Mount Cameroon Looming in the background, that’s not a cloud.

On February 16 I ran, hiked, and skipped up an incredibly steep volcano with only 650 other idiots attempting the “Race of Hope” in Buea, Cameroon. In a country in which “making sport” is a very popular weekend pastime, with thousands of people donning full track suits and sweating it out under the soggy, humid rays of an intense African sun, there are relative few that sign up for the country’s most famous race. Among these strong and dexterous athletes was a small number of “foreigners.” 5 other Americans and I started out with our Cameroonian comrades from the stadium in downtown Buea, ran 4 miles up to the trailhead (where most people who hike Mount Cameroon begin their trek), then slogged up the treacherous mountain, laden with slippery volcanic rocks and locals wondering what on earth we were thinking in taking on this race- since we obviously couldn’t win. When we rolled back down the mountain and into the stadium and across the finish line some 9 hours later, my running partner and I were smiling, covered in volcanic dust, and eager to sit down and give our wasted quads a rest.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  I left Yaoundé on Thursday in a giant Suburban with three other Americans and a fantastic driver named Tata. We drove safely down a notoriously deadly stretch of road toward Douala, Cameroon’s largest city and its big, sadly-inefficient port. (Check out this funny video about the “Highway of Death.”)  Two of the four of us were former Peace Corps volunteers, so a “pit stop” meant a nice stretch of tall grass, but it was probably cleaner than any actual toilet we would have chanced upon. We stopped in Douala for a satisfying Lebanese lunch at a restaurant called Aladdin. (I’ve been out to eat so little here, this was a real treat for me.) That evening Greg, his wife Deb, and Katy and I all went for a walk before the sun set. Just a stone’s throw from the hotel we happened upon a giant banana plantation, a subsidiary of Del-Monte. I loved trekking the quiet dirt roads lined with banana trees holding their jewel-like blue plastic bags. The bags protect the banana-fruit from bugs and help it to ripen faster, I think. Apparently the locals don’t eat these bananas because they taste terribly bland, and compared to the bananas on the street here, American-supermarket bananas taste like paper.

Bananas mounted to a zipine that will be pulled/led by hand to processing center in the middle of the plantation.

Taking bananas to market (or the processing facility)

We passed several people on our way through the banana-field and no one stopped us. But man, do Cameroonians hate me taking pictures of anything connected to a factory or business.  White-girl+big camera=spy, of course. I felt like Mike Teavee intending to take Willy Wonka’s secret recipe and sell it to Slugworth, but really just intended to put it on my blog. The banana-processing center was very interesting- we witnessed a man bathing in the creek running next to the warehouse, a conveyor belt dumping “undesirable” bananas into a taxi filled to the brim to be used as animal-feed, and crates and crates of bananas loaded into ancient refrigerated trucks.

Banana processing warehouse

  The next evening, the night before the race, Katy and I ran a quick 5K through the fields again. I tucked away an ominous feeling while under the oppression of the giant volcano that looked like a distant cloud, high above the horizon. Looking at the peak of the mountain and thinking it to be my goal for the next day, I was sufficiently intimidated.

  The day before the race. Goals:  ensure our registration forms were received, get the required “medical check”, pick up our race shirts and numbers.  Time we completed our goal: 9:30 pm. Turns out I was the only American registered.

Greg confirms that I am the only one of our group from the Embassy actually registered for the race

  Our medical check was a hilarious blood pressure station, in which it turns out we all have hypertension, followed by a short interview with someone behind an upturned table-as-screen. I was asked if I had run a marathon before, if I’d had a heart attack, and if I was feeling pain in my chest, abdomen or limbs. Since I answered well to each of the questions, in the final section titled “Conclusion” I scored a check next to “Fit” and was given the green light by a young man with a dingy lab coat worn unbuttoned over his athletic wear. Several of my friends, a little older than myself, had the pleasure of lifting their shirts for a “hernia check.” Wes said that they instructed him to lift his shirt and “firm up his abdominals.” He obeyed their instructions but was met with the man’s insisting him to “No, FIRM up your abdominals!”

Deb being triply checked for an acceptable blood pressure to ensure she wouldn’t need an med-evac, which in this race, consisted of a couple of Cameroonians carrying the injured person down the mountain, no helicopters or crazy-juju-craft.

Conclusion: Fit

Greg was interviewed by the Cameroonian press because someone realized he was from the American Embassy. He cooly fielded questions and then dismissed them like a rockstar, tired of all the attention. Just kidding, but he did a great job on camera. Just go to www.CRTV.com and you can watch the clip. Kidding again.

