Contracting Learning

There came a time about halfway through the week when the students stopped talking over each other. It was gradual and seemed to be connected to this week’s lesson plan. We have been learning contractions, or shortcuts. However, as seems remarkably culturally apropos, shortcuts lead to even more work. From the beginning, some students have been wanting to say “I don’t” or “I didn’t”. They do not, though, know that it means “I do not” and “I did not.” So we had to backtrack and cover the basics of tense and principle parts of verbs. And once it was clear and we had done several in class exercises, I wrote the contractions on the board. Suddenly, these students who had been able to say the word “don’t” since the beginning of the year had lost that ability. To read is so far from to pronounce, much less to write. This is why it is particularly important to emphasize the length of time it takes to traverse a shortcut. For no matter how many paving stones are laid before hand, the horse will find either a path it prefers or step into the first small crack in the path and throw a shoe.

What then happened on Thursday? I have no idea. I was standing before the class asking about principle parts of verbs when all at once the answers flowing to me were not half-hearted murmurings of error, but clearly spoken “Eat. Ate. Eaten” “Drink. Drank. Drunk.” And then we were making sentences “I drink water” “I do not drink Fanta.” The diction was superb and I began doing my bounce for joy to the delight of all. The bounce for joy is where I start on one side of the room and bounce backward while singing their praises and fist-pumping like hasn’t happened since Marky-Mark little dreamed of becoming “The Fighter.” And once I showed the pattern for contracting “cut out the ‘O’ of “not” and close the gap, there we were contracting all the live long day. “I don’t drink milk.” “He doesn’t eat chicken with pineapple.” “Doesn’t” takes some getting used to as the pronunciation is very difficult and “couldn’t” is basically impossible. But even my rowdiest class was on top of the English learning game on Thursday. They sat with ears perched forward and eyes darting faster that the woodpecker and pencils jabbing at notebooks with greater eagerness than even the woodchuck who can chuck wood. How much fun it is to teach students who are desperate to learn and desperately attentive! I reviewed vocabulary: they all knew that beans are les haricots. They remembered that chicken was le poulet. And of course they had no problem with vegetables and les légumes. I decided to reward them in the dictation the next day.

For my fifth levels, I just kept it simple with a slight review of adjectives and told the story of Cinderella and all the food she “couldn’t” and “didn’t” eat, but for my fourth levels (remember these are the most advanced) I decided that a little cross-linguistic playfulness was in order and gave them the following dictation:

“The healthy” WOOOOH. Too much. They understood none of those syllables. What had happened? Where were my students of yesteryear? Like the most nostalgic of the Old English Ubi Sunt poets, I stood beneath my rood and dreamed. (there’s a recondite allusion). Or I would have (would’ve) except that students were suddenly jumping out of their chairs and pointing fingers declaring one of my quietest boys to be listening to music on his cell-phone. Well, even if he was, it was far from disturbing anyone, and as he seems to me most awfully innocent, I frankly did not care. After all, he performs well, asks questions and does his work. But these students are at an age where they want to put others in trouble. I solve this, cruelly, by scolding the students who are disturbing the class with their accusations. Well, it is time to start dictation again, after shoring up the pit in my stomach that formed from the erosion of worry on account of thinking that I was going to lose control of the class.

“The healt” I didn’t get any farther. No one was even trying to write down the sounds they heard. Finally I just wrote “The healthy” on the board so we could move on. So much for iron-clad will with regards to dictation. I then slowed from reading slowly in phrases to reading word by word.

“The healthy student had drunk her juice. She had eaten her beans. She didn’t eat chocolate, and she couldn’t drink milk. She began to break the tables. She had eaten fish and was sick because fish is poison.”

Do you see the awesome linguistic punning? I worked so hard. So very hard on it.

Well, fish is poison, in a way because the French for fish is le poisson! At least I was entertained. They should have enjoyed it even more because the word for poison is the same in both languages.

I'm getting pretty comfortable in the teaching but find there is so little time to hear each students speak and have a small grammar lesson and review vocab. All in an hour. But it is fun.

The Slicing of an Apple

I have become quite familiar with a set of new sounds this week, sounds which rasp, scrape, and whisk into the aural with a force greater than that of gravity’s 9.8 m/s/s.

