If it’s worth having it’s worth fighting for!

After two months, I have come to the end of my time in Cameroon.  I have made the obligatory rest-stop at Kribi, (almost) en-route to the airport.  Kribi is a small town along the Atlantic coast, not far from the border with Equatorial Guinea.  The name Kribi comes from the word ‘Kiridi’, which translates as ‘small men’ the ‘Pygmies’ who were the original inhabitants of this region – although I’m not sure if I have seen any here!  Kribi is a great opportunity to collect my thoughts and wash off two months of dust and grime in the beautiful warm sea before I get on the plane home.  So as I’m having my last spaghetti omelette and Guinness (a typical Cameroonian breakfast) it’s time to reflect on my experience here.  I suppose that all the things that I imagined would be challenging haven’t actually been so difficult to cope with – I soon got used to the lack of running water and the constant power cuts.  Sharing a taxi with eight other people, a ton of bananas and a couple of goats, soon became normal.  Falling asleep each night to the sound of exorcisms in the church next door and being woken up by the noisy compound at five in the morning became my accepted routine.  All these domestic challenges of living, eating, sleeping and travelling are relatively easy to adapt to with time.  But I did struggle to adapt to the many frustrating contradictions of Cameroon – a country with so much resource and potential where bare foot and hungry children spend all day in the hot sun selling bananas instead of going to school while corrupt government officials are living it up in luxury hotels in Switzerland.  Another frustration being the typical personality of the Cameroonian people – so warm and kind to everyone they meet but at the same time sadly far too placid and accepting, refusing to fight or protest for a better deal, to the extent that they are constantly taken advantage of and exploited by both the government and the church.  As I ate my last spaghetti omelette in a fly infested ‘chop shop’ in Kribi, there on the tinny TV set, was none other than Cheryl Cole, belting out her (probably one and only) hit ‘Fight for this Love’: If it’s worth having it’s worth fighting for! Fight, Fight, fight…   How ironic that here in sub-Saharan Africa the person I hear speaking the most sense is Cheryl Cole.  Needless to say that none of the other people in the chop shop were sufficiently distracted by Cheryl to stop drinking their morning Guinness and take heed.  Perhaps a future partnership with Cheryl and Samuel Eto’o and this could become the new National anthem?  (JohnnyC – that’s my one and only football reference!).  So I leave Cameroon with mixed feelings – lots of frustrations about all the limitations but also feeling hugely privileged to have been so warmly welcomed into ordinary Cameroonian’s homes and workplaces; an experience I will never forget.

~ by petercarr on May 15, 2010.