Gutteral Rumblings

Being a Livetoeater, as opposed to its more emaciated step-sibling, it means that a large portion of my life is dedicated to the act and indeed art of eating, therefore, it shouldn’t come as a huge shock if a similarly large portion of my fast decomposing grey matter be dedicated likewise.

So, yes, more food!

This strained and bedraggled scotsman is now the proud owner of a solar drier which has, as you can imagine, brought no end of optional additions to the culinary experience in these sand rich parts of the globe. Fruit and veg has a habit of rotting in the space of about three and half minutes which, due to its organic nature, is hardly surprising. The problem isn’t the quality so much as the quantity. Buying a couple of onions isn’t an option. 100 Francs (10p) gets you about a dozen and the same goes for pretty much everything else. In a land of big families it makes sense to be able to buy in bulk but little ol’ me, cooking for little ol’ me, struggles to find a use for 38,629 tomatoes a week.

The fridge does its best, but with power being as sporadic as it is, it means that weekends can pass when food sits unchilled within it’s incongruously white walls. The solution: a solar drier. Met a man who made ‘em. Made ‘im make me one. Man made it. Man gave it. You name it I’m t/drying it.

It made its somewhatmoresubstantialthanIthoughtitwouldbe appearance a couple of weeks ago now and since then I’ve been able to add sundried tomatoes, sundried onions, sundried bananas and goat to my diet. The goat, incidentally, was a by-product of the drier and was not itself dried.

Being a goat and one of Insatiable Curiosity at that, it thought that it might try and scale the technically challenging partially glazed face of the contraption in question and in so doing placed a dainty hoof through the aforementioned glazing. This, seemingly, was the last in a long line of straws and when I got back from school I found that the neighbours had dispatched said goat and were in the process of readying it for consumption.

Guess it won’t be doing that again.

A lunch of barbecued goat ribs was followed by the presentation of a bowl of goat bits which defined the word ‘offal’. No idea what many of the bits are and even the resident biology teacher could only tell me that they were entrails. Yes, thanks for that. I realise that. Which ones is what I want to know. He shrugged. I thanked him and went on my way.

They were already cooked, I hasten to add. I wasn’t just presented with a bloody bowl of gore; Mrs Neighbour had prepared them in her own easily imitable style, which is to say, soaked in Maggi®. “You can cook them in the way you usually do,” she added ... Can’t admit to ever having cooked a bowl of goat entrails before but there was a challenge there so it would have been rude not to accept it.

Rifling through the bits I can say with some certainty that there was liver, kidney and something which I believe was stomach. There was a chunk of irregular shaped bone with an irregular covering of what I’d like to describe as meat of the common or garden variety. Then there was the wiggly bit and the bit with all the tubes. Haven’t the foggiest notion as to their origins, or indeed function, but as with most bits of animal, often it’s best not to know. And besides, they made a very tasty curry.

Time has huft’ighted it’s often ponderous way to well past my bedtime. There’s less than week twixt now and the oft mentioned end of term and the excitement that is the festive period. This, therefore, could easily be the last posting of 2007; a year that started incredibly and nearly ended inedibly. On Friday I’ll be starting the Christmas travelling, heading south on the train for a festive stint in Anglophone parts. A festive sojourn that could not be anticipated to a greater extent than is the case.

To say that I can’t wait would be the biggest of understatements but to try and put my anticipation into words would be an exercise in futility.

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And just before I sign off, a Christmas-from-this-end type online card to satiate the visual sorts among you. This last weekend was spent in the vicinity of Maga; a town that until 40 years ago was little more than a collection of mudhuts. These days it’s a sprawling metropolis of mudhuts and the Far North’s main source of all things pescatorial.

Spent a very pleasant time in the shade of a million trees, at the side of a perfectly chilled pool and took in a skimming ‘cross the 27km long artificial lake that 20 feet of dyking has spawned; a skimming to the natural waterways that feed its watery imensity to try and spot an aitch-eye-pee-pee-oh ... or five.

We mutually kept our distance and our engines running. The photo’s don’t do them justice but it did give me 280 opportunities to see what more my camera can do ... an edited samplet by way of a taster. I’ll try and be more visually stimulating in the new year but technology tends to hamper my attempts.



On that note, hoping that one and all, or one at least, have a splendid festive bit. I’ll give your eyes a rest and will be back with more on the other side.

Serving Suggestion
Alwiello recommends Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen as the ideal accompaniment to the cranial feast that is alwiello.blogspot.com

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Cameroonian Cuisine. As I sit here killing the minutes or indeed hours before the next meal begins its Maggi® laced way through my digestive tract, it seems like a fitting occasion to expound on the gastronomic delights of Cameroonian cuisine.

This evening promises a pescatorial feast that is peculiarly common place in these landlocked sub-Saharan climes. A fish answering to the name of ‘capitaine’ barbecued by a woman answering to the name of Marie in a street answering to the name of Avion Me Laisse. The bombed out shell of a building that was formerly the venue for such exquisite sustenance has been replaced by an all-singing-all-dancing-pool-table-filled-semblance-of-a-bar that is wholly out of character with the generally bombed out look of the entire street and indeed quartier. In fact, if the truth be known, most of Maroua looks bombed out; the peculiar pattern of erosion that afflicts the buildings here bears a striking resemblance to bullet holes and the results of a sustained mortar attack.

The fish itself is presented on a tray with a dollop of green, a slop of red and a blob of white and the options of salad, fried plantains and the almost-entirely-indescribable flavour and texture that is ‘batons de manioc’. Cutlery is of the fingers and thumbs variety and invariable messy and the end of the meal is marked by the grabbing hands of a gaggle of hungry street kids determined to glean what they can from the clean-picked bones.

Manioc ... someone spent a lot of time working out how to eat manioc and if I’m totally honest, I’m not entirely sure why they bothered. To make it edible you have to wash and peel the toxic root, shred it, boil it, dry it, make it into a powder, soak it, wrap it in a leaf, steam it, let it cool and then eat it. It smells a little like vomit, has the texture of Pritt Stick and tastes of nothing at all. Not that that has ever stopped me ordering it.

In a typically Cameroonian demonstration of economic theory, the street itself is lined with about 20 women all selling exactly the same thing at the same price. Quite why Marie gets our trade is a mystery lost in the mists of time. Given her inability to serve you what you asked for, her tantalising people skills and her distinct lack of small change it’s a wonder that she continues to do business.

Just around the corner is Maroua’s main drag and pumping heart and soul; Boulevard de Renouveau de Domayo. Bars and clubs share the pavements with vendors of barbecued chicken and kebabs. Stacks of spatch-cocked chooks are sliced and diced into a jigsaw of gigots and served in a torn piece of cement bag with a side serving of potentially amoeba-laced salad, the ubiquitous pimant and perhaps a loaf of bread.

As with most places here, you find a place to sit, usually a bar, put your order in to the chicken/fish/goat/lamb/beef vendor and tell him where you’ll be. You can even sit in a restaurant, order a drink and then get your food brought from somewhere else entirely.

Bona fide eateries are hard to pick out amongst the debris of the sprawl that purports to be urban. Gloire de Dieu has become something of a favourite despite the ongoing attempts of Mama Magui to lure the unwary to the Evangelical Church. At 500 Francs (50p) for a portion that would silence even the most gluttonous of gourmands it won’t be winning any prizes but when it comes to Ndole and couscous it’s hard to beat. Cameroonian couscous, incidentally, is about as close to its Moroccan counterpart as I am to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Ndole is another Cameroonian staple that you have to spend three and a half years rendering palatable before you can consider eating it. What happens to it after it’s been detoxified is anyone’s guess but it looks a bit like spinach and if you close your eyes, hold your nose and think of nothing but spinach it could almost pass as something that’s a bit like spinach.

The Couscous is made of millet and is basically a large ball of an almost entirely tasteless, white, gelatinous gloop. Gombo takes the theme of gloop to a whole new level, having, as it does, the consistency, flavour and nutritional benefits of wallpaper paste. Folere is almost exactly like Ndole in every way imaginable except that it’s not Ndole. Legumes are almost exactly like Folere in every way imaginable except that they’re not Folere and also, despite being called vegetables, contain large chunks of something once living that often bears a remarkable, nay, uncanny resemblance to cow.

At the posh end of the scale are the hotels and guide-booked restaurants which invariably employ the more vivacious members of society whose incredible memories and puppy like enthusiasm are conspicuous in their complete absence. If you manage to get their attention and a menu, half of the things on the menu are invariably not actually available and if you manage to find something that is and that the chef can be bothered to cook, you quite frequently end up with something that is only partially what you wanted.

Pre-empting this intricate dance and asking the ‘waiter’ what’s available is an exercise in futility as the weakness of the connective tissue in the head and neck is so fragile and brittle that any expression in the affirmative or negative is potentially life threatening and so answers to questions tend to be based largely on guess work. Eyes rolled or a gurgling noise that could just as easily be trapped wind covers a multitude of bases which makes the ordering process just that little bit more interesting.

Paying is a pleasure on a whole new level. Entire new life forms could evolve, pick fights with one another and be consigned to the fossil record in the time it usually takes to get change.

Other succulent morsels to satiate the Lockhart hunger include beignet which is either made of black-eyed peas mushed into a pulp and deep fried, or what are basically doughnuts in everything but shape. Goat in its dismembered entirety grilled over a barrel and soaked in Maggi® and served with raw onions and the ubiquitous pimant. None of it’s likely to win any prizes or become the next big taste sensation but it fills a hole and you can’t ask for more than that.

And so to the star of the show: Maggi®. Cubes or Arome? The options are, well, two fold. It’s basically MSG in a liquid or stock cube form and is the essential ingredient in all Cameroonian cuisine. Nothing is cooked without it which means that everything tastes strangely similar. It does, admittedly, add a bit of flavour to what is occasionally quite bland food but the result is that everything ends up tasting the same, which is to say that chicken, fish, beef, goat, salad and vegetables all end up tasting almost exactly unlike what they are but almost entirely but not quite totally similar.

