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?

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.

Le palu

I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's fabulous novel Americanah shortly before leaving the States. In one scene, the male lead Obinze casually tells a concerned friend, "I'm just tired. I think I'm coming down with malaria.

I have to apologize now to Ms. Adichie, and my parents, as I used the words of the former to quell the fears of the latter. When they asked me about malaria, I didn't tell them, "Well, it's the number-one killer of children under five in Cameroon," or, "The most lethal form of malaria, falciparum, is the most common in Cameroon." What I said was, "It's like getting a cold. People get it all the time and recover a few days later. See? This Nigerian guy isn't even concerned."

I'm sorry, Mom and Dad. I thought I was doing the right thing by trying to downplay the seriousness of it. Honestly, I don't regret it. My friends and family were concerned enough about my departure, as the vast majority of news that makes it from Africa to the States isn't terribly lighthearted.

One of the first things we received upon our arrival in Yaounde as trainees was tablets of doxycycline, a malaria prophylaxis, and training included hours of discussion about malaria, from prevention to treatment to how the disease incubates in the body, specifically the liver. Then people started falling sick. First two fellow trainees were admitted to the hospital, then others. At a certain point, I accepted that at some point during my service, I would get the disease.

Which isn't to say that I haven't been vigilant. While some people shun prophylaxes for their side effects, or due to fear of potential side effects, taking doxy has long since become a part of my breakfast routine. There is no standing water around my house where mosquitoes might breed. I tuck in my mosquito net, a sort of fine mesh canopy that hangs over my bed, every night before falling asleep. If I go out at night, I usually wear leggings or pants.

Of course, I'll never know exactly when or where some generous mosquito shared her parasites with me--the incubation period generally varies from one to two weeks--but I can't help but wonder if an all-night Halloween party in short shorts was my downfall. (Even if it was, it was totally worth it.)

 It started in the wee hours of the morning of November 9th, a little over a week ago. I awoke at about 3 AM wracked with nausea. Thinking it was merely indigestion, I took some Pepto Bismol and tried to go back to sleep. Instead the nausea worsened and led to vomiting. Of course, I stayed home from school that day, but at that point, I thought I'd come down with food poisoning or some sort of stomach bug, and assumed that everything would resolve itself within 24 hours.

Which, of course, it didn't. I traveled to the regional capital, Ngaoundere, on Thursday to purchase medication that would calm my nausea, but by Saturday, I was wrapped up in a blanket with only my face peeking out, fevered and shivering and aching all over. "Do you  need anything?" asked Candice (the Volunteer featured in my Teachers' Day post). "I'm fine," I said. "Wanna watch The X-Files?" And so I spent the next three to four hours trying to distract myself from my fever dreams of death with the adventures of Mulder and Scully. But to no avail. I finally called the Peace Corps nurse, who told me to get a malaria test as soon as possible. Candice and I (still wrapped in my blanket) went to the nearest pharmacy, but there were no rapid malaria tests to be had, so I bought paracetamol (ibuprofen) to try to treat the fever and aches.

Normally mornings are the bane of my existence, but after hours of fitfully tossing and turning, I got up at 6:30 Sunday morning. Candice, my unofficial motivational coach, accompanied me to the regional hospital, where after describing my symptoms to a doctor, I was told to take a malaria test.

The nurse who took my blood was a gorgeous woman wearing expertly applied eyeliner and an Afro. The test came back in only minutes, and she looked at me and said emphatically, "Tu as le PALU!" or, "You have MALARIA!" (It should say something that malaria is so common here that it has its own little nickname. In French, malaria is "paludisme," but everyone, even health workers, uses the diminutive "palu.") I'm still not sure why she said it that way--maybe my parasite load was high, maybe she was just really enthusiastic about her job. She didn't offer any explanation, just asked for the cost of the test (200 francs, about 40 cents), and told me to return to the doctor to get a prescription. In typical Cameroonian fashion, the doctor--a man in this thirties--asked me if I was single and why I wasn't married yet before handing over the prescription.

The treatment I was prescribed lasts for three days, but the first day showed little improvement. The first night, after taking my second dose of Coartem in addition to more ibuprofen, I lay in bed with my feet frozen but my forehead on fire and my entire body pulsing with aches and pains. In a fever-induced delirium, I thought to myself, "This is how I die." I summoned up a meditation technique I'd learned a few months before and eventually drifted off to sleep, only to awaken four hours later drenched in sweat and still in pain.

I allowed myself to sleep as much as my body deemed necessary that night, and astonishingly, awoke the next morning feeling not normal, but markedly improved. The improvement was dampened by the discovery that even a short shower could exhaust me, but I was happy to be free of the fever and ever-present aches.

Malaria is the most fluctuational sickness I've ever experienced personally. In a matter of hours, sometimes minutes, I could go from feeling almost normal to being unable to think about anything other than the symptoms I was experiencing. Day one was at times terrifying; day two was a reprieve; day three the pendulum has swung backward, but not nearly as severely. Today I'm merely contending with a headache, temperature fluctuations, and an overall sense of weakness. Insh'Allah, this will be over tomorrow, as I've taken my last dose of Coartem this evening, but I shudder for every child who has suffered or died of this illness, many of whom are too young to understand what is happening to them, and for the parents who have had to watch their children suffer, including some of my closest friends in Nyambaka. This is one of the many situations where I can't help but be recognizant of my own privilege, specifically when it comes to health, and while I am of course grateful for it, I am also ashamed that I should have this privilege when so many don't.

World Health Organization: Malaria

Against Malaria Foundation

Malaria No More