The waiting game

So the fieldwork is all over and here I am back in Yaounde, waiting again in this familiar hotel for the Prof to give me a visit, to sort out various things that need sorting, as usual.

The last trip went by unbelievably fast. Lise, the Cameroonian student I'm working with, was even more work-crazed than she normally is, desperate to finish so she could get back to Yaounde in time for a reunion. I was happy for her to leave early, but the Prof (who was in Yaounde but often on the phone to Lise) decreed that we must return together, and it seems his word is sacred. So we were working in the plots from 7-5 each day, not counting travelling time, with a grudging 10 minutes for lunch, and on the last day we had to put in 3 hours from 6:30 to 9:30am, before tackling the 10 hour drive back to Yaounde. We got back on Tuesday night and as you can imagine all I did yesterday was sleep!

Talking about sacred, religion seems to play a huge role in people's lives here, none more so than for Lise and the Prof. Every year they celebrate Lent in what seemed to me a surprisingly Islamic way, by fasting until 6pm each day. With the tough physical work in the forest I have no idea how they can do it. They also get up at 4am each morning to spend an hour reading the bible. As I said, religion is important to them!

The relationship between Lise and the Prof seems much closer to father-daughter than supervisor-student. She is treated just like a member of the family. I admit I am slightly envious. But they are alike in many ways, other than their religiosity and dedication to their work. They are both very no-nonsense, seemingly hard people. I was surprised at the abruptness of their bargaining style - just demanding a price and very rarely accepting any other offer. (I found it fitting that the French translation of 'to ask' is 'demander'). But the Prof has the air of a patron, while Lise makes it very clear she doesn't approve of me.

I came to feel that their no-nonsense approach garners a lot more respect than my attempted friendliness. To be honest I've found it a lot harder than usual to deal with the inequalities of wealth between myself and most people here - especially as I have been in charge of paying some of the guys working for us and deciding how much they should get. This is a process fraught with difficulty, especially when you pay someone and they declare that it is not enough and they deserve more. At this point Lise normally steps in to quell the dissent.

After the first trip I felt guilty that I been too stingy and not appreciated the guides work. So I determined to be more generous next time, but then it was pretty clear they were trying to take advantage of me, which didn't feel good. This third time I think I got it right at last.

The second and third trips were in the Anglophone region of Cameroon, and I was really looking forward to being able to communicate properly and take a full part in conversations. But while the French spoken in the Francophone region seems grammatically perfect, in the Anglophone region the main lingua franca is actually Pidgin, which is so different to English I can't understand it any better than French or Spanish. One phrase I remember because I understood it completely and it shows the different approach to tenses: "No pass here morning time." The guys could mostly understand me but their fluency in standard English was very variable - often they were better at French. Plus of course they would speak one or two native dialects as well, putting me to shame as usual.

One thing I've enjoyed here - the music is way better than in Bolivia. Having to listen to the same two CD's repeating again and again on a series of long journeys is enough to put you off any style of music (the shitty romantic covers sent me mad in Bolivia), but here I actually liked one of them so much I went out and bought some CD's in Yaounde. Even the cheesy pop music has an attraction. One of my favourite tracks has these classic lyrics in the chorus:

'Somebody say ooh girl...ooh girl...

You are my African Queen,

The girl of my dream

Take me where I've never been

Make my heart go ding-a-ling-a-ling.'

In terms of the political atmosphere here it's also a huge change from Bolivia. That was a very restive democracy, where if you wanted something done you organised a week-long road blockade to protest about it. Here it's a long-standing autocracy. The events in North Africa are on the news here but don't seem to resonate at all with the population. The next Presidential elections are due in October and already preparations by the ruling party are going full steam ahead. On our first trip we witnessed a staged event with a group of women from the village wearing dresses bearing the President's portrait and singing songs urging people to vote for him. On the second trip we could barely find a room to stay in because they were all taken up by a group of local chiefs that were in town for a meeting with an important minister. The snazziest buildings I've seen in Yaounde belong to the Office of the Prime Minister. And two other monstrosities stand half-finished because the politician who was building them (I think his title was Secretary-General to the Presidency) got jailed for corruption first. One time as we drove past I noticed a women hanging out washing in one of the unglazed first-floor windows.

