• About Kayla Faith

Les Pieds Fatigués

~ "If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys." – Chief Dan George

Les Pieds Fatigués

Tag Archives: village

Oravský Hrad and Orava Village Museum

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by Kayla Faith in Europe, Slovakia

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abroad, beer, bryndza, Case Western Reserve University, castle, centuries, cheese, clothing, country, Czech, Czech Republic, Czestochowa, damage, ethnic, Europe, fairytale, family, filming, fire, floods, fortification, gardens, garlic soup, Gorals, great-grandfather, herbs, history, indigenous people, livestock, local, local cheese, lunch, medieval, Mongol Invasion, Mongol Invasion of Hungary of 1241, Mongols, mountains, movie, museum, Orava, Orava region, Orava Village, Orava Village Museum, Oravsky, Oravsky Hrad, Poland, Polish, Prague, rain, region, restaurant, restoratin, rural, salad, sheep, sheep cheese, Skalica, Slovak, Slovakia, Slovenska bryndza, solo, storm, student, study abroad, summer, Tatra National Park, thunder, tools, travel, Turks, village, visit, voyage, Yilina, Zuberec

This morning I got up to fill out the postcards I got from Skalica which I will mail later.  Then Juraj and I jumped in the car and headed east from Žilina to nearly the southern border of Poland.  We made a quick stop to view the Praying Monk and Camel rocks near where we hiked yesterday, then continued our journey.  We were in the Orava region, home to the indigenous group of people called the Gorals.  The region was very mountainous and rural.

We pulled off first to tour the great castle called Oravský Hrad.  The castle was built before 1267, placed over the site of an old wooden fortification from the Mongol Invasion of Hungary of 1241.  The castle eventually grew in size over the years and as it changed hands in ownership.  Unlike most castles in the region, it was never destroyed by Turks or others with the single exception of a fire over 200 years ago which damaged much of one section.  That section has since been repaired and, in the last century, a lot of restoration efforts have been made to bring it back.  Even the chapel and included tomb is now open for visiting.  Unfortunately, the castle may be closed some of the next year due to another fairytale filming.  But it was by far the nicest castle I have visited or seen from afar in this country thusfar!

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We left the castle and headed even closer to the Polish border.  Just after entering the Tatra National Park, we stopped for lunch.  I had beer, of course, with garlic soup and a salad with some more of the region´s notorious Slovenská bryndza.  Right next door was our next stop, the Orava Village Museum in Zuberec.  The village is a series of moved buildings such as houses, barns, churches, etc.  Many are open so you can walk inside, some just have windows to peer through.  We walked around the village to get a feel for what life was like here over the last several centuries.  The rooms were decorated heavily with ethnic clothing, handmade tools, and drying herbs.  There were even real livestock and crops growing in well-kept gardens.  On the way out, I found a cat to pet and Juraj and I threw pebbles in the bell tower until we got the bell to ring.

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A storm was brewing, so we hurried in and left just before the museum closed.  The drive home faced intermittent rain.  By the time we were home for soup and tea, the thunder was roaring and the rain was coming down heavily.  I just keep thinking towards my plans for Prague and other regions and the realization that recent floods might be altering my route a bit.  Nonetheless, we will head back to Poland tomorrow to view the town where my great-grandfather grew up, Częstochowa.

The Reality of EWB Projects

05 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by Kayla Faith in Africa, Cameroon

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Africa, beer, Cameroon, Case Western, Case Western Reserve University, Engineers WIthout Borders, failed projects, French, reality, student, translator, travel, University of Delaware, village, volunteering

Photos coming soon.
Bamendjou, Cameroon, Africa.

Engineers Without Borders projects always seem so glorious.  They’re these amazing projects done by amazing people working with much a much different culture, these poor people who are so thankful and embracing.  And then the project is started, they work side-by-side, and it finishes.  And there’s all this happiness forever around the project.

FALSE. These projects are not any of those things.  Not in that way, at least.

