While I have your ear, er eye, I suppose I should cover a couple of the basics in my Cameroonian experience thus far. Namely, the two most influential issues are language and food.

After studying French for 9 weeks and spending many sleepless nights running over various survival sentences in my head, “So, how do I ask my host sister if she can do my laundry tomorrow?”, I was shipped off to the Anglophone province of the South-West. Here they speak English, well sort of. While it is true that most of the population knows how to speak English, amongst themselves they speak Pidgin. I was under the impression that Pidgin is simply broken English, and I’d know how to communicate in no time. I felt like this would be an experience similar to a parent attempting to relate to their “hip” children. I’d throw in a “dude” here, or a “like” there and be A-OK. Ha! Pidgin is slightly more complex than I’d at first imagined. Essentially, Pidgin is the epitome of language evolution. Any linguists out there? Pidgin, at its foundation, is a “trade language”. It was believed to have begun in the 15th century with the arrival of the Portuguese to West Africa. Over the centuries it borrowed heavily from Dutch, German, English, and French. Throw in a little local dialect and there you have it, Pidgin. While I can communicate with English, it is difficult to join in conversations with a group of Cameroonians. My friends, bless their souls, are bent on teaching me, regardless of how stubborn I may be. The extent of my Pidgin thus far is “Ashya” (I feel you, or sorry), and “I chop plenty I done flop” (I ate so much I’m now required to explode). This is a good segue (the food not me exploding) to our next section.

One of my fundamental concerns coming to Cameroon was food. As anyone who knows me can attest, I am picky and don’t eat much as it is. My favorite quote is, “I eat to live, not live to eat”. Cameroon, though, is no Ethiopia. People are often quoted as saying that no one goes hungry in Cameroon. The country is built, almost entirely, on volcanic soil, so anything will grow here well. In fact, it is difficult to walk for more than 5 minutes without running into some food vendor. So, I’ll start here with street food. While it will be (after the rainy season) hot enough to boil an egg on the street, this is not what I’m referring to. The street vendors sell Discoveries (round, dough rolls), hard-boiled eggs, meat on, and off, a stick, yogurt, grilled corn, grilled plantains and prunes, and more fruit than the Chiquita lady could fit on a hat. We have bananas, papayas, watermelon, coconut (fruit or nut?), tomatoes (nailed that one), pineapples, and now is the season for oranges so they too are plentiful. As for the table food (a termites dream), things get a tad stranger (In fact, up North termites are considered the potato chip of the region). Perhaps the food that worries me the most is the mole rat. Young kids can be seen on the roadside dangling the little guys be the tails attempting to make a sell. They average over a foot in length, and, what worries me, is the meat is in many types of food, so I may have already indulged. Other foods include (as I butcher the spellings) Ayroo (Green leaf with palm oil and other ingredients), Foo-Foo (A cassava, play dough-like concoction), Endolay (bitter leaf with ground peanuts), grilled fish (I can spell that), and Bobo (boiled cassava). Of course, in addition, there are the old standbys like rice, beans, tomato sauce, and spaghetti, but two things never change when Cameroonian cuisine is prepared: palm oil and pepe. The palm is perhaps the most important plant in Cameroon. From wine, to oil, to palm nut soup no part is gone to waste. Pepe is a hot pepper that is used to make sauces and as an ingredient in most foods. I love the stuff, but even a bottle of fine filtered water can’t get the burn out. Before you all run out and ship cases of canned foods in an attempt to give me a taste of home, I have found “ice cream”, Snickers bars, and double cheeseburgers. Even I won’t go hungry in Cameroon.

Thanks for listening/reading. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog…