cameroon log

Elephant meat, and politics

Wednesday November 19th 2003

I ate elephant today. Not only that, but I got a bunch of other ‘whitey’s’ to join me. Basically, Alex came in and told me that there was elephant available, and wanted to know if I wanted any. I said.. ok. It came in. I had a bite, and after initially looking at me with horror, the others also had a bite. I am the devil. All those pure souls… tarnished. All this good karma earned.. down the toilet.
So, first of all… its pretty good. Not good enough to justify killing, but rich nonetheless. Second of all. The elephants that are killed here, are mostly killed for the ivory. The corpses are left to rot in the forest…Word gets around, and some locals find the body, and start cutting it up, and hauling the meat back. My not eating it will not stop the killing… and it will rot in the jungle either way. Let me clear. This is not justification. I ate the elephant before I knew that this was how it worked. But is it better to eat the elephant, or not?
This relates to another observation that I’ve had. Its about garbage. So, garbage is thrown pretty much on the ground… all over the place. Up ‘til about 20 years ago, every piece after a month or two, would turn into dirt again. Then along comes Mr. Plastic. Mr. Plastic doesn’t go away.. and yet, there is so little of it, that it doesn’t really cause much of a problem… it just gets burried in little bits and pieces all over the place…and if it does get to be too much, it gets burned in neat little piles. So.. what this makes me think about is our giant dumps. We don’t scatter our trash around.. we stick it all in one place. There is no way that it can easily re-absorbed…I mean, I get that we have so much trash that if we spread it around it still would be a problem. The observation here is not about our nasty habits, it is about how we look at other people. We see people throwing trash all around, and think its dirty and nasty… but actually, here, it’s the opposite. Putting all of your trash in one place is considered nasty… just like wiping your ass… why would we want to smush the shit around our asses with a piece of paper? And having a toilet? Why would you do that? Collecting all the shit in one place? Shouldn’t it be spread around a bit?
Dinner Chez Jacky… with Arlette, and one of CIAD’s funders… a funny dutch guy from an organization that barely even visits the organizations that it funds.. they have very little staff. This guy spends about 3 weeks a year in Cameroon. The SNV and other donor organizations don’t have a lot of respect for them, but I would love to do a study (well, not really, but you get the idea) of whether or not randomly handing out money is any more or less effective in the development process. My guess is that there is a small difference, but that the overhead incurred by having people ‘on the ground’ and checking things, and all the rest of the bureacrats, doesn’t come close to justifying the increase in cost… Man, would that change the development world or what? Any grad students out there looking for an earth shattering topic?
So, at dinner, Arlette pretty much completely dismissed Jen, and insulted the rest of us… she pretty much couldn’t give a shit about us.. which I understand. We are just meat… tourists. And most of us don’t get a fucking thing accomplished. This added to the fact that we are out in the sticks.. well that is just the final straw.