As I’ve been back in the US for about a week, I’ve been
answering a lot of questions for friends and family about what life is like in
Cameroon and how different life is between the two places. (People also ask
what it is I do over there, so apparently this blog was not as well advertised
as I had thought it was) People want to know if I’m going through a lot of ‘counter-culture’
shock, like is it disorienting to see so many cars or such huge markets or so
many white people all at once. To answer briefly, it is. To answer the question
a little more comprehensively, it’s not as though I forgot what life was like
in the US but I certainly got used to living a different way.
I am realizing that when I return to Cameroon, I am going to
be re-entering with a very different set of expectations than I first arrived
with. Landing in Africa, I was probably expecting something out of Gulliver’s
travels. People walking on their hands or talking hippopotami, perhaps. When
you start off expecting such oddities and are really only faced with a few
different ways to cook and eat corn, some creative (or old-timey) solutions to
living without electricity/running water/personal transportation, or variations
on the theme of ‘existing power structures’ (which essentially amount to, some
people have it [and want to keep it], some people don’t [and want to have it]) the
relative bizarreness gets downgraded.
Additionally, by the time I left the US in 2011, I had
gotten my life to a point where I felt pretty comfortable with my lifestyle and
carbon footprint (then I got on a plane...) and I had already shunned or tried
to do without many of the modern conveniences my friends and family figure a
person would miss most. Seasonal food choices were already a part of my life;
if I wasn’t renting a fairly small apartment I probably would have had a
composting toilet; I used public transport and/or craigslist rideshares to get
just about anywhere; I got most of my clothes from the Salvation Army (and the
clothes market in village is essentially the same thing). So I was maybe a
little less disposed toward the initial shock.
That being said, what jumped out at me soon after arriving
back in PA is the aesthetic choices that are taken for granted here but do not
hold the same prominence in Cameroon. The appearance of lawns, flower beds,
paintings on the walls, furniture, architecture styles, public green space, and
so on are all choices that people make on a daily basis with an eye towards
form as much as function. The range of options available is wide enough to let
anyone express themselves (though most people stick to a pretty conventional
pallet). From what I have seen in Cameroon people would make interesting and
unique choices but are very limited both in time and materials. Occasionally
you’ll catch someone dressing up the area around their home with some trees and
flowers just for the sake of a little color, just not as ubiquitous as I’m
seeing now. Similarly, everyone in Oku is happy to get their hands on a new
calendar or photo to put on their wall to liven up their living room, but a
print or oil-painting is pretty much out of the question. (Incidentally, I did
pick up a few oil paintings from a Kumbo artist named Jean Samuel Mfikela and
they have gotten a good reception from friends and family)
On the flip side, I got a few good reminders that
frustrations are not unique to the African continent. In the past week, my
parents have been going through a series of complicated hoops to make
settlement on a new house. A complicated process, no one would argue that, but
when I hear that the process is being held up because a document in one lawyer’s
office needs to be signed by another lawyer, both of whom have internet
connections, mobiles phones, fax machines, and access to three private document
delivery services in addition to the United States Postal Service, one gets the
feeling that it isn’t just a question of technology when it still takes a few
days to get that signature. In a similar vein, my sister’s fiance (an Irish
bloke) was navigating his own immigration adventure at the US embassy in Dublin
recently and got pushed back a full day because he didn’t bring a self-addressed
postage paid envelope with him to his morning meeting with the officials there.
So for as many times as I and my friends and co-workers get into a snag and want
to throw our hands up and say, ‘well, that’s Cameroon for you,’ it was nice to
be reminded that maybe we ought to just say, ‘well, that’s living in the 21st
century for you,’ instead.
