

In other news, I’ve made it through my first week as a real Volunteer. Only 103 left to go?

This just in: Blip Festival was moved from this December (which I had no chance of making) to next spring (which I could potentially make). Rock!

Went shopping again today. Made a friend in the car, named Kamgo Boris — he just started talking to me, I guess he was friends with some previous volunteers — and he looks halfway between Akeem, my old co-worker, and Jelani, friend from high school/college. He volunteered to help me haggle and go shopping, so although I intended to just get one thing, we spent most of the afternoon bouncing around Bafoussam and it was dark by the time I finally got home with my newly-acquired plunder.

Today we bought: the bottle of gas for the stove (bottle 30,000; gas 6,000); the tubing for it (one and a half meters: 3,150); some rags for washing stuff (2700 at the supermarket); some detergent (900?); some flatware (1800 for 12 forks, 12 spoons, and 6 table knives — which I think is a little expensive, weren’t they being sold by the piece at 50 in Bafia?); some eating plates/bowls (1800 for 6); two pots (7500? 8000?); another bucket (1500). In theory I’ve spent about 115,000 of my 200,000 CFA "settling-in" allowance already, but in practice I only have let’s say 64,000 left, which means I’ve spent closer to 136,000. I can account for about a half of the difference by going over my petty-cash transactions. Not sure what that means except that I’m a shitty accountant.

At the supermarche I saw a couple piles of five-CFA and ten-CFA pieces. In Cameroon, the smallest useful coin is 25 CFA, so these are like nega-cash. Cameroonians tend to make jewelry out of them. I guess a supermarket acquires a certain amount of them so exchanged a 50-CFA piece for some. Picture forthcoming.

With my first bucket, I became equipped to take showers, which was a requirement at the time. With a second bucket I am now capable of doing laundry, which is fast becoming a requirement. The pants I wore today are completely muddy, and they’re gonna require some heavy lifting. We’ll see if I get the motivation sometime.