  The tv crew asked Katy, Deb and I to get our blood pressure taken again, so they could film it. Horrifyingly, the camera came to me, zoomed in on the machine taking my blood pressure and recorded for all of Cameroon to see my numbers shoot the roof as my heart started beating faster, realizing they would soon turn the camera on my face. When they asked me how I felt about the race tomorrow, I answered a pithy, “I’m okay.”  And that was it. What? No matter. My housekeeper and her entire family saw this clip on tv (they watched it on her husband, our gardener’s, cell-phone) and she wrote me the following text that evening: “Madame, my whole family saw you on CRTV and words can not express the feeling of joy I have for you. We are all praying for you tomorrow during the race.”

  We returned to the stadium to hand in our medical forms and were told that someone would bring our numbers to us that afternoon, not to worry. Feeling excited with our success-in-registering, we took a picture under the winner’s banner.

Katy, Myself and Deb, Also referred to on that day as “Greg’s three wives,” since he was walking around with us. But I hate this arrangement because as the youngest of the three, I’d be forced to do the least desirable housework while Deb would be able to sit back and relax as the “wife aînée.”

  Having accomplished all we could towards actually registering the four of us, we headed to the city’s cooking school, where the U.S. Embassy’s chefs trained, a place called O.S.C. It serves traditional Cameroonian food which means the menu is like this:

chicken or fish,

with corn fufu (grits, but finely ground then steamed into a hard ball) or plantains,

and a side of jamma-jamma or ndolé ( both stews of a bitter green leaf mixed with peanut paste and reminiscent to me of the detested collard greens my great-grandmother made).

 I had chicken, corn fufu (Deb’s favorite, not mine, but I swallowed it for “carb’s sake”) and jamma-jamma, which tastes good if I think of it as creamed spinach. Not exactly a spaghetti dinner, but hey, a marathon up and down Mount Cameroon isn’t exactly the New York Marathon.

Pre-Race Carbo loading, Cameroonian-style

  In Part Two of this post, I’ll get to the actual Race of Hope. I promise.

        “Eid al-Adha  (also called Feast of the Sacrifice, the Major Festival, the Greater Eid, Kurban        Bayram and Bakrid,) is an important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide to honour the willingness of the prophet Ibrāhīm (Abraham) to sacrifice his young first-born son Ismā’īl (Ishmael) as an act of submission to God’s command and his son’s acceptance to being sacrificed, before God intervened to provide Abraham with a lamb to sacrifice instead.”

 Call me crazy, but it sounds a whole lot like the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (technically his second-born son) but his only child borne to him by Sarah. Just sayin’.
Anyways, so there was this fête, and lots of people were going to pray lots of times and go to a mosque or Islamic center, and then go home and kill a sheep or a goat and celebrate with their families. Sheep were, by the way, super expensive for the few weeks leading up to the holiday. Like 3 times as expensive. And the Sunday before the fête, as I was running my 12th of 16 miles, Christina and I had to yield to a herd of a few hundred goats walking up a main, 4-lane road by the Palais de Congrais (Congressional Palace). 
Day of the Fête, I paid an American neighbor’s daughter to watch the kids while they watched a movie and Kevin and I went to nearby Islamic center, which was totally and completely packed out. We couldn’t park anywhere near it and there were just thousands of people collected there, finishing their morning prayers as we drove up.

We found a place to park the car that we hoped wouldn’t get blocked in (one never knows), and I started taking pictures. The first little girls I saw (below left) are the daughters of a man who works at the embassy. He was happy to let me take their picture. The rest of the people I took pictures of were a little more touchy about me pointing my lens their way.

But everyone likes to have their picture taken. The Cameroonian custom is to have a “photographer” (man with some sort of digital camera and printer) walk around an event and take posed, unsmiling pictures (below). Then he will print the pictures and set them up near an exit area and sell the prints. Like at the end of Splash Mountain in Disney World.

We happened on some animals being not-so-ceremoniously-washed.

You think he knows what today is? Poor guy.

Lots of families wore matching or coordinating outfits.

Baby rocking some eyeliner.

We walked through the throng of people leaving the Islamic center and back around to where we parked. There was a lot of traffic, as expected. Sometimes I think, “It’s so busy not another car can fit on this road.” And then I see a guy with 50 12-feet-long sticks of sugar cane from the bush loaded on a rickshaw and pushing it through gridlocked traffic.

Trail of Tears (for animals)/Walk of Pride (for lucky men that have enough money to buy a sheep to share with his family)

Princess.

Took this shot below as we were leaving. See the empty road on the right and the packed road on the left? I’m guessing that’s where the butchers are.

