THE WISE FROG DOESN’T PLAY IN HOT WATER

Tags

Africa, Cameroon, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, USAID

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chad working on a USAID funded project, I’d spent a good bit of time in the USAID office in N’Djamena. Also we mixed a lot socially. One of the senior USAID guys and maybe the best of the breed, Ed Costello, had been to my house for pig roasts, and I had been to his house to watch recordings of football games. So my interview with him near the end of my three years of service went smoothly. At the end he said that they probably had something for me lined up. He smiled, “But George, don’t go out and buy a cadillac yet.” So as soon as I was a free man again, I was hired on a short term personal services contract to figure out where the money they’d spent on a big multi-donor agriculture project had actually gone. Apparently they didn’t have a clue, or at least they pretended not to have one. I suspected that it was a bureaucratic hot potato thing. That project was a complicated mess and way too far gone to rectify. The folks back in Foggy Bottom must have demanded accountability or closure or something, and nobody wanted to have their names attached to that final ugly post-mortem report.

Since the project was potentially career tarnishing, the responsibility for supervising it had drifted down to the least common denominator, Stephen (don’t remember his real name). Stephen was the youngest and least experienced USAID direct hire employee in Chad. Let’s define that further to just one of the least experienced human beings anywhere period. He had spent some years as a monk in India (I think). I believe he even mentioned having taken a vow of silence for awhile. He was a likeable guy, academically smart, who exuded pleasantness and calmness and blissful ignorance about all things Chadian. Unfortunately he had become infamous in Foreign Service circles when he’d had some special honey shipped to him through the diplomatic pouch. A jar had broken, and from one stop to another the package had leaked the sticky stuff. Apparently the pouch had made several stops along the way to Chad, each one generating an angry cable. The ambassador was not amused. The point here is that sending Stephen up to the project site in remote Bol would have just been cruel. So they hired me, a rough and tumble well driller with language skills who knew his way around up there.

I spent a few weeks in the USAID office going over all the project files and learning to navigate my way through that bureaucratic sea. If that sounds like an exorbitant amount of time, then you have no idea how much paper a USAID project can generate in four years or so. USAID might be the preeminent bureaucracy in the entire US Government. If not it’s a contender. Until Jack Anderson wrote about it, they had an actual official job title: The Administrative Assistant to The Assistant Administrator for Administration, United States Agency for International Development. I mean when an agency’s “handbook” surpasses twenty-five volumes, that pretty much tells the story. We wells vols used to goof on USAID. When we wrote the subsequently approved two million dollar extension to our current project, we stated in it that once approved the first thing we needed to do was to go out and take a PISS (a pre-installation site survey).

A word about the Ag project. The polders are finger-shaped valleys at the edges of Lake Chad. Lake Chad has no observable outlets but it remains fresh water. It floods in the winter months when the accumulated water from earlier rains much farther south finally reach it via the Chari River. The river pours fresh water into the lake, and the higher salt content stagnent water is pushed to the fringes, flooding the polders. When the lake recedes again, shallow pools are left in the polders to evaporate during the dry season. There are also other ways the lake sheds salt, like natron formation and harvesting, that are not relevant here. Since the water table in the polders is near the surface, pumping up fresh water and flooding them to desalinate them if needed is not a big deal. Then build a little earthen damn across the usually narrow entrance to keep the lake from flooding it again, and you have a very fertile easily irrigated little valley. Traditionally when irrigation in Chad’s hot dry climate built the salt content of the soil back up, the locals would break down the damn and flood the polders again. The polders have been used for local agriculture for thousands of years, however up to that point never on a grand mechanized scale.

When that huge multi-donor project was conceived, in most years for a few months the open water reached Bol during the fall and winter, and then barges could navigate the lake and river between N’Djamena and Bol. So the idea was to grow wheat on a large scale and send it by barge down to N’Djamena to be processed and turned into delicious baguettes. Seemed like a great idea. Then the great Sahelian drought of the early to mid seventies hit just as the project was getting underway. The open water no longer came within miles of Bol, and never has since, even in wetter years. Lake Chad shrank. And tropical vegetation soon filled the void. Given the significant infrastructure investment and the lure of the fertile polders, they looked for solutions. For years at great effort and expense they kept a channel open through miles of vegetation, but the barge thing never panned out. So they decided to grow vegetables in the polders and ship them by truck over sand pistes (just tracks in the sand) and rough roads. Vegetables sold to expats at the project store in N’Djamena generated cash. Useful stuff cash.

In the beginning of Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra Expedition, he writes of his trip from N’Djamena to Bol to study the papyrus boats on Lake Chad as a great harrowing adventure, fraught with danger. I found his hyperbole amusing. At one point I almost fell out of my seat laughing as he described his acute anxiety at being surrounded by “swarthy bedouins.” He was talking about Kanembous. In N’Djamena the street vendors carrying bright colored towels and scarfs on their heads who insistently tried to sell you cigarettes and heart-shaped sunglasses were Kanembous. Also Kanembou ladies were renowned for friendliness. En brousse I found them to be generous, hospitable, and quick to laugh, but stubborn at times. Once a bunch of young Kanembou men piled into the bed of my pickup and refused to budge until I drove them to a not too distant village for a wedding. A fellow wells vol compared them to the Hekawi Indian tribe in the TV show F-Troop. Honestly I never for one moment felt threatened by Kanembous, annoyed at times, but never threatened. I’m sure they found me annoying at times too. Anyway a trip to Bol was just a day at the office for me, albeit a long dirty one. I must have made that trip thirty/forty times. Still and all, it was difficult enough that I knew it couldn’t make economic sense to ship perishable vegetables that way.

Other than some cement and construction materials which went into the project infrastructure in the early days, the USAID part of the project consisted of underwriting the costs of improving and maintaining roads in and around the polders. The Chadian governing agency, the World Bank and the UN were really the major players. So it was my job to find out if the USAID money had gone and was still going where it was supposed to go. USAID did ask me to try and find out exactly what their construction materials had been used for. However, short of any authority to access the files of the other project participants, that was a fool’s errand, water under the bridge, and I ignored it. Within two days up in Bol I had confirmed what I’d suspected from the files, that the USAID polder road maintenance funds were financing nearly all of the operating costs of transporting vegetables to N’Djamena by truck, including fuel, vehicle repairs, even driver salaries. I stayed up in Bol for two weeks anyway. I had friends up there, fresh vegetables aplenty, and as long as you had shelter from the mosquito swarms coming off the lake at night, Bol wasn’t a bad place. I was in no hurry, earning some real money was nice.

