On Catcalling

It manifests itself in a myriad of ways. Sometimes it’s all-out loud and annoying: “Oh! La blanche!” Oh! White woman!

Sometimes it comes in the form of outlandish requests: “Epouse-moi!” Marry me!

Sometimes it even cloaks itself in politeness: “Bonsoir, ma chérie.” Good evening, my dear.

Call it what you will: Misogyny. Sexual harassment. Catcalling.

I dealt with it in the States—usually someone making an assumption about my sexual orientation based on my short haircut—but never on a daily basis. And frankly, it’s exhausting.

It’s exhausting to replay these scenarios over and over in my head, trying to think of what I could have said or done, trying to decide whether it’s better to not react at all.

It’s exhausting to have to plan my life around the assumption that someone is going to yell at me.

“I’ll cross the street here so it’s less likely that someone will dérange me.”

“I won’t go to this location at night because there are too many bothersome men.”

“If I go to this place with a Cameroonian friend, people will be less likely to make comments.”

It’s exhausting to hear the same crap over and over and over again.

I don’t know what their endgame is, but then I never did in the States, either. Are you trying to hit on me? Epic fail. Are you pointing out the foreigner for the benefit of everyone in earshot? I’m pretty sure they already noticed. Are you trying to make me feel uncomfortable and vaguely unsafe? Well done, sir.

I’ve accepted these kinds of comments when I’m in a city, but for whatever reason, they’ve started to happen more frequently in Nyambaka. I used to hear something every once in a while at market day, when people from surrounding villages come into town to trade, but walking home from school today at 4 pm on a Tuesday afternoon, two separate incidents occurred.

Of course, none of this is new. This doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation about street harassment, and my ranting isn’t going to help anything.

Once, walking to a bar with my ex-boyfriend, a man drove by and yelled a sexually explicit comment. After I’d had a few minutes to swear profusely and threaten the man with all manner of bodily harm, my boyfriend asked me what he could do to rectify the situation.


Well, clearly men like that don’t respect women, I said, but perhaps they respect other men. The only thing that might work, it seems to me, is if men speak out when they hear their friends/acquaintances/coworkers/whomever harassing women.

But that’s probably just my hopeless idealism flaring up again.

La Cuisine du Cameroun: Bean Beignets

I come to you today to sing the praises of the bean beignet, or as one volunteer called them, “village chicken nuggets.” In addition to being a delightful little snack, it’s a source of protein in the incredibly carb-heavy village diet.

Like so many things, bean beignets are beautiful in their simplicity. White beans or black-eyed peas are cooked and mashed, formed into shapes not unlike chicken nuggets, and deep-fried. The taste and texture is somewhere between a chicken nugget and a hushpuppy.

cross-section of a bean beignet

Bean beignets are especially popular during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sundown. Many people actually gain weight during Ramadan despite fasting, since they break their fast every evening at about 7 pm with a variety of delicious oily dishes.
Thankfully for me (and unfortunately for my expanding waistline), bean beignets are available year-round on market days, and are only ten francs (about two cents) apiece. Usually an adorable little girl in a hijab (headscarf) will sit behind a large platter loaded with a pile of beignets and place them in a “plastique,” a small transparent plastic bag.

Usually a show some level of self-restraint and get five, but today I went all-out and spent 100 francs (20 cents) on ten. Bon appétit to me.

Lights Out

I’ve never been a morning person. Once, during a spring break in my early teens, I slept until after two in the afternoon. When I asked my dad what was for breakfast, he curtly replied that the rest of the world had already eaten lunch.

My tendency to sleep in isn’t quite that bad anymore. My friends and neighbors in Nyambaka know that I “faire la grasse matinée” (sleep in) on the weekends, and though they tease me endlessly, most people respect it and don’t knock on my door until at least ten.

Today is Tuesday, which means that my first class starts at 10:30, but I woke up a little after seven, due to the lack of power.

I have no right to complain about losing power, so I won’t. Many other volunteers, especially in the Adamawa region, never have it, and power their Kindles and other small devices with small solar panels, or they read honest-to-god books. I wish I could tell you that these people have learned to live a simpler life, or evolved past a need for electricity, but the truth is that most of them come into the regional capital twice a month or so to binge on refrigerated drinks and the Internet, just as I do.
Today is the third day we’ve been without power, and there’s no way of knowing how long it will go on. As is the way of the village, rumors abound. Some say that in clearing fields, a careless farmer burned down a power line. Others say that this was a planned outage. Everyone attempts to triangulate the scope of the outage and infer from this information how long it might last. We know that both Ngaoundere and Meiganga, the cities on either side of us, both have “lumière” (light), so we are to assume that it’s not a large problem, and should be remedied shortly. But then again, nothing is for sure.

The longest Nyambaka has been without electricity since I’ve been here was about a week, shortly after my arrival. At first, it was kind of exciting, even romantic, to live by candlelight after the sun went down, but as the days wore on, my electronics started dying one by one, as if a contagion was spreading amongst them. First my laptop died. It had done this multiple times before during shorter previous outages, so I didn’t fret. A couple days later my Kindle started protesting, flashing exclamation points on the screen, but with no source of power to revive it, it quietly settled into slumber. This loss was more inconvenient than that of the laptop, as reading is one of my daily habits, but I had a few books in the house, so it wasn’t an insurmountable loss.
Shortly after my Kindle began its hibernation, my iPod too told me that it wouldn’t last much longer, a frightening red battery hovering in the corner of the screen. After a valiant effort against the dying of the light, it also went dark, leaving me alone in the house with only a few books and my own thoughts. A terrifying prospect, indeed.

I’m fully aware of the privilege inherent in this statement. The only other iPod I’ve seen in village is one that a former volunteer gave to her neighbor’s brother, and reading happens exclusively with the aid of books, not e-readers. The sad fact of the matter is, I have yet to learn how to live without electricity, and more importantly, without some source of constant noise to distract me from my own thought processes.

I spent the following days reading voraciously and journaling, scribbling horrifying truths about myself that I wouldn’t have acknowledged if there had been any kind of buffer between me and my own psyche. It was a moment of great honesty, to be sure, but also of great doubt.


On our seventh or eighth day without power, I was walking home from the market early in the afternoon having just bought provisions for another candlelit dinner. A series of delighted cries of all ages came up from a group of small houses, and I heard small children yelling “Yité warti!” (“The fire is back!”) As I returned home, unlocked my door, and turned in the living room light, I couldn’t help but smile to myself.