Think I’m being harsh?  Google it.  My friend even sent me a link of a talk in Canada about how these projects just don’t work and why. Well, we always see why.  Why do they fail?  Well, today, like many days yet again … people don’t show up to help.  They don’t fully comprehend that they are the work force.  They think we have all of the money, all of the power, that we can make things happen without them.  This is our gift to them.  They probably have a million reasons why we’re doing it or maybe they don’t understand, they just know we come from a place that – to them – is perfect, plentiful, and overflowing with wealth.  They can’t comprehend why we can only stay so many days and will tell us just to stay for another week.  Or just move there, no biggie.  They can’t comprehend why, when they thrust their fists in our faces, we don’t just give them money.  Because to them we must have endless money and why wouldn’t we share? They also have been living like this for a very long time.  Many have not seen better conditions and consider what they have to be happier, less stressful, the “simple” life as many have said.  It makes me wonder why we even help.  What is so wrong with this way of life, anyway?  Sure, disease, but do you know how many foreigners get sick from the food that these people eat constantly?  Who’s really worse off?  I guess the largest lacking factor is a medical program that can keep people healthy and treat them for individual deficiencies, or someone who can tell them to avoid incest because that’s why there are so many albinos or people with genetic problems.  Telling them about germs and giving them clean water just gives the kids something to sing about later and a new spigot to dance around that’s closer to home. But what happens in the long run?

Well we saw that today when we visited Bamendjou, a village not too far from our own (you can tell by all of the “ba-” names).  The University of Delaware closed a project there very recently.  The project was essentially the same as ours, using solar panels to pump water downhill to some taps part of the way up a hill and ultimately up some pipes to fill a tank way up on the hillside by a school.  We hiked clear to the top to see the tank first and were disappointed to find it hollow and totally bone-dry.  We walked past the buildings and went back down the hill.  There were people standing around, trying to pump water that wasn’t very willing to come up.  They were looking at us with some excitement, but they’ve clearly seen some people around before that look like us.  Finally, Eric turned in disgust and observed the solar panels.  They were completely caked in dirt.  There was no way they could produce enough energy needed to pump water.  As a group of the guys took buckets from the villagers and showed them how to clean off the panels, sloshing a couple over the surface, Kate H. and I ran around with the children saying “Ka-ra-teyyy!” and karate chopping one another.  They were literally rolling on the ground in laughter and running from us, screaming and laughing, if we got too close.  I caught one child by surprise and he looked terrified.  We all laughed as his friends fled and refused to help him from my grasp.

We had stopped on the way to the other project to see the “sacred” waterfalls along the highway.  According to Google Maps, it’s called Chute de la Métché.  Paul Dennis freaked out when I tried to touch the water and he said I was getting “too close”.  Africans and their water!  These people in Central and Western African, in my experience thus far, really really really don’t like the “wickedness” within!  I settled for mists in my face as we took group pictures and returned to a village that was still drinking from the party.  These people never stop.  (Unless it’s construction work!)  When we got back, I was so tired that I went to bed early.

The Biggest Funeral Party I’ve Ever Seen

05 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by Kayla Faith in Africa, Cameroon

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abroad, Africa, alcohol, Bharat village, Cameroon, Case Western Reserve University, culture, customs, Engineers WIthout Borders, EWB, experience, funeral, student, tradition, travel, village

Pictures coming soon.
Batoula-Bafounda, Cameroon.

It was yet another morning at the site.  The same weather every day: cool mornings with light fog in the deepest thickets of banana trees, slowly warming air, then warm air with a hot sun.  No rain.  I could wear flip-flops and jeans all day, plus a hoodie in the morning which I would remove by about 10am.

We spent the morning topping off the tower.  It was increasingly difficult to explain to the villagers not to touch our tower or climb on it.  The children were eager to scale the sides, especially when I had to help compact dirt on top or place fill.  We had already spent so much time explaining why there was no need for cement on a tower using geotextile and friction to hold it together.

The market was up and running today, so we left the site briefly to join the rest of the villagers.  It was a swarming mess of people, some from more remote parts of the village who had not yet encountered us.  The people are pushy to sell, but it’s definitely not like in other places I’ve been.  The loosely assembled stands that we’d seen passing through the village before were now bustling with people and stocked with all sorts of goods.  There were a lot of random electronic stands with random assortments of radios, cables, and things that seemed to old for me even to identify.  There were of course also hot food stands and big burlap sacks of sugar cane being pulled from overloaded cars.  Perhaps the worst section was the meat section, where fish that looked whole and shriveled laid, skewered, on mats in the sun.  There were goats lying on tables, cut completely open with the fur still on.  The flies were incredible and the smell was putrid.

