Sannu Nazara! Jam-na ?

I am living in an African village.

Read this sentence again. It has to melt down your tongue just like a scoop of icecream develops its flavour when it liquidifies in your mouth before you can get a mere notion of its taste. It took me about two weeks to swallow this, to really realize this reality. You may want to read it again and you still will not catch the meaning of it.

So there I am, in the middle of Cameroon’s Bushlands of Adamaoua, enjoying the nice climate of the current dry season. To give you a first glance on what I am living here, I am working in a hospital with 150 beds run by the protestant church, supported with Austrian and US-American donations. It’s the only hospital with the basic equipment for operations in an enormous area, people are coming from 150 or even 200 km away to get treatment here. However, the market of medical care still manages to divide up in several segments. Often patients don’t arrive any more for the large distance calls its victims, so that cases are directly being taken care of by the church. Often the illness is not bad enough to see the expensive doctor and the local medicine man of a village will be able to help with his fancy smokes, magic animal bones’ or horn powder, curing herbs and the like. And there are many patients with intermediate illnesses; they remain to form our main market.

The creation of the hospital some 50 years ago has caused the emergence of a tiny village which slowly grew to its nowadays’ size of estimated 1500-2000 souls. People are living in simple circumstances, houses or rather huts are made from clay and usually have thatched roofs. Almost only the European’s and the hospital management’s houses are constructed with concrete and have proper roofs, accommodating thousands of bats. And this is the place I call home for this whole year.

So, what is more to describe – think of cocks and hens all around, think of goats everywhere, banana-plants, palmtrees, papaya plants, a river… and the New Year's Eve was probably the most fascinating and exciting of my life, partying in our village's church together with a crowd of cool children who by now are getting my friends already :-) And to explain my statement above, the children often call me Nazara, because I am a Nazara, I look like one of those missionaries from imperialistic times that always told of a very good man from Nazara... or as we call it: Nazareth.

Feel again, what does my initial statement taste like? Is it like caramel-peanut? Peanuts are a commodity that does indeed grow here in this dusty environment and one of the few sweets we can get here are "caramelles d'arachides". It is delicious!

Well, I shall mention that this is one of my very few signs of life for the moment as I don't have any internet available that is less than a journey of 7 hours away. Sorry for this, I am working on a solution. Meanwhile you may call me on +237 - 94701802.