Hailstorm Yaounde

I’ve seen a few things that been perfectly characteristic of Africa, like the little boy marching along diligently carrying a broken piece of polystyrene on his head, in preparation for heavier loads. But this hailstorm was not one of them. Yes that's right, I thought I was prepared for any extremes of weather the tropics could throw at me, but chunks of ice over 1cm across? It just seemed so out of place...

Other than realising how easy it is to be stranded the wrong side of the road for 15 minutes or so by a tropical ice storm, here's a few more things I've learned here so far, in no particular order.

1) There's no such thing as simply 'tropical forest.' If I didn't know it already, the Dja showed me very clearly how variable these forests can be. The plots were arranged in three pairs, the two plots in each pair a few hundred metres apart. One of each pair was a mixed forest, full of weird and wacky trees, tangled lianas, and treefall gaps bursting with very spiny palms and shrubs, a nightmare to get through. The other member of each pair was a monodominant stand, where 90% of trees belonged to the same species, undergrowth was very limited, and all in all they couldn't have been easier to survey, although that did make them a bit boring. As for why forests so close together should be so different, well that's a good question.

2) It’s not only women that go to the toilet in groups. I’m using the word toilet in a very loose sense here, but really in Britain you wouldn’t expect to see three men walk off together to empty their bowels. Maybe it was the machetes they were carrying to dig the holes to shit in that made the task suitably manly? Or maybe it was just a convenient time and there was no particular reason for them not to go together?

3) Ideas about family composition vary hugely. I think the biggest laugh I got from the guys was for my response to hearing about Sagam’s 11 children – “Avec 11 enfants on ne peut pas dormir!” Sagam didn’t seem to find this a problem, indeed he wants one more, his wife only wanted 8 though. But what the others were really shocked by was the fact that in these 11 children, he has a pair of twins.

4) It’s possible to create a transport system using only yellow taxis. That’s not completely accurate because I have seen buses here in Yaounde, but they’re so rare as to be practically irrelevant. Most countries I’ve travelled to, I’ve found the public transport to be very efficient, even if initially confusing. But here instead of the usual packed minibuses, almost 90% of the traffic on the streets is these yellow share taxis. They never put up destination signs on the dashboard because this depends on who they happen to pick up. So if you want to go anywhere you just have to stop every taxi that passes and name your destination – if they drive straight off they weren’t heading in that direction, if they stop you can get in. Since each taxi can only take 5 passengers there’s a lot of traffic congestion...

5) Some people have incredible faith in the power of medicine. At least in comparison to me that is. This might take a little bit of explaining, but for a day or so I managed to convince myself that I’d contracted Hepatitis (watch out Gavin, you’ve got competition for the title of family hypochondriac supreme). The next day I felt perfectly fine, and whatever it was has definitely gone now. But anyway that night I’d consulted my medical bible and come up with Hepatitis as fitting the bill. We decided it was best for me to rest and take a day off. But Lise was also determined to give me medicine. Before giving me a chance to refuse she presented me with a cup of dissolved generic-copy soluble paracetemol. I tried to explain that as a painkiller this wouldn’t actually cure the illness. Since I was going to rest the next day a bit of pain wouldn’t be too much of a problem, indeed its presence or absence could tell me whether or not there was still anything to worry about. Plus if it really was hepatitis then both the medical book and the leaflet from the paracetemol pack strongly warned against taking any medicine that could further damage the liver. But Lise is not a person to back down easily. She knows what’s best and she makes it happen. She was so insistent that in the end the only way I could refuse her remedy was to say goodnight and go straight to my tent.