I passed the section with the more pleasant food and bought a classic white-and-blue striped plastic baggie of twisted beignets.  Some of the students went around purchasing machetes and clothes.  Everyone liked my dresses I had tailored in Benin, so I was helping them buy material for their own.  I ended up finding a used dress for a dollar which needed a new zipper.  I had the zipper replaced at another stand for about the same price.  I also bought my grandma a dress, myself more fabric and clothes, and my brother a shirt.  While standing around looking at the shirts, Victor came up and started asking for me to marry him.  He was in hysterics as I said “no” and kept sucking on a plastic bag.  It was the same kind of plastic bag I’ve seen kids suck on after picking them off the ground.  Victor eventually turned to go and I realized the bag was actually a little sack of to-go whiskey.

Emily was glad to find something to wear the funeral that we were then expected to attend for Tomas.  I too found something to wear.  We went back to the house and washed up.  After everyone was dressed traditionally, we started a long walk down some new trails.  The people around us kept multiplying.  When we got to the thickest of the group, it was amazing how much of a party the funeral looked like.  There were drinks, the music was loud and live, and people were singing everywhere and dancing too.  We stood for what felt like an impossibly long time, observing Tomas with his family sitting around an opening where the casket was.  Apparently it’s traditional to be buried by your ancestor home or something like that.  This was certainly not the kind of area Tomas currently lives in, with his large mansion and Italian marble floors.

When we were told to head back, we were followed by a select…hundred or so…of people.  We all walked through the afternoon heat in our bundles of fabric and found seats at one of the tables under the tents set up on the soccer field at Tomas’s house.  There was sooo much catered food and so much alcohol too!  I was surprised how much alcohol is accepted where I’ve been.  Some man even in and took photos with us… and he was really drunk.  It was kind of funny, until he got aggressive and we all stopped acknowledging him.  When we left the party, we ended up just doing our own things for the rest of the day because everyone was so tied up with the funeral that we couldn’t get enough hands to finish the work.  What a typical workday in Cameroon…

Damned If You Give, Damned If You Don’t

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Kayla Faith in Africa, Cameroon

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Africa, Cameroon, engineering, EWB, king, project, solo, solo travel, travel, village, volunteer

Pictures coming soon.

Batoula-Bafounda, Cameroon, Africa.

We got up early and found Bismarck.  We had brought 40 pairs of gloves to distribute after the elderly complained yesterday that their hands were bleeding.  Bismarck oversaw the next trench going most of the way in that day.  Kate, Ryan, and I re-paced everything and began leaning towards not adding an extension to the system (as contemplated) due to too much head and no 4th tap due to the scope of the project.  When Kate H. and I split off from Ryan to investigate the back pathway near the potential 4th tap, we encountered a peaceful trail with barely a passerby and a thick stream of ants.  There were little ants, big ants, fast ants, and ants carrying large leaves.  We photographed it, much to the curiosity of a man passing us on the path.  We’d just never seen so many damn ants in one superhighway before.

Ryan, Amy, and I next verified the elevation drop in the extension and little kids followed us the whole way.  They kept giving us avocados.  I guess that’s a really huge “thank you”, even in a place where it seems food could be so plentiful.  As we crested the hill and descended towards some larger farms, we saw a hunched woman with a cane and crooked legs carrying a huge bag on her head.  She rose out of the fields and climbed to the top of the hill.  I had a moment of guilt and then I realized, this is why we’re doing this.  Because of the inconvenience of the water situation here.  Because, too, of people like this woman who can’t get medical help as easily as she can get someone to put water 50m closer to her, making her daily trek a little less painful.  50m each way, several times a day, every day…it adds up.

We got back to find that our new pipe had arrived but that it was not the right schedule. (40).  Also, the king demanded our presence.  I was told he asks the prettiest of the group to marry him and that I will be asked.  Unfortunately, when I was with Amy at lunch I had opened the leftover bottle of wine to taste at lunch so we only had our gifts.  We didn’t know he wanted us to bring wine.  We don’t al even get to shower when he says we must come.  We get ready quickly and arrive by van to find that he is not there.  We go back, angrily, eat dinner, and go to bed.  Nice one, Mr. King.

