Wednesday, February 1, 2012
An offering to the children
Youth day approaches. The students will prepare skits and poems and (really good) dances, and then march through the town. Nomi is also a youth, and I feel his tremendous fame within Mayo Darle could be put to good use. This week or next week, I will offer to loan him completely over to my students for youth day. LeCoq, one of my Terminale students and Nomi’s babysitter, could be in charge of him. If they choose to parade with him, I’ll have a handsome pagne boubou tailored up. I’m sure he’d be the first dressed dog ever to walk the streets of Mayo Darle. He’d make the students feel cool, and therefore, proud, it might encourage some village children to think about school, and it would be a true symbol of better human-dog relations for the next generation.
Grammar Question:
I am an English teacher, so this is serious:
In the sentence, “I find it amusing, but I also find I don’t like thinking about diarrhea while having it,” is “having” a gerund?
In the sentence, “I find it amusing, but I also find I don’t like thinking about diarrhea while having it,” is “having” a gerund?
Petit Chauffeur, “Little driver”
Most strips of roads (maybe 90%) traveling through the Adamawa are dirt. In dry season, dust flies up from the road with passing vehicles. (Or, as I saw today, even with extremely fast dogs.) if a truck drives by, most people cover their mouths and noses. if I find myself without a cloth for covering, I usually try to breathe only through my nose to filter it. before coming to Cameroon I had never really appreciated our little nose hairs.
Travelling in dry season, you often hear conversations like this : someone from the back says, “role down the window.” the person in the front replies, “no there is dust.” person in back says, “yes, but there is also heat.” person in the front, “we’ve got to just deal.” and this response*, so common it’s almost a mantra, settles the argument. sometimes I want to ask them, deal with which, the heat or the dust? personally, I prefer the dust. we white people come out of the car looking like we just got spray-tanned, but it’s better than being sealed in with over-heated bodies. usually, they end up rolling the windows down on paved or calm sections, and crank them back just in time to lock out the approaching dust clouds when other vehicles pass.
This weekend, on the way back from Nyamboya, Hunter’s post, I had a new personal record : 12 people in a car. it was a two-door, five-seat manual Toyota. Two of these people were children, sitting on lap. Two men shared the front passenger seat (with a little girl), Six men and women shared the back (with one little boy). Luckily there were no big mamas, only Fulbe women who are still very traditional. They usually marry cousins, so they all look similar. They often have sort of triangular shaped noses, are always wrapped in colorful pagne, and sometimes their front teeth jut forward. Fortunately for us in the car that day, the Fulbe also tend to be slim.
I was riding petit-chauffeur, which means sharing the driver’s seat. car-loading is both a packing and a balancing act, so seats are often dictated. Because of my size, the drivers often put me petit-chauffeur. most people complain about petit-chauffeur, especially other volunteers. But most people aren’t quite as small as me and I secretly love it. As petit-chauffeur, if one is relatively petit, you can get pretty much all of your butt on the seat. Sometimes, the drivers put down funny cushions or towels to pad the buckles in the middle. As petit chauffeur you are only crushed by someone on one side, and you can lean back because the driver will always keep his right side in front of your left, so he can reach over you to shift. you can watch the road and see how he decides to handle the onslaught of bumps and pits. it’s easy to ask him to stop if you need to get out. and once in a while you get to help with the emergency brake, etc. Most importantly, you can see. your view is as un-obscured as the driver’s.
Traveling in Cameroon is slow, squished and jostling, but the music is always good, (almost every driver has a usb key hook up for the radio) and the view of the forests, passing through the small villages, making faces at the pant-less children who always pause to watch the car go by, and driving up the mountain of the Nigerian plateau to get into Mayo-Darle, feels like meditation, especially sitting petit-chauffeur.
*in French, “il faut supporter.”
Travelling in dry season, you often hear conversations like this : someone from the back says, “role down the window.” the person in the front replies, “no there is dust.” person in back says, “yes, but there is also heat.” person in the front, “we’ve got to just deal.” and this response*, so common it’s almost a mantra, settles the argument. sometimes I want to ask them, deal with which, the heat or the dust? personally, I prefer the dust. we white people come out of the car looking like we just got spray-tanned, but it’s better than being sealed in with over-heated bodies. usually, they end up rolling the windows down on paved or calm sections, and crank them back just in time to lock out the approaching dust clouds when other vehicles pass.
This weekend, on the way back from Nyamboya, Hunter’s post, I had a new personal record : 12 people in a car. it was a two-door, five-seat manual Toyota. Two of these people were children, sitting on lap. Two men shared the front passenger seat (with a little girl), Six men and women shared the back (with one little boy). Luckily there were no big mamas, only Fulbe women who are still very traditional. They usually marry cousins, so they all look similar. They often have sort of triangular shaped noses, are always wrapped in colorful pagne, and sometimes their front teeth jut forward. Fortunately for us in the car that day, the Fulbe also tend to be slim.
I was riding petit-chauffeur, which means sharing the driver’s seat. car-loading is both a packing and a balancing act, so seats are often dictated. Because of my size, the drivers often put me petit-chauffeur. most people complain about petit-chauffeur, especially other volunteers. But most people aren’t quite as small as me and I secretly love it. As petit-chauffeur, if one is relatively petit, you can get pretty much all of your butt on the seat. Sometimes, the drivers put down funny cushions or towels to pad the buckles in the middle. As petit chauffeur you are only crushed by someone on one side, and you can lean back because the driver will always keep his right side in front of your left, so he can reach over you to shift. you can watch the road and see how he decides to handle the onslaught of bumps and pits. it’s easy to ask him to stop if you need to get out. and once in a while you get to help with the emergency brake, etc. Most importantly, you can see. your view is as un-obscured as the driver’s.
Traveling in Cameroon is slow, squished and jostling, but the music is always good, (almost every driver has a usb key hook up for the radio) and the view of the forests, passing through the small villages, making faces at the pant-less children who always pause to watch the car go by, and driving up the mountain of the Nigerian plateau to get into Mayo-Darle, feels like meditation, especially sitting petit-chauffeur.
*in French, “il faut supporter.”
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