Flowers and Bees

Mrs. Godshall was my English teacher my junior year of high school. She’s still giving me descriptive writing assignments. But better yet, I’m still doing them. :)

This one’s for her. If you don’t like flowery imagery go to the next blog! But feel free to let me know what you DO want to know about in my Cameroon!

July 28, 2008

As I’m walking down the hill, the sky is alight like on a post card. Never mind the fact that I have yet to see a post card for sale in Cameroon. The hard red dirt zig-zags in rivets and bumps under my thin shoes, and my legs brace themselves so as not to just glisse on down the hill. When it rains in Bangangté, it pours, and the mud becomes too wet to even be sticky. Any time after the rains, we walk into our training house with mud ringed around our feet, looking like red snow shoes. We’re supposed to pry the mud off before going inside, so mounds and mounds of scraped off goop sit forlornly rejected at the entrance of the house. Today though, the earth is dry, so I’m not carrying too much souvenir sludge on my shoes.
*(glisse = slide)

My very first impressions of our current town, Bangangté? Christmas. Red and green. On a beautiful day like today, it’s red earth, roads, and roofs; green fields; blue sky; and even yellow is lit up from somewhere inside the tall corn-stalks and grasses. Bangangté is a seemingly endless, spread-out village. Fields and houses are interspersed, and repeat themselves in red and green pattern as far as I can see over the hilltops. As I walk down the hill on the way home from town, my concentration on the dirt and colors is distracted by boys’ yelps.

A crowd of boys is gathered in front of one of the houses. Two of them do a hopping dance around each other as though they’re about to start boxing. I can’t help but to slow down, smile, and watch the action. They catch me looking, and they giggle. The two boxers, each probably about 10 years old, start to take little hits and squeal and dodge each other. The eight or so spectators are also shrieking in delight. Walking past this same house yesterday morning, I had been taken off guard as a boy zinged out of a corn field, across the road in front of me, ran into this same front yard, catapulted himself off a two-foot ledge I previously hadn’t noticed, and cut a front flip! I’d had to clap, secretly pretty envious I was wearing a skirt and couldn’t even do a cartwheel in solidarity! So this house is definitely the neighborhood hot-bed for hyperactivity.

Beautiful days and smiley kids make me happy, and I was doubly content because I was on my way back from going into town to discover a new bar/bakery with a couple of amigas. I get bored easily in any one place, so I’m always excited to just plop myself in new surroundings, if only to kill time and a dollar on weird pineapple-flavored soda. The girls and I had indulged our munchies at a local bakery with a loaf of warm chocolate-swirl bread. We’d found a bar with accommodating outdoor plastic tables and chairs, and settled in. My chair had only been partially rickety, and the table-top wasn’t filthy, always good. I had a view of the street, the main road through town, and the constant bustle of passers-by. A woman sold beans and beignets nearby from a make-shift stall on the side of the road. I never knew I liked deep-fry until I tried some of these Cameroonian beans and beignets. It’s a national staple, and that is just fine with my taste buds (yet-to-be-determined effects on my derriere.) The girls and I whipped out my fab-Africa-map book (reference previous blog) and talked about the places we want to travel post Peace Corps. As our first loaf of bread vanished, one of us hopped up without delay to retrieve another from the bakery around the corner.

As I walked home from town, belly-full of bread and contented with the afternoon, I thought about how much fun it was to get Mrs. Godshall’s e-mail with blog writing assignment. Duly, I reminded myself to look up, look around, soak in, and notice the colors and boy squeals that have slipped by me almost every other day.