A journal about being in Cameroon

–       My mom, dad, aunt, uncle and grandma came to visit me, as in here in Africa.  Seeing them deplane at Douala International Airport was a welcome sight for me and for hundreds of swarming porters and drivers.  As soon as hugs were out of the way I laid out the battle plan.  Pascal, the driver I’d already booked on a vouch from a Peace Corps friend, was waiting for us in the parking lot with his 15-passenger van to drive us to Limbé, a beach town 100km away.  All we had to do was get the bags, duck our heads and push.  I had told my family that it was crucial that everyone bring only one rolling bag, or else transportation in this country would be a nightmare.  Advice was not followed and our first challenge was to get to Pascal’s car with all our effects.  Luckily no one else in my family speaks any French so the blitz of requests to carry suitcases, exchange currency, rent a car, buy tissue packets, or simple charity were serendipitously ignored.  We made it to the outdoor parking lot, still surrounded by over 20 full-time unlicensed bellhops and porters.

“Over here!” Pascal had no trouble finding us, obviously.  He batted away several porters with one giant hand and picked up the heaviest of the suitcases with the other.  I looked around for his promised van and saw nothing on the scale.  Pascal turned to the nearest car—a violet four-door sedan—and popped the trunk.

“This is the car you brought?! Where is your van??”

“Hey, you said only your family was coming.  I didn’t know you needed the big van…”

“It was the very first thing I said when I called you! Besides, This IS my family! We are in Africa, Pascal, the word family to you should imply at least 50 people!”

Shouting was the wrong thing to do at this time.  My words must have wafted through the entire parking lot, because now even those who hadn’t originally latched on to our party smelled an opening.  People crowded to offer services, only some of them relevant.  At least five taxis, all no bigger than Pascal’s car, drove up and some more ambitious drivers actually tried to load bags into their own trunks without any cue.  A man in the middle of it all had set his hat on the ground and was strumming a 5-string guitar; I don’t even know where he came from.

I was getting stressed.  We had to get out of the Douala airport parking lot.  Cameroon isn’t the sort of place where you fear that someone will kidnap your grandma for a ransom; it’s more the sort of place where they will physically pick her up, put her in the backseat of a nearly wasted Corolla and drive her to the nearest hotel, insisting that she should stay here and demanding 5,000CFA for the trouble.

“Dad, you and Chris go with Pascal.  Put all the bags in the car and go to Carrefour Rondpoint.  You,” I said to the taxi driver across from the pointed end of my finger, “you can take the rest of us.  Please just follow Pascal.”

I explained the situation to those in my car while we crawled through Douala afternoon traffic. Rondpoint was a temporary stop to regroup and hopefully find better transport to Limbé, where we already had room reservations for the night. “What we really need is a big van…like that one.”  I pointed to a large pink van stuck in the next lane, definitely big enough to take us all.  “Hang on,” I said to everybody.  I jumped out of our car in the middle of the highway (traffic was really slow) and knocked on the window of the pink van. The van was empty except for the driver and his copilot up front.  They were likely headed to some agency to take normal customers to some other destination.  Fortunately, anything is negotiable in Cameroon, so we quickly agreed on a rate to Limbé while I paced along outside the driver’s door.  I ran back a few cars to Pascal, dad and my uncle.  “See that van?  He’s going to take us to Limbé.  Sorry, Pascal.”  They stepped out onto the highway and I ran back to my taxi.  “OK, everyone out.  We’re getting in that pink van.  Ready?”  The pink van driver hopped out (traffic was really slow) and helped me hoist bags out of the taxi into his van.  Then we ran back to Pascal’s car to do the same.  Finally, I ran back to my dad, grabbed a fistful of CFAs and paid the taxi man his fare, and gave Pascal a fraction of our original deal for putting us in this mess.  Pascal protested.  “But, you were going to pay me 100,000 to go to Limbé…!”

“Pascal, thanks you my family is standing on a highway right now.”

____________________________________________________________________________________

OK.  I’ve been keeping a loose journal of what’s been up the past few months. But I’m going to redact most of what has happened and fast forward to now, because:

1. I went to Europe, and it was pretty awesome, but you probably don’t care about that.
2. It’s been summer, so my workload was lower than normal.
3. It wasn’t that exciting, so skipping over it and using the word “redacting” makes me sound more interesting.

I’ve been in Cameroon for over a year now, and I’m starting my second year of teaching.  I’ve learned a few things along the way.  Teaching English is no cakewalk, nor is it as fulfilling as cake.  A lot of us arrive here, proud and naïve, ready to tramp into our villages with an REI backpack and some bottles of Purell, expecting do something really important.  I had dreams where I imagined myself at some level of cool between Reading Rainbow guy and the kid from The Never-Ending Story, riding on the back of Atreyu and encouraging my eager students to explore the rich jungle of the English language, quaffing down its peculiarities and happily awaiting the benefits that their education would deliver unto them.  At the very least, they could watch Die Hard movies without subtitles.  So far they’ve done neither.

I started my second year by walking into my principal’s office and reciting a well-rehearsed proposal asking for fewer hours.  I explained that I am a volunteer, and my work extends beyond classroom hours.  I’m supposed to be plugged into the community, aware of their most urgent needs and prepared to offer a hand or an outsider’s solution to a particular problem or need.  Yeah, Cameroon needs English teachers, but there are times where I feel like I’m simply providing free labor for an economy that can’t afford to pay a perfectly capable native to do this job.  After all, a strong minority of Cameroonians are native English speakers, a vestige from back when England controlled the western side of the country.  Plugging this hole isn’t sustainable, and it occupies too much of my time in order to allow me to leave some tangible mark on the community (a selfish sentiment, perhaps). Over the summer I’d been coming up with ideas for projects I could do other than English teaching (which I will not go into right now, to guard my visions of grandeur).  I should reiterate also that even though my job title is “English Education Volunteer”, the Peace Corps by nature is very broad and volunteers are encouraged to pursue whatever works or projects they deem useful for their posts.

I spat out this long-winded spiel in my principal’s office the week before school began (these talks always go better in your head, don’t they?). As soon as I was finished, he told me that the otherEnglish teacher and my good friend, Mr. Eyene, had just quit.  He had apparently left the school to become a full-time pepper farmer.  If I didn’t assume Mr. Eyene’s classes, they simply would not have an English teacher this year.  What the hell do I say to that?