Snick

Ksssshtk

Hwunk

They are the sounds of classroom distraction. At USC in my classes, the worst I had to worry about was the occasional buzz from an iPhone or Droid announcing its own importance to the owner and thereby acknowledging said owner’s importance for he or she was receiving a text message. Less often, there was the actual ringing of the phone at which point all immediately judge the recipient of the action based on the ring tone chosen. It turns out that Cameroon has its own form of the Apple Invasion, but I think that in a battle betwixt the two, Cameroon would win, for you see (or rather hear) my classroom is interrupted by the sounds of small boys playing with machetes.

Now these machetes seem normal enough, but they are basically military grade farm implements. With the slightest movement of a blade of grass brushed by the wind against the blade, the grass falls decapitated and lying headless like verdant Pompeys littering the Ngaoundere-ian red dirt. These young boys, lacking any normal sign of hirsute maturity, nonetheless carry with them the great shavers of nature. No razors for them, for their face is nature herself and they will insure that she is no bearded lady at which the masses may hoot and holler and pay their 50 CFA. At first I did not notice the presence of the machetes, the students would put them quietly on the table. But then, as I walked around the room, I noticed a dull reflection of the sun against the mottled metal of the blade. I ignored it at first, but then I discovered that when my back was turned there I presented an opportunity for the student to carve into the tabletop the latest in proprietary graffiti. Truly, the effect is primal, I almost expect pants to be lowered and urine to be sprayed. For goodness sakes, this is a classroom, not a lavatory wherein one brags of one’s non-existent conquests.

I can now, as a result though, differentiate between the sounds of a machete on cement, on wood, and on metal. I only hope that I never learn the sound of machete on flesh and bone, but as any reader of Dickens knows (see esp. Nicholas Nickleby) violence can spring up in the class. At least I know that I am no Wackford Squeers. Also, the machetes seem to have a magnetic attraction to the floor. Throughout class the tinkle and clang of metal against cement rings out as the blade bounces and the wooden handle clumps.

But no not think that Cell Phones are absent. Though I have yet to hear one of the students’ ring out, they nonetheless bow their heads in pious genuflections to their technological gods as I give my lessons. I will turn around after drawing a brilliant diagram of the possessive adjective system and see a head lowered over the paper. Ahh, I murmur, such dedication, a real student of the school of osmosis-learning. But no, such is not the case, for the student merely thinks that I cannot see that he (as it has thus far inevitably been) is looking at the screen of the phone. The strange thing is, no one is texting and they are not reading texts. I think—but surely I must err, here—that they merely look at the technology to purposefully destroy their eyes, as though such would earn great credit in certain social circuits. I can imagine the conversation “Oh yeah, man, I went blind at 13 from looking at my cell phone so much. What? You didn’t go blind ‘till 90 and then it was from syphilis and various funguses of the eyes…loser!”

By the way, the reason that the students have machetes, which it took me all week to learn, is that some do chores as part of their payment for the school. The first part of the week, though, I just assumed that it was like having a yo-yo or something as was hip when I was in middle school. And yes, my yo-yo was the best and I was awesome; just as if I were a student in this school my machete would be the best and I would be able to lay low more grass per second than anyone else.

What else, you may wonder, comes to mind as a difference between the educational system at USC and here in Ngaoundere. Well, for one part, teachers are encouraged to use technology at USC becomes this keeps students engaged (they are obviously not listening to my luddite warnings about school making kids blind—that’s right, folks, masturbation is no longer the leading culprit) while here I maintain attention through song and dance. That is right, I am now a three-class famous singer of Musical Theater ballads. Whenever the students start to drift too much, I simply launch into some passionate anthem or another from my vast repertoire of 20 measures from a lot of different songs. The only downside to such an action, though, is that the students actually take music class and apparently one of the instruments they learn is percussion, so my songs are accompanied by the drumming of machetes. “Do You Hear the People Sing…” has not really sounded like this before. It all began one day when I came in with my exuberant “Gooooood Morning” I let loose the good for the whole length of the class as I walk to the front and toss a rakish finger in the air in a heretofore unprecedented arabesque of pedagogy before dropping the finger and telling the students to take a seat. For whenever a teacher enters the room, the students rise. It is rather flattering and would be more so were the students to not use it as an opportunity to talk.

