our man in cameroon

..and this bitch is one.

Meet the bitch. The bitch on a bike in this case.

The bitch is what I’ve come to call my fridge.

Bought just after Christmas, she soon ground to a halt making this horrible clicking noise.

It was fixed expensively and a timer installed that would switch if off during the times of low energy. It was the low voltage that was ruining it.

It lasted another week and then ground to a halt again. It was taken back to the fridge menders.

Chief fridge mender was away so I watched as it sat outside his workshop for a week, gathering red dust by the inch.

During that week, most likely as a result of under refrigerated food I contracted food poisoning.

Most likely as a result of badly stored food – I got mice in the house.

But finally it was back yesterday – it had been running superbly at the workshop I was told.

I plugged it in at home after waiting the requisite hour to let it settle. Nothing.

Pressing my ear up against the outside of it I could hear a vague hum. Perhaps it was just cranking up slowly.

I left it overnight. In the morning it was off and it had blown the fuses in that part of the house.

Right…

Around midnight, while the fridge was shuddering to a halt, a mouse decided to nosily make merry in my undies draw until I tipped it out and the thing freaked me out by running over my toes.

I eventually chased it out of the room and wedged the door shut. They can have the rest of the house. They know I’m too much of a wuss to kill them. But the bedroom is mine.

I did, however, buy spray recently to deal with an increasing number of cockroaches. Obviously once I spent money on the spray they stopped coming. I guess word got around.

My house is somewhat idiosyncratic.

First off I do have a very lovely home, arguably the loveliest of my fellow VSOers and for that I am thankful. But there are issues. One bathroom’s shower won’t switch off so whenever you use the sink or flush the toilet you have to turn the water on at the tap under the sink.

Obviously when you do that you get soaked by the shower.

The light in the other bathroom won’t switch on. I tried changing the bulb and it blew the electrics. Now I just shower in the dark.

I say shower. Actually I bucket bath. As a treat to myself when I first arrived here I paid the money personally to have a hot shower installed. So far it has only succeeded in…you guessed it…blowing the electrics.

I gave up on it after the seventh or eighth time.

So in the comparatively cold mornings I instead set my alarm 45 minutes early get up and fill my big stew pan from the kitchen tap. Unfortunately for no apparent reason the kitchen tap is also the lowest pressure tap in the house. Unfortunately the kitchen sink is the only sink large enough to take the pot.

So while it fills, I kick my heels and curse for a full five minutes.

Forty five minutes later it’s two minutes of bucket bath heaven. Something inside me dies when that last warm scoop of water is ladled over myself and I realise that there is no more.

And so to work. Today in fact…

I arrived to find a colleague, and this is a recurring theme, wanting to scan qualification certificates basically, I am guessing, so she can send them off and go and work overseas. Typically the printer wouldn’t work. Typically whoever wanted them had requested them a very specific size that was just larger than A4.

Then a colleague wondered why she couldn’t read a PDF. She didn’t have PDF reader.

Unfortunately because her computer was so riddled with viruses even opening Adobe to download the program took 20 minutes.

So I then had to open the PDF myself and then print it out. Which meant, because nothing is properly networked, putting it onto a flash drive and taking it to another computer. Unfortunately putting my flash drive into another PC means another dozen or so viruses to deal with.

Another computer needed to be looked at -turned out that it wasn’t crashing every two minutes – it was running the screensaver that the user had decided to download.

So then at lunch I go into town to try and recredit my Camtel account – the people who provide the internet in my house. And I get to the Camtel building and…hang on a minute…

It’s not there. Or rather the building is there but it’s all closed up. Where is Camtel?

I get sent backwards and forwards and eventually I am told that the Camtel shop has relocated to the Camtel district offices.

I found the little window where I am to pay up two flights of unswept stairs thick with dust and rubble.

I pay my cash and am told to take my yellow receipt to another office.

This always bugs me – why should I take my receipt to another office? Why can’t I pay you and you turn my internet on? Or at the very least, why can’t you take the yellow receipt?

But hey..I’ve learned not to question Camtel – just to curse under my breath instead.

So I take it to the dragon lady. I call her this on the basis that she is an utter dragon.

Here is my yellow paper, I am here before the 2pm cut off period which, in the past, you have told me is the point whereby nothing else can be achieved before the rest of the day. (It’s 12 noon on Fridays)

Please switch my internet on.

I will try, she says.

But you said…

No, she says, all I can do is request that the engineers in Douala switch you on.

Well, if you don’t next time I am switching to MTN.

She laughs at me.

What does she care?

And so to now, as I write this – my achievements today are zero.

Everyone has different views on why Africa just doesn’t work.

It’s easy to point at the people.

But imagine dealing with this kind of crap every day. Imagine wading through the treacle to achieve anything. Imagine how long it would take you before you thought **** this and headed out for one of those large bottles of strong beer instead. Then another and another.

Today I’ve had enough of Cameroon. I’m heading home hoping that the cereal I bought yesterday hasn’t been eaten by mice and the unrefrigerated UHT is still useable.

Good night

I may, or may not, be online later.

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This entry was posted on February 12, 2009 at 3:20 pm and is filed under cameroon. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: cameroon, infrastructure, problems

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