A Snake Among Us

02 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by Kayla Faith in Africa, Cameroon

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Africa, Cameroon, Case Western Reserve University, digging, engineer, EWB, labor, project, snake, solo, solo travel, student, travel, trench, village, volunteering, well

Pictures coming soon.

Batoula-Bafounda, Cameroon, Africa.

The goal today was to trench from the tower halfway to the market.  We were out of the compound and working on site by 7am.  The mornings are always refreshing – surprisingly cool and damp with a nice mist lingering in the banana and avocado trees.  Not much of the village was awake at all due to all of the parties the night before.  We tried making noise at the tower while we worked and some people slowly started arriving.  Regardless, we worked with what we had to trench and got pretty far.  When we weren’t expecting it, loads of people arrived and we trenched the whole thing in less than a day.

Children who can’t hold more than a pebble on their shovels or who can hardly lift a pickaxe about their heads were lining the ditches, working.  I walked the line.  I did some quick head counts as I walked the path but, as I passed through trees and got a new vision of the distance ahead, it became overwhelming.  With each turn, I saw more sweaty, smiling faces and heard “Bon courage!” passed around like a greeting.  Today’s crowd not only brought the children but every woman with her gardening tools and an incredible workforce of senior citizens.  And boy did they know how to work hard.

Women with bent shovels meant to dig green bean rows lead the way with the lines we had staked out.  Others of every kind began to follow, picking and then shoveling around the hoards of chickens dipping in and out of the trenches in search of insects and worms to eat.  Men took up the rear of the line and perfected the square trenches to depth.

Bismarck likes to be in charge so I used this to my advantage.  He was perfect to translate between my French and his village dialects as well as between technical to simpleton.  We showed him depth sticks and he made his own and distributed them to the lines of people.  Ryan and I consulted him on choosing a final and slightly different well location and he helped us pick our pipe elbows to drive through some gardens and past houses for the home stretch without losing too much head on the line.

At one point, a woman screamed and Bismarck dragged me up to see a dead Fat Burrowing Asp on the road and told me to take a picture.  As I did, the woman sing-songedly screamed again and threw another snake onto the ground right at me.  The two snakes were smacked and smashed and I never saw the end because I chose to leave the chaos.  Kids wanted to see but the elders were voodoo-weary.  Ryan and I pinpointed the type in our HASP later and confirmed that the snake isn’t even venomous.  Guy later told us it was lucky the woman saw the snake first because if it’s the other way around, she would have been bitten.  It’s either you or the snake, I guess.  Except a bite is a bite.  Snake pulp on the other hand…

I walked the line again and explained to some children what we were doing.  They got excited and helped me drag a line out for trenching.  We conversed in French quite easily.  Later, the saw me scraping off seeds from my clothes and helped pick them off me.  So, there I stood, in the middle of a field, with three or four Cameroonian village children smiling and trying to pull every last husk from my jeans and tie-dye t-shirt.

Bismarck later walked us down the far tap line.  I played with children along the way and they showed us their singing and dancing games.  It reminded me of a time in pre-industrialized America where prairie children would have been living a similar life, tending to the family and the cooking and the farming and then spending their time playing simple games amongst each other.  No board games, no cards, no TV… just creativity and rehearsed lines.

It was the last day off for the children.  Bismarck’s daughter was especially adorable and the kids kept striking poses while she shyly hid behind them.  The pipe arrived and was potentially too small so Kate H. had gone to town to order more.  We are unsure of what our situation will be.  Tomas is meant to have a party for us at the house, so we are sitting around waiting.  The party eventually turned into dinner and eventually a meeting with everyone like the ADEBAT guy, Paul Dennis, Tomas, and Guy to discuss misunderstandings in our plans.  Guy translated.  When it was all said and done, we drank and went to sleep after a long day…like every day.

Digging and Digging, then Dancing at the Night Box

31 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Kayla Faith in Africa, Cameroon

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adventure, Africa, boit de la nuit, Cameroon, Case Western Reserve University, climate, dancing, engineering, Engineers WIthout Borders, mountains, New Years, night club, solo, student, travel, village, weather, West Africa

Pictures to be added.

Batoula-Bafounda, Cameroon, Africa
Our crew got up early but it took 2 hours for us to actually start.  By then, it was 8am.