So there you go. Cameroonian cuisine. It’s not going to take the world by storm but it does all that can be hoped of it, albeit with the occasional but very real risk of intestinal invasion ... whoop whoop, as they say.

Here be monsters ...

It’s Thor’s day once again; that’s to say it’s 7/8ths of the way through Thor’s day and Freya is warming up in the wings. At least it looks like Freya but if the king of the giants can be fooled by a bearded Thor in drag then how can we mere mortals expect to fare any better?

Weeks - that’s to say two - have passed since I last walked the well-trodden streets of this bloggerhood and once again it is the T word that has been the pebble in the boots in which I wander. If rumours are to be believed then the T word was struck down by a dose of dolphinitis. The story goes that Cameroon’s sub-atlantic fibre-optic connection to the outside world was attacked and severed by a dolphin. Surreal enough in many ways and met with something much akin to incredulity in many circles, and for obvious reasons.

Here in sub-Sahel-type places the reasons are less obvious. The logic goes like this: It can’t have been a dolphin because nobody’s seen one and therefore they don’t exist; they can’t exist because if they did someone would have caught one and eaten it, therefore, QED, seeing as no one has eaten one they don’t exist.

You can see the kind of challenges I’m up against.

It’s probably a good thing in someways as it means that I’ve got something more insightful to say than the usual stream of consciousness drivel that spews in an unending torrent from my heat-dried brain via my chalk-dried fingers. If only it were true.

So term one is almost done. In fact there are only three weeks twixt now and its much heralded demise; three weeks of ever diminishing class sizes and the joys of report writing. Three weeks of mounting excitement at the onslaught of the festive period and all that it holds clasped in its clammy grip. Three weeks to endure before another three weeks away from the desert sands and the sub-Sahelian heat, swapped indeed for the sea and greenery of the south. Bliss. There’s no other word for it.

I just know that the three weeks away from the noise will make the blink of an eye look positively pedestrian but then that’s always the way.

On that note it’s time to part once more. Short and sweet? Not really. The blogging equivalent to a “Wham” bar me thinks, albeit without the need for ext/pensive dentistry and the sickly after taste, but then again ...

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Satur has replaced Thurs but as far as days go this one bears all the hallmarks of the 334 that preceded it although November has succumbed to the overwhelming and looming presence of 2007’s swan-song in the form of December.

Term, as I’ve said, has three weeks to go before it’s consigned to the “reduced to clear” shelves although for many of the students they’ve assumed that because the second mid-term exams have been completed there’s no more learning to be done and so have bogged off in an all too Cameroonian manner. Classes are emptying of bodies faster than rodent forms from scuppered schooners. Once again the good ship Cameroonia Educationia is listing although with the arrival of CES de Godola’s first government provided teacher, there’s a hope that it’s not terminal.

As for the Monthrufri’ety; The forthcoming Mon is going to be something of a watershed in many ways. Recent disillusionment at the worthiness of my being here has provoked a reaction of the ‘lay it on the line’ variety. There’s no way that I can do half the stuff I’d hoped I’d be able to do when I’m up to my oxters in teaching duties and so the D word’s going to be sat down and informed of my decision not to teach next year.

Whether I’m still in the ‘roon for ‘08-’09 is a little uncertain to say the least and if the current frame of mind is anything to go by then this country will be seeing the back of this Scotsman in the summer of ‘08. The proposal that I put together in an attempt to goad an element of longevity from VSO’s soon to expire stint in secondary education has been beset by what I suspect is an all to Cameroonian malaise. It’s gathering dust at the bottom of cupboard somewhere being reduced to such a state itself.

It’s hard to keep the motivation and enthusiasm going, and the cynicism in check when the harder you pound your head against the seemingly innocuous packed earth wall, the less effect you seem to have; especially when the local reaction is one of standing and gawping while pointing and invariably laughing at the strange white man.

Think I need a holiday.

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P.S. I've started sticking some photos on Flickr ... There aren't many at the moment but I'll keep adding as time goes on!

A Dane in the life ... is worth two in a bush

The mechanical screeching of a digital cockerel shatters the already stifling morning silence with its clichéd cockadoodle-ing and irritatingly catchy tune that you just know is going to echo round your mind until around lunchtime. The alarm rarely achieves what it’s employed to do with the heat, light and the general hubbub created by these cleavers of Dawn’s crack in whose midst I find myself, getting there first. A far from pleasant analogy but given the overwhelming stench that pervades every quarter of this infuriating country, a fitting one I feel.

Half past six the clock says and who am I to disagree.

Five minutes later, the fluorescent green cocoon of the mosquito net is breached and the world is one step closer. Turning off the almost-but-not-quite-totally ineffectual fan that has spent the night neatly chopping the heat-thick air into almost-but-not-quite-totally uncooling blocks I step through into my living room where the floor is, generally, ironically strewn with the corpses of a thousand dead, or in some cases dying, insects; those that the lizards couldn’t stomach.

Nature calls and at the first sign of my Scottish loins having been girded the neighbour shrieks in whichever language she feels like, something I assume is a morning greeting, but which could easily be an insult, wrapped, as it usually is, in the dulcet sounds of cleared nostrils and expectorated phlegm; not particularly nice at any time of the day but especially unpleasant when it’s the first thing past delicate morning ears.

I won’t walk you through the performance itself just to say that it’s outside, the hole is about the size of cereal bowl and, being such a sluggard, I’m a lowly 5th in line to this far from regal throne. Can’t say what the neighbours’ approach is but all I can add is that it needs refining. The experience is unpleasant enough without the all too real spectre of the bobbing jobby: bearing in mind that with nothing in which to bob, it tends to merely languish at the side of the pool ... I’ll move on.

Breakfast, washing and dressing absorb the 15 or so minutes that I have before I have to quitter la maison and wend my way to school, invariably unshaven as when water is at a premium and time is of the essence Mr Gilette is frequently left off the bus altogether let alone expected to take a back seat. Ginger fuzz may not look very nice, but at least I don’t smell!

The walk to school is a barage of ‘bonjours’ from One and All, All and Sundry, Tom, Dick, Harry and Old Tom Cobbley himself but definitely the most uplifting one is from a gaggle of pre-school types whose naked and semi-clothed salutations sound, to all intents and purposes, like ‘Bonjour Messiah’ ... does wonders for ones self-esteem to be worshipped before the day has really begun. I hasten to add that ‘Messiah’ is meant to be ‘Nasara’ which is what anyone who is not Cameroonian is referred to as, and which is so non-descript that it is basically the equivalent of me calling everyone I meet ‘African’ - as a name, that is, rather than an adjective. “Morning, African. How are you?” “What plans have you got for the weekend, African?” “Hey, African! Want to buy some tomatoes?”

Having performed the morning ritual that is shaking the hands of each and every one of the colleagues and asking them whether they slept well, and having watched as the ranks of odourous, odoursome, odourful, olfactory oddities ooze their unruly way across the thresholds of their respective classrooms all at the hastening swipe of the school accountant’s stick, it is time to relish those final moments of relative calm before the madness begins.

At first glance you’d think there was an element of control, but it’s a thin and infinitely fragile facade whose tolerance is pushed to the limit within about 12 seconds of the start of class and whose shattered shards then chafe in all those parts that chafing should be discouraged.

What happens within the hours of teaching is of little import, suffice to say that sometimes some learning gets done, other times it’s a battle of wills between teacher’s patience and students’ propensity for making noise. There’s no point shouting as they can always out do you; sending them outside just means they get beaten. Some might say I was a soft touch, in fact, all of them almost certainly do, but here in a world where no rod is spared but rather is tested to the extreme, there are ways of getting through that don’t result in whelt marks or tears.

Four hours of teaching followed by a 30 minute break and then a further three and a half hours of teaching means that on those days when I have a full timetable, by the time it gets to 3.30 I’m stretched a little thin and not a little hungry. Thankfully it’s only Monday and Thursday that require such martyrdom.

Afternoons are spent doing those things that one must in this world where everything is fought for. Fetching water, washing, washing up, cooking, cleaning, planning lessons and, joy of joys, marking. I often considered being a ‘proper’ teacher but the concept of curriculum scared me. Still does. The concept of ‘marking’, however, is one I hadn’t thought of before and I have to say that I find it the singularly most tiresome aspect of this job. Granted, some of the things you see are mildly entertaining, particularly when you get language interference (“All the children put on their uniforms and are defiled in the street” ... ‘defiler’ means parade, or in this case, march) but generally it’s a pain in the soft parts and I don’t think anybody pays the slightest bit of attention to anything I may scribble on their paper. I suppose I could humour myself and simply write nonsense down the margins ... it’s certainly worth considering.

With life’s chores out of the way, the reins of control are then handed back to me and I can do what I want, although by then it’s usually getting close to dinner time which means not only deciding what to eat, but preparing it too. The power supply is such that you never can tell when you’re going to get plunged into darkness, so it’s best to chop, dice and slice before the sun has saddled up, packed up its monotonously predictable rays and swaggered off into its own setting.
Then it’s time to brave the insects.

My ‘kitchen’ - a term I employ in its loosest sense - consists of a solitary gas bottle and a recently purchased barbeque, both of which live outside. The gas bottle has one burner on which to cook and so meals tend to be of the one pot variety, although with the arrival of the barbeque, it does mean I can now cook two things at the same time; does life get any crazier? Meat is seldom part of my Monday to Friday diet as the local butcher never seems entirely sure what animal it is that he’s hacking at, and besides, there are various people peddling all those bits of goat that were once deemed edible, often it seems in times of severe food shortages, and, despite not knowing which part of the aforementioned beast it is, they do actually taste pretty good.

Because cooking is a wholly external affair it means much to-ing and fro-ing to stir and prod whatever it is that I’ve decided is going to satiate the Lockhart hunger. Each to and every fro means opening the door and the inevitable intrusion of a billion buzzing beasties who then serenade me while I eat with the irregular thump of exo-skeleton on light bulb and shortly afterwards the gentle patter that signals their frustrated demise as they fall from the ceiling to the floor and become one-step closer to a date with their reptilian destiny.

Evenings are spent contemplating life’s greater questions and considering the merits of my being here, of our (VSO) being here, and battling with the doubts I have regarding the validity of the beast that answers to the name of Development. As I mentioned before, with no-one to speak to, it means this poor harassed laptop has to bear the brunt, and it’s remarkably placid given the Essaitch-Ayetee that wends its way from under-worked brain through over-worked hands ... On those occasions when the greater questions are not so pressing I do what I can to fill the hours twixt fed and bed, which usually means dispatching of those insects who found the neon not bright enough and, instead, headed for my legs.

The evening routine is just that, a routine and is one based heavily around cleansing. A bucket of water, a bar of soap, a bottle of water and a toothbrush ... the details are much the same as they are the world over, or rather at home. I would part with limbs for the luxury of running water and a long soak in a bath, or indeed a fresh towel and an evening collapsed in an armchair and it’s for those reasons that I could never call this ‘home’ in the genuine, emotion-heavy meaning of the word. It’s not as tough as it could be and I know that this is life for so many, but at the same time I’ve seen the other side, I’ve sampled its succulent herbage and it definitely is greener; it’s not just a trick of the light.

This is home for now, but only for now.

And so bed beckons. The evening ablutions have been performed, the door has been locked and it’s back to the awaiting, protective embrace of the fluorescent nylon cocoon that I must return. Another day looms, and with it all of this excitement once more ...

Now you know!

... and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

Technology: wonderous when it works; wank when it won’t.

Technology: the bane of my life these last weeks and the scapegoat whose gluttonous neck is being shorn in preparation for a much-needed blood-letting and, with it, the prospect of a carnivorous addition to my otherwise vegetarian diet.

I’m starting to confuse metaphor with reality which can’t be healthy. Forgive the ire it’s just with no one to turn to and vent my occasional spleen, it is to the non-judgmental digitised face of my laptop that I must revert. In many ways it’s a bit like the family pet to whom the world and their wives spill their collective troubles and in its doe-eyed, non-comprehending manner never implies anything aside from undying loyalty, adoration and unwavering, slightly sycophantic devotion.

You innumerable masses(!), whose lives revolve around my spewings from these peculiarly foreign parts, will doubtless have realised why the usually rich pages of monologue that adorn the walls of this literary guide to the darker recesses of my mind were left blank last week. t.e.c.h.n.o.l.o.g.y ... an etymological grafting of the prefix ‘tech-’ with a bastardised, abbreviated, hybrid of the phrase ‘no logical reason why it doesn’t work’.

So I’m sat here in the balmy wilds of an increasingly sweaty Godola in an attempt to defeat the power-surges and post an update by composing it ‘off-line’. Thursday’s showered and ready for bed and a host of leapy, jumpy things sound as if they’re trying to break through the sheet metal that is my front door. There’s a preying mantis on the roof, doing it’s finest Daniel-son impression while shivering with excitement at the veritable buffet of insect life it has strayed upon in the ever-alluring flicker of my one working light, and the spiders, whose variety makes Mr. Heinz look like a one-trick pony, are casually trying to drop the sticky, gossamer-wrapped cadavers of the flies upon which they have feasted to the floor; all that happens though is they end up stuck to my walls. Not only does my broom work overtime on the floor cleaning up dust and dead insects, but it now does a weekly circuit of the roof to get rid of cob-webs, and also the walls to get rid of fly corpses. It’s a miracle I have time to do anything else.

The craziness never stops ... actually that’s a lie. More often than not it’s the mundane and tiresome that buzzes on like the Duracell bunny, seldom interrupted by anything approaching even mild-lunacy, although when the lunacy does arrive it does so fully lit, hamper free and missing most of the face cards.

An example: A neighbour wondered whether I’d like to go for a wander in the fruit rich fields beyond the river where many a mango has been permittedly purloined and which is now stiff with guavas [a brief aside: what, indeed, is the plural of ‘guava’? Guave? Guavi? Or does it do a mouse mice thing and go weird on us: guice, perhaps?]. It would have been rude not to, especially seeing as the guice are good and they taste that much better when they’re free. “Don’t forget a bag to carry them in”, he added.

Took a bag.

Filled it.

Anyone got any ideas as to what to do with 136 guice? That is indeed one hundred and thirty six. Cent trente-six. Nya soom-choo took. 00010001. It would have been 140 but he very reluctantly took four off me. Extremely generous or dafter than an entire brush factory? Who knows. He had skipped class earlier in the day, perhaps it was an obscure fruit-based apology. Who needs Hail Marys or Al-lah U Akhbars when you’ve got a guava tree or three.

Another example: Was in town on Tuesday and ventured to its finest bakery, whose ovens were cold and shelves bereft of baguette type fare, much like those of every baker in the whole of Maroua, when I’d been doing my messages on Sunday. Whatever hadn’t been there on Sunday was there by the barrel load on Tuesday and with nostrils as cavernous as those which adorn my face I could just pick out the smell of freshly baked bread over the infinitely less appealing odours of dried/drying/dying fish, rotting fruit and veg, poo and the all-pervading stench that is humanity in this oh-so-fragrant corner of the world.

Squatting outside said bakery was an old feller footling around with something I couldn’t quite make out. Eyes focused, hastily unfocused and I thought pleasant sunny thoughts of nice things as opposed to the one that had just assaulted my unprepared consciousness.

Said old feller was forcibly prodding his male groinal appendage of the same name with a stick. And not just prodding it but giving it the kind of chim-chiminee-chim-chiminee-chim-chim-cherooing that Dick Van Dyck and his army of harmonious and sickeningly chipper colleagues could only dream about. The less you think about it the better, believe me ... I only hope that he found whatever it was he was looking for; it was clearly of some importance to him: the philosophers’ stone perhaps or the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre. The secret to eternal life. A recipe for guava.

Sometimes you think you’ve seen it all; many times you wish you had ... not sure what the t-shirt for ‘I’ve seen an old man sticking sticks up his’ would look like but if there is one, I can now add it to my collection, along with ‘I’ve eaten that bit with which they didn’t know what else to do’.

Talking of which, the entymological feast has yet to transpire. That said, rumour has it that there are purveyors of cooked insect life to be found on the streets of Maroua. Couldn’t work out why I’d never seen them given that in South Korea pretty much every street corner had someone selling boiled silk-worm larvae (apart from actually eating filth which, I hasten to add, I’ve never done, I’m not sure there’s anything I’ve tasted that was more disgusting. Not quite sure what I was hoping for but it wasn’t that). Dawned on me the other day that I tend to frequent the Muslim area of town for my weekly purchases and, as you’ll all be well aware, insect life is not Halal and so is off-limits to the sand-crusted propheteers of Mohammed.

Never quite understood that Halal thing until this week, by chance, Mr S Rushdie of address unknown, in one of his more Fatwah inducing works, explained it in as simple language as he is able, and I quote:

”He [The Prophet] vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that living creatures understand that life has been real, and not a sort of dream.”

Perhaps the aforementioned old man was doing the same to his, although why anyone would wish to is beyond me.

Insects, for that matter and from my experience tend to die either fully intact for seemingly no reason at all, or in a crunching squishy manner that is wholly contrary to the concept of bleeding. If prawns are banned, other-worldly as they are, then it figures that insects would be too. Still not convinced by pigs but as a self-professed porcomaniac, that’s probably not that surprising.

It’s now well past my bed-time but tomorrow, being Friday, I have a lie-in. Don’t have to be in school till 9.30 but by the time you get your eyes on this the day, the date even the time will have passed. What does it mean? Absolutely no idea ... not sure I really care either. The bulbous boil of verbosity has had its much needed lancing and that’s what counts. Don’t discount a Post Scriptum, though, as you never know what might go galloping through the mine-field of my mind ... watch this space.

---

P.S. An additional moment of lunacy to add to the ever-lengthening list: Whilst quietly minding my own business in my habitual manner awaiting the arrival of any form of transport that was willing to take me and my backpack into town, the local mad woman approached me and let me know that I just had to say when I wanted her to prepare my rice and she’d set to it, arms and hands covered in cow-shit up to the elbow and clad in a fetching pair of plastic-bag bootees.

The bootees have been encountered before: it was only when they were kicked off did I notice that they too were full of cow yuck. A student who was passing casually hinted that she was mad - the woman, that is, not the student. One has to hope she is, otherwise she has made a conscious decision to walk around with shit-filled bags on her feet … each to their own.

Meet the Neighbours

Sat here in the clinical whiteness of what I currently refer to as home, tap-tapping away the minutes before slumber seizes what’s left of my day and wittles October down by another degree or two, all to the disturbingly distressing bleating of the neighbour’s goat which arrived today, unheralded, and whose days, I suspect, are numbered … much like it was but only in the singular but now is to the tune of three. There’s foul play afoot and I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the chicken.

Most of the livestock that finds its way through the gates of my compound tends to end up cooked, unless of course you happen to be a lizard, in which case your demise is seldom celebrated in a culinary manner but instead you are lobbed over a wall into a festering pile of fester to be devoured by whatever passing beast finds its fancy tickled by the prospect of dead lizard.

Personally I don’t have issues with the lizards, in fact, as previously mentioned, the fact that they keep the dead insect count down means while I don’t lure them into my house, nor do I necessarily want to wake up to find one sharing my bed they do make the housework that much easier. Live and let lizard as they say ... clearly not in Fulfulde though where the maxim appears to be Kill it and eat it, unless you don’t want to, in which case just kill it. Not nearly as catchy but I suspect it loses something in the translation.

