Wherein I give a lecture

Several months ago there was a meeting here in Ngaoundere. At this meeting, Ann introduced me to Pastor Koulagna who is the doyen of the seminary in Meiganga. At the time we tossed around the possibility of a lecture. I began writing it, and indeed it was this lecture that I gave to the students at the seminary in Ndu while I was traveling with Alfred. Nothing came of the initial meeting, but I happened, while Ann was here before, to hitch a ride to see Meiganga, simply in order to see more of Cameroon. Well, she was quite disappointed to learn that nothing had come of those initial conversations and especially so since I had written the thing. For me, there is nothing so sad as a disappointed Ann, not a bedraggled cat, not wilting flowers, not an unattended funeral. In order to rectify the situation, I performed an action that is the equivalent of drying the cat, tending the flowers, and hiring funeral attendants-- I said I would come back. We arranged for Friday the 18th and I figured out the bus schedule. But then, yee-haw, Phil came up with a few things that needed to be sent out in that direction, so I would get the car. I was all set to drive, especially since the local driver had gone missing, when said driver suddenly showed up on thursday afternoon. So he ended up driving me and then continuing on to GB before fetching me in the afternoon. All in all everything was in order and sounded great. I arrived early in the day, around 9:05, roughly an hour and a half before my lecture. I went straight to the doyen to say I'd arrived and then ensconced myself in the library to fine tune my discussion and quickly write in some more details on the handout. That finished, I gave the handout to be photocopied and settled down with Ricoeur's "The Rule of Metaphor" which the library happened to have. At ten thirty I heard a great clanging of a bell, the resonance of which announced the fact the the lecture was imminent. Fluffing my bubu and straightening my cap, I walked down the stairs and into the chapel, which is where they decided to have the talk. Yikes, it was not the cost seminary style sit-around-a-table and talk like at Ndu, no, here was row after row of chairs all facing forward. I made them give me a chalkboard, though, and chalk and then picked up a small table from the back and carried it to the front. WHUMP! Then something went bump, how that bump made me jump. I had slammed the table into a cement support on the ceiling. No harm, but the sudden arresting event soon became the dominant characteristic of the day. I told them to settle in amongst themselves and talk while I wrote on the board. I wrote the map of the lecture, key names of antiquity and dates in the church history that I'd be referring to often and a handful of Greek words that are important to understand me. I was waiting a bit and then I asked where the teachers were, turns out they were not coming, so there was another big difference between Ndu, where the professors and students had participated equally. Well, though disconcerted, I quickly shrugged it off and began. Now it had never been clear what language this event was expected to be in, and my requests to know were met with things like "our students know some English" or "if something is not clear we can translate it." well the two teachers that actually could have helped in translation were also the ones who were not their. I began, having written an introduction in French and a detailed list of my four main theses. And then, because it was in front of me in English, I began to read. At first there was silence and attentive reading, but then the table smacked the ceiling and they roared in unison for me to stop. Now, if it had been a roar of disagreement with my ideas, that would be one thing, but this particular roar was one of stupefaction. I brainstormed with myself for a reasonable amount of micro seconds and then decided that I would translate on the spot. Now this is eleven pages of academia containing: literary background, historical background, history of church, discussion of philosophies of maintaing hegemony by maintaining the archive, and an intense literary exegesis with forays into theory of genre. So not only was I translating, I was simultaneously reformatting all my ideas into the thousand word vocabulary that I have easy mental access to. Also, because I was afraid of losing them at certain points, I gave the lecture in the following style at each shift in thought. "here is what we just discovered. Here is what we are going to discover." then I would show the steps for the next leap of knowledge and do the same review. I like to think they thought I was like a pedantic six-year old, but I'm sure they just thought I was crazy. But at the end, some had questions and had even followed me through the twists and turns and stalls on the speed bumps.  One of the interesting things in doing the translation was to discover a major gap in my knowledge. Mainly, I had no idea about how to speak of BCE and CE, it took a second, but eventually I found out that it was AVJ and APJ (before Jesus and after jesus). This discovery facilitated a great deal. After a question and answer session of about eight questions, I retired to the library to hold an informal office hour. I had two students come up to continue the discussion which was pleasant.  I then read for a while through a marvelous rain storm, went with one of the teachers to eat cold fish, uncooked potatoes and weak piment and then Dennis picked me up and we whisked home.  So differences with Ndu: at Meiganga, the students had much more Greek and were interested in the church history side of things, though they struggled to understand the fact that arguments seemed based on words that seem to be similes, so I had to detail the way that nuance is crucial not so much to explicate the word, but for the person arguing to maintain distance and power once the word is chosen. At Ndu, the students were interested in the ways the New Testament was canonized and my theory of quotation. Today is National Day, so I am off to the marching and then the English Club students are hosting a small farewell.