Critters

This blog post is dedicated to the memory of the three geckos who have tragically fallen to their deaths in my latrine hole. Rest in peace, geckos. You are gone but not forgotten.

I recognized long ago that my house is an ecosystem unto itself. Within it, various bugs and beasties are born and live and die. And that’s fine, as long as they don’t make a mess or eat my food or crawl on me.

Today has not been a good day for critters. After days of hearing the telltale noises of termites, I discovered a notebook (blank, thankfully) whose pages had been utterly destroyed by the little bastards, and so they met a fiery death on my trash pile. A few hours later, I noticed that a particular corner of the living room had a rather unpleasant odor, and discovered the body of baby gecko no longer than my little finger under a 15-liter water jug.

a (living) gecko of comparable size

In the year and a half I’ve been in this house, I’ve seen a small sampling of the wildlife Cameroon has to offer. Aside from the aforementioned termites and geckos, there are a number of spiders, most of which I allow to live since they eat unpleasant things like flies and mosquitoes. In a fit of paranoia one night in Ngaoundere, I researched the various arachnids I’d seen in the house and deduced that most of them were wall crab spiders, which are harmless to humans. I also discovered that the black widow has a lesser-known and less lethal cousin, the brown widow, which can be found in Cameroon, specifically, in my kitchen. (For this reason, I always have a can of Raid in the kitchen.)

Did you know that scorpions are also arachnids? I can attest, having counted eight legs on the two specimens I killed in my living room.

But the worst kind of visitor is one with no legs at all. One day a few months ago, I walked into my living room to find a small snake (about as long as my forearm) in my living room near the front door. It was black, and though I can’t be certain what species it was, I knew that black mambas were native to Cameroon, so I tried to stay as far from my uninvited visitor as possible. Somehow I had the idea to blind it with insecticide, which actually worked, and once the snake was disoriented, I got it into the front yard using a hoe, found the largest rock in the yard, and threw it at the snake’s head. Cruel? Yes, but in my mind, necessary.

At first I thought my neighbors would be rather nonplussed about the snake, since they didn’t seem bothered by any of my previous critter encounters, but my friend Pepito was shocked to find a dead snake in my yard. I don’t remember the exact exchange, but it went something like this (translated into English for your reading pleasure):

Him: Did you know there’s a dead snake in your yard?
Me: Yes. I killed it.

Him: You killed it?? Why didn’t you ask someone to kill it for you?
Me: There was no one around.
Him: Wow, you’re brave. Even I would have run away.
Me: (glows with pride)

And, scene.

Despite all of this, I must say that aside from the occasional bat infestation or rogue scorpion, I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve occasionally heard volunteers complain of houses crawling with cockroaches or having to keep food in Tupperware so mice can’t get to it. And while my latrine is home to a number of cockroaches longer than my thumb, they rarely leave their hole, presumably because they know I will show them no mercy. My relationship to the critters now is kind of like that of stereotypical college dorm roommates: As long as they don’t touch my stuff or get into my space or wake me up at some ungodly hour, I mostly live and let live.

Les fous

I just passed Mama on my way home from school. He was walking a few paces behind me, laughing hysterically. I turned, said “Sannu” (hello), and continued on my way. He didn’t respond—perhaps he didn’t even notice I was there—but I didn’t expect him to.

The first time I saw Mama was a few weeks after my arrival in Nyambaka. It was August, late in the rainy season, and my yard was overgrown with tall grass. Every once in a while, I would peek out my front door and notice a little boy, maybe eight or nine years old, sitting in the grass and imitating the birds’ songs or just laughing to himself.

Perhaps a month later, I was eating lunch at Diddi’s house when Mama and his father (an elderly gentleman never seen without his bicycle) passed by. Diddi and the father exchanged greetings in Fulfulde, while Mama said nothing.

“Does he go to school?” I asked after they had continued on their way.

“Why would he?” replied Diddi. “Something’s not right in his head. He didn’t even start speaking until about a year ago.”

Mama is what people here might call a “fou,” the French word for crazy. Of course, I’m not a huge fan of this word, but frankly, I haven’t heard any alternatives.

Mental health in Cameroon is something of an enigma. Even those within the medical profession seem to equate mental health issues with some kind of personal failing. For example, when having blood drawn for my yearly physical in Yaoundé, the very kindly nurse asked me if I was on any medication. I replied that I took a malaria prophylaxis and an antidepressant every day.

“Oh, no,” she said as she shook her head sympathetically. “You really should stop.” (Spoiler alert: I did not, after five years, stop taking antidepressants based on the advice of a woman I’d just met.)

The nurse’s mentality is par for the course for Cameroonians, who largely seem to believe that those who struggle with depression, anxiety, or any number of other issues are simply lacking in moral or spiritual fortitude. In many cases, people with mental health issues are basically told to deal with it, but more severe cases may face more extreme forms of treatment, such as a young woman in another Volunteer’s village who was forced to listen to recitations from the Koran for hours every day.

But as frustrating as it is to hear stories like this, I can’t stand on a moral high ground and judge the people who react this way. After all, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the United States became a “Prozac nation” and finally began a public conversation about mental health. Even personally I struggled to accept the nature of my condition, believing throughout my late teens that I wasn’t depressed, I was just sad all the time and would have to live with it. So when a Cameroonian woman looks at a spoiled American woman who takes pills to make her not sad, I can see how the Cameroonian would be skeptical.

And of course access is a huge issue. As far as I know, there’s only one psychiatric facility in Cameroon, which is physically and financially far out of reach of the vast majority of the population. And even if someone were able to travel to Yaoundé and be admitted, how astronomical must the cost of treatment be? Surely a farmer in Nyambaka would be unable to pay even a minute fraction of the cost.

