What Would You Change?

This isn’t a travelogue, but I have to mention that I took a hike with Cassman up to the top of Mt. Oku, where he keeps his sheep. So two weeks, two major touristic attractions. Check. Again, beautiful. As you walk from the village up the mountain you go from fields of maize into the same weird forest that surrounds the lake, through a (non-native) copse of bamboo, and finally come out on the other side of the forest where goats and sheep are left to pasture in large fields of grass and herbs. The question of how natural is this pasture is beyond me. It is about 3000m above sea level (which is not above the tree line) and the borders of the forest seem decidedly man defined; on the other hand, the grasses and herbs that the sheep and goats are chomping on mostly seem to be native, particularly the most dominant which is called Clouds of Kilum. You can find this plant all over Oku, but up on the mountain it bunches into thick carpets and takes on a prominent white hairiness. The fact that it clumps this way in the midst of hungry goats and sheep would suggest it isn’t very palatable, at least not as the stems mature.

The real point of this post is to explain a conversation I had while on the mountain. We were sleeping in a hut owned by a friend of Cassman’s, an older man who also runs a fairly busy shop in Oku’s main market. The hut is a one room affair (3 x 3 meters maybe?) with two beds/platforms for sleeping, a fire pit in the center of the room, and all the essentials for cooking or keeping water handy. We passed two nights there, keeping a fire going through the night to stay warm. Personally, the smoke from a cooking fire in this sort of situation drives me crazy. Maybe people develop a tolerance for it, but I certainly haven’t and after a few minutes my eyes and throat sting like hell. In the general consciousness of Oku there is no tie between smoke inhalation and respiratory problems (a friend of mine was shocked when a doctor told him to keep his daughter out of the fire kitchen for a while after she was diagnosed with pneumonia); sitting around a fire in a closed space without a good chimney is a part of life that goes back as far as anyone cares to consider.

Anyway, I had a complaint I’d have been willing to offer if anyone had asked me. Now, I’m not a pansy, so I wasn’t about to ask anyone to turn the fire down, but it was on my mind as I crouched on one of the bed/platforms trying to stay as low as possible without getting on the floor. Then, Cassman’s friend says to me, ‘So now you see how we are suffering here?’ This is a fairly common phrase in the North West Region. Pass someone at work in their field and ask how they are and they might say, ‘Well you see how we are suffering.’ Frequent deaths give plenty of occasions to point out the suffering in the world. It is as usual to hear the statement directed at a foreigner as a local. An American friend of mine suggested that (like many English words when they are used here) ‘suffering’ takes on a big range of connotations borrowed from nearby synonyms that aren’t so popular. These span from what someone might call ‘roughing it’ in the US to actual physical pain due to illness, so what seems like a pretty melodramatic statement to me isn’t nearly so fraught when it comes from an Oku man. (Let me put the semantic rant aside now)

In any case, whether this guy was suffering from small pox or felt a bit of a draught, I keyed into the statement (largely because it was the first thing said in English in about 20 minutes of Oku conversation). How do you respond to a statement of suffering? It feels kind of tricky. You can try to be sympathetic, empathetic, or apologetic; you could contradict the guy and point out that we just have plenty of food, a warm fire, and sheep outside that can be sold in the market; you can be helpful and offer assistance; you could be a one-upper and talk about how cold it gets in Ithaca in January. I don’t like any of that. I started a kind of game: I asked the guy, if he could change one thing about the way we were living at that moment, what would he change? Unlimited money, unlimited time. It took a little time to get my point across and even then the man was very hesitant to give an answer. I offered suggestions like electric lights, mattresses for the beds, a gas stove, a chimney (this is my vote, by the by) but in the end the man settled on wanting to have cows instead of goats out in the pasture. That was pretty unexpected. Leaving the economics of grazing animals aside (cows are more valuable than goats on a per head basis, but I can’t guarantee their more profitable on a small scale), when he said he was suffering, he was definitely referring to what was going on inside the hut, what I had wanted to find out was, which part of the experience did he find to be uncomfortable and how could we change it? But I was left wanting. (Again, for me, smoke + eyes – chimney = suffering; a pretty simple equation to balance).

On the way down the mountain the next day, Cassman and I spent some time talking about the question of ‘what would you change?’ and his friend’s answer. Cassman was a little preoccupied by the man having asked me the question at all, seeing it as kind of rude, but we eventually got to how life could be made more pleasant (key word – not better or [god forbid] more developed, just more pleasant). Here’s the thing, these guys enjoy living in these huts, having their fire going, and knowing that their animals are outside eating, growing, and making babies. As I said, suffering might just mean ‘roughing it’ and there’s a lot to be said for the simple life. But I know that Cassman enjoys comfortable things sometimes: he just recently built himself a new fire kitchen (still mud brick, but two rooms and a tin roof now) and he really enjoys it and I know that as soon as electric lines come to his side of Oku he’ll be one of the first in line to get a connection. So I pushed him on it, I needed a response, and eventually he admitted he wouldn’t mind a solar charger so that he could charge his phone, a light, and a radio.

There’s a lot going on in these conversations: economics, semantics, stranger v. autochthone dynamics, maybe a little pride. Also, imagination. I can’t picture an American being taken aback by the question ‘what would you change?’ Here in Cameroon, most of the American’s I know start a pretty extensive list of things they would change given half a chance from the moment they get off the plane (usually before leaving the US actually) and they would have similar lists where ever they were living. There are some local people who could answer this question easily and these people tend to be local leaders; not a coincidence. It’s fine, probably even normal, to be a little dissatisfied with life but when you find yourself suffering, try to at least know why and imagine how to change it.