Bertoua to Batouri to Kentzou

          There are a few wonderful things about African countries that I miss when I am back stateside. The first is the wide variety of items you can get at a market. Think of a Wal-Mart, but instead of aisles, you have individual vendors each selling a different item for a price that you can negotiate. Not to mention they already have all the add-ons that mega-marts are going for now (nail and hair places, food shops, pharmacies, etc). You can walk down one lane of a market and purchase anything from tomatoes to electronic sockets to fake hair to cloth. We spent the morning in the market, where Geoff bought a pair of pants that were the same color as the dirt (reddish brown) in Kentzou. The second thing I love is that you can get the clothes you buy tailored to fit you right there in the market for the equivalent of a dollar and the time commitment of ten minutes, as Geoff did with his pants. Amazing.

            It started raining while we were in the market and the effect on Cameroonians is immediate and pretty amusing. Cameroonians do NOT like the rain. Rain deranges (Peace corps French meaning: annoys, messes up, bothers, disturbs) everything. If you have a meeting with a Cameroonian and it’s raining, you can bet on the fact that they will not show up to the meeting. “It was raining” is as good a reason not to show up as any. So while it was raining in the market, Geoff and I stopped off under a stall to avoid the rain ourselves and watched the vendors and shoppers scramble to escape the rain as well as protect their goods from the offensive water. Fortunately, it was just a quick shower and we chose that opportunity to return to the case. Once we were back at the case, the real rain started. The road from the main road to the case is dirt and really, ridiculously bad. After the rain that day, the road got even worse, which I didn’t think was possible. Giant sinkholes of mud made traveling on any sort of vehicle a miserable experience.

            That night I had my first (and worst) reaction to food. I got food poisoning from one of Geoff’s favorite places to eat in Bertoua, “Beef Tec”. It wasn’t fun but it wasn’t the worst that could’ve happened. Plus my sickness didn’t mess up any of our traveling plans, which was a bonus. The next day we began our trek to Kentzou. We took a private car from Bertoua to Batouri, which is a faster but more expensive means of transportation. Africans tend to pack as many people as will fit in a vehicle and this was no exception. There were four adults and one baby in the back and two adults in the passenger seat in the front of a 1990 Honda. For 3 hours. On a pockmarked dirt road. We reached Bartouri just in time to catch the last prison bus to Kentzou (I was glad, at this point I was anxious to get to Geoff’s village). In typical African travel fashion, we bought our bus tickets, saved our seats and then had to wait about an hour for the bus to leave Batouri. The bus took about 4 hours to get to Kentzou due to numerous stops for Muslims to pray and to load and unload passengers. Despite the longer time, I preferred a prison bus to a private car. A prison bus is a tank. If we hit anything or if any car/truck/moto hit us, I doubt the bus would even gain a dent. There are speed limits posted on the roads but no one follows or enforces them. (Overall, I think Cameroonians drive too fast for the quality of roads and cars that they use.) And Geoff and I had our own seat that I didn’t have to share with another Cameroonian and her baby.

            One funny story from the bus. A big, happy Cameroonian mama gets on with a giggling, smiley baby girl. As the mama boards the bus, the baby is happily whacking the mama’s gigantic cleavage. I’ve never seen a happier baby. The woman settles in on the seat in front and diagonal from Geoff and I. Her baby continues her game until she catches sight of me. Her eyes get wide, her mouth falls open, and I do the thing that comes natural to me when I see a baby: I smile. The happiest-baby-in-Cameroon’s face takes on a look of horror and then crumples. She starts screaming and the mama looks to see what caused the abrupt change in attitude. When she realizes it was my offensive white face, she turns into the happiest-mama-in-Cameroon and all her friends join in. The white person scares the baby game continued for about an hour until I gave up and wrapped my head in my shawl.