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!
Friday, November 16, 2007
Friday, November 02, 2007
... 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.
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.
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