The truth is, the “fous” in Nyambaka seem to have a pretty pleasant life. As is the case so often in Cameroon, their family or the village becomes their safety net, because there is no other safety net. Mama’s father, for example, does an admirable job caring for his son by himself. He feeds him well and allows him to pursue various adventures around the village. Two other men—one perhaps in his 40s who does not speak but smiles at everyone, and another already in his old age whom everyone calls “The General”—are not merely tolerated but accepted by the community, who invite them into their homes to share their food or shake their hands when they meet in the market. No one speaks of their difference. Their mental health is a non-issue, even nonexistent.


Of course I wish these individuals had access to treatment, but I cannot look down on their lives. They have all of the necessities, and a support system, and a quality of life, and really, isn’t that all any of us can ask for? Until revolutionary systemic change comes to Cameroon’s health system, this is their lot. And while I don’t think anyone should be complacent about this, I also don’t think these individuals should be pitied.

Speaking with a stranger's tongue

The French language makes no distinction between foreigners and strangers: both are simply “les étrangers.” Of course, here, I am both, and my tongue betrays this difference as I move through various spaces.

I began learning and speaking French as a freshman in high school, and by the time I graduated was somewhat proficient. During my first trip to France at the age of eighteen, I was able to mask the fact that I was American, but people asked where I had learned French, as it was evident that I was not native to The Hexagon. (As this was in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, I didn’t think it necessary to hide my American origins, but that’s another topic entirely.)

I continued my studies of la langue française in university, even spending a summer in France at a university near the Pyrenees between my junior and senior years. In all this time, I carefully cultivated something resembling a French accent, and when I returned to the States, a few people in the French department remarked that I sounded like someone from southwestern France. I took this as an enormous compliment.

It’s not that I’m trying to conceal myself or lie about who I am and where I’m from. My attempt to train my tongue is more an effort to disappear into the crowd, to become anonymous, or more precisely, to become like everyone else. I’ve never enjoyed being the center of attention, and not surprisingly, marking oneself as a foreigner or a stranger (or both) tends to draw attention.

It wasn’t until I arrived in Ebolowa for training that I had to reconsider my manner of speaking. Of course, most of Cameroon used to be a French colony, and while it’s not surprising that many people still have a certain disdain for the French, I had been so caught up in so many other aspects of cultural difference that the possibility of such disdain hadn’t occurred to me. It wasn’t until I watched other trainees (who barely spoke French) interacting with motorcycle taxi drivers that I realized why these same drivers who were genial with my comrades were terse with me: They thought I was French.

And so, once again, I began to train what some call the most powerful muscle in the human body. The process became more intensive when I arrived in Nyambaka and began constantly hearing the specific brand of French spoken by people whose first language is Fulfulde. While the “French” r bubbles up from the back of one’s throat, Fulfulde speakers roll their r’s. Funnily, people here also have the tendency to turn n into ng, not unlike people in, say, Marseille, so tomorrow morning is transformed from “demain matin” to “demaing mating.”

And people here are defensive about their accent. I was recently at a friend’s house for lunch. She was watching TV, a pop culture interview program of some sort, and the interview subject was a choreographer, a young Cameroonian woman with straight chin-length red hair. My friend was incensed. “You think you’ve arrived because you’ve been to France, but you’re still Cameroonian,” she said. She imitated the woman’s French accent and rolled her eyes. “And I bet you’re bald under that wig.” She then changed the channel to one of her favorite programs, a soap opera from India.

Aside from the accent, there’s also the construction of what is said. Cameroonians are frugal, fiscally and linguistically. When interrogating a misbehaving child, a Parisian mother might ask, “Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?” or, “What happened?” whereas most Cameroonian mothers will simply bark, “C’est comment??” which I don’t think has an equivalent in English but translates literally to “It’s how??”

Over months, it happened like osmosis. My tongue grew accustomed to new tastes as well as new words and sounds, until one day, on a bus, an old Cameroonian woman spun around in her seat and brightly told me, “Mais tu parles comme une Noire!” But you speak like a Black woman! I was flattered, and somewhat proud of myself, but the moment was bittersweet. Of course I could never become anonymous here, or part of the crowd.

Even in other parts of Cameroon, I now mark myself as a stranger. I visited my host family in the South about one year after leaving their home, and shortly into my visit, I could see the confusion on their faces. “Tu es un Nordiste!” declared my host mother finally. You’re a Northerner! In the South, this is not a compliment: The northern regions of Cameroon to them are associated with child brides and Muslim extremists. And so my Cameroonian tongue betrayed me, even within the country’s borders.

The Peace Corps literature tells us that one of the things volunteers find most difficult to readjust to upon returning home is a return to anonymity. My time in Nyambaka is probably (hopefully) the closest I’ll ever get to being a celebrity, and apparently many volunteers have trouble with this loss of this recognition. I have no doubt that returning to the States will be difficult, but this will certainly not be an issue for me. Last summer, I went on holiday to Barcelona with my dad and his husband, and the ability to not draw attention to myself, the possibility of blending in with a crowd, was perhaps the part of the trip I savored most. (Just kidding. The sangria was the best part, obviously.)

Now that I have learned to speak with a stranger’s tongue, I wonder how long it will take me to speak like an American. Even now, trying to describe my situation, I sometimes have to look away from the screen, squint at the wall, and ask myself, How do you say that in English? I wonder, how long will it take me to stop peppering my speech with French words and phrases? How will my friends back home react when I accidentally describe something serious as grave? After being rolled and pulled into various contortions that were once strange and foreign, will my tongue remember to speak its first language?