Again, Mr. Eyene (his name is Jules) is one of my great friends here.  He’s around my age, we watch football together and I’ve been teaching him to play guitar.  But the news that he’d quit to work on a pepper farm was pretty disappointing.  I called him later that day and he told me, as he had mentioned a few times before, that having a large pepper farm was his dream in life.  I didn’t have much to say except, well, ok, do what you want to do with your life.  If pepper farming is your calling, then go to it.  However, you don’t need a microeconomist to tell you that if there is ONE THING (emphasis necessary)that isn’t lacking in Lolodorf, it’s these peppers. Sometimes the vegetable market is out of literally everything except hot peppers and maybe a few rotten onions.  It was a bit painful to see my friend abandon an honorable and profitable profession to work in a market that is, to my outsider eye, already oversaturated.  It’s hard to exaggerate how commonplace these peppers are. They are to Cameroon as IHOP is to the American interstate system.

Now I had a really ugly choice to make.  I could take less hours at the high school and pursue these projects I’d been drawing up (I’d spoken with a women’s activist group about opening a cybercafé and computer education center, for example), but by doing so I would condemn several classes to vacated hours meant for English and virtually ensure that they fail their national exams in May.  The national exams are extremely important in this country, and if you fail—which happens all the time due to, among other factors, a lack of teachers—then you have to redo the grade level.

I settled for some sort of compromise.  One project I’d had in mind for the year was an environmental education tour.  Not just in Lolodorf, but all around Cameroon.

Backstory—when I was in 3^rd grade, my grandparents were gracious enough to offer me a vacation anywhere in the US.  I chose the aquarium in Monterey Bay, California.  Now, I read books on evolution for fun.  Planet Earth is the only set of DVDs I’ve purchased since high school.  I’m not a tree hugger, but I have seen way too many dogs kicked in the face (or worse, chimpanzees cooked for dinner) around here. There’s really no soft way to say it: Cameroonians, in general, have little respect for or understanding of the environment, in a place where the environment is perhaps more crucial for survival than any other part of the world.  Plastic bags rain from the sky here—if I buy a single onion it’s immediately wrapped in plastic, and if I say I’m happy to simply carry it in my hand the market lady looks at me like I’m weird for turning down something free.  Once they’re home, most locals will toss that bag on the road outside their house without batting an eye.  Once, my eighteen-year-old neighbor told me that gorillas were evil creatures, and if he could push a button to kill every single one he wouldn’t hesitate to do so.  It’s hard to stress how little appreciation so many people here have for the beautiful forestry and animal diversity in their country.

One other thing pushed me towards this project—my cat Austin, whom I wrote about a while ago, is dead.  My ten-year old neighbor, Dodo (different from the neighbor mentioned above), whom I trusted with my cat and house key as caretaker while I was away, told me when I came back that Austin had “ran away to join a gang of cats one day while he let it outside to play.”  Later that day the really young kids in the neighborhood came over to ask if I’d seen Austin, because she had been “bleeding and her head was broken.”  Dodo had also recently acquired a new slingshot, and he liked to sit on his porch and shoot at lizards and chickens.

This kid knew how much I liked my cat.  He had helped me track it down as a kitten (I wrote about that sometime last year).  He knew that it was well trained, it never bit, and it would happily sleep on strangers’ laps.  He was even medicated for fleas and rabies.  Austin won the cat lottery in terms of comfort and ease of living, until Dodo killed it while I was gone for a weekend.

I was pretty furious about the whole thing—the kid I trusted the most in the neighborhood, an otherwise intelligent and pretty good child, had shot my cat, presumably for sport.  I went to his mother, who’s also generally been very supportive and friendly towards me—and instead of punishing Dodo, or even apologizing, she covered for him.  Either she believed his wacky alibi about a feral cat gang, or more likely put “family first” and backed up his lie (I could elaborate for hours on the psychology here.  In Africa, family is everything, and although it’s a peachy sentiment I’ve seen on more than one occasion the dark side of this cultural commandment manifest itself in nepotism and dependence.  But now is not the time.)

Here’s a few quick apropos statistics: Cameroon was one of the few African countries left whereit is possible to find all of the “big five” animals in the wild—until the western rhinoceros was declared extinct in 2011.  In Waza National Park, which is sort of like Cameroon’s Yellowstone, there were over 100 lions just 50 years ago.  Today there are between five to nine. The cheetah has already gone extinct in the wild.  Gorillas have only survived in two of Cameroon’s ten regions, my own South and the Southwest.  The Cross River Gorilla, which lives close to my town and could probably be tracked by an expert hunter in a single day or two, is the most endangered ape in the world. It is numbered at around 250, and yet it is still hunted for its meat. Things aren’t looking good either for the chimpanzee, the elephant, the mandrill…I could go on, but I don’t need to, because as Americans we are usually sensitized to these issues at an early age.  We understand the concepts of “endangered species” and “extinction”, which are terms that virtually none of my students understood, even when translated into French. In general, whether by having a pet, taking a field trip to the zoo, or watching a TV show with talking chipmunks or dinosaurs or crime fighting turtles, we like animals.  That meme simply does not exist here (OK, I know I’m speaking broadly, and I should never characterize an entire nation.  But after a year of living here, I can say this pretty confidently: most Cameroonians don’t really care about wildlife, or more specifically the well-being of the fauna that are crucial to the ecosystem which is in turn crucial to human existence.)

So I decided that this year, coupled with English courses, I would incorporate lessons and sensitization towards the unique wildlife of the Congo Basin.  I kicked off the project by inviting my friend Sean, a science teacher and the Steve Irwin of Peace Corps Volunteers, to come spend a week with me at my high school to go from class to class giving two hour lectures on the importance of the forest to survival in Cameroon and for our entire planet, and on the imminent danger facing so many animals that make these forests special.

