In Cameroon, most high schools have an organization that basically boils down to “Teacher Drinking Club.” You meet once a month at a different teacher’s house for a meeting, a feast, and two beers. They organize various events, such as all-night dance parties for Teachers’ Day and Womens’ Day. It’s a good way to socialize and enjoy life with your fellow teachers, and honestly these nights are some of my best memories of Cameroon.
The highlight of Teacher Drinking Club is the yearly trip to visit another school. You and all the teachers pile into a van, drive long distances on sketchy roads, and then party for a long weekend as guests of your host school’s Teacher Drinking Club. It’s a rollicking good time.
My first year, we took a trip up to Kousseri, a medium sized town right across the river from the capital of Chad. We went in April, a hellishly hot time with temperatures well above 110 degrees. But Cameroonian teachers are pretty unshakable. Our bus left at six in the morning. By nine we were riding down the highway through a nature reserve, spotting giraffes out the window as we stood arm in arm singing Cameroonian pop songs and throwing back shots of whiskey. When we arrived in town, we were wined and dined by everyone in town, and got a nice tour of the town’s attractions (an old house, an old statue, a look at Chad’s rather lackluster capital). We then toured our host school and were assigned with a host family to stay with.
Of course, it’s always funny to see people’s reactions when they figure out who is going to host the foreigner. By this time, I was pretty familiar to the people at my school, but for sure I was an oddity to everyone else! I was assigned to the home-ec teacher’s house. We went home for a rest so we could sober up before drinking all night at the traditional all-night dance party.
The weekend passed well. The problem did not come until it was time to go home, just before I had to head off to get on the van to go home.
I got diarrhea.
Bad.
Cramping do-not-leave-the-toilet terrible diarrhea.
That’s not the worst part. My gracious host lived in a compound with about five families. They all shared one dark (but really well maintained) pit latrine. Furthermore, my host was actually gone, and I’d been placed in the care of a sister, who could only speak local languages. I was blocking the only toilet that five families had to use, and I couldn’t communicate why. Furthermore, I had only a few minutes to decide if there was any way I could get on that van for the 12+ dirt road trip back home. If I missed the van- well, I didn’t even know if I had money to catch a paid bus back home and it’d probably take two days to do it by public transport, meaning I’d miss a lot of class. It’d be a long, expensive mess.
And I’d certainly have to stay the night somewhere…where? My host family would certainly insist I stay there, but I really didn’t want these five families to have some strange foreigner stuck on their pit latrine for hours at a time. I didn’t know if there were any hotels or where they would be. Nor did I feel well enough to look for one. Looking back, I’m sure my school would have set me up. But I was still fairly new in Cameroon and learning how things worked. When you are sick out there, it’s like all you know is that you are sick in a strange hot place and you don’t know what to do.
If I went with the van, what would happen if I got sick en route? There are no rest stops. And it’s outright desert out there. I couldn’t just get off somewhere and find my own way home. There would be no villages with a hotel for at least six hours. So if I did get sick, I’d be keeping this bus full of exhausted hung-over teachers waiting for me to shit by the side of the road. And if it was really bad, how many times could I ask them to stop, and how much misery would I be in in between?
Also, remember during all of this, it’s like 115 degrees out.
Eventually I took the risk and got on the bus. Luck was with me that day- the problem subsided and I survived the trip with no problems at all.
I’ve got a million of these stories. I vomited at the foot of the Amritsar Golden Temple on the floors they wash with milk and sweep with peacock feathers. I’ve passed out in a malarial haze during the ritual slaughter on Tabaski. I’ve thrown my luggage off the back of a Guatemalan bus, so sick that I didn’t know or care where I was or if another bus would come in the next week. I’ve developed a UTI during a 16 hour overnight Chinese train ride in a hard seat. Nothing like travel to give you stories to tell!
