Friday the Thirteenth

My non-superstitious brain was being traitorous.  Somewhere around twenty-five hours north of the capitol city and staring out the bush-taxi window, I started noticing all the paranormal-seeming parallels between arriving at my first and second posts with their strangely similar stormy and cold evenings and their lack of any Cameroonian counterpart to welcome me to their alien homelands.  Plus, it was Friday the 13^th.  Not good.  A dark lightness was appearing, and in an instant, Brainhurt* was spreading throughout my egg-shaped extremity and starting to ring in my ears.  I had been kidding myself.  It wasn’t the last post that was the failure.  It was me.  Changing posts wasn’t going to make it better.  This was no good - forever to be known, at least in my own unread herstory book, as The Great Njombe-Maroua Repeat.

“Oui, à la maison rose.” 

My luckily-short nineteen point two seconds of Brainhurt vanished when a welcomed disturbance came via my friend’s voice.  With the motivation given by an unreasonably hostile and open sky, pelting its unforgiving wet daggers down upon us, and with my two Peace Corps friends darting out of the car like well-tipped porters carrying my unnecessary amount of luggage past the gate to my new home, the unloading went quickly. 

I had arrived, and I arrived to a better place.

*Brainhurt: a lifelong annoying condition arising when my underdeveloped brain becomes (over)worked with having to hold and/or process thought; a chubby kid forced to play basketball in P.E. is an external embodiment of this malady; side-effects are unflattering.

 A view of Maroua, my new home, from Mt. Maroua - a short hike outside of the town

 Rhumsiki - Rainy Season - volcanic plugs - about 3 hours west of Maroua

Kapsiki Peak and donkey at Rhumsiki - Rainy Season