Week 7: In which my gaming partner deserts me and my amoebas start getting a bit uppity

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Week 7: In which my gaming partner deserts me and my amoebas start getting a bit uppity

Saturday was a day of rest and revelry. Matt and I whiled away several hours at the local café, guzzling coffee and other wise indulging ourselves. In an exciting diversification of our time wasting options, I learned to play backgammon on Matt’s newly acquired, custom-built backgammon board; quite possibly the only one of its kind in all of Cameroon. Though I managed to recapture my lead in our running cribbage tourney after a rather unjust skunking received the previous night, Matt, in what can only be an example of the underhanded cheating of a most devious mind, trounced me in backgammon 13 games to zero.

Our gaming reverie was somewhat interrupted by the occurrence of a moto accident in the street right in front of us. Two motos collided, and a woman passenger and one of the drivers were injured, not gravely but still rather seriously. A large crowd soon gathered, and only grew as fight soon broke out from unknown causes. And in the truest testament to the Cameroonian entrepreneurial spirit, not long after the accident, an aspiring businessman was taking advantage of the assembled crowd to hawk his wares, baseball caps at 3,000 cfa.

Later that evening I set off for the N’joco’s to join them in a party they were hosting to celebrate the scholastic achievements of 3 of their children and the birthday of a fourth. It was a lovely party, with at least 20-30 guests. A tasty buffet dinner was introduced with speeches by the eldest son (who just graduated from high school) and proud father, and a short prayer by the honored guest and bon vivant Officer Wabo, chief of Dschang’s Commisariat. Officer Wabo also took it upon himself to start up a celebratory bottle of whiskey with an African tradition (new to me) where the first person to open the bottle pours whiskey into their hands and goes around clasping the hands of everyone else who is sharing in the drinking.

Sunday morning I woke up late and took of for morning run to sweat the previous night’s festivity out of the system. Now this will be news for my audience, but for the past 3 weeks I’ve been carrying a small colony of amoebas around in my lower intestine. Having amoebas isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a guy, as they manifest their presence only sporadically, with painfully acute cramping and some unfortunate intestinal activity. Maybe once a week for the past several weeks I’ve found myself afflicted for periods of several hours at a time.

As the treatment is supposedly rather harsh, and with side effects of fatigue and body aches, I’ve been roughing out what spells have come, thinking of my amoebas as something of a temperamental ant colony. But that was before the amoebas attacked viciously outside the Commisariat Centrale, 1.5 clicks into a 3 k loop. Methinks I’ll be paying a small visit to the pharmacy on Monday.