L'Américaine au Cameroun

I have been waiting for rain. One of my most favorite things about life here is just how unbelievably beautiful it is: Rolling green hills with pineapple bushes and palm trees. Tomatoes and peanuts and corn and beans growing everywhere. Mount Batcha in the distance with clouds and mist drifting across the top. All of these things disappear during the dry season.

I know some of you are braving snow and heavy rain out there, but over here in Bangou we've been sweating through the dry season since the fall. It's horribly dusty: Dust covers the trees and the dead stalks of corn, dust filters in through the air vents of the cars as they barrel down dusty dirt roads, dust collects on dishes drying in the dish drainer. Dust is thick like bad L.A. smog and makes it so you hardly know Mount Batch is off in the distance.

I've been asking people when the rainy season will start up again and everyone says -- with unshakable confidence -- March 15. Each and every person answers the exact same way. With absolute precision, they say: "March 15th. The rain will come March 15th."

Time is elastic here. Nothing starts 'on time' because 'on time' is a totally foreign concept. I've started saying that things are on an "American hour" when I invite people over or have meetings. Even Bangou's language is flexible on the issue of time.

In a patois lesson, I asked my teacher to explain the difference between past, present and future tenses. This really had honestly not come up. "Well," she said, writing in my notebook, "here is how you would say you prepared food yesterday, here is how you would say you are preparing food now and here is how you would say you will prepare food tomorrow." The past and future sentences were almost exactly the same.

See, Bangou has tenses that roughly correspond to past and future tenses, but a more accurate translation would be that there are sentence structures that differentiate between now and not now. The word usually given as tomorrow is better translated as the not now after today and yesterday as the not now before today.

So I hope you can understand why I found the absolute precision of a March 15th start to the rainy season amusing. I had some serious doubts. I was pretty sure it would start sometime in March, or at least not before February or after April.

March 14th came just as dry, dusty and hot as all the days before. March 15th started off that way, too. But by early afternoon the wind was blowing and the sky looked like it was close to sunset. Soon big, fat raindrops began falling out of the sky. Then thunder claps followed by hailstones bigger than peas but smaller than gobstoppers. The hail and rain continued, and I filled up my buckets of water off the stream pouring down the roof. March 15th, I shouldn't be surprised by hailstones. The rainy season's here.