200 francs, Tsinga

If you need to go somewhere in Yaounde that is too far to walk and you don't have a car (which is most people), you don't hope on a bus or metro; you take a taxi. As in much of Cameroon, taxis are the primary form of transportation in the capital city, yet the system is very different from that of the United States. First of all, taxis here are communal, meaning that the driver will take as many passengers as he chooses, picking up and dropping off people on the way. As one can imagine, this means that taxis are often packed tightly with people. "Doubling" riders in the front passenger seat is to be expected, and it is not at all unusual to have four (or more) in the back. Occasionally, you even see taxi drivers sitting on other passengers' laps. This move is called "petit chauffeur". It is also common to pick up people from the market loaded with hefty baskets full of produce to toss in the trunk, along with the occasional live animal.

To hail a cab, you stand on the side of the street where traffic is moving in the direction that you want to go and wait, although on slow days, drivers will often pull up beside any random pedestrian to offer a ride. Once the driver slows down near you, you generally have a window of about two seconds to call out the neighborhood you want to go to and the price that you want to pay. If the driver is going that direction and/or likes the price you offer, they nod, honk and stop for you to hop in and specify the location before barreling off down the road and repeating the process with other potential clients. Sometimes it can take several tries to find someone who is going your direction; the communal aspect means that drivers are restricted by the destinations of the other passengers.

The first few times that I took cabs this had not been explained to me, and I got offended as driver after driver shook their heads at me and sped off. By now, taking cabs has begun to feel fairly natural. I know the correct names and locations for the places that I go regularly as well as the prices. It costs me 200 francs (the equivalent of a little under 50 cents) to go from my school in Bastos to my house in Tsinga, and I've been conditioned to reject any driver that insists on 250 or even 300 francs. There are some drivers who assume that they can charge much more that what is normal since I am obviously foreign, but generally I name my place and price with enough conviction that people believe that I know what I'm talking about.

The roads of Yaounde are always filled with taxis; generally yellow and in various states of disrepair. Through my American liberal-arts-school lense for sustainability, the environmental impact of using taxis for public transportation instead of, say, a good bus system is hard to miss. However, the taxis provide a ton of jobs in a country where the unemployment rate is through the roof. They are at least cheap and efficient, and provide the background for a lot of wild adventures.

The Wild West

I am now back in Yaoundé after two weeks in the west of the country. For a majority of the time we stayed with host families in a smaller town, called Dschang. My host family was very welcoming, and with four children between the ages of five and eleven, things were never boring. It was a good experience to be outside the city for a bit, away from the chaos of Yaoundé. It took me a while to adjust to living without consistent electricity and running water, but people are so adept at dealing without these amenities that the frequent "cuts" of the water and electrical current do not impede daily activities such as showering and doing homework at night. I became very efficient at washing clothes and dishes by hand and helping my host mother cook, sometimes over a fire outside. It seems ironic that many people consider this lifestyle to be so charmingly "simple" when in fact it is a lot of hard work.

Ultimately, two weeks was not enough time to get used to all the new things, but it was a nice glimpse. One afternoon, I had the opportunity to travel with my host mother to her natal village, which consisted of a few houses constructed from mud and straw surrounded by fields and livestock. The family all spoke in their mother tongue (one of over 200 in Cameroon) and shared all that they had with each other. When we finally left, we were sent off with warm hugs and a trunk full of agricultural products. Leaving Dschang was not entirely different for me. My host family loaded me with gifts and snacks for my journey, and the open invitation to come "home" to see them at any time.

After Dschang; we travelled to the city of Bamenda; which is located in one of the only anglophone regions of the country. There, we discussed the conflict between anglophones and francophones with a member of a radical secessionist group, the Southern Cameroon National Council. This linguistic division is a major point of controversy throughout the country; every speaker we have had has expressed a different point of view on the situation of the anglophone minority in Cameroon. While in Bamenda, we also met with Ni John Fru Ndi, the chairman of the primary party opposing the current administration. We talked primarily about the upcoming presidential election in 2011; in which Fru Ndi will likely be the main contender running against President Biya, who has been in office since 1982. However, there is a lot of speculation about the fairness of the electoral process, leading many people to doubt the probability of democratic change in the next election. We'll just have to wait and see.