Nasara! Nasara!

Hello! After a lovely few weeks back with my host family in Yaounde, I'm now in the northern (and mostly Muslim) city of Ngaoundere. Besides the desert heat and the men shouting 'Nasara' (white person) at me, things are going well. I'm staying with a polygamous family, but unfortunately two of the three wives are apparently traveling. It's also my first experience with a latrine, which has been interesting - the hole in the ground, which also serves as my shower drain, is pretty tiny and requires some serious aim.

Our house is really several rooms surrounding an outdoor courtyard, where everything from laundry to cooking to dishes is done. The kitchen is small room off the courtyard with a firepit; it's always smokey, which makes it difficult for me to assist in the cooking as I keep coughing. Most of the family speaks Fulfulde, a language brought by the Fulani Muslim conquerors of Northern Cameroon a few centuries ago - only the 14-year-old daughter and 17-year-old brother (who doesn't live at home) speak fluent French. I've been spending a lot of time with those two!

To get to Ngaoundere, we took an overnight train ride that was quite an adventure. Fortunately, we all had sleeping compartments, which was nice particularly when the railway broke ahead and we had to stop for 3 hours. Apparently, derailments are quite common. We spent some time in the snack car playing some strange card game with the (slightly frightening) security guards, who each held M21 rifles. We also talked about the Bible with a Cameroonian man named Ema, who didn't believe that Lot had sex with his daughters after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (he was drunk; but he totally did). Cameroonians seem to pick and choose the parts of the Bible they read.

Now I'm in an Internet cafe, trying to get some sort of Haggadah printed out for a makeshift seder we're going to do next week for Pesach. I met up with a guy from the Israeli embassy in Yaounde last week to get a huge box of matzah. The other Jews on the program and I are looking for things to represent the other Passover staples...

Next week, Waza!! I'll be seeing elephants, lions, baboons and such at this national park in the extreme North. I'm pumped!