Pigin is cool

I went out for beer and soya (grilled meat) yesterday with a friend here in Bamenda. We know each other when he was a teacher in Mbongo and I was a volunteer. We haven’t seen each other for 9 years, and he orders the first round of beer. He gets 33 Export for him, a Castel for his wife, and a Mutzig for me without asking me what I wanted. He just remembered from when we were together what beer I drank. People in Mbongo remembered too. It’s pretty funny. Cameroon beer drinkers are a marketers wet dream since people are so particular about which beer they drink. People will only very grudgingly drink a beer that is not “theirs”. This one gives headaches, that one makes the belly run, the other tastes bad, and one isn’t strong enough or is too strong. It seems one of the most important qualities of a beer is that you can drink the most of it with the least amount of side effects. I just like the taste of Mutzig.

Pigin is a great language. You can’t really describe it without hearing it, and when I get back, no matter how much you ask me to talk, it doesn’t come close to how Cameroonians talk it. It’s filled with so many words and expressions that are unique and often hard to understand. These are some good pigin words that I’ve heard that I’d forgotten about, spelled like I hear them.
Wyoh – like a con artist or scam. Dat man di make wiyo.
Langah – to want or be jealous. I di langah dat man ee njumbah.
Njumbah – girlfriend
Coni – fake or façade, not on the up and up, to fool. Mommy whey di sell okrikah di alays make coni.
Okrikah – you know all the used clothing you donate to Salvation Army? Much of it ends up in bales that are opened up in Bamenda, Kumba, Mokolo etc. markets that are then sold.
Congossa – gossip
And there are so many more. Anybody have any favorites? Add them to the comments.

I used a good Pigin expression a lot toward the end of my stay in Mbongo (thanks Babanki Tungoh man) when people asked me if we would ever see each other again. The obvious answer was “we dey like njangah and pepe, and go meetup fo pot soup.” Everybody understands this right away. Which means we’re like shrimp and hot pepper. Make sense? Shrimp and hot pepper always are eventually cooked together in the same pot to make hot pepper soup. So, it basically means, yes, we’ll meet again. I have no idea when, but it’ll happen. And generally, people just have a great turn of phrase to express things. I was drinking palm wine one morning and conversation in local drinking places usually ranges from here to there and everywhere else. This one morning we all went to look at a small plantain garden and all learned about the different varieties, how to plant, diseases and everything. Perfect conversation for an ag teacher. Anyway, the conversation turned to bowel movements (I didn’t start it), and this one guy said that when he ate this one kind of “chop (food) made me so my shit was very lively”. I thought that there wasn’t really a better way of expressing it. It conjured up all kinds of active and familiar thoughts that we’ve all experienced at some time. Accurate and discreet. I know we’ve made several bowel references. It really hardly comes up in conversation here, but when it does, it’s just really funny, so I write about it. It’s not something you hear strangers talk about in the states.

I’m not sure what I think about having internet here. It’s great, and I’m sure it would’ve been a welcome form of communication during my Peace Corps service, but I’m glad we didn’t have it while we were here. It is a wonderful thing for Cameroonians, though. Internet and phone have really made accurate and timely communication possible. Before them, phones were only in the larger towns, and very expensive. Now, cell service has reached pretty much every corner of Cameroon, and while it’s still relatively expensive for people, you can at least call to make visiting arrangements, or if there is a family emergency. Also, for people in towns, e-mail is also a cheaper and more effective way to communicate, as well as access information outside of Cameroon, land of libraries with 50 books from 30 years ago. For me, as a PCV, before leaving for Cameroon, I didn’t know what the internet was. I don’t think it even really had a name. I used it once to look at the CIA website to learn about Cameroon. While we were here, it seemed like every other Newsweek cover was talking about the Information Superhighway. I was like, “what the fuck is that?” It didn’t make any sense to me but it seemed like it was important to somebody over there in America. Then, I noticed that the Sunday funnies my parents faithfully sent to me started to have what I later learned was an e-mail address. Doonsbury was the first one to have it. By the time I left, all of them had their little e-mail address on the strip. When I got back to the States, everybody was like “what’s your e-mail address?” I was like “I don’t know. What’s an e-mail address?” “It’s the Internet, man, get with it.” OK. So I got my hotmail account and there was no looking back. Everybody said it (e-mail and internet) was easy which kind of made me mad, because it wasn’t. And it isn’t. I’ve worked with people who have never used a computer, or only on a very basic level, and the amount of computer and keyboard knowledge and visual interpretation you need to know is kind of overwhelming and difficult. We just take it for granted, like the telephone and ice cubes. Once you get the hang of it, like anything else, it is easy. But till you get the hang of it . . . Anyway, the internet cafes here are always packed, and many offer intro to internet and computer classes. It’s good to see so many people learning and using it to their advantage. The one I’m at now costs CFA 300 for an hour, or about 60 cents. So it’s relatively affordable. It’s hard to imagine life now without internet and e-mail, and it’s something that we’ll be using until the day we die. And it was kind of neat to be in Cameroon during that brief moment in history when we left it was Before Internet, and when we came back, it was all sides.

Being in Mbongo, as I’ve already talked about, was a lot of fun. Before we went, I had not idea what people’s expectations would be of us, if there would be hard-selling to bring new development projects or leave money, or just in general how people would react. I also felt not really guilty, but very conscious of how much we spent to be in Cameroon to visit compared to how much money people make in a year. Pretty much across the board, people just seemed appreciative and happy that we thought it was important enough to visit. The chief’s counsel of Bonjare summed it up the best of what several other people also expressed, was that people thought it showed love in our hearts that we would spend so much money to visit rather than spend it on other things. And it was left at that. It was I thought a very generous, kind - and true - interpretation of our visit. That and palm wine (puff puff and beans, plums, fufu corn and cabbage, pineapples etc).