Not that my face has ever turned green he from what I've eaten, unlike others with stomachs made of frangipani. No, what I am talking about is the sweet song of green sung by the earth of Ngaoundere. For five months we've been living in the monochrome of brown, and while it is interesting, it is only for about as long as John Cage can keep silence interesting. After a week of strong rains grasses are everywhere, pushing up out of the dirt, past layers of dust, through disintegrating plastics, to get a look at the Cameroonian sky. Spring has arrive
While all this was happening, I spent the week basically moving from bed to school to my living room, to bed. I slept about ten hours every day and moved, since last Sunday, from fevers of 102-103 with a high point on Tuesday of the fever, rabid shallow breathing, enormous pain in my lung and rib area when I breathed, and blurry vision. Wednesday marked my recovery as the fever began to lower and then Thursday night it broke and returned to 98.6 so with two more days of drugs left I'm feeling pretty strong and everyone is relieved it was not malaria. And though I still sleep a crazy amount, the fierce night sweats that I was suffering from for a long time have ceased. It is something horribly awful to fall asleep and awake under a sweat frozen sheet and then search for andry corner to continue sleeping and to drench that as well. I had to take to sleeping on a towel and hanging both towel and sheet up in the morning to dry all day before repeating the process. But now I am watching sheets, towels, and putting my pillows in the sun as a mark of overcoming the sickness.
School started.
Right now, in colleges across America after spring break, boys and girls become like curious goats and are eager to get out of class to search for new clover, thus little gets accomplished in class and it is sad. And the other teachers said there would be a similar experience for me here. But they are wrong. I whipped into class on Monday, feigning health, and roused those students into a frenzied state of review for englsih grammar. It was like Friday fight night between Bob "broken bottle" Casey and Finn "don't mess with my shamrock" McCasey. Sabine bit and clawed over Ngo-Yetna to give me the three principle parts of the verb To Swim. Ousmanu flung his small narrow chest out against the bustier Simo to change the present tense sentence to present perfect. Bere stood up and gestured the students to silence and declared the opposite of hot is cold, while Mariyamou let none fool her into thinking the adverb of fast is fastly. And everyday was the same. I had only a listening comprehension gave set for Tuesday, an activity that used to take the students the whole class, but they sat in silence, whipped through my questions that emphasized dates and numbers and left me with a half an hour of activity to come up with in a fevered state. Then Wednesday and Thursday we did huge verb review where I wrote fourteen verbs on the board of which five were knew. We did the principle parts, and then students volunteered to write sentences for those verbs on the board in the various tenses and persons I indicated. And it is was beautiful mutual support that they supported one another's successes and with the most naive attempts at secrecy that they whisperingly pointed out an error to a fellow. So even though I have only two more weeks of full serious teaching, I am feeling ecstatic about it.
Last night I took the Canadians to a Femme pour Christ Soiree Gastronomique. It began only an hour and a half late, and given our arrival time we only had to wait forty minutes. It began with some singing, some speeches, including one pretty neat one by a lady who gave the exhortation and declared women are 55% of the church population and need to understand that this translates into economic power and that they can use that to leverage for whatever change they see fit. Then there was some more singing including a sweet counting song that was like the twelve days of Christmas only it was about numbers in other was. For example, one god, two testaments, three persons in god, four apostles ten commandments, I forget the rest. And at the end the whip down the list and I was up on my feet rapid clapping and hooting my support. It was really rather exciting to see all these women sweating through this song. Plus there were sweet actions, much different from the normal hand-cum-wave gesture. Food was the normal fare, though the chicken was particularly scary looking, so I contented myself with some delicious fish eyes.
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