And the water falls

Along with Phil and Mia one bright Sunday morn, I put over a long-sleeved white shirt tucked into jeans, my favorite green sports jacked and strolled along the embankment that is between my house and moat until leaping across it heroically ( I hope that when I speak of the aforesaid moat, all Dickens readers recognize the implicit reference to Wemmick’s Castle from Great Expectations). We moseyed a minute or two before exiting the brutal wall and dodging our way across the ubiquitous red-dirt of the road. Suddenly a blindness overtook me of the sort that happens only when one is so overcome by colors that none are differentiated and sight is reduced to synesthesia and all that remains is the scent of something extraordinary. Sunday. 8am, time for church.

Phil has attended this particular Fulfulde church and mingled with its congregation since he was a child, and though the building was in a slightly different place then, the feeling of welcome has ne’er changed. The blindess that I saw was the ladies’ garments. Those broad swaths of colors that don’t exist in the mixtures of brown, lush green, and soggy red that make up this particular region of Cameroon. Here draped over the bodies of great beauties young and old are the oranges to make the sun’s spots envious, are yellows that any giver of disease would crave for its victim’s face. Are green’s that only a careful tincture of the blood from a certain green eyed monster could create and only then if mixed with the pumiced scales of a crocodile. The blues cause clouds to cover the sky’s shame and the red’s are the eyes of the goblins in hemoglobin. And throughout them all are patterns of increasing complexity though they be but a simple design. The complexity arises from the ways in which the folds cross the bodies of these women, for their bodies are just as much a part of the clothes as the clothes are the bodies—and these are woman who are standing still. The men, for the most part, are arrayed in suits of various sorts and ties that are clownishly short and thick, though there is no humour in the bearing of these august sorts. How you must desire a picture, but I find it very difficult to take pictures of persons as it seems to invasive and my presence is already invasive enough.

Going inside, Phil led us to the second pew and we took a seat on the right side. The left, I little knew, was to be seating for the choir(s). And moment by moment passed. I shook a few hands here, and nodded a few bonjours there, but for the most part I looked about at the star shaped interior. When it seemed events might begin, I turned forward and waited for the commencement of the service. Only it came from behind. A call, one man’s voice rising quietly over the congregation’s head. A response, echoing in its unearthly haunting unknown from the recesses of a passion deeper than that of any I’ve know but perhaps known by Abelard and Heloise and the moment Aquinas began to levitate (though not from levity).Goethe’s “Mehr Licht” held perhaps a quarter of the desire to understand that these throats released, and the hammer of Martin Luther may have resounded against the doors in the ways that these same incomprehensible syllables beat their way into the church. After the hours had passed in which I began to try to understand this noise, I turned. All that had passed were not hours but the blink of an eye. There gyrated forth, snakelike, came a throng of women and a single man calling out their responses. They made their way to their seats to the slow movement of hips, and the slight curved undulations of half closed hands. Suddenly they were in place and the service began. For the most part it carried forth in a recognizable manner, though I was never too sure who the head pastor was or where exactly we were in the liturgy, and at one point people just began to shout out songs and everyone would sing for a while. Then up on my feet I rose after Phil mocked us for being dead and not dancing to the music, and I too rocked my hips—though not at all as some have seen me dance in the past. The service was two hours, two different offerings were taken, two different languages spoken. At the close came a time for announcements. I rose to say that I am a new English teacher at the College Protestant and sat again. The service next ended.

Next in line came a plan of Phil’s to show off part of the surrounding area to me and Mia. We went forth in the Lutheran Mobile and bounced up hills, over bridges, and through low-lying water. We waved at boys, grinned at girls, and passed through villages counting the nomadic herders. Herders who herd this cow:

The bulbous bit on the shoulders is apparently quite tasty and very fatty. I am still seeking a satisfactory answer for what it is, but that being said my searches are far from strenuous. One of the great things about the cows here is that they are immune to a great many of the diseases that afflict foreign introduced livestock. By that I mean Heifer international. Heifer, though, is doing a great thing by bringing in animals, the locals then crossbreed to create a new master race of cow. See genetics at work, even if it is crazy hard to find anyone ready to talk about genetics and mutations in humans here. Joining us on this adventure was Bob. He, along with his wife and once upon a time their three children, lives in a small village five hours from Ngaoundere and is a bible translator and a carder of wonderful yarns—all of which are true and told with impeccable timing. We soon arrived at our destination and walking down a slippery slope encountered:

What grand waterfalls! This is a really really wet land I have waded into. We were to pick-nick here, but first decided to walk around a bit and cut our way through some underbrush; Phil bore a mighty machete upon his shoulder and occasionally would thwack said underbrush so that it was felledbrush. We made good time and good friends with small sticky balls that clung. At one point I reached out to balance against a tree and wound up with a wound on account of the invisible prickers (really about an inch long but well disguised). Phil had taken us to another waterfall and I took this from behind it, from the place where secrets have been whispered to the waters to carry them far far away.

There is also the town of Ngaoundere that I like very much to walk through. Again the pictures aren’t great because I don’t like to take them of persons, but the main streets are paved, sort of—the middle strips are, but the sides plunge to red-soil rutted pathways. Shops of all sorts speckle the ways, some looking mighty temporary, and some quite stolid. Moveable vendors carry enormous loads on their heads and, as an added bonus, the other day in celebration of Ramadan, the women had painted mesmeric patterns upon their feet and hands and the youth were dressed in their finest robes. When I walk through town in my five fingers (toe shoes) people find my feet as fascinating as I find theirs, and from this mutual fetishizing I derive much pleasure. Here is a brief scene of a street:

And from most places in Ngaoundere one can see its eponymous mountain:

And of course the rains. It rains all the time in great spurts, or subtle deluges, it matters not. It will rain. And when it does the motos that crowd the street with their heavily clothed riders take shelter:

And now it only remains to show a brief something more of the compound, whether it be the system of farming

or of lawn-mowing

or of playing on the playground. The metal thing that cannot be seen in the left is the remnant of a teeter-totter while the tire stuck in the dirt is a fun bouncy toy. I tried it. It was fun. For a second.

On Monday I begin teaching at the