Sean, the guy to call if you need a bird ID’ed

Things went pretty well, but the project’s not over yet.  After his week here I arranged with my boss to go up to the extreme northern part of the country (the brink of the savannah, as opposed to the jungles of the Congo down south) and give the same lectures, except slightly modified to talk about desertification instead of deforestation; lion endangerment instead of gorillas.  Results to follow…

The bus trips around country are more enjoyable during the dry season because there’s no risk of a rain burst that will force everyone to shut their windows and ride out the remainder of the journey in a cramped sweaty pillbox.  I always try to stake out a window spot so that I can catch the virgin breeze as it whips though the bus and rattles the well coiffed wigs of the women in the back.  Often times, there will be a lady behind me with a small child, and she will lean forward and ask me to close my window so that her baby does not catch a cold.  It is a medical factoid here that a gusty wind will chill your body and can cause you to fall sick (It is for this reason that moto drivers roll around town under the basking equatorial sun wearing puffy jackets or zipped up hooded sweatshirts).  Sometimes I try to reason, saying that to the best of my knowledge the cold virus doesn’t float across long distances like dandelions in the wind, but rather from your baby’s runny nose that you are failing to wipe.  But since I am no doctor, and since this mother’s mother probably warned her against leaving  windows open in moving vehicles and trusting strange white men who read books on buses, she will usually go with her gut and think I have it out for her child.  One mother even wrapped her baby in multiple blankets like a sausage roll and hid him under her seat to shield him from his certain death.  At that point I genuinely felt bad, not only because this lady now feared for her child’s life and thought I was evil, but also because if the baby stayed wrapped up like that for very long he would risk asphyxiating or overheating, which would be an ironic tragedy.  Defeated, I slid my window shut, but I was too proud to give up the logical high ground without a fight.  For several minutes I tried to explain to the mother (and by now, many other listeners) what causes illness and why a little breeze never hurt anybody.

During this most recent trip, I was feeling fortunate that there was no mother behind me.  I had my window opened to its full glory, and I was even leaning my head and my right arm partway out, as I often do in demonstration of my faith in science.  This time, though, if there had been a mother behind me, she might have had the good fortune to ask me to close my window before the screaming pig rolled off the top of the bus, falling in front of my face and meeting the paved highway with a mighty oink.  I wasn’t sure what I had just seen, and for a moment I thought we had hit a child.  Other passengers around me had seen something fall past my window as well, and two young girls next to me were screaming louder than the pig had been.  “Chauffeur! Arretez! Mon porc est tombé!”  a woman yelled at the driver.  That phrase translates pretty much as you’d expect: Hey driver, stop, my pig fell off.

When we pulled over to the shoulder I leaned my head out further and twisted around for a look.  Fifty yards back, the fully grown hog was trying to hobble to its feet.  The problem was, its back legs were still tied together.  Remarkably, the hog acted unhurt.  It appeared to be merely inconvenienced by the rope around its legs, and took off hopping away from the bus at its maximum speed.  As the bus was easing to a stop, the pig’s owner was making her disapproval known.  She let off a string of curses, belittling the driver’s knotting ability and expanding my repertoire of foreign insults.  The driver kept his head high while shifting into his parking gear, then opening both the driver and passenger doors.  All filed out, either to assuage the situation or to watch the spectacle unfold (I count myself in the latter).

The pig hadn’t made it very far—the poor thing seemed to have tired out and was now zigzagging across the highway.  The driver, dutifully bearing his responsibility, grabbed the pig by its tied hind legs and dragged it to the side of the road.  No one seemed to be enjoying this more than a drunk man who was hollering encouragement to the driver and slapping the backs of fellow passengers. “Where’s your camera, white man?” he asked me with a wide smile.  “Shut up and help me.  This pig is heavy,” the driver barked at the jovial drunk.  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll get his front legs.  Like that, he’ll kick you and not me.”  An army officer who had been silently watching stepped forward to grab the other front leg.

And so it was that a soldier, a driver, and a drunk shuffled a panicked hog back to our bus and up the rear ladder onto the roof.  Apparently when we had left Yaoundé, the driver (in a rare display of haste [or more likely, negligence]) had only fastened the back legs to the roof rack, and he hadn’t even done a decent job of that.  I watched as he tied the hog a second time, now with the help of the soldier.  The pig had given up screaming and now just appeared to be scanning the group of forty-odd onlookers in search of someone who would take pity and help him escape.  I couldn’t help but feel his eyes were particularly locked on me.

When I got to my house in Lolodorf that evening, two things were immediately apparent.  The first was that I still had no power.  More than two weeks ago a man in our neighborhood decided to set fire to the trees and bushes in his yard in order to clear space for some crops he planned to grow during the upcoming rainy season.  Never mind that burning all your existing flora is a pretty bad idea, ecologically speaking, if your goal is to replace it with other plants.  Worse in this case was that the primary power line which covers our entire neighborhood runs directly over his lawn, and his “controlled fire” rose so high that it melted the wire in two.  After the damage was done, fifty meters of copper wiring would need to be replaced, sold at 1,000 CFA (≈$2) per meter.  $100 is a pretty big sum around here, and definitely not something a sustenance farmer would budget for on a normal Sunday.  As such, the rest of us can only wait at his mercy until he finds the money.  The real jewel to this story is the fact that the wire was roasted just after it connects to his house, so while the rest of us wait in the dark every night, we can look up the hill to see the single house with a porch light on, casting a glow over a downed power line snaking through a charred field of soon-to-be pineapples.

The second thing I noticed upon coming home, happily, was that my cat was still alive.  She’s still only a few months old, and this was the first time I’d left her alone at the house for several days.  I had given the neighbor kids a key to the back door, as well as stockpiles of powdered milk and dried fish.  I have a pretty high confidence in these kids, but you just never know for sure what will happen with a stash of food during a three-day absence.  Thankfully they seem to like my cat almost as much as I do, so most of her food likely made it to her plate.  They also know that when I return I’ll buy them some smoked beef or candy to thank them, but that’s me putting a lot of faith in delayed gratification.

I decided to get a cat several weeks ago in part to show neighbors (kids and adults alike) that animals can be friends.  Generally speaking, I’ve found that Cameroonians have a disdain, even a fear, of animals that we normally want to touch and invite onto our laps.  “They’re mean.  They’re dirty.  They bite you,” I often hear.  Dogs are kept as pets for different reasons here.  Their purpose is more utilitarian, mainly for protection.  And most cats are feral, scrounging whatever food they can from trash heaps and tall grasses.  In fact, there isn’t even a word around here for pet as we would mean it.  They’re just animaux domestiques. 

If I get a cat, I decided, I can show them that if you’re nice to it, then it won’t grow up to resent you and scratch your face when you come near it.  For some reason, kids love being cruel to animals (my politically incorrect theory is that since children are often beat here, they in turn need to pass the rage along so that they are not the bottom rung in the chain of aggression, and thus acrimoniously chunk stones at dogs, cats, and goats).  What’s worse, I’ve not once seen a parent scold a child for harming an animal, which is perhaps indicative of a deeper indifference towards animal welfare.  In Bafia, I scolded my host family’s kids a number of times for kicking their own dog.  This wasn’t some feral brute that would come around peeing on the deck chairs and tearing up flower beds; this was the bona-fide family mutt that ate their table scraps and followed their father into the fields every morning.