So, yes, the compound is now stalked by a goat whose days may just exceed those of the cockerel that turned up the day before. The last time there was a resident rooster was when I arrived back here post-summer and my morning slumber was disturbed by said cock’s ultimate cockadoodle-doodling after which it was well and truly cockadoodle-done. There was a chicken here a couple of weeks back but she barely lasted 12 hours, bought as she was to celebrate the return of the worlds most annoying laugh and the neighbours’ number 2 daughter whose frankly quite tiresome and distinctly clichéd crying at bathtime had been conveniently wiped from my memory.

As part of the ongoing cultural exchange twixt yours truly and the local populace I couldn’t let the opportunity pass and so spent a good twenty minutes explaining the intricacies of “second child syndrome” ... the neighbourette seemed convinced but then she is living with the dictionary definition so I don’t think that’s that surprising. The constant wail, the lack of any coherent vocabulary and the cataracts of snot that grace her permanently bawling maw do little to endear her to anyone it seems but the multitude of things that go ‘bzzz’ and her immediate family. Her penchant for dropping her shopping wherever the feeling strikes is admirable in its brazeness but it makes the morning trip from front door to exit of compound something that one must negotiate with a great deal of skill at a level which is beyond my ability at silly o’clock in the morning. Thankfully thus far she appears to be donkey like in her performance and tends to keep close to their kitchen area which must do wonders for the family’s intestinal fauna. Best not think about it too much.

* * *

I’m now sat back in the olfactory assault zone also known as the Woila Cybercafé itself graced by another of Cameroon’s more sullen members of the fairer sex from whose massed ranks all those who find themselves working in a customer facing industry seem to be plucked. The one here is a little less sour-faced than her contemporary at the Sahel but not by a lot.

Service with a smile is a concept as foreign as plumbed in toilets and the words please and thank you. Actually service itself is pretty thin on the ground so guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

As I said, sat in the olfactory assault zone of the Woila Cybercafé whose steps are graced by one of Maroua’s innumerable egg vendors and one whose accident quota is clearly quite high. The steps are strewn with baked on egg and the cadavers of a million and one flies which, for whatever reason, have decided to end their lives there. It’s not nice but it’s the fastest connection in town and vaguely reliable.

It’s Tuesday though and so I can’t stay long. The in town tasks have been achieved and now I must sally forth from whence I came … until the next time.

Leg or Breast

There's a time and a place and I am currently experiencing both. The time is now, the place is here and you good people are the consumers of what could easily turn out to be a long stream of barely coherent weekend babble from the fingers and the mind of this nomadic scotsman.

The trials and tribulations of my solitary Monday to Friday existence tend to be exacerbated by a shortage of people with whom I can verbally spar and so it is here that my linguistic spleen must be vented if only to ensure that the other volunteers who have the 'pleasure' of my company at the weekend don't get inundated with what is known in the business as 'pent up chat'. The peculiar word based sense of humour tinted spectacles through which I view life and the world doesn't take too readily to translation and so it is that my life is one observed with looks of perpetual befuddlement on the part of my colleagues, neighbours and friends. Does it bother me that they don't quite get it. Not really; I'm only doing it for me.

And so another week passes. With the last entry's wholly uncharacteristic conciseness, I revert once more to the stream of cranial effluence in which my train of thought has been replaced by the Heart of Gold and its Infinite Improbability Drive. Hang on to your pants people, we could end up anywhere.

Have adopted a peculiar approach to the hoards of crawling, jumping and wriggling multi-limbed lifeforms that seem to hang out chez moi. Two questions go through my head as they sashay through my open door and hurl themselves against my light: Are you dangerous and can I eat you. No idea why, perhaps I'm lacking something in my diet. I'll let you know if and when the time comes for entymological edibility experimentation. I'd ask around for recipes but, alas, insects aren't halal and my village mostly is.


from: i101.photobucket.com

School is as school always has been, and aside from the volume of student that habitually frequents our four meagre classroom spaces, the challenges of the job are few and far between. Curriculum teaching, as I suspected, is not for me. All that jumping through hoops to appease well-meaning ministerial types and to salve their corpulent, corruption-addicted souls with the pretence that they are achieving something has no effect on the level of awareness of the impoverished but, by in large, content members of this central african society. The books with which I am armed and from which I am meant to be teaching are of a level so far above that of their intended audience that I might as well be gargling with jelly and spitting it at the board for the amount they would gain from it.

Having just tested all 521 of them I think my jelly spitting needs some work. For large swathes of Godola and its environs, spring and sawdust appears to be the head filler of choice. Some of them have so little between their ears that you could hold your ear to theirs and probably hear the sea although you'd have to fight through noxious clouds of BO to get close enough. It's probably not worth the effort.

The last two weeks have seen the loss of yet more teaching days with the international day of the teacher absorbing last Friday in a fit of pyjama clad excitement and then yesterday, as you'll doubtless be aware, was the end of Ramadan. Not a good time to be a sheep as you know your days are numbered. Fête de Mouton is 60 days away although if the Fête des Enseignants was celebrated in a similar manner I'd now be curried, which is nice. I'm not, just in case there was any doubt.

So Ramadan is Ramadone and life returns to normal for the legions of Muslims who habitually starve themselves twixt dawn and dusk. Hopefully the students will be a little more receptive now that they're not starving and dehydrated in class. The school director seemed to get a small amount of sadistic pleasure in troughing through plates of beans during the 30 minute breaktime, but I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised given his vociferous and outspoken criticisms of Islam. The tolerance levels here are high which is just as well given the inherent racism and tribalism that exists throughout. Still, either way, donned in Boubou I strolled the streets to shouts of "Al-Hadji!" and "bonne fête!" ... visited those friends who do the Allah thing and helped them celebrate. The place was crazy with legions of Cameroonians and Cameroonlets similarly bouboued and looking quite the part.

And so another week of joy looms. Tonight there's a rugby match happening I believe and in a salute to times past I'm off to buy a cockerell, a trumpet, some red, white and blue material and I'm brushing up on my Marseilles. Afterall, it would be rude not to.

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We're not in September anymore, Toto ...

It's Sunday. It's the 30th. September's swansong and October is stretching it's well-rested limbs for its annual 31 day foray into the collective conscience. Ahead lies a week of wrongly dated letters and back in the homeland thoughts turn to the pagan and quasi-pagan festivites that litter the winter months. The nights are drawing in, the clocks preparing in their own inimitable, unconscious manner for their slip into the embracing comfort of GMT, and the natural world is downsizing its activities for the winter.

Here, it's hotter than Lucifer's hot bits, thought not as hot as it was in March, and the rainy season has done its bit, any further seasoning is according to personal taste; where's a man with a 4 foot long pepper grinder when you need one?

It's been a couple of crazy weeks in one way or another. The highs have outweighed the lows and life goes on in the way in which I have, in the last 5 weeks, become accustomed. The teaching is as manic as can be expected and life 'au village' goes on in its own particular/peculiar manner, helped on its way by the insane ramblings and surprisingly profound ignorance of my neighbours. This week a lesson in the diurnal rotations of the earth, its most prominent satellite and the direction of the points of the compass. How simple life must be if you don't know what the moon looks like, or in which direction the sun sets. Pity her poor child who is currently being home tutored ... not by her university qualified science teaching husband but by the good lady herself.

Last weekend saw a peculiar mix of general contentedness combined with rage, anger and irritation. Some light-fingered son of a lady dog tried and succeeded in liberating me of 700 Francs. There I was hailing a moto-taxi when he sidled up beside me, stuck his hand in my pocket and helped himself. I grabbed his wrist which he tried to pull free, eventually succeeding with the small amount of change I had in that pocket, and for his troubles got a right hook to the side of the head from my motorcycle helmet wielding right hand. It may have only been 70p but that's not really the point.

That was the solitary low but it was low enough to make me walk around for the rest of the weekend like a bear with a sore head, and pretty much everyone of Cameroonian extraction, no matter how well-meaning their intentions, got what could be described as the choke barrell with a smattering of short-thrift. Even this weekend I've been a little on edge but there we go ... it'll pass although I can't help hope that my light-fingered assailant is still aching.

This week sees another day lost with International Day of the Teacher taking over Friday ... a walk down the dusty streets of Meri with the region's bastions of teaching excellence will be a novelty if only for being dressed from head to foot in material that I'd have to consider seriously before using as a floor cloth. Baby Blue or Baby Pink were the approved choices. Basically a pair of wear once glorified pyjamas; life doesn't get any more rock and roll.

The only other excitement has been the arrival of the new volunteers: 13 of them of which about half have been struck down by something. In the last 2 weeks there have been cases of Typhoid, E. Coli, Intestinal parasites and Malaria. Culture shock for every element of the human condition it would seem. As I've said before, fun comes in all shapes and sizes.

Onwards and upwards. It's now nearly 3 and I must rentrer before the taxi's start taking liberties.

A boinked crossbill results in digital rubbish (9,8)

Another week passes and another blogging courses its ephemeral way to you across the ether; binarised bollocks from the balmy boulevards of Extremely Northern Cameroon's foremost purveyor of all things bright and lighted. Lucidity comes in waves upon which I surf the shores of sanity but in this brackish backwater the waves themselves are few and far between so don't hold your breath.

Week two and another week of firsts. The first wet-season invasion of a billion buzzing beasties all intent on dying in the intermitent flickering of my living room light. Their brief lives and flighty dreams of procreation blown to pieces in a glimmer of neon luminescence. Sex or the bright light; it's a tough call if your a bug apparently.

The first lost days of the school year. We're two weeks in, 10 teaching days, and already 20% of them have fallen by the way in a rush of all too Cameroonian disorganisation. What was achieved in the meetings for which education was put on ice? For answers please submit an SAE to Fanny Adams, c/o The Catering Department.

