In case you haven't heard, I had mango flies. Or rather, mango fly larvae.
Mango flies lay eggs in damp laundry. Ideally, you should iron or wait three days for the eggs to day before wearing your clean clothes. If not, the eggs hatch and the larvae burrow into your skin.
After a few days they burrow out again.
Thursday I found three mosquito bite-like bumps which turned into angry, red, scabby sores. Mango fly larvae, yay! The PC doctor removed them today after injecting a mild anesthetic and slicing open my skin.
Yum. Go eat some KFC now, yeah.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Gardening
5/30/2007
I refuse to waste any more money cooking good things for Cameroonians. I spend a bit of money at the market in Yaounde on eggplants, zucchini, cucumbers, apples. After constantly being asked when I’ll cook them a certain dish, my friends stare at it, push it around on the plate, then ask for salt.
I finally told one of them, who said if all whites ate like I do he could never live in Europe, that he was indeed too “villageois” to leave Africa.
Exams
This week students all across Cameroon are composing the Baccalaureat. It is required for graduation from high school. It takes five days, usually comprising 2 subjects per day. There are separate “series”, either math and physics, math and life sciences, or philosophy and languages, in a general high school, so subjects are of different lengths and coefficients (a method of weighting). This morning I supervised a four hour long math section for the life sciences students. Yikes. It reminds me of AP exams.
Next week is the Probatoire, for students in the next to last year of high school. They must pass in order to move to the next class.
Afterwards is the BEPC, for 3eme students. It’s not required to pass to the next grade, and many Cameroonians quit school after receiving their BEPC. In terms of necessity for social mobility and employment, you might compare it to a high school diploma in the US.
Cameroonian cucumbers (or “mer de concombre” versus “sauce pistache”)
Cameroonians cultivate a type of cucumber that is small and round, like a cantaloupe. Instead of eating these cucumbers, they cut them open, dry the seeds, remove the shells, then crush them into a paste.
The paste can then be steamed with dried fish into a tofu-like substance called “mer de concombre” which is eaten with taro or nyams.
The paste can also be dissolved into oil and used as a sauce, with meat or fish, and served with couscous or on rice, depending on consistency. For an unexplainable reason, it is called “sauce pistache” despite the fact that pistachios are not used, cultivated, or even known in Cameroon.
Real cucumbers, the long green ones that you would recognize, are available in Yaoundé. I serve them in vinegar, chilled. Or chopped in a pasta salad, only to have Cameroonians pick them out and ask what the hell these are.
Bamenda carpenters
The Northwest province of Cameroon is Anglophone, and its jungles export a lot of high quality wood. Naturally quite a few of its residents are carpenters. Bamenda is the capital of the NW province so most people think of all Anglophones as Bamendamen. (If you know the Bamilike, you might say the Bamenda are Bamilike who speak Pidgin, and I think the two ethnicities are closely related.)
Everyone knows the Bamenda are dishonest and violent. The Bamenda in Bokito are all carpenters and they are all cheats. I have now worked with three different Bamenda carpenters and they are the same! They take your money and say the bed, armoire, bookcase, etc will be finished in X amount of days. You return in X amount of days to find no work has been done. The carpenter complains of power cuts and rain. He tells you to come back in a week.
A week later he tells you to come back in three days.
Three days later he demands more money for the “machine” to cut wood.
Soon enough two months have passed and you threaten to take him to the gendarmes. “Neighbor, I beg, I’m so busy and I have so many problems. I’ll finish this week.”
Three months after you originally asked for your item, he brings it to your house on a pushcart.
My failed garden
I dug up my back yard two weeks ago to plant the okra seeds my grandparents sent. Each night I watered them as necessary. About four days later, seedlings appeared. I cleaned out weeds and stray grass, waiting for them to grow big and produce all the tasty pods of okra I could fry.
Then the rain drowned them all.
I refuse to waste any more money cooking good things for Cameroonians. I spend a bit of money at the market in Yaounde on eggplants, zucchini, cucumbers, apples. After constantly being asked when I’ll cook them a certain dish, my friends stare at it, push it around on the plate, then ask for salt.
I finally told one of them, who said if all whites ate like I do he could never live in Europe, that he was indeed too “villageois” to leave Africa.
Exams
This week students all across Cameroon are composing the Baccalaureat. It is required for graduation from high school. It takes five days, usually comprising 2 subjects per day. There are separate “series”, either math and physics, math and life sciences, or philosophy and languages, in a general high school, so subjects are of different lengths and coefficients (a method of weighting). This morning I supervised a four hour long math section for the life sciences students. Yikes. It reminds me of AP exams.
Next week is the Probatoire, for students in the next to last year of high school. They must pass in order to move to the next class.
Afterwards is the BEPC, for 3eme students. It’s not required to pass to the next grade, and many Cameroonians quit school after receiving their BEPC. In terms of necessity for social mobility and employment, you might compare it to a high school diploma in the US.
Cameroonian cucumbers (or “mer de concombre” versus “sauce pistache”)
Cameroonians cultivate a type of cucumber that is small and round, like a cantaloupe. Instead of eating these cucumbers, they cut them open, dry the seeds, remove the shells, then crush them into a paste.
The paste can then be steamed with dried fish into a tofu-like substance called “mer de concombre” which is eaten with taro or nyams.
The paste can also be dissolved into oil and used as a sauce, with meat or fish, and served with couscous or on rice, depending on consistency. For an unexplainable reason, it is called “sauce pistache” despite the fact that pistachios are not used, cultivated, or even known in Cameroon.
Real cucumbers, the long green ones that you would recognize, are available in Yaoundé. I serve them in vinegar, chilled. Or chopped in a pasta salad, only to have Cameroonians pick them out and ask what the hell these are.
Bamenda carpenters
The Northwest province of Cameroon is Anglophone, and its jungles export a lot of high quality wood. Naturally quite a few of its residents are carpenters. Bamenda is the capital of the NW province so most people think of all Anglophones as Bamendamen. (If you know the Bamilike, you might say the Bamenda are Bamilike who speak Pidgin, and I think the two ethnicities are closely related.)
Everyone knows the Bamenda are dishonest and violent. The Bamenda in Bokito are all carpenters and they are all cheats. I have now worked with three different Bamenda carpenters and they are the same! They take your money and say the bed, armoire, bookcase, etc will be finished in X amount of days. You return in X amount of days to find no work has been done. The carpenter complains of power cuts and rain. He tells you to come back in a week.
A week later he tells you to come back in three days.
Three days later he demands more money for the “machine” to cut wood.
Soon enough two months have passed and you threaten to take him to the gendarmes. “Neighbor, I beg, I’m so busy and I have so many problems. I’ll finish this week.”
Three months after you originally asked for your item, he brings it to your house on a pushcart.
My failed garden
I dug up my back yard two weeks ago to plant the okra seeds my grandparents sent. Each night I watered them as necessary. About four days later, seedlings appeared. I cleaned out weeds and stray grass, waiting for them to grow big and produce all the tasty pods of okra I could fry.
Then the rain drowned them all.
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