“Dodo,” I said to my ten-year old neighbor one Sunday after Christmas, “I think I’m going to get a cat.”

“Today?”

“OK, today.  Let’s go find one.”

And so we set off, Dodo and I, with no real direction or plan other than to find a suitable kitten.

We wandered through neighborhoods, asking people we knew if they might know where to find cats.  We asked the priest, the tailor, and a couple of boutique clerks, all of whom weren’t able to help.  We followed random cats on the street, hoping they would lead us to babies, but with no luck. “Barrett, let’s go to Quartier Hauossa, there are a lot of cats over there.”

“Sure,” I said.  He knows Lolodorf much better than I do.

Quatier Hauossa is the predominately Muslim neighborhood across town from me.  It is further away from the sole paved road that runs through Lolodorf, so the houses are spaced by narrower dirt paths, impassable by car, and are thus more cramped than my side of town.  If you walk through the neighborhood at the right time of day, you’ll hear the siren calling Muslims to prayer.

We stopped by Madame Bobo’s, a motivated woman who’s worked with Volunteers in the past to build toilets and plant soybeans.  “I don’t have any cats here.  But try Albin at the orphanage, there’s always some cats living around there.”

As we left her house, I heard someone call behind me.  “Hoo, le blanc, come here!”  Dodo and I turned.

“You’re looking for animals, yeah?  I can get you animals.  Dogs, cats, snakes…do you want a chimpanzee?  I can get you a chimpanzee, if you want one for your house.”  He was talking quietly, his face too close to mine, and I could smell the alcohol through his missing teeth.  “I…only want a cat. Only a cat.” was all I could think to say.

“Cats.  I have cats.  Give me 200 CFA for a moto and I will bring you back a cat.”

I chose not to give him any money, but he insisted that I at least come by some time to see what he has to offer.  Whether or not the man actually sells chimpanzees is doubtful, although possible, as there are still apes in the hills just a couple miles outside of Lolodorf.  Still, I took the man’s number and listed him as “chimp seller” in my phone.  One never knows when he might have need of a chimpanzee.

At the orphanage, Albin took us to the house of an old woman who normally feeds the nearby cats.  She was over sixty, with a disorderly house that smelt like, well, cats.  I gathered that she was inviting us in, so I followed her to the living room and took at seat between her and Albin.  Apparently she only spoke Ewondo, which is fairly rare these days in this part of the country.  I know other volunteers who struggle at post with learning the local tongue, where French is only spoken in business or formal situations.  However, French is the certainly the default language in the bigger cities, among most people under 40, and in the South of Cameroon where the traditional culture hasn’t seemed to hold as strongly as elsewhere (I know I just made a bunch of broad generalizations, and maybe later I can try to explain what I mean.  But since I’ve already veered off topic, I’ll just have to drop it in for now).

Albin translated back and forth for us as we discussed kittens.  “She says that this cat had kittens a couple of months ago, and they should be ready to separate with their mother by now.”  She indicated towards a scrawny Calico, one of several I’d noticed walking around the house.  Her fur was nappy and one of her ears was chewed down, but that’s all pretty normal wear and tear for an African cat.  Her babies were climbing in and out of an empty potato sack and seemed healthy enough.  Not knowing what other criteria to go by, I decided to take one.

“Ok, but how much should I pay her? What’s a normal price for a kitten here?” I asked Albin.  He relayed my question, and the cat-lady responded with something that sounded a little vexed.

“She says that she cannot sell the kittens.  It is not customary here to sell kittens.  Instead, you normally trade them for another animal, like a chicken perhaps.”

I did not have any chickens, and I did not know where to find chickens without going on another hunt much like the one that had finally led me here.  For a desperate moment I thought about calling the chimp-seller to see if he had the hook-up.  “What if I pay her for a baby chicken?”  I asked hopefully.  “Say, two thousand CFA?”

I smiled politely while Albin translated into Ewondo and listened to her response.  “She says that is ok.  Come pick up the kitten tomorrow at 6am.”

And so I got the cat–although I’m not sure why I had to wait another night, because I don’t think she was filing any pedigrees or running background checks on me.  When I first brought the cat home, the neighborhood kids were terrified of her, but over time they have transitioned from complete eschewal to a nervous run-around.  Now the braver children will even sneak up behind her and touch her thigh.  It’s not exactly “petting”, but it beats a kick in the ribs.

The other day, a student raised his hand in my 6^th level (≈11 years old) to ask a question during class. The fact that someone offered a question without my usual chiding insistence is pretty remarkable, since my students generally avoid questions like rich white guys avoid taxes. This kid raised his hand during a rather dull in my computer class where I had just finished explaining the difference between an operating system and a regular piece of software such as Microsoft Word. “Yes, you have a question?” I said as encouragingly as I could in a foreign language, unsurprised that someone in the audience would desire more clarification, but surprised that that someone would actually break with tradition and ask for it. Instead, the kid hit me with this curveball:

“Why do Americans have such nice backpacks?” The equal and opposite reaction to my daily, possibly overbearing, reminder that all questions are welcomed and encouraged in my class had just swung back and knocked the words out of my mouth, like one of those Newtonian marble models.

“You, Amanda, and my sister, I mean,” the student specified. Ok, my backpack isn’t too bad, and Amanda had a pretty sturdy REI hiking pack, but…

“You have an American sister?”

“The girl who just moved in with us. Her backpack looks like yours.”

Ah, the Fulbright. I haven’t met her yet, but the word around the water cooler (Lolodorf is populated by humans, after all) is that a new white girl has just arrived in town. I know that she’s moving in with a local family for several months, and I hear she’s here on a Fulbright scholarship to do research on some nearby Pygmy tribes. Beyond that all I know is she brought a good backpack.