I have been walking from my house to the boys’ school- about a mile and a half each way. The route takes me along a very busy street for a bit but it’s mostly on smaller streets (without sidewalks, of course). I have been wearing my camera around my neck and “shooting from the hip” in an effort to catch some candids of the crazy things I see around here. It hasn’t worked yet. I haven’t perfected the angle I should be holding the camera at and I have a lot of shots of the ground.

But I got to the school last Thursday, my $$ camera around my neck and my friend Rachel, who has lived here for 2 years and was in Zambia for 3 years before this post, freaked out a little at me. She was shocked that I have done this walk more than once with what is essentially a large diamond around my neck. She knows of two people personally that had someone walk up and say, “Give me your camera” and the people just had to give up their little point-and-shoots. (I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but because of the extreme and widespread poverty, there is a lot of robbery. And apparently the thieves are not violent if you hand over the goods. But resist at all and out comes a knife or gun, so it’s just better to give over your possessions.)  So on the walk home that day, I put my camera away in Caleb’s backpack and held it for him. I’m not sure what I would do if someone tried to take it. I think I would hesitate, at least.
I related the story to Kevin later and expressed my frustration with not being able to take pictures. I said something that I realize now is ridiculous:
“I just feel like I’m failing if I’m not taking pictures of the crazy things I see here everyday. And I’m trying to find the balance between not taking pictures and … not getting killed.”
But finding that balance is actually a greater question of identity, really.
I am a photographer. I am a mother. I am a wife. I am an athlete (of sorts). I am an artist. I am a cook. I am une ménagère (the french word for housewife). It reminds me of the word manager and to me at least, more accurately describes what I do than “stay at home mom”. I stay at home yes, but that conjures up an image of a middle-aged pudgy woman in a pink sweatsuit with tapered ankles “folding laundry” while watching soap operas and eating potato chips in the middle of the day. This is not who I am. It also doesn’t describe a single one of my SAHM friends, either. So I’ll take the French term.
But back to who I am. When Kevin fills out our taxes he always fills in the blank for my occupation as photographer. This causes an argument between us because, although that is who I am, it’s not actually what I do. Or at least, it’s not been what I have done since getting pregnant for the first time 7 years ago. It’s what I want to do. Intend to do.
When people find out that I am a photographer, that I studied it in college, there are two reactions.
One: can you shoot our family portrait? The answer is yes, but you probably don’t want to pay me enough even to cover the cost of a babysitter for me to take your pictures, much less edit them. You (theoretical person) have been inundated with too many Groupon deals from desperate Mommy Photographers offering shoots for $50. That is a ridiculous price, even for a mom with no overhead, save the babysitter. I’ve done some of these and thoroughly enjoyed them, but I haven’t decided to go head-first into this flooded market.
Two: What do you take pictures of? The answer to that question hits close to my question of identity. What I shoot tells about who I am. I like to shoot people. To capture moments of intimacy and emotion, but these happen only when the subject is not conscientious about my camera’s lens focusing on him or her. I spent my last semester in art school taking photos of my three sisters, examining their lives and the relationships between them.  They were relaxed and comfortable with me pointing my giant lens towards them.
Shooting strangers on the street here in Cameroon can only be done from a car unless I approach the subject and ask him if I can take his picture, lest someone get offended/upset at me. But after approaching someone and introduce myself, the dynamic is different. He is aware of me, self-consciously. Also, I am just very shy about interrupting and bothering people. I hate to be obtrusive, so asking if I can invade a person’s space and capture his or her soul on (digital) film is just not something I like doing. But come on Kristen, scores of photographers do this everyday and so many whose work I admire had bigger cohones than I have. Of course this iconic picture comes to mind:

Dorothea Lange, Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California” 1936

Dorothea Lange’s are the kind of telling pictures I want to take. Of course her work has inspired thousands of young photographers and I am no different in wishing to replicate her insight.  I know I am not exactly like Lange, she was white, as were most of her subjects and she spoke their language. I feel like an Asian tourist in Disneyland, pointing my camera at the most inane things and taking photos of things that are commonplace to the people here. But she was wealthy enough to be in a separate class from her suffering subjects. And that I have in common with the people here, as uncomfortable as that “class” distinction is- it’s undeniable.
I found this photograph (below) of hers from the National Archives. It very closely reminds me of some of the neighborhoods and roads here. The small shanties look the same, the way of cooking/cleaning laundry, the huge puddles in the muddy road. Only the car looks nicer than most cars here. And the emptiness in the photo is something only witnessed in Yaounde in the very early morning on a weekend.

Dorothea Lange’s “Cheap Auto Camp Housing for Citrus Workers” 1940.

The softness here was not done in Photoshop. That’s how I shot it.