Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.....

Rather than a corner shop such as you’d find in towns in the UK, here there are dukas at the side of the road. These are generally fairly rustic-looking stalls selling a variety of relatively staple items from mobile phone scratchcards to fruit and vegetables, milk, meat, sodas (Fanta, Sprite, Coke, …) and bread. There’ve been a group of them about 100m along the road from my front gate. I can’t say that I was ever a regular shopper there, but occasionally I’d have the need to get some items, and various colleagues frequented them rather more often. It’s been a bit of a centre of life in the neighbourhood too, with people hanging around there for a good part of the day and evenings (as well as the dukas selling items, there was actually a pool table in one, a hair salon in another, and, I think, a tailor). So, I was rather surprised when I came back on Sunday from a weekend away to discover that they’d all gone! Apparently, people from the City Council and the police (some fairly inebriated) arrived at 2:30am Friday night in trucks, and proceeded to tear them down, taking some of the stock, burning things, and generally destroying whatever livelihoods the people working there had. I was told that it resembled a war zone on Saturday morning, with burning embers, electric wires hanging loose, and the owners salvaging whatever they could. Yes, they were probably there without permits, but they had been for at least 12 years, so surely that gave them some rights? It looks very empty down there now – and very dark at night, the electric bulbs which used to hang in each one, all gone. It makes you realise afresh how fragile life is here.

Impressions of Yaounde

I was in Yaounde, Cameroon for a week at the end of September for work meetings. Another opportunity to experience a new African country, and again, a Francophone one. Impressions gained from the trip were generally that life there is a whole lot more chaotic than here (I hadn’t thought that possible!). The plane there was the first introduction. I was travelling with our Francophone Regional Directors, who are well practised in dealing with these trans-Continental flights. First thing was to find out which side of the departure lounge we were going to exit by in order to board the plane. The reason? People seem to travel with an inordinate amount of hand luggage and these smaller planes don’t have quite as much space the overhead compartments as you get on the big jumbos. It was actually a bit like a glorified matatu or bus really. Once the doors were open, it was a scrum to get onto the plane (we were the first, having positioned ourselves by the door), and indeed, there wasn’t enough luggage space for all the paraphernalia that people had with them. I was warned too that our checked-in luggage might get bumped if there was too much (the plane went to Yaounde and then Douala, and sometimes, just luggage for one of these destinations gets through!). Thankfully, it all made it (I hadn’t thought to pack a spare set of clothes or toiletries in my hand luggage – I’ll know for next time!). Most of the time in Yaounde was spent at our organisation’s Centre there, so I didn’t experience much of local life. On the last day however, our meetings finished at lunchtime, and a Kenyan colleague and I were taken to a market in town by a lady who’s been working in Congo Brazaville for a number of years, and who’d spent some time previously in Cameroon, following an evacuation from Congo due to war. The taxi system is such that you just hail a cab at the side of the road, and see whether it’s going in the direction you want to go. Then you pile in, with whoever is there already. These are regular saloon cars, but it seems that 4 in the back, and 2 in the front passenger seat is the norm! The cars are all yellow, and just about all look pretty beaten up. I’d thought that driving in Nairobi was hazardous, but this seemed even more so. The market was a rabbit warren of a place. It was under cover, with narrow passageways between the stalls. The section we were in was mainly clothes and cloth. Bright African textiles – great against black skin, but not always so flattering to those of paler complexion! I was thankful in the market for my lack of French as it meant that I had no idea what people were saying (In Kenya, you’re constantly assailed by stallholders wanting you to look at their wares – “Looking is free”; “Promote me”; “I give you a good price”), though I was aware that my lack of response may have been taken as rudeness rather than cluelessness.
Leaving the country that night proved an ‘interesting’ experience. I flew back with Wairimu, who has even less French than me (whilst in Francophone Africa I’ve discovered that when I’ve been trying to dredge up my school French of 30 years ago, Swahili words have come to mind – encouraging for the Swahili, though not so great for communication purposes!). Our taxi driver had no English, but he was great chaperoning us through the various sections of Yaounde airport, pre check-in. Having stood in a queue for a short while, we were shepherded off to the back of the hall, where some guys were set up to wrap people’s cases. Ours were mostly wrapped, and then seemingly something wasn’t right, as they got unwrapped again, and our taxi driver took us off to another section where another group of people were wrapping cases in plastic. (On asking later, I was told that this was for the bags’ security – it would appear that theft there is common (actually, Wairimu had lost something from her locked case on the way).) We then went back to the queue, but were then told that we had to go elsewhere. A rather officious lady in uniform, then asked us about souvenirs. Despite the trip to the market, I had nothing, but she insisted on opening my case, which meant of course, that all the plastic had to come off, so she could rifle through my things. We finally made it through, got checked in, paid our departure tax (it can’t be that many countries these days where you pay to leave as well as to enter!), and got through Immigration, with ‘Sortie’ stamped in our passports. (On arriving back in Nairobi, I had to email through a scanned copy of the departure stamp as proof of actually having left – something to do with the application for the visa for entering still being in the pending pile….!)
I rounded off my time there by proving that I was a good student – guess who was first onto the plane?!