World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 - (Page 31)

large as six or eight feet in diameter and as long as the trucks. As we dodged the logging trucks, red dust followed us in a cloud, engulfing our car and settling on our clothes and hair and on the roadside foliage, which had turned the same brick red as the road. The logging truck drivers all looked the same: lanky backwoods cowboys who drove at breakneck speeds, slaloming in and out of the deeper holes. Surely they weren’t paid much for their work, however treacherous, but there was a distinct sense of urgency about them, as though threatened by something large and unseen. As we got deeper into the forest, we started to see wrecks, spectacularly smashed-up trucks that had careened into a ditch, or into a tree, or head-on into each other. We saw crushed cabs with shattered windshields; trucks jack-knifed into the woods; trucks flipped on their backs next to bridges, like overturned beetles. At one bridge, we saw a truck that had plunged over the edge into the stream just below and was stuck on end, its rear tires high in the air. It was impossible to know how long these wrecks had been there—some were attended by their drivers, looking relatively unharmed, scratching their heads, but others were abandoned. Like everyone else we met on our trip, the people in the stores and along the roadside during our drive were unfailingly friendly and generous with their time and advice. Along with Richard’s superhuman driving and deep patience, my impression of the trip was of being handed along by a vast network of kind strangers, a sharp contrast to the harsh conditions of the road. As we drove into the outskirts of Douala, with its ramshackle market stands cheek-by-jowl and snarled traffic and vendors hawking snacks and Kleenex on the shoulders, the memory of it was like a jolting fever-dream, vivid and unreal. But of all my memories of the trip, it has persisted. The landscape scrolled by, strange and absorbing: piles of fruit in the roadside markets, women carrying buckets of water on f their heads, children crowding at the windows g of stopped cars to f sell nuts. sell nuts. l uts. Lauren Wilcox Contributing Writer Lauren Wilcox is a freelance journalist who lives in Jersey City, N.J. Her work has appeared in World Ark, Smithsonian Magazine and The Washington Post Magazine. Photojournalist Geoff Oliver Bugbee has focused on global health, basic human needs and social justice issues for 14 years. In 2007, he photographed stories in more than 15 countries including Syria, Egypt, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Tanzania. www.geoffbugbee.com FEBRUARY/1-8/2008 www.heifer.org September/October 2008 | WORLD ARK 31 http://www.geoffbugbee.com 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

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.