The first 150+ lesson and there's more to come I feel. Mayhem has tended to be the adopted approach but then TEFL favours a student centred approach but then it doesn't expect classes of greater than about 25. Did he let that put him off? Don't be silly. "I'd like you all in groups of 6", he said, with the reckless abandon of the clinically insane. 10 minutes of Beatlemania-esque noise pollution but it was worth it. Fellow VSO-EFL-ers look at me as if I'm mad ... horses for courses is what I say and if that means dessert too, then so be it.

One of the more surreal moments was during a conversation with my neighbour who has returned with solitary sprog in hand so I am still a family of one. She whose accent is so convoluted I have little idea as to what she's talking about most of the time and whose stick of consciousness is as gnarled and twisted as a, something gnarled and twisted. An example:

Mrs NEIGHBOUR: "Avez-vous un chien?" / "Do you have a dog?"
Yours TRULY: "Un chien?" / "A dog?"
Mrs N: "Oui, Un chien pour cultiver les choses dedans." / "Yes, a dog for growing things in"
Yours T: "Un chien? Pour cultiver les choses dedans??" / "A dog? For growing things in?"
Mrs N: "Oui" / "Yes"
Yours T: "?" / "?"
Yours T: "?? ... ?" / "?? ... ?"
Yours T: "Oh, 'un champ' ... " / "Oh, 'a field' ..."

That was in week two. This week, during one of those fascinating rural conversations about hatching tiume of various beasts of the air, I told her how we'd once put a duck egg under a hen who had hatched said duckling. She couldn't work out how a chicken had hatched a duck ... I gave her a brief lesson in genetics and haven't seen her since. Not quite sure what she's doing but she then gave me a bowl of guinea-fowl eggs. Do you think she wants me to try and hatch them? It might break her heart if they actually hatched as guinea-fowl and not English teachers ...

Welcome, as it were, to my world.

In parting I leave you with possibly the finest piece of advertising the world has ever seen ... it's my opinion and I have no pretences towards humility but it's kept me smiling for at least 10 years now ... here's hoping it works. If not, there's a tag underneath.

Enjoy people, until next time.

"Hi. I'm Ray Gardner, spokesperson for Blackcurrant Tango ..."

An Educational Perspective

Here I sit; back in the canned cool of Hôtel le Sahel, surrounded by those members of Cameroonian society with email addresses and the well-heeled adventurers that choose this characterless hostelry in which to conceal themselves from the plight of the poverty riddled masses huddled outside its whitewashed walls.

Back beneath the solitary bright light of this 3 horse town for a weekend of English conversation and a hops based beverage or two.

The first real, proper, genuine teaching week has been and gone and the fears that kept me from sleeping last Sunday were all but unfounded. Yes, class sizes were on the wrong side of ridiculous, but the novelty of having a "nassara" being a prat at the front of the class, all in the name of education seemed to keep them entertained and that's got to be part of the battle. 139 has, thus far, been the mark to beat but given there are still 40-odd children missing from that class, the jury is still out ...

The good news: we are three teachers and possibly 4 as of tomorrow. There's no-one teaching Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Technology or Biology but they're not very important really, are they. I mean Maths ... who needs Maths? Shocking really but I guess if a teacher gets here before the school year's out it'll be a good thing.

Biggest challenges so far: teaching in the rain. Yes the roof leaks a bit but it's the noise that does it. I think the heavens were being drained for their annual inspection last week. Tuesday to Thursday saw deluges of biblical proportions and the tin-roofed classrooms became war zones. The noise was unreal and for all the wild gesticulating I was doing, I don't think any of the kids are any closer to fluency. Big Challenge 2: Bingo. Explaining the concept of the game to a group of children who have never been asked to think for themselves, who can't understand why anyone would want to do such a thing, in English - a language which is thin on the ground at the best of times and non-existent the rest - was novel to say the least. It took 90 minutes but I feel it was 90 minutes well spent.

And that's the thing. Here they are trying to be bilingual, studying from books that are so far above their knowledge level as to be demoralising, in classes the size of entire schools back home and with nothing but a blackboard on which one cannot write, with no books. Each class gets 5 hours of my time per week. That's 300 minutes of English per class. If classes were 100 strong, each student would get 3 minutes of learning time per week; 30 effective teaching weeks = 90 minutes per year, assuming of course that classes start on time, I do no speaking, each student attends every class and there are only 100 students per class. With none of the assumptions being true, I'm not quite sure what they're hoping to achieve. Bilingualism in 90 minutes ... if they find the answer it may just solve all their problems.

A factual outpouring from this font of general inanity; it doesn't happen often and normal service will be resumed. Gutteral rumblings have once again forced my hand, and so, like a malicious croquet fanatic I will post once more and calm the beast within.

On est ensemble

I'm back.

Back here in both senses of the word. Back in extremely northern parts and back on this patch of virtual real estate, peddling my intellectual wares in both. Most of it should probably be recalled for the toxicity of its garish paintwork and is almost certainly not suitable for children, but that's for someone else to decide.

Having left the verdant pastures of South Lanarkshire, itself basking in a somewhat tardy summer, it felt a bit odd stepping off the plane in the heat of here. The greenery that was so notable in its absence when I left has appeared with something that is definitely on the more aggressive side of avengeance. Mile upon mile of barren and lifeless desert has been replaced by fields of 10 foot high millet, corn and various of the other green staples upon which this country survives. The goats and donkeys which were free to wander wherever they wished in search of a succulent succulent or two are now tied down so as to limit their perambulating prandialising.

Dry river beds are now raging torrents by comparison and the roads bear testament to the pounding this country has received. The road from the airport is nigh on unpassable being more hole than not and scattered along its length are legions of Cameroonlets, frantically filling the holes with dirt, waving down the passing cars to get them to slow down and then asking for a 'cadeau' for their efforts. So wrong on so many levels. We're not talking provincial backroad here, we're talking arterial link between the capital of Chad, Ndjamena, the north of Cameroon, its more prosperous southern counterpart and the coast. It's basically the M74. And there are children mending it. Voluntarily.

Sitting at the bus stop in Garoua, being crawled over by lizards and approached by some of the world's more bizarre salesmen (one guy had a handful of sunglasses, a solitary tooth brush and an iron), I got talking to a guy from Chad. Told him what I was doing here and the struggles of teaching 180 students in one classroom and about life at school in general and he was appalled. He couldn't believe that the situation was so dire in a country that is, by comparison, so rich. You could rake and sift hell's ashes and still not find any hope for Chad's development: it's landlocked, perpetually on the brink of civil war, mostly desert, all but cut off from everywhere and apart from a puddle of oil has as many natural resources to exploit as a bucket of luke warm vomit ... not a nice image but fairly accurate.

It throws into sharp relief the massive disparities in wealth distribution in this odd country, something that was further demonstrated in a radio programme I picked up the other day. There are schools in Yaoundé, the capital, where parents pay upwards of 200,000 CFA per child, per year (about GBP200). Here, where school fees are a staggering 13,000 CFA (GBP13), most people can't afford to pay. And if they do pay, they then can't afford books, uniforms or anything else ... it stinks I tell you, and not just in an olfactory manner.

But still, as I said, I'm back. As unbusy as ever and therefore prone to sessions of soul searching. School starts on Monday and there's a hope that this might mean my mind is a little more occupied ... with 20 hours of teaching in theory, I can do little but keep my fingers crossed. Turns out there are going to be other teachers too which is nice. The thought of having to teach physics in French was getting a little scary!

Slave to my stomach that I am, lunch is calling and it would be rude to deny the grumblings ... on est ensemble, as they say, even if you are over there, wherever it may be, and I'm not!

The contents of this blogging,
Are not quite what they seem.
Nor are they, I should probably say,
the features of a dream

With minutes in between myself
and hitting Paris, France,
En route to Northern Cameroon
I've a blogging boil to lance.

There's pent up chat that's welling up,
behind my sun burnt brow,
And trepidation oozing
like a waste product of 'cow'

Forgive this lit'ral effluent,
that decks this e-based journal,
And be so very grateful
that for you it's not diurnal.

One minute thirty seconds left
This internet's quite pricey,
And the Yates' Mighty Burger
Was, I think, a little Dicey.

The 'Roon it calls,
It's hours away, and so I must post ...

Ethereal Effluent

ethereal (1)light, airy, or tenuous; (2)extremely delicate or refined; (3)heavenly or celestial; (4)of or pertaining to the upper regions of space.

effluent (1) something that flows out or forth; outflow; effluence; (2)a stream flowing out of a lake, reservoir, etc; (4)sewage that has been treated in a septic tank or sewage treatment plant; (5)sewage or other liquid waste that is discharged into a body of water, etc.

The decision, to coin a phrase, is yours ...

---

Here I sit in the wilds of Dorset, a million miles from the hardships of the 'Roon surrounded by children from a host of nationalities whose sole concept of hardship is being told 'No'. The phonetically massacred refrain of "It's not fair" reverberates around the school and the smell of the unclean stalks the corridors waiting to leap out at the unprepared. The smell aside, I don't think I could be any further from Extremely Northern Cameroon.

Half way through the course and I have to admit to enjoying being back at work. I know that this isn't possibly the best preparation in the world, given that classes here are no bigger than 15 and there are more resources than anyone could wish to use in the space of a 4 week course, but at the same time it's been good to be back behind the wheel. 150+ students with 8 books between them and that on a good day is definitely going to be a little more of a challenge but then it wouldn't be the same if it wasn't.

It's weird to think that in less than a month I'll be back on the sand, grass and gastro-intestinal resident diet, this time with the added pleasure of the marvellous, magical Mrs Anopholes and her parasitic henchmen. Wet season = lying water = spawning grounds for voracious mosquitos and their insatiable apetites for destruction.



Somehow doesn't feel like it's me who's over there but then I suppose given that I'm not at the moment that's probably not that surprising ... doesn't actually feel like I was ever there. Needless to say, going back is going to be a little peculiar.

Stinky Green and Paris in the Sprung

It’s been far too long since I scribbled on this, my patch of virtual virality but here I am now so back in yer box, as they say.

Back to Blighty and back to a veritable downpour of deluges: the oft-dreamed of drizzle has started to become almost as tedious as the perpetual sunshine and when I’m beginning to feel like it might be my fault that this summer has yet to materialise. I apologise, just in case, but would like to point out that upper-atmospheric goings on are outside my remit.

The garland of partisanship that dangles round the Great British public’s neck for the proper noun that is The Wimbledon Fortnight (for which non-capitalisation is, ironically, a capital offence and punishable by hanging) already looks bedraggled: paper flowers don’t do well in the rain - they just go limp and lose their colour, much like the hopes of the nation especially now Mr Murray has had to pull out. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Tiger Tim (hear him roar ... ) pulled one out the bag and actually won: an instant knighthood, methinks, bestowed on court and almost certainly an instant fatwa care of the losing finalist’s countrymen.

Two-n-a-bit weeks into my return to green and pleasantness and it doesn’t actually feel like I ever went away ... little has changed but so much has. The uncertainty that stalked my pre-departure days has been replaced by a cynicism that has taken me a little by surprise although not anyone else it would seem! I don’t think I was deluded when I went out but perhaps I was self-deluded in my delusion that I wasn’t deluded.

With the benefit of a brain and body that have been chilled to a more sensible temperature and with the benefit of x thousand miles between me and there, as well as the chance to air my thoughts and feelings past people who aren’t so close to the woods as to have the bark pattern imprinted on their faces and squirrels taking up residence in their nostrils, I sometimes feel like I’m missing something.

“Anything can be made better by rubbing money on it”; thus spake if not the prophet then someone with a fairly astute take on the human condition. Money: the great panacea that salves our collective conscience and makes the patient feel like we’re on their side. Is it just me or is there something wrong there? Is it wrong that I disagree with the kind of development that involves throwing money at something and hoping it’ll sort itself out? I could rant and rave til I’m bluer than I already am ... if you want to discuss further, let me know and I’ll save the ranting for then.

Talking of Paris (and reminded of Milan) and comparing both with Edinburgh I have noticed, with some disappointment, quite how sterile the centre of the capital of Scottish culture is: how immaculately clean the streets are and how undaubed the walls. I know that in the less salubrious areas, where children are weaned onto a diet of saturated fats, nicotine and aerosol spray, graffiti is what gives the concrete its character but there does seem to be a distinct lack of what I like to call the Rrrr factor. Street art has its place and without it it's almost too quiet.

Compare, if you will, Paris:

Edinburgh:



I don’t know what it means, but Edinburgh feels like a show home whereas Paris feels lived in. Edinburgh still smells of paint and varnish and the bed is too tidily made to have been slept in. Paris smells of last night’s pizza and the bed is barely discernible from the detritus of life that is scattered around it.

Some would say I had too much time on my hands ... and they’re probably right.

It’s time to go and light the barbecue. If it starts to rain, I take full responsibility.

A well got goat.

Here I sit, 4 days from skipping this peculiar country for a couple of month's respite, light drizzle and products of porcine origin. It would be fair to say that I can't wait although there is an element of disappointment.

I'd planned on being here until 2009 with perhaps a sanity break back to temperate climes in the summer of '08 but the peculiar timing of my arrival and the lack of gainful employment of either body or mind since then have forced me to take drastic action. I considered hanging around and seeing the country but the rains are a-comin which means that all those bits I want to see are the wrong side of inaccessible, and what's more the VSO salary, hefty as it is for the simple home life I lead, doesn't stretch to even the most spartan of hostelries, especially once you factor in travel and sustenance. There isn't perhaps as much of me to sustain as there was in March but the Lockhart appetite is a voracious one as any one who has hosted one will atest.

And so I find myself tying up the ends that have worked their way loose over the last three months of mental and physical inertia, which basically means I'm not doing an awful lot apart from twiddling my now well developed thumbs and trying to summon the courage/willpower to clean my dust and insect ridden abode. A lizard of local make has recently moved in which does mean that the flies that insisted on using my house as a knocking shop and then promptly turning up their far too numeous toes, have been drastically reduced in number. The flip side of reduced insect 'life' is an upsurge in the amount of lizard poo one has to deal with; not a sentence I ever envisaged myself saying.

It's been a funny old three months that has seen the sheen of enthusiasm be rigorously buffed by the brillo pad of reality back to the base metal that makes up its all too common place core. Serious flaws have been exposed and flowers of rust are already blooming, but there's will and so there must, by default, be a way. Trying to overcome the hurdle that is 'folding stuff' and everyone who's in power's absolute obsession with it is going to take a man of greater stature than I, but at the same time there is hope. My director, for all his pontificating on life's greater questions, does have an almost violent aversion to corruption, but there is only so much he can do.



While the uniformed satraps that plague every move anyone makes in this country do their best to derail its stuttering development, there are good people out there trying to stick to the rules of life as the world sees them, but they are in a minority. Give a man a uniform and he'll want a little something on the side. You know things are bad when you have to bribe immigration officials to get an exit stamp.

Did I say bribe, I meant 'give a present to'; silly me, I must take more care over what I'm saying.

So much still awaits and there are so many opportunities that I'm looking forward to coming back and getting going. The previously mentioned penned letter received a response along the lines of 'tough, we've made up our minds' which was nice ... nice to know you're being supported in your decisions. Hey ho.

Sometimes it's like nailing jelly to a wall, othertimes it's even more infuriating and I haven't even started yet.

Sheesh!

The beast within needs appeasing; the voracious Lockhart appetite has stirred it's insatiable loins and is demanding a sacrifice. There's a man who sells a fine line in barbequed goat just along the road though don't think he's seen the map.

---

You may have noticed I've worked out how to add pictures ... gone are the days of the expansive monologue ... now you get visual sustenance too! Don't say I don't think of you!

Bad Request (Invalid Verb)

That's what it just told me ... no idea what it means but seemed to be asking to be a heading.

Sitting here in the canned cool of one of Maroua's more exclusive hostelries pondering, not for the first time, my usefulness. Pondering, indeed, to such an extent that I've just 'penned' a letter to the country director to see if he can help. Idle minds have to keep themselves occupied, particularly minds like mine; minds that don't like sitting still.

Of late my mental facilities seem to have been surviving on a diet of e-numbers and tartrazine which has done little for my sleep pattern and even less for my enthusiasm for the job in hand. I'm not about to throw it all in and leave this peculiar country to its fate, but it has got me asking things.

Such things may be natural after a few months in placement; perhaps everyone goes through this questioning stage. The rose-tinted, wildly optimistic, and generally blinkered enthusiasm and excitement that keeps the adrenalin up during the pre-departure weeks and the first months post-arrival have been gradually eroded by the realities of my chosen role (English teacher as opposed to cheese'n'pickle, though what I'd do for a slab of cheddar and a generous serving of Branston ... or perhaps a spot of Lime pickle ... ).

"What do you mean? You haven't done anything yet!" and hence the reason for my not throwing in the towel. I haven't done anything yet, aside from see how it works in other places, ask questions of the school's 'Elite' and see what types of things they want from me that doesn't fold. The teaching hasn't started yet and I know that that will keep me occupied, but in the background will be the perpetual thought: "what's the bleedin' point?"

Is that really a questions someone fresh to the world of development should be asking? Doesn't sound very altruistic but at the same time it's been asked and there's no taking it back. After 2 years, what is going to have been gained by my having been here? Yes there will be a handful of Cameroonian teenagers who will understand the different uses of the present perfect, but aside from that I find it difficult to see that anything else I do will be sustained. I may be all puppy dog enthusiasm for this that and the other but if there isn't someone here to keep it/them going then give it a year and it'll all have vanished beneath the ever thickening layer of red dust that covers everything else.

The most disheartening thing is that I'm not entirely sure anyone - my director, the school 'Elite', the community - actually gives a shit. Strong words I know, but truthful me thinks. Volunteers are measured locally (not by VSO I hasten to add, but by the employers and their legions of yes men) by what they achieve at a physical level i.e. what gets built with foreign folding stuff. Buildings though, aren't the issue. It's teachers, it's school books, it's pens, pencils, rulers. It's desks and chairs. We've got two fairly well maintained blocks, 2 classrooms in each block. It's not a lot, and it's a bit of a squeeze but compared to some we're not doing badly.

Ask the 'Elite' what they want to see in the immediate future: a computer suite.

Great! Good idea! Any thoughts as to what might be more important than a computer suite?

An office for the director and a staff room?

Ok. Anything that might, perhaps be more benefit than either of those? I'll give you a clue. It falls from the sky in the wet season and everything on this planet depends on it for survival.

Yep, we got none water. I take three litres to school every day and would take more but for the fact the toilet facilities are a little on the exposed side and 420-student induced stage fright tends to put paid to any peeing efforts. Explodingbladderitis: not very nice in any language. On a good day, the students might get half a pint each. Most of the time they get nothing. There's a well half a mile away, but that apparently is enough.

Also, the fact that the school doesn't have electricity you would have thought might be thought to be a key part of the computer lab dream, but apparently they hadn't thought of that.

So, I don't know. It all seems a bit useless at times but I'll stick it out until such time as I can make a more educated judgement. It may just be the lack of sleep that's giving me these outbursts of soul searching and cynicism but I don't think so.

Oh, and just so you know ... 9 June 2007 ... that be the day upon which I reach green and pleasant lands. Until sometime mid-end August ... If you're about would be spiffing to see you.

