Yesterday was interesting. Magloire and I had our prise de contact at the ecole protestant and afterwards headed to market. On the way, I saw a bull by the side of the road, a bunch of men beside it. Magloire said they were going to slaughter it.
On my way back home from market, I stopped to watch the slaughter for awhile. They had killed the bull and were now dismembering the body, part by part. An anglophjone man and his friends, also watching, explained certain parts of the process to me. When the butchers pulled out one of the chambers of the four-chambered stomach, still full of undigested grass and started cleaning it, I asked if people eat the stomach. “Of course. They call it the bible because it has so many pages (layers),” he laughed at his own joke. “So if I go to a restaurant and ask for the bible, they will serve me the stomach?” I asked. Yup. He was right, it did have an incredible number of folds, and I thought of all the villi that are on the surface of the stomach to absorb food as I looked at the now-clean, nubby stomach tissue. Next, as they chopped apart the abdominal cavity, one butcher took the lungs, now unattached, and dipped them in the blood that had pooled on the bull’s skin. Like a giant paintbrush, he used the lungs to spread the blood across the skin. “It is to give it (the skin) a nice color, like a dye” the Anglophone man told me. I figured they’d use the skin to make leather goods but then the Anglophone man said that they’d eat the skin, so I wondered why it needed to be a nice color.
I watched as another butcher slowly squeezed would-be shit juice from the large intestine and then dipped the membrane in a bucket of water from the nearby stream where I always see people doing their laundry. Another butcher took a machete and began hacking at the spinal column, as if the bull were a tree he was chopping down. Oh and I almost forgot to mention the reason they were butchering this bull – it had been pregnant but had a breach delivery – the baby bull had died during childbirth, still inside the mother. One of the first things they pulled out from the mother’s body was the giant uterus, baby’s legs poking out the bottom. The Anglophone man told me “Whats [that is, white people – often pronounced like “what” here] like to eat the baby meat, not Africans though.” I wasn’t sure about the validity of that statement, especially since as I watched the bull become less and less a bull and more and more dismembered meat, I was becoming more and more vegetarian.
In any case, then an interesting thing happened. Right there, as we watched a bull get butchered up into sellable meat pieces, like some sick twisted Discovery Channel Special, the talk turned to politics. “Do you support Clinton or Obama?” the Anglophone man asked. Instead of answering, I threw the question back at him. “Obama,” he said. America needed a black president, “ someone who would not do harm, like Bush.” I asked if he knew that Bush was in Rwanda at the moment. Yup, and Condaleeza Rice too, he said.
I found the discussion interesting because, even here, in this small villagee quite out in the forest, people were keeping up with American politics. They were keeping up with a country half a world away, when I, an American, barely managed to keep up with my own country’s news when I lived there. What power America must wield when people across the world, even people who don’t have electricity, manage to tune into the news and find out what’s up in the grand ole’ U.S. of A. It was a bit sobering.
I left them to go home and relax before my animation with the high school health club. I had planned an animation about HIV transmission, and bolstered by what I thought was last week’s successful animation, was hopeful it would go swimmingly well.
I started by asking is anyone could recap what we discussed last week. Crickets. Finally, someone raised his hand to explain that we’d learned about the difference between HIV and AIDS. Good, I thought. I asked if anyone remembered the game we’d played to illustrate how the immune system works and how HIV destroys the immune system. Crickets, again. Finally the same guy raised his hand and gave incorrect answer. Crap, I thought. Maybe I was too optimistic last week.
I hoped that things could go better today, but I don’t think they did. For one, I get the sense that the kids are afraid to ask me questions, or just nervous to speak up at all, so when the comprehension isn’t there, it stays that way because they wont ask me a question to be sure they understand.
This led me to start reflecting on my work with Magloire, who is certainly NOT your typical Cameroonian. All through training, we were warned that we had to be very patient with people, that Cameroonians rarely came on time to meetings, and sometimes just never showed up, that drinking starts at 8 AM and is a full-time job – in essence, that our American sense of urgency need not apply here. On the contrary, my work with Magloire has never borne out the truth of these warnings – he is always on time to our frequent meetings, he works very hard, rarely drinks, and always understands things pretty quickly.
I began to realize that there’s a disadvantage in working with someone so much more in tune with an American work ethic; namely, I’ve been a little blind to the reality of work with people other than Magloire. It’s almost as if my comprehension/integration scale is in fast-forward with regards to my work with him, but is in slow motion with the rest of the community. Only I didn’t realize it until yesterday. Now I’m starting to realize the reality of working with people here – how slow it might actually be. A few days ago, Magloire chuckled at something I said and said “Oh, Beck-a, you are still too American.” When I asked why he said that, he replied “ You still expect things to work like they do in America, whereas here they just can’t work like that.” At the time, I was really stung. I thought I had come a long way in adjusting my expectations, in being flexible, and trying to just appreciate Cameroonian life. I was glad I was wearing sunglasses so he couldn’t see my eyes well up at what I took as a huge insult and he intended as a joke.
But now, I wonder at the validity of his saying that. Perhaps I have been blinded to certain realities – but if so, it’s at least partially because he himself is such an exception to these realities. As I walked home after the health club animation, I got to chat with some of the members. This is one of my favourite parts, the chance to shoot the shit with the health club kids. I think it gives them a chance to get to know me and be less scared of me. As we were walking, a girl, 12 y.o., said “I still have questions about the difference between HIV and AIDS.” I encouraged her, said it was fantastic that she was asking questions – why didn’t she ask them during the meeting? So then, I tried to explain by way of analogy how HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. I used the example of malaria – a parasite enters the body and then causes the symptoms, the malaria illness itself. HIV is like the parasite, I said – it enters the body and causes the AIDS symptoms. Then I asked her to explain the difference to me. She began by saying “First, there’s malaria and a germ in the body…” and then she trailed off. CRAP. Clearly, my analogy had not made anything clearer, but merely confused her more and now she thought that malaria was somehow part of the difference between HIV and AIDS. I tried once more to explain before giving up. How could I make this understandable??
After the health club, I had my Tikar lesson, during which I started to feel like shit. I had felt especially tired after running in the morning, a fatigue that had lasted all day. I started getting a headache and just felt like I was wilting as the lesson continued. Finally, I cut the lesson short and went home, totally wiped. For the first time ever, my neighbour brought me some dinner. I had been hoping for awhile that she would invite me over, but I didn’t know how to finagle this. And she just showed up with a plate of food for me, unasked. I asked if I could come and eat with her and the family, but I don’t think she understood my question. In any case, it was a well-timed, happy surprise for me – it means that my neighbors are starting to warm to me, and this makes me happy. They’re a young family (their two kids are adorable but still frightened of me. Whenever I say hi or try to have a small conversation, they still just stare at me without responding) and both are teachers. They’re not originally from Ngambe Tikar, but I’ve been trying to figure out how I can get into their good graces for awhile. This was a positive sign for me. I asked Carenne, who had brought the food over, if she could show me the whole process of making koki – if we could do it together. She smiled and said sure.
Later, when Magloire came to check on me, I was feeling better and I ended up showing him me “St. Louis, Then and Now” book. As he looked at the photos of St. Louis now, he commented that he wasn’t sure he could live, eat like that – there wasn’t enough nature. And indeed, concrete sidewalks and tall buildings everywhere doesn’t leave much in the way of nature. But I pointed out to him, imagine how it is for me here; “you say you couldn’t like there because it’s so different. I say I can’t live here because it’s so different.” He just chuckled.