We were served breakfast (it always seems to be a selection of eggs, potatoes, or plantains with little variety).  I curled up on my usual spot on a big, leather couch and waited for the food to be served.  It always amazes me how much cooler the mountains of Cameroon are than the beaches were in Benin or Togo.  Granted, the days become much hotter, but I can work outside all day in jeans and feel fine.  In the mornings, I’m so thankful I thought to bring along a thin zip-up hoodie.  I don it every morning and don’t usually doff it until mid-afternoon.  I’ll come in every few times in the day to refill water bottles and get supplies and I’ll notice that the Italian tile floors are always cool and always being swept for the constantly accumulating masses of red dust.

Kate J. slept in and didn’t touch breakfast until much later.  We, the rest of us, started the tower and the trenches, but not much else happened.  When Kate J. finally got up, she left for Bafounda at 2pm or so for goods that we needed.  The labor stopped by 3pm for the day.  We aren’t sure how many will work tomorrow on account of New Years Day being a big thing here.  It sucks to have yet another holiday and getting nothing done when time here is valuable.  The locals don’t understand that we can’t just “stay an extra day or two”.  They think money is as plentiful as the water we speak of in the States.

Sometimes I wonder how big the village really is.  We are living up at the front of once of the entrances, but allegedly there is a river and many more areas that cannot even access what we will be installing.  I also wonder how far people travel in a day since I always see the same adults putzing around the well project.  They’re the only contributors, but I can’t blame the others.  It would be hard to take time out of your strenuous day to contribute to a well that is so far away that you will never access it.  But I’m also disappointed by how many elderly people and children show up to work.  Do none of the healthy people have time?  What can they possibly be doing in the day?  Are they all farming and leaving their four-year-olds to tote pickaxes in our trenches?

After dinner, I read in my room and napped a little while the others talked, then I came out and asked if we were going to go anywhere for the New Year.  How strange, to be in the New Year a solid 5 hours ahead of the east coast.  I would literally be waking up for a day of hard work before people in the States were in the New Year.  Kate H., Eric, Ryan, and I decided then to celebrate, so we went out to find a club.  As we were ready to cross the road, Eric with a headlight on his head and us with some semi-traditional clothes and sandals on, some villagers came out of the compound and asked us to join them.  We suddenly recognized them as the “pool boys” from the compound who spoke only French and their local dialects, wore impressively white pants in the dust, and were always sneaking around us girls and texting people on their phones.  They must be the hotties in town, I guess.

We congregated in the darkness.  The boys were so dark-skinned that I could only see their pants and the whites of their eyes in the moonlight.  We were standing under a tree that was hissing incessantly.  Cockroaches?  I almost preferred not knowing.  When the boys seemed to have a cue of where to go, we followed them 2km into the village to a very odd night club.  By odd, I mean… it looked like a garage.  It was a big cinder block square with obnoxious French-African dance music playing from some boom box and little colorful disco lights that you might find at a 6th-grade basement party.  When we walked in, the boys seemed to wave off the cover.  Everyone moved aside for these absolutely out-of-place visitors.  The large congregation at the door just stared at us.  When we walked in, we were handed glass bottles of Coke and wrapped bubblegum – bubblegum?!  We felt like we were given special treatment as chairs were put up on the stage for us and we were asked to sit down.  Of course, nothing is free; we then had to pay back for it all later.  But, in the meantime, we decided to dance.

Dancing in West Africa is definitely different, and it varies by country.  In Ouidah, dancing for men was – men don’t move their hips, the ladies do that.  Here, the men literally were grinding on each other to get the ladies’ attention.  Oh, and there were maybe a dozen men plus our guys, then me and Kate H. plus two girls who looked like they were 12.  The four of us tried to stay in a group, but the men kept stealing us and dancing us away.  I lied and said I was married to Ryan, Kate H. claimed Eric, and then the boys struggled to play the same games to win us back.  Every move we made was a strategic move to get away from the others, so we would literally cha-cha to a far corner and into a tight-knit circles.  But it never failed.  The boys danced right back in and made our boys uncomfortable.  It was so loud, everyone was speaking the same language: laughter, body movement, and facial expressions.  What an experience.  It wasn’t so enthralling that we couldn’t leave, it was just a bit tiring and still strangely intriguing – different.