At USC, if one is outside walking, reading, talking, various Koreans will approach and ask if you believe in god or if he has saved you or various other personal questions delivered so rotely as to become impersonal. Here in Ngaoundere, ladies come up with huge loads upon their heads and flies buzzing around and ask if you want to buy chunks of smoked antelope that the men had brought out of the wild. It is really rather incredible. And the teachers love it. They handle all the meat, putting it on the ground, tucking it under armpits, laying it across notebooks. So much antelope, all tied with long braided weeds. And the flies buzz and the wind blows, and profits are made. When I told Phil about this he immediately frowned and told me that the flies are a good clue that these animals had been poisoned (usually by people stealing insecticide meant for Cotton) and that the meat is often heavily contaminated. There are also banana sellers and orange and fig sellers. It is quite an event to be outside during the Pause.

A few words on teaching this week. Among my 7^th graders (cinquième) I taught adjectives. And to my 8^th graders (quatrième) I taught the simple past and possessive adjectives as well as introducing principle parts of verbs. With adjectives, it is interesting to note that students cannot say “healthy” or “wealthy.” It comes out as “heafty” and “wefty” But that is small beans compared to their attempts to say “pretty” which comes out as “British.” I have no idea how that happens. “Thin” Comes out as “Tin.” So we do a lot of pronunciation exercises and keep reviewing “eyes, ears, and purple.” The reason I make note of pronunciation is that many who learn French complain about the difficulty of pronouncing that language, but it turns out that English has many difficulties as well.

Yesterday there was a faculty meeting. I understood the first part of almost every sentence, but then the speakers drifted into slang, complex subordination, and mumbling and I lost most of the meaning. What I did not miss, though, was the fact that among the teachers there are no machetes. Instead, there are cell phones. And these phones ring and ring and ring (some people have two and both will ring). But no one silences them. No, he (and again it was only men) answers and talks right through the person who has the floor. It is rather shocking especially when someone addresses a colleague directly and the colleague proceeds to take a call. I most certainly am pleased not to have a phone.

Today some English teachers met up to start planning a Leadership conference, of which I am sure to be reporting more. It will involve about 25 students and bring in outside speakers. I encouraged us to take a global perspective (someone who is a leader in the international community) and a local business (getting a female businesswoman) and community (a local organizer) so that the students can see various professions to aspire to. I have the feeling that they don’t encounter a lot of really positive role models. My part will be to write role-playing skits about conflict resolution.

Some items of my personal life. I eat a great many bananas and mangos and avocados. I have rice every day that I mix with either beans (which I am very bad at cooking so that they are soft) or lentils (which I am awesome at cooking—CF the British tv show “The Young Ones” for my inspiration) and usually a can of tomatoes mixed in to make a bit of soupy flavor. Everything I cook I load with curry powder to give it a bit of flavor. Some days I will also have some cookies. I also eat a lot of peanuts (or groundnuts as they are sometimes called—L’arachide they call them, though the French word I first learned was cacahuète). I buy them roasted and shelled from a group of six ladies who sit on the outskirts of town on small stools with whisky bottles laid out before them, whisky bottles filled with peanuts. For 1,000 CFA I get a full bottle of peanuts and what fun they are to eat, tipping the bottle up and feeling the rush of awesome peanutiness down the throat. I also drink several glasses of green tea and if I could figure out how to use my coffee maker I would drink that as well, but I am rather incompetent. Once in a while I will go out to eat at the Coffee Shop where I’ll order a local fried fish and roasted vegetables and French fries. Also, for a great drink, there is Top Pamplemousse (Top being the brand and pamplemousse being Grapefruit pop). I read pretty much all day long, a mixture of French, English (alternating between British nineteenth century and American post-modern), and Greek and Latin.

Facts is Facts

Dickens’s critique of rural school systems, Hard Times, a novel oft taught in high schools and thus responsible for many claiming a dislike of the inimitable one, opens with a passage as well known as those from Bleak House and Great Expectations—but not so well known as that from A Tale of Two Cities.

'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'

As has been noticed, even Grandgrind fails to obey his own laws of education having to resort to metaphor, in this case a natural and agrarian one, in order to explain his factual claims. Such an impossibility is my new daily occurrence for I have begun to teach in Africa.

The time began last Friday when I volunteered to help grade entrance examinations for those who are just arriving to the college. I graded seventeen exams and the opportunity gave me an insight in the troubles I shall encounter. First of all, the difference between fifty and fifteen (or any number that ends with a “ty” and the “teens”) needs to be iterated; second, basic vocabulary. I learned, though, that a main reason many of these students do not know the word Fromage is because many of them do not have cheese in their daily lives and may never have even seen it. It is like suddenly having to translate haggis—though that may be a more difficult problem. With the entrance exams under my belt, and a rough understanding of what we will have to work on, spelling, numbers, food groups, I began to plan my first week of teaching. This was facilitated by my learning that on Saturday I was to receive the dispensation of school supplies. Look at the picture! Do you see all the athletes? They are famous. I don’t know them. I did, though, know the person gracing the cover of the notebook that the teacher ahead of me received, he got the advertising poster for the Angelina Jolie film Salt on one cover and on the other a scantily clad pop singer named Katy Perry. I explained that her tunes are all one heard on the radio before I left and in the stores. But now, I have no idea what one hears. Soon I shall be as clueless as everyone else here what the Hits are.

(these are my school supplies)

This past week was solely to discover the level of my classes. I have three, 5B, 5C, and 4A. These match up, roughly, with our seventh and eighth grades. But what a difference there is. For one, the students range in age considerably. Some are no more than eleven while others are far into their teens. Everything depends on whence the students come. Some cannot leave villages until they are older, others have failed a certain class several times, and others just started late or had to wait until they saved enough money to enter the College. This makes for a fair amount of shyness; indeed, it is remarkable that my most vociferous students are the shortest and youngest; of course they are also some of my great troublemakers. But, as a rambunctious short middle-schooler myself, they could definitely do with some lessons on mischief making. It will not, however, be me who teaches them such hi-jinks.

(morning assembly and flag raising)

In order to begin to discover what the students know, especially basic vocabulary. I drew a figurine of the human body on the board. Now, I make no claims to excellence with regard to artistic refinement, but the body looked like a body. Nonetheless, it took a while to convince the students that it was such—it helped when I warped my body into a strange contortion and said “See, it is me!” From there we learned the words for: head, nose, eyes, ears, mouth, tongue, hair, shoulders, hands, arms, legs, stomach / belly, feet, foot, back. One of the great difficulties I have discovered is that of the song “Head, shoulders knees and toes.” As a result of someone having taught them this song, frequently when I would point to my legs and ask “What are these” the students would mumble “head shoulders” and then shout “KNEES.” So, I had to deal with that. Suddenly, I was interrupted. “Date” one young woman demanded. Indeed, everyday she demands the same thing, that I write the date on the board. But then when I ask what the date is, everyone knows. Nonetheless, I broke off my admittedly less than awesome lesson plan to write on the board: “What is the date today?” (one of my main focuses is getting the students to ask questions and give answers in full sentences). And then they cry out in unison “The date of today is….” Well, no wonder they wanted me to ask, they had a formulaic answer to it, though one of awful awkwardness. I did not let it bother me, until they used it every day. Finally yesterday I wrote “The date of today is…” and then drew an enormous X through it and emphasized “Today is…” Well, what shocked faces greeted me. It turns out someone had taught them that their response was the right one and normal. Immediately I began back-peddling, but as I had no bicycle I stopped the pantomime and said instead that in other classes they can say what they had been taught, but in mine we are attempting to speak as people speak. But I get ahead of myself.

(the empty school, before term begins)

I decided, once we had this awesome vocabulary that we ought to ask questions and provide answers. So I taught them “What is this, what is that?” And “What are these, what are those?” It went very well. I stood in from and pointed to my nose “What is this?” I asked “Nose” they answered. STOP. “That is a / the nose.” Ahh, everyone understands. “What are these” I said, pointing to my shoulders.” Shoooldrs” Well, we fixed the pronunciation and added the sentence “Those are (my) shoulders.” Awesome. Time to break up into small groups. I told them to take up a partner and practice asking questions and answering others. I asked if everyone understood and eager faces nodded to me. Great, I began walking around. No one talked. “Ask and Answer” I said again and took up my eraser (a huge piece of foam rubber) and acted out both parts. Understood. I began to go around. The first group:

A: “What is this” he does not point.

WOAH, I suddenly realized that we had to learn a new verb. Rushing to the front, I wrote “TO POINT” and then I had them conjugate it, a task they performed admirably. “I point, you point, he/she/it points, we point, they point.” At first they wanted to have a vous person (second person plural / honorary plural) but I would not let them have it. And then to explain, I began pointing at everything I could. A great cheer arose as they began pointing wildly. So then I taught the focused point. Begin again.

A: “What is this” he does not point.

Whoomph. Well, baby steps.

(the teachers' lounge)

So I asked the questions to the small groups. See, my teaching philosophy is that even if we learn hardly anything in a day as long as each student has the opportunity to speak some English and hear my corrections then he or she gets a lot more out of it than if I talk the whole time. I think this might be something they are not used to, though, because it has taken all week to get into the groove of small group / partner activities. –a brief side note, last night Mia, Phil, and I went out to eat and Phil explained that pointing is rude in Africa. Well, that may be, but not when it comes to asking questions, the simple head jerk that some use could just as well be asking “what is that “(chin, sky, zit, epilepsy, Plato’s theory of the Forms, my village over in Chad). We need very specific points. Well, after I had gone around the whole room, I had a sense of who my talkers were, who had great pronunciation and what we need to work on. One thing to work on, getting boys and girls to work together. As soon as the class caught on to what I was doing, their were subtle seat exchanges so that no boys and girls would work together and if someone failed in the eerily silent musical chairs that they all played, then the student would sit silently when asked. It was quite a phenomenon. The main difficulty, though, by leaps and bounds is the aural understanding of the difference between EARS and EYES. If I did not point and asked instead “where are my ears” the class would flip the proverbial coin and point to either the ears or the eyes. We are still working on this difficulty. The other one is plural and singular and adding the “S” ending. These are things that the fifth levels learned last year, but I don’t think that they had a lot of practice with it, the fourth level is a bit better.

Well, on to the second day. One of the most effective ways of teaching, I’ve found is a very short review of what was learned the day before. Thus, at the start of class, I wrote “Review” on the board and drew my person. The students demanded my lame joke of “it is me” and then identified some parts of the body. I had to stop my review, though, because I had forgotten to put the date on the board. And so I did that. Unfortunately, or rather embarrassingly, right as I was fitting myself into the groove of the class like the wheels of a train fit into the iron pathway upon which it rolls (for the sound it makes, abracadabra, see Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children one of the late chapters where he takes his son and the snake charmer to Bombay), another of the teachers knocked on the door. Ooops, I had gone to the wrong classroom of level fivers. Rats. First big mistake of what I am sure will be many—and most will probably be just as innocuous. I continued into the leaped right into the lesson, after putting the date on the board. We practiced with our plurals and we practiced pointing. As I left class, I did so to a resounding chorus of small voices raised in euphony POINT POINT POINT.

And now came Wednesday. This is my short day because I don’t meet with the fourth years. Instead there is English club, but not yet in the first week, so I will have some tales about that soon, I hope. I decided to introduce some new vocabulary so that we would have new things to POINT to. I introduced classroom vocab: First word. Wall. I then wrote the French because I wanted to be clear (even though I was slapping the wall and saying WALL). Two of my more eager students rose in protest exclaiming that I ought not write the French. So I erased what I had written and then introduced the next word: Ceiling. As I pointed and looked at their nods, I proceeded to chair. But I was proceeding through a chorus of protest, for suddenly I had to write the French. So le plafond found itself on the door. Other words: desk, table, chalkboard, window, door and floor. As I had them play my favorite game of “what is…that is” I had to emphasize that to ask “what are” questions one had to point to more than one thing. But suddenly students who were practicing were pointing to the most random things and so I had to ask that they only use the new vocabulary. The game went well except for a certain difficulty between floor and ceiling. Oh well, every set of words has those that get confused (though eyes/ears seems a bit more acceptable that floor/ceiling). I then had the bright idea of introducing “bench” because it gave me the opportunity of showing the plural “benches” students were crazy excited about that, it broke all the rules!