Even though this question was completely off topic, I was actually grateful that it was benign and mostly non disruptive. Usually when a student opens his mouth this is not the case. Being a teacher in Cameroon is causing me to change the very fundamentals of who I am. That sounds drastic, but I’m pretty serious. I’ve given it a lot of thought (especially when the power is out; it’s between that and reading books) and the tough reality is that I was just not born with the constitution of a person who successfully teaches at a high school in Cameroon. The archetypal teacher persona here is authoritarian, quick tempered, and fluent in French. None of these are qualities that I brought with me, and try as I might to fake my ability to be rough and intimidating, usually the kids see it as a permeable act. Still, If you don’t make a constant effort to corral your class, the students will simply eat you alive.

To clarify, the teachers are not mean people. I’ve gotten to know most of the staff at the school and they’re all very welcoming towards me. We have “amicals” —teacher meetings—every month, where we eat, drink, mingle, and even have an opt-in raffle for a robust pot of money. They’re all intelligent, hard working, and believe in the value of education, or else they wouldn’t be there. But in class, my colleagues know how to turn it on. I’m learning a lot from them, and on this continent, it’s adapt or die, so my newly stocked French lexicon comes with a disproportionate amount of angry words.

The Cameroonian school system (which, if you’re looking to place blame, is really a direct import of the French education system) consists of a daily shredding of students, and constant attacks on their mental and physical faculties. In the English speaking chapters of my life, I strive to be likable enough, not to make any enemies; basically never to be the guy who begets hushed moans from some corner of the room when I come into a party. I don’t really try to be the focal point of any gathering, because this is usually a polarizing position; I just don’t want anyone to hate me.

This philosophy may work well for landing a job in a cubicle or getting invited to weddings, but it has not worked well for classroom management here. Almost all of the standard practices for shutting students up are either morally or legally prohibited in the US. These include, but are not limited to: having them stand in the corner with their noses touching the wall, having them kneel in front of the chalkboard on their knees for a very long time, brandishing a rubber tube and barking threats inches from their faces (slugging percentages vary), or my seasonal favorite, making troublemakers run a lap around a distant tree during a heavy rain. I’m reticent to use any of these tactics—except the tree one, I really like that one—but by now the students are privy to my reputation as a peacenik, and some see it as their ticket to act like jackasses without fear of serious retribution (after so many laps in the rain, you can’t get much more wet).

Not all the students are bad, it’s just that the plurality wear very well that universal teenage mantra of not-giving-a-fuck. It doesn’t help that most of the classes I teach are junior high-aged. They drag on the progress of those who do want to learn, and they give a bad name to those in the third, most elusive camp; that is those who don’t actively disrupt but don’t really pay any attention either, instead preferring to stare rather lifelessly at the photos of Beyoncé and Lamborghinis which cover their notebooks. By this point I’ve pretty well mentally sorted my students into their respective camps, and my time is divided between policing the first group, teaching the second, and shepherding the third.

It also doesn’t help that I’m terrible at remembering their names. Almost everyone here has a French-Christian first name—lots of Oliviers, Jeans, and Kevins—which they often don’t go by. When doing grades and school stuff, students go by their family names—Ntsama, Ndtoungou, Ngouong, Ngongo, Nguiamba, Monobo, and so on, which are embarrassingly difficult to read off a hand-written roll sheet. I usually delegate this task to the class president, whose name also escapes me, because he never calls on himself. Since my classes are essentially lectures to a large audience, I figured I’d just take the college professor route, who may recognize faces but has little idea which student matches with which name. Now it seems that not knowing very many names has made classroom management harder for me, so I’ve been making a belated effort to call students by their names and commit more of them to memory. Fortunately, not all the names are hard to remember- I have Elvis and Robert Dylan in the same class, as well as Bangbang, who does not pronounce his name the way I wish he did. There’s also Paul Biya, the 13-year old named lovingly named after the 30-year incumbent president.

My favorite class to teach right now is probably my computer class. I was a little worried about looking like a fraud after seeing the syllabus for the higher level computer courses—binary theory, the advantages of different information networks such as WAN vs. MAN, and setting proper margins on Microsoft Word, something I imagine Bill Gates still fusses with. Thankfully, I deal with the youngest kids, and our work with Microsoft Word is limited to typing one’s name and, optionally, what they ate for dinner. Lolodorf High has a great computer lab, which has twelve functional computers as long as there is power in town (still no generator, but I’m working on it). Unfortunately, there are 68 students in my computer class, most of whom do not have computers at home; several have never used a mouse. As with English, the subtle oddities of using a PC surface when teaching to others who have no existing mental framework of the subject. I can’t explain why you click one time to open the Start Menu, hover your mouse without clicking to navigate the stacked layers in the drop down menus, and finally double click to open a saved file or program; you just do. Thus the first fifteen minutes of every class is spent spelunking through the Start Menu to find and open Microsoft Word, a process we’ve done weekly since I started teaching the class but still troubles all but the brightest. Once it’s open, the real magic begins. And I mean that kind of seriously—you know the scenes in the early Harry Potter movies where the kids are in class, experimenting with some new spell but creating mostly mayhem? The teacher, being the only one with any degree of mastery over the process, walks around briskly; correcting, uprighting, thawing, or extinguishing all imaginable errors. Well, sorry for the lame analogy, but that’s how it goes in there. Sixty-eight eager but mostly clueless first year kids, me, and several gigs of mayhem. At one computer, six students have managed to turn the text purple in size 6 wingdings; at the next station, someone will have unintentionally inserted a hyperlink to Jiffy Lube. One thing they all do well is type in ALL CAPS. I HAVE TOLD THEM THAT WHEN YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS, IT IS VERY ANNOYING TO THE READER. IT IS LIKE YOU ARE SHOUTING AT THEM. WORSE, THEY     PUT    ABOUT    SEVEN     OR    EIGHT     SPACES      BETWEEN        EACH    WORD,   SO       EACH      SENTENCE    ENDS     UP       LIKE       THIS. I don’t know why they think this is a good idea, but they must’ve picked it up somewhere, because literally every one of them prefers to write this way. It’s not even consistent number of spaces, its just after each WORD they jam the space bar an indiscreet number of times until they’re content. At this point, they know what I’m going to tell them—

“Stop that. How many spaces between each word?”

“One, Sir”

“Yes. And how many capital letters in each sentence?”

“Only one….Sir”

— but they still try and SLIP IT PAST ME AS IF I WON’T NOTICE. A couple of the savvier students even shrink the font size AND KEEP THE CAPS LOCK INTACT, AS THOUGH THIS WERE A REASONABLE SUBSTITUTE. I don’t know why they detest the lower case, but I think it has something to do with the way my neighbors yell for each other outside every morning at 5:30, and the volume at which they leave their TVs during dinner. Noise is power.

We’re reaching the end of the 6 weeks period, and I have to test them on something. I’m thinking I’ll let them work in groups of twos and have them turn on the computer, open a Word document, type one sentence (with appropriate spacing), and save it to the desktop. Hopes are high, but realistic. As long as I don’t get too many breathy shouts, I’ll be pleased.   

The box of spaghetti I just ate is stamped with an expiration date of May 2009. It was found cached in a footlocker in my room by my predecessor’s predecessor, but being wheat pasta, throwing it out would have been criminal. My roommate, who has been here two years and established herself in my eyes as a very credible cook, has assured me that eating things like this is perfectly normal here. I could also tell she was salivating over the prospect of wheat pasta after sustaining herself mostly off low-grade bags of Asian imported noodles whose label probably translates as “cheap shit”. As I poured the spaghetti into boilng water, I had to salute its storied history. This is a pasta that has not only known three American tenants, but has been around long enough to recall the rise of Twitter and the presidency of George Bush Jr. It passed the smell check, though, so it was good enough for us to eat. Luckily, the box was huge, but we didn’t stop there. We chopped up pretty much everything we had in the kitchen—green beans, peppers, onions, even some lime—because we were starving. It’s been a solid twenty four hours since our last square meal, and the time between was filled with lots of hiking, awkward handshakes, and grilled rats.

Sunday afternoon, the three local volunteers—Ben, Amanda, and I—made a trip out to see a Pygmy village about 10 miles outside of Lolodorf. Amanda is leaving the country in a couple weeks, and this had been one of the last things on her bucket list. This week, she called a local, a friendly woman named Florence who was born a village very near the Pygmy camp and knew the area well. It was arranged that on Sunday, she, her husband, and the three of us would make the trip and spend the night, in order to get “the real experience” (not my words). On Sunday afternoon, they showed up in traditional African style, that is to say, four hours late and unapologetic.

The first leg of the trip was a twenty-minute ride out to where the trail begins. Our fleet of motos cut through beautiful forests and a number of tiny villages with unpronounceable names for non-native tongues, except for one called “Cité de Vatican”, where I imagine the Pope summers. We arrived in front of a small boutique in a village called “Ngoyang”, more or less, which was the last pit stop before the hour hike through the jungle into Pygmy town. The three of us Americans were armed for the trek with knee high rubber boots, backpacks, equal quantities of water and bug spray, headlamps that made me feel like a dork even out here, and long sleeve shirts in spite of the thick heat. Our Cameroonian counterparts carried small handbags and wore flip flops.

Although the other four were well accustomed, this hike was the first time I’d ever really gone out “in bush” in Africa. I was hoping against reason that on the way we would pass a family of elephants, or at least couple small primates. Unfortunately, we didn’t pass anything big enough for me to take a satisfying picture of, but at one point a yellow beetle did manage to fly underneath my glasses and hover between the lens and my eyeball. Still, the scope and breadth of plant life was amazing. Tree trunks as tall and wide as their natural enemy, the factory smokestack, rose into the foggy sky and blocked out most of the sunlight. Florence and her husband pointed to various vines and fruits lining the trail and explained how Pygmies have used them as traditional medicines for centuries. The path was narrow but remarkably well kept, establishing the Pygmies’ reputation not only as resourceful doctors but also accomplished housekeepers.

After more than an hour, we reached a clearing not much bigger than a football field and lined by about ten square, mud block houses. A group of small children were playing near the point where our trail emerged into their encampment, and I quickly learned the easiest way to distinguish Pygmy children from a typical African child. While most of the kids in Lolodorf, Yaoundé, or pretty much any city I’ve visited so far like to yell the color of my skin at me and share a laugh with their small friends in celebration of their quick wit, Pygmy kids did the opposite: they stared, horrified, at our white trio, the way you would look at a group of otherwise normal people whose hair was on fire. None of us knew any of their language, and our attempts to wave and “bonjour” them made them run for their shacks.

The tribe was overall welcoming, if not extremely timid, but they loosened up once we sat down and our guides told them we weren’t simply tourists, but rather volunteers who lived and worked nearby. Their disposition further increased when Florence suggested we open the gifts we had brought for them. When people come to visit Pygmy tribes, it is expected that you’ll bring some gifts in exchange for their willingness to be looked at. I was completely OK with the concept of this exchange, but two days before our trip, the Pygmies had explicitly asked for the following: twenty kilos of frozen fish, a couple giant sacks of rice, three cartons of Gold Seal cigarettes, and 20,000 CFA (roughly $40) of individual whiskey sachets. These goods had been delivered earlier in the day by moto, but the Pygmies had thoughtfully waited to unwrap their gifts until we arrived to demonstrate the gratitude and rehearsed surprise.

Now, inside the primary hut, the majority of the adults (which were no more than twelve) busily divvied up equal portions of fish and rice, and snatched up packs of cigarettes for immediate consumption. As for the whiskey, most of them eagerly ripped into one or two of the sachets, but hundreds more were stored away for the inevitable party to come.

That evening, the five of us visitors sat on a makeshift bench erected for our arrival, eating chicken and plantains Florence had brought from Lolodorf and prepared in advance. A couple of the Pygmies sat outside near us, just watching and not doing much of anything else. Truthfully, this is likely what they would be doing anyway, except tonight they had strangers to occupy their gazes. Although none of them seemed to speak French (if any of them did, they didn’t make an effort to let us know), the presumed leader, a young, strong, but short man who wore an Italian football jersey and ancient jeans, chatted with Florence’s husband in local tongue. Apparently, their village has been in this location for about 50 years. In the past, the pygmies resisted permanent settlements and instead roamed through the bush, but lately their nomadic lifestyle has become impossible to sustain. Today they mainly farm for subsistence, as well as hunt at night for their own food and to sell whatever is left to nearby villages. As for their legendary appearance, yeah, they’re pretty short, but not at the dwarfish levels one might presume. Most of the men were maybe a little over five feet, the women less than. Another feature that distinguished them from other nearby Africans were their faces. Aside from having recognizable noses and bone structures, they all had an intangible difference to them. They all looked tired.

As I’ve told people who have asked, Cameroon, especially my part of Cameroon, is not really National Geographic’s Africa. Blessed with abundant natural minerals and oil, good soil, and sea access, Cameroon has more fortunate and stable than most of its arid and landlocked neighbors since the colonial era ended. No doubt Cameroon’s got its problems, but thankfully extreme malnutrition and starvation aren’t major issues in most parts of the country (again, I say this in comparison to other African countries).  The Pygmies, as isolationists, do not mingle much with the Cameroonian economy and are therefore not very tethered to it. Without getting too preachy or speculative, it’s safe to say that the last century hasn’t been very kind to their lifestyle, and it was reflected in their eyes. The way Lolodorf children look upon your foil wrapped granola snack is primarily out of curiosity. Here, that look was different.

As we ate in the dusk, a couple pygmy women came out of the main hut and said something to Florence. Afterwards, she translated their conversation for us. They had said they were cooking dinner, and wanted to make us something traditional to show their appreciation for our gifts. Florence smiled, as she was familiar enough with Westerners to anticipate our reaction to what she was about to say next. “They’re grilling a rat for you.”

The chunks of meat they brought out honestly didn’t look that terrible. I mean, you’d know you weren’t looking at a plate of carnitas, but the meat didn’t clearly identify itself as rat carcass, either. The smell, on the other hand, offered some clues.
In hindsight, I guess I attribute it to white guilt, but Amanda and I tried a bite. It wasn’t very good, but I’ll leave it at that. I remembered watching 1 a.m. reruns of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern during college, and recalled his advice to “always try everything at least twice.” After the second bite I was able to authoritatively announce to myself that rat sucks, and close the book on the matter.

When the thick rain beats down on my neighbor’s tin roof, it sounds like popcorn.  Luckily, my house is a little more modernized, and therefore more insulated against the African storm that introduced itself shortly upon my arrival in Lolodorf yesterday morning.  Still, the organic orchestra keeps me from focusing on much else.  The torrent hasn’t really stopped, save for a few intermissions; a pause in the fury where the dark cloud draws in its next big breath and prepares to belch more rain on the helpless below.  I’m sitting at my window, eating fried potatoes.  The power has been out since this morning so there’s little else to do than watch the fog roll over the nearby hills, or mountains, or whatever these lumps classify as.  I wonder if this is the rainy season everyone says is coming.  I can’t imagine otherwise.

To my right, I see the neighbor’s door swing open and Yvette, my very welcoming neighbor, darts across our shared patio.  It’s one of those rains where you feel threatened even under cover.  Yvette has come to my door to offer a plate of stewed beans and potatoes.  I’m not very hungry, but I accept out of politeness.  Back inside, the lights return for only a minute, and then once again flee the storm.  I eat the entire plate.

Overstarched and disconnected, I agree to myself that I have no excuse to put off sweeping my floor.  I see Cameroonians sweeping all the time, in defiance of the dust that finds its way into places it never should.  It’s no secret to anyone that their floors will be made dirty again in a depressingly short time, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone from manually dusting every corner of every room for the fleeting satisfaction of a proper house.  One thing you have to admire about Africans is their dedication to cleanliness.  They hate having a dirty floor, dirty clothes, or a dirty bike.  To an outsider, it seems fruitless knowing that there’s a war of attrition between them and the unrelenting dirt outside.  Admiring their persistence, I’m inspired grab the hand bristle and corral what I can towards my front door.  Ten minutes later a significant amount of dust, soot, and bugs has accumulated at my door, ready to be banished, when I notice out the window a stranger cutting through the raindrops and approaching my stoop.

I pretend not to notice, but seconds later he rings the doorbell.  Maybe it’s another neighbor, here to offer more potatoes.  I open the door to greet a tall man wearing black plants, a black long sleeve shirt, and small glasses.

“Bonsoir”

“Bonswarh”  I cough back.

“I am here with the proviseur.  If you are free he would like you to join us.” He says in baritone French, over the rain.  He motions up the driveway to a black car idling on the side of the road.  Earlier that day, I had taped a hand written note to the proviseur’s office at the school asking for a meeting to discuss this school year.

“Yes, I am free.”  I respond.  I was shirtless, wearing only gym shorts, and the pile of dirt still lay between us.  “I need just a minute.”

I shut the door and quickly put on pants and a clean shirt while the man waits outside.  I choose to leave the dirt mound for now, rather than sweep it over the threshold in front of present company.  Stepping over the mound, I exit my new house in Lolodorf, lock my door, and join the unknown man through the storm into the unknown car to head off to an unknown location.  This is Cameroon, after all.

My escort runs around to the drivers seat and I hop in the back.  Two other men are inside the car.  The one in the front passenger seat turns around, and I recognize him as the proviseur that I met on my site visit to Lolodorf two months ago.  The other man, in the back seat with me, is unfamiliar.  He is wearing a white button down shirt and large, gold-rimmed glasses that crown his bald head.

The proviseur shakes my hand and reintroduces himself.  “And he,” the proviseur says, gesturing to the man sitting in the back with me, “is now your new boss, the le nouveau proviesuer du Lycee de Lolodorf.”

In Cameroon, teachers and school staff are employees of the government, and can be affected— relocated anywhere in the country, at any time— by government decree.  Two months ago I met the man in the front seat, my boss at the time, and we discussed what I would teach and the role I would have at the school.  Now he is telling me he has been affected to Kribi, the beach town an hour or two south of here.  His replacement, and my new boss, smiles next to me.  “Welcome to Lolodorf.  Would you like to join us for a beer?”

The rain is still coming down as the car pulls over off the main drag in centre-ville.  Four car doors swing open to reveal four umbrellas, which scramble out and reconvene under the awning of the bar.  As we seat ourselves the waiter comes over and greets my hosts as friends.  They order three 33’s and look to me.

“Make it four, please.”

The former proviseur gets up from the table to search for snacks.  I turn to my new boss to ask him about himself.  He tells me he was born and raised here in Lolodorf.  He was most recently a philosophy teacher until being promoted this summer to proviseur of the lycee.  I seize the opportunity to build a conversation.

“I love philosophy.  I took some courses in college and it’s really fascinating.”

“Ah, yes.  Who do you enjoy reading?”

Shit.  Time to act real.

“I read a lot by Hobbes and Rousseau.  Mostly the political stuff.  I also really liked Kant.”

We talk about Kant for a little bit and I do my best to recall what I’d learned in college.  Suddenly those years feel more distant than ever.  Then I realize, what was I expecting it to feel like?

At some point, Kant’s idea about world government was brought up.  According to Kant, who wrote over 100 years ago, the world was on an inevitable trajectory towards one world government.

“I don’t know if it’s a good trend or a bad one, but I think it’s natural.  The world gets smaller and governments get bigger.  Look at Europe.  It used to be a bunch of kingdoms and small states.  Now it’s almost all a part of the EU.  It doesn’t move backwards.”

“Yes, but this is Africa.  Africa is very different.  We here are too different to be subjected to one body of laws.  Consider, my son, have you seen the pygmies yet?”

“No, but I hear they are around here.”

“They are.  And their lives are very different from what I, or especially you, know.  We cannot expect them to fall into an African Union with the rest of the continent.”

“Yes, that is true,” I say, carefully.  “But perhaps they must.  They are independent, yet they still live in Cameroon.  They already have to follow rules they didn’t write.”

“Kant’s idea’s were interesting, but I don’t think that will happen here.  Africa is too diverse, and Kant wrote as a white man, a Westerner.”

“Maybe.  I hope you’re right.  But I do notice that the world moves in one direction, towards….” I interlock my fingers to indicate a French word I do not know, the idea being assimilation.  “Nous sommes ensembles.” The unofficial mantra of Africa, we are together, seems a propos.  “Whether you believe we came from Adam, or evolved from something, either way our origin is the same.  Humans are not that different from each other.  We want to work together, to form communities.  Voila, globalization.”

The proviseur didn’t see it the way I did, but in fact I have seen evidence of my argument everywhere, and well outside the realm of politics.  When someone like me comes to Africa, one expects, more or less, a National Geographic program.  Deep in the bush that purity may still exist, but only where the Coca Cola trucks can’t find a parking spot.  Development, it seems, is a double-edged sword.  Every car needs a Texaco fuel station to keep driving, and every TV broadcasts CANAL and France 24.  Hell, my host brother in Bafia knew more MTV songs than I did, and by a large margin.  It’s great to see Africa develop, but development here seems to be synonymous with Westernization.  Culture, economics, politics; we are together, and it’s survival of the fittest.

I snap back to reality as the former proviseur, now the principal of Kribi, sits back down.  He has ordered a platter of beef and onions, and I am very grateful.  We each grab a toothpick and fall back on small talk.  The fourth man, the only one whose role I haven’t yet identified, reveals himself as the treasurer of the lycee.  All money spent goes through him.  Given what I’m about to ask, he’s a good friend to make.

The bar overlooks the Likoundje river, which runs through the core of Lolodorf.  As the men speak quickly and colloquially in African French, my attention is pulled to the family washing clothes on the riverbank near the small rapids.  I wonder: which is better?  Hand washing by the riverside, or a secondhand American made washer and dryer? Which one leads to a richer Africa?  I don’t know.

I catch myself in the habit of zoning out and snap back to the table.  My proviseur has just finished his second beer.  I remember something else I learned in college, during a psych course: the part of the brain that controls feelings of happiness is most active after two beers.  Now is the time to ask.

I change the conversation, somewhat unnaturally in my awkward French.  “I understand you want me to teach computers here, too.”  I say.  “I’d like to do that.  Computer skills are important.  It is the future, n’est-ce pas?”

“Yes.  We were hoping that you would.”  The proviseur smiles.  Having already visited, I knew that the computer lab he had inherited housed fifteen working PCs and was in need of an instructor.

The thing was, Lolodorf had had a computer teacher.  A Peace Corps Volunteer, in fact, assigned specifically to do so.  The volunteer was a very qualified computer specialist, but had found conditions here unworkable.  Power is chronically unreliable around here, and it turns out that teaching computers is difficult in the midst of a week-long blackout.  After several months, the volunteer felt frustrated by the lack of progress, as well as a number of other reasons best left undiscussed on a public blog, and requested a transfer.  My understanding is that Lolodorf asked for another IT volunteer, but somehow ended up with me, an English teacher, as that volunteer’s replacement.  There may have been other factors I’m unaware of, but I don’t try to hard to make sense of it.  Learning to work within both Africa and the Peace Corps means you just have to roll with things.

“I have spoken with the last volunteer here, the computer teacher, and he says that teaching here was very hard for him because of the frequent black outs.  We both think it is necessary for the school to buy a power generator.  Without one, I don’t think I will be able to teach computers.”

I had just laid my first test out for the public education system of Lolodorf.  I know how much generators cost here, and I also know the school fees each student pays.  If my numbers are accurate, then I don’t see why the school can’t afford a generator.  The problem is, money in Cameroonian schools has a well-known tendency to…disappear.  I’m new to Lolodorf and I realize that is a very general statement, so I won’t say much more on that topic for now.  [I’m sorry— I know that last bit as well as a few other things I’ve written here are vague and possibly incomprehensible to people who aren’t familiar with the situation here.  I try to be as clear and descriptive as possible, but sometimes that is hard to do without risking reproach later— especially with the way computers and Internet access are spreading rapidly over here.  It’s great for Africa, but bad news indeed for my WordPress.]

I now had the attention of all three men at the table.  My old proviseur, the one who had been moved to Kribi, seemed in favor of the idea.  My new boss was more skeptical about the feasibility, costs, and ability to sustain the fuel.  The treasurer just listened.  The three of them began to discuss the idea in their own conversation.  That is to say, they turned to each other and spoke at a speed of French at which I could only comprehend subjects and phrases, with little hope of injecting anything to the discussion.  After several minutes, the new proviseur turned to me.

“Mister Barrett.  OK.  We want the students to learn computers.  It is very important, yes.  We will get a generator for the school.  We promise to have one by October.”

“Great,” I smiled.  “Then I would love to teach them.”

I had decided upon coming to Lolodorf that pushing for a generator at the school would be my first goal.  Although I’m officially here as an English teacher, my job duties are in fact much broader.  While some volunteers stick pretty rigidly to teaching, for others it falls into a secondary position as they work more with the community doing health, education, or organizational projects.  It’s really up to the volunteer the amount and variety of work that you do here.

My ultimate goal would be to get all the computers online.  Africa, like the rest of the world, is moving quickly in this direction and I’d love to see Lolodorf be a model school for its computer lab.  It already has fifteen computers, a hefty total by national standards.  Step two is securing a steady power source, and right now I had a promise to do so, albeit a shaky one.  These are the promises I’ve been warned to be wary of, and I won’t call it a victory until the generator is humming behind the school.