Waka waka

I need to start a tally. I’ve lost count of the moments where it hits me:

I live in Africa.

You’d think I’d have figured it out by now. I’m four months into my time in Cameroon, I bathe from a bucket, I’ve eaten animals I didn’t know existed, (or had only seen in cartoon form… sorry Toucan Sam) and my house has no electricity. Yet I get the mental catch-ups once every few days. My favorite was last week when my friend Flora, known to the general population as Mamiyanga, dropped by and informed me to grab my dirty laundry – we were going to “the source.”

I should take a moment first to brag, both for myself and for Mamiyanga. I am no wuss. I can hand-wash clothes, no problem. I got pretty good at it the six months I lived in La Reunion. Or so I thought. Homegirl taught me different. This sassy 25-year-old mother of three dropped out of school in quatrieme (8^th grade) and has been with a guy who’s married to someone else, her baby-daddy, for three years, and still manages to show up all the other girls in town with the restaurant she owns and runs single-handedly, 9-month-old child on her back. And it’s not some dinky little bean stand, either. We’re talking rice, beans, bread, fish, meat (of various qualities, most of which would make my friends at the World Wildlife Fund faint to think of eating) couscous, and whatever else comes along. Today I spent three hours with Mamiyanga going to market, negotiating the price of “erison,” which looks like a giant tailless beaver, carrying said erison from the hunter’s house to the restaurant, cooking beans, washing pots, and making sure the dogs didn’t run away with the uncooked monkey meat. And her boyfriend/babydaddy added to the day’s stock the rat he somehow killed with his motorcycle. Yum.

Anyway, the point is that Mamiyanga is a veritable force to be reckoned with. And she’s my best friend in village. She loves to chat, to tease, to dance, and to do anything and everything it takes to make me one of the community. (Unfortunately this involves trying to convince me to marry every unmarried guy in town.) So when she showed up to recruit me as company to do laundry, I was more than happy. Until this point I’d been doing laundry on my veranda with water stored in large plastic containers, hauled from a forage a kilometer away. You can imagine my pleasure when we headed off down a random path into the tall grasses, wash basins on our heads, rolling hills and trees all around, toward this mysterious “source.”

Remember when you were a kid and you watched Fern Gulley for the first time? That’s what it felt like at the source. After a few minutes, the path to the source descends onto a stone staircase that leads directly to the little concrete enclave through which the stream is directed, ankle-deep and cool in the afternoon shade. Four hours we were there. I finished my small pile of laundry in half an hour, but my dear friend had three times as many clothes, four times as dirty (restaurant work and a baby tend to do that), and twice as thorough. Clothes here get USED, like tools rather than decoration, so Mamiyanga was straight-up scrubbing, hard-bristled brush and concrete. And that’s how I learned to wash clothes properly. By late afternoon, when I saw her rinsing the last of the clothing, I was mentally preparing myself to leave, when all the women, one by one, discretely disrobed and began bathing. Yup. For once it wasn’t my skin that made me stick out from the rest; it was the fact that I was still clothed. That was the moment it hit me -  I was at the river with half the neighborhood’s worth of mothers and children bathing, shameless, in front of each other, buckets full of clean, wet, heavy laundry ready to be placed on the heads of the women and carried home to be laid out on clotheslines and roofs and bushes to dry in the sun.

Waka waka. Welcome to Africa.