Vignettes of Nyambaka

I’ve heard a number of volunteers describe their strange relationship with age here, and as I’ve mentioned before, age is an important component of gaining respect here, but I experienced one moment that I think perfectly captured my tenuous balance between respected elder and young whippersnapper posing as a grown-up.

I was walking back to my house from the market when I passed an old woman. Her head was covered in pagne, as most women’s are here, though I haven’t yet adopted this habit.

“Sannu,” (“Hello”) I said with a nod and a smile.

“Sannu, bingel,” (“Hello, child”) she replied.

I’ve never been called a child in Nyambaka, before or since, so this greeting, though well intentioned, caught me off guard. I was even more perplexed when only a few seconds later, and young man greeted me with a cordial “Bonjour, Madame,” a title generally reserved for married women or women of authority. I’m certainly not the former, but apparently, I may belong to the latter group, depending on whom you ask.

------------------------------------

I entertained for a moment the possibility that I was having a stroke. Surely that was the only explanation for smelling cigarette smoke for no apparent reason?

Luckily, I rounded a corner and passed various overgrown plants to find an older gentleman with gray stubble and a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

It was only after I’d greeted him and continued on my way that I realized I had never seen someone smoking in Nyambaka before. No wonder the scent of smoke had caught me off guard—I’d gone nearly a month without encountering it. Since Islam forbids drinking and smoking, and the Christian-majority neighborhood is on the other side of the village, I must have subconsciously accepted an existence where I would see (or smell) neither alcohol nor cigarettes.

It’s strange how quickly one becomes accustomed to such things. I wore a skirt in Ngaoundere recently that showed my knees, and though I owned (and wore shamelessly) at least one mini-skirt back in the States, exposing a part of my body that hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks made me feel unnecessarily self-conscious, even a little scandalous.

I guess my saving grace is that when people were staring at me, it probably wasn’t because of the length of my skirt.