World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 - (Page 30)

REPO R E P ORT E R’ S O T EB OOK: RE PORT ER’S NOT E B OOK: REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: K: L au r n i lc o Laur en Wilcox Lauren Wilcox cox Cameroon Cameroon hotels in town where we planned to stay were full. The thing to do, our hosts decided, was to drive straight through to Yaounde, Cameroon’s capital, in the south. Like outlaws, we stole out of town before dawn, when the dark shapes of the mountains were still shadows against the starry sky. Our driver, Richard Anchie, drove us past tiny villages of mud huts where people were building their morning fires in the dimness. The day brightened and heated up. The landscape scrolled by, strange and absorbing: piles of fruit in the roadside markets, women carrying buckets of water on their heads, children crowding at the windows of stopped cars to sell nuts. We crossed a broad river where two hippopotamuses floated, oily black and big as barges. Few things about the trip seemed as straightforward as a road trip in the States. There was the issue of gasoline, for one—stations were scarce in the interior of the country, which I didn’t notice until we stopped to refuel and I realized that we were carrying a tank of our own in the covered back of the truck. Richard whistled at a couple of guys sitting by the road who appeared with a makeshift funnel and a hose, and one of them, wiry and muscled in a sleeveless shirt, hoisted our tank onto his shoulder and held it, biceps popping, while it emptied into the truck. We made it to Yaounde just after dark, dusty and stiff after nearly 15 hours of driving with only 30 minutes or so of stops. We expected the following day to be easier, just a threehour trip on a paved highway from Yaounde to Douala. But somehow we got on the wrong road and no amount of surveying the locals made the situation clearer. (“Mon ami! Which is the road to Douala?”) Richard would shout at a cluster of men on the shoulder, rolling down his window. The road they pointed us down led us, first, somewhere quite different. We quickly found ourselves in Cameroon’s rain forest, a densely jungled region where the old-growth trees, which once formed a canopy overhead, are now dramatically thinned by aggressive logging. The road was so washed out and pitted that driving it was like steering a dinghy on the high seas: up one wave and down the next. The only other vehicles on the road were massive logging trucks, each a hundred feet long and precipitously loaded with four or five of the old-growth trees, as T he country of Cameroon is shaped like a tall, pointy hat that slouches slightly to the right. The country’s major airport where Heifer photographer Geoff Bugbee and I entered the country is in Douala, the economic capital, which lies in the bottom left corner by the coast. Maroua, the capital of the Far North Province and our destination, is up in the slouchy peak. The two areas are a country’s breadth—and worlds—apart: Douala is a sprawling city on the banks of the Wouri River, low-lying, swampy and buttressed along its waterline with massive metal warehouses, oil tanks and the other industrial ephemera of its busy port. The Far North region, by contrast, is arid and austere, its towns cobbled together from small white buildings and tree-lined, red-dirt roads. Our two-hour flight to Maroua from Douala was filled mostly with what appeared to be Muslim businessmen wearing robes and carrying briefcases. But there were also a couple of journalists en route to the Chad capital of Ndjamena, a short distance from Maroua. Only days before, armed men in Ndjamena began battling the government in an attempt to take over the city. The effects of the armed activity in Chad were just beginning to reverberate in Maroua as people fleeing the fighting crossed the border into Cameroon. Hotels were filled to capacity with these refugees. At the end of one of our workdays, sitting at our hotel bar having a Nigerian beer, I talked to a couple of these folks: a banker in a suit who said that he left in such haste he had no other clothes and a chain-smoking U.N. worker, a young woman from Paris with a nose ring, who told me that she saw people in Ndjamena being brutally attacked, even shot, in the streets. “It is as bad as you can imagine,” she said, drawing deeply on her cigarette. The upheaval in Ndjamena did not change our workdays, but we scuttled arrangements to visit Lake Chad, very near the fighting. Done with our visits to Heifer projects, our hosts’ plan was for us to return to Douala by car, a two-day trip across Cameroon with a stopover Ca halfway. The night before ha leaving, we found that hotels le throughout the country were th flooded with refugees and the 30 September/October 2008 | WORLD ARK www.heifer.org http://www.heifer.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008

World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 Contents Letters For the Record The Good Life Asked and Answered Digging Up the Past Not a Drop to Drink Facing the Ogres of Progress Mixed Media Heifer Bulletin Heifer Spirit World Ark Market Calendar First Person

World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008

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