We went back, after paying of course, and stumbled down the long trail by the moonlight.  I kept pointing out constellations, causing everyone to look up at the wrong times and stumble into washed-out ditches and cracks in the trail.  I started talking about lions, tigers, and beasts, and we gave ourselves chills thinking about the wild animals in Africa and asking ourselves what could possibly be waiting in the bushes of mountainous Cameroon?  When the boys led us under the hissing tree and back into the compound, I went back upstairs immediately.  Kate H. and I tried to clean up as quietly as we could so as not to wake up Amy or trip over her on the floor.  I texted people for New Years, then I curled up on my bedbug-infested mattress, rolled my dirty clothes into a ball for my pillow, and went to bed.  Could it really be 2013?

Through the Mountains of Cameroon

29 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by Kayla Faith in Africa, Cameroon

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Africa, alone, Bafoussam, Batoula-Bafounda, Cameroon, Case Western, Cleveland, culture, Douala, Engineers WIthout Borders, flight, French, Mbouda, solo travel, student, tour, translation, translator, travel, village, water, water project, well

Pictures coming soon.

Doula-Bafoussam-Batoula-Bafounda-Mbouda, Cameroon, Africa
Today was not very eventful.  We got up early, had eggs for breakfast, then packed our van again and set off due north towards the mountains.  The drive was so long.  The road was winding, forever and ever and ever.  Cars would pass when they felt like passing, and we would pass them when they were too slow.  As we moved out of Douala, the population density changed.  We began seeing a lot more villages and farms with shacks lining the roads.  The trees were mostly banana trees and the soil was noticeably red.  Houses were typically made from mud bricks and topped with corrugated steel sheets.  Everywhere you looked, women were wearing the same brightly patterned fabric as they did in Benin.  The only difference is, this time, the men tended to wear dirty street clothes and not so much traditional African outfits.  We swerved a lot of potholes and picked our speed up significantly on straight stretches of hills.  Periodically, we hit a toll booth or had to slam on our brakes to go over speed bumps as we approached a new town.  The scenery was fairly constant, so distinguishing one village from another was generally only possible by noticing flocks of people selling goods in markets or along the speed bumps in the road.  They loved taking advantage of toll payers, too, whose windows would be down and whose cars were idling.  Bunches of bananas were shoved into our windows along with strips of fermented foods wrapped in leaves, drinks, and green oranges.  It was no different than Benin.

As our drive continued, the air temperature became gradually cooler.  The climb got steeper and I looked around as the villages thinned out a bit.  There were some banana plantations and avocado farms.  The largest of these farms had plastic bags protecting the bunches of bananas from bugs.  We stopped after about 3 hours of driving and Elvis and Guy bought us some bananas from a group of women huddled along the highway.  The bananas didn’t look ripe, but they were the sweetest bananas we had ever tasted.  You can’t get bananas like that in Benin.  They cost not even 10 cents apiece.

Another periodic encounter was police checks.  Fortunately, we weren’t pulled over as often for our paperwork as we were for our van documents.  A lot of vehicle smuggling and theft occurs, so the police in Cameroon frequently check for rental information, etc.  I got a kick out of this considering I had just signed that document for Ryan back in Benin.  I realized how chill Benin is in comparison to Cameroon.  Also, I was noticing how much kinder and friendlier the people – police included – are in Benin.  Knowing someone gets you far in Africa, but not nearly as far in Cameroon as it does in Benin.  Cameroon’s police force is corrupt, so any involvement with them generally spells trouble, especially for a foreigner.  Every time I was asked to show my documents, I was afraid they would be taken, I’d be told they didn’t know where they went and that I was lying, and that I would be arrested.  It may be difficult to believe, but the possibility was extremely high.  We were fortunate to have Guy with us.  He can smooth talk us out of anything, and he did on several occasions when we butted heads with the police.  We made one quick stop in the busy center of Bafoussam to pick up our cook, Aylynn, and our new driver, Zefere, then we were off on the last stretch.

At last, our van slowed down and pulled slowly to the right without there being a checkpoint causing our stopping.  It was close to dusk and we had finally arrived at the village.  Our van drove extremely slowly over a road that had once been soft soil, but was now extremely compacted ripples.  Driving over it was extremely unpleasant.  “Tomas always has his driver let him out here so he can walk the rest of the way to his house, it’s so unpleasant,” someone commented about the road.  Tomas was our host for our stay in the village.  I had heard a lot of rumors about this man with his numerous Italian leather shoes, enormous house, and suspicious Mafia-like activity.  Yet we were staying with him?  I guess he was threatening enough to keep us safe.  Sure enough, as we pulled to the end of the bumpy lane, I saw a large salmon wall barring us from what was inside: Tomas’ mansion.

The other two women aren’t expected until tomorrow, so we took our things into the house and waited on some fancy leather couches to meet Tomas.  “His sister has just died,” Guy warned us, nodding his head towards some large portraits of a young African woman that were lining the walls.  I looked around.  There were lights, marble floors, sofas, TVs, and two floors above us.  His compound was enormous, even for most American households.  Some men around the ages of us students were running about, doing chores – “pool boys”, as Eric fondly nicknamed them.  Then Tomas came in.  We stood and greeted him.  When he spoke, I was startled.  His head was shaved and he wasn’t a very large man, but he looked athletic.  He had a large scar running along the sides and bottom of his neck and throat.  His voice was raspy, deep, and barely comprehensible.  He sounded like Darth Vader.

Kate H. was the only one present in our American group who had met Tomas before because she came on the last implementation trip with Kate J. and Emily.  She did the introductions in English (Tomas is bilingual), and then we were let to go upstairs to drop off our things.  The boys were led to one room, us three girls were led to another.  “So, five of us in this room?” I asked.  The guest rooms all had a door to a balcony, a bed, a night stand, a bathroom, and a window, but our floor space wasn’t enough for two mattresses, assuming we could fit three to our bed.  “Let’s look at the boys’ room,” Kate said.  There floor space was larger, so we switched before unpacking.  I expected all three of us would sleep in the bed that night, so I set my stuff up there.  Kate and Amy took the two mattresses on the floor instead.  “I have a feeling this isn’t going to work out,” Kate warned.  “Why not?”  I asked.  “Well, I’m fine with it,” said Kate, and I could see Amy wasn’t having an issue.  “The problem is the other Kate.  She’s… a bit of a diva,” she chose her words carefully.  “And yet she’s here in Africa?”  I asked.  “Just wait, you’ll see,” warned Kate.  I had met the other Kate briefly once, but I wasn’t sure what to expect.  “Let’s go look at the site before dinner!” said Kate, so we gathered up the guys and went outside.

Kate remembered fairly well how to find drilled well.  We followed her down a dirt road and then through some trails around farms.  “Bon soir,” said every person we saw.  Usually they would wave their arms wildly, throw kisses, shake our hands, embrace us, and repeat “Merci, merci!” several times.  They clearly knew we were here to give them water.  There were chickens and hogs dodging through the brush everywhere we turned and frequent clusters of small children balancing gasoline cans full of water that were much larger and heavier than they were.  When we finally arrived at the site, the well just looked like a covered PVC pipe sticking out of the soil.  There were trees overhanging the system and we realized our well would be in the front yard of an elderly man who was watching us suspiciously from a log on his stoop.  Satisfied that the well indeed existed, we packed it up quickly to join Guy, Zefere, Aylynn, and Paul Dennis in a town just north called Mbouda.

In Mbouda, we stopped at a bar to have a meal and some drinks.  I quickly learned of Eric’s love for beer and told him what I knew about African beer.  We ordered Castels.  The others ordered sodas.  Then we had large dishes of food.  The others ate a meat dish, but I had salad and pasta with fries – typical modern African fare.  I had had it so many times in Benin by now, I was beginning to expect it.  We sat in a loft above the main bar.  The floor was surprisingly weak and, as a group of primarily American Civil Engineers, its lack of integrity made us a little nervous.  Washing our hands before eating was a bizarre process because the sink we used was along the wall in the main bar and the soap was a dirty bar.  In so many ways, African establishments are way below American par in terms of health standards.  That much has become evident.

When our meal was done, we returned, got ready for bed, and decided to start our day at 6AM.  Aylynn agreed to have food ready for us.  We had a long day ahead and were relieved to finally lie down, even if our mattresses were questionable and pillows were apparently now bygone luxuries.

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