Keeping busy in the Baka land.

For the past few days, I’ve mostly been working on Jenn’s new home during the day. We put some wooden beams in place to frame a veranda in the front. The framing is not complete yet but hopefully will be soon and screens can be installed. More importantly, once the stucco was complete, we cleaned the excess, splattered concrete of off the walls and floors. The whole place is looking a lot cleaner now. The toilet and sink for the bathroom have been installed. Today I put in screens for the windows, installed door knobs and helped install some of the window shutters.

When I was in Kribi, I thought to myself, “I’ve never been bitten by as many bugs before.” I remember counting many mosquito bites on each arm and on my legs. Well, I’ve come to the rainforest and now I can say again, “I’ve never been bitten by so many bugs before.” Thank God my mom packed bite itch cream in my Christmas stocking just before I left. It has come in handy quite often during my stay here. I had a war with a wasp in Jenn’s new home while doing some cleaning. It wouldn’t leave me alone, and I whacked it with a broom I was using. Then it was angry. We fought back and forth. It would leave, and come back, and leave and come back. Finally I got some bug spray, shot it a few times and it wasn’t an issue after that.

There are also these really tiny flying insects known as moot-moots. They’re so small they look like pieces of dirt so I rarely even notice that they’re on me when they are. They leave small red dots where they bite that aren’t raised and don’t itch, at first. Jenn told me that when you first get here, and are bit by moot-moots, they don’t itch. But after you’ve been here for a few months, the bites itch a lot! I’ve also been bitten by many mosquitoes. I probably have about 20 or so bites on each arm and several on each leg. I really have to try hard to not scratch them and make the itch worse.

In addition to flying insects, there are many ants. Ingesting ants here and there is just a part of life. You’ll find them in your sugar, honey ¬cereal, all sorts of stuff. Just the other day, the Andertons were having bread with honey. The honey was speckled with dead tiny tiny ants. They’re not necessarily bad for you. It’s just something to get used to. I have not yet knowingly eaten anything with dead ants in it but I’m sure I’ve ingested more ants so far in this trip to the Baka land than I have in my whole life. Just one piece of bread with honey has about 20 ants alone. They’re miniscule and can squeeze into the air tight seal between a Tupperware bowl and lid.

Yesterday, Noah and Nelson Anderton, ages 13 and 9 I believe, led me into the forest on a hike to see “The Big Tree.” We left around five in the afternoon suited up in long sleeve shirts and pants. Noah was leading the way and we didn’t get more than 30 seconds away from the compound where they live to a point where Nelson said, “hey Noah, you missed the trail.” He pointed to a section of overgrown plants and trees. I laughed and thought he was joking. Noah responded by saying, “oh yeah. There it is.” He wasn’t joking. Our hike consisted of “paths” if that’s what you want to call them where you are constantly ducking under or climbing over vines, branches, fallen trees, and every plant at least partly in your way. For most of the hike I was walking with my hands in front of my face to push the leaves out of the way. There was a clear path sometimes more than others. Still, it was all very overgrown-certainly not like walking through Washington Crossing State Park in New Jersey.

We passed through areas where loggers cut down a tree, cut a section out, and left the rest. They even had tons of cut wood just sitting there, waiting to rot. This “red wood” is extremely strong stuff. At one site, I estimated there to be at least $200 in already cut 2x4s and 4x4s just sitting on the ground. It’s amazing that they go through the effort to cut a whole tree down, only to cut into about a quarter of it, but I really have to wonder what the purpose is of taking some of the wood that was removed from the tree, cutting it into 2x4s and 4x4s, and then just leaving it there on the ground. Now, admittedly, this $200 in wood isn’t worth that much here. That’s just how much it would be worth sitting in the lumber section of Home Depot. But still, that’s a lot of precious, usable wood.

There was one massive tree that still had a large section of its trunk just sitting horizontally on the ground, rotting. Its center is pretty much completely rotted through. You can even actually crawl inside of it. Noah said his dad once counted the number of rings on the tree, got about ¾ on the way through and gave up. He counted 300 rings making the tree around 400 years old. America was still in colonial days then.

We finally arrived to the big tree. It’s about 300 feet tall, according to ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬a forestry expert who had come to the Baka land sometime recently. I have a picture looking up from the base of the tree but it doesn’t do the tree justice. I also have a picture of me standing in one of the trees many large roots but you can’t even see the whole base. It was too big for the picture. It was starting to get dark and we decided to head back for dinner. We got to a clearing with another tree that had been chopped down with tons of cut wood just laying around that Noah and Nelson had never seen before. We realized we were lost and pretty soon we got really lost. We wound up not on a path at all, completely hacking our way through trees and plants. By this time it was pitch black out.

We managed to find our way back to the tree with all of the wood cut down where we first realized we were lost. We tried to retrace our steps and take the path back into the rest of the woods to get back to “The Big Tree.” We made marks on the trees we passed with a machete so in case we got lost we could get back to the clearing with the chopped up tree. It’s a good thing we did because pretty soon our path was no longer a path. We went back to the tree and sat around for a few minutes trying to think of a strategy. Pretty soon we heard motorcycles off in the distance. The road must’ve been nearby. We found a path, probably the widest path we had been on all afternoon, that took us in the right direction. Pretty soon we encountered Baka people familiar with the forest that Noah and Nelson’s mom had sent out to find us. We made it back safely and all was well.

The Baka people are somewhat nomadic. They don’t often stay in one area for a long period of time. They’re scattered throughout the southern part of Cameroon and a good part of Gabon. There’s a wide estimate that there are between 5,000-60,000 Baka in Cameroon. Some say they do live way way out in the forest and some say no one lives out that far. It’s hard to tell where they might be since no roads go that far into the forest.

It’s apparent the Baka don’t hold onto possessions, and cherish them quite like Westerners do. It’s common for Cameroonians to share what they have with one another, specifically friends and family. Since many don’t have a whole lot, they have no problem lending things out to people in need. It’s a very communal sharing system. But the Baka are even more to the extreme it seems. When they have something, they treat it as though it could easily become lost or just downright gone. They have no way of locking things up to keep them safe from being stolen. Things break after repeated use and they just very quickly and easily accept that it’s no longer around.

When someone in the family dies, often they don’t really seem to grieve much. A young girl, about 12 years old died a little while ago. Her mother and father were not around and her aunt raised her her whole life. This niece was practically like her daughter in that sense. When she passed away, the aunt said very nonchalantly, “we knew she was going to die. It’s the path of everyone.” Joan Lokker told me about one time when she was talking to a Fulbe woman in the middle of cooking some food for supper. One of her children had recently died and Joan said she was sorry to hear that. The woman stopped a brief moment said, “eh, it’s God’s will” and kept on cooking and talking about whatever. Very nonchalant, very accepting. It’s just the way it is.

In the evenings I usually play a game with the Anderton boys and Conrod boys such as Risk or Monopoly. I also try to hop on the internet for an hour or so to catch up on the news. Tonight everyone here watched a movie called “The Gods Must be Crazy.” I’d never seen it before and I really enjoyed it. It has a lot to do with cultural differences between different people and takes place in Africa, specifically South Africa and Botswana.

I’ll be here for another week or so before heading back to Banyo. I’ll probably update at least once more before I go. Until next time…