Interdit de lutter, fumer, cracher, vomir dans le car

Think I might append it to the title bar, just to ensure my French readers don't start taking liberties and sullying the grounds of this pristine, almost Singaporean cyberscape with their gallic expectorations, gauloisic exhalations, gastronomic ejaculations and generally revolutionary exertions.

An undoubtedly wise man once said, "Pygmy Minds could polynate retribution activity for incautious verbosity. Reality Guide Books are best written with the benefit of hingsight - and distance!"; for those of you who are wondering to what it is reference, see the previous posting!

Caution and advice duly noted - 'duly' a word seldom written and, therefore, consigned to a life of looking wrong. Noted, doesn't mean obeyed. This furrow is deep and the ground is good to soft ... may as well keep on ploughing.

Sat, as I am, in Extremely Northern Cameroonian climes, a lone scotsman in a sea of quasi- and real Mohammedans (quasi, that's to say only in appearance), craving a bacon sandwich and dreaming of bangers and mash, it suddenly occured to me whether or not there be any link between fondness for and, therefore, popular consumption of porcine produce and 'Development'.

Is there, indeed, a Bacon Index? I've no idea what, if anything, the answer to this question might imply but you never know if you don't ask so, hence the asking. Have a think ... there might just be something there or is it just me? If, of course, there is a link then the hurdle's a massive one, not that it's not already fairly monstrous, the Bacon index just adds a little, what the french like to call, 'hon-he-hon-he-hon'.

The InsideOutsider’s Guide to Cameroon

"Cameroon is a country of diversity. Of that there can be no doubt. They, whoever they may be, sometimes call it Africa in miniature with its deserts, mountains, jungles, beaches, multitude of tribes, and in a far more literal sense, pygmies. It’s a country of small minds and smaller ambitions; of little means and little idea or inclination as to how to change anything. It’s a little better than a lot of other African countries and a little less dangerous than most of its neighbours. Its miniaturisation is almost complete: much more and one could pop it in a snow globe and flog it to tourists."

How's that as an introduction. It's my new business concept: Senza Merda Guides ... for the discerning tourist who's going to go whatever the guidebook says but would like to know the truth.

Hope you're sitting comfortably, I may be some time.

In my more egotistical moments I like to think that those of you who take time out of your busy lives to peruse the wanderings of my under-worked mind and fingers as they range, seemingly unchecked, across this now somewhat grimy keyboard, will have been worried and wondering what’s happened to me. After the surge of blogging activity that was the first weeks here, there has - the more observant of you will have noticed - been something of a lull. Nothing more untoward than time has happened which after the knuckle-dragging,semi-bipedal and painfully slow staggerings of the first few weeks has to be a good thing. In fact the stealth, speed and general vitesse of the most recent ones have borne all the hallmarks of steroid abuse.

Yes, indeed, tempus has done its best and fugit’ed. And I for one am not complaining. If my tasks here could be likened to the seeds of parable fame, those relating to teaching have fallen on decidedly stony ground and it’s going to take a few millennia of erosion before they bear fruit. Others though have struck lucky and fallen in a fortuitously placed pile of poo and are doing their best at doing what they do best. Things have been agreed; whether they come to pass is not entirely in my hands so we’ll just have to wait and see. Either way, the things I've done to get tempus airborne has succeeded with unexpected success.

Time has been absorbed in a manner that puts Always Ultra to shame and all without the addition of wings and a dry-weave top sheet. In this still baking heat I suspect it is more likely to have evaporated than been absorbed, but either way there’s still no sign of it on the surface. Think I might be pushing things on the analogy front but better that than the alternative I’m sure you’ll agree.

A tripette to the wilds of Moutourwha to pick brains achieved its aim and a brain was picked. The following day was supposed to include a further brain selecting session but alas Thor had other plans but seeing as it was his day one could hardly begrudge him that. Donner und Blitzen and a downpour of biblical proportions gave some relief from the infernal diurnal. Back to school on Friday for another day lost; the top year’s P.E. exam distracted the entire school, largely I suspect for its outright absurdity. They run, they jump, they throw something not very far and then they do a gymnastic routine that even the most sedentary of lard-arses could do from the comfort of his own sofa and without spilling any of his Coke.

Drunken learing of 12-year-old students by government P.E. examiners, and a dribbled and almost entirely incoherent offer of a lift into town on the back of the director’s motorbike - which I politely declined - were thrown in to make things just that little bit more exciting, although a near death experience still ensued thanks to the ‘my one’s bigger than yours’ mentality of an f’wit in a 4x4.

Saturday was taken up almost entirely by the end of paragraph 2, despite lasting only two and a half hours and having started at 9am. The maths doesn’t really add up but then again I’m an English teacher so what do I know?

This last week has been notable not least for the almost microscopic amount of time I’ve actually spent at home or indeed at school. With Tuesday being May day, Monday was naturally a day off too: the ‘pont’ as it’s affectionately referred to and something of which I am quite fond; its Italian counterpart allowed for no end of mini-adventures. The adventures this time were purely domestic and involved buying new saucepans which, believe me, is exciting in any language.

Odin in his prime couldn’t have predicted his day to be so full of adventure, albeit a vaguely Cameroonian adventure, worthy of mention not least for its almost total lack of activity. Spent a large amount of time waiting for things to happen. Went to school and waited while the director slaked his beer induced thirst then, with his permission, waited for a brace of Olde English hours for a bus to depart. Disembarked at a nameless junction of a nameless town and waited for the one available moto-taxi to have its tyres and wheels put back in their respective places and then bog off with someone else. Eventually got to where I was wanting to get, Midjivin, a little parched to say the least and only to find that there was nothing to drink in town except peanut juice which is something that defies explanation. Midjivin makes Godola’s solitary horse look like a marvel of technology; on the evolutionary scale of habitation, Midjivin is still dragging itself, somewhat reluctantly it seems, from the primeval ooze.

Less than 12 hours later I was back at the same junction waiting for a bus to take me back the other way; back to Maroua. The visit was a success and achieved all I’d hoped it would which has to be a good thing. CES de Midjivin and CES de Godola have the same number of students. CES de Midjivin has 6 classroom blocks, and administrative block and a football pitch; CES de Godola has 2 classroom blocks and a tree. Some of the issues are much the same but others don’t even compare.

The weekend saw another mini-adventure to the wilds of Rhumsiki and it’s environs. What a place! Were it not for the legions of midge-like Cameroonlets who plagued our every step in a desperate attempt to flog us tat for prices just the wrong side of extortionate, it would have been even more of a pleasure. Still, a good time was had by all even if the evening fare of garlic basted in a rich and more-ish “sauce MSG” left one more than a little parched. Rhumsiki itself has been referred to as ‘lunar’ though I have to say it reminded me more of Monument Valley crossed with Andalucia ... all it needed was Clint and an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

And so another week went. It’s Wednesday now and I’m off on another tripette this afternoon: does it get any more rock and roll.

A slice of excitement though to finish on a high: those of you who thought you’d seen the back of me ‘til 2009, bad news I’m afraid. Heading back to the cold and drizzle and insects that are a normal size for a couple of months from mid-June. Was going to stay here but, alas, the VSO salary doesn’t allow for a huge amount of extravagance and I’d go mad if left alone for too long! Also everything is washed away and travel becomes close to impossible throughout the wet season. Ready the tickertape, dust off the bunting and get that calf fattening … failing that I’m always keen on a drink or two!

A week attempt ...

I've sat and waited for what seems like a lifetime for this page to load up and so I must apologise if the forthcoming entry is little more than a Kerouac-esque stream of consciousness drizzle through which you are wholly at your leisure to wander although I would suggest a sturdy mac and a decent pair of wellies. Should there be any deluges of cranial excrement that threaten to innundate then I will try and stem the flow but as it is I've reached line four and I'm not entirely sure what is going to come out I think it best to warn you. Pack your waders and a brolly just in case, but if it looks like it's going to get nasty I can recommend a hot buttered crumpet and a cup of tea.

Week one of term three has evaporated in a manner in which I am almost wholly unaccustomed. Quite what happened to it is neither here nor there but then I don't have the pressures of exams or courses to keep me on my toes. The first day back was largely spent fawning at the feet of the intellectual juggernaut that is the school's director. He's a philosopher, you see, and being such he asks an almost endless stream of questions that seem to have little if anything to do with the realities of running a school. The existence of god is his current favourite, itself usurping the anglo-saxon work ethic. Fascinating in many ways, particularly in a second language, but is it going to get another classroom block? Spent the day observing the biology teacher and learnt, once again in a second language, just how many types of worm I am pretty much guaranteed to play hostelry to during my time here. Fun comes in packets of all shapes and sizes, one just has to hope that it's not 80cm long and wrapped in paper fitting my description. It's not all doom and gloom though; I just have to be careful about what I eat, drink, where I walk, who I talk to and generally avoid fruit, vegetables, uncooked meat, cooked meat, fish, dairy products, cereals, pulses and tubers and whatever I do try not to touch anything.

Tuesday came and went in a blur of almost comatose inactivity on the part of CES de Godola. Lessons didn't really seem to happen and I was given the rare treat of ignoring the threat of gastric guests and dining with the Director. Wall paper paste with shredded nettles and the remains of some long-dead animal, helped down with balls of gloop all to the aurally anaethetising wail of the director's youngest spring-off who is absolutely terrified of me. The small fry over here generally are, although strangely enough if they're crying when they see you they stop, but if they're not they start ... hmm, he says, stroking his chin pensively. Did though manage to organise a meeting with the elite of the school where I can pick their collective brain and see what they do, for one, want, for two, and expect of me, for three. I suspect the answers will be along the lines of not a lot and money. We shall see though ... I bet you can't wait for the next installment!

