Et Le Navire Va: Ramadan and Rainy Season

Friday, July 17, 2013

So a while ago when I was in Ngaounderé staying at the case (transit house) we were watching The Lion King. It’s amazing how often we end up watching cartoons or Pitch Perfect whenever we’re in any case. Anyways, it’s at that part near the end where Simba beats Scar and the whole area turns from brown and dead to green and beautiful. Someone I was watching it with joked, “this whole movie happened during one dry season.” It’s probably funnier if you’re here, but it’s amazing how true that could be; I don’t really know how long it takes for lions to mature… but the North now looks like Simba came back to power.

It’s started raining almost every day now, and the place is just getting more and more green. I honestly thought I was living in a place that would look like Arizona, Nevada, or West Texas for the next two years. I know rainy season doesn’t last long, but it’s great… and terrible. While it used to take an hour for clothes to dry, max, now it takes all day, with some things still damp. Yesterday it was pouring and some of the roads were flooded, including the one in front of my house. I thought those gutters looked too clogged to work.

It’s interesting the things that are in season at different times. The price of tomatoes and lettuce has gone way up, while all of a sudden now there is grapefruit. I’ve been having grapefruit for breakfast almost everyday. I’ve also started buying dates; they are a great snack, and something that I can just readily eat without having to cook. Apparently the ‘hungry season’ is starting. It lasts about 6 weeks and it is when everything is growing, so people don’t have anything to sell and therefore no money to buy food. It’s times like that when this job can be really frustrating – there’s not really anything I can do.

Speaking of hungry, Ramadan has been going on for a week or so. For those of you who don’t know, Ramadan is a Muslim holiday where you fast during the daylight hours. As someone who is at best agnostic, and has no plans to participate in the fast, my observations are completely as a selfish outsider. For me, Ramadan has half been awesome and half sucked. There isn’t any food during the day, but there are white-bean beignets and other things for sale at night. Now if I don’t want to cook, there are actually options. By the way, white-bean beignets taste like chicken nuggets – just without the chicken. That with the hot sauce I have is awesome. And beer of course.

There just isn’t anything available for lunch, or at least it is a lot harder to find. The market is still open of course, but I mean ready-made things that I’m used to, like tofu and brochettes (sticks of meat). I usually eat lunch at home, but still. Guider actually has an unusual amount of tofu for the North and Cameroon in general, I wonder if maybe some previous volunteer introduced it. I eat it way more than I ever did in America, though I’m not really sure how healthy it is for me. It’s usually covered in palm oil.

The town is also strangely empty during the day. There are not near as many people walking on the streets as there usually is. While the daytime is quieter, the night and early morning are not. I’ve been woken up at 3 or 4 AM every night since being back by the first call to prayer. They don’t just do it when it’s time to pray, but when it’s time to get up or get ready to pray too. Everyone needs to get most things done before the sun rises because they won’t get to eat again and most Cameroonian food is fairly labor-intensive.

I’ve actually been pretty proud of myself – for the last four days in a row I have been practicing French using Rosetta Stone and been working out using Insanity (a really intense set of exercise videos. I don’t know if I’ll have the discipline to keep it up, but I hope I will. I’m going to at least try. Other than walking and some hiking, I haven’t been doing much exercise since I’ve been in country, it’s startling how much weaker my legs are then when I was playing hockey. Other than that I’ve mostly been working on stuff for the 2014 National Girls’ Forum and September’s Pre-Service Training. There’s not much to do when it’s summer vacation and Ramadan. Plus I haven’t been here for a month so I haven’t had time to plan anything in Guider.

These pictures are from a while ago: