High speed chase in a "souped-up" Starlet

Quick note: I changed a setting on the blog for those who have had trouble commenting. It should work now. Comment away! I love hearing your feedback. Of course, kindly do leave your name so I know who you are!

It's funny, after over a month I still forget I'm here sometimes. I'll wake up to some noise in the middle of the night and be disoriented and trying to remember what strange bed I'm in. A lot of people come and go during the night, and my wall facing the hospital area is actually mostly window. I hear everything, so I gain semi-consciousness around once per night. And I usually know when a baby was born during the night. Honestly it doesn't bother me so much! The birds in the morning are the real nuisance. They start warming up their voices at around 4 am, and go until...    well pretty much sunset. On the weekdays it's fine. On the weekends when I want to sleep in, I usually end up going outside every 10 minutes to throw rocks at the sparrow that sits in the tree right by my window without fail. Not very restful! Eventually one of us is going to learn his lesson though.

A few more things I've noticed about living here in Cameroon: For one thing, everybody here greets people more habitually than in the states. People are always saying "Good morning" "Good Afternoon" and "Good Evening". Francophones have a hard time with the concept of morning and afternoon since for them Bon jour is a blanket statement for all day. So they usually say good morning any time before 5 pm. Even when people enter a taxi it is customary to greet everyone with a "Good morning/afternoon". That's one thing that struck me a little differently, and it's also something I'd like to make a habit of and bring back home with me.

Seeing other non-African people makes me feel like there's an automatic connection betwixt us. There was a Chinese guy who I doubt spoke a lick of English, but I saw him walking on the street and just felt like I was seeing an old friend or something.

I was worried about the whole "Only American, only student missionary" thing, but the solitude has been a much needed respite from the distraction of the world. I've learned so much about myself in the short time I've spent here so far. I feel far more connected to my subconscious, as well as to my spiritual life than probably ever. It's really shocking to me (almost frightening) how much my artistic side is attempting to break out of its shell here. Lots of time spent alone and sometimes bored has had my right brain trying to snap its chain. And the quotient of my artistic curiosity is a bigger dog than I realized (Like a Rottweiler on a poodle's chain). It's not that I don't get out, I'm just not finding myself challenged by my immediate environment so much anymore. Buea's a pretty big town, but there are few stimulating activities here that I've found besides grocery shopping. I'm trying to manufacture logical challenges for myself (sudoku, A&P a la Khan Academy, etc.). Anyway, I'm finding an increased interest in language, writing, and poetry, as well as finding an almost spiritual appreciation for that which I find beautiful. I saw a jar of JIF at the market and was nearly in tears (okay maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. It was Skippy.)  I attribute this partly to my lack of a guitar - my right brain is trying to find ways to compensate for not having the creative outlet I've always relied on. Trying to learn French, while a genuine motivation, is probably to blame for my increased interest in language and travel. Journaling daily has likely heightened my appreciation for writing. Also, copious amounts of dancing like nobody's watching may have something to do with my feelings of "liberation". Art to me has always been represented by a murky pond of uncertainty. There are no right or wrong answers, and it's so subjective that I get woozy just thinking about it. But I'm letting it happen. That's maybe the most frightening part of all. Sudoku and Anatomy aren't enough. There are no more theorems, postulates, or formulas to suppress my right brain. I'm plunging in, willingly or not. I don't necessarily want it to stop, but I'm afraid that my logical sense will atrophy and all of the math/science courses in my major will somehow be comparable to, well, arts and humanities classes before I came. In short, I hope that instead of exchanging my enjoyment of sciences for symbolism, my appreciation of tactic for talent, I am becoming more well-rounded as a whole.

And finally, storytime:

Cabs are interesting here. 95% of them are Toyotas (the highest clock I've seen so far was pushing 600,000km), some have train horns, and most have this very discotheque-inspired neon interior lighting that the drivers turn on after dark. A lot of the drivers like to put these big, plush rugs over the upholstery. I'm still not sure if this is designed to conceal the condition of the original upholstery or to engulf anything that falls out of patron's pockets. Probably both. Anyway, after exiting cabs I'm usually pretty good at checking my pockets, but this one time I neglected to until after he began to pull away. Noticed my phone was missing so I began to run after trying to flag him down again. No luck. He stopped for an offer about 100 meters up the hill, but didn't pick the person up. The distance began to increase and I had just given up when a taxi (might have actually been a Toyota Starlet, plenty of the taxis here are) without any passengers pulled by and stopped 20 yards ahead of me. The odds of an empty taxi are slim to none, so seeing this as my golden opportunity, I ran up, jumped in, and shouted "Follow that car!" (If you've never done this before, do it once in your life! Talk about feeling like a BA, I mean this was the real deal). Unfortunately, the first taxi was lost in a mass of other taxis (like picking an individual out of a herd of zebras), but I remembered that the only other passenger when I exited had asked for Bakweri town. It wasn't far, took perhaps 3 minutes to get there. Taxi drivers here already drive like, well, taxi drivers, but I was still surfing the action-movie-like adrenaline rush of it all, so it felt like we were driving 100 miles an hour weaving in and out of cars. By the time we ended up there, I wasn't sure I could recognize the taxi OR the driver (I mostly saw the back of his head. And I think all Cameroonian barbers are trained at the same school, because the men's hairstyles are all remarkably similar). My current cabby offered to call my phone, and the first driver actually picked up! Great! He talked to the driver on my cell until his credits ran out (all of about 30 seconds). Not so great! I was afraid that maybe my first driver hadn't gotten the message, but we finally did catch up to the first cab a little below where I had initially been dropped off. To the best of my understanding the first cab driver wanted 1000 XFA as a finder's fee. I only had a 10,000 XFA note (largest denomination here, worth about 20 bucks) and some change, and so my second cab driver had to make change. I paid back the 1000, then offered my current cab driver 1000 for the fare, plus to reload credits on his phone, which left a pretty good sized tip. I was out of breath, and the bread in my backpack got squashed a little, but at least it was an exciting story. Thankful that I got my phone back, I guess I'm chalking it up to being a "God thing". I could have bought another one I guess, but it would have been a pain in the butt and wouldn't have involved jumping in a taxi and shouting "Follow that car!"

TL;DR Commenting enabled for all. I still wake up disoriented sometimes. Cameroonians feel obligated to greet each other. Not necessarily friendly but habitual. I suffer from MARIMBAS (Medically Ambiguous Ridiculously Immediate Minority Based Attachment Syndrome - invented that phrase myself). Solitude, my greatest trepidation about being here, has actually helped me learn a lot about myself, and I'm enjoying it thoroughly! There's more artist than I ever thought I had in me. I almost lost my $20 plastic cell phone forever, but got it back a James-Bond-like chase scene loosely involving taxis, zebras, and barbers. Worth reading the full version just above.