One of my friends, Mike Bouchard, was a PCV mechanic in Bol working on the ag project, and whatever else they asked him to do. He was the youngest vol in Chad, and very unusual for Peace Corps didn’t have a college degree. Apparently he had been in college and had been questioning if it was really the thing for him at that time, sitting around in a dorm with some buddies (maybe drinking, maybe stoned, I don’t remember him telling me that part), when they saw a Peace Corps recruiting ad on TV that enigmatically asked if the glass they were showing was half full or half empty, call this number to find out. He called. The recruiter never answered the question, but she did ask Mike if he had any skills. Mike figured that electric guitar probably didn’t count, so he answered with his other main skill. “Well, I’m a diesel mechanic.” There was a pause. “Hold on, let me get your information.”

Once during what passed for the rainy season up there, when Mike had been in Bol over a year, I stopped the landrover on top of a dune, and we looked out over an expanse of small dunes sparsely covered in light green cram cram grass. Cram cram is a burr grass, and where even cram cram no longer grows is considered by some botanists as the demarcation of the true desert. If we gazed at the most distant dunes, they appeared to be totally covered in a light green fuzz, but closer you could clearly see the sand beneath. Mike turned to me: “It kind of reminds me of the Shenandoah Valley.” After I took that in, I replied, “You know Mike, perhaps you should consider going home for a visit.”

Mike worked with David Girven, one of the true Chad legends. David had been a Chad vol back in the early days when Peace Corps did fun things, like teach new vols the wrong language and dump them without a structured job in isolated villages. Psychovacs were not uncommon in those days. David had stayed on in Chad working for the Chadian Government agency running the ag project as a mechanic. He fixed everything that needed fixing, and invented things like a plowing shield to put on the bow of the boat that cleared the papyrus blocking the channel to open water. He had a Chadian family, lived in a humble mud brick compound, and was bigger than life, a Chadian Jeremiah Johnson, liked and respected by Chadians all over that region. He was a humble, compassionate, and generous man.

Since a good portion of Bol used our wells, we vols were up there fairly frequently. Many a night we’d camped out in David’s compound, huddled under our mosquito nets. You didn’t walk around much in Bol at night. The massed whining of mosquitos coming in off the lake at sunset compared to a big jet preparing for takeoff. One night David stood outside the nets and held out his bare arm until no skin was visible, just mosquitos. David was not loquacious by nature, but it was a real treat when we could coax one of the old stories out of him.

So after a couple of weeks I went back to N’Djamena, spent another couple weeks in the USAID office slugging through the bureaucracy, and then turned in my final report. I was still being paid to hang around while people digested my report, in case they had any questions. The initial reactions had been favorable, and I had hopes USAID would find something else for me to do. At that moment all hell broke loose in N’Djamena. It was a civil war, fighting in the streets, a total breakdown in order. Leaving the war stories to be told separately, after several days when the fighting had diminished enough to risk it, I made my way out to the airport. All non-essential personnel were being evacuated to Yaounde, Cameroon, and from there to the states. Baggage was limited to two suitcases per person. Apparently some of the “essential” personnel decided that my language and practical skills could come in handy, so I was asked to stay on and help with logistics, first and foremost the loose packing of abandoned homes. I accepted.

IDRIS AND THE RIVER PEOPLE

Tags

Africa, Bagirmi tribe, Cameroon, Capitaine Fish, Chad, Fable, French, Slave Raiders

This story takes place sometime in the nineteen twenties. It is about a young fisherman named Idris who lived in a village on the east bank of the Chari River between the city of Fort Lamy a little ways to the south and Lake Chad much farther to the north. A member of the Bagirmi tribe, his family was poor because his father had lost an arm. They depended on Idris who was an excellent fisherman. His best friend Moussa came from a wealthier family. In fact Moussa’s family was distantly related to Sultan Moustapha of the Bagirmi Tribe. Most days, especially in the dry season when the river was shallow everywhere but in the very center, Idriss and Moussa would go out on the river in a fine pirogue that belonged to Moussa’s father Aboubakar and try to net or spear fish in the shallows. Aboubakar spent his days tending his herds of cattle and goats and riding his handsome horse. Idris’s family owned an old leaky pirouge that he used only in Moussa’s absence, for fear of it sinking. Their prize catch was the large capitaine (a.k.a. Nile perch) so highly valued by nasaras (white people, mostly French), who lived in Fort Lamy. One large capitaine would sell for enough money to feed a family for a week, maybe two.

It had been the Bagirmi Tribe that had appealed to the French for help against the Arabic slave raiders. We sometimes think of slave raiders as small gangs of outlaws, but in those days some commanded what amounted to small armies. In fact in Idris’s day many of the older Bagirmi women had plugs in their lips intended to make them unattractive to the raiders. Idris was happy that girls no longer had to do that. A few years before Idris was born, a combined and badly outnumbered but better armed French and Bagirmi force had defeated Rabah, the last and greatest of the slave raiders, at Kousseri, a small town on the Cameroonian side of the river across from the eventual Chadian capital city of Fort Lamy, named after the commanding French officer who had died heroically in that battle. Many years later it would be renamed N’Djamena following Chad’s independence from France. Idris’s father had lost his arm at Kousseri, and from then on could only fish with line from the river bank. In addition to his father’s arm, the price of that victory had been that the French settled in to govern that vast area known as The Chad, the last significant area in Africa to be colonized. And now the Bagirmi were less than they once were, just one of many tribes, but they no longer had to worry about slavers. Whether things were better or worse under the French was something the old men argued about over millet beer.

Fishing on the Chari was dangerous. Hippos would sometimes overturn pirogues and kill fishermen. Drowning when the river was flooding was always a danger, for very few people knew how to swim. It is easy to learn to swim in a nice swimming pool or a safe little lake or pond, but not so easy in swift rivers or in ponds infested with poisonous snakes. And once in a while a large crocodile would slip down the river from the endless reeds on Lake Chad or the seasonal swamps and ponds on the west side of the river in Cameroon. In fact the west bank of the river was a favorite place to fish. Lines on paper drawn by nasaras didn’t mean much to the Bagirmi. Also Idris and Moussa were always on the lookout for the river people, not that they saw them often. In fact Idris had seen one only twice in his life. The river people looked something like nasaras, with their pale skin and long flowing blonde hair. They also had angled emerald-colored eyes, many small pointed teeth, gills, narrow heads, and webbed hands and feet. That they were seen so rarely was thought to be due to the magical powers that some thought they possessed. No nasara had ever seen one, at least as far as anyone knew. They doubted that the river people existed at all, believing them to be folk legends. But then no nasaras spent days on end searching the river for fish. Seeing one of the river people was considered to be an omen of some sort, whether good or bad was a matter of debate, probably because hippo attacks sometimes followed sightings. Some thought that the hippos were like cattle to the river people.

