Falling in Love with "Football"

It’s no secret that I love what we in North America call football—some of my best university memories are centered around the time I spent at LaVell Edwards stadium, as a marketing assistant and a fan. Contrarily, I’m no great lover of what they in Africa (and the rest of the world, for that matter) call football. Soccer has just never really been my thing. Except that, as it turns out, it kind of is. Maybe it’s the excited reverence for the sport that is in such abundance supply here. Maybe it’s the culturally infused energy of the fans. Maybe it’s a sense of solidarity because it was women playing. Whatever the cause, I found myself falling hard for the one sport I never could have imagined could lay any claim on my heart.

Cameroon hosted the 2016 female African Cup of Nations football tournament. Group B played at the new stadium in Lime, offering plenty of opportunities to go see the action live.

I went with Pavel to the stadium for the first double header, and we decided to cheer for opposing teams. I took Nigeria and Ghana, while he repped Mali and Kenya. When Nigeria demolished Mali 6-0, we decided to make a bet on the second game. When the game ended in Ghana’s favor, I was one pineapple richer. Between the games we went and found John, and walked around the outside of the stadium, generally blowing off steam from a long week. I had to laugh when a group of guys asked to take a picture with me. It’s still strange to me that the colour of my skin alone inspires such interest and curiosity. After weeks of first being housebound and then research-bound, it was strangely euphoric to be out of the house after dark, and being social.

I adopted Nigeria (seen here in green) as my team for the tournament, but I vowed that I would cheer for Cameroon if it came down to the two teams facing each other.

I was still riding the high as we left the stadium, but as we descended, I was surrounded by men, all trying to talk to me at once, encouraged by each other’s presence. The attention, some of it clearly predatory in nature, was overwhelming and mostly not in a good way. To his credit, Pavel was trying to intercede, get them to leave me alone. The other men began to jokingly argue with one another in pidgin, playfully shoving each other and in the melee I got jostled. Nothing major, just enough to take away my attention from the ground in front of me for a moment, and in my next step, I caught a large rock, and in a fraction of a second I had fully twisted my ankle and ended up on the ground. The pain was pretty immense, battling with my pride for which was more hurt in the tumble. I tried to hobble on for some time anyhow, but Pavel eventually insisted on calling Eric to come get us. Sweetheart that he is, he felt so bad, blaming himself, even though I insisted it wasn’t his fault in the slightest. He went out and got me a cold drink and the next day, when he saw I was having great difficulty bearing weight, he went out and got sugar cane for me to use as walking sticks. Meanwhile, I re-purposed my yoga pants as a compression bandage, trying to keep the swelling at bay.

Sometimes it pays to have a little MacGuyver spirit in you.

I hadn’t really planned to watch Cameroon’s first game, especially seeing as the Lionesses were in Group A, playing at the capital in Yaounde. Nevertheless, I found myself watching the broadcast from the seat of honour at MaMa Ida’s modest home. I had met the kindly older woman at church, and she invited me to visit her (already, this is out of the norm here—not many people around here like to entertain at home, they prefer to spend time with friends at bars and restaurants). Upon my arrival she installed me in the biggest, most comfortable chair she owned and waited on me, bringing me pineapple soda and refilling my class any time it dropped below three quarters full. Honestly, it made me almost uncomfortable, though I could see it made her so happy just to have me there. We didn’t speak all that much—MaMa Ida speaks primarily pidgin, so Gloria had come along to serve as a sort of intermediary—but soon, she was insisting that I think of her as my Cameroonian mother, and telling me to come to her if I needed anything at all.

MaMa Ida is the sweetest. She regularly sends me pineapples from her farm and I'm in heaven.

I was still hobbling, though finally with a proper tensor bandage in place, by the time we went back to the stadium for the second double-header. This time Mali and Kenya took the W’s over their respective opponents, leaving every team in the group with a single victory. It was hard to be disappointed by “my” teams losing, though, with the joyful traditional singing and dancing going on right in front of me throughout the night.

Such energy-- they sang and danced through two whole games.

As far as work was concerned, it was a productive week, despite delays. Here, there is a lot of waiting—whether it’s because things aren’t working or are unavailable, or because people don’t conform to the same strict notions of time that I’m used to. Often, the only real option is to wait out the issue. Like when I traveled to Buea to print the documents for my orientation sessions, and had to wait more than three and a half hours because there was no “light” (aka power). There’s just not much you can do about electricity being unavailable.  Similarly, I had to exchange all the money I had brought to pay my participants, but had to do it in repeated trips over a period of several days, because the exchange office only had so much money available every day. Then I had to work at collecting smaller denominations over a period of several days so that I could give each participant the correct amount. Then there was when my cell phone network wasn’t operational, and I had to call participants. I ended up having to go to town to buy a second SIM card and credit, like so many here who have phone numbers on different networks, because the cell networks aren’t reliable enough to only have one. Nevertheless, I was able to get a message out to all participants to check in on the progress of their self-directed participatory activities and went with my research assistant to do the “observation” portion of the research, namely mapping and outlet audits in two key neighbourhoods.

Continuing to sample new cuisine... "Peypey" aka Pepper Soup. So spicy, but so yum.