I.
I woke up at 4am on this particular Saturday and, after hitting snooze a few times, I got up and finished arranging my bags and getting everything together for the quick, whirlwind trip to Mogode, a town in the Extreme North region of Cameroon. A few weeks back, one of the government officials from Mogode invited us, the Veterans Club of Ngong, to come play a friendly match. Naturally, we said okay and after raising the money for transportation (10,000 cfa/person) we were ready to go.
Several people told me the day before to get to the sous-prefet’s office at 5am, no later, as it was a long trip and we needed to make good time. Well, I got there a few minutes after 5 and, in typical Cameroonian time-management fashion, I was probably the fifth person there. I sat around and talked to a few other veterans for a bit as people slowly started trickling in. One person asked me what was wrong because I looked sad. No no, I said, I’m just sleepy, I want to be back in my bed. Well, he replied, Wake up! We don't sleep on this bus! Oh, and that bus that was supposed to be there by 4:30? Well, it showed up around 6. Around 5:45, a few people started opening their first beers of the day. I abstained, but it was at that point that I knew what kind of day this would turn out to be.
We loaded up the bus and I sat next to my friend Amadou, a flashy guy with dyed blonde/yellow hair, a pretty spiffy man purse, and a really good soccer player. He even told me once that when he was younger he played for a time in the Cote d’Ivoire leagues. Anyway, we sat together making jokes and screwing with each other. We were also doing little pranks like tapping somebody’s shoulder and then pretending to be asleep or tickling somebody’s neck with a piece of grass. Real mature stuff, I know.
We had to stop in Garoua to wait for the president of the club who had to take care of something at the Catholic Mission there before we left. Well, it turned out to be about an hour stop so, naturally, as the people who had been drinking beers were out, they went for a quick run to a beer store. I tried to get some people to kick the soccer ball around with me but nobody really wanted to. Interesting, seeing as the supposed purpose of the trip was to play a soccer game. Anyway, the president finally got there and we took off.
On the bus, everybody was laughing and joking around about how they were all going to have newborns the next day after the party tonight, and it seemed that half the people on the bus were playing music with their cell phones…at the same time. Well, somebody had the bright idea to put one of the memory cards into the stereo on the bus so that cut down on the number of songs playing at once, though there were still multiple going on. But as things seem to happen here, the memory card would quit working after a song or two so the vice president in the front seat would skip songs, people would yell at the “DJ” about missing a song, and eventually the card would be changed. (“C’est les cartes chinois!” It’s those Chinese cards!)
About an hour and a half out of Garoua, we stopped in a town called Figuil for breakfast. Figuil is a dusty city on the main road to Maroua and its main claim to fame is that there’s a gas station and a huge cement factory there. Well, breakfast consisted of bread and some beef in a bouillon sauce. Pretty tasty, but all-in-all a pretty standard Northern Cameroonian breakfast. I also had a glass of sweet tea (“Shai” in Fulfulde) and the wife of one of my friends gave me a can of orange juice because she said I looked tired and needed the energy. When another volunteer saw me drinking both at the same time, he told me “Harley! how can you mix the hot and the cold!” I replied, “I’m not! I take a drink of one and then a drink of the other later… it’s not difficult.” He shook his head in disbelief.
We had been making pretty good time before Figuil but, unfortunately, after Figuil the nice, new, pot hole-free road that the EU built ends. After that it’s still pavement but we were frequently swerrving around pot holes, driving on the other side of the road and, a couple times, almost coming to a complete stop to maneuver through some tricky dips and holes in the tar. As we kept driving north, the scenery kept getting drier and browner, with less trees and more yellow grass. In the dry season (which we just started about a month ago) the North region (where I live) is pretty hot, pretty dry, and pretty desert-y. I get the impression the Extreme North region is like that most of the time, and has a legit claim to being in the Sahel desert.
About an hour outside of Figuil we saw a little green sedan on the side of the road with a smashed up front end that continued to a caved in windshield. A couple people were standing by it, one person in a Red Cross-logoed vest, and I realized the wreck had happened shortly before we got there. Somebody shouted out “That’s the principal’s car!” I wondered what the principal from Ngong was doing in the Extreme North until I remembered he was affected up here over the summer. The president of the club talked with the guy in the vest and apparently the principal’s wife had been driving with one other person in the car, not the principal. He wasn’t sure how everyone was. We got a move on again and a few minutes later when we had some service the president called the principal and he said that nobody was too terribly hurt, but we decided to stop by his town (about 20 minutes later) to visit for a short time with them.
We met the principal at the hospital and I think he appreciated all of us visiting. Then we visited with his wife and a younger man who might have been his son (I wasn’t exactly sure) in a hospital room. The younger guy looked to be in some pain and had a taped up wrist and some blood on his shirt. The wife didn’t seem to be injured, though it was hard to tell for just a short amount of time because I didn’t linger.
Outside of the room, one of the veterans Noele was sitting on the steps with his head in his hands. A few months ago, Noele had been in a pretty bad car accident—the car had rolled several times though, luckily, he wasn’t seriously hurt. I’m sure seeing the car wreck and the boy who was hurt was just bringing back memories. A couple other veterans were sitting with him and then got him up to walk away, holding his hands and with their arms around him. Cameroonian camaraderie.
We loaded up the bus again and hit the road.
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