Now Idris thought more deeply about the river people and things in general than Moussa and the other young men in his village. Except for their long blonde hair everything about the river people seemed designed for swift movement in water. That bothered him, so one day he asked Hussein about it, the wisest old man he knew. Hussein said he didn’t know for sure, but the hair could just be vanity. He’d seen many a strutting bird and preening animal, so why not river people? However he then asked Idris to think about how few times river people had been spotted. Hussein smiled and said that with the sun shining down and his hair fanning out above him as he sat on the sandy river bottom, a river person might be pretty hard to see. Also since the river wasn’t deep all year long, often Idris had wondered where the river people lived. Moussa’s father believed that they lived in cavelike villages under the banks of the river, although no one had ever seen such a village. Others said that they lived under the reed mats floating in Lake Chad and only came down on occasion, which is what the members of the Kanembou Tribe around Lake Chad claimed, but then the Kamembous were known for telling tall tales. Anyway no one knew for certain, not even old Hussein.

One day while Idris and Moussa were fishing, a giant crocodile broke the surface holding a struggling river man in its jaws. Moussa wanted to paddle away, but Idris stood up and threw a spear that pierced the crocodile’s eye. The crocodile released the river man and disappeared beneath the water. Although bleeding violet blood from several wounds, the river man stared at Idris, as if memorizing his features, then he’d nodded once and rolled beneath the water. When the villagers heard the story, they were amazed. No one knew whether it meant good fortune or ill fortune for Idris, but everybody agreed that it had to mean something.

Now it so happened that all the sultan’s daughters had been married off one by one, save for his youngest, a gazelle-eyed beauty named Aisha. Whenever Idris and Moussa encountered Aisha, Idris thought her shy smile drifted his way more than Moussa’s, but perhaps that was wishful thinking. For each daughter in turn the sultan had held a contest to determine the lucky young groom. The first had been a horse race. The second had been the longest crocodile skin. And the third had been a hunt for meat for the bridal feast. A renowned hunter had brought in a magnificent antelope cheval, but the prize had gone to a handsome younger man who had brought in a warthog. Turned out that the Sultan just loved roasted warthog. Who knew? That night at the feast, although his portion was small and not choice, Idris discovered that roasted warthog really is delicious. Later he watched as the daughter in question gave a quick sly wink to her husband to be. For Aisha’s contest the Sultan had decided on the largest capitaine. The suitors were given one week with prizes measured every evening. That gave Idris hope, for everyone knew he was the best fisherman for many miles around. Briefly he wondered if maybe Aisha had had something to do with that.

Over the first five days of the contest Idris and Moussa fished together as usual. Both had caught capitaine, but Idris had caught the largest. It was part of the contest ritual to gut and clean the fish in the late afternoon with all the villagers present. On the sixth morning Idris discovered that Moussa had taken his pirogue out earlier by himself. So Idris took his old pirogue out that day. He didn’t catch anything. In fact Moussa had left in the middle of the night and paddled the ten miles or so against the north flowing current all the way to Fort Lamy. There in the fish market he had spent all his money to purchase the largest capitaine he could find, one larger than the one Idris had caught earlier. He thought Aisha was a fine looking girl, but really for him it was all about marrying the sultan’s daughter. Paddling back with the current was much easier. When he presented the fish there were murmurs because the fish had already been gutted and cleaned. Moussa explained that he had caught the fish early in the morning and was afraid it would spoil laying ungutted in the pirogue all day. Idris was suspicious, but he had no proof.

He decided to go out by himself the next and final day of the contest, his old pirogue notwithstanding. He no longer trusted his friend. He fished vainly all that day and began to despair when suddenly the water around the boat began to roil. That frightened him because that often happened just before a hippo attack. But soon the water on both sides of the pirogue filled with river people. That was frightening too, but there was little he could do about it, so he sat quietly. The river people on one side grabbed the pirogue and held it steady, while the river people on the other side hoisted up and dumped over into the center of the pirogue the largest capitaine that Idris had ever seen, maybe that anybody had ever seen. The fish was so heavy that the pirogue sank down until only a couple inches remained above the water line. It would later measure out at just under six foot and three hundred and sixty pounds. And it was beautiful with silver scintillating scales blue tinged in places and black eyes surrounded by bright yellow eye walls. When he looked back up all but one of the river people had disappeared. Of course it was the one whose life he had saved. The river man smiled. That was a pretty scary too with all those little pointed teeth, but a smile is a smile for all that. Idris smiled back and this time the river man nodded his thanks. Then he turned gracefully and slipped beneath the water.

When Idris returned oh so carefully in his pirogue, he became the toast of the village. The sultan himself came down to gut the fish, quite an honor. Idriss heard some old men mutter that it was the biggest capitaine anyone had caught since the days of their great great grandfathers, which made him smile. In his experience when it came to fish stories, great great grandfathers, great grandfathers, grandfathers, and old men in general were not exactly wedded to the truth. When the sultan sliced the fish’s belly open, a large emerald fell out. After some oohing and ahhing, the sultan announced that much of the money from its sale would be used as a dowry for Aisha. He bought them a plot of land on a hill overlooking the river, with a nice mud brick house that had a real tin roof, and he gave Idris a fine new pirogue. The land behind the house was flat and fertile so Aisha could grow spices and hot peppers and gumbo and ground nuts among other things. In the years that followed, Idris and Aisha had four healthy children. Surprisingly they all had green eyes and just the tiniest bit of webbing between their toes and fingers. They loved the water and were all fine fishermen and fisherwomen. His two girls were strong limbed and fished as well as the two boys. As for Moussa, from that day on he had no luck fishing. He became a herder like his father.

Moral: You know, every great once in a while, just to keep the universe honest, a good deed really does go unpunished.

ONE DAY HONEY, THE NEXT DAY ONIONS (GREGORY “GROMO” ALEX’S STORY)

Tags

Africa, Beer, Cameroon, Chad, Gregory "Gromo" Alex, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps

Gromo died young as the result of a fall at his home. I believe he was fighting cancer at the time. He was a truly great man, awarded for valor by the UNDP for his heroic efforts to save lives during the horrors of Rwanda. I wrote this story long before his passing and without any knowledge of his time in Rwanda. It reflects a happier time. The Chadian Arabic proverb translated for the title is: “Yom assal, wa yom basal.”

