Cameroon Recap - Part 4: a shoe, a shot & the police station
Part IV: A shoe, a shot, and the police station.
People really do walk around with just about anything balanced on their heads. It was incredibly impressive, and I was told by one of the volunteers that should I ask my host mother she would have been very happy to teach me how; starting small to build up my neck muscles. They carried around containers with donuts they were selling 3-high, platters of bananas, platters with eggs & mayo (yes, lots of flies, and hot hot sun – we were duly warned to avoid this delight), and my favorite…. a single shoe. I kept seeing men walking around with one running shoe on their head, and wondering where the hell the other one was! Then I noticed that some of them would be carrying a variety of single shoes around, with one balanced atop their crown as a kind of billboard. They were shoe salesmen! I guess if you happened to like the one perched on his head you simply needed to inquire to get a matching set and jog on your merry way.
This was honestly one of my favorites – shots in a baggie. We learned a common saying during training: “Peace Corps Volunteers to South America return Revolutionaries, to Asia return Buddhist, and to Africa return Alcoholics.” Depressing, don’t know how true.
Sadly many Cameroonians have a problem with alcohol, and one of the easiest ways to satisfy your craving is to head into a shop, or corner store and buy a little plastic tear off bag, (think those racks near the cash register at the store here), filled with alcohol. A Shot-in-a-Bag, so to speak. They only cost about 5-10 cents! Apparently, we were told, you shouldn’t be alarmed if you jump in a taxi, the driver starts up, stops, runs into the store for a couple baggies, drinks them, and then begins the journey… I thought, hey if nothing else, throw a couple in your med kit, and if you get run over by a bus (or taxi for that matter) then you can splash some on the wound to disinfect it and knock one back to dull the pain….
They were also very fond of packing as many people into cars/vans as possible. 5 people on a scooter, with bags. No problem. Or as we managed in one of the PC vans, 19 of us! Good training for cross country trips we were told. Arriving only a little banged up about the shins at the end of our site-seeing trip back from the police station.
Oh – great story about the police station. So we all had to go and get our pictures taken for our in-country identity cards. We were put in a little wooden booth (think outhouse) and told not to smile. Alas, our black & white photos had us all looking either mortified or exhausted. Then we had to fill out a form and go in 2 by 2 to have it finished by 2 clerks. They cut the pictures out and placed them on the form with our info, and made them official. Then on to the height measuring & finger printing, measuring went OK. Though they were a bit pushy with some of us. Then the finger printing went like this: The man would take some ink, drip it on the edge of a desk, spread it out into a thin film, and take our fingers – all 10 – dip them in it, and finger print us. No big deal really, though they must have just left everyone up to their own devices to clean the ink back off (our wonderful PC staff had a couple buckets and soap for us) because there were black fingerprint streaks all over all the walls of the station – inside & out. So upon arriving it kind of looked like some unlucky prisoners had been dragged off grasping the walls for help (think nail marks on the coffin if you know what I mean.) And the smell – we must have been just down wind from the ‘toilet’ because it smelled to HIGH heaven, in alternating gusts of stench and foulness. Finally, as we were all finishing up, someone realized that they had accidentally used someone else’s form. Instead of just tearing it up and re-doing the fingerprints on a new form, the resourceful staff busted out some White Out and whited out the fingerprints. Naturally the ink was pretty dark and saturated, so whiting out really just resulted in a nice purplish hue on the form. Waited around, and started again. Great….
People really do walk around with just about anything balanced on their heads. It was incredibly impressive, and I was told by one of the volunteers that should I ask my host mother she would have been very happy to teach me how; starting small to build up my neck muscles. They carried around containers with donuts they were selling 3-high, platters of bananas, platters with eggs & mayo (yes, lots of flies, and hot hot sun – we were duly warned to avoid this delight), and my favorite…. a single shoe. I kept seeing men walking around with one running shoe on their head, and wondering where the hell the other one was! Then I noticed that some of them would be carrying a variety of single shoes around, with one balanced atop their crown as a kind of billboard. They were shoe salesmen! I guess if you happened to like the one perched on his head you simply needed to inquire to get a matching set and jog on your merry way.
This was honestly one of my favorites – shots in a baggie. We learned a common saying during training: “Peace Corps Volunteers to South America return Revolutionaries, to Asia return Buddhist, and to Africa return Alcoholics.” Depressing, don’t know how true.
Sadly many Cameroonians have a problem with alcohol, and one of the easiest ways to satisfy your craving is to head into a shop, or corner store and buy a little plastic tear off bag, (think those racks near the cash register at the store here), filled with alcohol. A Shot-in-a-Bag, so to speak. They only cost about 5-10 cents! Apparently, we were told, you shouldn’t be alarmed if you jump in a taxi, the driver starts up, stops, runs into the store for a couple baggies, drinks them, and then begins the journey… I thought, hey if nothing else, throw a couple in your med kit, and if you get run over by a bus (or taxi for that matter) then you can splash some on the wound to disinfect it and knock one back to dull the pain….
They were also very fond of packing as many people into cars/vans as possible. 5 people on a scooter, with bags. No problem. Or as we managed in one of the PC vans, 19 of us! Good training for cross country trips we were told. Arriving only a little banged up about the shins at the end of our site-seeing trip back from the police station.
Oh – great story about the police station. So we all had to go and get our pictures taken for our in-country identity cards. We were put in a little wooden booth (think outhouse) and told not to smile. Alas, our black & white photos had us all looking either mortified or exhausted. Then we had to fill out a form and go in 2 by 2 to have it finished by 2 clerks. They cut the pictures out and placed them on the form with our info, and made them official. Then on to the height measuring & finger printing, measuring went OK. Though they were a bit pushy with some of us. Then the finger printing went like this: The man would take some ink, drip it on the edge of a desk, spread it out into a thin film, and take our fingers – all 10 – dip them in it, and finger print us. No big deal really, though they must have just left everyone up to their own devices to clean the ink back off (our wonderful PC staff had a couple buckets and soap for us) because there were black fingerprint streaks all over all the walls of the station – inside & out. So upon arriving it kind of looked like some unlucky prisoners had been dragged off grasping the walls for help (think nail marks on the coffin if you know what I mean.) And the smell – we must have been just down wind from the ‘toilet’ because it smelled to HIGH heaven, in alternating gusts of stench and foulness. Finally, as we were all finishing up, someone realized that they had accidentally used someone else’s form. Instead of just tearing it up and re-doing the fingerprints on a new form, the resourceful staff busted out some White Out and whited out the fingerprints. Naturally the ink was pretty dark and saturated, so whiting out really just resulted in a nice purplish hue on the form. Waited around, and started again. Great….
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