L'Américaine au Cameroun

We found out our posts a week or so ago. I will be in Bangou, a small town in the West Province. Bangou used to be up on top of a mountain, and the surrounding territory stretched down the mountain and across the valley floor below to the base of the next mountain over. There is a road that runs from the top of the mountain down to the base, and this road connects at a T-intersection with the main road on the valley floor. In the 1980s, the main road on the valley floor was paved, while the road up top was left to have rain run gullys through it during the rainy season and have dust cover everything during the dry season. Since the main road was paved, Bangou has slowly shifted from the top of the mountain to the base. The original Bangou is now called Bangouville and the base is called Bangou Carrefour, or Bangou intersection. There is a bank in Bangou Carrefour that is part of a big network of Cameroonian microbanks, and a one-person satellite of the bank in Bangouville. I'll also be working with another microbank in Bamena, a few minutes away. (In case you are noticing the plethora of Ba-something towns, that is because the prefix Ba means 'people of,' so Bangou means 'people of Ngou,' Bandjoun means 'people of Ndjoun,' and so on.)

Bangou is a small, small place. It has a market every eight days (the traditional calendar is an eight-day calendar) that sells your basics: Pineapple, tomatoes, avocados, peanuts, potatoes and plastic flip-flops. The taxis in Bangou are either the worst automobiles on the face of the planet or feats of engineering and ingenuity. The cars are mainly tiny little Toyota or Datsun four-doors and have spent the last twenty-five years bouncing up and down the road from Bangou Carrefour to Bangoville with eight passengers inside and a bushel of plantains or two and a goat strapped to the top. It can be really hard to find rides up and down the mountain, because there's not very many cars, not very many people who want to make the trip and each car wants seven paying passengers in order to justify the trip. (In case you are wondering where the eight people fit, that's four in the backseat, two in the front passenger seat and the driver plus a 'petite chauffeur' in the drivers seat.)

I've spent the last few days traveling around the West province and visiting Bangou. The PCV I will be replacing and I went up to Bangouville to meet some farmers he has worked with and another volunteer who is posted up there. We headed up in the morning, after waiting for 45 minutes for the car to fill, and spent the rest of the morning up there before eating lunch with the farmer and his wife. We headed back to the spot where cars pick up passengers and proceeded to wait for two hours for a ride. During our wait, two cattle herders came though town with about a dozen cattle. Here in Cameroon, nobody ships their cattle to market in a lorry, they walk them to market. These cows were skinny and had obviously been walking for awhile. The herders stopped the cows in Bangouville's main intersection, where many of the cows proceeded to lay down for a nap. As the cows rested, one herder smoked a cigarette while the other talked with some Bangouville men. Some money changed hands, and one herder cut off four cows from the rest of the group while the other started the remaining cows down the mountain. Two of the cows left behind stayed sleeping quietly in the street, but two weren't happy about being separated from their friends and tried to make a dash for the rest of the heard. The local children and I proceeded to spend the next 20 minutes watching the biggest news in Bangou, and the herder chased down side-streets after the wayward cows, only to get them back to the intersection and have them run for it again.

After the excitement finally died down and still no cars had shown up, we decided to walk down the mountain, about a two and a half hour walk. While the steep hills and rainy-season gullys made for a difficult walk, the views were absolutely amazing. I am still working on adequate descriptions for the landscape here, but think that it may have to wait for pictures to be posted. The mountains are green, with low-lying vegetation and steep ravines, and with clouds covering their tops. The valley is more of the vegetation green and mud red. It's just beautiful.

We walked about two-thirds of the way, passing people on their way back up, when a car with two empty places passed us going down. We got in and continued down the mountain for a minute or two, only to slow down waiting for the heard of cows to make room for us on the road. The car let us out at the intersection without charging a fare, and we went off to make dinner.