Gromo came to Chad as a Peace Corps Volunteer almost two years after I did. He was a big muscular English teacher, reminding me of Mongo in Blazing Saddles, not that he lacked intelligence, but rather he exuded an aura of placid strength. It was impossible not to like Gromo. Chadians loved him, especially children. He couldn’t go anywhere without attracting a flock of kids. For reasons known only to him, he chose to make Princess his girlfriend. Princess was the name we vols gave her, one of those contrary nicknames like calling a huge man Tiny. We knew all the street ladies, some better than others. Remember this was the mid seventies, before AIDS, or at least before anybody knew about it. Most of them had come to N’Djamena as runaway brides who couldn’t stand being married to a much older man, or a cruel one. Or they had failed to produce children in the allotted time frame. In Chad it was never the man’s fault. In general they weren’t callous hardened prostitutes. One older vol advised us to think of them as old-fashioned New England town tarts. That said they looked to establish a longterm relationship with a rich man. And to them all white men were rich, even Peace Corps Vols. They weren’t above using a trick or two to accomplish that task. A few volunteers had been surprised by eleven month pregnancies.

Most of the street ladies were delicate boned and lightish colored, from the northern Islamic tribes. Many had tribal scars, but these tended to be shallow scars on the upper jaw or under the eyes, more decoration than disfigurement. A smattering had blue tattooed lips, permanently appearing to be wearing smeared blue lipstick. The tribal scars didn’t bother me, but I admit to finding the tattooed lips a bit off putting. Princess was a big southern Chadian woman, not fat, but strong, big-hipped and very black. She was no wilting flower. I remember sitting at an outside table at a bar one night. None of the tables were far from the caniveau (concrete open sewer) that ran alongside the road. That perfume was part of a night out in N’Djamena. I heard a commotion and looked several tables away where Princess shouted at a French soldier. Suddenly she picked up a twenty-two ounce beer bottle and hit him over the head. Then she hoisted the stunned soldier on her shoulders and tossed him in the caniveau.

As a rule Chadian women were proud, jealous, quick to anger, and not adverse to violence. Nasaras (white people or sometimes foreigners in general) were strange creatures from a mysterious culture. Like most women they wanted to gauge the worth of their relationships. A friend of mine’s girlfriend made him so angry he smashed a favorite piece of furniture, which delighted her. He must have valued her highly. Another male vol invited a female vol to dinner, thinking nothing of it. When his Chadian wife found out a woman was coming, she broke every dish in the house one by one. Nobody was coming to dinner at that house. One night in the same bar where I witnessed Princess conk the soldier, Joe, another vol, publicly admonished his girlfriend because he had given her a scarf and her female Chadian friend was wearing it, not her. The girlfriend jumped across the table and bit into his well worn Levi’s thigh high. He tried to pry her loose, but she kept at it as blood began to run down his pants. Finally he punched her hard. That worked.

Sitting and drinking with Gromo and Princess at another outside bar one late afternoon, I noticed a fly in my beer glass. In the states I would have tossed the beer, but not a poor PCV. I fished the fly out. I was feeling magnanimous. “Fly on little buddy and live.” But I really should have known, you can’t fly with beer suds on your wings. Suddenly Princess stood up and walked to a table with four legionnaires. Soon she was laughing and flirting. Being the more experienced vol, I explained to Gromo how this was going to play out. She would keep at it until he walked away, in which case she would know he didn’t value her highly. Or he could intervene and probably get the crap beaten out of him. Four French Foreign Legionnaires were more than a match even for Gromo. Further I explained that I was leaving. I had no intention of fighting legionnaires over Princess. I left. Gromo took a beating. Princess was happy. Eventually Gromo went so far as to take her to the states. Not long after he attended a party a bit roughed up from a recent fight with her.

I finished my Peace Corps service in December of 1978 and immediately went to work for USAID/Chad on contract. Just two months later in February of 79 civil war broke out in N’Djamena. I was asked to stay on and help with administrative tasks. After a few days of fighting, when the firing had slowed enough to permit movement, all Peace Corps Vols and non-essential personnel were evacuated to Yaounde, Cameroon. Since I stayed on in N’Djamena, I heard the rest of the story from my Peace Corps buddy Mark. After experiencing that ordeal and being suddenly uprooted, the vols were in a fey mood. Their lives had been turned upside down. The afternoon after their arrival in Yaounde, they gathered at some welcoming function at the Ambassador’s Residence. Unfortunately the pool was under repair and dry. After who knows how many beers, somebody dared Gromo to dive in anyway. He did. He didn’t kill himself, but he bloodied his head badly.

That same night in the bar district of Yaounde, Gromo sported a bloody swath of bandages and suffered a severe headache. There was a disturbance in the street. A large long-horned steer had escaped its owner and was running free trailing a rope. A crowd of laughing and shouting people chased it. This was tremendous entertainment. Gromo stepped into the street directly in front of the steer. The steer stopped. For a minute or two there was a High Noon style face off. Then Gromo reached forward and grabbed both horns. His arm muscles bulged as he held the steer. Then the steer lowered its head and flipped him up and over the steer’s back. He somersaulted in the air, landing on his back behind the steer. Thankfully part of the fall was broken by the crowd. However, his heroics allowed the owner to grab the rope and control the steer. The crowd hoisted Gromo on their shoulders and paraded him up and down the street – the conquering hero. For reward a taxi driver offered to take him anywhere he wanted to go for free. Instead Gromo asked if he could just ride around with the taxi driver all night while he picked up fares. And that’s what he did.

MY CONTINUING WILDLIFE ADVENTURES IN CAMEROON AND BENIN

Tags

Africa, African Widlife, Benin, Cameroon, Gameparks, Humor, Nonfiction, USAID

Waza National Park is located between Maroua and N’Djamena on the main road. It is a large gamepark and has a wide variety of wildlife. During my time in northern Cameroon I found the hotel at Waza a pleasant place to stay. It is nestled in a group of rock buttes just across the road from and facing the park. Since it was in Joel’s territory, sometimes I helped him out by providing transportation. However because Waza was usually a convenient stopover after I had driven someone to or from N’Djamena or Maroua. More often than not I was there by myself.

While staying at the hotel for a couple of days enjoying the park and the hotel, I perused some park literature that mentioned a colony of hyrax living on top of the big butte behind the hotel. I had never seen hyrax. They looked cute from pictures, a bit like guinea pigs. I went out to take a look at the butte. I wasn’t a pick and rope climber, but I was in good shape. A shallow fissure ran almost all the way up, petering out maybe four feet from the top. It looked to be a tough scramble but doable. Other than taking a lot of energy the climb wasn’t bad. The only tricky part was at the very top where the edge bulged out more than I’d anticipated. I had to dangle my feet in the air a few seconds before I pulled myself up and over. However even if I had fallen at that point I would have dropped back into the shallow crevice, maybe spraining an ankle but not risking death.

The butte was rather flat on top until it began a gentle decline to my right, perhaps offering an easier descent than straight down the face. In the middle of my end of the plateau in a jumble of boulders a hyrax stood guard at a small entrance. Seeing me he made a half barking half piping sound and ruffled his fur causing a strange little off color tuft of fur to rise up in the middle of his back. Make no mistake rock hyrax are cute critters. I suppose tree hyrax are too but I never saw one of those. Don’t ask me but the experts say that the animal most closely related to hyrax is the elephant. They also say that any rabbits mentioned in the Bible were actually hyrax. European translators weren’t familiar with hyrax, and the descriptions more or less fit rabbits. Makes you wonder what else could have been mistranslated. At first there was a mad scramble of hyrax seeking shelter from the intruder. I settled myself on a boulder at some distance and waited patiently. I needed the rest. Eventually a few brave souls ventured out again so I could observe them, but they didn’t stray far from safety.

While sitting there a troop of baboons wandered by, including a mommy with a baby on her back. They headed down the decline to my right. For inexplicable reasons, perhaps a suppressed death wish, I decided to follow them at a distance. Baboons are incredibly strong animals and can be very aggressive. Jurassic Park dinosaur petting nonsense aside, any strong wild animal is dangerous regardless of whether they are interested in eating you or not. More people in Africa are killed by buffalos than lions. Suddenly the baboons stopped and huddled. Then while the main troop continued on, two young males turned and faced me, not advancing, just holding their ground. Message received five by five. I decided to go back and observe the hyrax.

I was thirsty. It was time to leave, my dreams of finding an easier path down thwarted lest I risk running into the baboons, wisely concluding that further interaction should be avoided. It was about here that I realized I had made a rookie climbing mistake by not making note of precisely where I came up. I couldn’t see the beginning of the fissure from up top because of the edge’s outward bulge. I mean I knew the general area, but that wasn’t good enough to risk dangling myself out over a cliff. An intelligent person would have brought some rope. I didn’t qualify. I looked around. A bit further down a thin rocky outcrop jutted out precariously, resembling a diving platform. Carefully I worked my way out to the very end of it where I could see my crevice. I wished I had skipped breakfast. I marked the exact spot I needed to descend from and presently dropped a couple of feet into the crevice without twisting an ankle. The rest was perfunctory.

During that same period in Cameroon I briefly visited Benoue National Park, a giant gamepark just south of Garoua. Garoua was a bit south of my usual purview, but due to the Chad disturbances there was a temporary logistical office there manned by embassy personnel. The next large city south, NGoundare, was the northern terminus of the railway. I had to make a few trips to Garoua. The park ran along the Benoue River, a major tributary of the Niger River. The park area was so huge that it encompassed some villages, whereas in more manageable Waza they had moved villages to just outside the park. As one might assume, poaching was a problem. Nevertheless I remember large herds of waterbuck, western hartebeest, and buffalo.

That was my first encounter with tsetse flies. Damn they hurt. A single bite hurts about like a horsefly bite, but more needle like. Of course horseflies don’t swarm or leave big itchy red welts, and tsetse fly bites can penetrate normal clothing. Sleeping sickness aside, no wonder the presence of tsetse flies inhibits animal husbandry. In Chad we had bot flies. They lay eggs on moist clothing. If you wear the tainted clothing without killing the eggs first, an ugly boil with a worm inside forms on your skin. Very few people had clothes dryers in Chad. Ironing everything including underwear and socks solved the problem. The common people used irons filled with coals.

Speaking of dastardly insects, I was stung by scorpions a couple times — no big deal, a kind of take a benadryl thing. Perhaps Chad’s scorpions were less poisonous than some others. My great adventure with African bees and termites was covered in another story. Perhaps my worst personal experience with African insects was getting bitten or stung (not sure) on the knee by a spider one night when I was out in the great beyond drilling wells. The wound developed an odd transparent skin window with something dark deep down there. It hurt like hell. After two days I could barely walk. The nearest doctor worthy of the name was two days away mostly on pistes (tire tracks in the sand). Therefore I thrust a big needle into a fire and pushed it inches down into my knee until I managed to get everything out. Goliath beetles are worthy of mention. They are huge winged beetles attracted to light. En brousse we could hear one heading for our flashlights and lanterns from a distance. The sound they made flying reminded me of a helicopter, stopping and starting, getting closer and closer. When it neared we would douse the lights until it headed off elsewhere. We called them flying turtles. It was no fun to run into one on a mobylette.

I have one other tsetse fly story. Honestly my memory on this one is rather vague except for the core story which I remember pretty well. It might have occurred in either Benin or Togo, as the three of us were together in both countries one soon after the other. Logically I’m going with Benin, since we all worked on the same project there. I was the USAID contract project manager in Benin for a multi-donor potable water/health project. Sarah was my colleague on the health side, and Agma was a health consultant. The three of us went up to northern Benin on project related business. I have a fleeting memory of staying at the house of some vols in the town of Nikki. As always when the work was done I wanted to visit the nearest gamepark, or in this case I believe it was a lesser category of protected area, a forest reserve or nature preserve, something in that ballpark. Agma passed on the reserve. She had grown somewhat fatigued with my habit of stopping vehicles to look at birds, thus lengthening the journey. Somehow I managed to drag Sarah along. It didn’t take long for me to get the truck stuck. I had a talent for that. We were both gathering sticks when tsetse flies attacked. I received a bite or two, but they loved Sarah. By the time we made it out, she had a fine collection of itchy red welts, some in interesting places. Being a southern gentleman, when we got back to where we were staying I offered to powder her backside. She demurred. Actually in colorful language she told me to take a hike, or something roughly equivalent. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

My memory is clearer about this next story. Agma and I and a visiting young lady acquaintance of Agma’s drove up to Natitingou in northwestern Benin and stayed at the Tata Somba Hotel. That region is famous for the fairyland like Tata Somba houses, and the hotel was designed with that architecture in mind. It also had a great pool. Agma did her health stuff. I met my Benin project director and the UN project manager, M. Bouton, along with local officials, and we set out to visit some spring sites for possible inclusion in the project. I insisted on driving my little project pickup. They had a sedan and a chauffeur. I liked to control my own transportation whenever possible. I’d had some close calls in Africa, most often at night where a big truck had broken down and parked in one lane of a two lane road. West African roads rarely had decent shoulders. Without street lights, and maybe with an oncoming vehicle’s lights in your eyes, you would see the dark looming shape of the truck too late to do anything but swerve off the road or into the other lane. Off the road was a near certain crash with no medical help nearby. So you usually tried the oncoming lane. If you were lucky, it would be clear long enough for you to pass the truck. If not you died. I’d been lucky twice. I made it a rule never to drive at night on rural African roads. We spent a long day climbing hills and looking at springs. We were about an hour from Natitingou as sunset neared. Men in groups get macho disease. They wanted to drive to one more site. I refused. I told them my reasons and drove back to the hotel. I still arrived after dark. I ruffled a few feathers, but they got over it.

When the work was over I wanted to visit the not too distant Pendjari National Park, often touted as one of the best in West Africa. Our hotel had glossy brochures on the front desk trumpeting a nice hotel right in the middle of the park. Agma passed on the park, but she asked me to take her companion along. Fine. The young lady was over from England to visit her intended. I got the impression that everything wasn’t all orange blossoms with that. She was young, but I had no idea how young. I thought mid-twenties. She was on plump side, polite but aloof, wore makeup even out in the African bush, and dressed in a style I would describe as British matron. Later I found out that she was much younger than I’d thought, eighteen or nineteen I think. I’ve never been good at guessing the ages of European women. Had I known, I would have had to think long and hard about taking her with me.

It took an hour and a half to get to the park entrance, and, with stops along the way to watch animals, another two hours to reach the hotel. We arrived just at dusk to find that the hotel had burned down years before. I should have verified things, but it never occurred to me that my hotel in Natitingou would be passing out brochures to a burned out hotel. Maybe they had boxes of them leftover and just thought they were pretty. Sometimes Africa wins. Fortunately I usually pack some camping equipment when I go upcountry. As I wasn’t about to drive three and a half hours at night, most of it through a gamepark on a dirt road, I found a room mostly intact, no roof or door but it had four sturdy walls. I cleaned it up some and set up mats, sleeping bags, and tall tent-like mosquito nets for both of us. It was hot, so I put her by the door to catch the breeze and myself in the far corner. The young lady later told people that she had been half convinced that I had planned all this just so I could ravish her in the night, and she had been certain that I’d placed her by the door so that a lion would take her first. I’d camped out in gameparks with far less shelter than four solid walls. I did park the pickup close to the door, but I wanted to leave some space for air. As for the ravishing, she was somebody’s fiance, and I wasn’t the least bit attracted to her. Even if I had been, at most I would have tossed her a few compliments to see if she was interested. Uninvited pouncing was not in my repertoire.

I slept soundly. I suppose I’m bragging here, but my ability to sleep in odd places and strange conditions was legendary. I once slept curled up inside a large truck tire hanging off the back of the truck on a rough road. We all have our little talents. I wish I still had that one. She didn’t sleep at all, listening to animal sounds all night long. I wanted to get a very early start. Before dawn the next morning when I offered her some sardines and crackers for breakfast, she told me she’d thought that I had set her up as lion bait. She said it half humorously, so I wouldn’t take offense. She didn’t mention the ravishing part. I laughed. I asked her why she didn’t ask to switch places with me or sleep in the truck. Then I explained how rare it was to see lions in West African gameparks. I told her to get in the truck and try to nap while I loaded everything. Dawn was just touching the eastern sky when I got in the truck, started the motor, and turned on the headlights. A lioness passed right in front of us, just a few yards from where we’d slept. You know, all my life I’d heard the phrase if looks could kill. Up to that moment I had never really experienced it.

MY WILDLIFE ADVENTURES (OR GOOD NIGHT RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE WHEREVER YOU ARE)

Tags

African Widlife, Birding, Cameroon, Chad, Gameparks, Humor, Kenya, Peace Corps

“So geographers in Afric-maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er uninhabitable downs,
Place elephants for want of towns.”
(Jonathan Swift)

The gameparks in Kenya are grand. I enjoyed several of them while visiting dear friends stationed in Nairobi. It was wonderful to have use of a vehicle and driver thanks to them. However I wasn’t there long enough to develop many stories. There was one that is worthy of note. Nairobi National Park is just seven kilometers from the city. You can see skyscrapers. They had to put up a fence on the city side. Surprisingly it has a wide variety of animals, some like chetahs I had not seen in West Africa. It is a beautiful thing to watch a chetah run. I happened to be in Nairobi at the time of the annual animal census in which my friend Paul and a friend of his, both Foreign Service Officers, regularly participated. They invited me to go along, but the lady who ran the thing was a class conscious Brit. There were still colonial remnants in Kenya and apparently the gamepark census was one of the them. The participants had to be vetted by her. Paul solved this problem by introducing me as Doctor Branson. “Yes, yes, delighted to have you aboard Dr. Branson.” It was a fun day. No doubt the gameparks of East Africa were where to go for a tourist in those days. They had more animals and were far better organized. However the rough and tumble gameparks of West Africa, where I had the great fortune to spend significant time, had their own charms. I mean who gets the chance to live in a gamepark for months on end, an obscure little park to be sure, but quite beautiful in its way. There was an unpolished beauty in those less traveled environs.

My first visit to a gamepark occurred before I was officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. Peace Corps has a trick. They don’t count training or vacations as time served. They put me on a plane to Africa in July, 1975 and officially mustered me out in December of 1978. They credited me with three years of service. Not that I’m complaining, it was a great experience. Just before my fellow wells project recruits and I finished our on-the-job training, we took a trip to southern Chad, the city of Sarh, to a small project spin off where one or two of us would be posted. Manda gamepark is just north of Sarh and on the main road. We decided to camp out there and go into Sarh the next day. In the park they had a raised platform for such purposes. Fortunately the park didn’t have any big cats. We arrived just before dusk and barely had time to set up camp before dark. Extremely excited, when the night animal sounds started up a strange feyness overcame us. We grabbed flashlights and ran out into the elephant grass looking for animals. The park had elephants, hippos, buffalo, and poisonous snakes, among others, stumbling upon any of which could be fatal. Hippos come out of the river at night to graze and are particularly dangerous. Perhaps God does look after fools or the noise we made drove everything away, anyway we didn’t find anything. The next day herds of antelope leaped the road in front of us as we drove around the park, and a buffalo even gave the door of one of our two Land Rovers a head thump. Very satisfying that.

