cameroon log

back in Lomie.

Tuesday October 28, 2003

I’ve been back almost a week now. It felt good to get back here. Getting to Yaounde really helped my state of mind. I got to blab about stuff, gossip, eat cheese, buy equipment, meet new people, get my FedEX (which made me really happy… yay for comic books) relax, and abuse the internet… but getting back, I actually felt like I was coming back to something that wasn’t totally alien. That, and I have a fridge. So, since I’ve been back here is the rundown of events and thoughts:
Some guy in a village up the road killed a gorilla, and she had a baby. They now have a baby gorilla at their house. They wanted to sell it to me. Alex went to go shoot some video of it, but they got cold feet. They were worried that he was associated with someone who would turn them in. Um.. if he knew about it, why didn’t he already turn them in. Sometimes logic loses out to emotion… or maybe they just don’t like technology. I may try to go there with my camera to see if I get a different response. I may tell them I have a potential buyer in the US, but that they want to see some video before they buy.. and then when it comes to buying.. I’ll just ask to see the papers. I am an asshole, but at least I didn’t shoot the mother. If I do go, it will be the first time I’ve ever seen something like this.. a gorilla in somone’s house.
When I was going to take my Meflaquine, I went through my medication bag.. and noticed something had moved. Alex looked a bit guilty, but I couldn’t find anything missing. At first. Then, the next day, I saw something red in the bushes in front of my place. It was a used condom wrapper. The kind that the VSO gives out. So, I waited for a bit.. and then, when I was sitting on my stoop, as I am doing more these days, and he came up.. I said: “hey.. what is that things over there?” He said “what thing”. I said “that red thing? Can you get it for me?” He walked over a few steps, saw what it was, and totally broke down… I had to get on his case again. Another long speech about responsibility… “it isn’t that you took the condoms… I don’t need them, its that you didn’t ask, and you didn’t tell me when I got back”. Another lecture. I fucking hate this. He is 25 years old. I shouldn’t be talking to him as if he were a child. Since then I’ve talked to him several times. I am getting more and more blunt.. and I repeat more and more. He also spent some money on beer that was for our food. I busted him on that as well.. which he refused to cop to.. and somehow, sort of found enough money to buy what he was supposed to. I am now starting to go shopping with him every time… which is what I want to do anyway. The funny thing is that he was supposed to buy 5 kilos or rice… but they were out, so he bought 3 dozen eggs for about the same price. He was a little perplexed at why I didn’t really think that was a good exchange. When I told him that eggs only last a few days…then he began to understand. It is strange to me that he has so little knowledge of food preparation. Our neighbor bought some Mackeral, whole… and he was really excited to show me. He had never seen a large, whole Mackerel before. When I told him that I have seen that before, he was surprised. He was even more surprised when I told him how big tuna really is.
My printer is working great. I have been taking portraits, and printing them out. I am going to be a popular guy in town..although I can’t really afford to print out too many as paper is REALLY fucking expensive here. Wow. But in the meantime, having it is great. It stays at my place, until I leave, then I leave it here. Charlie was already coming up with ways to make money off of it. This is why it stays with me for now. I feel so patronizing sometimes, but then again, I’d rather that, than no printer.
Kitty went away. She was just gone. I was pretty sure that she was eaten by one of the frequently sighted giant snakes in the area. It seems that because there is no real rainy season this year, the snakes are out in force. I have no idea what the correlation is.. but there you go. Two days later, when I started asking around, our neighbor returned her. She apparently wandered off, and they took her in… and wanted to keep her.. because, surprise… she is friendly. Most people are stunned that she is friendly. I tell them it is because I held her a lot when she was smaller (which is hard to imaging, cause she is still really small), and I treat her well. When my neighbor returned her, she immediately crawled on my lap, started purring and fell asleep. She had a hard few days. She is doing fine, and now comes in and out of the house freely. She doesn’t really seem interested in wandering off. Either she did, and met some bigger meaner animals, or my neighbors spotted a kitty, and took her. Who knows. Now that they know she is my kitty, I won’t have any more problems… unless she runs away for real, but I doubt that.
I ate monitor lizard for dinner on Saturday night. I didn’t like it that much, but I didn’t want to complain. I won’t be going out of my way to eat it again, that is for sure. Very fatty, very stringy, and the hands were a little much for me. I mean they looked like cooked child hands. Oh, and I think that monitor lizards are protected. Sigh. There goes that moral clarity again.
Alex, or a friend of Alex’s, had some trouble with the law, and Alex was called in as a witness. Something about support beams for houses, and them being stolen. Turns out some kid stole them from his mother, and then lied about it.. pinning the blame on Alex’s friend. The interesting part here is that one of the local gendarmes let his friend off the hook, but not before taking Alex aside and saying: “finisons”. It litterally means lets finish this. What it really means is it is time to talk about bribes, or grease, or whatever you want to call it. So the deal is: this guy wants to get a camera from the US. He is willing to pay for it, but needs Alex to ask me to get it for him. I’m OK with that. It isn’t really a bribe, more like a little something to keep the local constabulary on the happy side. I let Alex know that the soonest something like that could make it into the country would be with Eric over the summer. That seems to be OK by everyone.
On that note, I have been doing some video CD tests with my new software, and.. they work on the machines here. It turns out that my mistake was actually reading the labels on the machines. They all say DVD, and SuperVCD player (and Sony and…). Not true. There are pretty much all knock offs. Only in the expensive stores in Yaounde (where I got my printer) can you get the real deal. The thing is, no one here can really tell the difference… and I didn’t really bother to look more carefully until my experiments didn’t work. The good news is that I can output the video I am shooting here to VideoCD and keep people happy pretty easily. CD’s are pretty cheap, so I can live with that.