Wednesday's a half day that singularly fails to do any justice to the nordic deity after which it's named. The afternoon saw a visit to a fellow vol in Kaele to see things from a different point of view. The bus was a white-knuckle ride of terror across Diamare and into Mayo Kani, past rock stacks with rocks, surprisingly stacked ... quite something to see. Off revisiting the rockstacks this week so will take phots and see what happens. Wednesday eve was spent feeding and watering and generally chewing the cud of life. The undoubted highpoint was having Mama Flo (the owner of the bar), having her daughter drop her shopping indecorously on the floor of the bar right next to our table then proudly stand up and announce to the bar that that is what she had done. Not sure what she was expecting but the stick and shouting that ensued was a little shocking to say the least.

Thursday saw a visit to the Lycee de Kaele which puts little old CES de Godola to shame. 1800+ students and a library that would contain our entire school. They even have a swimming pool. It doesn't have any water in it, but that's beside the point. Was hoping to observe a class but alas they were all cancelled because of mocks which having seen the question papers is a frighteningly fitting adjective. Scuttled back to Maroua squeezed between the collected buttocks of a villages worth of people and was decanted unglamorously at the side of the road at prayer time. Just as a matter of interest, does anyone happen to know what's on the flip side of the 72 virgins? What's the alternative?

Grilled fish and a spider-ridden room constituted the evening's entertainment and then while the sparrows roused I hot-footed it back to Godola for a day of educational pleasure. Or not. Exam invigilation ensued. 2 hours it was meant to last, it perhaps took the students an hour at most. Geography was the subject and I don't think I've ever seen an easier paper and this is bearing in mind that it was in a second language and largely on the topic of Cameroon, whose geography I know like the back of someone else's hand

A wild afternoon of domesticity and then a Saturday spent being seminared on how to take excellence into the classroom. Free food and accomodation and a chicken fest last night so can't all be bad. And so another week passes. This one went faster than the rest which has to be a good thing. Got more plans for visiting this week and so it should scuttle past too ...

Not the most exciting stream of thought perhaps but there we go ... it can't be all excitement. Lunch beckons and it would be rude to ignore it any longer. The beast within needs satiating.

Ostensibly Elephants

Imagine, if you can, that you are in Cameroon.

It's 48,000°K, and you're in the middle of the country's foremost wildlife park, Waza. You've seen giraffes, antelopes, a gazelle, a couple of jackals, warthogs, ostriches and more different varieties of bird than anyone in their right mind should ever know the names of. Big ones, small ones, huge ones, tiny ones, colourful ones, brown ones, black ones, ones that look like they belong in cartoons and others that circle you, ominously, on the off chance that something life-terminating happens.

You've spent most of the day perched on top of a Ubiquitous Toyota Landcruiser - Japan's all-pervading gift to the world tourist trade - and the seat of your formerly beige trousers bears all the hallmarks of a sudden and somewhat dramatic bowel evacuation but it is, in fact, entirely due to the fact that you were sitting on the filthy and bald spare tyre, on the roof-rack.

Your impatient and almost wholly incomprehensible driver has hurtled down dirt tracks at something close to warp-speed, paying scant regard for your life and trying his best to have you neatly kebabed on any number of heavily armed trees. Your toothless and gurning guide gurgles at you in what you assume is a contented manner.

Bruised and battered and a little pink about the gills, you come to a halt in a cloud of dust atop a man-made viewing mound: it's that time of day, you see, when packs of pachyderms perambulate waterwards after a hard day's grazing.


..... .. ..... .. . .......


From our 'vantage' point, that there line of dots is about as much as we saw. They were elephants and there were a huge number of them: if Sini the guide and Sali the driver are to be believed, and who am I to doubt them, there were in the region of 200 and that's a lot of elephant no matter which way you look at it.

We looked at it from the front and from the side and had I not run out of water and my fellow trippers out of patience then I could have told you for sure.

Oh well. There's always next time.

'It's life, Jim, but not as we know it ... "

It's that time again when the cranial flatulence that builds up during the week/month needs to be released for fear of more dramatic and possibly explosive effects should it continue to be contained. In many ways this blog is like the tap thing at the curved but not noisy end of a trombone: you press it and the result of all that "thpwttt"-ing drips out onto the heads of the unfortunate bassoon players in front. You lucky people are the bassoons and I apologise for the dripping but needs must.

I have now been here for what is affectionately refered to as "a calendar month". That is, of course, as opposed to a lunar month, solar month, synodic month, sidereal month, anomalistic month, nodical or draconic month.

In fact to be totally correct I've been here for just over a calendar month and I'd like to say that time has flown but, alas, it has been dragging it's talon like nails over the blackboard of life and it has only been those brief moments of respite while the hand returns to the top of the board that have scuttled past. It feels like I've been here a lifetime but then I did get here at possibly the most obscure and least busy time of year so I can only hope that things will start to speed up.

March and April. Daffodils. Winter's retreat. Lambs. A mud:grass ratio that favours green over brown. Longer, warmer days. April showers. A temperate utopia ... we don't know how lucky we are!

That battleship greyness that plagues our winters and condemns us to a perceived drizzley misery. That battleship greyness that stalks our every waking hour, that blots out the stars, that hides the sun, that wraps us in its damp and gloomy interior and forces us to retreat indoors.

What I'd give for one solitary cloud ... if it could just drift in front of that heinous ball of flame for just a moment ... is that too much to ask?

Yep, the heat is not good! There really is no escape. From 11 til 3 it's almost unbearable and there's little or no respite after that. Everything becomes a washed out beige colour; life collapses in whatever shade it can find. The people melt into pools of inactivity. The most deranged of mad dogs and even the most pith-helmeted and handle-bar-moustached of Englishmen hide themselves away. Not that it's any better the rest of the time, and in fact nights are almost worse. At least by day there's an excuse. It may be an excuse that's 93million miles away but it's an excuse all the same.

By night, the walls that during the day had absorbed all that radiation, do their best at getting rid of it ... that's to say the house becomes an oven. Lying in bed, stuck in limbo between needing to sleep and not being able to because of the infernal heat, the foam matress doing its level best to ensure that you don't toughen up by basting you evenly like a chicken in a rotisserie. The fan, stirring the air and blowing like a hairdryer over your already baking body.

A nice cold shower would go down a treat, except the only cold water you have is in the fridge and has been filtered for drinking ... when you have to fetch your water from the well, filter it before you drink it and you're drinking 10+ litres a day, it's a little extravagant to pour it over you for all of a 10 second respite.

I could go on, but I think you've probably got the message!

So, yes, after a whole two weeks of work I now find myself on holiday. What from I'm not entirely sure as there didn't seem to be a lot being done when I arrived. Next term apparently gets really hectic with a whole 4 weeks of teaching before the school can't afford to pay its teachers any more and exams start which means it doesn't have to! I'd like to say I was joking but ...

As I said, an obscure time of year to be sure. In speaking to one of my fellow education volunteers who is nearing the end of her stint, it seems that September to December is really the only time that anyone gets any educating done. In a school year of 38 weeks, under half of them (16) are spent constructively. What happens for the other 22? Good question, although I guess if the schools run out of cash 10 weeks before the end of the school year that really only leaves 12 to fill. And if the last two weeks of the 'spring' term (and I use the term 'spring' loosely - far too energetic a word: slump would be more appropraite) are spent writing reports, then I guess that only leaves 10 to account for. A week is lost at the beginning of each term while students realise they're meant to be back at school (8), and then the week leading up to Independence Day is lost while everyone practises their marching (7) ... the weeks flee like rats from a sinking ship and I can't think of a more appropriate analogy.

The good ship Cameroonian Education is listing badly. The pirate ship Bureaucracy has riddled her barnacle encrusted hull with great holes of corruption and the barrells of goods have been thrown overboard. The Captain is clinging on to the worm-infested steering wheel while his inexperienced crew are being keel-hauled for their troubles. You get the picture.

Possibly not the cheeriest of blogs but an honest one! The pre-match sheen of enthusiasm has worn off and the realities of this peculiar life of mine are thrown into sharp relief by the glaring and relentless sun. Everything they tell you before you arrive, the briefings, the lectures, the workshops, they help but it's only on arrival that you realise just how thankless a task this is. And the doubts then start to surface.

Why am I here? What can I do? Where do I start? Why am I doing this? The answers, that seemed so clear through the rose-tinted but blinkered spectacles of blind optimism drift away with the smell of gunpowder and all that fills your head is the sound of water pouring in.

You start to question the merits of 'Development' ... who are we to impose our thoughts, our beliefs, our morals on anyone else. If any of you, friends, strangers, whoever were to come up to me in the guise of Cameroonian culture and to start expounding your views on life, the universe, everything, we'd disagree on an awful lot of things and I may find many of your views offensive but who am I to say that you are wrong and that I am right; with freedom of speech, after all, comes the freedom to offend.

Oppression is something that we, the global North, have only relatively recently seen as being an overcomable affliction. For centuries it was seen as part of life. It made society what it was. Society, that huge organic organism of which we are all a part; it grows, it changes, it develops, it evolves, just like everything else. As those first primitive life forms dragged themselves from the primordial soup, breathing raw air for the first time, nobody could have known, least of all them, that we'd get to here and possibly further.

Yet we did ... it took time but we got here. Society has done the same: it dragged itself through its own primordial soup albeit at different rates and in different directions the world over. It adapted to the environment it found itself in. It evolved to where it is today. Society isn't technology: you can't very well throw it away when a new and purportedly better version is developed, particularly when the infrastructure isn't there to support it.

Edinburgh and Glasgow are different enough and they're only 50 miles apart, and they've got their own share of troubles, yet here I am trying to instill Northern social mores on a people and culture who have ones of their own.

If someone is right does that mean everything else is wrong? That big sea of greyness is swallowing me up again ... alas the light drizzle is conspicuous in its absence.

This weekend I are be mostly seein' elephants and giraffes ... which reminds me: mustn't forget to remember not to forget the drugs.

* B A N G *