As a PCV my gamepark experience was limited to a visit or two to Manda when I was stationed in Sarh for some months. However while drilling wells in the north, on rare occasions we would run across gazelles, warthogs, jackals, and majestic roan antelopes (antelope cheval in French), among others. A few wild animals like monkeys and lizards were ubiquitous. Interestingly our Chadian counterparts used one word “laham” (Chadian Arabic for meat) to describe any edible animal we encountered. Even though our counterparts save one were not Muslim, a few of the Muslim dietary restrictions had become more or less generalized in Chad, with the notable exception of pork which they ate with gusto. They refused to eat carrion eaters like shellfish, not that dry Chad had a lot of shellfish, and animals that had hands like monkeys or even appendages that vaguely resembled hands. One of the night guards at the Peace Corps Office did a favor for an Air France pilot. The pilot repaid him with a bucket of shrimp, a rare and expensive treat in Chad. The guard approached me with bucket in hand and explained that he hadn’t wanted to hurt the pilot’s feelings, but he couldn’t possibly eat those creepy little things. He asked me rather doubtfully if nasaras (white people) really ate them. I recalled the old line about it being a brave man who first ate an oyster. In my best Lewis Carroll Walrus voice, I replied: “Yes, yes, indeed we do, as disgusting as that may seem. My good man, I will gladly take them off your hands. I mean what are friends for?”

In the spring of 1979 everything changed for me. While working on contract for USAID Chad civil disturbances broke out. My experiences in Chad are covered elsewhere. After a few weeks, with the airport closed and bridges blocked, I was assigned to northern Cameroon to provide logistical support to the US Embassy in N’Djamena, chiefly transportation of personnel. My expenses were covered generously. I could have stayed anywhere I wanted between Maroua and the Cameroonian border directly across the Chari River from N’Djamena. There were three nice hotels in Maroua and one at Waza, the big gamepark between Maroua and N’Djamena. Over a period of roughly five months I tried them all out from time to time. I enjoyed the amenities they had to offer, hot showers, AC, excellent meals. However after years of simple food as a PCV, I appeciated rich French restaurant cuisine more as a sometime thing, not everyday fare. From my visits to France, probably the average Frenchman feels the same way. They don’t eat like that everyday either.

For the most part I chose to stay in Kalamaloue National Park, located just ten or so kilometers from N’Djamena. As a consequence I ate a lot of sardines and crackers, but I could always buy baguettes and basic supplies in nearby Kousseri. The park had one round hut with no electricity and only cold water that the park guards would pump up to barrels on a tower. Actually when the sun had been shining on the barrels all day late afternoon showers weren’t that bad, but morning ones were best avoided. Because I paid my modest fees in cash and stayed so long, I was their cash cow and they treated me like royalty, useful since they weren’t about to question my iffy credentials. The park was so strapped for funds that the guards were issued only three bullets each annually and had to strictly account for them. Kalamaloue was a tiny park as these things go. I’m not sure of the exact measurements, but having walked it I would estimate the size at thirteen thousand acres give or take, which is extremely small by African standards.

My hut had windows without screens or glass, just wooden shutters that you could prop open. The beds had mosquito nets. The hut sat on the only hill in the park and looked out over a plain. I suspected that the hill’s origin was not natural, most probably the result of successive habitation. Not far to one side was a steep decline to a water hole where a large crocodile lived. He would often crawl out on a sandbar to sun with his mouth gaping open. I nicknamed him Walter. We were friends. We played games. I would walk around the top of his hole, and he would sink down with just his eyes showing and stalk me, hoping I would come down for a drink. Toward sunset with the heat retreating somewhat, I would pull out the metal table and chair and sit there looking out over that plain at gazelles, kob antelope, waterbuck, jackals, warthogs, and whatever unusual treat that would choose to show itself that day. As a kid I was a big fan of the TV show Ramar of The Jungle, a show way too politically incorrect to ever be shown again except on youtube. OK I didn’t get to live in a neat treehouse like they did, but this was about as close to a childhood fantasy as it gets. An hour or so before dusk the park’s three guards would go home, leaving just me and the animals. Usually I could manage a glass of wine or perhaps Ricard as the sun drifted downward. Those were moments of profound contentment.

Sometimes for a few days here and there I would share my hut with Joel, a PCV assigned to the gameparks in northern Cameroon. He worked alone, but when I was available I would help out with various projects. This was before Caddy Shack, but anyone who’d met him after seeing that movie would have compared him to the Bill Murray character, the main difference being that Joel wasn’t mentally slow. He had been a grunt in Vietnam and bore the scars. He was awkward socially and half deaf. He was taciturn at times and talked incessantly at others with the loud voice of the hearing impaired. He was best taken in small doses, but he was a really good guy. I liked him.

Joel asked me to walk the park with him while he did an animal inventory. We were unarmed, but Kalamaloue wasn’t supposed to have any of the more dangerous mammals except for the hippos from the river, and they stayed in or near the water during the day. Nevertheless there were dangers on foot, snakes, feral dogs, and such, and it was safer with two people. We walked systematically the grid Joel had developed. At one point we heard frenzied yapping and approached a jackal raising hell at a big bush. We walked around the other side and came face to face with a lion. That was a come to Jesus moment. He was an old male and from his belly it looked like he had just eaten. Lucky us. We backed away slowly. Another time Joel was in the park when a troop of elephants migrated through, a ragtag troop, a mere remnant of the vast numbers of bygone times. Somehow Joel talked me into climbing trees along the likely trails and dropping paint on elephant butts as they passed below. He wanted to document their migration. That lasted until a female became annoyed and made a mock charge toward my tree. At my insistence we called it a day.

I was blessed to be in Kalamaloue during the summer rainy season and able to help Joel with bird counts. Fortunately that could be done from my vehicle. I was pretty good at identifying birds, but Joel was way above my class. We would come across temporary ponds that were chock full of all kinds of birds, some resident but most migratory — spoonbills, crowned cranes, sacred ibis, four or five different duck species, kingfishers, and marabou storks standing like a row of undertakers. Maybe en route we would watch an Abyssinian roller with its electric colors, in tumbling flight one of the most beautiful birds in the world, or possibly spy a majestic African fish eagle. The rainy season in off the beaten path Kalamaloue was one of nature’s great secrets, a once in a lifetime birder’s paradise.