(my classroom, sans eleves)

Thursday was a rather special day, though in a sad way, because the night before a senior night watchman had passed away and there was to be a funeral. I arrived at the church at 8am when I was told the service would begin, but it was locked tight. I proceeded to the school to learn that everything had been delayed for a while. Monsieur Oliver (the head of the English department), found me hanging out at the teacher’s lounge (PICTURE) and invited me inside to watch his class. He is teaching Terminale (our seniors) and boy they were all over the various verb tenses—it is always strange to see advanced grammar of one’s own language, especially when things are termed a bit differently. Thus the imperfect tense is called the past continuous. But even here some pronunciations were difficult, so I think that I am going to make tongue twisters a major feature of my lessons. After this I headed to my next class at 9.20, I was met with an exodus of students. Time for the funeral. 10 minutes later they all filed back to the school. The funeral had been delayed again. After a long delay (I could have held class) the funeral came. And the church was packed brimful. The entire student body, friends, faculty, family were all scrunched together. And I mean scrunched. I had to sit sideways and when we stood people alternated who was in front and who behind. The service was moving, but rather strange. There was an insistence on using electronic instruments, but the machinery was turned all the way up and so the sound cracked and echoed in a discomfiting manner. And, though I could be way wrong on this, the two eulogists were chosen for their place in society and not for close personal connection. That is too bad, in my eyes. Near the end, everyone in the church files up and past the coffin which has sat in the front and gives money to an offering for the family of the deceased. Once over, school began again. This seemed strange as a great many of the students were quite distraught. What it also meant, though, is that my 5B students were now far advanced. I had not even gotten to teach 5c the new classroom words and my 4a students, with whom I had been doing question words, had not seen me for two days, but the week rolls inexorably on.

(coming to school)

Friday. YEAH Friday’s are dictation day. This is the most important part of the week for me because I would finally have an opportunity of seeing what they were hearing me say. The 5b students did not get to do dictation because, sadly, I had not gotten far enough with them to have any words to say, but for 5b I had the following brilliant piece of prose:

A woman walks into the classroom. She points to the blackboard and the benches. She falls on the floor and yells. Then she says: “that is the ceiling.”

Well, after reciting it excruciatingly slowly twice. And I mean slowly. Try reading the above statement so that it takes four and a half minutes, it is hard. But then I said “normal speed” and read it at a bit slower than normal. Whoomph, it was as though the world’s biggest pterodactyl had suddenly entered the room and flapped its wings. The students reared back in shock (of seeing a dinosaur) and physical discomfort (of the wind). I then said that such a speed was our goal for the year. Then I said it once more very slowly. After this I walked around and had every student read to me what he or she had heard me say and written down. None were perfect and the spelling was surreal, but for the most part they read the majority of what I had said. All sort of petered out near the end and also, to my disappointment, had missed the spelling of “benches” and “points” I then taught the new vocabulary of “to fall” and “to yell.”

When I got to 4a, I surprised them with the dictation, for they had no idea it was coming. For them I had another inspired action narrative that only Lara Croft could star in the film version of:

A woman came into the room. She pointed to her nose. “What is this?” Then she asked “Where are my eyes?” A boy pointed to her ears. “No” she said, “These are my ears, and these are my eyes. Who are you?”

Notice the awesome past tense and the tight concatenation of question words. Well the students did a fair job, though only three perhaps got the difference between ears and eyes correct. That is just going to take a crazy amount of work.

Ahh, I had forgotten to mention that the favorite part of class for all three groups is when I take attendance. If I dare begin to forget, they remind me forcefully and then drown in the gales of laughter that meet my pronunciation of their last names. I do fairly well on the first, which are for the most part French, but I am just the Steve Martin of showmanship for the middle and last names. Also, interestingly, the naming don’t seem to have any gender relationship, or at least very little. Thus one of the young women is Blaise Pascal…and a young man Celeste.

And how many are there? Well, each roster has about forty students on it, but the most I have yet to see are 22. At the least it seems that between 15 and 19 students are gone every day. I don’t know if they will soon come, but it might get too chaotic if they all do show up. Also, I teach three classes a day and there is no system. Sometimes I begin at 7.30 sometimes not until 11.50 and the classes are all jumbled. I think it would be hard to be a student under such a system.

Thus ended my first week of teaching, most of which I invented myself. See if I don’t turn into a Rousseau or a Dewey by the end of the year.

(taking a break)

Nature Adventure: Last Sunday Phil took me to the escarpment for a pick-nick and to hunt bamboo. Look at me trekking through tall grasses, see the jungle for yourselves. It was really really spectacular.

(jungle)

(me)

(forest)

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