Journey North

After a week’s training in Yaounde, the group of volunteers split into those going to the English speaking North West and those going to the French speaking Far North (in Cameroon as a whole it is about 80/20 French/English and there are around 250 other languages, of which Pidgin is the most common in the North West and Fulfulde in the Far North). There had been ten of us, coming from Ireland (just myself), Wales, France, Canada, India, the Philipines and Zambia, and five of us headed north. The station was as chaotic as it could be but we managed to avoid the pick-pockets and swindlers of all sorts. We had a fifteen hour train journey over night with couchettes. Before it got dark we passed through very green countryside with lots of trees and rivers but by morning the countryside was more arid, there was much less vegetation and most of the river beds were dry. The countryside was sparsely populated and the dwllings were very basic, usually consisting of mud huts with straw roof within compounds surrounded with straw walls. The train stopped at a lot of stations where people with baskets of food on their heads frantically tried to make sales through the windows. Most purchases cost of the order of 20 cents and I doubt if the vendors averaged even one sale per train.

We arrived at another chaotic station in Ngaoundere and somehow found our bus. The first four hours to Garoua were not bad but then other passengers were packed in and it was impossible to move for the next five hours in suffocating temperatures. Also on this part of the journey there were huge potholes in the road and the bus driver tried to weave his way among them, with mixed success, somehow avoiding oncoming traffic which was similarly weaving all over the road. Our luggage was piled way up on top of the bus and it was hard to know how the bus did not topple over. We passed some broken-down buses but happily our’s did not have a problem. We had one stop so that the Muslims could say their prayers after meeting their calls of nature and washing themselves scrupulously (with no loos in the stations everybody, both male and female and of whatever creed, just did what they had to do with no cover).

Christians are in a majority in the south of Cameroon (although even in Yaounde the Muslims managed to wake me every morning at 4:30 with their call to prayer) but in the Far North they are in a majority. On the bus the radio played mostly Christian religious programmes (it was Sunday) interspersed with lots of updates on soccer matches.

As we approached Maroua the countryside became flatter but with sudden hills consisting of huge rocks which must have resulted from some eruptions (Cameroon still has active volcanoes and we saw some relatively fresh lava on our journey).

Somehow we arrived in Maroua intact and on time, much to the surprise of the VSO people who were used to over-night vigils on such occasions.