One night by myself at Kalamaloue, sleeping with the shutters propped open, I heard some noise. I picked up my powerful flashlight and illuminated a civet in my hut. Now a civet is about the size of a very large domestic cat or a small raccoon, which it kind of resembles although it is not related. The poor thing panicked and began running around the perimeter of the round hut, which included jumping on my bed and stomach and bringing down my mosquito net. I was afraid to make a sudden move for risk of getting bitten. Rabies shots were no fun in those days. The civet made three round trips total, landing on my belly on every lap. Eventually I gathered my wits about me and turned off the flashlight. Then the critter lost no time figuring out where the exit was and departing out the open window.

CAMEROON VACATION (A Study In Communication).

Tags

Africa, Cameroon, Chad, Humor, Non-Fiction, Peace Corps, Pidgin English

Thanks to Gregory Greenwood for the photo of Mark Heffernan back in dry dusty Chad.

When five new trainee wells project Peace Corps Volunteers arrived in Chad in late August 1975, we had already spent a month in Benin studying French, Chad’s official language. Mark and Kevin spoke French well enough that they had been allowed to study Chadian Arabic there, a rough Creole Arabic spoken as a lingua franca by the common people in the northern half of Chad, which included N’Djamena, the capital city. Not everybody spoke French which was often a third or fourth language. Even Chadian Arabic was often a second or third language. Aboubacar Abdoulai was our Chadian Arabic tutor and quickly became a friend. Delightfully one of the first things I learned was that in Chadian Arabic “who” meant “he”, “he” meant “she” and “when” meant “where.” I felt tempted to respond, “Who’s on first!”

Greetings in Chadian Arabic could be an elaborate ritual, including both classic Arabic phrases such as “asalamalakum” and the Chadian Arabic “affia”, which depending on inflection and standing alone meant either, “How’s it going?” or “Everything is fine.” You’d start off with a few dignified classical Arabic phrases that would bounce back and forth, while touching your chest with your right hand from time to time. Next you would employ “affia” to ask in sequence about the health of wife, kids, home, and usually end this sequence with “Koulu affia?” (Everything is fine then?). The normal response to each inquiry being “Affia!” Of course the other person was free to reverse the process at any time. For the final stage of the greeting ritual one person might exclaim, “Tamam! Queese! Alhamdulillah!”(Fine! All praise to Allah!), with “Alhamdulillah!” being echoed back by the other person. I’ve greeted people in many ways, in many places, and in several languages, but in Chad you felt greeted to the bone.

Aboubacar loved proverbs. Dounya ghasi (the world/life is hard/difficult) was a common phrase. If someone had a fun personality, he would say that they had dam hafif (light blood). Once a young Chadian woman walked by balancing effortlessly a single vertical glass coke bottle on her head. That took perfect upright posture and imparted interesting movements to her lower backside, which was tightly wrapped in a colorful pagne. Back in South Carolina my dad would have said that her rear end looked like two wildcats in a gunny sack. It drew my attention. In Chadian Arabic Aboubacar said, “The wise frog does not play in hot water.”

In early 1977 after we had been drilling wells on the border of the Sahara for well over a year, one of my fellow well drillers, Mark Heffernan, and I decided to take our vacation in the greener parts of neighboring Cameroon, a welcome change from the desert. We got a real kick out of western Cameroon, the English speaking part of the country. Those people loved to party. We were there in February and several tipsy people wished us a happy New Year. The local Pidgin English was a trip. You formed verb tenses by adding “go” for the future tense and “done” for the past tense. Therefore the future of “go” was “I go go.” If you were in an bad accident, maybe lying hurt on a road, somebody might stand over you and exclaim, “Onderful!” (Wonderful!), which neutrally expresses shock or amazement. I remember seeing a very professional sign: DR. JEROME NGABWE SPECIALIST IN: Gastric Pain, Malaria, Head Pain, Foot Pain, Epilepsy, Back Pain, Knee Pain, Impotence, Sterility, Witchcraft and Madness. They embraced the pageantry of language there. On the foggy slopes of volcanic Mount Cameroon, we ate beans and rice in a little roadside shack named The Genesis of Culture Hotel, and then we strolled down the street to The All For God Bar, where we ordered two beers. The waitress looked at us and said, “You must speak English.” I repeated slowly, “Two beers please.” “You must speak English!” I was at a loss. Where do you go from there? Mark saved the day, employing the little Pidgin he had picked up. “Beer dare?” She smiled, “Beer dare!” Then he held up two fingers. Clever boy.  Honestly to this day I don’t know whether he was goofing on us or not, but a local vol told us that a submarine in Pidgin was a “bottom bottom water whacker.”

Staying in the seaside town of Victoria (now Limbe), we heard that we could walk to a nearby beach. A couple miles from town the road bent away from the direction we needed to go, so we cut across an oil palm plantation. A nicely dressed Cameroonian drove up in a golf cart and informed us that we were on private property. We explained that we were PCVs from Chad on vacation who just wanted to swim in the ocean. His face lit up and he gave us a tour, dropping us at the beach. He invited us to stop by a bar on the way back. The beach’s black volcanic sand was rough on the feet, but for a couple of desert rats it sufficed.

Hot and salty on the way back, we decided to bypass the shack bar on top of a hill. However our new friend shouted us up. The shack was a portal we passed through to the field behind where about a dozen men sat on coke crates. They were drinking Guinness Stout and palm wine mixed half and half. We drank it with them. It tasted like the diesel fuel I’d swallowed once while siphoning. I noticed that the men varied in age and attire, from the mid-twenties to very old and from nice suits to near rags. The order of business was drinking and conversation. Some spoke the Queen’s English and others spoke Pidgin English, and interestingly I couldn’t peg them before they spoke. A well-dressed middle-aged man might speak Pidgin, and a fellow in a badly frayed shirt might speak with a cultured British accent. And on one end there was a shabbily dressed old man who didn’t speak at all. As the afternoon and the drinking wore on, I noticed that for an American the conversation seemed oddly cooperative. Nobody argued or tried to one up anybody. When someone made a statement, more often that not a few people would nod their heads and mutter: “Yes, yes, quite so.” I felt a part of some uniquely male society, commiserating over timeless male concerns. The conversation floated along from subject to subject. At one point someone mentioned President Kennedy. It amazed me how much they knew about him. Then someone mentioned President Ford. The old silent fellow perked up and in flawless clipped English said: “President Ford, seemed like a nice chap, but he wasn’t very bright was he?” And we all mumbled: “Yes, yes, quite so.”